Interview
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Should we show or not the images of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7? The lecturer in film studies at the University of Paris-8, and specialist in representations of the Shoah, is not in favor of their public broadcast and warns of the need to overcome astonishment.
Spectators – deputies, mainly – trembling, shocked, frozen with fear. On Tuesday, November 14, the National Assembly chose to broadcast to a restricted audience the film produced by the Israeli army documenting the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7. Several screenings took place in Israel at the end of last month, at the UN and in around thirty countries, and others are planned in France, as requested by Republican Roger Karoutchi, president of the friendship group. with Israel in the Senate. Bringing together images of different types, the forty-minute film shows the atrocity that took place in these mass crimes.
And there is still debate about the relevance of showing them. A controversy reminiscent of the release, in 2016, of the documentary film Salafists of François Margolin and Lemine Ould Mohamed Salem, who had decided to broadcast without comment death videos produced by Sahel jihadists. Do we necessarily have to confront this visual flow of frontal violence, perhaps unprecedented? Ophir Levy, lecturer in cinema studies at the University of Paris-8, and specialist