We see, for instance, a parade of Palestinian workers scrambling over a low panel in the wall in the early morning, on their way to jobs inside the Jewish world. We see a bored and irritated Israeli soldier at a checkpoint, dealing with people who lack the right paperwork, who refuse to stay in line, who are trying to enter or leave in the wrong direction. Sometimes the events are barely events: Workers slowly fit two of the wall's cement slabs together as a radio blares an Arab pop hit; a girl misses the bus in front of a section that's been painted to look like trees, sky and scenery.

There's also material that more closely resembles journalism. Bitton interviews an Israeli government spokesman, eager to discuss the wall as an engineering achievement. (The cost is close to $2 million per kilometer; the whole thing will cost about a billion dollars.) She talks to an apolitical West Bank suburbanite in designer shades, who offers to host Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas at his house, and a lifelong kibbutznik who sees the wall as an act of Jewish suicidal desperation. Casual bigotry is displayed on both sides, as well as heartbreaking compassion; no solutions are proposed.

But the real strength of "Wall" -- winner of several major festival awards, including a special jury prize at Sundance -- is not ideas but images. It demonstrates, more clearly than a thousand magazine articles, how intimately these two groups live side by side, in mutual distrust and terror, on this beautiful and sacred desert landscape. Bitton never expresses an opinion on whether the wall, and the system it embodies, dehumanizes and humiliates Palestinians (as it does) or whether Israelis' fear of deranged zealots is legitimate (as it is). "Issues" of that kind merely complicate the picture, which is, as a psychiatrist in the film puts it, that of a society where extremism and madness have become normal, of a Holy Land conquered by the devil.

"Wall" opens Aug. 26 in New York and Minneapolis, Sept. 9 in Chicago, and Sept. 23 in Los Angeles, with further engagements to be announced.

"William Eggleston in the Real World": Let's get drunk and not talk about art
There's an anecdote in Calvin Tomkins' great biography of Marcel Duchamp in which the poet William Carlos Williams describes an evening he once spent with Duchamp and friends at the Manhattan apartment of Walter Arensberg, a famous art-scene hangout. As if trying to get in with the cool kids, Williams took an opportunity to tell Duchamp he liked a certain painting of his. Duchamp turned to him and said, "Do you?", apparently with withering sarcasm. "I realized then and there," Williams remembered, "that there wasn't a possibility of my ever saying anything to anyone in that gang from that moment to eternity."

Michael Almereyda now feels Williams' pain. Almereyda didn't exactly fall off the turnip truck from Podunk; he's the director of the cult vampire film "Nadja" and a 2000 version of "Hamlet" that reimagines the Bard's classic as a teen soap. But his effort to make a definitive documentary about William Eggleston, the notoriously laconic Southern photographer who remade his medium in the '70s and '80s, is almost utterly defeated by its subject's sardonic stonewalling.

"William Eggleston in the Real World" is a fascinating document of total frustration, reaching its apotheosis when Almereyda gets Eggleston alone, and drunk (not, it seems, an infrequent condition for him), in a Memphis barbecue restaurant. The director starts making effusive, if banal, comments about photography -- it captures moments that are gone, making them permanent, and so on. Eggleston deflects it all, looking as always like your college English professor on a dangerous bender. He lights cigarette after cigarette, saying, "That just means nothing to me" or "I just never thought about it," all the while refusing to look into the camera. Finally he shrugs, almost imperceptibly, and says, "What is there to talk about?"

Photography buffs will want to see this, whether they venerate Eggleston's work or hate it -- and the latter cause has pretty much been defeated. His deliberately uncomposed, color-saturated portraits of random bits of decaying Americana may have seemed shocking at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, but as Almereyda observes, they were clearly in the tradition of Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank, which might today be described as the dominant strain of American photography. We see enough of Eggleston's pictures in the film to remember how powerful and how necessary they were.

The man himself is another thing entirely. One might describe the Eggleston we see here as a certain type, the hermetic artist whose superficial politeness can't hide a hard kernel of protective hostility. You might say Eggleston is two types at once, since he's also an almost classic eccentric Southern artist, a lush and womanizer who masks his peculiarities beneath a guise of conservative conformity. He's part Duchamp or Samuel Beckett in one direction, part Faulkner in the other. Is he likable? Yes, in a way. But he also seems inscrutably wounded and, like many other important artists, completely unable or unwilling to discuss how and why he does what he does.

Almereyda clearly went into this with the idea of making a film matched in some way to Eggleston's aesthetic. He follows the artist around with a hand-held digital video camera, accompanying him on shoots in rural Kentucky, on drinking binges and assignations (Eggleston has been married for 40 years, but it seems to be one of those marriages), to museum shows in Los Angeles and award ceremonies in New York. Eggleston remains amused and uncommunicative, precariously balancing his cigarettes and gracefully wielding his glasses of bourbon. Almereyda won't shut up; he asks Eggleston endless questions and natters on in voice-over. Honestly, what the hell is there to talk about?

"William Eggleston in the Real World" opens Aug. 31 at Film Forum in New York.

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