Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
teacher impersonates a deaf-and-dumb Palestinian construction worker and forms a friend-
ship with a group of Palestinian workers, depict attempts at close relationships between Israelis
and Palestinians. These narratives usually lead to tragic endings that express Israelis' disbelief
in the likelihood of real and lasting peace. These fi lms include Palestinian actors and actresses
playing the Palestinian parts.
In another trend, the Holocaust survivor becomes a more complex character, not just a to-
tal contrast to the New Jew, the Sabra. In early Israeli fi lms, the emphasis was on erasing trau-
matic memories in order to adapt to the Zionist experience. Now the painful past is brought
into the open.
Wooden Gun
(1978), for example, tells the story of a Sabra boy in the 1950s who
is a member of a youth gang. One day he shoots the leader of a rival gang with a slingshot (the
wooden gun of the title). The leader falls down, bleeding from his forehead, and the protago-
nist, fearing he has killed, runs away. In the course of running away, he hurts his knee and is
taken care of by a disturbed woman who lost her family in the Holocaust and lives alone by the
sea. Her shack is a shrine to her dead family. The boy feels tremendous empathy toward this
woman, whom he and his friends used to taunt, and he walks out a different, more sensitive
Sabra.
Nihilistic Cinema
The outbreak of the First Intifada in December 1987 stilled the wave of politically critical cin-
ema. Instead, in a time of Palestinian violence toward Israel, fi lms that avoided any direct
political message, often taking a nihilistic stance, became prominent. One major work from
the decade after the uprising began is Assi Dayan's apocalyptic
Life According to Agfa
(1992).
The fi lm — a critical and commercial hit — stirred a huge debate over its depiction of current
Israeli society as violent, oppressive, and nihilistic. Set in a forlorn Tel Aviv pub, used as a
metaphor for Israel, the story, shot in a stark black and white, centers on a group of customers
and staff, each representing a part of Israeli society: a few soldiers, a policeman (representing
a distorted image of the heroic Sabra), a Mizrahi, a Palestinian — all men — and some women.
The characters are all perceived as victims of their own violent, militaristic Israeli psyches. The
fi lm ends with a massacre carried out by some drunken soldiers who kill everyone in the pub.
Agfa
was the fi rst in a trilogy of fi lms written and directed by Assi Dayan, the son of Moshe
Dayan, Israel's minister of defense during the 1967 war. Dayan had been the star of
He Walked
Through the Fields
, in which he played the ultimate embodiment of the heroic Sabra. The two
other fi lms constituting Dayan's “nihilist trilogy” are
An Electric Blanket Named Moshe
(1995),
a surreal fantasy that follows a homeless person, a Romanian prostitute, and her philosopher
pimp (a character that fi rst appeared in
Agfa
) on a Dantean journey; and
Mr. Baum
(1997),
which unfolds in real time — the last ninety-two minutes in the life of Micky Baum (played by
Dayan himself ), a successful businessman who suffers from an incurable disease, which sym-
bolizes the tension between personal and national that exists in all of Dayan's works.
Mr. Baum
includes a scene in which a surrealist exhibition publicly displays a magnifi ed,
detailed recreation of ordinary objects — a half-eaten apple, a parking ticket, a set of keys —
that are related to Baum's last moments. In that way, Baum's life and death become a satiri-
cal comment on a society that lives on the myths and rituals of heroic-national death. In yet
