Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion

24. The End of a World, the Beginning of a New World: The New Discourse of Authenticity and New Versions of Collective Memory in Israeli Cinema

3 4 0 24 The End of a World, the Beginning of a New World The New Discourse of Authenticity and New Versions of Collective Memory in Israeli Cinema miri talmon introduction: Cultural identity, immigration, and israeli Cinema Stuart Hall has argued that cultural identity is about both “being” and “becoming .”1 We constitute ourselves not only as “what we really are” but also in terms of “what we have become,” as history intervenes and subjects individuals and communities to traumas of war, immigration, exile, and transition . Cultural identities are those unstable constructs of identification which are made within the discourses of history and culture. They are not essences but positionings, constituted not outside but within representations. Cinema , in this context, is not a mirror held up to our faces, both as individuals and as imagined communities, to reflect our identities as they already exist but a form of representation that enables us to negotiate our identities, discover who we have become, constitute ourselves as new kinds of subjects, and rediscover hidden histories. Discussing how Caribbean cinema negotiates cultural identity by relating to the past, Hall argues: It is because this New World is constituted for us as place, a narrative of displacement , that it gives rise so profoundly to a certain imaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to return to “lost origins,” to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning. . . . And yet, this return to “the beginning” is like the “Imaginary” in Lacan—it can neither be fulfilled nor requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic, of representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery —in short, the reservoir of our cinematic narratives.2 The End of a World, the Beginning of a New World 3 4 1 Israel’s history and nation-building processes are inextricably bound with traumas of displacement and immigration. In early mythologies constructed in the culture, including Hebrew cinema, such traumas were part of the pre-Zionist exilic phase in the indigenous nation’s “prehistory.” These traumas are now becoming a constitutive part of Israelis’ histories. Their self-consciousness and self-definition are constantly evolving. They are constantly in a state of becoming, still negotiating not only their future but their past as well. This negotiation of the past is no longer collectively generalized as it used to be but is becoming more individualized and in many senses privatized. It is this yearning that Hall describes, to return to an imaginary lost plenitude of an original, stable identity in the past in order to resolve the pains of immigration, indeterminacy, and multilayered identities that feed Israeli cinema’s retro and nostalgia imageries and narratives.3 It is the second generation’s quest for severed roots that feeds the narratives of Israeli cinema with personal biographies and Israeli culture with rituals of root searching as well as pilgrimage to original places in the Diaspora.4 This essay is about the articulation of these trends and the negotiation of Israeli identity and history in Avi Nesher’s film Turn Left at the End of the World (Sof Haʾolam Smolah, 2004). Authenticity, Take one: Whose Story, Whose history? The film Turn Left at the End of the World was surrounded by debates, which reverberated with past controversies. These past controversies are associated with the popular Israeli genre of the Bourekas films;5 the film Shkhur (Azoulai-Hasfari and Hasfari, 1994) was also controversial.6 Questions of cinematic quality versus commercialism as well as questions concerning the authenticity of representations—both of ethnic identity and of authorship— are at the core of these debates. In the case of the Bourekas films it had been argued that Mizrahim (Israelis of Middle Eastern/Sephardic heritage) were represented stereotypically and falsely in films mostly created and directed by Ashkenazim (Israelis of European/Western heritage); therefore, it was argued, the films offered an Orientalist, unauthentic perspective of Mizrahim .7 Furthermore, critics viewed Bourekas films as vulgar commercial products aimed at the lowest common denominator within Israeli audiences and thus both too formulaic to be authentic and not representative of any authentic experience, biography, or collective history of Mizrahim in Israel. Associated with the Bourekas and criticized for such challenged authenticity was Sallah (Sallah Shabbati, 1964), a film about a Mizrahi protagonist made by Ephraim Kishon, an immigrant to Israel from Hungary. It 3 4 2 New Cinematic Discourses achieved...