The Viewing Booth – An Important But Imperfect Documentary

The Viewing Booth follows a Jewish American college student named Maia Levi who was also a staunch supporter of Israel, appearing in videos depicting Palestinian life under Israeli military rule in the West Bank, challenging her worldview and her beliefs about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

A painful truth is that many of our lives are consumed by propaganda. Almost every bit of media we consume is propagandistic on some level or another. It can get truly insidious when it is sold using believable wording, a credible tone, to paint the misinformation as ‘reality’. Have you ever heard stuff like ‘America is the greatest country in the world’ or ‘This foreign country is trying to bring terror and crime and drugs to America’ or something else among those lines? Do you ever get the urge to just roll your eyes in disgust, because you just know that’s a whole lot of nonsense? How about more subtle messaging that blurs lines, presents issues and matters as complicated and unexplainable as can be? Maybe justification of endless wars via painting foreign countries as cesspools for radical terrorism? Many, often jaded, young adults of the 2020s have shown to be more conscious of the need to be aware of what they’re receiving, to be sure what they are receiving is what they asked for, and who often act in their own interests before anyone else’s. This is to say nothing of how the U.S. Government will blame other foreign countries for problems and make a point to avoid self-implication or accountability of any kind.

The Viewing Booth brings into question one’s view of foreign countries, especially ones driven to squalor by dictatorships. Here, the film shines a light on the Israeli-Palestine conflict where information from the American government has muddied the main narrative of the conflict. It builds upon that conflict by taking a Jewish person with a loose association to the conflict and the presence of mind to dispel notions about Israeli’s rule of Palestine. It was certainly compelling to see how it takes specific steps to point out tricks many could utilize when putting together a propaganda video; subtle editing, cutting out entire segments, and splicing out context so as to recontextualize what’s happening. As the videos play out over the course of little over an hour, viewers are kept at a distance as their reactions are filtered through those of another person. That seems like it’s part of the point, and perhaps it feels a tad clinical, but it is a clever concept to make people realize the falsehoods of the information they’ve been fed. The main issue is that Levi’s reactions did not feel involved enough; there’s something artificial about the way she’s reacting, and that somewhat mutes the investment the audience would otherwise have in watching these videos.

The message of The Viewing Booth about the information we receive becomes increasingly heavy-handed as a result of Levi’s presence. It feels like she’s essentially spelling out everything we’re supposed to feel as a viewers instead of the film letting them come to these conclusions themselves. Perhaps it goes to show that simple images work best even more than words being spoken. There could’ve been a less obvious way to convey a message as worthy as this.

In the end, The Viewing Booth is definitely a worth the watch for whoever would like to learn more about propaganda and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, offering more than that statement would imply, even though it’s not perfect.

still courtesy of Rocco Films

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Gabe Guarin

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