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Soul-Searching in Israeli Cinema: A Certain Vietnam Dissatisfaction Is Spreading
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13927 |
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THE ARTS
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2 / 1988 |
2,040 Words |
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Dan Yakir
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In recent years, Israeli cinema has slowly shifted from mass entertainment aimed at the lowest common denominator to increasingly relevant fare, with strong social and political overtones. Israeli films are now featuring exceedingly unconventional heroes--from soldiers running amok to Palestine Liberation Organization sympathizers.
With Israeli society undergoing an intense soul-searching as the political Right and Left seem unable to reach a common ground--presenting parallels to America in the Vietnam years--Israeli filmmakers have been in the foreground of social comment. This means the status quo is neither taken for granted nor celebrated. Instead, alternatives are examined and the human factor is observed with new, often startlingly unexpected insights.
Changing Role
The changing role of the outsider, especially the Arab, in an environment previously depicted as homogeneous, has figured largely in Israel's most recent films. Arabs are increasingly depicted not as sidekicks or villains, the way minorities often seem to be portrayed in Hollywood, but as full-fledged heroes in sagas that do not shy away from self-criticism. Filmmakers are seeming to reflect ever more the role of the alienated intellectual.
The smashing commercial successes of two recent Israeli films, Renen Schorr's Late Summer Blues (Blues Hachofesh Hagadol) and Eli Cohen's 1986 film Ricochets (Shtei Etzba'ot Mi'tsidon) bear proof that the Israeli public is willing to spend its hard-earned entertainment shekels on self-examination. Schorr's film depicts the soul searching of high-school graduates on the eve of their induction into the army, while Cohen's is an Israel Defense Forces training film that becomes a powerful drama about soldiers questioning their moral and military involvement in Lebanon.
In Late Summer Blues, the directorial debut of a film lecturer at the Beit Zvi Institute, seven teenaged boys and girls confront their future as they face induction into the Armed Forces in 1970, a time when the War of Attrition at the Suez Canal drags on. Not only will the boys have to face the possibility of death on the battlefront, but for the first time they all must examine the options before them in a reality traditionally dominated by a mentality of "No choice"--namely, that Israel has no choice but to defend itself against its enemies by force.
Much of this funny, biting, nostalgic film was shot as a home movie (one of the protagonists is a movie freak) and the picture successfully carries the immediacy of such an intimate endeavor. Not surprisingly, audiences responded to how the film reflected reactions to excessive emphasis on heroism in the wake of the Six Day War of 1967, as well as the way it anticipated the self-reproach which was to be engendered by the high cost of the War of Attrition. While some characters rebel against the reality facing them, which extends to government policy (symbolized at the time by the late Golda Meir), others accept it after much soul-searching.
"I just had to make the film," says Schorr, who admits to its semi-autobiographical nature. "The period before my drafting was the most beautiful in my life. It was 1970, the second year of the War of Attrition, and there was death in the air, with young people reacting
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