New Article: Peri-Bader, Everyday Experience in Israeli Cinema

Peri-Bader, Aya. “Everyday Experience in Israeli Cinema: The Port and the City’s Margins.” Emotion, Space and Society 18 (2016): 17-26.

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.01.003

 

Abstract

Representation of the port in Israeli cinema reveals a dialectic relationship to the concept of boundary and the possibilities that this suggests. A port is a physical place with a symbolic dimension, since it is an urban edge with various roles connected to both its environment and its users. The way it is presented leads to conclusions regarding its perceived urban atmosphere and related environmental affordances. Its inaccessibility to a look, a touch or movement indicates its limitations in realizing ambitions to escape a confining space, emerge from a crisis, or even just offer hope. An analysis of Israeli films shows that the port, as an urban edge, with historical, cultural and political contexts, is disconnected from the Israeli city fabric, and appears as a detached cinematic image in the way it is used and perceived. In this study I argue that when the protagonists arrive at the edge of the city in Israeli films, their actions have common features. In this cinematic universe the port serves as a site symbolizing rejection and denial of both sea and land, and concentration on daily life, the personal and the individual, thus producing unusual and sometimes unique human activity. Assuming that there are no innocent representations, and each one is therefore ideological (Comolli and Narboni, 1969), I trace the way urban portrayals of the physical environment are used as TEL Amediating images leading to the inner world of the characters and common, inter-subjective expectations and preferences. The research method is interdisciplinary and deals with an examination of the cinematic medium (structure, theme, characters and expression) from the spatial and architectural perspective (such as usage, form, geometry, materials, and borders).

 

 

 

Screening: Dancing Arabs at American University (April 30, 2015)

Screening of A BORROWED IDENTITY aka Dancing Arabs
Thursday, April 30 7:00 PM
Location: Washington DCJCC, 1529 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC
Tickets ($12.50) may be purchased at:  http://washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/film/wjff-year-round-/film-pages/aborrowedidentity.html

Winner of the 2015 WJFF Audience Award for Best Feature! (Dir. Eran Riklis (104min, Israel/Germany/France, 2014) Hebrew and Arabic with English Subtitles.This bittersweet ‘80s coming-of-age drama from the director of The Syrian Bride and Lemon Treeadapts two autobiographical novels by popular Israeli-Arab writer Sayed Kashua. Eyad is a gifted Arab teenager who wins the chance to attend a prestigious Jewish boarding school.  Post-screening discussion with American University Global Scholar Daniel Munayer, an Israeli Christian Arab who grew up in Jerusalem, and Maram Masarwi, a post-doctoral fellow at the Free University of Berlin who was head of the Early Childhood Education Department at Al Qasemi College of Education in Israel.  Co-Sponsored by the Washington Jewish Film Festival, Greater Washington Forum on Israeli Arab Issues and The Center for Israel Studies at American University.  

New Book: Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema

Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: Tauris, 2013.

 

Waltzing with Bashir proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies – the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from the trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, the book seeks to theorize this still under-studied field thus breaking the repression of this concept and phenomenon in psychoanalysis and in cinema literature. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, this pioneering work ventures to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. In contrast to the twentieth-century definition of the perpetrator based on modern wars and totalitarian regimes,Morag defines the perpetrator in the context of the twenty-first century’s new wars and democratic regimes. The direct result of a drastic transformation in the very nature of war, made manifest by the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier turned perpetrator, thus offering a novel perspective on issues of responsibility and guilt.

Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.

Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Table of Contents

Introduction
From Victim to Perpetrator Trauma

Part I: Victim Trauma
1. The Body as the Battlefield
2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror
3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror

Part II: Perpetrator Trauma
4. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator
5. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator
6. The New Wave of Documentary Literature

Conclusion
The Perpetrator Complex

New Article: Harris, Palestinian, Druze, and Jewish Women in Recent Israeli Cinema on the Conflict

Harris, Rachel S. “Parallel Lives: Palestinian, Druze, and Jewish Women in Recent Israeli Cinema on the Conflict: Free Zone, Syrian Bride, and Lemon Tree.” Shofar 32.1 (2013): 79-102.

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shofar/v032/32.1.harris.html

Abstract

Free Zone (Amos Gitai, 2005); The Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis, 2008) and Syrian Bride (Eran Riklis, 2004), explore the Arab-Israeli conflict through women’s experience of the political and military stalemate. In presenting Palestinian, Druze, and Israeli women, these filmmakers attempt to contrast and compare women’s shared encounters, including their experience of patriarchy. While the characters may come from diametrically opposed sides, their experiences as women occlude their political differences. In these films, women are foregrounded within the plot, and have agency over their actions if not their situations. Rejecting the masculine frame that has governed representations of the conflict, these filmmakers demonstrate a new kind of approach in Israeli film that considers feminist aesthetics in the construction of character and plot, as well as the treatment of women’s physicality, gaze, territoriality, and agency.