Research Statement

Historians are trained to work in archives, collecting documents that serve as records of the past. As such, the process of reconstruction lies at the very heart of historical writing, and historians consolidate archival sources into a coherent picture – a timeline through which the past is ordered and interpreted. As we seek to reconstruct how individuals experienced the past, we ask: What decisions did they make, and for what reasons? How did they think and feel? What forces shaped their everyday lives and perceptions? While these are the questions historians are trained to ask as a foundation of research methodology, what happens when a research methodology asks the historian to deconstruct a timeline?

As a PhD candidate in history, I am accustomed to constructing timelines with words. Although my dissertation engages with audiovisual history – specifically, Israeli and Palestinian propaganda films – my research is ultimately conducted and presented in textual form. I analyse films within a broader historical framework, contextualising them with other historical sources such as production files, official policy papers, newspaper clippings, and reception reports. Together, these materials allow me to construct a timeline of how spectators understood and experienced the Israeli–Palestinian conflict at the time.

In June 2025, I had the privilege of participating in the Reframing the Argument: Videographic Criticism as Graduate Research Practice workshop at the University of Notre Dame. This intensive week-long program offered a rare academic opportunity to explore, in the company of exceptional colleagues and mentor-scholars, the wide-ranging potential of videographic criticism techniques through direct, hands-on engagement with audiovisual materials. Among the various methods we encountered, one exercise, developed by Ariel Avissar (2024), introduced the “videographic dissection” approach. This method employs the video editing software’s timeline to deconstruct a chosen media object, with the process documented through screen capture. The aim was that the resulting video, which records the act of dissecting the timeline itself, could serve as a site for generating new scholarly insights and potentially suggest a methodological framework for examining other media objects in future research.

For me, this was perhaps the most challenging and thought-provoking exercise of the entire workshop. As a historian, my work is typically grounded in the construction, rather than the dissection, of timelines. Those timelines are largely metaphorical, composed of words on the page rather than embedded in technological interfaces. Engaging with the videographic dissection required me to reimagine the timeline not as an abstract organising device for historical narrative, but as a concrete, visual, and manipulable space within the editing software. In doing so, I exchanged the library and the archive for the nonlinear editing suite, translating the metaphorical timelines of my written scholarship into literal ones unfolding on my computer screen – timelines whose arrangement, duration, and rhythm could themselves become instruments of historical analysis.¹

The idea that historical analysis can be enriched by tools or concepts originating in the cinematic domain is not new and has already been discussed in scholarship (Smith, 1976; Ferro, 1988; Rosenstone, 1995). In his seminal work The Historian’s Craft, the French historian Marc Bloch employed the metaphor of film to articulate the essence of the historian’s work:

[I]t is change which the historian is seeking to grasp. But in the film which he is examining, only the last picture remains quite clear. In order to reconstruct the faded features of the others, it behooves him first to unwind the spool in the opposite direction from that in which the pictures were taken (Bloch, 1953: 46).

For me, the videographic dissection approach offered a concrete mechanism for enacting Bloch’s conception of historical inquiry. It enabled me to dissect an audiovisual historical source from my own research, in order to re-examine it from new perspectives. The deconstruction of the timeline paved a path toward its reconstruction and the reinvestigation of historical reality, allowing me to view the images “in the opposite direction from that in which the pictures were taken.” Borrowing Walter Benjamin’s famous metaphor, this act of dissection also became a way of “brushing history against the grain” (Benjamin, 1996: 392).

Inspired by Benjamin’s cultural theory, Catherine Russell has argued that the rise of digital media and the emergence of video essays as both pedagogical and poetic forms have provided a prolific critical framework for examining archival materials (Russell, 2018: 28). While the audiovisual use of archival footage may raise aesthetic and ethical questions (Baron, 2021: 7–8), it also carries significant potential to interrogate hegemonic meta-narratives, shedding new light on silent narratives that might otherwise remain forgotten or marginalised (Bell & Grant, 2025; Ford, 2024). Videographic research, therefore, offers a particularly powerful opportunity to re-examine hegemonic structures by dissecting them on the timeline and exposing the archival building blocks from which they are constructed.

My videographic dissection examines With Hitchcock in Jerusalem (1966), an Israeli state-sponsored propaganda film documenting Alfred Hitchcock’s visit to Jerusalem in September 1966. This 15-minute production aimed to promote Jerusalem as “a city of peace” – a portrayal that diverged from the city’s historical realities in the mid-1960s. At the time, Jerusalem was a border town, divided between Israel and Jordan. Jordanian snipers occasionally fired on curious tourists who ventured too close to the borderline (Segev, 2007: 169–170), a phenomenon incompatible with the peaceful municipal vision the film sought to project and one it entirely omitted. Instead, the film follows Teddy Kollek, then the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, as he personally escorts Hitchcock on a guided tour of the city. As a work of state propaganda, it meticulously stages Jerusalem’s landscapes and public spaces to construct an image of harmony, stability, and openness to foreign visitors.

The film was intended for broadcast on American television and was produced by the Israel Film Service (IFS) for the Israeli Ministry of Tourism and the Municipality of Jerusalem. Archival records from the IFS reveal that Teddy Kollek not only funded the film but was also personally and actively involved in its production. One document indicates that Kollek himself oversaw “the process of shooting more general views of Jerusalem, as intercuts to Hitchcock’s trip through the city.”²

In the following video, I apply the technique of videographic dissection to isolate the original shots of Hitchcock from the intercut shots of Jerusalem that were added later at Kollek’s request. Within the editing software, I marked these two categories with distinct colours and arranged them into two parallel timelines, each composed of small colour-coded thumbnails. In the final video, these timelines run side by side in fast motion, accompanied by a reference window displaying the original film. The reference window itself was also colour-coded: green for shots in which Hitchcock appears, red for the intercut views of Jerusalem.

This visualisation reveals that approximately half of the film, about 50% of its timeline, consists of footage shot without Hitchcock, after he had already left Israel. It yields historical insight into the power of propaganda and audiovisual manipulation to shape historical perception. It also raises various questions: Did the added intercuts obscure other images of Jerusalem? Did Kollek’s involvement contribute to the presentation of a very specific – and perhaps selective – vision of the city? Could such manipulation have directed the spectators’ gaze toward one side of Jerusalem while silencing other perspectives?

The dissected, deconstructed timeline reveals how an imagined Jerusalem was constructed on screen: a peaceful, harmonious, and sacred city. This representation deliberately eclipsed the city’s less photogenic realities – its poverty, conflict, and violence – as well as its divided status at the heart of a protracted national struggle. Instead, Jerusalem was reframed as a vibrant, modern metropolis, a vision designed to appeal to American audiences while minimising the fractures within the city itself.

This videographic dissection, therefore, reflects on the political power of “silent eyes,” evoking both the absence within the images themselves and the ways in which spectators may be guided to see (or not to see) historical realities before them. Ultimately, it highlights how any historical source may contain a concealed timeline, awaiting revelation.

AI Declaration

The authors have no known or substantial use of generative AI to declare.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.