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Israel on location
By Raphael Zagury-Orly
Tags: Israel news

"Israeli cinema is well known now in France primarily due to the success of contemporary works. Very few know that it has roots going back to the late 19th century, when the invention of the medium more or less coincided with the early Zionist movement." So says Dr. Ariel Schweitzer, the artistic consultant of the Israeli film retrospective entitled "Tel Aviv, Le Paradoxe," which opened two weeks ago at the Forum des Images in Paris and will run for five weeks.

Schweitzer is a cinema historian, critic and curator who has lived in Paris for two decades. He teaches film theory at the University of Paris 8 and at Tel Aviv University. His book on Israeli cinema of the 1960s and '70s was published in France in 1997 and translated into Hebrew in 2003 (Babel - The Third Ear). A book he edited about contemporary Israeli cinema was recently published in Italy (Marsilio Press). Since 2004, he has written regularly for the French magazine Les cahiers du cinema.

Schweitzer explains what led to the decision to devote such an extensive retrospective (comprising approximately 80 films) to Israeli cinema and Tel Aviv: "Each year, the Forum des Images, one of three leading film institutes in Paris, devotes a large retrospective to a major world city. I first proposed Tel Aviv a few years ago, but at the time the Forum was holding a retrospective devoted to Tehran that ran into a lot of political problems. The Forum director, Laurence Herszberg, jokingly told me then that after what they went through with Tehran, she was only going to hold tributes to Scandinavian cities from then on. Two years ago, she decided that this was the right time to do it, and we started to work on the project, which coincides this year with the celebration of the Tel Aviv centennial."
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How was the program built?

"The retrospective examines the evolution of the image of Tel Aviv through eight decades, starting with Zionist cinema, in which the city is portrayed through the prism of labor and development (Helmar Lerski's 'Avodah,' 1935), to the bohemian and 'European' Tel Aviv of the 'new sensitivity' in the '60s and '70s (Judd Ne'eman's 'The Dress,' Boaz Davidson's 'Shablul,' Uri Zohar's 'Big Eyes'). It looks at Tel Aviv-Jaffa as portrayed in popular cinema (Ephraim Kishon's 'Arvinka,' Menahem Golan's 'Kazablan'), and as social criticism (Nissim Dayan's 'Light Out of Nowhere,' Moshe Mizrahi's 'The House on Chelouche Street'). There's political Tel Aviv (Gur Heller's 'Night Movie,' Amit Goren's 'The Cage,' Assi Dayan's 'Life According to Agfa'), and on the other hand, movies that flee from the conflict to the realm of postmodern aestheticization (Savi Gavison's 'Shuroo'). And from the '90s, we see the city as a mirror of a competitive, materialistic and merciless society (Amos Gitai's 'Devarim,' Joseph Pitchhadze's 'Year Zero'). The retrospective will also include tributes to the Minshar and Tel Aviv University film schools, and a special event will be devoted to David Perlov's 'Diary,' which will be introduced by his daughter and collaborator, Yael Perlov."

Didn't you feel a need to depart from the common categorization of Israeli cinema?

"We chose a more or less classic and chronological historiography so as to allow the foreign viewer to understand the processes that led to the birth of the different genres and schools in Israeli cinema. At the same time, it was important to me to also screen films that are not included in the standard canon and which I feel are of key significance. For example, Yaki Yosha's 'Shalom, the Prayer for the Road' (1973), a film that combines a modernist aesthetic with sociopolitical criticism in a fascinating way, and which is one of the outstanding films of the 'new sensibility' wave, or Gidi Dar's 'Eddie King' (1992), which is highly influenced by the films of Godard and attempts to transfer this influence to a Mediterranean setting. We'll also be showing Dan Wolman's 'Tied Hands' (2006), which was inspired by the life of the filmmaker Amos Guttman, a film that I really love and which did not receive enough exposure. And there's also the beautiful 'Avanim' ('Stones') by Raphael Nadjari."

Were you guided exclusively by artistic considerations, or did political considerations also play a part? Is it possible to separate the two?

"The first thing that guided me was to show good Israeli cinema. Beyond that, it was important to us to present Israeli cinema as an intersection of forces, uncertainties, questions, and at the center of that, also political questions. We're opening the event with Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani's 'Ajami.' This is an important work just because it doesn't declare itself from the outset as a political movie, but arrives at the political via the mundane, the human scale, by means of exposing the complexity of the intertwining lives of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa. Later there will be a wide variety of critical Israeli films (works by Ram Levy, Amos Gitai, Amit Goren, Keren Yedaya) and there will be a round table that will focus on political questions. However, we really wanted to present Israeli cinema as an expression of a society that is not embodied solely by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather aspires to some sort of 'normalcy.' Therefore, we are devoting a lot of space to feminine Israeli cinema and also giving expression to homosexual Israeli cinema and to the path it has taken from the margins (Amos Guttman) to the center (Eytan Fox)."

Mainstream, not vulgar

This is not the first time Schweitzer has presented Israeli cinema in Europe. Previously, he curated a retrospective dedicated to David Perlov in the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2005), and lately a comprehensive program of contemporary Israeli cinema as part of the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy (2009).

What is it about Israeli cinema that really lures the international audience?

"Israeli cinema relates to reality and gazes upon it directly, sometimes from a subversive point of view. This point of view, which was typically found in the most important European cinema at its height (Italian neorealism, the Czech New Wave, the German cinema of the '70s) is almost completely absent today, although it is starting to develop in several peripheral countries like Romania or Israel."

Doesn't Israel's centrality in the European discourse as a theological-cultural entity also contribute to the interest in Israeli cinema?

"It is clear that Europe's interest in Israeli cinema is also connected to what one could call an obsession with the Jewish question, and as a consequence, also with Israel as an expression of Jewish nationalism. I found an interesting example of this in one of Godard's last films, 'Notre musique,' where the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish says that the Palestinian fate doesn't interest the Europeans at all, while they have a genuine obsession with the Jewish issue. Therefore, Darwish continues, the Palestinians are fortunate that their war is with Israel, for otherwise they would just sink into oblivion. How much this obsession 'contributes' to the success of Israeli cinema is hard for me to say. I only hope that the audience will be exposed through movies to a representation of Israel and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that departs from prejudices and mythic, sometimes superstitious beliefs, from which Europe has yet to completely liberate itself."

Do the movies produced in Israel with the support of the various foundations really contain elements of criticism, political or otherwise?

"Up to now, the policy of the foundations has been more or less balanced. They finance political cinema and also movies that don't necessarily deal with 'current' issues. The danger lies elsewhere, and it has to do with the mainstreaming of Israeli cinema. Every healthy industry is characterized by a mainstream cinema, and Israel has managed in recent years to produce a mainstream cinema that is not vulgar (unlike in the years of the 'burekas movies') and sometimes quite interesting. The best example is, of course, 'The Band's Visit,' by Eran Kolirin. The fact that more than 200,000 spectators saw this film in Israel is highly significant, since this public assures the existence of Israeli cinema as an industry. At the same time, it's very important that there be space for the margins, for more radical and experimental cinema. Directors like Avi Mugrabi, Keren Yedaya, Mushon Salmona or Raphael Nadjari are like a laboratory of talents, artists who take chances, and who in the end create the basis for the renewal of Israeli cinema.

"Shmuel Maoz's movie 'Lebanon' is a fascinating example of the way in which the mainstream and marginal cinema can fuel one another. This is a mainstream movie, a genre film, but one that is based on an aesthetic principle whose origin lies in experimental or avant-garde cinema: filming the war from within the closed space of the tank while adopting the point of view of the soldiers inside it. This is a radical aesthetic motif that is being used in a movie aimed at a wide audience."

Do you think there are directors who deliberately meet the political expectation that Israeli cinema take the 'right kind' of critical angle?

"Israeli cinema could die the day it becomes politically correct, the moment the cinema foundations only support films that have the 'right message' and the 'proper aesthetic.' Israeli cinema without ambivalence, without a dimension of disquiet, will very quickly lose some of its vitality and power. But the much bigger danger is that Israeli directors themselves will become politically and aesthetically correct in order to be accepted by the European audience and the various festivals.

"The most blatant example of this is Eran Riklis' movie 'Lemon Tree,' which is a collection of cliches, stereotypes and simplistic dichotomies ('good Palestinians, bad Israelis'), designed to recreate for the European audience the binary structures to which it is frequently exposed in the media, without any attempt to deviate from them or question them. The fact that the movie was a total failure in Israel but was very successful in Europe just goes to show what a perverted attraction this kind of cinema has for a certain audience around the world, and the cynical use that is sometimes made of this by Israeli directors. Haim Tabakman's portrayal of homosexuality in ultra-Orthodox society in 'Eyes Wide Open' is just as problematic, as it is both 'politically correct' and exotic and fulfills the expectation of creating an image of Israel as a 'picturesque' society that is nonetheless archaic, backward and intolerant."

Violence as a boomerang

At one event in Paris, Schweitzer will moderate a panel discussion about women in Israeli cinema, with the participation of Michal Bat-Adam, Ronit Elkabetz, Keren Yedaya, Hadar Friedlich and Hagar Ben-Asher. And the week before, there will be a special tribute to Gila Almagor, attended by the actress.

You often emphasize the importance of women in Israeli cinema. Why?

"This has been without question one of the most significant aspects of Israeli cinema for several years now. Basically, ever since Keren Yedaya's film 'Or' won the Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, an event that could be said to signify the birth of the new, young and, to a large extent, female Israeli cinema. I don't know if it's possible to talk about a female aesthetic in Israeli cinema, but one can certainly talk about a female sensibility, about a female gaze. On this level, feminine cinema is also political, since to a certain extent it subverts the hegemonic Israeli point of view, which is largely male, aggressive and military. Women's films in Israel show how, for a society that has at its base a mystification of force, of violence toward the other, in the end, that same violence acts as a boomerang; it trickles back in and undermines it from the inside. This is one of the interesting motifs in the films of Keren Yedaya, and in Dalia Hagar and Vidi Bilu's film 'Close to Home,' which I love."

In the last few years, Israeli society has been depicted on film as fragmented and diverse. What is your view of this trend and of the general focus on the "ethnic" in cinema?

"For years, Israeli cinema was very centralized, and depictions of the periphery were mostly caricatures. The geographical expansion of the cinematic view is indicative of a new phenomenon in which Israeli society is being revealed as multicultural and heterogeneous. This multiculturalism is a basis for political, social and ethnic tension, but it also holds a tremendous potential for dynamism, for cultural richness and variety. Movies like Dover Koshashvili's 'Late Marriage,' Eran Kolirin's 'The Band's Visit,' Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's 'Shiva,' David Volach's 'My Father, My Lord,' Mushon Salmona's 'Vasermil' and Eran Merav's 'Zion and his Brother' all express these tensions, this ambivalence and, to a certain degree, also the great promise embodied by this fabric of Israeli society. After years in which Israeli movies imitated foreign cinematic and cultural models, they have now internalized to some extent the lesson of Iranian cinema: The more local you are, the more universal you become. It's amazing that movies that were filmed in remote development towns in the Negev or in a Tel Aviv suburb attract hundreds of thousands of viewers all over the world. Of course, this representation of multiculturalism also needs to avoid the trap of becoming no more than cheap exoticism or folklore."

In a recent article in Le Monde, you criticized the boycotts of Israeli cinema. What was your argument?

"In the article I pointed out the hypocrisy that is often found behind the calls for a boycott of Israel. Ken Loach pulled his movie 'Looking for Eric' out of a small festival like Melbourne because a director whose trip was paid for by a public Israeli organization was invited, but he presented the movie at the last Cannes Film Festival in which five Israeli movies participated (three features and two short films), with some of the crew from those movies going to the festival with Israeli public aid. Apparently, the Cannes festival is too important financially and in terms of media exposure for even a director as combatant and political as Ken Loach. But beyond that, I am opposed to any cultural boycott, and all the more so when it comes to Israeli cinema, which is also significantly political, critical and oppositionist. In my opinion, it's much more meaningful to present at the opening evening in Paris a movie like 'Ajami' or the films of Amos Gitai, Keren Yedaya or Ram Levy, than to boycott Israeli cinema as a whole."

How do you envision the future of Israeli cinema?

"David Perlov once told me that Israel is a nation of cinema but it doesn't yet realize it. The variety of human faces here, the variety of cultures, the traditions, the languages - all of this has incredible potential for the cinematic medium. Not to mention the fact that this is a country in constant conflict, in ongoing drama, which are the basic components of the cinematic narrative. Israeli cinema will need a few more years to realize this vision, to free itself of artificial influences as well as its feelings of inferiority, and to understand that the materials of the country's reality could indeed have universal power. It's important for this process of searching and discovery to continue, because the moment we shout: 'Eureka! We've found it!', the moment we begin to celebrate, the moment we start to recycle political and aesthetic structures - that's when the dying process begins. In other words, Israeli cinema must keep on being critical, toward itself first of all."
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