Fellow traveler: the cinematic-political consciousness of Judd Ne'eman.
The peculiar trajectory followed by Ne'eman in his post-1977 political films reveals the characteristics of the political consciousness of a large group of Israeli artists, academics, and left-oriented activists. Their passive political resentment at the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip that followed the 1967 War took a radical shift following the political overturn in the 1977 elections, which brought to power the right-wing Likud party, leading the group to politicize Israeli culture and to denounce the Israeli occupation and the repression of the Palestinian people. However, this altruistic stand was based upon a dead-end, pessimistic, and ultimately ethnocentric viewpoint. We find in the films of Ne'eman and other Israeli filmmakers after 1977 a contradiction between an explicit moral critique of Israeli politics and the aesthetic grounding of this critique within a cinematic reality of persecution and hopelessness. Ne'eman, however, in his last film, Streets of Yesterday, brings to light the conflict submerged in his prior films and in all the films produced by the group. Having revealed the futility of the group's political consciousness Ne'eman abandoned his cinematic political activism in favor of research and teaching.**********
This study of the films by Israeli film director Judd Ne'eman focuses upon what Lucien Goldmann has termed the social dimension of an author's consciousness. (1) This dimension results from an interpersonal process and consists of the alignment of symbols and meanings shared by a group in the society to which the author belongs. The members of the group are aware of the dimension, and each author expresses it in his own personal formal and thematic way, in a conscious process of production. According to Goldmann, the accomplished author not only succeeds in presenting his personal vision of this dimension (what Goldmann terms the real-empirical consciousness shared by the group members) but also reveals what Goldmann terms (following Lukacs) (2) the potential consciousness of the group. By this he is referring to the limits that the group's consciousness can reach, and beyond which it cannot change, since this would mean the group's dissolution. (3)
It is my contention that Ne'eman, in his political films, evidences more than other filmmakers the political potential consciousness of a group I will call the 1980s Israeli "Fellow Travelers." (4) Historically, the term has referred to radical sympathizers with the communist revolution but who abstained from full identification or commitment, due to their individualistic, liberal consciousness. However, they supported the revolutionary elements in communism and its concern with the eradication of social injustices. I consider these characteristics to aptly describe the political consciousness of a large group of Israeli artists, academics, and left-oriented activists who are not identified or affiliated with any particular left-wing political party, but whose political tendencies are an amalgam of socialist and liberal tenets.
The political consciousness of this group began emerging in response to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip that followed the 1967 War. This social awareness was due to the military rule imposed by the State of Israel over the million or more Palestinian inhabitants of these territories and the slowly expanding Jewish settlement within these areas. The passive political resentment that this group felt towards this slow annexation took a radical shift following the political overturn in the 1977 elections, which brought to power the right-wing Likud party for the first time after the sixty-year hegemony of Israel's left-oriented Labor party. Ne'eman, like many of his fellow travelers, (5) began to intensively politicize Israeli culture and give escalating expression to the resentment at measures taken by the Right, primarily in respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the explicit political expression of this resentment was mostly confined to a narrow moral dimension of the conflict, judged mostly according to a clear-cut binary opposition between good and bad.
Hence, the stand of the group was characterized by a strict moral judgment of the Israeli occupation of the conquered territories and the repression of the Palestinian people. Their moral altruistic stand was, however, based upon a dead-end pessimistic viewpoint. Thus, this moral judgment of reality, rather than offering venues to change it, merely expressed a despairing and unfocused cry for change. It is in this dead-end conception that the group's ethnocentrism is revealed. For seeing the situation as a dead end, in light of a moral stand defining Israel as the tormentor and the Palestinians as victims, can only lead to an impasse and the maintenance of a tense and violent status quo, whereby occupation continues to the benefit of the conqueror. (6)
Tracing the trajectory followed by Ne'eman in his post-1977 political films reveals the characteristics of the political consciousness of this group of Israeli fellow travelers and the course of its development, as well as the particular evolution of Ne'eman's cinematic rhetoric. The films that will be discussed here are Paratroopers (1977), The Sailor's Revolt (1981), Fellow Travelers (1983) and Streets of Yesterday (1989). (7) It will be seen that while Paratroopers reveals the budding activist, empirical-political consciousness of the group, his last film to date, Streets of Yesterday, reached the limits of his group's potential consciousness. At this point his vision seems to have shattered; he discerned historical trajectories that would only come to fruition years later, (8) stopped making films, and started dedicating his energies to research and teaching.
The Forging of a Cinematic-Political Consciousness
The following brief discussion of Paratroopers (1977) and The Sailor's Revolt (1981) shows how Ne'eman forged his cinematic political consciousness, his major characters, and his central subversive strategies and plot structure. These tropes would come to full fruition in his last two films, Fellow Travelers (1984) and Streets of Yesterday (1989), which I will address in the next section.
Paratroopers is a film based both formally and rhythmically upon American films protesting the Vietnam War. (9) Unlike theirs, however, its protest is hopeless, and therefore pointless, and is confined to the military establishment without reference to the political sphere. The film deals with the military establishment's failure to deal correctly with an unfit soldier. In this film Ne'eman construes two of his later recurring protagonist types: one is Weismann (played by Moni Moshonov), a soldier in basic paratrooper training, the unfit victimized protagonist, whose only escape from a catch-22 situation imposed upon him by his surroundings appears to be suicide. The other is Yoni (played by Gidi Gov), Weismann's training officer, the victimizer-authoritative protagonist whose actions lead to Weismann's death. In this film Ne'eman also uses a subversive device that will be expanded in his later work: he takes a past value-charged motive and shifts its value. Finally, the film lays the foundations for the dead-end plot structure woven around the victim. All these come together in the scene depicting Weismann's ambiguous accidental death/suicide. In it, we witness Weismann's platoon training for urban warfare. Weismann, depicted as an unfit soldier despised by his platoon for his failure to withstand the heavy training, since this has resulted in their collective punishment, is selected to clear one of the houses by throwing in a dummy grenade and bursting in after its "explosion." His failure to do so (he bursts in before the grenade explodes) leads Yoni, the platoon's admired and fearless officer, to force Weismann to repeat the drill. This time however, it is a real grenade that Yoni puts into Weismann's hand after pulling out the pin and activating the detonator. Weismann's protests are rejected by Yoni, and Weismann, with a growing sense of despair and entrapment, throws the live grenade into the house, again enters before it has detonated, and is killed. As noted by Nurit Gertz, this scene subverts a key mythological scene in pre-independence patriotic literature. (10) It references the literary death of Uri, Moshe Shamir's legendary Sabra hero of his 1947 emblematic book He Walked Through the Fields. There, too, as in Ne'eman's film, a soldier dies from a detonated grenade during an army drill involving an admired officer and a misfit trainee. However, whereas in He Walked Through the Fields it is the officer who gives his life to save his men after the misfit soldier drops the grenade on the ground, hence meaningfully giving his life for the sake of the collective, in Paratroopers it is the officer who brings about his subordinate's senseless ambiguous suicide/accidental death (senseless since, as Gertz has noted, the unfit soldier is not offered in the film any viable option other than to be a paratrooper). Thus, while in one stroke Ne'eman overturns the game and subverts the image of the Israeli combat officer, an image cultivated by the national fighting ethos from the 1940s on, the subversion implied in this figuration is neutralized by the dead-end situation depicted.
In his next film, a documentary called The Sailor's Revolt (but also Yah Brechen!, which in Yiddish means "Yes, Break!"), Ne'eman's protest becomes explicitly political. The film chronicles the process of breaking up a sailors' revolt by the governing Mapai party (acronym of Israeli Workers Party), headed by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion during the 1950s. The revolt is presented in the film as an apolitical strike by sailors working for Israel's maritime company, "Tzim." Led by Nimrod Eshel and Ayk Aharonowitz, the sailors demand that the government-controlled general workers' union (the Histadrut) and the government improve their working conditions and salary. The violent breaking up of the strike, which was perceived by Ben-Gurion as a subversive act on the part of the communist-leaning Mapam party (United Workers Party) aimed at toppling his government, signals, according to Ne'eman's film, the forced establishment of Mapai's centrist socio-political structure during the 1950s, a turn to an economic Liberal policy, and denouncement of the Socialist egalitarian tenets it had held prior to Israel's independence. Here too Ne'eman uses the devices first traced in Paratroopers. By calling the film Yah Brechen!, Ne'eman was referring to the cry the Jewish right-wing revisionists used to shout when attacking left-wing strikers. Hence, in describing Mapai's breaking up of the sailors' strike by this call, Ne'eman represents this left-wing party's betrayal of its socialist tenets and its alignment with the national-liberal ideology of the right. (11) Here too Ne'eman represents the strike leaders as victims and Ben-Gurion as an authority figure who victimized the striking sailors.
Ne'eman's new device in this film is the weaving of a dead-end plot (which had already appeared in Paratroopers) as a political conspiratory plot that closes upon the naive strikers until both their voice and their dream are silenced. Also new is the presentation of such conspiracy as an act of treason (i.e., the betrayal of the sailors in the film by the party that is supposed to represent their interests as workers). The conspiratory plot and the theme of treason would become dominant in his later films. In this film, as in Paratroopers, Ne'eman also stylistically references a body of protest films that fit his subject while undermining the potential for change embodied in this protest by the dead end towards which he leads his protagonists. Hence, whereas in Paratroopers he had referenced films protesting the Vietnam War, in The Sailor's Revolt he references Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin (1926), a film that employs dynamic editing sequences to depict the 1905 failed upraising of sailors and the people of Odessa, crushed by the Czar's soldiers. (12) However, while Eisenstein's film positions the failed upraising within the trajectory leading to the successful October revolution, Ne'eman's film shifts the dynamic and forward-moving direction embedded in Eisenstein's style to an unfocused protest that leads nowhere.
Ne'eman's Detection of His Fellow Travelers' Potential Consciousness Limits
In his last two films, Fellow Travelers and Streets of Yesterday, Ne'eman turned to deal directly with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (13) The films bring together the various cinematic devices described earlier. Hence, Fellow Travelers was released in Israel under the name "The Silver Salver" (Magash Hakessef). "The Silver Salver" is the title of a famous poem by Natan Alterman that refers to the soldiers who died in battle, becoming the metaphoric "silver salver" upon which the State of Israel was handed to its people. Ne'eman subverts the name to refer to two peace activists, an Israeli Jew and an Arab, both of whom are murdered by either the Israeli security forces or by an Arab terror group. As in the earlier films, both these films too focus upon State officials who victimize the naive protagonists for their own ends. However, in these last two films, Ne'eman found a styling and generic framework that perfectly suited his ongoing thematic conception: a stylistic claustrophobic configuration (14) articulated within the generic framework of a political thriller. (15) This better fits his ongoing concern with political crimes, betrayal, conspiracy, and dead-end than his earlier dynamic cinematic protest formations (i.e., American Vietnam protest films and Eisenstein's revolutionary cinematic montage).
In Fellow Travelers (1984) the film's major protagonists are motivated by the idea that the establishment of a Palestinian university to strengthen the Palestinian spirit is a better option for realizing the aspirations of a people--aspirations that are never explicitly defined--than guerrilla terrorist warfare. The mutual interests of the two leading protagonists, Yoni, an Israeli singer (played by Gidi Gov, a popular Jewish-Israeli singer) and Walid (played by Yussuf Abu Warda, a well-known Israeli Arab actor), in establishing such a university, forms the basis for their otherwise somewhat unrelated mutual understanding and help. The idea of establishing a university implies (though this is not explicit in the film) the belief that education, culture, and science can offer a relevant basis for creating a fraternal solidarity between the two national groups.
However, these ideas, which are partial and problematic in the degree of their cognitive comprehension of the conflict, are inscribed within a cinematic articulation that empties their vague potential import. The film's locations and the occurrences at these locations constitute the first layer weaving the film's dead-end ambiance. These locations and situations, which include a mental institution, the fenced enclosure where Palestinian workers sleep, military patrols enclosing the entrance to a West Bank university, recurring breaking and entering into private homes, and roadblocks, as well as constant verbal and physical violence among different protagonists on differing grounds, and the presence in almost every scene of armed soldiers, create a sense of suffocation and build anxiety, which emanates from every shot.
The plot is complicated. Yoni and Walid try to protect the money they have received to establish the university and safeguard it from the Jewish-Arab group (to which they had once belonged) that wants to buy weapons with it for their terrorist purposes. At the same time, the Israeli internal security agents are on their trail, trying to use them as agents provocateurs in order to catch the terrorist group in the act.
The complicated plot weaves a net around the two protagonists from which they are unable to disentangle themselves, and in which--it becomes progressively clear--they have been essentially caught from the outset. Thus, the German professor who gives Yoni the money at the film's opening is murdered immediately afterwards. All subsequent moves made by Yoni and Walid are supervised (as it sporadically becomes clear) by agents, some of whom are revealed to the audience while others are assumed. These agents have informational advantage over both protagonists and audience alike. We are exposed to partial information through the malicious character of Max, the internal security agent (played by Yossi Pollak, a well known and well reputed theater actor), who pulls hidden and exposed strings, appears everywhere, and knows everything.
The story framework, as it evolves from the plot development and the positioning of characters, is a variation upon the classical tragedy structure: the hero commits an act--brings the money--that awakens the forces of destiny and eventually brings about his bitter end. These forces in the film are embodied in the character of the malicious Max on the one hand and of the terrorist group on the other. They operate within a Machiavellian system of conspiracies and power struggles, eventuating in the protagonists' deaths. The conflict is conceived in the film as a tragic dead-end conflict. The forces operating within it fight, and will fight, to the end, and whoever is caught in the middle is bound to die.
There is a certain parallelism between the plot's winding form and Max's malicious character, which together weave a paranoid scheme absorbed in the character of Yoni. He is persecuted by the whole world. He is subject to a constant encompassing threat and remains alone at the end of the film after his gradual desertion by all the characters once close to him--first the German professor murdered at the beginning, then Walid who is murdered in mysterious circumstances, and finally his girlfriend who betrays him and leads Max to the mental institution where Yoni has sought sanctuary.
The mental institution scene, which is symptomatic, also presents a rare moment of comic relief. Thus, in the scene in which Yoni asks the admissions committee to institutionalize him, in order to persuade them that he is paranoid, he describes what he has been through to that point, operating on the joke according to which one's being paranoid does not necessarily imply that one is not actually being chased!
The idea of establishing a university and its unelaborated implications is made totally improbable from the beginning. The death of the protagonists also signifies the death of their utopian idea (disregarding the fact that Palestinian universities exist, and as if that were the problem). Moreover, the three partners to the idea are the only ones murdered in the film. In the final scene, in which Yoni is murdered by a bullet from the shotgun of one of the terrorist group members, the camera slowly dollies up and looks from afar at the scenery--Jaffa. The camera's withdrawal and detachment from the events (reminiscent of the backtrack shot at the end of The Night the King Was Born) implies the mute anger at the crime committed, the irrelevancy of ideas that attempt to challenge the dead-end basic conception of the conflict, and the despair that accompanies such a conception. (16)
Streets of Yesterday (1989), Ne'eman's last film to date, replicates the formal and thematic elements of Fellow Travelers, including their narrative succession. This is also a political thriller at whose center stand a young Israeli Jew and his friend, a young Palestinian, who get caught in a net of political conspiracies between malicious Israeli secret police agents and a political Palestinian terror group. As in the preceding film, here too the Israeli Jew is led to a dead-end situation after his Palestinian friend has been eliminated. Finally, here too the reality woven is a claustrophobic one. Analysis of the differences between the films, which are variations on the same story, reveals the process that led Ne'eman to reach the limits of the potential consciousness of his group.
Hence, Streets of Yesterday differs radically from its predecessors in its political awareness. While in Fellow Travelers the Jewish protagonist fights for naive and vague ideas to which he remains loyal until the bitter end, all in an ambience of political crimes, murders, and treason, in Streets of Yesterday his actions and destiny change. As the film progresses it becomes clear that the Israeli Jew has actually betrayed and given up his good Palestinian friend to the Israeli security forces. Moreover, the Palestinian in this film is responsible for implicating his Israeli friend, after having been involved in the political murder attempt of an American diplomat. Finally, again radically differing from Fellow Travelers, the Jewish Israeli protagonist in Streets of Yesterday does not die at the end of the film but bids farewell and leaves the scene of violence unharmed.
As can be seen, the crucial difference between the two films is not in the conception of reality they offer concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in both is Machiavellian, criminal, and ultimately unproductive. Rather, the difference concerns the political awakening of the latter film's protagonist. He realizes that his vague ideas are irrelevant to the reality he himself perceives as a dead end, that his political involvement in the conflict is turning him into a self-interest-driven component in the murderous weave of conspiracies, and in particular that as a naive peace-seeker he is not the cardinal factor in this conflict. It is not him that both sides are persecuting, but each other.
Through this protagonist Ne'eman goes beyond his fellow travelers' films by revealing their (and his) ethnocentrism and the limits of his group's potential consciousness. Hence, in Ne'eman's prior films and in all the films produced by this group, the protagonists were portrayed as the tortured victims of a process they had morally judged, without seriously immersing themselves in the intricacies of a reality they perceived as dead-ended to begin with.
However, beyond Ne'eman's tracing of the limits of the political consciousness of the Israeli fellow travellers, as evidenced in the cinematic political awakening of the protagonist in Streets of Yesterday, the film also predicted beyond it, in reality, the collision trajectory that the Machiavellian political system directing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was leading towards. Hence, it may be said, in retrospect, that already in 1989 Streets of Yesterday foresaw the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The film depicts for the first time in Israeli cinema (and to the best of my knowledge in Israeli cultural production in general) the planned political murder of a left-wing minister by a right-winger, on the explicit grounds of the former's determination to enter into serious and compromising negotiations with the Palestinians, based upon the principle of returning land for peace. In the film, the Palestinian assassination attempt aimed at an American diplomat is intercepted by an Israeli secret police agent, who manipulates this attempt into one to assassinate the Israeli foreign minister and put the blame on the Palestinians. Moreover, in contrast to Fellow Travelers, it is this all-powerful agent and not the Jewish activist who is lynched at the end of the film by a Palestinian mob. In this, the film foresaw not only the outbreak of the first Intifada that paralleled the film's distribution and exhibition, but also the brutal violence characterizing the present Al Aksa Intifada, as shown in the depiction of the brutal lynching of the Israeli agent as a cruel, vindictive mob murder.
These prophetic insights (17) reveal the strength of Streets of Yesterday and the weakness of the potential political consciousness whose limits it exhibits. This consciousness, restricted to a morally judged political dimension, avoids conducting a complex and comprehensive analysis of the geo-political, socio-political, and economic factors that determine this narrow political dimension. An analysis of these factors might have revealed the processes in reality that have led to changes in the reality depicted in the films (e.g., the eruption of the Intifada), pointing perhaps towards viable options to solve the conflict (e.g., a Palestinian state).
This perception of reality as a dead end evidenced in the stylistic configuration that evolved in Ne'eman and in the films of other Israeli filmmakers after 1977, which consists of recurrent compositions and figurations whose interrelations evoke notions of claustrophobia, violence, threatening encirclement, and suspicion, (18) reflects the group's ethnocentrism. It evidences a double-bind notion of persecution: one, internal, having to do with the group's fear of now being persecuted by the Right, who had attained political power; and the other, external, having to do with the long-held geopolitical notions of this group as part of the Israeli Jewish populace in general, whereby the State is perceived as being persecuted by the surrounding Arab world. This is probably why we find in these films a contradiction between an explicit critique of Israeli politics and the aesthetic grounding of this critique within a cinematic reality of persecution and dead end, making the critique irrelevant to what the films perceive to be Israel's real situation.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In his last film, Ne'eman reaches the limits of the potential consciousness of his group. For the group's ethnocentrism contradicts in a sense its moral, or rather moralizing stand concerning the conflict. When this conflict between ethnocentrism and altruism, which is at the core of the fellow travelers' political consciousness, surfaces, as it does in Ne'eman's last film, it demands a resolution that goes beyond the limits of what holds this group together. It is at this point that Ne'eman too, following his protagonist's departure from the political scene in the film, abandons his cinematic political activism in favor of research and teaching.
Whereas Ne'eman reached the apparent limits of his group's potential consciousness through his filmmaking, other group members reached this limit when faced with the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada, (19) evidenced in their turn away from cinematic dealings with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict altogether. I believe the reason for this is connected with the fact that the Palestinian uprising necessitated this group's resolving their conflict between ethnocentrism and altruism by way of choosing one side over the other. Such a choice went beyond the limits of what had constituted them as a group. Hence, the group effectively dissolved.
Nitzan Ben-Shaul
Tel Aviv University
(1) See Lucien Goldmann, Marxisme et sciences humaines, (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 94-120. There seems to be a clear connection between some of the locales and motifs that recur in Ne'eman films and his life experience. The well-informed scenes located in hospital interiors, particularly in mental wards, and even his recurring concern with death in the films, the restrained cruelty of some of his characters, and his cold and analytic directorial point of view, most probably derive from Ne'eman's being an MD and from his year's internship in a mental ward. Likewise, the precise rendering of the basic training of the elite paratrooper corps in its strategies and atmosphere (see Paratroopers, 1977) derives from his being a combat MD officer in the Israeli paratrooper corps in the 1967 and 1973 wars (he received the "Exemplary Insignia"--Ot Hamofet--medal following his treatment of wounded soldiers under fire during the 1967 war). I do not employ an empirical-biographical approach, however, because, beyond offering factual information, such an approach does not help to understand the ways in which such factual elements function within the film.
(2) See Lucien Goldmann, "The Importance of the Concept of Potential Consciousness for Communication," in Cultural Creation in Modern Society (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1976), pp. 31-39; Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1970), p. 51.
(3) Such potential consciousness, evidenced in the accomplished author's work, can be understood when considering the group's situation and empirical consciousness in relation to the political-class relations in society.
(4) See a critical definition of the "Fellow Travelers" in Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russel & Russel, 1957), Chapter 1. Ne'eman uses this expression for the first time in his documentary The Sailor's Revolt. In the film, which deals with the strike by Israeli sailors that was violently crushed by Ben-Gurion's government in the 1950s, Nimrod Eshel, one of the revolt leaders, compares their situation to that of those persecuted by Senator McCarthy in the U.S. "Fellow Travelers" is also the English title of Ne'eman's film Magash Hakessef (The Silver Salver).
(5) In the area of film see for example Uri Barabash's film Beyond the Walls (1984), Daniel Waxman's Hamsin (1982), Rafi Bukai's Avanti Popolo (1986), and Shimon Dotan's The Lamb's Smile (1986). Among this group of films, Ne'eman's films stand out in their subversiveness and despair.
(6) For an extensive analysis of the class, ethnic and political factors that forged the political consciousness mentioned after the 1977 political overturn see Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), pp. 33-47; 68-83.
(7) I will not address here Ne'eman's earlier, modernist apolitical films such as Boys and Girls (1968), The Man is the Center (1971), Momo's Yard, and The Little Doctor From Habbashim Street (1972). They deserve a separate discussion. They belong to a 1970s group of Israeli films that have been called "personal films" (due to their dealing with apolitical issues in a Neo-Realist and French New Wave style), which Ne'eman, along with most Israeli filmmakers, radically broke with, to make the critical political films of the late 1970s and 1980s. See Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege. For lack of space I will also leave out Ne'eman's documentary film Observing Acre (1975). This interesting film, dealing with Jewish-Arab relations in the mixed city of Acre, is the first political film Ne'eman made.
(8) Both Lukacs and Goldmann maintain that the realist or qualitative (respectively) work of art can discern the buddings of social processes that will become manifest only years later. In this, they believe, artworks can predict, while the empirical consciousness is blind. See Goldmann, Marxisme et Sciences Humaines, pp. 57-69.
(9) See for example The Deer Hunter (1978) or Coming Home (1978). For a discussion of the reference made in Ne'eman's and other Israeli filmmakers' films to these American films, see N. Gertz, Motion Fiction (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1993), pp. 238-9.
(10) Gertz, Motion Fiction, p. 191.
(11) This stand characterizes the Israeli fellow travelers of the 1980s, who began to view the Right that came to power in 1977 as a continuation rather than a break with the preceding Labor government, who in their view had turned its back on its Leftist socialist ideology.
(12) See S. M. Eisenstein's analysis of his own film in Jay Leida, ed., Film Form (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).
(13) His initial turn to this subject occurs in the short film The Night the King was Born (1983). The film depicts the forceful and illegal appropriation of a Palestinian's plot of land by Jewish settlers, Israeli army officers, and an astute Jewish Orthodox real estate agent. I have omitted the analysis of this film because this one was based upon a script written by Amnon Dankner, whose anti-religious and antisemitic overtones in the story are not characteristic of Ne'eman.
(14) This configuration, as I have widely instantiated elsewhere, characterizes most Israeli political films produced during the 1980s (N. Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films [Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997]).
(15) See in this respect the films of Costa Gavras, particularly Z, which deals with a political murder carried out by the Greek generals' regime. Somewhat similar to Ne'eman, Gavras too deals with such political crimes from a moral universalist stand detached from the concrete context that led to it.
(16) An analysis of this film also appears in Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege, pp. 71-73.
(17) See footnote 6 above.
(18) Through shadowy patterns of lighting, visual and aural configurations composing closed and labyrinthine spatial formations, open threatened spaces where there is no refuge, unexpected abrupt editing patterns and camera movements creating violent surprises, temporal circular structures whose synchronic framework disjoints their diachrony, fatalistic or bounded story structures, recurrence of suspicious and violent interactions among characters, conspiratory modes of action, and thematic and formal isolation of threatened individuals or groups.
(19) An index of this group's awakening to the narrowness of their cinematic-political conception after the Intifada can be found in Avraham Heffner's short film What Happened? (1989). The film's title, questioning the eruption of the Intifada, is an index of the group's complete surprise in face of the Palestinian popular uprising. It contradicted their belief that while Israel's repression of the Palestinians is to be condemned morally, there is nothing much the Palestinians or their Israeli sympathizers can do about it.
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| Author: | Ben-Shaul, Nitzan |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Shofar |
| Geographic Code: | 7ISRA |
| Date: | Sep 22, 2005 |
| Words: | 5262 |
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