Director Erez Laufer has executed a radical maneuver with his new documentary feature, Rabin in His Own Words. The film contains nothing written by Laufer; nearly all of the words in the work are spoken by the 20-years-deceased Yitzhak Rabin himself. Certainly Laufer is still present, even if nearly invisibly, guiding the viewer through the biography. In addition to a thorough portrait of Rabin, Rabin in His Own Words is also a crucial socio-historical argument about the development of Israel. It utilizes Rabin’s rich life story as a way of explaining the country he so obdurately served. Laufer, then, is part filmmaker, part chronicler and part theorist.
The film is devoid of exposition and assumes that the viewer is fluent in the social and political history of Israel. Rabin, of course, was firmly enmeshed in this history. He was an officer in the battles against the British and the Palestinians that led to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. He rose to Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Force during its brilliant victories in 1967’s Six-Day War. He then served as Ambassador to the United States and Prime Minister of Israel in the years prior to the Camp David Accords, though his political career was rocked by scandal prior to their signing. In the 1980s, Rabin was Defense Minister before being reelected as Prime Minister in 1992 after campaigning on a platform of reconciliation with Palestine. He helped formulate the Oslo Accords and famously shook hands with Yasser Arafat at the White House, for which Rabin co-won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. On November 4th, 1995 he was assassinated.
All of these events are covered in Rabin in His Own Words, but they are explained through Rabin’s own experiences as expressed mostly in press conferences and historical interviews rather than through voiceover narration or the filmmaker’s interviews with the subject’s surviving family members. It is documentary as found footage, in a sense. This style has two disorienting effects and they are essential to why the film is worthwhile.
First, the viewer is not pushed through the history of Israel to a rigid position. While Laufer is quite obviously intervening in the telling of events, he is doing so with great subtlety and care, more as an editor parsing information than a director generating the information. He can be too heavy-handed. For instance, Laufer’s coverage of Rabin is prolific when the protagonist was a key peacemaker in the 1970s but is nearly silent when it comes to showing what happened in Israel’s hawkish 1980s, which tips the filmmaker’s hand. Overall, however, Laufer shows great fidelity to his radical decision to maintain the viewer’s autonomy and this is efficacious. The viewer is allowed more space than is usually permitted to come to terms with the material.
The second crucial effect of the filmmaking style is that Rabin, as he is telling the viewer what has happened and why, is not himself aware of what comes next. When Laufer shows an excerpt from Rabin’s post-1967 discussions about victorious Israel, the viewer knows more than the protagonist, namely that 1973’s stunning defeat is on the horizon. This is an effective plot device, presenting a sort of real-time portrayal of events as they were actually lived. Certainly, the most poignant, thrilling and horrifying instance of this rhetorical decision comes when Rabin is dismissing threats on his life on the soundtrack while visual clips show him attending the peace rally in Tel Aviv’s Kings of Israel Square (Rabin Square today). The viewer knows his assassination is imminent, but Rabin does not. It is a chilling final note which legitimizes the film’s foundational structural conceit.
Rabin in His Own Words is more than a creatively-crafted documentary of an impactful 20th century figure. Laufer posits an argument on the nature of Israeli society. He is in accord with the claims forwarded by the seminal Israeli sociologist Gershon Shafir, who has traced Israeli national identity as an ever-shifting negotiation between three contradictory ideals: democratic universalism, Zionist/Jewish particularism and ethno-nationalist colonialism. Laufer has marshalled Rabin’s biography as a way of demonstrating the consequences for Israel of this shifting identity-formation over the course of the past 100 years. Like Shafir, Laufer also suggests that the violence of the 1990s, culminating in Rabin’s murder, was the result of a particularly volatile balance of these three identities that created extremist tension. While this argument is by now conventional among scholars, Laufer’s intervention into the conversation is nevertheless important, positive and, given Israel’s continued domestic political polarity, necessary.
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