Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel

Afterword: What Is Mizrahi in Mizrahi Cinema?

251 Afterword What Is Mizrahi in Mizrahi Cinema? This work has explored the cinematic rendering of Mizrahi dilemmas— the prolonged ethnic marginalization and cultural displacement as well as Mizrahi protest and struggle. My film analysis was chiefly designed to tease out the ethnic by pointing to the problematics when it is subsumed within the issues of class, generational gaps, and gender (in the near-exclusive focus on women’s condition when films feature a Mizrahi woman). Similarly, against the beguiling performative play on ethnicity in contemporary “post-Bourekas” films, I pointed to the residue this exercise leaves and to the redrawing of ethnic boundaries and, thereby, the reiteration of Mizrahi identity in these films. And yet, notwithstanding all the elements and studies that attest to the persistence of the Mizrahi predicament in the areas of education, housing, employment, the scarcity of high-ranking Mizrahi executives in business and media, and the stalled rate of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi intermarriages ,1 it is outrightly fatuous to draw clear boundaries between the Mizrahi issue and other social maladies or, for that matter, to categorically demarcate the territory of Mizrahi cinema. In my interviews, some of the most prominent and prolific Mizrahi filmmakers went as far as to shun the label “Mizrahi cinema”; time and again, these filmmakers alluded to the contrived nature of the construction “Mizrahi cinema” and to their preference for “Israeli cinema” as a signifier for a developing, variegated, and inclusive artistic endeavor. Consider, for example, filmmaker Eyal Halfon’s (interview, June 2, 2004) unequivocal rejection of 252 • Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel the self-designation “Mizrahi filmmaker” and his skepticism about the utility of the “Mizrahi cinema” appellation in general.2 When I referred to Sh’hur as a Mizrahi film due to its focus on a Mizrahi family and community , Halfon retorted, “Right now I’m working on a film about Philippine migrant workers in Israel; does it make it a Philippine film?” It is by virtue of these and other considerations that I emphasized earlier the importance of treating “Mizrahi cinema” as a corpus of films where the question of whether a single film qualifies as “Mizrahi” is mostly inconsequential. Similarly, these formulations and reflections prompt us to attend to the question posed in the title of this Afterword. We should then turn to thematic and aesthetic features that may characterize Mizrahi films. My definition of Mizrahi cinema at the beginning of this work—films whose subject matter is Mizrahi people and space—is primarily thematically based. It is evident from the cumulative discussions in this work that the construction of identities and space (respectively , chapters 2 and 3), the rendering of ethnic struggle (chapter 4), and the focus on ethnicity in the context of gender, class, and religion (chapter 5) in Israeli films do imply the formation of a rather particular corpus of works that warrant the epithet “Mizrahi cinema.” But beyond content, what of particular or alternative aesthetics in contemporary Mizrahi cinema? Robert Stam (2000) suggests, “To address the question of alternative aesthetics, we must first address the question of the normative aesthetic” (258). Considering, however, that Israeli cinema is still in its formative phase, the rapidly changing film scene in Israel (finance, institutions, and competing media outlets), and, finally, the varied aesthetic traditions that immigrant or returnee expatriate filmmakers have infused, it is downright speculative to delineate the outlines of a normative aesthetic in Israeli cinema. Elsewhere in this work I elaborated on the unique cinematic style in Yosef-Joseph Dadoune’s works (which I considered haptic cinema) and on distinctive cinematographic features in Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Seven Days, but these do not amount to a sustained trend that can typify Mizrahi cinema. Even the language polyglossia3 where characters move swiftly between two or three languages (most common of which are Hebrew, Moroccan Arabic, and French), a rather prominent feature of contemporary Mizrahi cinema, does not develop into what John Mowitt (2005) calls “bilingual enunciation”—a set of filmic codes that render an alternative film language.4 Another avenue then in our undertaking to discern aesthetic characteristics of contemporary Mizrahi films will direct us to assess it in light of Afterword • 253 ethnic, subaltern, or accented “world cinemas” or Third Cinema.5 A cursory examination of some aesthetic commonalities or features that characterize these cinemas will further attest to the problem of attributing to Mizrahi cinema alternative...