One aspect of Israel to celebrate on Yom Ha’atzmaut is its amazing movie culture. Anyone with even a casual acquaintance with the film industry in Israel recognizes it as a fine product of cultural creativity and imagination. More than a vehicle for superb entertainment, Israeli cinema reveals the pulse of contemporary Israeli society and engages its audience with challenging issues that have deep relevance in Israeli life.
The spectrum of political positions, the range of issues and the variety of perspectives hold a mirror to the diversity and the challenges of Israeli life today. Israeli films make deliberate use of set and setting – landscape, cityscape, public space, interior space, domestic space – to pose questions and explore personal, family, social and political issues.
The richness of the Israeli film scene led me to create courses at York University on Israeli cinema.
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In my classes, we look at film as a vehicle through which to explore questions of history, identity, conflict and reconciliation, war and peace, gender, ethnicity, and the tensions between individual and collective values. We think about how the unique resources of the film medium can be used to express ideas, bridge conflicts, portray differing points of view, and persuade.
Out of my own fascination with films, and to develop my courses, I attend the Jerusalem International Film Festival as often as I can.
One film that was screened at the festival last summer is a good illustration of the ability of film to engage an inherited past in order to imagine future possibilities. Harmonia re-imagines the biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac as a modern event. Fashioning a kind of cinematic midrash on a story that has provoked the sensibilities of traditional biblical commentators, Harmonia casts the Hebrew patriarch as a maestro of the Jerusalem Philharmonic Orchestra and his wife as its renowned harpist. The couple long for children, but Sarah cannot conceive. A bond of friendship develops between Sarah and Hagar, a Palestinian French-horn player from east Jerusalem. Hagar volunteers to bear a child for the couple, and the story we recognize from Genesis takes on modern form in the hands of director Ori Sivan. But much like classical midrash, Harmonia responds to its own internal issues and sensibilities. It suggests that perhaps we are not fated to endlessly reproduce old enmities.
Teaching courses on film poses certain challenges. One of the first classes I taught as a university professor looked at movies as a serious art form that challenged us to look at ourselves and our societies in new and sometimes discomfiting ways. I team-taught the course with a colleague, and together we selected a roster of films that experimented with cinema, storytelling and chronology, and made demands on the viewer.
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Early on, our students politely let us know that these were not the kind of movies they would ever choose to see for themselves. But the films did provoke far-ranging discussions, and our students showed themselves to be insightful and intuitive viewers. At the end of the semester, my colleague and I made dinner for our class. The students told us that, in retrospect, they were happy we had introduced them to this kind of cinema. My colleague beamed. I asked them if they would ever choose to see these kinds of movies on their own. There was a long pause. Finally one of them said, “Well, not on a date.”
But there is a different dynamic in courses on Israeli cinema. Whether they’re familiar with Israel or not, whether they’re Jewish or not, many of my students tell me that they invite others to watch the films with them: boyfriends, girlfriends, buddies, parents, even grandparents. Something about Israeli movies surprises, engages, provokes and invites. The daringness and openness of Israeli cinema make it an important marker of a vibrant and democratic society.