In a formula often taken up, the eminent historian Marc Ferro1 qualified cinema as a “privileged hearth of historical consciousness,” a definition that a reading of his work2 also allows one to interpret as national consciousness or again as political consciousness. In the mirror of the films made in Israel over the course of the last fifty years, it would seem that Israeli identity — at first conceived and deliberately elaborated against Jewish identity3 — seeks today to recover it, at the moment when the present crisis of ideologies engenders in contemporary cinema sometimes an apocalyptic vision of the future of the nation and of the world, sometimes an incitement to a withdrawal into the private sphere of the couple and the family.
It is thus that in the most recent films, and to cite only those that have met with a favorable public and critical reception, none of the major problems of the nation and of society is evoked. While the interminable and bloody conflict with the Palestinians brings, along with the disquieting erosion of Israel’s image, the reawakening of an antisemitism unprecedented since the Second World War, today’s films offer sometimes timeless family dramas, sometimes renew the ethnic comedy of former times (then called “Bourekas”) by readapting it to the changes that have occurred within a society that has become conscious of its cultural pluralism.
Thus, Les Ailes Brisées (Broken Wings) (Nir Bergman, 2002) underlines the difficulties of readjustment of a family whose father has just died and where the mother must henceforth assure on her own the existence of her four children. The film attaches itself above all to showing, with infinite sensitivity, the existential and emotional conflicts provoked by absence and mourning, both in the two eldest — adolescents suddenly burdened with new responsibilities — and in the two youngest, often left to themselves. Broken Wings sketches a magnificent portrait of a mother very conscious that the demands of her work — she is a midwife in a large hospital — limit and sometimes sacrifice the projects and the aspirations of her children, provoking their anger and their revolt. In particular, the difficult mother-daughter relationship has rarely been analyzed with such finesse and tact.
Moreover, the text foils the expectations most deeply rooted in the habits of the Israeli spectator, for whom the sudden death of a still-young man can only be due to a military operation. The disavowal is underlined further by the insistence the film accords to the absurd circumstances of this death, and thereby lays claim to an unexpected “normality.”
Despite its title, the film Bétar-Provence (Ori Inbar and Youval Friedman, 2002), also remarked upon on the local scene, refrains from any allusion to the political, but evokes rather the passions that its football team “Bétar” raises among the inhabitants of a small town in southern Israel. If it scratches in passing the evident disaffection of a part of today’s youth toward military service — by showing the star of the local team busy fleeing the military police who recall him to his civic obligations — it is the decisive encounter with the prestigious national team that constitutes the essential of the film. It is also, for a few of these former Mediterraneans, defectors from Morocco, the dream of going to, of living perhaps on the other shore of the mare nostrum, that the lavender-colored Provençal postcard which closes the film suggests…
Still more centered on ethnic specificity but above all on certain cleavages transmitted by communal tradition, Mariage Tardif (Late Marriage) (Dover Kosashvili, 2001) unfolds within the Georgian immigration, which in the film expresses itself in its own language, Hebrew being reserved for the youngest or for extra-communal exchanges. Can Zaza’s family accept the stormy and passionate liaison of their son, already in his thirties and a doctoral student in philosophy, with a superb Moroccan woman, divorced and moreover the mother of a little girl? Zaza will end by bowing to the demands of the clan, not only by putting an end to his exogamic relationship but by accepting the fiancée — gawky and a virgin — that his parents will have destined for him. While he will also have paid, in the toilets where he meets his father, an unequivocal homage to the “primacy of the phallus,” Zaza, during the “late marriage,” will raise his glass, in an ironic and totally ambiguous toast, to his one great love and to a single woman: his mother.
Kosashvili had already distinguished himself at the Cannes festival where, in 1999, he received the short-film prize for what had been his graduation project at the University of Tel-Aviv. His description, at once moved and satirical, of a milieu where everything must be done “according to the laws” (the title of his short film) no doubt meets a whole so-called “glocal” current, since Late Marriage has in the meantime become an international public success and the first of its kind for Israeli cinema.
The word and the letter
In their diversity, these films give an account of what present reflection today names, nostalgically, painfully, the end, the destruction of the dream. The Zionist “grand narrative” had indeed defined itself against the Jewish eschatological perspective, where the disaster, the catastrophe awaited, called forth its redemption in a dialectic Hurban / Geula (destruction / redemption). Thus, when political Zionism is born on the model of the European nation-states, some of which accomplish their formation at the end of the nineteenth century, it is held that the wandering of the Jewish people is going to come to an end. One awaits its regeneration through the return to the space of the origins and — the Sabra having replaced Ahashver (the Wandering Jew) — its rejuvenation? its rebirth? in the Promised Land. The “Lovers of Zion” are there henceforth to irrigate it, to fertilize it, to make it fruitful.
In counterpoint, the native, the Palestinian avant la lettre, who for centuries maintained, made fruitful, and cultivated it, finds himself, in the spirit of the ambient imperialism, sometimes ignored — the founding fathers of Zionism having glimpsed an empty and virgin land — sometimes imitated: he is regarded both as the heir of the biblical Hebrew and as the model of the Israeli to come, a conception whose duality corroborates the contemporary analyses of the ambivalence of the stereotype and of the colonial relation.
Numerous writings document the questions that preoccupied the thinkers of Zionism at the time. They express opposed convictions as to the nature of the future State and reflect conceptual antagonisms regarding the idea of the nation: a Jewish cultural reserve or a space of freedom for all the peoples of the region. By the ardor of their polemic, the one and the other inscribe themselves in the direct line of the Jewish tradition. Indeed, this tradition has at all times privileged the transmission of the word and the instance of the letter over the image, struck with opprobrium as a possible source of idolatry. The biblical prohibition of human representation will have been variously interpreted over the centuries and will have known multiple exegeses. It will be no less heavy with consequences in entailing the rejection of the beauty of forms, which religious orthodoxy, even in our day, pejoratively taxes as “Hellenism.”
This indifference, this negligence toward aesthetic research will weigh heavily on the first attempts of the young Israeli cinema, for which the idea, the message to be transmitted will prevail over the means deployed to represent them. But the secular mistrust toward the image also proceeds from ancestral experience: indeed, the Jew, as the original representative of alterity in Western civilization, never ceased to confront his reflection as a reprobate in a long iconographic practice that, from the medieval illumination to the modern caricature, was never benevolent toward him.
A “committed” cinema… in the service of the State
Moreover, the political elites that form in the agricultural colonies during the years that precede the advent of the State of Israel are men of letters, if not writers; the only art of representation they revere is the theater as it is incarnated in the troupe of the “Habima,” born in Russia under the venerated aegis of Stanislavski and Vakhtangov, who in the 1920s adapted and staged the unforgettable “Dybbuk.” Cinema, on the other hand, is openly scorned. The future prime minister Ben Gurion, whose opinion carries authority on everything, sees in it a waste of time and will later resolutely oppose the introduction of television into the country: it will appear belatedly and part-time only in 1968. The first cinematographic initiatives will therefore be, in the image of the Zionist utopia itself, the work of a few exalted dreamers whom one rediscovers today4.
Subsequently, cinema will be functionally pressed into service to serve the political needs of the moment. Thus, the weekly newsreels will fulfill the same task as everywhere else in the world, covering the events the establishment then judges memorable. Documentaries, more or less clumsy, celebrate the pioneer conquests, opposing the “before” to the “after” of the Zionist realizations. With the advent of the State in 1948, various ministries finance short films called informational, in fact unsophisticated propaganda, while the cinematographic unit of the army permits the training, during their military service, of the future directors and technicians. This is the origin of what will later be called “Zionist realism,” a formula that reveals it to be not far removed from the Soviet “socialist realism.” This apprenticeship is completed when international companies — American, British, French — come to Israel to make films that the nascent local industry would have been incapable of carrying through. It is therefore foreign productions that reveal to the world the Zionist epic, celebrate the pioneer virtues, underline the heroism of the combatants during the war of Independence in Une Épée dans le Désert (Sword in the Desert) (1949), La Colline 24 ne répond plus (Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer) (1954), and of course Exodus (1960), to which must be added the French film Donnez-moi dix Hommes Désespérés (Give Me Ten Desperate Men) (1966).
These films recovered the myths of the origins from which Israeli cinema will subsequently draw tirelessly. The unequal confrontation of David against Goliath underlies most of the scenarios where the quality of the individual must prevail over an enemy superior in number and in armament. Besieged Masada, where the Zealots preferred death to servitude, becomes an obsessive political metaphor: one must vanquish or die5. This set of films, later dubbed not without irony “national-heroic,” will be appreciated above all abroad, and in the United States especially, whereas on the local scene it already arouses sarcasm if not unease. This cinema, out of step with its public, will provoke a double reaction, revealing of the new stakes and of the changes in mentalities that take place from the 1960s onward.
Toward the “New Sensibility”
It is here that the theory of the cultural polysystem, inherited from the Russian Formalists and developed by Itamar Even-Zohar6 and the Tel-Aviv School, can give an account of the specificity of this evolution at the same time as of the magnitude of the identity crisis. We have seen that the canonical model at the center of the polysystem constituted by Israeli cinema illustrates the national ethos and retraces the difficult “birth of a nation.” Now other models then put themselves in place that attempt to push back to the periphery the obsolete, anachronistic genre of the national-heroic films. For it is the constant tension between the different components of the polysystem that gives it, in synchrony, its dynamism and, in diachrony, permits the change of models.
Here, there is on the one hand the attempt to create an auteur cinema inspired by the French New Wave and aspiring to personal expression. On the other hand, “ethnic” films that criticism will derisively nickname “Bourekas” — an oriental pastry much appreciated here. They are financed by shrewd producers for the oriental immigrants recently arrived in the country, those whom the sociologist Georges Friedman defined as early as 1962 as “The Second Israel”7. The adopted formula is modeled on the popular cinema of the Mediterranean rim and will enjoy a considerable success with a public whom its arrival in Israel, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, had deterritorialized, proletarianized, frustrated.
By contrast, modernist, elitist, Western-style cinema will obtain, with rare exceptions, only a limited audience. Now the intelligentsia to whom this type of cultural realization is addressed has become very critical of the government dominated by the Labor Party. This intellectual left will soon find itself in a state of anomie when the nationalist and populist right comes to power in 1977: a deferred fallout from the profound crisis provoked by the Yom Kippur War. In the image of the contestation that expresses itself in the other arts, auteur cinema — or again, as it is named today, “the new sensibility” — becomes from then on a committed cinema8. Its politicization manifests itself through the diversion of another biblical myth: the sacrifice of the son, Isaac, by his father Abraham. The reinterpretation implies the immolation of the young generations by the founding fathers. The subversion attains proportions until then unequaled, since it touches the very heart of the resurrection of the Jewish people into a young Israeli nation. A further limit will be crossed when another sacrosanct institution finds itself attacked: it is the army that is now criticized, in its different corps, its cadres, but above all by reason of the emotional paralysis, the erosion of sensibility, that it entails in the young recruits. Parachutistes (Paratroopers) (Judd Neeman) dates from 1977, then come Le Vautour (The Vulture) (Yaki Yosha, 1981) and Plongée répétée (Repeat Dive) (Shimon Dotan, 1982) on the training of elite units.
The image of the enemy will also find itself transformed thereby. Until the beginning of the 1980s, the Arab adversary, whether Egyptian, Syrian, or Jordanian, remained undifferentiated. As for the Israeli Arab, he appeared as a shepherd, as an agricultural worker, emerging from an indeterminate biblical space and time. Now, at the beginning of the 1980s, in the wave of films devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the Arab antagonist has become the Palestinian adversary who, on screen, speaks his language and affirms his own identity claim. This new attitude expressed itself simultaneously in the theater, in literature, at the same time as in the cinema. If one has sometimes been able to mock the liberal, but still ethnocentric, “patronizing” position presiding over the recognition of the Palestinian Other by which the Israeli would attempt to reconstitute, to appease his (bad) conscience9, it is nevertheless necessary to underline the multiple attempts, variously expressed, to apprehend the Palestinian problem from the inside. Henceforth, whether they be “road movies,” films of wandering, war films, prisoner films, they often invert the roles: the Palestinian protagonist assumes the values of humanity and humanism once regarded as inscribed in Zionist ideology. The reversal is sometimes striking. The Palestinians, incarnated by Palestinian actors, have adopted the behavior, the gesturality of the Israeli heroes of the national-heroic genre and are filmed in the same style: in a magnifying low angle, the Kalashnikov of the guerrillas replacing the Uzi of Tsahal (the Israel Defense Forces). These films will insist on the interchangeability of identities. In Avanti Popolo (Rafi Bukaee, 1986) it is an Egyptian soldier, an actor in civilian life, who declaims the famous monologue of Shylock from The Merchant of Venice to win over the Israeli soldiers he meets in the Sinai desert. In Le Sourire de l’Agneau (The Smile of the Lamb) (Shimon Dotan, 1986, after the book by David Grossman), the roles of the Jews are held by Arabs and vice versa. Finally, in Mariage Blanc (A Marriage of Convenience) (Haim Bouzaglo, 1988) a group of workers from Gaza take with them an Israeli, wrongly believing him to be one of their own. A reversal of another order operates in the documentary masterpiece of David Benchetrit who, in L’Exil et le Voile (Exile and the Veil) (1993), depicts three portraits of Palestinian women. An involuntary homage to the sensibility and the aesthetic sense of the director — even the Palestinian public was deceived by it and believed it to see the work of one of their own.
Open or latent, one sees that it is war, the successive conflicts opposing Israel to its neighbors, that constitute the inexhaustible source from which Israeli cinema draws its subjects of reflection, where it tirelessly redefines its identity. One notices also that, contrary to the traumatic Yom Kippur War, passed over in silence in the cinema, the Lebanon War inspired numerous works that underline the absence of national consensus regarding this controversial military operation. In two films, Ricochets (Eli Cohen, 1986) and Le temps des Cerises (Cherry Season) (H. Bouzaglo, 1991), one hears the same children’s rhyme, transposed into an act of accusation:
Come down, little airplane / Take us off to Lebanon / There we’ll fight for Sharon / And come back in a coffin.
To the front and to the war is opposed the home front that the young soldier, on returning from an operation, finds again, incredulous that the course of life can continue there, so distant, so close. The hedonism of Tel-Aviv has in recent years defied the touchy spirituality of the holy city, Jerusalem. Young, apparently carefree, Tel-Aviv suggests the superficial, indeed the artificial, in numerous films where the protagonists seem more preoccupied with the image than with the reality it reflects — in La Vie selon Agfa (Life According to Agfa) (Assi Dayan, 1992) as well as in Histoires de Tel-Aviv (Tel Aviv Stories) (Nirit Yaron and Ayelet Menahemi, 1992). Of the chaotic urbanism of a city built on sand and that seems constantly threatened with returning to it, one retains dilapidated houses, the concrete and the plaster that crack and flake under the intense sun, graceless streets, styleless neighborhoods. The new protagonists situate themselves very far from the fields that the heroes of the national-heroic films cultivated, of which the prototypical example was Il allait à travers champs (He Walked Through the Fields) (Yossef Milo, 1967), after the eponymous play by Moshe Shamir already staged by the same Milo for the opening of the Cameri theater in 1947.
The characters of today’s Israeli films, obstinately city-dwelling and nocturnal, find one another in the innumerable bars of the city that “never stops” in most of the films cited above but above all in the work of Amos Gutman. The latter in particular recreated in his films a closed homosexual world — it was its first appearance on screen — where he projected his profoundly original and somber vision of a decadent city in which marginal figures evolve. Gutman also broke another taboo by offering, in Bell-Room (1987), his only film of historical reconstitution since it deals with the war of ’48, a meditation on young mutilated bodies, inaugurating a series of films on a youth invalidated by war.
It is here that one must underline with force what the preceding lines have perhaps already suggested. On the whole, Israeli cinema was, until the last decade, a cinema of men, made by men and no doubt also for men. Even though it is one of the rare countries in the world to have instituted obligatory military service for women, it is the virile body alone that remains threatened with mutilation or annihilation in the multiple armed confrontations against which the country has measured itself over the course of its fifty years of existence. The particular, quasi-fetishistic attention that cinema brings to the physical integrity of its male protagonists and to the different manifestations of the body — the obsessive exhibition of the “abject” in the sense Kristeva gives to this term — no doubt emanates from the fear of its loss. Consequently, the feminine presence on screen or behind the camera remains ostensibly occulted, ignored. Now, the new visibility recently acquired by women, as actresses, as directors, has occurred in a particular context, which brings us once again back to the Israeli quest for its identity.
Presence of the Shoah, or the return of the repressed
We have seen that the identity of the Sabra — the fruit of the country — had constituted itself through “the negation of exile,” that is, the renewal of Hebrew as a vernacular language, the veneration of the work of the land and of manual labor in general, the edification of an egalitarian and just community. It is on the disappearance of the socialist-Zionist utopia that the works we are treating interrogate themselves, more or less consciously, more or less openly, without there having been until now any evocation of the true “crack of the world”10 of the Jews.
As surprising as it may appear, rare have been the attempts to evoke the Shoah in Israeli culture and in particular in its cinema. Dass was war (“that which was”), to cite Paul Celan’s elliptical formula, has been obstinately repressed, if not from Israeli consciousness, at least from its artistic expressions. It is only very recently that, in the cinema, the generations of “after” begin to question the survivors and provoke confidences long repressed. Thus L’Été d’Aviya (The Summer of Aviya) was first a “one-woman show” written and performed by the grande dame of the stage and the screen: Gila Almagor. The text then became an international best-seller of children’s literature, before being adapted for the screen (Eli Cohen) and awarded a prize at the Berlin festival in 1988. Almagor gave a sequel to her literary success that also became a film: Sous l’arbre Domim (Under the Domim Tree) (1995), where the adolescent Aviya grew up in those institutions that so many children of survivors, or survivors themselves, then knew. That same year, 1988, the Berlinale had also distinguished a documentary devoted to the repercussion of the disaster in the consciousness of the children of those who had escaped. In À cause de cette Guerre (Because of That War), Orna Ben-Dor questioned two pop musicians much beloved of the young, about their painful art, such as it expressed itself in their record Cendres et Poussière (Ashes and Dust), one of whose songs was to inspire the film’s title. Based on interviews, song recitals, and on the parent-child interaction, it gave rise to a wave of filmed testimonies, which have meanwhile become a genre in itself that today counts a dozen examples. One of the most remarkable remains to this day Choix et Destin (Choice and Destiny) (Tsippi Reibenbach, 1993), where the director stages her family around her survivor parents. While the father recounts his ordeals in an even tone and with a black humor dominated by a smiling fatalism — whence the title — the mother, obstinately silent, attends tirelessly to the housework, incarnating, in the sense Claude Lanzmann gives to this term, the obsession with order and cleanliness, and with food too, often affecting the former deportees. This is what one finds also in the film by Asher Tlalim Touche pas à ma Shoah (Don’t Touch My Holocaust) (1994), which does not content itself with retracing the elaboration of the most controversial play of the Israeli repertoire, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Performed by a “fringe” troupe, the company of Acco (Acre), where actors of the second generation come together with oriental Jews and Palestinian Arabs, this tortured and overwhelming happening proclaims that, in this country, the Shoah is the legacy of all and that each one — Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or Other — assumes its inheritance. One thus sees the principal protagonist have inscribed on her arm, in her flesh in the manner of a registration number, the date of the death of her father, once a deportee. The scandal that the performance had provoked came from the pitiless critique, the cruel parody, of the rituals of commemoration instituted and institutionalized, practiced until then in Israel, and of the recuperation of the Shoah for political and even military ends.
The testimonial films proceed, it must be recalled, from the childhood narratives made more than twenty years ago now, such as Cache-cache (Hide and Seek) (Dan Wollman, 1980) and Fusil de Bois (The Wooden Gun) (Ilan Moshenson, 1979), which already rose up against the repression of emotions and the denial of memory that characterized the Sabra, the child of the country. The latter today lays claim to the expression of his feelings, speaks of them in his films in the first person, without however being able to escape the pressure of the hic et nunc, of a complex, hard, invasive historical reality, where — beyond the conflicts on the international scale — the new immigrant and the Sabra, the religious and the secular, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Orientals confront one another. Thus in his film with the programmatic title Sorti chercher l’Amour… de Retour bientôt (Out for Love… Be Back Shortly) (1998), Dan Katsir evokes and also documents the upheaval that the assassination of Rabin provoked for his generation. Ron Habilio, in his monumental Fragments-Jérusalem, offers us, through the description of a neighborhood, a street, the tormented history, the superb evocation of a beloved and torn city, that also of his family, where one finds again, with the diversity of origins, religious observance and its rejection, the millennial Jewish aspiration to the universal and the provincial temptation of withdrawal into the self.
Strange closures, despairing conclusions
I have undertaken this tableau of the quest for Israeli identity as it sees itself transposed into its cinema, by underlining from the outset these two contradictory tendencies: the apocalyptic denouement that culminates in murderous frenzy and total destruction as in La Vie selon Agfa (Life According to Agfa), in the annihilation of the protagonists in Le Temps des Cerises (Cherry Season), in the consented immolation in Le Prédestiné (The Appointed) (1990). The strange impression of unreality that these despairing conclusions leave joins other closures no less bizarre and improbable, where the characters suddenly escape, take flight, to flee their destiny (Un Nouveau Pays (Newland), O. Ben-Dor, 1994). The recourse to the irrational, to the inexplicable, to the unexpected, extends even to the intimist current, where amiable comedies also call upon disconcerting elements, opposed and foreign to the down-to-earth realism that had prevailed until then. The dead-end political situation of these last years is no doubt not unconnected to it. However, a major event on the national scale has provoked changes whose influence makes itself resolutely felt today. It is the arrival in the country of a massive immigration from the countries that formerly formed the Soviet Union, provoking a radical renewal of the cultural scene: orchestras, instrumental ensembles have formed, a prestigious theatrical troupe has transported itself integrally from Moscow to Tel-Aviv, which one can see in the film by Lihi Hanoch Le Cirque (The Circus) (1995). These actors now appear in new Israeli films, sometimes directed by immigrant directors, and where the problems of cultural uprooting, of social deterioration are commonly broached. There is no doubt that the predominant Russian presence — a fifth of the population to this day — is going to rework Israeli cultural identity and remodel its cinema.
For its part, the Ethiopian immigration has given rise to various documentaries, presented above all on television, where the ordinary racism of the average Israeli is underlined. The shameless exploitation of the wave of foreign workers — come to replace the Palestinian labor force sealed off in the territories at each new attack — has also inspired these same directors, such as Dan Wolman, who in former times rose up against the cult of armed force or the misrecognition of the Other. Moreover, if the dispute with the Palestinians is no longer treated in fiction cinema — these latter today making, and often remarkably, their own works — the contestation never ceases to rise and to protest by means of the documentary shot on the terrain of the litigation, that of the occupied territories.
Israeli cinema thus seems to want to pursue its role not only as a “hearth of historical consciousness” but also of a political and, today more than ever, ethical consciousness.
Notes
Marc Ferro, Cinéma et Histoire (Cinema and History), Gallimard, 1993.↩︎
Marc Ferro, Cinéma et Histoire (Cinema and History), Gallimard, 1993.↩︎
Judd Neeman, “Zur zionistischen Erzähltradition im Israelischen Film,” Arnoldshainer Filmgespräche, 1993.↩︎
Hillel Tryster, Israel before Israel: Silent Cinema and the Holy Land, Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, Jerusalem, 1995.↩︎
Nurith Gertz, “Social Myths in Literary and Political Texts,” Sociocriticism Vol III, 2 (No 6).↩︎
Itamar Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Theory,” Poetics Today 1, 1-2, 1979.↩︎
Georges Friedman, Fin du Peuple Juif ? (The End of the Jewish People?), Gallimard, Paris, 1965.↩︎
Judd Neeman, “Les Modernes, le Manifeste Inédit” (The Moderns, the Unpublished Manifesto), in Cinémas d’Israël, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1992.↩︎
Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “Back to the Future: Evolution of the A/Teleological in Recent Israeli Fiction,” Discourse, Fall 1996, V.19, No.1.↩︎
I borrow here the admirable title of the book that André Glucksmann devoted to an entirely different problem, Flammarion, Paris, 1994.↩︎