In their work The Disappeared, the artists Adam Kaplan and Gilad Baram reflect on the feature Hane’elam (The Disappeared) from the year 2000, produced by a chief army officer of the Israeli army. The film, which was almost completed at the time, drew attention to the rising number of suicides among soldiers, but it was censored before completion and is available today only via the memories of the participating actors, crew members and advisers. Pointing to this censorship, the work by Kaplan and Baram merely shows a black or white background. But at the same time, the artists utilize the most timeless and limitless force to generate images: imagination. Without a picture limiting one’s imagination, the individual voiceover statements are brought to the fore. The emptiness of the screen is intensified by contrasting subtitles. The work is set to the original film music by Eldad Lidor and starts and ends with a recitation of the last scene of the original script. In between, memory accounts of the actors and actresses who participated at the time (among others, the leads Lior Ashkenazi and Nataly Attiya), views of the Spokespersonʼs Film Unit that supported the production personnel-wise, legally, and financially, multiple perspectives from the Israeli society as well as numbers and facts on the Israeli military – among others the rising number of suicides – condense to a complex view on the film’s historical and social background. The institutional and overall social impact of the film is open to speculation due to the early censorship. The work of Kaplan and Baram, however, demonstrates that memories cannot be censored, but that they can indeed be revived.

Lena Hortian

Artist Statement
The Disappeared is an experimental documentary unraveling the story of an eponymous film that was denied the right of appearance and left to languish in the limbo of censorship. As such, it is a film that is available only via the recollections of the individuals who took part in its creation. Black screens, which usually stand for "nothingness" in the cinematic syntax, become its pivotal visual element as The Disappeared embraces the absence of the material that stands at its core.*

Adam Kaplan & Gilad Baram