Contemporary Israeli Cinema

In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel , Yaron Shemer presents the most comprehensive and systematic study to date of Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish or Arab-Jewish) films produced in Israel in the last several decades. Through an analysis of dozens of films the book illustrates how narratives, characters, and space have been employed to give expression to Mizrahi ethnic identity and to situate the Mizrahi within the broader context of the Israeli societal fabric. The struggle over identity and the effort to redraw ethnic boundaries have taken place against the backdrop of a long-standing Zionist view of the Mizrahi as an inferior other whose “Levantine” culture posed a threat to the Western-oriented Zionist enterprise. In its examination of the nature and dynamics of Mizrahi cinema (defined by subject-matter), the book engages the sensitive topic of Mizrahi ethnicity head-on, confronting the conventional notion of Israeli society as a melting pot and the widespread dismissal of ethnic divisions in the country. Shemer explores the continuous marginalization of the Mizrahi in contemporary Israeli cinema and the challenge some Mizrahi films offer to the subjugation of this ethnic group. He also studies the role cultural policies and institutional power in Israel have played in shaping Mizrahi cinema and the creation of a Mizrahi niche in cinema. In a broader sense, this pioneering work is a probing exploration of Israeli culture and society through the prism of film and cinematic expression. It sheds light on the play of ethnicity, class, gender, and religion in contemporary Israel, and on the heated debates surrounding Zionist ideology and identity politics. By charting a new territory of academic inquiry grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, the study contributes to the formation of “Mizrahi Cinema” as a recognized and vibrant scholarly field.

The last decade has marked the growing visibility and worldwide interest in Israeli cinema. Films such as Walk on Water, Or, My Treasure, Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir have been commercially and critically successful both in Europe and the United States and have won a number of prestigious international awards. This book examines for the first time the new ideological and aesthetic trends in contemporary Israeli cinema. More specifically, it critically explores the complex and crucial role of Israeli cinema in remembering and restaging traumas and losses that were denied entry into the shared national past. One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema is the number and scope of films dealing with past traumatic events – events that were repressed or insufficiently mourned, such as the memory of the Holocaust, traumas from wars and terrorist attacks, and the losses entailed by the experience of immigration. Current Israeli cinema exposes and highlights a radical discontinuity between history and memory. Traumatic events from Israeli society’s past are represented as the private memory of distinct social groups – soldiers, immigrants, women, queers – and not as collective memory, as a lived and practiced tradition that conditions Israeli society. This detachment from national collective memory pulls the films into a world marked by a persistent blurring of the historical context and by private and subjective impressions – a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and myths. These groups feel duty-bound to remember the past, recasting repressed memories through the cinema in order to return and to give meaning to their identity.

With top billing at many film forums around the world, as well as a string of prestigious prizes, including consecutive nominations for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Israeli films have become one of the most visible and promising cinemas in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an intriguing and vibrant site for the representation of Israeli realities. Yet two decades have passed since the last wide-ranging scholarly overview of Israeli cinema, creating a need for a new, state-of-the-art analysis of this exciting cinematic oeuvre. The first anthology of its kind in English, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion presents a collection of specially commissioned articles in which leading Israeli film scholars examine Israeli cinema as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities through the medium and art of motion pictures. The contributors address several broad themes: the nation imagined on film; war, conflict, and trauma; gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; religion and Judaism; discourses of place in the age of globalism; filming the Palestinian Other; and new cinematic discourses. The authors' illuminating readings of Israeli films reveal that Israeli cinema offers rare visual and narrative insights into the complex national, social, and multicultural Israeli universe, transcending the partial and superficial images of this culture in world media.

This book examines several Israeli fictional and non-fictional films, and how their portrayal of landscape and territory provides a unique perspective on Jewish and Israeli identity. The book demonstrates how space in film is not only a 'container' for events in the plot, but an event in and of itself, since space and place are significant elements in the on-going negotiations regarding Jewish and Israeli identity. Films capture more than just the outward appearance of a place: they also record a web of unruly traces of economic, social, and political systems. Almost 2,000 years of Jewish exile created a gap between the idea of 'the Israeli place' and how the modern State of Israel has actualized that idea. Israeli cinema contains layered expressions of this issue, and, in this book, place and space function both as the subject matter of the analysis and as a theoretical tool. This innovative perspective will enable readers to discern themes significant both to contemporary culture (maps, borders, checkpoints, and military zones) and Jewish mythology (garden, desert, water, Jerusalem, and sacred space). Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema includes references to Israeli literature and art, and it interweaves observations from the fields of visual studies, cultural studies, mythology, and Jewish thought to create a thought-provoking analysis. *** "Given the number of important, critically recognized Israeli films, this is a welcome book. ...Zanger's attention to the place of minorities--including women, Mizrahim, and Arabs--within Israel greatly enchances the book's timely appeal. Recommended." - Choice, Vol. 50, No. 08, April 2013

In this collection, leading scholars in both film studies and Israeli studies show that beyond representing familiar historical accounts or striving to offer a more complete and accurate depiction of the past, Israeli cinema has innovatively used trauma and memory to offer insights about Israeli society and to engage with cinematic experimentation and invention. Tracing a long line of films from the 1940s up to the 2000s, the contributors use close readings of these films not only to reconstruct the past, but also to actively engage with it. Addressing both high-profile and lesser known fiction and non-fiction Israeli films, Deeper than Oblivion underlines the unique aesthetic choices many of these films make in their attempt to confront the difficulties, perhaps even impossibility, of representing trauma. By looking at recent and classic examples of Israeli films that turn to memory and trauma, this book addresses the pressing issues and disputes in the field today.

As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community, Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. Directed by God explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it. Once the purview of secular culture, Israel’s media initially promoted alternatives to traditional religious expression; however, using films such as Kadosh, Waltz with Bashir, and Eyes Wide Open, Yaron Peleg shows how Israel’s contemporary film and television programs have been shaped by new religious trends and how secular Israeli culture has processed and reflected on its religious heritage. He investigates how shifting cinematic visions of Jewish masculinity and gender track transformations in the nation’s religious discourse. Moving beyond the secular/religious divide, Directed by God explores changing film and television representations of different Jewish religious groups, assessing what these representations may mean for the future of Israeli society.

Through analysis of the complex discourse surrounding trauma and loss, this book provides a necessary examination of temporality and ethics in Israeli film and television since the turn of the millennium. The author examines posttraumatic idioms of fragmentation and incoherence, highlighting the rising resistance towards generic categories, and the turn to unconventional and paradoxical structures with unique aesthetics. Maintaining that contemporary Israeli cinema has undergone an ethical shift, the author examines the revealing traumas and denied identities that also seek alternative ways to confront ethical question of accountability. It discusses the relationships between trauma, nationalism, and cinema through the intertwined perspectives of feminism, queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies, showing how national traumas are constructed by notions of gendered, sexual, and racial identity. This innovative text highlights the complexities of discourse surrounding trauma and loss, informed by multiple categories of difference. Across each chapter various elements of Israeli film are explored, spanning from strategies used to critically examine victim-perpetrator dynamics, co-existence in temporal space, women’s cinema in Israel, displacement, and queer communities and identity. Beyond its direct contribution to cinema studies and Israel studies, the book will be of interest to trauma and memory studies, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, Jewish studies, Middle Eastern studies, and cultural studies.

When the Hebrew edition of this groundbreaking book came out, it provoked a stormy public debate. The author has now up-dated "Israeli Cinema", adding a substantial new postscript that reflects on the book's initial reception and points to exciting new trends in the cinematic representation of Israel and Palestine. Ella Shohat explores the cinema as a productive site of national culture, dating back to the early Zionist films about turn-of-the-century Palestine. She offers a deconstructionist reading of Zionism, viewing the cinema as itself participating in the 'invention' of the nation. Unthinking the Eurocentric imaginary of 'East versus West', Shohat highlights the paradoxes of an anomalous national/colonial project through a number of salient issues, including the Sabra figure as a negation of the 'Diaspora Jew', the iconography of the land of Israel as a denial of Palestine, and the narrative role of 'the good Arab'. The new postscript examines the emergence of a richly multiperspectival cinematic space that transcends earlier dichotomies through a palimpsestic and cross-border approach to Israel/Palestine.