"Writing with a Camera"

Restless Archive culminates with Chapter 9's exploration of different layers of the cinema of the displaced, as realized in The Illegals. This hybrid film document was the American-Jewish journalist Meyer Levin’s attempt to create a record of what he claimed was absent from the land-sea crossings, a “real time” record of the Brichah from Poland to Palestine. To some extent, he was correct. The Illegals was Levin’s outraged response to the Exodus 1947 drama. It remains an under-appreciated though politically loaded example of semi-constructed reality and a real-time archive of maritime movement from Italy to Palestine which he argued was absent. The chapter concludes with Levin’s subsequent attempts to re-tell the story of The Illegals in The Unafraid (1977) and the retelling of Brichah as a connected Poland to Palestine journey through Alpine Peace Crossing tours in Austria and trail walks in the Carmel Forest in northern Israel.  

The following map locates and colorizes multiple placemarks: (1) Sara and Mika's divergent cinematic trajectories, as depicted in The Illegals; (2) Meyer Levin's film production shoot locations across Europe (in alphabetical order; rather than sequenced), with casting and other obstructions experienced at different cities and crossings; and (3) the film footage documentation locations of Arthur Zegart and Bill Bernstein.

As with other Geolocators in Restless Archive, this map clusters locations with numbers increasing and decreasing depending on the zooming function / resolution that readers/viewers choose to use. Zooming in (click on the + sign on the map) on certain locations (for example, Vienna) will reduce the number linked to towns/cities in that area, and return more precise locations. Zooming out (click on the - sign on the map) will increase the number of geolocated towns/cities in that area to the regional scale. 

The locations of the film production shoot of The Illegals (with yellow placemarks) and related commentary is taken from Meyer Levin, In Search. The deep blue placemarks depict Mika and Sara's cinematic routes in The Illegals within the larger map. The light yellow lines depict Sara's route and the black line is Mika's. These placemarks are extracted from "Die Reiseroute der Illegals", as included in Ronny Loewy (ed.), Unerschrocken. Auf dem Weg nach Palästina. Tereska Torres' Filmtagebuch von 1947 (2004). The light blue lines depict periods when the characters of Mika and Sara are together, diverge and then, reunite.

The grey and blue placemarks depict the filming locations of Arthur Zegart and Bill Bernstein (as related to their amateur film footage).

For more information on the Escape Trail and its environment, visit the website of the sponsoring organization, the KKL-JNF, and learn more about its historical evolution. " The Fifth Decade, 1941-1950 " is the most relevant category to the historical context of this chapter's focus on The Illegals.