Moby Dick (2000), is a direct remake of Herman Melville's famous story of the hunting of the white whale. In this film, the artist's interest in body art and slapstick shapes up as he makes his first attempt to work in, rather than against, a familial situation. As expected, Ben-Ner and his daughter Elia play most of the roles in the film. The kitchen is turned into a whaler – the mast is stuck in the sink, the marble counter becomes the bridge, the refrigerator is turned into the food depot, and the cupboards – into the crew’s sleeping quarters. The whale lard is cooked on the stove, and the greenish tiles of Ben-Ner's kitchen floor perfectly match the clear waters in which sharks look for prey. 

Moby Dick is an accomplished work in terms of filmic context, being ultimately a film about film and art. The process initiated in Berkeley's Island, whereby the narrative and figures are shaped by icons from the history of art and cinema, is consolidated here. Scenes intended to provoke the sense of the ship’s long journey, for instance, are taken from Chaplin who depicted these situations in several of his films. From The Immigrant Ben-Ner takes the scene where two fellow passengers share a plate of food thanks to the ship's furious pitching; and from The Gold Rush he quotes the hallucination scenes of Charlie’s hunger-crazed fellow gold-digger who imagines him to be a giant chicken – in Ben-Ner's film, his own daughter metamorphoses into a chicken. 

The different figures in this film are typecast from the body art dictionary. The cannibal, who in Melville's story has his body decorated with tattoos, obtains in Ben-Ner's film the image of a 1963 performance by Natsuyuki Nakanishi in which the artist covered his body with clothes-pins; the big-hearted harpooner has his heart delineated by shaving his chest hair, as a direct allusion to Vito Acconci's Openings (1970), the film-performance where the artist tears out the hairs around his navel one by one, Geoffrey Hendricks' Body/Hair (1971), and several other hair-related performances. 

From: Guy Ben-Ner; Self-Portrait as a Family Man; catalogue of the Israeli Pavilion at the 51st International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale.