Dani Gal’s record archive is comprised of over 300 audio documentations of declarations, addresses and historical interviews recorded throughout the 20th century at various places worldwide. Presenting the records – like traveling in a time warp – provides a peek into many of the defining moment that paved the way to the present reality of global politics (where the practice of political addresses is in no lesser use). Gal’s unique record archive is a sort of colorful and diverse monument not only to historical milestones past, but also to obsolete audio-visual techniques and formulas of propaganda that were in use in pre-digital modern times.
With support form the Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv
The Talking Mountain of Israel, Video, 21:44 mins, looped, 2006
Images: David Harris and the Government Press Office archive, Israel
Opening titles: Jacob Sharkinger
Narration: Omer Krieger
Special thanks to Zechariah Misrovsky
A sequence of photographs showing landscapes, sites, cities, inhabitants and state apparati were publicly aired on January 4th 1966 – a half-hour that was Israel’s first ever public television broadcast. Its propaganda and publicity content targeted not only some 30,000 TV sets then in Israeli households. But also, in an act of muscle flexing and bravado, they were also aimed at the TV sets in neighboring Arab countries, out of hope that their inhabitants will see and fear. Notice for example how views of east Jerusalem are casually combined in the presentation, although still outside Israel’s borders at the time.
The work is a reconstruction of the sequence of sights and sounds aired on January 4th 1966, a sequence that was never recorded. The reconstruction makes for a fascinating, nearly documentary infomercial about Israel and the Zionist dream on the eve of the Six Days War.
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