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  • Radical Vision:The Films of Judd Ne'eman
  • Janet Burstein (bio)

This essay argues that Judd Ne'eman's films begin in political critique, seek out causes of cultural malaise in the failure to see and to hear "others" both outside and within the self, and ultimately envision new cultural promise in the work of performance artists. In his films a "radical vision" evolves—in the literal, original sense of the word: a way of seeing that goes to the roots. Documentaries and feature films look at what his culture looks away from in the lives of Bedouins, Israeli Arabs and Jews, soldiers, and dissidents. His films expose the hidden roots of persistent personal and collective conflicts and finally elicit from the work of writers, dancers, and actors a new mythos—to succeed the broken myths within this troubled state. As his characters learn to see the world they've made, they demonstrate the struggle to become responsible for themselves and for one another.

"Cinema, a visual art, is meant to show what is hidden." (Judd Ne'eman, Haifa Film Festival, 2006)

In 2009, forty years after his first film appeared, the State of Israel awarded the Israel Prize for Cinema to Yehuda Judd Ne'eman, one of its severest critics. As filmmaker, critic, and teacher, the judges said, "he has left his mark on crucial junctures in the history of Israeli film since the 1960's." They called his work "subversive and full of vision,"1 for it calls into question again and again [End Page 112] his country's failures to live up to its promises. And it envisions not only the sources of those failures but also possibilities of moving past them.

Teacher of the first seminar on Israeli cinema at the department of film at Tel Aviv University and mentor to a generation of film students, Ne'eman has left an imprint on Israeli cinema that extends, as the judges suggested, beyond the films he himself has made. But in his own films the gradual development of Ne'eman's way of seeing becomes revelatory. For Americans in particular, who do not know his work as a filmmaker and who struggle to discern the logic of the Israeli left in these confusing years, Ne'eman's films, taken together, offer valuable insight: beginning, as one Israeli critic points out, in political critique—in time, they look past this "dead end"2 to seek out causes of cultural malaise, and to envision the emergence of new promise. In his films a radical vision evolves—"radical" not in a political sense, but in the literal, original sense of the word: a kind of vision that goes to the roots, to see what needs to be seen. First, the films look at what his culture looks away from. Then they expose the hidden, tangled roots of personal and collective behavior. And finally, the most recent three films about the performing arts elicit from the work of artists and performers a new mythos—to succeed the broken myths3 within this troubled state.

Ne'eman's early medical training and his later reserve service as a paratroop combat surgeon in three wars between 1967 and 1979 probably cultivated this way of looking that probes beneath surfaces in quest of understanding and repair. Since the sixties, film—and writing about film—have become his primary instruments of radical vision: both the means by which one learns to look, and the sites in which what can be seen at the roots achieves cultural significance and moral promise.

Ne'eman's first film dramatizes the need to see: a challenge that his films will work on for three decades. He began work on this film before the Six Day War, while he was in the paratroop reserve brigade. The film reveals the tension between looking and looking away that characterizes a combatant's response to injured bodies of comrades and enemies on the battlefield. Characters in The Dress (1969), completed in the years after the war, peer at one [End Page 113] another and at the world of post-war Tel Aviv through various lenses, trying to frame and to penetrate visual experience...

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