ABSTRACT
First scene: A picture on the wall. In it the farmer is ploughing the soil. Cypress trees in the background, a pale summertime sky. The farmer will grow bread for us so that we grow up. This scene is quoted from a song titled: ‘Homeland Class’, whose lyrics were created by Israeli songwriter Eli Mohar and its melody by musician Efraim Shamir. It is also quoted from my own memory of my own homeland, Israel. My memory of lush green fields, orange groves and cypress trees bordering them. I am not quite certain if I can separate the real cypress trees bordering our farm in the Israeli village I was born and grew up in from the ones in JNF posters Mohar’s song alludes to: JNF posters, in which small white houses with red roofs, neatly ordered ploughed fields bordered by cypress trees, establish the iconography of place associated with the revived and becoming ‘Israel’. These images, which Israeli visual and cultural texts connote as the emblems of the young national-cultural-geographical entity ‘Israel’, were created to replace the displacement of the old wandering Jew and locate him within a new geo-cultural and historic scene. Images of the weary, wandering, homeless old man were transformed in propaganda films into a young Israeli female soldier, holding a ‘Jaffa’ orange, smiling, her whole life yet ahead of her. Whether these scenes are real biographic memories, or a cultural invention captured in old hasbara or propaganda posters and films, does not really matter when it comes to how culture works. Ann Swidler 1 discusses culture at work as a repertory of images, songs, memories, and practices, which inevitably become part of a toolkit for its members to understand the world they live in, relate to it and describe it. The farmer, the plough, the field and the cypress tree are items in the Israeli cultural toolkit that designate the Israeli place as experienced and remembered, as communicated by Israelis among themselves, to the next generations and to the outer world. These iconographies of place, however, change over time. New images that permeate visual Israeli culture and the Israeli songbook replace the nostalgic, rustic fecund landscape from Mohar’s song. Bold, romantic gestures on a deep blue evening, or a romantic scene in sun-washed landscapes under the Mediterranean skies, replace the green agricultural landscapes and articulate new senses of place. These new cultural iconographies of the Israeli place as articulated in Israeli cinema are the subject of this article. The discussion starts with 1930s Zionist-Hebrew cinema, and proceeds to Israeli films from the first decade of the second millennium by the Israeli author Shemi Zarhin. The core argument of this discussion is that the ideologically invested Orientalist Zionist perceptions of the ‘East’ as an alternative to the exilic Western-Jewish decadent environment have transformed into the current position in Israeli culture, wherein the Middle Eastern Mediterranean becomes a sensually lived cultural experience. Rather than a fabricated allegorical South from a Bialik song [‘El Hatzipor’: ‘To the Bird’], which articulates the subject position of an exiled Jew in the cold North yearning to go to the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, current popular Israeli songs or commercial advertisements recreate the Israeli everyday visually and sonically as if experienced in a ‘taverna’ in Greece or in a loud and colorful Italian neighborhood. Rather than representing the land of Israel as a symbolic site of national revival, as early Zionist-Hebrew cinema did, current Israeli cinema represents the Israeli everyday in its Mediterranean Middle Eastern environment, which becomes a taken-for-granted, natural background for the familial and individual dramas that take place within it in the foreground.
