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16. Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global: Women and Religious Oppression in a Minor Film
- University of Texas Press
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2 1 3 Penetrating the intimacy of a world fixed in a religious time zone, otherwise hermetically sealed from its contemporary surroundings, the film Kadosh (Sacred; Amos Gitai, 1999) portrays the life of abstinence at the core of one of Jerusalem’s religiously constituted enclaves. Much like the subject of his film, Gitai’s gaze is committed to the exercise of restraint, reducing the cinematic form to the poverty of its language, to its desert, and as such rendering it barren and unfit for reproduction.1 In this double play Kadosh never splits from that which is unique to its locality and at the same time sustains its freedom from the pervasive reign of any universal signifier, therein foregrounding the film’s “minor” standing. But what do I mean by minor standing and what does it have to do with the production of meaning which is so critical for the interpretation of any film, regardless of its immediate context? The interface between local cinematic texts and their foreign viewers is one of great intricacy. Members of juried committees in international film festivals, potential distributors, and general audiences worldwide perceive such films from some distance, outside of their local context. Still, in recent years a growing body of Israeli films has gained increasing international awareness. What qualities may be attributed to the ability of such texts to lend themselves to the derivation of meaning? nava dushi Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global Women and Religious Oppression in a Minor Film 16 2 1 4 Jewish Orthodoxy Revisited National Cinema in a global Context Analyzing the textual characteristics by which emerging national cinemas assume their mobility across cultural borders creates a new ordering scheme which positions such films as objects within a broader textual field. Similar to other human works (law, science, the fine arts, ethics, religion) observed by Pierre Bourdieu, cinema is produced in these “very peculiar social universes which are the fields of cultural production” in which competing agents fight for the monopoly over the universal.2 Since the 1910s American narrative norms have occupied a central position of influence within the field by mounting a textual system which stands as a point of departure for international cinematic expression.3 The term “films with legs” once used by the industry to describe films that endure is now related to their capacity to move easily in global markets,4 implying a textual volatility detached from cultural particularity. It is this era of intensifying symbolic exchanges in which the very prospect of originating difference resurfaces and calls for reevaluation. The essay is thus concerned with the space of possibilities opened for emerging national cinemas, and Israeli cinema in particular, in the twenty-first century’s global cinematic field. As Zygmunt Bauman’s account of mobility as the new power structure in Globalization: The Human Consequences suggests, “the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern times.”5 In a world dominated by the massive movement of peoples, goods, images, and ideas the thinking of the nation demands the application of an adaptive imagination.6 Stuart Hall posits that the erosion of the nation-state is spearheaded by Western-dominated media technologies and standards of representation which can no longer be limited by national borders. The free flow of cultural artifacts, forced by some of the largest transnational media conglomerates, takes on a powerful form of homogenization, undermining the mechanisms that centralized and mobilized national identity in the past—hence it is termed “globalization from above.” Consequently, national identity undergoes a process of fragmentation from which a new kind of globalization emerges: a “globalization from below” the state, to use Hall’s term,7 or “grassroots globalization.”8 Grassroots globalization brings to the fore new voices that in past formations were marginalized or excluded from national discourse, such as new genders, new ethnicities, new regions, and new communities.9 These voices presently counteract the homogenizing forces of the global through the local, as Ella Shohat suggests: “While the media can destroy community and fashion solitude by turning spectators [3.89.163.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:22 GMT) Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global 2 1 5 into atomized consumers . . . they can also fashion community and alternative affiliations.”10 Building on the notion of grassroots globalization, I suggest that over the past decade the emergence of local cinematic texts has formed a transnational web of themes upon...