Israelis never hesitated to elaborate ideas, fantasies, critiques, and obsessions about their cinema and its place in the world. Well before a financially viable industry emerged in the late 1960s, filmmakers, government functionaries, critics, journalists, and cinephiles produced passionate essays and took part in heated debates about moving images. The talk explores the desire to create a moving picture industry in the Yishuv and early Israel as it appeared in various mediums including film magazines, journals, memoirs, and columns in daily newspapers. While their understanding was often incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, and occasionally eccentric, the talk argues that their views were frequently grounded in real dilemmas and fundamental questions about Jewish identity, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
Research on Israeli cinema has traditionally placed its films within the history of Israel and Israeli society. In contrast, local writers framed Israeli films within transnational coproduction networks and global distribution, and they constantly compared Israeli filmmaking to other industries throughout the globe. Early Zionist cinema is often read as celebrating the “new Jew” and the “negation of the Diaspora,” whereas local discourse reflects a strong attachment to Jewish communities abroad and a desire to reconnect with the pre-Holocaust Diasporic past. Israelis were especially invested in the notion that major filmmakers and movie stars from the Jewish Diaspora—Hollywood, Europe, or Cairo—would soon gravitate to Israel and help their fledgling industry. In addition, although many scholars view Israeli films as expressing the ideological beliefs of its society, contemporary writers were at times cynical about the country’s cinematic output. They saw it as clumsy propaganda that pandered to Jewish fundraisers abroad. They lamented that Israeli films were artistically flawed and suffered from what they defined as “too much ‘Zionism.’”
Boaz Hagin is chair of the graduate film studies program at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. The talk is part of his current work on the discourse on film in the Yishuv and Israel. He has published articles on Israeli cinema in Camera Obscura, GLQ, Screen, Journal of Film and Video, Jewish Film & New Media, and Journal of Jewish Identities (forthcoming), and is co-editor of the book Deeper Than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema. In addition to work on Israeli cinema, he is the author of Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema, co-author of Memory, Trauma, and Fantasy in American Cinema (with Thomas Elsaesser), and co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic. He is co-editor of the Depth of Field series, published by the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television in collaboration with Am Oved.
Tuesday, April 8 @ 5:00-6:30pm
370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus
RSVP Here.
Co-hosted by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies