New Article: Ofengenden, Therapy and Satire in Contemporary Israeli Film and Literature

Ofengenden, Ari. “National Identity in Global Times: Therapy and Satire in Contemporary Israeli Film and Literature.” The Comparatist 39 (2015): 294-312.

 

URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1103877

 

Extract

To conclude let us step back and look at the effects of all of these transformation narratives together. These and other novels and films engage in a sustained reusing of the past and successfully transform the way people articulate their identity. They do this with an empathic retelling of the national story like Oz, with the German or Arab Israeli other as in the film Walk on Water and Arab Labor, or with a crazed narrator like Kaniuk’s and Castel-Bloom’s. Therapeutic interventions end with a working through of displacement and immigration, a heightened awareness of the effects of the Holocaust, and a new appreciation of the creative potential of Jewish identity and culture. Self-critical satire breaks open a monolithic national identity, exposing its constructed nature and calls for creative transformations. We can now ask why these two narratives are so central to the way literature and film re-imagine national identity in contemporary times. I think that the answer lies most prominently in globalization. International flows of culture, goods, and people help strengthen civil society in its critique and parody of state violence and state agents. Somewhat paradoxically, globalization also leads to a demand for specifically national narratives in the international market. In a recent talk, Salman Rushdie pointed out that contemporary writers are increasingly asked to mediate the story of a nation for an international audience. Indeed that is what his own Midnight’s Children did for India, what J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace did for South Africa, Toni Morrison’s novels for the U.S., and Oz and Grossman for Israel. Thus we get narratives that are called to represent the nation on an international market but heal, critique, or poke fun at it at the same time. The system in which Hebrew literature finds itself has radically changed. Previously this system or field was constructed as a national field; now the field is constituted as semi-global. Some actors achieve international success while others remain domestic. Some mediate and explain the national story on the global stage while others parody the nation in order to change it.

Israeli national-cultural discourse is not a sole expression of some underlying economic forces that determine its content. However, its expression is a result of creative adaptation to economical and political pressures and opportunities that have become more and more global. Mainstream literature and culture has responded by articulating narratives that simultaneously reflect feelings of lack of political agency and an empathic apologetic self-representation for the global other. Minor literature in Israel saw an opportunity in the weakening of the state to articulate a critique in the form of parody that attempts to reconfigure national identity.

 

 

 

New Article: Kokin, The Theological Sub-Text of Walk on Water

Kokin, Daniel Stein. “Between Eyal and Axel, Yahweh and Christ: The Theological Sub-Text of Walk on Water (2004).” Prooftexts 33.3 (2013): 365-280.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/prooftexts/v033/33.3.kokin.html

 

Abstract

The stereotypical character of Walk on Water (Israel, 2004) has represented a severe obstacle for many viewers, who have been quick to denounce it as both trite and superficial. This article argues instead that the film’s clearly intentional and self-conscious recycling of numerous clichés concerning Germans and Israelis alike points to its deeper meaning and purpose. In particular, it shows that these clichés constitute the essential infrastructure with which the film engages and attempts to resolve the problematic German–Israeli, and by extension Christian–Jewish, relationship in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It further suggests that the film offers its own “final solution” to this vexed relationship—a “messianic” deliverance from the respective traumas of each party—in the form of an allegorical synthesis of Jewish and Christian theology, directly reflected in the contrasts and evolving relationship between its two primary characters. Itself highly stereotypical, the theology upon which the film draws facilitates its critique of German and especially Israeli attitudes toward power and violence.

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 Book: Yosef and Hagin, eds. Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema

Yosef, Raz and Boaz Hagin. Deeper than Oblivion. Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

 

URL: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/deeper-than-oblivion-9781441199263/

 

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and Israeli Cinema Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef

Chapter 2: Postscript to Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation Ella Shohat

Chapter 3: Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu Ghraib Diane Waldman

Chapter 4: The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann Trial Anat Zanger

Chapter 5: The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi Shmulik Duvdevani

Chapter 6: Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort Raz Yosef

Chapter 7: Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan’s “Trilogy” Yael Munk

Chapter 8: Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second Intifada Raya Morag

Chapter 9: “Our Traumas”: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen Days Boaz Hagin

Chapter 10: History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni

Chapter 11: Last Train to the Holocaust Judd Ne’eman and Nerit Grossman

Chapter 12: Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli Film Yael Zerubavel

Chapter 13: “Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory Janet Walker

Notes on Contributors

Index