In 2011, Evron revisited the architecture of 1960s East Jerusalem in his 35-mm film A Free Moment. Presented as a high-definition video that often covers the entire wall onto which it is projected, this work reverses the relationship between site and building established by Oriental Arch. Whereas the earlier video lingers on the hotel’s interior and exterior details, neglecting the city beyond its walls, A Free Moment was shot in a building that was never completed; with no walls to block the view, the camera can’t help but capture the city extending beyond it.

The film is composed of a single four-minute shot. A computer-controlled robotic apparatus determines the camera’s movements, which consist of a dolly shot, a 360-degree horizontal pan, and a 360-degree upward tilt. These movements occur simultaneously and last exactly as long as it takes to expose one film cartridge. The film’s taut structure helps compensate for the incomplete form of the building and the mutability of its environment.

As with the Seven Arches Hotel, the subject of A Free Moment occupies a lofty perch above the eastern part of Jerusalem in territory once governed by Jordan. The concrete hulk is what remains of the royal family’s Summer Palace, begun in 1966 and left incomplete when the area became a site of battles during the Six-Day War. As with the Mount of Olives, this hill, known as Tell el-Ful, is now territory administered by Israel.

The viewer’s experience, as the camera moves along three axes at once, is as disorienting as the political changes that halted the building’s construction. Viewers of the wall-size projection feel the camera’s silky movement in their stomachs as ground and sky become confused. Its lens focuses upon scarred concrete ceilings that, briefly shorn of context, look like the surface of the moon. Eventually the dolly track and the robotic arm operating the camera come into view. At the end of its four-minute ride, the camera is once again upright and once again pointed toward the northern end of the building, this time from the opposite end of the structure. The city, seen without obstruction at the beginning, is now sandwiched by two heavy concrete floor plates. The dolly track is like a zipper that, when pulled, will reveal even more of the surroundings.

In Oriental Arch and A Free Moment, politically relevant historical information is encoded in a language of formal austerity. Evron’s use of structuralist or materialist strategies is appropriate. Such inquiries into film’s characteristics were first articulated, and were explored most avidly, during the 1960s. The self-reflexive explorations were a search for film’s essential identity. Questions of identity, of course, permeate Israel’s history, become acute during the 1960s, and continually reshape the human meaning of such places as the Seven Arches Hotel and the Summer Palace.

Text: Brian Sholis, from exhibition catalogue of Masad, Evron’s solo show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art,  2016