The pivotal scene in The Insult consists of the exhibition of archival footage from Darmour in the court. We learn eventually that Tony – our chief plaintiff in the film, belongs to Darmour too. The footage seems to reveal the origins of his trauma. It is the set of incidents depicted within this footage that – the film posits - arm Tony with the ethnic contempt that he has nurtured and harboured over the years against any individual who occupies the image of the oppressor as he is depicted in the footage. The exhibition of the footage is not just a moment of catharsis for Tony but also serves to transfer his distress to those who were not present there – a curious transplantation of memory, where none exists. It becomes interesting to note at this point that throughout the film, one observes sporadic glimpses of the memory resident within Tony, but never the entirety of it. Could he have forgotten the incident with time? The footage also serves, therefore, to render an old scar fresh – curiously, it also makes him an observer of the object of his own hurt (a removal from one’s own reality and an observance of it is, after all, one of cinema’s privileges). It also provides, as it must, a moment of reflection for his opponent too - he is finally able to fathom the reason for Tony’s deep-seated agony. The same night, he visits Tony at his house, taunts him, provokes him and causes Tony to hit him back and break his ribs - a moment of glorious closure.