In The Viewing Booth (2019), one of my favorite recent films, director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, “a pro-Palestine Israeli activist-filmmaker, invites Maia Levy, a pro-Israel university student, to record her responses to videos depicting confrontations between Palestinians, the Israeli Defense Forces and security personnel, and Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank that have been circulated online both by B’Tselem and by IDF spokespeople and Zionist groups” (134). In Alexandrowicz’s film, Pooja Rangan explains, “Maia is asked to describe what she sees. But her responses function not as audio description (a process of making visual media accessible to blind and partially sighted audiences, often shorthanded as ‘say what you see’ [. . .]) but as a means of verbalizing how she reads or interprets the videos in order to arrive at a verdict. Maia’s commentary offers access to the mechanics of a defensive mode of juridical listening that has become a de facto norm of the so-called smartphone era of video witnessing” (139).

The instruction to say what you see is the standard prompt for producing audio description as a disability access tool. But Maia doesn’t say, and thus provide access to, what she sees in The Viewing Booth so much as she provides access to how she watches and listens to the material that she is shown, a “defensive mode of juridical listening” in which she puts her own sense impressions on trial to better defend her beliefs. Here, she first weighs what is admissible evidence before then making judgments about its admissibility through the lens of her “belief system.” Watching the film, I was more than a little unsettled by the close proximity of accessibility audio description practices, used for accessibility, to Maia’s “defensive preoccupation with finding audiovisual proof of Palestinian guilt” (134).

It isn’t until the end of the film that Alexandrowicz engages in a direct dialogue with Maia. He expresses his concern about the limits of human rights media to move oppositional audiences to side with the oppressed, a concern that finds no resolution in the film. But Rangan argues that the film’s utility lies in the access it provides viewers to picture how ideology proliferates and hardens itself through Maia’s selective listening.

Maia wavers when confronted with evidence that challenges her Zionist worldview, but regains her balance by strategically employing narrative disaggregation––a technique named by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gary Peller to describe how the lawyers defending the cops that assaulted Rodney King chopped up and froze the real time of the video evidence of his beating to insert alternative narratives that cast doubt on the clear and present document of racist abuse. Narrative disaggregation transforms the videos into proof of their own untrustworthiness or inadmissibility as evidence, asking spuriously about what happened before, after, or outside of the frame. 

But I don’t want to relieve my own discomfort by simply disaggregating my commitments to accessibility practices from defensive listening. Instead, I want to reflect on a moment in The Viewing Booth when Maia does practice audio description. The initial instructions Alexandrowicz gives to Maia, while ostensibly not given with a disabled audience in mind, are almost verbatim the same ones that I’ve given participants when I ask them to record audio description for my films: “I’d like you to verbalize whatever comes to mind when you’re viewing.”  

At first, we’re shown Maia watching, in silence, a video titled “Settler Violence.” Listening to Maia, here, means being as attuned to her silence as to the ways her eyes dart around the screen and her head shakes and nods. Ostensibly because of her lack of spoken commentary, Alexandrowicz offers her further instruction: “Just describe in real time what it is that you’re seeing.” He tells her she can also pause the videos to further describe them. She watches footage of a confrontation between a Palestinian videographer and an IDF soldier; their words are subtitled on the screen, although we’re only shown Maia’s face as she watches. Someone says, “Put it down.” Someone else says, “I’m allowed to film.” They shout back and forth.  

Maia pauses the video and describes it as follows:

“Yeah, the, the . . . the Arabs are . . . the Arab citizens or civilians are expressing their, um, rights to . . . to film and I guess freedom of speech . . . in some sense. And they’re showing the religious settlers . . . really negating that, and the soldiers . . . like, really, not even letting them film. Like they don’t want anyone else to see what’s going on . . .”

Here, she turns her head like she’s acknowledging that someone has made a good point. Then, she qualifies vaguely, “. . . in a sense.” In what follows, Maia persistently pushes against the assignment she has been given to describe what she sees. Instead, she bargains with causality. She invents new contexts to explain why what she’s shown does not align with what she believes and is therefore unreliable or, as she says early on, “confusing.” 

I want to offer a reparative reading of the role of description here. I think it’s doing something different than Maia’s later rejections of the truthfulness or supposed bias of the video evidence she watches. I think this is because audio description and other forms of doing access work are exemplary of what Rangan calls elsewhere, in her chapter on “accented listening” and the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “interlistening” or attending to the “complexity of multiple resonant voices” (73).

Describing what she’s seeing as she’s seeing it, Maia names the dynamics of what the video shows with a lack of ideological bias that will prove to be uncharacteristic for her as the film unfolds. It is not that she does not see the abuse of power here. Because Alexandrowicz has put us in position to listen to her, we also get to perceive her not only seeing but also naming, describing, and understanding the “religious settlers really negating” Palestinians’ “freedom of speech” and “rights to document” things that the settlers and IDF “don’t want anyone to see.” 

At the same time, in order to better understand what this moment has to tell us, Alexandrowicz lingers on Maia’s face as she speaks. We might be aided by an audio description of what we’re shown as Maia describes the video, a strategy that he gestures toward later in the film, as she watches and reacts to footage of her earlier reaction. 

Here’s my description of what I see as I watch her:

The frame is close to Maia’s face in a dark booth, lit only by the blue light of a video monitor, out of frame. She’s leaning in to get a close look at what she’s watching. She squints or maybe even winces as she says “freedom of speech.” When she says “religious settlers” she seems to take a moment to compose herself to remove emotion from her voice. Then, when she turns her head as if acknowledging that a good point has been made about the soldiers and settlers not wanting anyone to see what’s going on, her voice maintains the same even tone. 

Although Maia’s facial expressions, tones of voice, and use of qualifiers all seem to be working together to distance herself from her own words, the words she uses to describe what she sees can’t effectively separate her from the settler violence the video depicts. Instead, her descriptions of the video name this violence and even come to a reasoning of why it is taking place: because “they don’t want anyone else to see what’s going on.” 

Much of the process of juridical listening in which Maia engages occurs as a repudiation of the assignment to describe what she sees. This assignment puts Maia in a position where she attempts but cannot seem to find the words to see what she believes. While she can disagree with the truth of the video itself, she cannot fully pull off the maneuver to disagree with her own description because it is, in fact, what she sees. This is also why I am interested in whom she seems to be acknowledging when she turns her head to the side and says, “They don’t want anyone else to see.” This is her own description of what’s going on, but with the nod of her head, she seems to momentarily recognize the presence of others.

Maia’s juridical self-defense and Zionist ideologies are late arrivals to this moment; first, there is the act of seeing that someone else doesn’t want this thing to be seen. This moment of description allows us to linger in the moment just before her self arrives to marshal its defense.

* My Accented Ear, Pavitra Sundar
* The Spatial Audit, Tory Jeffay
* Outlaw Communities of Care, LaCharles Ward