Described by The Nation film critic Stuart Klawans as the nerviest of Gitai's early films, the forceful Field Diary is a film journal of the West Bank made on the eve of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It is also a document of the power of a camera against the power of the gun. "People repeatedly threaten to break Gitai's camera; he's continually poking the underbelly of a closed society." (Leslie Camhi, Village Voice) Gitai's obstinate, insistent camera records extended encounters with Palestinian refugees, Israeli soldiers, and Israeli settlers. These, combined with observations of the everyday details of the occupation and long traveling shots of the contested landscape, construct, in Gitai's words, "the story of the occupier's inability to face up to his own actions, taking refuge in abstractions (God, the Nation, Security) and turning that into a mechanism for legitimizing what he does."