By ROBERTA DABDAB*

Considerations on the film directed by Basel Adra & Yuval Abraham based on Vilém's theories Flusser

1.

1.

It was with surprise, admiration – and obviously a lot of indignation – that I left the cinema after watching the 2025 Oscar-winning documentary. No other land or in the Portuguese translation, Without ground. The film exposes the “problematic” relations between close or, we could say, others: the residents of a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank in the Masafer Yatta region and the Israeli army with the Israeli settlers who, “religiously” or “intelligently”, understand that this region is an Israeli military training zone.

It highlights the perspectives of the two main characters: Basel Adra, a Palestinian who has experienced the Israeli invasion of his village since he was 5 years old and who does not have the right to come and go, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who goes to meet Basel to interview the residents of one of the recently demolished villages. It is at this moment that they meet, in 2019.

I begin with indignation because, although I do not intend to delve into the historical Israeli-Palestinian conflict or analyze colonialism, prejudice and injustice – subjects that I do not have the expertise to discuss, it is obvious that my position is for a free Palestine.

The admiration came because it was a courageous, controversial and explosive subject, which we know is difficult to approach and execute.

I would like to highlight my surprise when I realized that the environment and the relationships developed during the film are a very clear example of the thinking that the Czech-Brazilian author Vilém Flusser, a media theorist and staunch cultural critic, produced here in Brazil and which was not understood at the time. I have researched his work extensively during my doctorate and that is why I decided to exchange some of Vilém Flusser's ideas with the reader, in light of the documentary.

2.

Vilém Flusser was born in Czechoslovakia and was Jewish. He fled the Nazi occupation in 1939, first going to London, where he stayed for 1 year, and disembarking in Brazil in 1940. He lived in São Paulo for 32 years, became a naturalized Brazilian citizen and had 3 children. Due to the military dictatorship, he and his wife Edith, a great supporter of his work, decided to leave Brazil and go live in Europe. His children stayed here.

The author never stopped maintaining relationships with students, friends, intellectuals and influential people in Brazilian society, people who in some way were thinking and acting in favor of the “progress” of the country and with whom he did not agree in many aspects. Vilém Flusser died in November 1991 as a result of a car accident.

The author defined himself as a “expelled”, expelled, and his thought bears this origin: it is eclectic, nomadic, constructed in the condition of never having been established in a perspective, university or in a “nation” and is imbued with the relationships he maintained with writers, artists and influential figures. Vilém Flusser was immanent, dialogic, reflective and for some, too blunt. Perhaps because he was so sure of his “groundless” thought, he was not properly heard and recognized here. His interlocutors were more concerned with following the modern model of progress.

I also consider myself a “expelled"After 30 years working as a photographer, I migrated from the image market to research and academia. My contribution with this article is to reflect on the praxis and products of culture, relating Vilém Flusser's ideas with the links presented in the documentary.

Interviewed by journalist JC Ismael for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo in the mid-80s, Vilém Flusser answers about the influence of Brazil on his thinking: “I became aware of the need to overcome the dichotomy between science, art and political engagement and to return to concrete human reality. I know more clearly than before that everything I propose to do implies responsibility for my being-in-the-world as a whole, even if it is “just” writing articles about apparently commonplace phenomena, such as, for example, the gestures observed around us.”

I highlight here how an immanent experience – the concrete being in the world proposed by the author – incorporates responsibility towards others and “transcends” the dichotomous notions of ethics, aesthetics and politics. It is also interesting to point out that for the author the nomadic experience is a creative and free experience.

And it was precisely from his nomadic experience that Vilém Flusser would propose an intersubjective model and a theory of approximation for communication processes and what this means for culture, and which will be presented and related to the context of the film. It is worth mentioning that the author's notion of apparatus is quite clear in this context, but I will leave this endeavor for another time.

3.

At the beginning of the film, the Palestinian Basel Adra says: “I started filming when we started to finish.” The phrase carries a poetic and metaphorical meaning and is certainly moving. And from Flusserian perspective, filming is an attitude, a gesture to get closer, an intersubjective gesture; a gesture that is not only a form of expression – a subjective approach – but that opens up to dialogue, to others.

Vilém Flusser was a phenomenologist of the media and, naturally, of communication. When he looked at the “new media,” he knew that not being “dazzled” by them would be the most “beneficial” way to be with them. And it is in this sense that I think Basel understood how to use his communication, his devices, his art, his gesture of filming. It is an activist gesture because it is immanent: “I believe that we can prevent the expulsion if we are active and document what is happening on the ground. This can force the United States to put pressure on Israel,” he says.

On July 23, 1974, in an exchange of correspondence with one of his friends, Gabriel Borba, an artist, professor and director of the São Paulo Cultural Center, Vilém Flusser wrote about having seen experiments with “videotapes” in New York and how much this worried him, since such experiments were being carried out by people who considered themselves artists. This is to say, they aim at an “aesthetic” goal, or, in my terminology, they aim to propose subjective models of the world. But this is to ignore the virtualities of videotapes, wrote Vilém Flusser, pointing out and recognizing the dialogic opportunity of the “new” media.

It is at this moment that the author presents his intersubjective model, a model that challenges us to leave the comfortable subjective point of view – that of each one. I identified in the correspondence[I] above, from 1974 to 1986, Vilém Flusser “subtly provoking” Gabriel Borba to review his gestures as an artist and as director of the CCSP, in an environment saturated with ideologies and subjectivities.

In the interview[ii] Awarded to Thomas Mießgang, an Austrian journalist and writer in March 1991, a few months before his death, the author summarizes his idea of ​​a telematic society and offers a good perspective – from the other – for educational and artistic processes. When asked about the meaning of the term telematic society, the author highlights the prefix “tele” – which means to bring close – as an epistemological, existential concept and not just a technical and aesthetic concept.

He says that to approach means to break the barrier of space and time, since close implies a distance that can be understood both in terms of time and space and that incorporates proximity: “And this is a Judeo-Christian principle, which makes it possible to love one's neighbor. Love for one's neighbor instead of humanism[iii] – this is the essential aspect of the word “telematics”. And he adds: “The word telematics, which I did not invent, means to me that by bringing us closer together and, above all, by bringing others closer together, we open up fields of action that cannot be mechanized”.

4.

It is quite clear that Vilém Flusser's telematic society is not restricted to a society connected by cables and algorithms in mechanized processes. Flusser's telematics expands and proposes relationships of proximity, encounters with others and, as he states in an article published in the magazine Shalom, “Love thy other as thyself” in 1982, can solve the problem of the “concealment of reality” and the “beyond projections” that we develop with others: “The other does not exist without me, and I do not exist without the other. And from the intersubjective, concrete, immediate (and non-mediatable) relationship, both arise”.

Considering the current reality with the polarities of identity, the many narratives constructed from unique points of view – “religious” – that circulate freely in the “democratic” environment of the internet, polluting our imagination and limiting our imagination, I find Flusserian proposal for communication and art education urgent, since it starts from breaking the logic of the sender, usually a colonizing logic. Understood as a way of exploring otherness, bringing realities closer together and breaking the emitting gesture of anthropocene ecosystems, Vilém Flusser’s intersubjectivity is a procedure, a conduct. And it “forces”, for example, different sociocultural realities to meet, get to know each other, and get closer.

Without ground materializes this behavior; Palestinians and Israelis together. It is interesting to recall Yuval’s testimony when he received the award for best documentary at the Oscar ceremony and realize how much of Flusserian thought was present at that moment: “We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are strong. Don’t you realize that we are intertwined? That my people will be truly safe if all people are truly free and safe?”, or when he talks about Basel: “When I look at Basel, I see my brother, but we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civil law, and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control.”

For Vilém Flusser, intersubjectivity means a body that goes to meet another body; this going to meet the other, this dialogical mobility is the nomadic experience that Vilém Flusser defends: “there can be no experience of the body without the experience of thought — and no thought without the experience of the body”, and following the author, “nomads experience concrete reality in a network; they move within it and travel through fields of potentiality”.

The nomadic experience of the Israeli Yuval, in the Flusserian sense, was like breaking out of habit, which Vilém Flusser defines as a “cotton blanket, which hides the sharp edges and muffles all noises. Habit makes everything pleasant and silent”.

By getting closer to the Palestinian reality and meeting Basel and the others (Palestinians), Yuval understood above all the injustice they live through: “Without the right to vote, under military occupation. Basel, a guy my age, can’t even leave the West Bank. And we, we destroy their homes,” says Yuval in the film, during an interview for a television channel. Or in a very beautiful dialogue between the two protagonists, in the final moments of the film in the year 2023, visibly tired, talking about the future, when Yuval says to Basel: “It would be nice to have stability and democracy someday, so you could visit me too and not just me visiting you… I think people need to find ways to change things; that’s the issue.”

Here Flusser’s process of intersubjectivity is completed: “Every time I recognize a man, my world expands. I can see from his point of view as well. My knowledge of the world becomes less subjective and more intersubjective because in this way the objects of the world are projected from two points of view: they become more real. Intersubjectivity expands and deepens the world, makes it more real. This applies to intersubjective knowledge, intersubjective experience, intersubjective desires, and intersubjective actions.”

5.

Pointing once again to the sociocultural polarities and the gigantic problems we have with social chasms, as a researcher, artist, planetary citizen, activist of encounters and critic of the current excessive image production, I highlight this relevant Flusserian contribution as a way to “change things”; considering proximity as a basis and structure for approaches in education, public policies and cultural projects can be a way out, since intersubjective processes have the natural capacity to make a creative dialogue flourish between all these nodes that surround us and, as we saw in the film, provoke deviations in idealizations.

As a final reflection, I leave you with another answer by Vilém Flusser, now for a French newspaper in 1990. Utopian or not, considering our here and now, the Anthropocene and the challenges we will face with this social and cultural imbalance, it makes a lot of sense. What do you think?

“There is no such thing as a border line. No two phenomena in the world can be divided by a border. It would always be a bad and artificial separation. Phenomena cannot be separated in this way. Nor can they be organized according to straight lines. Phenomena overlap, they occur in layers. I should note that in French, “border” is used as a military term: the front. Let us hope that the idea of ​​establishing boundaries everywhere will disappear: this is a man, this is a woman, this is Germany and this is France. There are no whites, no blacks, no pure cultures, no pure disciplines. All systematic thinking is wrong, every system is a violation. Reality is tangled and therefore interesting. All Cartesian thinking that creates order is fascist.”[iv]

*Roberta Dabdab Roberta Dabdab is a photographer, holds a PhD in Communication and Semiotics and a post-doctorate from the Free University of Berlin. 

Reference

Without ground [No other land]
Norway, 2024, documentary, 95 minutes.
Directed by: Basel Adra & Yuval Abraham
Screenplay: Rachel Szor
Cast: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor.

Notes

[I] https://www.arquivovilemflussersp.com.br/vilemflusser/

[ii]https://artpool.hu/Flusser/interju.html

[iii] The author defines humanism as “the refusal to doubt oneself”. He was already critical of Modernity.

[iv] Vilem Flusser, Zwiegespräche. Interviews 1967-1991, ed. Klaus Sander, Göttingen, 1996, 97. English translation by Anke Finger.

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