01/02/2024 - In Daniel Mann’s essay documentary, the shooting of Rambo III in Israel’s Negev desert is shown as a camouflage for land dispossession

Central to contemporary discussions of war is the notion of “image warfare”: that large-scale human conflict also unfolds in the more abstract realms of media representation and spin. It’s several stages advanced from a mere battle of propaganda, itself once taking the form of newsreels and early feature films: scholars and observers of this newly theorised area seem especially excited about how pop-cultural texts contribute to this, alongside other eclectic media sources whose latent or unconscious meaning can be unearthed.

From its early archival footage of Rambo III publicity material, showing Sylvester Stallone musing on its elaborate production in his inimitable loveable-lug manner, Daniel Mann’s Under a Blue Sun – premiering in IFFR’s Tiger Competition – fits squarely in this new field of inquiry. The crux is that in 1987, the producers of the third Rambo movie sought Israel’s Negev desert as a location to stand in for the hills of Afghanistan, where Sly’s beefy mercenary was to assist the Mujahideen against the Soviet invasion. Here, Mann attests with some clarity to this holding great symbolic significance, and a characteristic example of settler-colonialism’s creed of geographic displacement.

Under a Blue Sun proceeds in two main cinematographic modes, one serving as a pathway to the other. Mann further illustrates his initial concept with video art-like imagery of a familiar nature, whereby we see exterior shots from Rambo III double-exposed against the same Negev locations in the present day, and tableaux of empty locations like a prop studio captured in static, deep-focus compositions, augmented with further image manipulations like slowly oozing red-coloured smoke, as if a heavy-metal concert’s dry-ice machine were deployed for a gallery installation. Yet this is something of a trojan horse for Mann to later deploy more traditionally informative footage, depicting the Bedouin population of the Negev and their troubled civil status in modern Israel, whose parallels to the country's other colonised Arab populations makes for a highly timely comparison.

With it occupying 60% of Israel’s contested landmass, the country’s powerbrokers have used the Negev over its lifespan as a grand canvas for their propaganda and state-building efforts; meanwhile, the Bedouins resettled after 1948 are subject to further persecution and, in the film’s words, are not “hooked up to infrastructure” where they can receive water and energy for their current homes, themselves mocked up in a tin exterior to avoid detection. With the rhetorical assurance that marks his career as a film academic by day, Mann creditably portrays Israel as the ruthless propaganda warriors many accuse it of being, equally aware as its critics of how the rich associations of the Negev can be twisted to make it a terrible, unreal phantom of itself. Yet as ever in these postmodern critiques, we can also be sceptical of the supposed danger and casualties of visual warfare – whose outcomes are hypothetical and disputable – as opposed to empirical, hard evidence from the field, however challenging that is to evaluate itself.

Under a Blue Sun is a French-Israeli co-production, staged by Acqua Alta, La Bête and Laila Films.