Israeli
cinema, at the start of the millennium, represents a unique cultural
phenomenon: a cinema without an audience, indifferent or even derisive
toward its viewers; rewarded with indifference or even derision by the
audience. A cinema that is seventy years old yet still in a static, fetal
state, not yet having begun to internalize the first principles of this
medium's unique language and idioms within the family of the arts. Fixated
on one enterprise – the writing of the Zionist narrative according to the
doctrines of Israel's "new historians" – the Israeli screen is constantly
inundated with imitative universalist moralism of a harsh and narrow bent
– that is to say, inundated with Zionist exorcism rituals, which are
repeated ad nauseam in film after film. Sequestered and neglectful of the
passage of time, Israeli cinema entraps itself in folly, in a dead-end
without egress or remedy – in meagerness of material and of talent, an
aesthetic void, technical-artistic impoverishment, stillborn narrative.
Indeed, few will dispute the lack of an Israeli cinema worthy of the name
and its lack of influence on the shaping and development of Israeli
cultural life. Militant leftism in Israel is, of course, the guiding
inspiration and reigning authority of the celluloid industry that by an
unfortunate misnomer is referred to as "Israeli cinema", and its ongoing
wretchedness can be debited to the leftist dogma of self-recrimination. If
there were any viewers at all, it might be possible to sum up a few score
years of Israeli cinematic activity as a protracted treading in shallow
waters. Even if the post-Zionist dogma has not delivered a terminal
cultural blow to the Israeli cinema, most likely it has greatly diminished
its chances to recover, or to transcend narrow and dilettantish
provincialism and enter the realm of autonomous cinematic creativity.
Thus, in light of its cinematic vacuity and its effects, how may one sum
up the damages of Israeli film's negative cultural contribution? Perhaps
as part of the symptoms of a real threat to democratic society and culture
in Israel?
