Israel

CINEMA SINCE STATEHOOD

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 amidst war with the surrounding Arab countries generated deep sociopolitical changes, mostly due to the doubling of the Jewish population within three years of independence (1949–1951) following the massive immigration of Jews from Islamic lands. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) shifted his party's Zionist socialism to a centralizing policy termed mamlachtyut (statism), which allowed for the rapid industrialization of the country in the course of absorbing the massive immigration. However, this policy resulted in the correlation of ethnic origin and class, whereby the newly arrived Jews from Islamic lands came to form the lower classes. The state's dominant ideology shifted accordingly, and the image of the ideal sabra (native-born Israeli) changed from being a socialist revolutionary to an ethnically mixed Jew who is a loyal citizen and soldier within a beseiged nation. The 1948 "War of Independence" became a central subject in statist ideology and was replicated by a dependent cultural apparatus. Thorold Dickinson's (1903–1984) film Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1956) portrayed the war as part of the long history of Jewish persecution, yet also presented it as the means through which the situation of the Jewish people was changing due to Israel's military resolve, its national independence, and the East–West condensed Jew forged by the inseparable experiences of war and sociocultural intermingling. This intermingling was interestingly dealt with in Tent City (Leopold Lahola, 1955), which also absolved the government of any wrongdoing toward the immigrants by blaming the Diaspora past for present hardships and ethnic strife, and by presenting government officials as impartial and authoritative, yet kind and dedicated civil servants. The film also promised a brighter future by showing through rhythmically accelerating editing patterns the ethnically varied citizenry harmoniously joining hands in different projects carried out during the rapid industrialization of the country in the 1950s, a subject recurring in other films that were mostly funded by Israel's major workers' union, Ha'Histadrut.

The expansion of the urban middle classes in the early 1960s, along with a relative geopolitical calm, dated the collectivist rhetoric of the government and the cultural establishment distanced itself from the government. Uri Zohar's (b. 1935) experimental Hole in the Moon (1965) and ethnic comedy Sallah Shabati (Ephraim Kishon, 1964), for example, offered parodies of Zionist socialism and statism by showing their incompatibility with the daily reality of a grotesquely depicted, yet "real" commercially oriented society. These emergent trends involving notions of art for art's sake and of art as industry gradually began to replace the earlier politically committed and propagandistic films, coming to full fruition after Israel's swift victory in the war of June 1967. Following this war Israelis had a sense of euphoric freedom at the lifting of a previously perceived siege due to the expansion of Israel's borders and the ensuing economic improvement, a function of increased US aid and the cheap Palestinian labor force that poured in from the newly occupied territories. Individualism thrived in the new economic and political situation, and a new generation of filmmakers influenced by the French New Wave and Hollywood began to produce films characterized by excess and lack of subtlety: war films, burekas films (comedies focused on interethnic relations), and personal films. War films celebrated the victory and disavowed the threatening geopolitical implications of the war, focusing upon the heroic and successful deeds of free-spirited, valiant, and arrogant protagonists—in sharp contrast to the collectivist soldier of the films of the 1950s. Uri Zohar's tellingly named film Every Bastard a King (1968) includes an unusually long tank battle scene showing the valiant rescue under fire of a wounded soldier by the individualistic hero. Burekas films deceptively reduced the mounting class–ethnic tensions of the period to comic or melodramatic capitalist competition over money and women. Katz and Carraso (Boaz Davidson, 1971), which revolves around the competition between an Oriental Jewish family (Carasso) and a Western Jewish one (Katz) over a fat government insurance contract, is emblematic. Personal films reduced interpersonal relations to conflicts stemming mostly from accomplished or frustrated sexual desires. Despite articulating these subjects through the use of New Wave techniques (jump-cuts, asynchronous sound–image relations), the complex existentialism, politics, and subversion of the original films were reduced mostly to voyeuristic glances at Westernized protagonists detached from Israeli reality. A particularly extreme example of this tendency is the experimental A Woman's Case (Jacques Katmor, 1969), which offers voyeuristic looks at the naked body of its peculiar woman protagonist through close-ups of her body parts and jump-cuts between them.