Fabric is set in a clothing factory in Jordan where workers produce fashion items for the Israeli market. Clearly Evron grew interested in the Jordanian factory following his research on “ATA”, but chose to use an extremely different medium: 16 mm film. The film cuts together close up shots of the worker's hats and heads with other close ups of the looms and sewing machines. Usually the depth of field is extremely shallow, so that a sharply focused nearby face or needle stands out against a blurry background. There is always a sense of tight cropping, with most of Evron's shots cutting out most of a worker's body, or most of a machine: at only a brief moment do we see the entire factory floor. Evron asks us to think about the relationship between the unwinding rolls of cotton and the unwinding spool of his film, and we are convinced that his account of a real, material subject (the production of Israeli clothes by workers brought to the factory from India) could only be expressed through a similarly material medium (16mm as opposed to a DVD or image file). There is such an intense scrutiny in this film: the viewer looks so closely at people, concentrating on their concentration. It could seem that this mode of looking stands in sharp contrast to the kind of looking staged in A Free Moment, for if the earlier film lets us see a landscape in a completely new way, turning our view upside down and to the side thanks to a computer-controlled device, the new film asks us to look at people in a manner with long roots in western art history: think of all the painters and photographers, from Chardin to Jeff Wall, whose pictures ask us to look closely at absorbed people. However, given its subject, Fabric also seems a very radical film, especially considering it is made by an Israeli artist and shows workers in Jordan. It demands that we look closely at other people and try as much as possible to appreciate their experience; it requires us, instead of thinking about current shifts of production and consumption through generalizing terms such as 'globalization', to confront with close attention how these large and sometimes abstract forces impact on people and on the world around us.
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