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).

 

 

 

Cite: Burstein, Performing Holocaust Memory: Judd Ne’eman’s Zitra

Burstein, Janet Handler. "Performing Holocaust Memory: Judd Ne’eman’s Zitra." AJS Review 36.2 (2012): 323-36.

 

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URL: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8749266

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Abstract

Memory and its representations can reveal as much about a culture’s sense of itself as they do about its past. Israeli critics have traced the ways in which representations of the Holocaust in their country’s films reflect, among many other issues, Israeli culture’s preoccupation with the construction of Israeli identity. According to one critic, the Holocaust survivor in films of the 1940s and 1950s embodied weakness and passivity: “all the traits that Israeli identity [was] meant to contrast.” In the 1970s, another critic suggests, films “read” the Holocaust from a “nationalist perspective…highlighting heroic resistance….” Thus, within a few decades, Israeli cinema seems to have represented in radically different ways—through the lens of the Holocaust—the intricacies of Israeli identity formation: first, by shaping memory in terms of the putative weaknesses of diaspora Jews, contrasting them with the strengths of the “new” Israeli Jew; and later, by emphasizing characteristics that linked heroic resisters with heroic Israelis.