Proxy: Suburban Zionism, Trans Positionality, and the Politics of Return on Camera

Abstract

When the filmmaker returns to their insular Jewish hometown, filming offers a way to mediate their new foreignness in the spaces they grew up in. The film is grounded in a personal politics of return to the filmmaker’s insular, suburban Jewish Zionist hometown and replicates their simultaneous insider and outsider positionalities there. Proxy’s temporality and emotional world are defined by the filmmaker’s medical transition and resentment/rejection of the strict Zionism of their childhood. The film brings audiences into close proximity with the town’s children, who act as visual representatives of Zionist and traditionally Jewish ideological formation and the filmmaker’s own failure/refusal to live out those ideologies. Proxy employs a methodology of slow observation alongside interactions with local children. Its restrained first-person voiceover is paired with observational verité footage and ambient location sound. Distant, observational, more intimate fragmentary and closeup footage situate audiences in a tense subjectivity between insider and outsider. Proxy showcases the lush, idyllic landscapes of suburban Zionism, asking audiences to grapple with these ‘perfect’, privileged sites and their relationship to hyper-present symbols of imperialism and violence visible on children’s clothing, in their hands, on front lawns, and in shop windows. Proxy is situated across time, in both the anticipatory space of summer where the filmmaker has not yet begun medical transition but imagines it from behind the camera, and simultaneously in the middle of medical transition through its voiceover, recorded nine months after initial filming. The film is oriented toward the future, desperate for change in and beyond the filmmaker’s body.