ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why films that show troubled histories to large audiences often make very little impact educationally, socially, or culturally, even when they appear to present those histories faithfully, leading to audience education and reception in recent films on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. From the physical and social conditions of perception to the work of interpretation and response, the experience of seeing film involves many elements and steps. Through an engagement with the critical theory of Critic Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer, and Miriam Hansen, th chapter offers a framework for a pedagogical aesthetics of film and applies it to films involving the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It presents three pairs of films which, when studied together, encourage students to compare, contrast, and engage with debates around the difficult history of the conflict: the first are dramas of human relationships; the second are documentaries; and the third blur the boundary of imagination and reality.
