Summer Rain 2008, 2008
Collaborative project by Ariane Littman and Reuven Zahavi
Photographs by Ariane Littman, video editing by Reuven Zahavi
The video Summer Rain (2008) is part of a multi-media project around the theme of Night and Smoke triggered by an on-going dialog with my colleague Reuven Zahavi over the general political situation.
I had been at the Kissufim crossing on the night of September 11th 2005, photographing the tanks leaving the Gaza Strip during the Disengagement. A year later, on the night of July 12th 2006, I was photographing the IDF tanks and armored forces reentering into the Gaza Strip following the attack on June 25th 2006, by a joint group of members from the Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees on IDF targets at the Kerem Shalom crossing. As a result of this attack in which two IDF soldiers were killed, four others were wounded and Cpl. Gilad Shalit was taken into custody, Israel had launched ‘Operation Summer Rain,’ with the release of abducted soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit being a top priority.
In the present video, the slow motion of images, coloured by a green light beamed from a projector in a disturbing shade of green, gives a ghostly presence to the tanks crossing the border. In the slow and gloomy ballet of the tanks, two legs appears and disappeared on the back of the tank which is stopped, reminiscent of a disembodied individual, lost in the physical and metaphysical existential labyrinth of endless wars with no beginning and no end.
