Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion

10. Trajectories of Mizrahi Cinema

1 2 0 10 Trajectories of Mizrahi Cinema yaron shemer The popular Bourekas genre of the 1960s and 1970s, marked by its stereotypical treatment of ethnicity, is often considered the harbinger of Mizrahi cinema—a corpus of films featuring the dilemmas of a subjugated Israeli collective whose origins are in the Arab/Muslim Middle East. Although recent Mizrahi films often steer away from the hitherto derisive representations of its Mizrahi characters, the discussion of Mizrahi films from the early 1990s to the present enables us to trace the genre’s legacy and reveals the marks that the Bourekas has left on the narratives, characters, and discourses of contemporary Israeli films. My discussion of the Bourekas legacy is not meant to provide a comparative study of Mizrahi cinema then and now. Nor does it suggest that the Bourekas genre should be the yardstick by which all Mizrahi films should be measured and studied; clearly, some important Mizrahi films have no recourse to the Bourekas genre.1 Rather, the analyses of Turn Left at the End of the World (Sof Haʾolam Smolah, 2004), Lovesick on Nana Street (Khole Ahava Beshikkun Gimmel, 1995), and James’ Journey to Jerusalem (Masʾot James Beʾeretz Hakodesh, 2003) are designed to probe into the tensions between the reification of ethnic identities on the one hand and the playful postmodern rendering of indeterminate individual and group identities on the other. introduction: The Bourekas Legacy The term “Bourekas” was coined in the mid-1970s as a derivative of the popular bourekas Middle Eastern pastry. Bourekas cinema, consisting primarily Trajectories of Mizrahi Cinema 1 2 1 of comedies or social (melo)dramas, generally foregrounds Mizrahi characters . These characters in most Bourekas films lack depth, complexity, and agreeable traits. The Mizrahi is often portrayed as irrational, emotional, oversexed, traditional, primitive, chauvinist, patriarchal, and manipulative. The titular character in Sallah (Sallah Shabbati, Ephraim Kishon, 1964) is a frenzied, lazy, primitive, rude, and sexist Mizrahi immigrant. He aspires to leave his residence in the maʾabara (transient camp) for a permanent housing in the shikkun (a cheaply built and undistinguishable apartment complex ), but he is unwilling to seek a job due to laziness or to let his son earn an income due to his reluctance to violate the familial patriarchal structure. Despite genre-related differences, both the musical Kazablan (Menahem Golan, 1974) and Sallah resort to a similar cluster of stereotypes. Kaza, the hero of the film’s title, is traditional, brutish, physical, and emotive, like Sallah . He lives in the old city of Jaffa in a mixed neighborhood of immigrants from various countries. Kaza leads a (quite benign) gang of young men; in accordance with genre conventions, they sing and frolic but never seem to work. Finally, Charlie of the comedy Charlie and a Half (Charlie Vakhetzi, 1974) is a petty criminal who lives in a slum. He is vulgar and manipulative and does not hesitate to recruit a young neighborhood boy as his “apprentice .” Interestingly, even the redeeming and charming characteristics of Sallah , Kaza, and Charlie—brevity, hospitality, warmth, and physical attractiveness —hark back to the stereotypical exotic markers of the “Oriental” subject, as pointed out by Edward Said (1978) and his followers. Paradoxically, reiteration of the Mizrahi predicament in the Bourekas and its often carnivalesque play with ethnicity amount to an elision of the ethnic problem.2 The formulaic narrative of the Bourekas social comedy calls for a happy ending not by offering the Mizrahi a cathartic new understanding but by demanding oblivion. Narratively, Sallah, Kaza, and Charlie might have missed the train of modernism, but the younger generation is fully ready to be co-opted into a putatively progressive Israeli society. Sallah’s son and daughter are marrying Ashkenazim and the baby Kaza was born to an Ashkenazi father and a Mizrahi mother, so the world of enlightenment is awaiting these “Ashkenized” younger people. The films’ seemingly benign discourse clearly suggests that the social, economic, and political power disparity is not structural and is thereby bound to disappear in the next generation. The Bourekas narrative in which Mizrahi children—native Israelis who are cultured, educated, and fluent in Hebrew—are often pitted against their parents (primitive, illiterate, and diasporic) further defuses the contentious problem of the ethnic dilemma by turning it into a generationgap issue. 1 2 2 An Ethno-Cultural Kaleidoscope As suggested by Rami Kimchi (2008: 269–270), contemporary films that employ the...