The Viewing Booth
Directed by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz
Running time: 1hr10mins | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Maia Levy, appearing in The Viewing Booth
You could take the format of the remarkably elegant, deceptively simple documentary The Viewing Booth and apply it to a vast array of different issues. All you would need is an emotive subject about which people hold wildly differing opinions. Abortion, vaccines, The Troubles, Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, Brexit, religion, socialism…
You could even attempt to apply The Viewing Booth’s methodology to something less important or sensitive: The Dress phenomenon showed how, while looking at the exact same photograph of a dress, people across the internet were prepared to swear blind that the dress was either #blackandblue or #whiteandgold. Jonathan Swift satirised humankind’s tendency to divide into bitterly opposed factions in Gulliver’s Travels, with an entire country gripped in a multigenerational conflict over which end to start eating a boiled egg (obviously the pointy end, and if you disagree, I’ll fight you).
But at least when it’s a viral photograph or fictional 18th century egg-war, this tendency is harmless and the conflict simple. The Viewing Booth is interested in how, even while looking at precisely the same highly sensitive and disturbing documentary material, people are still nevertheless able to construct different realities in their own minds.
The promise of so-called “impact documentary” (docs that change the world, broadly speaking) is that once people see what is really going on, cinema’s supposed function as a machine that generates empathy will grind into positive action. But this a premise that pre-supposes that audiences will see the same thing the filmmaker sees in their footage. The Viewing Booth is made by a director who has made impact documentaries in the past, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz. That he has sought to interrogate the easy assumptions around the ability of documentary to change people’s minds, is to his credit: he is, in effect, a whistleblower. But he’s blowing the whistle not on a company or a government, but on human beings and how we see things.
THE VIEWING BOOTH (2020) Written by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz | Shot by Zachary Reese | Edited by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz and Neta Dvorkis
