Gender and Space in the New Israeli Cinema

Over the past thirty years, Israeli cinema has been busy dismantling the Zionist narrative that had coalesced in the first years of Israeli statehood. The new Israeli cinema has linked this dismantling with two additional kinds of deconstruction: of the homogenous national identity that had been created in the early cinema of the 1940s, 1950s, and even the 1960s, and of the equation of nation, gender, and space that this cinema formed. The early cinema(2) eradicated the dynamism and differences in the Hebrew culture of its time by creating a hierarchy meant to support the homogenous view of the new Hebrew identity. The character stationed at the top of this hierarchy in these films, as the final goal of their plot, was the Hebrew Israeli male, who controlled space with his actions and gaze and dominated all dimensions: length, breadth, and height. This male was not a coherent, stable identity but rather a product of the cinematic discourse, a negation of the feminine Jew rejected by Zionism.(3) In essence, he was merely an imitation of the fanciful ideal of perfect Hebrew masculinity dominating an empty, submissive space. Nevertheless, the plots portrayed him as a natural, original, and universal figure. It was through him that "Hebrewness" in general was defined. The geography that unfolded beneath his feet and gaze denoted his connection with the homeland and his power to control it, and this power was shaped and aggrandized by the camera and the cinematic language. The camera adhered to his point of view and identified with it, and the finest cinematic techniques of the time amplified his image and displayed his control of space. This hero determined history, the structure of the plot, and the masculinity of the Zionist order. He defined the space he controlled, a space from which all others were excluded. The new cinema dismantles the equation created by the early cinema, that of nationhood and masculinity, and explores how the cohesive, homogeneous national identity, created at the expense of the others who were expelled from it, came into being. At its best, this cinema does not obliterate the homogeneous Zionist identity; rather, it merges this identity into a broader dialogue of identities and voices. From this standpoint, it uses an ambivalent language(4) that includes the self and the "other" and forces the spaces in which they exist to commingle. Instead of simplistically replacing the Hebrew masculine identity with a feminine Jewish one it integrates both identities and examines them inside and out. This cinema treats space similarly. Instead of replacing the Israeli space with an alternative space, it makes different spaces overlap and commingle. This cinema expresses the crisis in Israeli identity, and the attempt to overcome it, by combining and blending the spaces, nationalities, and genders created within it. The films shift between the various identities and spaces, dissolve the borders that separate them, and thereby transform the hegemonic Zionist discourse of the past into one voice in a polyphony of voices, which creates room for a new kind of Zionism -- open, tolerant, composed of various minorities from different regions, and attentive to the voices of others, whoever they may be. I intend to examine this polyphony in respect of gender and space, that the early Israeli cinema used as an infrastructure for the consolidation of the national identity. My example is the film Laura Adler's Last Love.(5) Irit Rogoff speaks about the dissociation that contemporary works create between geography and identity,(6) and Jane M. Jacobs develops this theme by discussing the proliferation of identities, cultures and histories that relate to one space.(7) This space is defined as a post-modern space(8) that has been deprived of its familiar and safe organization and its dichotomy of center and margins. It is a space composed of relations and not of permanent areas, a space in which the clear opposites -- inside and outside, developed world and third world, north and south, me and other -- have collapsed and have been replaced with hybrid perceptions that presume a commingling of identities in constant motion, in exile or in borderless cultures that converge. …