Navarro-Daniels
1
FOR L 110
Viewing Guide
Kadosh (1999, Israel)
Directed by Amos Gitai
1) “Kadosh” means “sacred.” What could this word refer to in the film?
2) Comment on the opening scene, when Meir wakes up and starts praying. Among other things,
he says “Blessed is our Eternal God who has not created me a woman.”
3) Meir and Rivka have been married for ten years and do not have children. Having children is
mandatory in ultra Orthodox Judaism. As Meir’s father, the Rabbi, sustains, a childless woman is
not a woman. They also believe that a barren woman may have not observed the rules of purity.
The Rabbi says that by having children, Jewish people fulfill a mission; therefore, Meir must
take another woman in order to have children with her. Nevertheless, the viewer learns that it is
Meir who cannot have children. Comment.
4) The Judaism depicted in the film is the ultra Orthodox or Haredi Judaism. It rejects modern
secular culture. It maintains a steadfast adherence to Jewish religious law by segregating itself
from modern society. Haredi Jews oppose the viewing of television and films, and the reading of
secular newspapers or books. Haredi life is very family-centered. Boys and girls attend separate
schools and proceed to higher Torah study, in a yeshiva or seminary respectively, starting
between the ages of 13 and 18. A significant proportion of young men remain in yeshiva until
their shidduch, introduction to a woman for the purpose of seeing if the couple wishes to marry.
After marriage, many Haredi men continue their Torah studies in a kollel. Studying in secular
institutions is discouraged, although educational facilities for vocational training in Haredi
framework do exist. In Israel, around half of their members do not work, and those who do are
not officially a part of the workforce. Families tend to be large, reflecting adherence to the
biblical commandment “be fruitful and multiply.” Haredim consider themselves the most
religiously authentic group of Jews. They are extremely ritualistic, obsessed with the law and
ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts. Explain how these characteristics of
Haredi Judaism are represented in Amos Gitai’s film.
5) According to Nava Dushi, what “grassroots globalization” means and how this concept can
help us to better understand Kadosh? What is “minor literature” and how can this concept be
adapted and applied to Kadosh as minor film?
6) Comment on the representation of gender roles and gender separation.
7) Comment on Rivka’s silence after being rejected by her husband. Do you see any symbolic
meaning in this “speechless” Rivka?
Journal Title: Israeli Cinema: Identities in
Motion.
Call#: PN1993.5.186 187 2011
Location:
Volume:
Issue:
MonthNear: 2011
Pages: 213-224
Article Author: Dushi, Nava.
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Article Title: Seeking the Local, Engaging the
Global: Women and Religious Oppression in a
Minor Film.
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Vilma Navarro-Daniels (navarrod)
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Jewish Orthodoxy Revisited
DVD. Directed by Anat Zuria. 2004. Tel Aviv:
Seeking the Local, Engaging
Television series created by Udi Leon, Nissim
the Global
D. Television series created by Zafrir Kochan-Berkowitz. 2007. Netanya: Globus United, 2008.
r). DVD. Directed by Shmuel Hasfari and Amir
ited, 2006.
d by Hava Divon and Eliezer Shapiro. 2008~d Entertainment, 2008.
adjari. 2007. Ramat Hasharon: NMC United
Women and Religious
Oppression in a Minor Film
at Zuria. 2002. Tel Aviv: Amythos Films, 2002.
· and Shuli Rand. 2004. New York: New Line
NAVA DUSHI
Penetrating the intimacy of a world fixed in a religious time zone, otherwise
hermetically sealed from its contemporary surroundings, the film Kadosh
(Sacred; Amos Gitai, 1999) portrays the life of abstinence at the core of
one of Jerusalem's religiously constituted enclaves. Much like the subject
of his film, Gitai's gaze is committed to the exercise of restraint, reducing
the cinematic form to the poverty of its language, to its desert, and as such
rendering it barren and unfit for reproduction. 1 In this double play Kadosh
never splits from that which is unique to its locality and at the same time
sustains its freedom from the pervasive reign of any universal signifier,
therein foregrounding the film's "minor" standing. But what do I mean by
minor standing and what does it have to do with the production of meaning
which is so critical for the interpretation of any film, regardless of its immediate context?
The interface between local cinematic texts and their foreign viewers is
one of great intricacy. Members of juried committees in international film
festivals, potential distributors, and general audiences worldwide perceive
such films from some distance, outside of their local context. Still, in recent
years a growing body of Israeli films has gained increasing international
awareness. What qualities may be attributed to the ability of such texts to
lend themselves to the derivation of meaning?
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National Cinema in a Global Context
Analyzing the textual characteristics by which emerging national cinemas
assume their mobility across cultural borders creates a new ordering scheme
which positions such films as objects within a broader textual field. Similar to other human works (law, science, the fine arts, ethics, religion) observed by Pierre Bourdieu, cinema is produced in these "very peculiar social
universes which are the fields of cultural production" in which competing
agents fight for the monopoly over the universal. 2 Since the 1910s American
narrative norms have occupied a central position of influence within the
field by mounting a textual system which stands as a point of departure for
international cinematic expression. 3 The term "films with legs" once used
by the industry to describe films that endure is now related to their capacity to move easily in global markets, 4 implying a textual volatility detached
from cultural particularity. It is this era of intensifying symbolic exchanges
in which the very prospect of originating difference resurfaces and calls
for reevaluation. The essay is thus concerned with the space of possibilities
opened for emerging national cinemas, and Israeli cinema in particular, in
the twenty-first century's global cinematic field.
As Zygmunt Bauman's account of mobility as the new power structure
in Globalization: The Human Consequences suggests, "the freedom to move,
perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes
the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern times." 5 In
a world dominated by the massive movement of peoples, goods, images,
and ideas the thinking of the nation demands the application of an adaptive imagination. 6 Stuart Hall posits that the erosion of the nation-state is
spearheaded by Western-dominated media technologies and standards of
representation which can no longer be limited by national borders. The free
flow of cultural artifacts, forced by some of the largest transnational media
conglomerates, takes on a powerful form of homogenization, undermining the mechanisms that centralized and mobilized national identity in the
past-hence it is termed "globalization from above." Consequently, national
identity undergoes a process of fragmentation from which a new kind of
globalization emerges: a "globalization from below" the state, to use Hall's
term/ or "grassroots globalization."8 Grassroots globalization brings to the
fore new voices that in past formations were marginalized or excluded from
national discourse, such as new genders, new ethnicities, new regions, and
new communities.9 These voices presently counteract the homogenizing
forces of the global through the local, as Ella Shohat suggests: "While the
media can destroy community and fashion solitude by turning spectators
Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global
215
into atomized consumers ... they can also fashion community and alternative affiliations."10
Building on the notion of grassroots globalization, I suggest that over
the past decade the emergence of local cinematic texts has formed a transnational web of themes upon which national cinemas thrive and assume
their mobility across cultural borders. In this web, the fragmented national
foregrounds local particularities that engage global audiences by way of
association with similar localities in variable social contexts.U One of the
prominent themes to surface from this emergence narrates the stories of
women and their oppression. Films such as Fire (1996, India), Two Women
(1999, Iran), Kadosh (1999, Israel), The Circle (2000, Iran), The Day I Became
a Woman (2000, Iran), Kandahar (2001, Afghanistan), The Magdalene Sisters
(2002, Ireland/UK), Whale Rider (2002, New Zealand), Osama (2003, Afghanistan), Atash/Thirst (2004, Palestine/Israel), Water (2005, India/Canada), and Persepolis (2007, France/USA) can be associated with this trend.
Minor Cinema
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari find inspiration for their concept of minor
literature in an extended diary entry of Franz Kafka, dated December 25,
1911, in which Kafka had begun reflecting on the dynamics of kleine Literaturen (small literatures) and in so doing engaged in an analysis of the sociology of literatureY Deleuze and Guattari read Kafka's approach as one of a
very personal nature, from a particular point of view in the symbolic field:
that of a Jewish writer at the dawn of the twentieth century, exposed to the
consolidation of European nationalism and the emerging attempt of Zionism to form a self-contained Jewish entity in which the Hebrew language
takes on a major formative role in its symbolic field. Kafka's reluctance to
identify fully with either of the two gave way to the development of a body
of work that Deleuze and Guattari rendered as minor literature,B based on a
triptych of outlined characteristics which I consider adaptable to the discussion of cinema.
The first characteristic of minor literature is that it "doesn't come from a
minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major
language." 14 Minor literature is self-appropriated within a field dominated
by a major language which the minor assumes to inhabit. Unlike a major
literature, however, in which the social arena serves as a mere background
to a foreground of an individual concern, in minor literature "its cramped
space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.
The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable,
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magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it." 15 Hence minor literature is always political.
Furthermore, minor literature is charged with the role of collective enunciation: "it is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her
fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility." 16 This collectivity does not stem
from the production of works that mirror an established representational
model or a canon; minor literature invents itself by exposing the forces of
difference and local particularity as an expression of a people to come. To
stress the significance of this point, Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist
that the distinction between minor and major is one of quality rather than
quantity. The minoritarian is not understood in terms of its number value
but as an entity that has no constitutive standard. For instance, despite their
majority in numbers women form the world's largest minority group. 17 What
then does the concept of minor literature hold for the discussion of contemporary Israeli cinema?
I conceive three patterns of enunciation by which Israeli cinema appears
to operate in the context of the global field. The first group includes films
that display complete submission to mainstream norms, emphasizing their
difference only to render their perception as inferior instances of the same
(major Israeli films designed for domestic consumption). The second group
consists of films that reject the classical tradition, dealing with their local particularity in a rather introverted manner, and are often rendered
unintelligible to foreign audiences. The third group contains films that act
on their undecided positioning in the field, exhibiting a formal adherence
to mainstream narrative norms while at the same time negotiating them
by way of infusing intrinsic cultural elements of distinction. I suggest that
films of the last group share the attribute of being minor films and, much
like minor literature, are constructed within a field dominated by Western
narrative norms and at the same time deconstruct them from within to
enunciate that which is unique to their locality.
These departures from the representational model parallel their political
standing, which seeks an expression that is creative rather than reflective of
identity. The identity created is an identity in becoming, refuting the application of closed representational structures and the subordination of difference to sameness. Thus, in the lack of a model or a tradition, the enunciation
of minor cinema takes on indefinite forms of appropriation, which can be
r
Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global
217
accounted for only on the level of the individual text and as such must be
read through a discourse unique to this individuality.
A Minor Film
The enunciation of the minor in Kadosh portrays a nested structure of three
concentric circles in which the outer circle embodies the seclusion of an
ultra-Orthodox community at the heart of the modern state's capital, the
middle circle observes the status of women within the community, and the
core circle contains the story of a barren woman. Each layer deepens the
marginality of its subject in relation to its constitutive domain. Within the
coordinates of this world, Kadosh inhabits the language of representation, if
only to invoke its shortcomings.
We enter the world of a childless couple, united by a marriage of love.
As they near their tenth anniversary, the religious procreative command
condemns the continuation of their unfruitful communion as sinful. The devout husband, torn between his religious conviction and love of his wife, is
pressured to divorce her and remarry. His father, the community rabbi who
holds childbearing to be the epitome of the fulfillment of religious practice,
argues the point with unrelenting recitation: "A man who dies without progeny rips a page from the Torah." Facing the father and son, we encounter
the fate of the barren wife and her younger sister, who is in turn forced into
an arranged marriage and denied communion with the man that she loves.
The wife tells her sister about an anonymous letter that she received, citing
from the Talmud: "A woman without a child is no better than dead." The
younger sister responds: "The Talmud ... women don't study the Talmud
here, but our father said that the Talmud contains everything and its opposite." Willful and irrepressible, both women pose an impending threat to
the community. Their route of escape from its suffocating oppression leads
one to suicide and the other to abandon the community.
The film opens with a prolonged eight-minute shot, setting the pace of the
film. Early morning: a man and a woman are sleeping in separate beds. The
man wakes up and starts performing what appears to be his daily routine,
wearing his yarmulke, blessing, washing his hands, getting dressed, covering himself with his prayer shawl, praying, waking his wife, and preparing
to leave the house. The audiovisual field is thus saturated by what seems to
be a meticulous performance of a repetitive daybreak ritual. All the while
the wife remains in the foreground of the frame, silent and devoid of action.
The stationary camera establishes a voyeuristic intentionality, that of an
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Jewish Orthodoxy Revisited
outsider looking in. At the same time, the denial of the cut withholds the
viewer's ability to get closer and more involved with the characters. This
minimalism entails the reduction of the representational field, stripping the
text from the use of any cinematic convention. Moreover, Kadosh invites
viewers to engage in a world whose unfamiliar religious praxis hinders their
prospects of understanding its systems of signification. With this twofold reductionism the film lends itself to the viewer through the suspension of her/
his judgment, focusing solely on the appearance of pure cinematic phenomena, the unfolding of human action on the screen and in time. Hence the
world of the film is reduced to the performance of mundane actions which
determine the constitution of its protagonists: men study the Torah, worship, and procreate, and women bear children, raise children, and attend
to their husbands' needs. Thus the nonaction of a barren woman can only
amplify, by juxtaposition to the actions of her husband, her lack as non being. But how are we to delineate meaning from nonaction and silence?
The cinematic experience involves the act of negotiating the space of
meaning, which is never a void, thus eliminating the impassability or rather
the impossibility inherent in the ideas of nonexistence or absence. The constitution of meaning entails the intentional act of delineating objects (social,
textual, or critical), of extricating a unity from the phenomenal flux based
on the notion of their essence. If essence is defined as the intrinsic nature
of something without which it would not exist or be what it is, then what
are the prospects of an infertile woman claiming any objective position
and thereby her right to exist in a society in which women are essentially
accounted for as child bearers? I argue that the intricacy embedded in the
claim to existence of an object prior to or outside of its constitutive domain
is a core enabler for the mobility of the minor in the symbolic field. As
such, it is deeply rooted in the conflicting demands that Kadosh poses for its
viewer-to constitute that which is becoming unconstituted.
In Edmund Husserl's theory of signs a distinction is made between two
kinds of signs, the "indicative" and the "expressive." While indicative signs
are conceived as "devoid of expressive intent and function as 'lifeless' tokens
in a system of arbitrary sense," the expressive "represents the communicative purpose or intentional force which 'animates' language." 18 Jacques
Derrida's deconstructive reading of Husserl provides a pathway to a reading
of the minor in Kadosh: "Whenever the immediate and full presence of the
signified is concealed, the signifier will be of an indicative nature." 19 Hence
the religiously constituted actions that men perform in the film can only be
perceived by viewers as indicative, given their unavoidable presuppositionless admission to the reality of the film. From this indicative plane emerges
Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global
219
the expressive signifier of the film, that of nonaction and silence. The barren woman who implies the threat that such a nonconstituted object may
impose is forced out of the community, out of her home, and ultimately out
of her own body. Her expressive void raises the ultimate question: What is
sacred?
Women who inhabit the religious community are seen as deprived of
the use of a language that they can call their own and as such, Gitai suggests, resemble the historically marginal position of the Jews. This condition facilitated the upholding of an individualistic social consciousness and
a unique point of view: that of coexistent belonging and lack of belonging. 20
This articulated duality, coupling the minoritarian position of women with
that of the Jews, appears to have permeated the textual fabric of the film.
It foregrounds a position by which one is able to create the aforementioned
minor identity within the globalized culture by making possible or creating a process of becoming but never through ownership of a representative
or static identity. 21 Man, says the rabbi to his son, was created to study the
Torah and worship God. A woman can only play an indirect role in the fulfillment of religious commands by bearing his sons.
This role division is visualized in the second scene of the film. The first
shot provides an objective wide view of the husband, among other men,
praying in a synagogue. The second shot presents two women standing behind the partition which commonly divides the synagogue's space, between
the main prayer area designated for men and the secondary area designated
for women. While the image graphically implies a sense of imprisonment,
the subsequent shots reveal the women's faces and their intimate gaze at the
men (viewed through the partition's cracks), thus constituting an alternative
realm of existence within the community-that of an outsider looking in.
The last two shots of the film present the sisters' ultimate deterritorialization. The wife enters her husband's apartment while he is sleeping and
lies next to him. At daybreak he wakes up to find her by his side and attempts to wake her. As he holds her lifeless body in his arms, weeping and
begging, the camera pans and moves toward the bookcase and his holy
books. In the last shot of the film the younger sister is seen walking outside
the community at daybreak. The camera follows her to reveal the old city
of Jerusalem. She stands with her back to the camera and gazes at the city.
The camera follows her as she goes out of the frame, then it pans left and
remains fixed on the final image of film: the Temple Mount. Thus Gitai
concludes his film with a modest mediation between the potentiality of becoming and icons of symbolic transcendence. Much like the barren woman
who does not materialize the expectation of reproduction, Kadosh evidently
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Jewish Orthodoxy Revisited
refuses to uphold and thus accept the dominant language of representation;
its lingering shots, meager montage, and minimalist sound design expose
the process of becoming minor.
Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global
221
would currently garner accolades, considering Deleuze's visionary observation that we are moving toward the age of minorities. 24 Over time, these
works reconfigure the distinctive collective enunciation that Israeli national
cinema embodies in both the local and the global context.
The Special Case of Contemporary Israeli Cinema
NOTES
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language
that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor
literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature
away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and
making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and
an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? 22
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's reading of Kafka through the concept of
minor literature brings to the fore issues and qualities of expression unique
to the Jewish people and to Israeli society. Zionism's raison d'etre-the reterritorialization of a historically deterritorialized people-persists in the
comparatively recent constitution of the nation-state. Hence the dynamic
relations between the major and the minor which mobilize the Israeli film
animate a primal complex in the Jewish state: imagining itself between
what we may call the creative freedom of the deterritorialized or exiled
minoritarian Jew from a self-defining universal and the majoritarian desire
to reterritorialize, to establish its own models and its own system of universals (expressed in the biblical reference of the people of Israel's demand to
have a king like all other peoples). These competing movements are strongly
linked yet play on the brink of mutual exclusion.
The unavoidable political enunciation of such ontological perplexity is
thematically repeated in contemporary Israeli cinema. 23 This core property,
I suggest, defines its minor role in the global cinematic field. Such minor
tendencies actualize film language by originating duration that engages individual viewers with the singularity of character and event. Recent Israeli
films stress the immanence of exile, not necessarily from the place itself
as much as from the universal. Consequently, Israeli identity takes on new
forms rendered not from a collective submission that either confirms or
disputes a master narrative, whieh characterized much of twentieth-century
Israeli culture (literature and cinema), but from the intensified appearance
of distinctive life experiences that act as lines of escape through that narrative and its structure. It therefore seems fit that this minor sensibility
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 19. Deleuze
and Guattari elaborate on the position of Franz Kafka, a Czech Jewish writer who
chose to write in German. They suggest that his use of the German language of
Prague in its very poverty enabled him to go "farther in the direction of deterritorialization, to the point of sobriety. Since the language is arid, make it vibrate with a new
intensity," thus opposing it to "all symbolic or ... simply signifying usages of it."
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, 134-135. Bourdieu
argues that the privilege of the universal cannot be dissociated from its historical
and social conditions of possibility, as such aesthetic value is durably constituted
rather than universally innate. His sociology of action seeks to expose the social and
economic conditions in which the habitually conceived universals are engendered.
3. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies,
12-13.
4. Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture, 23, 32-34.
Acland's proposed argument rejects the prevalent assumption which correlates "degree zero" of cultural particularity (universality) with geographic mobility, as it fails
to "account for the possibility that signs of cultural specificity may be precisely the
qualities prized by international audiences" (34).
5. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, 2. Bauman's discussion of globalization's eroding effects on the nation-state points to the dual remapping and dissolving of cultural practices in space and time. The consequent elevated
regime is that of mobility, freed from the regulating constraints of territoriality and
charged with technological advancements of time compression, which perpetuate immediacy and in turn undermine cultural memory.
6. Arjun Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination." Also
see the relevance of Benedict Anderson's coined "imagined community" to discourses
of national cinema, in Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, 2.
7. Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity."
8. Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization."
9. Baruch Kimmerling, The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony, 63-71. In a chapter titled
"The Newest Israelis" Kimmerling outlines the characteristics of the 1990s massive
Russian immigration. Kimmerling suggests that unlike prior immigrations, which met
the hegemonic demand for assimilation, the new Israel is founded upon the model of
ethic and cultural pluralism. The new Russian immigrants sought their professional
and economic assimilation and sustained their strong lingual and cultural affiliations
through the establishment of autonomic institutions which parallel state institutions,
thus forming a subculture within Israeli society. This fashioning of a Russian subculture points to a greater process of national fragmentation which coincided with the
rise of other subcultures within Israeli society.
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Seeking the Local, Engaging the Global
The Bubble, and My Father, My Lord (Volach, 2007), their appearance either initiates a
See also Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, 213-334. In part three, titled "The Emergence of Civil Society," Shafir and
Peled provide an account of what they term "agents of political change" by examining
Israel's supreme court and constitutional system and its economy and business community as well as the immigration noted above.
10. Ella Shohat, "Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema."
11. I therefore propose the label "Narratives of GloCalization," which includes but
is not limited to emergent categories such as "women and religious oppression" (Gitai,
Kadosh, 1999), "the imagiNation of queer sensibility" (Fox, Yossi and Jagger, 2002),
"Ethnic Minorities in National Contexts" (Koshashvili, Late Marriage, 2001), and
"urban networks, global migration, guest workers, and the local crossing of paths"
(Geffen and Keret, Jellyfish, 2007).
,
12. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature, 92. Bogue cites Ritchi Robertson's understanding of Franz Kafka's envisaged literatures of small nations.
13. Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine, 3-4. Bruce argues that
Kafka's estranged existence was often wrongly interpreted by critics as an ambiguous or even hostile feeling toward his heritage. She favors Marthe Robert's insight:
"Assimilated Jew, anti-Jewish Jew, anti-Zionist, Zionist, believer, atheist-Kafka was
indeed all of these at different times in his development, sometimes all at once" (4).
14. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16. See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 106. Here Deleuze and Guattari
argue that the major and the minor "are two different treatments of language, one
of which consists in extracting constants from it [major), the other in placing it in
continuous variation [minor]."
15. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17.
16. Ibid., 17.
17. Adrian Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary, 164-165. Also see Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, 105-106. Here Deleuze and Guattari insist that "all becoming is
minoritarian," thus pointing to the inherent connection between the two concepts.
18. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction, 43-44.
19. Ibid.; and Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 40.
20. Irma Klein, Amos Gitai: Cinema, Politics, Aesthetics, 296.
21. Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary, 164-165. Also see De leuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 106.
22. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19.
23. We encounter individuals breaking away from their constitutive environments,
driven by the potentiality of becoming. In Walk on Water (Fox, 2004) the Mossad
agent experiences a process of deterritorialization in his journey to a past that constitutes and informs his actions in the present. In Sweet Mud (Shaul, 2006) a fatherless boy in his liminal transition to adulthood is torn between his ill and alienated
mother and the constitutive standards of the kibbutz, leading to his desired escape.
In Campfire (Cedar, 2004) a widowed woman and her two daughters break away
from their modern Orthodox environment and its stipulated social conduct. In Late
Marriage (Koshashvili, 2001) the lead character, who seeks a relationship outside of
his ethnic minority group, is forced by his family to deterritorialize. In many of the
films a becoming coincides with suicide or death. In Kadosh, Kippur (Gitai, 2000),
Yossi and Jagger, Broken Wings (Bergman, 2002), Walk on Water, Campfire, Sweet Mud,
becoming or forges a minoritarian line of escape.
24. Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary, 164-165.
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Estetika). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameukhad Publishing House, 2003.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 1982.
Parr, Adrian. The Deleuze Dictionary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Shafir, Gershon, and Yoav Peled. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Shohat, Ella. "Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema." In Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Ezra Elizabeth and Terry Rowden, 39-56.
London: Routledge, 2006.
FILMOGRAPHY
Broken Wings (Knafayim Shvurot). Nir Bergman. Norma Productions, 2002. DVD: Sony
Pictures Classics.
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Jewish Orthodoxy Revisited
The Bubble (Habu'ah). Eytan Fox. Metro Productions, 2006. DVD: Strand Releasing.
Campfire (Medurat Hashevet). Joseph Cedar. Cinema Post Production Ltd, 2004. DVD:
Beaufort and
Film Movement.
My Father, My Lord
The Circle (Dayereh). Jafar Panahi. Jafar Panahi Film Productions, 2000. DVD: Win-
Star Cinema.
The Day I Became a Woman (Roozi Ke Zan Shodam). Marzieh Makhmalbaf. Makhmal-
baf Productions, 2000. DVD: Olive Films.
Fire. Deepa Mehta. Kaleidoscope Entertainment Pvt. Ltd, 1996. DVD: Zeitgeist Films.
Jellyfish (Meduzot). Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret. Lama Productions, 2007. DVD:
Zeitgeist Films.
Traces of the Binding Myth
and the Mother's Voice
Kadosh. Amos Gitai. Agav Productions, 1999. DVD: Kino Video.
Kandahar. Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Bac Films, 2001. DVD: New Yorker Films.
Kippur. Amos Gitai. Agav Productions, 2000. DVD: Kino Video.
Late Marriage (Khatuna Me'ukheret). Dover Koshashvili. Morgane Productions, 2001.
DVD: Magnolia Pictures.
The Magdalene Sisters. Peter Mullan. Scottish Screen, 2002. DVD: Miramax.
My Father, My Lord (Khufshat Kayitz). David Volach. Golden Cinema, 2007. DVD: Kino
ANAT ZANGER
Video.
Osama. Siddiq Barmak. Makhmalbaf Productions, 2003. DVD: MGM Home
Entertainment.
Persepolis. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. 2.4.7. Films, 2007. DVD: Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment.
Sweet Mud (Adamah Meshuga'at). Dror Shaul. Sirocco Productions, 2006.
Thirst (Atash). Tawfik Abu Wael. Ness Communications, 2004. DVD: Global Film
Initiative.
TWo Women (Do Zan). Tahmineh Milani. Arman Film, 1999. DVD: NEJ International
Pictures.
Walk on Water (Lalekhet Al Hamayim). Eytan Fox. Lama Productions, 2004. DVD: Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment.
Water. Deepa Mehta. Deepa Mehta Films, 2005. DVD: Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Whale Rider. Niki Caro. ApolloMedia, 2002. DVD: Columbia TriStar Home
Entertainment.
Yossi and Jagger (Yossi VeJagger). Eytan Fox. Lama Productions, 2002. DVD: Strand
Releasing.
It looks almost festive, excited, a huge procession, colorful and lively in its
way: parents and brothers and friends, even grandparents, bringing their
loved ones to the event of the season, she thinks, a closing down sale and
in every car there is a young lad, the first fruits, a spring carnival with a
human sacrifice at the end. And what about you, she digs at herself, look
at you, how pretty and put together you are to bring your son, almost your
only one, whom you loved so much, with Ishmael driving you in his taxi.
David Grossman, Until the End of the Land
Introduction
David Grossman uses indirect speech in order to describe the thoughts of
his protagonist, Ora, as she accompanies her son to the meeting point before a military operation. Two levels of significance intertwine here. On one
level, the narrative describes a common Israeli practice of parents driving
their sons back to the army after a weekend at home. On another level, the
father's name, Avr'am, and that of his son, Offer ("faun" in Hebrew), clearly
allude to the mythical story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis.
Like rnost texts, Until the End of the Land employs what Gerard Genette
calls "double writing" in his discussion of intertextuality and palimpsests. 1
I would like to subject two recent Israeli films to the same analysis: Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, 2007) and My Father, My Lord (Khufshat Kayitz, David
Volach, 2007). At first glance, the two films have little in common. Beaufort
takes place in a military outpost in southern Lebanon, Beaufort fortress,
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