ABSTRACT
Dozens of books and probably hundreds of publications have been produced in the last two decades on the subject of East/West relations in Israeli cinema. Almost all of them discuss the films from sociological, gender, political and ideological perspectives, completely disregarding film aesthetics. 1 This omission is not surprising if one considers the virtual absence of cinema from the Israeli cultural discourse till the late 1980s. Very little had been published on it besides press reviews, nor was it considered a worthy partner for any serious intellectual discussion. ‘Plato didn’t go to movies and yet he was one of the greatest men in history. And so was Moses, a great man, though he never watched TV’ argued David Ben-Gurion in the mid-1960s. 2 The 150-year history of Zionism favored the struggle for language, for Hebrew, which provided the ingathering of fugitives with a national identity. So did, to a lesser degree, music, painting, dance, and from 1917, Hebrew theater (since the establishment of the Moscow Habima Theater which moved into the Land of Israel in 1928. It was preceded by the amateur ‘Lovers of the Hebrew Stage’ who operated in the Land of Israel in the years 1904–1914, mainly in schools and community centers to promote the use of Hebrew language). Film, first conceived as an instrument of propaganda and fund raising, later as a commercial enterprise, was of secondary cultural importance.
