Politicians in a nutshell: four-minute documentary portraits of three Israeli leaders

In 2011, a leading Israeli investigative TV program (“Uvda”) launched “Four Minutes,” a series of short documentaries profiling public figures. This paper analyzes three portraits of Israeli political leaders—then-president Shimon Peres, then–Knesset member Tzipi Livni, and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (founder of Shas)—to show how the films, despite rigid temporal constraints, construct cohesive and complex political personas and agendas. We outline the multimodal means—verbal text, image, sound, camerawork, editing, and salient objects—through which condensed, multilayered, and often implicit messages are conveyed. We argue that the films’ overt content appears superficial, while their covert layers encode the primary meanings, reflecting both the protagonists’ strategic self-presentation and the filmmakers’ perspectives.

Silvia Adler, Ayelet Kohn