The Catastrophic Horizon: Contemporary Israeli Cinema\u27s Critique of Neo-Liberal Israel

In her article, Munk analyzes the gradual decline in social solidarity of the once-socialist Israeli society has become discernible in arts and society alike. This process has been voiced in films that described the dangers of a segregated society in a graphic manner, pointing an accusing finger at what Israeli society has become. In these films, the prolonged Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories considered by some as the source of all evil, has been removed from the intellectual foreground in order to provide by a deeper look into the catastrophic outcomes of the social dead end Zionism has reached. The article analyzes four feature films from four different Israeli male generations – Uri Barabash\u27s The Salt of the Earth (2006), Yaki Yosha\u27s Still Walking (2010), and Tom Shoval\u27s Youth (2013) and Jonathan Gurfinkel\u27s S#x Times (2013) in order to define the post-ideological shift that Israeli cinema has chosen. Through their representation of gratuitous violence, the four films selected reveal the unspoken social and political dead end that contemporary Israeli society has reached

“Dreamers Often Lie”: On “Compromise”, the subversive documentation of an Israeli- Palestinian political adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Is Romeo and Juliet relevant to a description of the Middle-East conflict? This is the question raised in Compromise, an Israeli documentary that follows the Jerusalem Khan Theater's production of the play in the mid-1990's. This paper describes how the cinematic documentation of a theatrical Shakespeare production can undermine the original intentions of its creators. This staging of the play was carefully planned in order to demonstrate to the country and the world that Israelis and Palestinians are willing to search for a peaceful solution in the Middle East: Two directors - Israeli -Eran Baniel and Palestinian Fuad Awad - co-directed both Israeli and Palestinian actors, using both languages: Arabic and Hebrew. This seemingly balanced solution was acclaimed on European television but for Israeli director Even, this was only a façade. Following backstage situation,  Compromise reveals the truth behind the mask in order to denounce the manipulative use of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines as state of emergency, which is the hegemonic mechanism that deprives people of the elementary civil rights. Questioning the issue of co-existence against the political background of the 1990's (including bomb attacks and the signing of the Camp David Treaty in 1993), the film plays on the discrepancy between the denouement of Romeo and Juliet and the unsolvable situation in which people in the Middle-East - amongst them the actors themselves- are condemned to live.

Investigating the Israeli Soldier’s Guilt and Responsibility

Alors que les technologies de la couverture de la guerre ne cessent de se perfectionner les images de medias deviennent de plus en plus nombreuses et de moins en moins crédibles. L’organisation non-gouvernementale israélienne “Briser le silence” qui a été fondée il y a quelques années, cherche à répondre à ce défi en documentant le quotidien des soldats israéliens dans les territoires occupés, sous la forme de témoignages-confession, d’où ressort le double rôle de ces soldats dans le système militaire de Tsahal – à la fois persécuteur et victime. Cette dualité vis-à-vis de la responsabilité du soldat israélien, qui semble avoir servie de base éthique aux derniers films Israéliens à succès traitant de la première guerre du Liban – “Beaufort”, “Valse avec Bashir” et “Lebanon”, offre en fait l’infrastructure intellectuelle sur laquelle repose la dénonciation de la manipulation militaire de jeunes hommes au nom du patriotisme. C’est pourquoi il se doit d’interpréter ces documentations comme des actes de résistance politique.While technologies of war reporting have been constantly improving, media images have been proliferating but also suffering from increasing lack of credibility. The Israeli NGO “Breaking the Silence”, created a few years ago, tries to answer this challenge by documenting the daily life of soldiers in the occupied territories. The organization proposes filmed testimonies/confessions, which highlight the double role of the soldiers in Tsahal’s military system, both persecutors and as victims. This double role, and this conception of the responsibility of the Israeli soldier, seems to have been the ethical basis of recent Israeli movies dealing with the first Lebanon War: “Beaufort”, “Waltz with Bashir”, and “Lebanon”. It offers the intellectual infrastructure to a denunciation of the military manipulation of young men in the name of patriotism. This is why the documents of “Breaking the Silence” must be interpreted as acts of political resistance

Arnon Goldfinger\u27s The Flat: Holocaust Memory, Film Noir, and the Pain of Others

This article engages with one of the most successful contemporary Israeli documentaries, Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat (Israel, 2011). Its success, both in Israel and worldwide, has been attributed to the unusual relationship it reveals: the sustained friendship between the Tuchlers, a Jewish-Israeli couple of German origin who were the director’s grandparents, and a German couple, of whom the husband was none other than the notorious Nazi officer Leopold von Mildenstein (1902–1968). Using a first-person narration, Israeli director Goldfinger sets out to investigate this weird friendship and discovers, completely by accident, what Susan Sontag termed “the pain of others.” He also comes to recognize himself as a second (or maybe third) generation survivor of the Holocaust: that he is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. These two discoveries shake the very foundations of his Israeli identity, since the new Israeli culture to which Goldfinger belongs has invested countless eff orts in concealing the vulnerability, physical weakness, and eventual flawed masculinity of the “Old Jew.” These two narrative lines intersect through the filmmaker’s adoption of one of the most fascinating cinematic genres, film noir—an unprecedented choice in Israeli documentary, which, as this article will demonstrate, was above all an ethical choice

"Dreamers Often Lie": On "Compromise", the subversive documentation of an Israeli- Palestinian political adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Is Romeo and Juliet relevant to a description of the Middle-East conflict? This is the question raised in Compromise, an Israeli documentary that follows the Jerusalem Khan Theater's production of the play in the mid-1990's. This paper describes how the cinematic documentation of a theatrical Shakespeare production can undermine the original intentions of its creators. This staging of the play was carefully planned in order to demonstrate to the country and the world that Israelis and Palestinians are willing to search for a peaceful solution in the Middle East: Two directors - Israeli -Eran Baniel and Palestinian Fuad Awad - co-directed both Israeli and Palestinian actors, using both languages: Arabic and Hebrew. This seemingly balanced solution was acclaimed on European television but for Israeli director Even, this was only a façade. Following backstage situation, Compromise reveals the truth behind the mask in order to denounce the manipulative use of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines as state of emergency, which is the hegemonic mechanism that deprives people of the elementary civil rights. Questioning the issue of co-existence against the political background of the 1990's (including bomb attacks and the signing of the Camp David Treaty in 1993), the film plays on the discrepancy between the denouement of Romeo and Juliet and the unsolvable situation in which people in the Middle-East - amongst them the actors themselves- are condemned to liv

Déplacement du mythe du Sabra

This article engages with Amos Gitai’s personal interpretation of Ya’akov Shabtai’s novel, Past Continuous (Zikhron Dvarim). For many years no one had dared to adapt this most modernistic novel to the screen, until filmmaker Gitai decided that his return to Israel after almost ten years in France should be announced by means of this ambitious project. A number of artistic decisions made Dvarim a remarkable film, in which the filmmaker entertains a dialogue with the image of the Sabra, with whom Shabtai was associated, and with his own biography. Although the age difference between Shabtai and Gitai dictated a major change in the narrative background, it also contributed to the establishment of a parallelism between two identity crises in Israeli history: the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war and the aftermath of the first Intifadah

On Steir-Livny’s Remaking Holocaust Memory

Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third Generation Survivors in Israel. By Liat Steir-Livny. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. ISBN 780815 636502, $7