The banality of Gaza: what NAZA asks of 'perpetrator cinema'

An old question, a new subject

Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” has been invoked so often it has become a cliché, a shorthand reached for whenever a documentary wants to suggest its subject is more ordinary than monstrous. NAZA, the film at the centre of a new Guardian essay, drags the phrase back into genuine discomfort. Its subjects are not ageing bureaucrats decades removed from their crimes but anonymised members of Israeli intelligence, describing in the present tense their role in what the film frames as the assault on Gaza. They are, by their own account, educated, left-leaning and explicitly non-racist. One of them, per the essay, uses the word genocide to describe what they took part in.

That a subject applies the comparison to Nazi Germany to their own conduct, rather than having it imposed by a narrator or an interviewer, is the detail doing the heaviest lifting here. It is also, as the essay notes, “understandably controversial”, a phrase that does a lot of quiet work in a single sentence.

The genre problem

NAZA sits inside a lineage the piece calls “perpetrator cinema”, films that hand the microphone not to victims or investigators but to those who pulled the trigger, pressed the button, or in this case, authorised the strike from a distance. The form has an uneasy history. It can produce genuine reckoning, as with earlier films that let killers talk themselves into confession. It can also produce something closer to rehabilitation, where articulacy reads as reflection and reflection reads, unintentionally, as absolution.

The essay’s interest is less in relitigating Gaza itself than in what it means for a film to let its subjects describe themselves as ordinary, moral people who nonetheless did this. That framing is the film’s provocation and its risk in equal measure: the closer the subjects resemble the audience, articulate, middle-class, liberal in their self-description, the harder it becomes to hold them at arm’s length as simply monstrous.

What isn’t in frame

What the source material does not tell us is almost as significant as what it does. There is no detail here on who funded NAZA, where it was shot, whether its subjects were paid or granted anonymity under legal advice, how distributors in Israel or elsewhere have responded, or whether the film has secured a UK release beyond the festival and review circuit implied by the Guardian’s earlier coverage in September. For a documentary built on access to serving or former intelligence personnel, those are not footnotes, they are the questions that determine whether what’s on screen is testimony, propaganda, or something harder to classify, and who stood to gain from getting it made.

Perpetrator cinema has always traded on a difficult bargain: the access needed to get insiders talking usually comes with conditions, and audiences rarely get to see what those conditions were. Nothing in the available reporting confirms what NAZA’s makers agreed to, or didn’t, to get their subjects on camera.

The takeaway

NAZA’s achievement, on the evidence here, is getting people inside an occupying intelligence apparatus to describe their own actions in the language of atrocity, unprompted. That is a rare and genuinely significant piece of documentary access. Whether it amounts to accountability cinema or merely a more sophisticated form of self-exculpation depends on facts the current reporting doesn’t supply, funding, editorial control, and what, if anything, its subjects got in return for talking. Until those are on the record, the film’s moral clarity should be read as a claim, not a verdict.