Arts & Culture

Netanya Fish Fry

By Joel Schalit / June 4, 2008

She's dead, now, but I can still hear her speaking as though she were right next to me. "All they ever want to see or hear is something about the fucking Occupation." I could sympathize with my friend, standing next to her one hot summer afternoon, in front of her house near Kikar Hamedinah. If only they could stop expecting it of us. If only we could stop producing it ourselves. If only, I remember thinking on the drive home that night, it didn't need to be written about at all.

That was nine years ago. Yet, for the past year, I cannot help but hear Naomi's words again. Writing on the controversy over the selection of Beaufort for an Oscar over The Band's Visit, Tom Tugend indicated his preference for The Band 's Visit because he found it so much happier than Joseph Cedar's noir, anti-war drama.

Reprising the theme yet again in a review of Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen's award-winning Jellyfish, Ella Taylor describes the film as" belonging to a new breed of Israeli movies — domestic rather than political in focus, and formally more sophisticated than the realist war dramas and blunt comedies that until recently kept Israeli cinema in the boondocks of international cinema." As much as I would like to agree with both Tugend and Taylor, I'd be hard pressed to see the non-political in yet another new Israeli production.

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  • By anat.s 6/13/08 at 4:47 a.m. UTC

    Joel,

    Rereading the article, I see that the source of what I understood to be criticism of Israeli filmmakers, rather than of American interpreters, is in the first paragraph: you quote someone who I understood to be an Israeli friend complaining that foreign audiences expect all Israeli cultural productions to be about the occupation. As I understood it, you then go on to criticize the wish for things not to be "about the occupation" as a wish that smacks of pretense, escapism, and ultimately, reactionary politics.

    I haven't read the American reviews you mentioned, and I guess this post is actually part of a "conversation" you're having which I barged into. In any case, read out of this context the post seemed to me to be saying something like, in plain words, "even if an Israeli film seems to be about universal human issues, it is in fact about the conflict".

    What I tried to say was that the thought behind this is true of ANY good film - it is always in some way connected to the social/political context in which it is made, although this point can be made in a more or less forced interpretation. In that sense I agree with you that "subjective" pain cannot be seen in isolation from the social context (this indeed seems like a particularly American way of interpreting Freud).

    Best, 

    Anat

       

  • Joel Schalit
    By Joel Schalit 6/12/08 at 10:08 p.m. UTC

    Hey Anat -
    Pardon me, but your interpretation of my position is off here. My article in fact does the opposite  of what you're saying:  it problematizes American attempts to de-politicize contemporary Israeli film by misconstruing their sophistication and nuance for something entirely else.
    In this case,  that 'something else' is art that has no social and political content. In our exchange, because of our disagreements, I've qualified this tendency as being 'insincere,' because the desire to want to experience culture outside of politics is itself a highly political impulse.
    Inevitably, such demands  always come from reactionary places. Ones which, in the case of a film like Jellyfish, for example, can't link any of the personal suffering in the film to anything going on Israeli society. The pain is always 'subjective', and always the responsibility of those who suffer it.
    In my view, that's not very empathetic, or considerate towards Israelis. That, in the end, is why I take to task such American criticisms of contemporary Israeli filmmaking. 
    Best, Joel

  • By anat.s 6/12/08 at 6:47 a.m. UTC
    Joel,
    I think what's confusing here is that, although your definition of "politics" is so sophisticated, you are applying it to a cultural context where the conflict is, in your own view, very traditionally "political". According to your view of the political, American or Canadian films such as "Happiness", "Short Cuts" or "The Sweet Hereafter" are political in the same sense that "Jellyfish" is political. But what your post seems to be saying is that Israeli films in which political aspects are more covert or nuanced, are insincere, as if in Israel politics must be treated more directly. This seems to me at the very least like an inconsistency, if not a double standard when considering Israeli culture.
    Best,
    Anat 
  • Joel Schalit
    By Joel Schalit 6/11/08 at 1:21 p.m. UTC

    Hi Anat,

    The difference between our points of view on this question comes down to the title of your post. The definition you're working with is a more didactic, polemical conception of political culture-making that's more traditional than mine.

    In that kind of framework, politics, in the arts, is always limited to things like consciousness raising, messaging etc, and always has some kind of explicitly pedagogical function that expresses itself in realist narratives and whatnot.

    Its not necessarily a synonym for describing how power, conflict and history express themselves in our lives and social relations. That's where the allegorical comes in, and why, in my view, its problematic to insist that politics are absent from such films. 

    Best, Joel 

  • By anat.s 6/11/08 at 2:57 a.m. UTC

    Hi Joel,

    I wouldn't say that it can't be experienced otherwise, just that a political interpretation in such a case seems to me to be a bit forced. 

    But I'm still not quite clear on what you mean by "the politics of that gesture". This seems like a rather broad application of the term "politics".

     Best,

    Anat

     

  • Joel Schalit
    By Joel Schalit 6/10/08 at 2:30 p.m. UTC

    Hi Anat,

    The question comes down to whether one can understand films (or any other cultural work for that matter) that are not didactic, allegorically.

    The way I read your argument, (correct me if I'm wrong) you draw a division in this regard, so that if a film is not explicitly political, it can't be experienced otherwise. 

    It's the politics of that gesture that concerns me.

    Best, Joel 

     

  • By anat.s 6/10/08 at 9:06 a.m. UTC
    Joel,
    How do you distinguish between a film that isn't political, and a film that pretends to be non-political and thereby advances another kind of politics (which kind, by the way)? I think such distinctions are in danger of becoming too nuanced.
    Anat
  • Joel Schalit
    By Joel Schalit 6/9/08 at 3:14 p.m. UTC

    Ofer,

    The problem with what you said in your post was that you assumed that since someone was writing about Israeli film, from a progressive political perspective, and in a non-Hebrew language, that they must therefore be a foreigner, and thus wrong.

    While I sympathize with the desire to want to educate non-Israelis about Israel, I don't when the reasons are so clearly partisan, and, when such discourses are directed at other Israelis like me. Political orientation is not a prerequisite for citizenship.

    I liked Anat's post, and she's right. Not every Israeli film is political. The problem is not that things have to be political. Its that the desire for them not to be, as stated in these kinds of contexts, is a way of insincerely advancing another kind of politics.  

    Best, Joel 

     

     

     

  • By Ofer 6/9/08 at 2:16 p.m. UTC

    Joel,

    I wasn't trying to play any card, I was honestly trying to give an Israeli viewpoint. In reply to your question, because when you live in a country things look different then when you are looking from outside, Many people here are generally sick to death of hearing about the Arab Israeli conflict, and films that deal with these themes are generally avoided. As Anat pointed out more and more good Israeli films stand on there own as good films that could have been made anywhere. Speaking generally support for left wing views have fallen dramatically in the past few years, and many former strong supporters of the Oslo accords (myself included) have absolutely no faith in the peace process and do not trust the Palestinians at all. I think that many commentators outside of Israel are unaware of this. I can promise you that if any peace agreement involving withdrawal comes to a vote, after the fiasco of the Gaza withdrawal, it will be rejected.

  • By anat.s 6/9/08 at 9:41 a.m. UTC

    I don't agree that the fact that the characters in "Jellyfish" are unhappy marks the film as Israeli. There are many non-Israeli films whose characters are eminently unhappy. In fact, unhappiness makes for good drama, as I believe Aristotle already said. Take, for example, "Zucker Baby" - a great German film whose subject is death. Of course you might say that Germans also have good historical-political reasons to make films with unhappy characters obsessed with death. But then, doesn't everybody? Isn't unhappiness a human situation, regardless of the political conditions in which it is clothed? In this sense I believe Israeli film is indeed becoming more sophisticated, showing more universally human situations than in the past. See, for example, films from recent years such as "Afula Express", "Love-Crazed in Shikun Gimel", and "Late Wedding". Although I think this trend has precedents in the late 1980s, with films like "Blues for the Summer Break" and "Avia's Summer" – not to mention comic classics such as Uri Zohar's "A Hole in the Moon", "Peeping Toms" and "Big Eyes".

  • Joel Schalit
    By Joel Schalit 6/7/08 at 4:19 p.m. UTC

    Ofer,

    Would you explain why we like to pull the 'lets educate the ignorant Americans' card, about what Israel is really like?

     J

  • By Ofer 6/7/08 at 3:34 p.m. UTC

    Speaking as an Israeli I have 2 points to make:

    1) Maybe you are unaware but there are lots of Israeli films that really have no connection at all to the conflict.

    2) Some of these left wing Israel bashing films are made with the goal of getting prizes at European film festivals where the crowd eats up these anti-Israel films. Very few Israelis actually go to see them.

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