For Shabbat, Pereg followed and filmed over a period of seven months the activity taking place all over Jerusalem at the entrances to ultra-orthodox neighbourhoods on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath. In Sabbath, this activity is repeated in endless variations showing the closing to traffic and thereby “consecration” of these neighborhoods, which gradually become synonymous both with the sacred day and the restrictions associated with it. By means of the actions depicted in this work, these neighborhoods are transformed into a separate sphere, “holier” than the rest of the city. 

In Sabbath, Pereg has introduced an essential component that would run through, expand in and characterize all her works from now on: her special treatment of sound. This consists in discarding the original sound recorded on location, and re-creating selected noises in the studio with y sound effects; a practive that is called “Foley”. Closely cooperating with her sound designer Nati Zeidenstadt, she conceptually chooses which sound to stress, and, disregarding all the rest, allots it a special place that has little to do with the empiric or with its relative position in reality.

Pereg’s videos are eerily silent. Sabbath was shot in very busy crossroads in Jerusalem. We see cars, buses and people – but we only hear footsteps, a car honking, nervous tapping on the dial of a wrist watch, the dragging sounds of metal barriers, and so on. 

Regarding the nexus of sound, space, and narrative in Jacques Tati's Les vacances de M. Hulot (1953), film historian Donald Kirihara wrote that “sound techniques in the film help to defeat our expectations of a space at the service of the narrative […].”[1]

Similarly to the French filmmaker, Pereg too tends to focus on one sound or noise by isolating and stripping it from any spatial coordinates. Thus, the hasty steps of a man hurrying to close a "gate" in Shabbat are audibly rendered without any depth. Devoid of any movement or articulation, they consistently sound the same irrespective of the distance between the spectator (or rather the camera) and the sound source. Pereg's treatment of sound makes it manifest that a “consecrated” space is one to which the usual narratives of time and space do not apply. 

[1] Donald Kirihara, “Sound in Les Vacances de M. Hulot.” Peter Lehman (ed.) Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, Tallahassee: Florida University Press, 1990, p. 162.