Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
In recent years, Israeli films have shown a penchant for plots dealing with the
include both Jewish included in the Return law definitions and Third-World and Eastern
European workers seeking employment. These films seem to express an awareness of the
complexity of Israeli society, in which the dream of the ‘Zionist melting pot’ is beginning
to fade away in the face of the cultural richness and diversity that stem from the country’s
historical development.
Yet the multiculturalism of day-to-day life is not validated by the state and civil
and deriving its present power from big capital, sees multiculturalism as a threat to the
national unity it requires defending the material basis of its existence. Cultural diversity
is seen as a real danger in an era when the political regime’s strategy for managing the
conflict with the Palestinians eschews any peace arrangement based on terms and
conditions that the other side can accept. The absence of the Palestinian issue from
Israeli films made over the last years leads us to seek an explanation in Israeli discourse
on culture. In the films discussed here, the Palestinians are an ‘other’ who is denied
Jewish-Israeli groups are minimised or obliterated. This article examines shortly the way
the multicultural encounter is portrayed in the films Late Marriage (Hatuna Meucheret,
Kosashvili, 2001), Foreign Sister (Achot Zara, Wolman, 2000), Magic (Shchur, Hasfari,
1994), and, more particularly, in Yana’s Friends (Hachaverim shel Yana, Kaplun, 1998).
Identity becomes from the social positioning of Self and Other, produced by
They can be linguistically indexed through label and styles, or linguistic structures and
systems. Identity is produced in a negotiation between self and other and between subject
and is an outcome of ideological and structures. 1 The article will analyse the ways that
immigrants have traditionally been represented in Israeli cinema along the historical
processes. I remark the power relationships between languages in the films like one of
the discursive strategies the Hegemony improve to construct the imagined Israel Identity.
It will also critique the Israeli hegemony’s discourse on multiculturalism, in order to see
how the discursive strategies that forge national unity are given aesthetic representation. I
will argue that the films discussed here view the conflicts of immigration from the
perspective of the Israeli hegemony and avoid any acknowledgement of ‘the other’,
creating a false image of Israeli society. Yana’s Friends, which describes the adjustment
of new immigrants from Russia during the Gulf War, is a comedy that could be
understood using the concept of "concise narrative", a segment of speech that contains its
3
the responsibility for determining the meaning can be distributed among the participants
in at last two ways: that of the speaker or that of the hearer. A case study of stand-up
comedy propose that both, the speaker and the hearer, are responsible for the meaning of
comic discourse.3 This ethnic comedy film lauds the process of immigrant redemption
that Zionism sought to foster, involving the audience in a spectrum of emphatic responses
norms of the neo-liberal and globalising values promoted by the Israeli hegemony.
Jewish national liberation that was a product of late nineteenth-century Modernism and
based on rational thought, science, technology, and general education. Left and right
fought for hegemony within Zionism, envisioning the same national solution to the
problem of the suffering Jewish minorities in Europe, but advocating conflicting social
plans.
The left imagined a socialist Jewish state as a national solution that would
contribute to world revolution. In the 1920s its leaders achieved control of the national
1
Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, "Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach" Discourse
Studies, 4-5 (2005): 585-614.
2
Shaul Shenhav, "Concise narratives: a structural analyses of political discourse", Discourse Studies, 3
(2005): 315-335.
3
Wai King Tsang and Matilda Wong, "Constructing a Shared 'Honk Kong Identity' in comic discourses",
4
an omnipotent workers’ union, promoted a mixed economy, and created collectivist and
and friction with Arab peasant wage-earners and tenants. Thus, the Jewish-Arab conflict
The Labour-led statism overlay in fact a classist society over which the middle
class managed to win ideological hegemony in the 1960s, and which enthusiastically
embraced global capital in the 1990s. Blinded by the Eurocentric vision that dominated
the occidental world, the builders of the Jewish National Home failed to leave a place in
their world vision for the Arab ‘other’ that inhabited Palestine. After independence was
declared in 1948, ethnocentrism found its justification in a daily life lived under the
constant threat of danger. The cult of force became a parameter of foreign policy;
respect its role in the construction of the Jewish-Zionist identity at the end of 19th century
and the first 30 years of the 20th. Some intellectuals like Eliezer Ben Yehuda and Ehad
Ha'am conceived the national language as a tool that differentiates among the persons that
speak it and the persons that utilize other national languages. The Hebrew was for them a
factor of internal cohesion and external differentiation from other national cultural
groups; it supported the organization of the national institutions. For others, like Haim
Nahman Bialik and Martin Buber, the Hebrew was a bearer of images and untranslatable
inflections that expressed the specific characteristics of the Nation. For a third kind of
position with a theological inclination, like Aaron David Gordon and Rabbi Eliezer Kok,
the language symbolized the course of the spiritual life of the human group, the Hebrew
was the soul of the Nation. But the compulsive imposition of the Hebrew in the daily life
is better explained when viewed as the politics of a new dominant social class that aspired
to stabilize its relations with the subordinate classes re-organizing the cultural Hegemony.
Like the imposition of the Roman language in the Risorgimento of Italy, the
Zionist elites utilized the imposition of the Hebrew as a strong cohesive factor in the
construction of the Israel Nation and the social relations. First of all the Hebrew
conquered the Yiddish of the Jewish-European immigrants, then the Arabian dialects of
the Jewish immigrants from Arab countries that arrived in the 1950' and 1960'. Yiddish
word were mixed for a long time with the routine Hebrew in a "macaroni speak", while
the routine use of Arabic, as a result of the indispensable differentiation from the
Palestinian Other and the neighbours Arab states, was repressed along with the oriental
cultures of the newcomers.4 But the renewed Hebrew incorporated many word from
Arabic, mostly because the Zionist settlers view the Bedouins like a kind of "Noble
Savage" that knows the secret of living and survival in a hostile land. Later, the
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the politics of open border that prevailed
until de rise of suicide terrorism in the 1990' permitted a wider and daily contact between
Israel and Palestine people, which introduced to Hebrew a long list of words without
Israeli culture is a long way from the utopia dreamed of by its ‘founding fathers’.
of immigration from Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Arab East. Some immigrants
were fleeing racial or ethnic persecution, others sought better living conditions. Ethnic
and cultural groups that retained economic, cultural, and emotional ties with Judaism but
were scattered in different social and national environments invented a common past and
Israeli society today no longer claims to be a melting pot in which diverse groups
integrate into a culture that expresses the values of socialist-Zionist pioneerism. Ethnic
diversity and the politics of identity, viewed as passing evils by the hegemony, were once
exploited in order to co-opt potential immigrant leaders. Israel is entering the twenty-first
representation and in which ethnic politics play a dominant role. It is impossible to build
Democracy’s reputation has gone bankrupt precisely when the politicians are trying
hardest to defend the sectarian interests of their electors. The newspapers in foreign
languages, published in the past by the political parties as vehicle of acculturation and
reproduction of the Ideology and Zionist Identity, have disappeared in the 1990s and in
their place flourishes the independent press and literature in Russian, a product of the
wave of massive immigration from the disappeared Soviet Union. The minorities have
‘forced’ the hegemony to recognise their cultural difference, but class differences are
deepening.
4
Yehuda Jud Ne'eman, "The Question of the Language and the Israel Cinema", Zmanim 39 (1991): 125-
126 (Hebrew).
5
See the preface to the Hebrew edition of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities [Hebrew], trans.
7
The neo-liberal capitalist system produces ethnicism, which has become, on one
hand, a way for the oppressed masses to show resistance, and, on the other, a power
strategy for political leaders and financial oligarchies. The political class—with notable
exceptions—serves the interests of big capital. The media culture and the ethos of high
The labour movement has lost ground and no longer has its own economy; collectivist
The globalisation process has produced cultural and ideological changes that open
the way to mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition. It has imposed peace requirements that
were incompatible with a world of national states polarised by the Cold War. The current
system prefers consumer-subjects to victims dying for the sake of their country. Peace is
a more profitable business than war, but the prospect of external peace is accompanied by
a rise in the internal ethnic tensions that are inherent in multiculturalism. While Israeli
society is suffering from the problems of post-modernity, Palestinian society must still
were building the imagined community by eliminating inconvenient facts from the screen.
Films produced from the late 1940s up to the mid-1960s, categorised as the ‘national-
heroic model’, showed Holocaust survivors ‘forgetting’ their past within a few weeks of
their arrival and rebuilding their lives by joining the national enterprise.7 The conflict
with the Arabs was always explicitly present, although not necessarily the focus of the
plot. The heroes of these films were often larger-than-life sabras, kibbutz members, or
combatants who sacrificed their lives for independence or security. The Arabs were an
anonymous threat, visible but lacking human features and psychology. A frequently
recurring image that expressed the ‘rebirth’ of the New Jew and his or her liberation from
the defects of the Diaspora was the immigrant’s arrival on the Mediterranean shore of the
Promised Land, the place where the symbolic ‘ascension’ to that land occurred.8 The
newcomers learned to speak Hebrew almost immediately, while the veterans spoke a
literary and theatrical Hebrew far away of the routine language of the spectators. The
"macaroni speak" did not existed in this filmic texts, because the movies were identified
with the Hegemony, that also subsidized the production via the State agencies or the
Workers Union departments. Most of the production was documentary, where the voice
and the spoken discourse of the immigrant were usually dubbed by professional actors
and singers from Israel repertoire theatres or popular entertainment. In other cases, the
7
Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema – East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1987), Nurit Gertz, ‘“Others” in Israeli Films of the 1940s and 1950s: Holocaust Survivors,
Women, Arabs’ [Hebrew], in Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman [Hebrew], eds., Fictional
Visions of Israeli Film (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1998), pp. 381-402; Moshe Zimmerman, ‘The
Holocaust and Alterity, or the Added Value of the Film “Don’t Touch My Holocaust”’ [Hebrew], in Gertz,
Lubin, and Ne’eman, pp. 135-159.
8
Zionist discourse referred to immigration to Palestine or Israel with the Hebrew word ‘Aliya’, literally
‘ascension’, giving it a meaning that was not only spiritual (liberating oneself from the cultural-religious-
physical oppression of the Diaspora) but also material: making Jews into productive workers instead of
the traditional ‘liberal professions’ or commerce.
9
newcomer voice and discourse were annihilated by the extra diegetic authoritative voice
the tax on film receipts and offering low-interest production loans. The new measure
stimulated the production of films aimed at the extensive market constituted by Jewish
immigrants from Arab countries. This type of popular film was called ‘burekas’ (a
typical Middle-Eastern pastry), or ‘classist’ by some experts. The mass immigration from
Arab countries had radically changed the demographic make-up of the Jewish population.
At the time, Israel was not industrialised, and lacked jobs, food, and housing. For the
most part, the state channelled the Eastern immigrant masses who arrived in the 1950s—
usually with no resources of their own—directly into the proletariat. Sociology and
ideology were mobilised to justify this process, which was not exempt from a certain
racism deriving from the encounter with an Eastern-Jewish ‘other’ whose identity, unlike
that of Western Jews, was not based on either memories of persecution and the Holocaust
hegemonic cultural group. Israelis immigrated from Arab countries spoke in the films
Moroccan, Persian, Algerian and other Arabic dialects that lacked referring in the social
reality. They spoke shouting, almost in hysteria, to mark them as impulsive and
Western women by Oriental men, followed by mixed marriage, or the symbolic triumph
of the Oriental male over the Western male. The potential for revolt inherent in class
the ‘victory’ of the Eastern Jew, who in fact accepted the hegemonic codes.9
The popular influence of these films was an indication of the marginality of the
movements, the most violent of these being the Israeli ‘Black Panthers’ in 1971. The
terrible toll of casualties and the collapse of national morale occasioned by the Yom
Kippur War in 1973 did nothing to change the classist film model. Paradoxically, the
Labour Party governed in the name of an ideology discredited by the consequences of its
policies. The Israeli middle class was already exercising cultural and ideological
hegemony, and achieved political power in 1977, when social democracy lost the votes of
the masses, who were sick of ideological cynicism and corruption. (They would be
rewarded with the dolarisation of the economy, spiralling inflation, and the 1982
Lebanese War.) The nation’s social conflict had been manipulated and redirected by
capitalistic, xenophobic nationalism, which used ethnicist rhetoric to incite hatred of the
ended the classist burekas film genre in 1978 when it instituted the Fund for the
Encouragement of Quality Israeli Cinema. The Israeli middle class now imposed an
9
Bakhtin clarified the subversive implications of the popular celebration, when the powerful become
paupers and vice-versa. See Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasure: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film
(London: John Hopkins University Press, 1989). See also: Shohat, Israeli Cinema, chap. 3.
11
elitist system in which ‘quality’ dictated the replacement of mass appeal with protest
potential. The new film-making regime favoured an individualist model that already
collectivism and the pioneering ethos of personal sacrifice, but they did not attract large
audiences. Their creators were of a new generation that had not fought in the War of
Independence and had no sense of the poverty in which oriental immigrant Jews lived.
They were influenced by the French New Wave and European modernist films; some of
them had studied in Paris or London. Their stylistic experimentation was a challenge to
The border war and encounters with oriental immigrants hardly appeared in the
individualist model. The characters in these films did not identify with the Israeli
collective, and, abandoning the heroic conventions of previous films, they radiated a
yearning for ‘somewhere else’. Their alienation, borrowed from contemporary European
films, served as a protest against the Israeli codes that imposed a monolithic ‘national
fraternity’, but they still spoke in a correct and normative Hebrew, because they were not
more than the "black sheep" of the Hegemonic discourse. Palestinians appeared at times
Most of the individualist films were not commercial successes. The official
support they received was an indication of the hegemony’s effort to co-opt the
intellectual-aesthetic elite and neutralise the critical potential of its works. The burekas
12
and individualist models, seemingly diametrical opposites, both reflected the hegemony
occupation just a few kilometres away; and having to tend to civilian problems at the
same time that it prevented resistance and breaches of the peace. Palestinian society
offered cheaper labour than Israeli society, but was not a significant market for Israeli
products. The Israeli occupation poses serious problems for the humanistic, socialist
world concept shared by different sectors of Israeli society. The brutal nature of that
occupation can be seen as a direct consequence of the failure of the socialist Zionist
Filmmakers, generally identifying with the humanism of the left wing, found
themselves after 1977 alienated from the hegemonic centre. Public opinion, encouraged
by the rhetoric of the ruling right wing, rejected anyone who proposed a mutual Israeli-
cinema’ or the ‘Palestinian series’, films that show Israelis confronting the problems
inherent in the domination of another people. The precedent Individualist cinema was
‘political’ in that it rejected absolute identification with monolithic society and the state
and introduced into the Israeli imaginary problems and options that had been ‘forgotten’
by the hegemony. The new films after 1977 called for a moral stand against the suffering
of the Palestinians and the damage that occupation did to Israeli society. Mutual
10
Nitzan Ben Shaul, ‘The Hidden Connection between Burekas Films and Individualist Films’, in Gertz.
Lubin, and Ne’eman, pp. 128-134.
11
Judd Ne’eman, ‘The Jar, the Sword, and the Holy Grail: Films on the Jewish-Arab Conflict and the
13
recognition, fraternity, and solidarity were the usual solutions proposed in the films, but
the protagonists never managed to break down the nationalist barrier, and the filmmakers
failed to transcend the ethnocentric limitations of Israeli culture. The ethnic differences
between Israeli human groups were now hidden in the films and the characters spoke a
The 1982 invasion to Lebanon and the ensuing occupation, which ended only in
2000, together with the 1987-1992 Palestinian revolt known as the First Intifada,
representations of direct encounters between Palestinians and Israelis in what was called
"the Strange and the Other" cinema, but only three films depicted the Lebanon War.
Many films of this period were English-spoke productions, made for international
distribution. While in the past the Hegemony rejected non-Hebrew speak in films, in the
1980' It considered the English like the new international "lingua franca" and recognized
the subordination of the National language and culture to the ascent global culture of the
big capital.12 Then, with the 1990s, a new influence came into play: globalization and
post-modernism, which introduced nihilism and the ‘pleasure principle’ as key elements
resistance in the text, spectators can choose to stay away from the film, causing it to fail
economically, or they can develop varied ways of consuming the film that partially
neutralise its influence on the process of identity construction. Since the British Mandate
period the national institutions have been the decisive economic factor in the
establishment of the Israeli film industry, which they see as a useful mouthpiece for their
own messages. Over the years the state has changed its methods of supporting cinema,
but it has never cancelled that support completely, both because it wants to develop a
medium in its pocket. It may also be influenced by the pressures brought to bear by
filmmakers and the public. Over the same period films have changed their mode of
presenting the issues involved in shaping the national identity, developments in society
and culture have been reflected in the appearance of new cinematic models and ways of
Today’s films are constructed as objects of pleasure that satisfy the secret or
openly expressed desires of the individual. Films that are ‘serious’, ‘political’, ‘have a
social message’, or deal with ‘national issues’ are becoming scarce. When such films are
produced, they attempt both to entertain and to discuss serious issues, thereby falling into
the trap of mixed messages. Audiences are suspicious of movies with a clear critical
of signification without code. The message flows from the movie to the spectators in a
15
Montage in the 1920' Soviet Union, Neorealism in Post Second World War' Italy or
Cinema Novo in the 1960's Brazil, some scholars support in the present the idea that the
prevents the rise of new and alternative aesthetics.14 Audiences’ cinematic tastes have
been ‘educated’ to prefer these forms, with the inevitable result of dwindling audiences
and markets for Israeli films—to the point that the Israeli film industry cannot support
itself without institutional support. The result is a trend towards post-modern films
produced with state or public support that focus on local issues with ‘folkloric’ overtones,
in which the use of foreign or ethnic languages is legitimize. Ethnic conflicts in Israel are
apt to be relevant to audiences in other countries, too, while the adoption of the
hegemonic forms of expression makes it easier to distribute the film and to market it to
of the Black Panther revolt, a protest that, despite a great deal of noise, did not manage to
shake the hegemony. Later the nationalist discourse of the political right wing succeeded
in channelling the protests of the disadvantaged sectors into a massive vote for the right
13
Metz, Christian, “On the Notion of Cinematographic Language”, in: Movies and Methods, ed. Bill
Nicholls, California University Press, 1976, Vol. 1, pp. 582 - 589.
14
Jorge Novoa, "Metamorfoses do Cinema Brasileiro na era da Mundialização Neoliberal: em busca de
uma Identidade Estética", forthcoming publication in Araucaria, Dossier: "Brasil: Texto y Contexto".
16
that resulted in the political revolution of 1977. During the campaign for the 1981
giving rise to the development of ‘identity politics’ that has led to the establishment of the
Sephardic and Russian ethnic parties. Parliament members and political leaders speaking
with a strong ethnic accent and a poor Hebrew vocabulary became usual. In contrast to
the co-option of ethnic leadership that characterised the era of the social-democratic
regime—the basis of the election parody in the film Salah Shabati (Kishon, 1965)—the
current phase reflects the advance of globalisation and the strengthening of group
identities. Such identities provide a sense of refuge against the erosion of authentic
cultural attributes and their replacement by folklore and pseudo-equality between cultures
Arabic accented speak of the past movies to sell "oriental" industrialized comestibles.
The reinforcement of ethnic identities does not clash with globalisation, but is in
fact caused by it. The cinematic expression of this apparent paradox is the commercial
films depicting the experiences of ‘strange and exotic’ cultures. Difference is not
with a limited film market, a local film that is rich in multiculturalism has a greater
chance of breaking into the world market, where there is already a demand for this kind
of work. The emergence of the modern Israeli ethnic film thus reflects a complex series
ethnicity, the obligation to create films that have some chance of being marketed abroad
in order to cope with reduced public investment, the filmmakers’ desire to depict reality
17
in their works without hurting their chances of marketing the film, the limits that public
discourse imposes on the subject, the idiomatic diversity among the spectators, and so on.
silenced in the past by the ‘melting pot’ cultural policy, but the hegemony continues to
see cultural fragmentation as a threat to national integrity and the ability to confront
external threats. Every social sector or factor of power that postulates annexation and the
consequent domination of another people sees national unity as basic to its strategy, and
must find the rhetorical means of preserving it. The exclusive and compulsive use of the
Hebrew as cohesive factor was changed by the "national interest" discourse. State
commissions appointed in 1999 and 2000 to analyse the state of culture concluded that
the nation had to accept multiculturalism while at the same time protecting what they
called the ‘cultural nucleus’ of national unity. Elements reinforcing this cultural nucleus
were identified as modern, democratic factors that helped uphold the laws and the
enterprise established by the Founding Fathers, whereas elements seen as divisive were
labelled irrational, superstitious, and so on. At this time, Arabic is the second official
language after Hebrew, but none is imposing it. Only the Nation owned First Television
channel include Arabic translation in some of their programmes and films, while
commercial channels are often adding Russian translation to the broadcast. By the other
side, Israel films at theatres included in the past English and French translation, even
Hebrew text, because the low sound quality of moviemaking or deficient sonorous
appliances at theatres, but never included Arabic translation. In present times, only
Hebrew translation and some times Hebrew dubbing are available at cinema theatres, but
18
nor because State dispositions, but because the multicultural equality between languages
and the impossibility to add three or four translations to the films. The profit
remembered like at all. A critical analysis of official reports on the state of culture on the
eve of the year 2000 listed four hegemonic rhetorical strategies that devalue
multiculturalism:15
1. The representatives of the hegemony depoliticise culture, since they assume that
identity politics counteracts class solidarity and threatens to ‘balkanise’ society. Instead,
legitimising only class conflict, and they criticise the ‘politics of culture’, which
postulates culture as an indissoluble part of the political demands made by social groups.
Some see identity politics as the basis of the culture of media ‘ratings’, and social
cultural claims of Israeli Palestinians, since by this means they can be put outside Israeli
for its spokespeople a supposedly neutral position from which other voices are seen as
imaginary construction that requires the exclusion of the Israeli-Palestinian culture and
19
and non-Zionist Orthodox Jews are considered extremely different, whereas the unique
definition that automatically excludes large social sectors from the ‘imagined
community’. Jewish groups are seen as part of the Western cultural camp—even Jews
multicultural discourse in the world and identifying identity politics with post-modern
traditions. Any demand for a recognition of uniqueness is seen as a demand for separate
multiculturalism in its most grotesquely post-modern version and obstructs any balanced
interpretation of it.
4. The hegemony redefines the boundaries between society and the state, considering
culture as a product engineered by the state. The latter acts in accordance with the law
and public ethics, placing itself above social conflicts in a neutral position that is not
view of the ‘national culture’, fearing the possible mythification of group cultures.
Confronted with these cultures, it postulates ‘the national cultural nucleus’, in which
15
Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yonah, ‘The Multicultural Condition’ [Hebrew], Theory and Criticism,
17, 2000, p. 166.
20
they usually promote the message of integration in the national collective, on the basis of
the ‘politics of difference’. Many of them feminise the ethnic character, an aesthetic
effect under which is concealed the logic of traditional gender relations: the ethnic
‘other’ must accept the codes of the patriarchal hegemony. Cultural diversity appears in
the form of parody, comedy, or folklore. Palestinians and Orthodox Jews are absent from
Magic (Shchur, Shmuel Hasfari, 1994) is the story of Rachel, the daughter of
Moroccan immigrants, a television star whose personal life is, paradoxically, plagued by
lack of communication: Her husband exists only on the telephone, her daughter is
autistic, her relations with her brothers are distant and difficult. Rachel’s trip to her
father’s funeral becomes an odyssey into memories of the past, namely her childhood in a
peripheral village during the era of the Israeli Black Panthers, 20 years earlier. Rachel’s
French and some words in Moroccan. This is the language compound formula that
expresses the deal between Hegemonic discourse and the ethnic identities. The
adolescent Rachel had escaped what she considered superstitious cultural backwardness
by gaining admission to a state boarding school and turning herself into a Westernised
All social and national conflicts have been eliminated from the narrative. The
Black Panthers, who in 1971 protested violently against marginality and ethnically based
21
social exploitation, are recalled only in graffiti; both their image and the memory of
police and political repression have disappeared. The Palestinians, the Orthodox, and war
are not mentioned; Moroccan Judaism is a succession of folkloric rituals. The lack of
communication is resolved when Rachel’s sister uses magical powers to break through
the isolation of the autistic daughter. The legitimisation of magic, native to Moroccan
culture, allows modern Rachel to revalidate her ethnic origins, adapting them to the
Mediterranean film style and Latin American fantastic realism—a supposedly Third-
World cinematic language used to support the social integration of ethnic minorities in
Late Marriage (Hatuna Meucheret, Dover Kosashvili, 2001) tells the story of
Zaza, a bachelor in his thirties engaged in writing a doctoral thesis in philosophy, who, as
the son of Georgian immigrants, breaks the stereotype of an ethnic group usually
considered ignorant and brutal. While Zaza is bilingual and obviously can speak and
write in an high brow Hebrew, the parents and relatives speak mostly in Georgian. Zaza
origin who is the stereotypical image of a warm, temperamental, impulsive, and maternal
woman. Her parents are not remembered at all. She speaks only Hebrew with her lover
and daughter. The couple concrete the Zionist melting pot: the second generation of the
16
Yosefa Loshitsky, ‘Authenticity in Crisis: “Shur” and New Israeli Forms of Ethnicity’, Media, Culture
and Society, 19, 1996, pp. 87-103. On the dissident nature of fantastic realism, see Amaryll Chanady,
‘The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to
Metropolitan Paradigms’, in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism—
Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 125-144.
22
The hero is ‘feminised’ by the film when his lover imposes conditions for their
relations and when his family tries to force him into an endogamous, parentally approved
Georgian family irrupts into Yehudit’s apartment to put an end to the shameful
relationship, and Zaza offers his father a machete, begging him on his knees to respect his
love or behead him. In the end, Zaza marries the girl chosen by his family but takes
revenge by making an embarrassing scene at the wedding party. Yehudit sacrifices her
happiness, understanding the importance of family peace, since it is a goal shared by her
own ethnic culture. The conformist Israeli Romeo and Juliet are defeated by patriarchy
Foreign Sister (Achot Zara, Dan Wolman, 2000) describes the budding friendship
between Naomi, an affluent middle-class Israeli, and Nagist, a young Christian Ethiopian
illegal worker in Tel Aviv. Naomi is of Sephardic origin, married to an Ashkenazi. Her
exemplary mother to two teenagers, and the manager of the credit department at a bank.
She speaks only in Hebrew without any ethnic accent. Naomi’s family is a prime
The film adopts a rhetorical strategy that compares the Christian-Ethiopian ‘other’
with the members of the hegemony. Nagist does not accept second-hand clothes because
she wears only what she herself picks out, like Naomi’s daughter. Another Ethiopian, a
friend of Nagist, turns out to be a better soccer player than Naomi’s son and husband, in
23
addition to having been a Shakespearean actor. Naomi’s family sends her to a hotel to
recover from stress, but she prefers to visit the Ethiopians’ cramped apartment. She goes
out with them to drink and dance at a bar frequented by illegal immigrants, first letting
her new friends put her hair in African braids—a physical change that suggests the
growing emotional bond between the two women. The Ethiopians speak in their own
language, but they can explain themselves in Hebrew. But this idyllic interlude is
shattered when Nagist’s friend is arrested and scheduled for deportation. Naomi’s lawyer
explains to her that only an astronomical bribe can save him, not the law. Later another
Ethiopian is injured by an Israeli employer who refuses to pay the wages he owes him.
The Ethiopians are afraid to take him to an Israeli hospital because they would be turned
Jerusalem—which they reach too late. The film ends when Naomi rejoins her family,
The plot focuses on Naomi and the process of consciousness-raising that Nagist’s
appearance in her life has triggered. The film appeals to the audience’s sense of justice,
but the Ethiopians are not shown as social subjects able to fight for their demands;
instead, they are feminised or victimised. Naomi’s new awareness is neither shared nor
perceived by her family, and the destiny and rights of the immigrants are left in the hands
of the hegemony and the state bureaucracy. The only Palestinians in the film are two
doctors with no role other than to announce the death of the illegal worker.
representation.
former Soviet Union and studied filmmaking in Israel in the early 1980s. The cast of the
film, headed by the director’s wife in the role of Yana, includes both immigrants and
native-born Israelis, as does the production team. Some of the immigrant roles in the film
were played by actors new to the country; others were given to established Israeli actors.
The possibility of allowing the ethnic subjects to represent themselves was conditioned
The plot is about how Yana, a young Russian immigrant, copes with a hostile
environment after being abandoned, pregnant and penniless, in Tel Aviv by her husband.
Yana manages to find her place in Israeli society and builds a new relationship with a
sabra. The Russian immigrants in the film exemplify various strategies of adaptation
while maintaining specific cultural characteristics. The film seems to be arguing that a
society made up of different ethnic groups is the current mode of carrying out the national
project. Contrary to the old melting pot idea, which demanded that the subject be
transformed to suit the needs of the nation-state and speak Hebrew very soon, the ‘ethnic
mosaic’ is presented as an approach that allows the subject to reconstruct his or her
personal life, while accepting the social injustice generated by the reigning economic
25
model. But multiculturalism is only a thin veneer beneath which, in the film, we discover
the aesthetic representations of the immigrant’s integration into the hegemonic culture.
Yana has no history; her life begins when she arrives in Israel—a feature that was
common in the Zionist national-heroic style of filmmaking. She is seen making her
homework for the Hebrew classes and in a short time the language barrier disappeared
young Israeli sabra named Eli, a name that in Hebrew means ‘my God’. The sabra
matches the romantic image of the son of Zionism that originated in the 1930s.
Physically it was a European type, the embodiment of the eugenic ideals common in
Western culture. This image transmitted the ethos of the ghetto Jew’s salvation through
productive physical labour, collectivism, and the redemption of the land of Israel. Sabras
prefer action to words, conscious of their role as the vanguard of the people, and are ready
to give their lives for the sake of the national ideal. The sabra is the antithesis of the
When Yana tries to leave the country without certification that she has returned
the grant for new immigrants, she encounters representatives of the state for the first time,
in the form of border police. They show no understanding of her, and express cultural
racism towards immigrants. The scene blurs the boundaries between society and state
contrary to both the law and the conduct expected of public servants. Similar behaviour
is shown by the police officers who are called to investigate whether a character in the
film, an accordion player, has kidnapped children for pedophiliac purposes. The player
speaks with her teenager daughter in Hebrew without any sign of misunderstanding
26
between the two. Yet throughout the film the state and its senior representatives are
conspicuous by their absence. On television the news shows the developing crisis in the
Persian Gulf, but no sign of the country’s leaders. In this way the film creates a
separation between the state and the life of the subject, a characteristic of the post-modern
Eli is not the "classical" sabra but an "Israel macho". He makes wedding videos
and films himself with random sexual partners, thereby combining scoptophilia with
narcissism. Both his name and his profession characterise him as the Creator, a
representative of phallocentric Zionism. During the film Yana is seen repeatedly through
Eli’s camera lens, an aesthetic ploy that is already part of the visual codes and reproduces
the effect of ‘reality shows’, ideologically reinforcing the existing order. The usual
combatants, and the plot generally assigns them a sphere that is subordinated to the
masculine role. In a few films that show women as protagonists, they obey the codes of
the masculine world, and only the female body is left them as a space in which occasional
autonomy is possible.17 Generally female characters are excluded from the ‘national
fraternity’ and they are often expunged from the story as well.18 Yana lends her name to
the film, but her transformation into an Israeli subject is the result of Eli’s intervention;
the woman without a history is redeemed by the sabra. This can be understood by the
device through which political narratives gain their cohesion. The concise narrative is the
17
Orly Lubin, ‘The Image of Women in Israeli Cinema’ [Hebrew], in Gertz, Lubin, and Ne’eman, pp. 223-
246.
18
Yael Schub, ‘The Image of Women and Narrative Deconstruction in Modernistic Israeli Film’
27
pivotal intersection of present-time events and wider historical perspectives. The uses of
"concise narratives" embedded in the large Zionist narrative, like Yana's redemption by
Eli pays for Yana’s illegal abortion, offering her the opportunity to begin a new
life. Their romance takes place during the Gulf War, when the residents of Tel Aviv had
to take refuge from Iraqi missiles in sealed rooms, wearing gas masks. The first intimate
encounters between Eli and Yana are grotesque scenes during the bombing, when the
physical contact between their bodies is an ironic antithesis to the impossibility of verbal
communication under the masks. As in the heroic genre, the circumstance of war is what
brings the strangers together, symbolising national and cultural integration imposed by an
external threat. Eli celebrates each new air-raid siren, analogously to the protagonists of
heroic-Zionist films whose lives achieved significance through the struggle for the
country. When the missile attacks cease, Eli uses a video recording of the alarm to draw
Yana into another intimate encounter, but when his deception is discovered the masks fall
The Gulf War caused a crisis in the Israeli masculine identity, when the US
government imposed passivity on Yitzhak Shamir’s government. Until then the Israeli
male image had been based on a sense described by popular culture as ‘we are all soldiers
enjoying a furlough in civilian life.’ Eli represents this shift in that his character is devoid
of any military aspect. In contrast to the Israeli hero thanking God that he has been
drafted into the Six-Day War in Every Bastard a King (Kol Mamzer Melech, Uri Zohar,
1968), Eli celebrates his non-combative masculinity with every Scud missile, providing a
Yana and Eli share an apartment owned by Rosa, a disagreeable veteran Israeli
who will tolerate no delay in paying the rent. Later it emerges that Rosa was once an
unmarried Russian immigrant with a son who was the product of a brief but unforgettable
love affair with a Red Army hero. The father had disappeared in action during World
War II, and the son had died during the capture of the Wailing Wall in the 1967 war.
Thus, a parallel is established between the two women as young pregnant Russian
immigrants, each of whom has lost the only person she had. Rosa has ‘paid for’ her
veteran status in a way analogous to the biblical sacrifice of Isaac. At the same time, she
has ceased to speak Russian, manifesting a total integration into Zionist culture.
In the apartment next-door to Eli and Yana lives a paralysed, catatonic old man
who has arrived in Israel with another family of Russian immigrants. This family’s aim is
to get rich quickly, and to that end they leave the old grandfather out on the street for
hours to beg, decked out in his World War II medals. The veteran turns out to be Rosa’s
lost lover. Moved by love to begin speaking Russian again, she demands that he be
turned over to her protection. The family refuses since he is their main source of income,
which they plan to use to emigrate to New York—a prospect condemned by Zionist
discourse in the past but presented as a legitimate option in the film. Secondary roles
include the immigrant musician who finds himself forced to play for money in the street
in front of the conservatory, with the hope that his talents will be recognised. He is a
violent drinker, like the usual stereotype of Russians, but an expert on European music
Discourses tend to metaphoric uses of constructed sources when the goal is the
clarification of complex concepts.20 The discourse in Yana’s Friends uses a well known
image of miracle to make clear the benevolent final of the integration process. It ends
happily in a carnivalesque scene in which Eli and Yana kidnap the paralytic old man to
please Rosa. A grotesque chase scene straight out of silent-film farce then ensues, in the
course of which the old man’s wheelchair rockets over the Tel Aviv beach while all the
other characters run vainly after it. The old war hero falls into the sea, and just when
everyone is certain that he has drowned, he appears smiling and erect on his own two
the immigrant and the New Testament’s miraculous cure of the paralytic. Rosa recovers
her lost lover, the lover recovers his health, Yana and Eli are established as a new couple
celebrating the integration of the sabra with the immigrant, the old man’s family can
emigrate without hindrance, and the musician will no longer have to compete with the
Statistics confirm that almost 20% of the mass Russian immigration to Israel was
not Jewish, which explains this combination of Judeo-Zionist and Christian imaginaries,
Correlatively, the Russian melodies included in the soundtrack in fact have a familiar ring
to Israeli audiences, recalling the ‘Israeli folklore’ invented by the Zionist pioneers in
their nostalgia for the culture of their homeland, the imaginary land of the Soviet
Revolution.
20
Lionel Wee, "Constructing the source: metaphor as a discourse strategy", Discourse Studies 3 (2005):
363-384.
30
Russian immigrants into the Israeli hegemony, analogous to the grotesque depiction of
since the days of the ‘heroic era’ and the national effort to build social solidarity, when
anyone who left the country was considered a traitor. The film legitimises migration in
search of individual economic well-being, and the state institutions do not offer any
relevant service to those who need it. New citizens speak their mother tongue, but learn
Hebrew with the same facility with which they internalise the codes of Israeli
into society within a few weeks. The image of society shown on the screen omits any
threatening or divisive factor: Orthodox Jews, settlers, Palestinians, and labour unions do
not appear. The Gulf War is glimpsed repeatedly on television screens, but functions
only as a motive for the growing intimacy between Yana and Eli, or the personal fears of
other characters in the film. Thus, the public dimension is present in private life, but its
political influence on the subjects of the film is nullified. No political view of the Gulf
crisis, the Palestinian conflict, immigrant absorption, or any other issue is expressed by
either dialogue or aesthetic devices, giving the movie a neutral quality reminiscent of the
Conclusion
The films reviewed above transmit an optimistic message concerning the
speaking foreign languages, they use aesthetic devices and constructs representations that
31
lead the spectator to identify with the process of integrating into the cultural hegemony.
In this way, multicultural Israeli films continue to exercise the same integrative
ideological function that characterised the National Heroic films. As long as the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues at its current level of violence, the tension between
the group identities seeking expression and the interests of a national unity threatened
from outside will continue to shape local cinema. If indeed the national oppression of the
Palestinians, the human losses, and the pain and fear on both sides are sufficient to make
the contending peoples and their leaders effectively seek to create means of agreement,
the analysis of film offers one more argument for the proponents of peace.
Bibliographic List
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities [Hebrew], trans. Dan Daour (Tel Aviv: Open University,
2000), pp. 15-38.
Ben Shaul, Nitzan, ‘The Hidden Connection between Burekas Films and Individualist Films’, in Fictional
Visions of Israeli Film, eds. Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman [Hebrew] , (Tel Aviv: Open
University, 1998), pp. 128-134.
Bucholtz, Mary and Hall, Kira, "Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach" Discourse
Studies, 4-5 (2005): 585-614.
Chanady, Amaryll, ‘The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and
Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms’, in Magical Realism—Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp.
125-144.
Gertz, Nurit ‘“Others” in Israeli Films of the 1940s and 1950s: Holocaust Survivors, Women, Arabs’, in
Fictional Visions of Israeli Film, eds. Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman [Hebrew], (Tel Aviv:
Open University, 1998), pp. 381-402.
Gurvitz, David, Postmodernism—Culture and Literature at the End of the Twentieth Century [Hebrew]
(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1997), pp. 28-31;
Keni-Paz, Barouch, ‘Israel Approaching the Year 2000—A World in Transformation’ [Hebrew], in Israel
Approaching the Year 2000--Society, Politics, and Culture, eds. Moshe Lizak and Barouch Keni-Paz,
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1996), pp. 408-428;
Loshitsky, Yosefa, ‘Authenticity in Crisis: “Shur” and New Israeli Forms of Ethnicity’, Media, Culture
32
Lubin, Orly, ‘The Image of Women in Israeli Cinema’, in Fictional Visions of Israeli Film, eds. Nurit
Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman [Hebrew] , (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1998), pp. 223-246.
Metz, Christian, “On the Notion of Cinematographic Language”, in: Movies and Methods, ed. Bill
Nicholls, (California University Press, 1976), Vol. 1, pp. 582 - 589.
Ne'eman, Yehuda Judd, "The Question of the Language and the Israel Cinema", Zmanim 39 (1991): 125-
126 (Hebrew).
----------------------------, ‘The Jar, the Sword, and the Holy Grail: Films on the Jewish-Arab Conflict and
the Romance’, in Fictional Visions of Israeli Film, eds. Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman
[Hebrew] , (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1998), pp. 403-425.
Novoa, Jorge, "Metamorfoses do Cinema Brasileiro na era da Mundialização Neoliberal: em busca de uma
Identidade Estética", Araucaria, 15 (2006), http://alojamientos.us.es/araucaria/nro15/ideas15_5.htm
Schub, Yael, ‘The Image of Women and Narrative Deconstruction in Modernistic Israeli Film’, in
Fictional Visions of Israeli Film, eds. Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman [Hebrew] , (Tel Aviv:
Open University, 1998), pp. 215-222.
Shenhav, Shaul, "Concise narratives: a structural analyses of political discourse", Discourse Studies, 3
(2005): 315-335.
Shohat, Ella, Israeli Cinema – East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1987).
Stam, Robert, Subversive Pleasure: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (London: John Hopkins
University Press, 1989).
Tsang, Wai King and Wong, Matilda, "Constructing a Shared 'Honk Kong Identity' in comic discourses",
Discourse & Society, 6 (2004): 767-785.
Wee, Lionel, "Constructing the source: metaphor as a discourse strategy", Discourse Studies, 3 (2005):
363-384.
Yonah, Yossi, and Shenhav, Yehouda, ‘The Multicultural Condition’ [Hebrew], Theory and Criticism, 17
(2000): 163-188.
Zimmerman, Moshe, ‘The Holocaust and Alterity, or the Added Value of the Film “Don’t Touch My
Holocaust”’, in Fictional Visions of Israeli Film, eds. Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman
[Hebrew], (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1998), pp. 135-159.
Zizek, Slavoj, ‘Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’, New Left Review, 225
(1997): 28-51.