Desert, Hill and Sea

Abstract

This article studies visions and re-visions of war in Israeli cinema. These cinematic negotiations of the memory of war articulate dynamic processes in the Israeli discourse about war and changing formations of cultural memory. The article focuses on the changing narratives of the 1967 Six-Day War in the films The Sinai Commandos – A Story of the Six-Day War (in Hebrew: Hamatara: Tiran), a 1968 film which negotiates whether the war is inevitable from an exclusively Israeli perspective and Avanti Popolo, a 1986 film which subversively assumes the Egyptian Arab point of view and depicts the war as absurd, deterministic and nonsensical. In the first decade of the third millennium, films about the war experience are anchored in autobiographic accounts that are portrayed on screen as envisioned in the time of the traumatic war experience and in the post traumatic, guilt-ridden, never-ending horror of the mornings after. These films demonstrate the return of the repressed Sho’ah into the posttraumatic experiences of the warriors, and the yearning to replace the binding law of the father demanding sacrifice and bloodshed for a maternal law sustaining life and the domestic mundane. This trend is exemplified in the film Adjusting Sights (InSight, in Hebrew: Teum Kavanot, a 2003 film adapted from Haim Sabato’s 1999 autobiographic novel about his own 1973 Yom Kippur War experience, as well as in two films that negotiate the memory of the first Lebanon War: Beaufort a 2007 film by Joseph Cedar, adapted from Ron Leshem’s 2005 documentary novel “If There is Paradise” and Ari Folman’s 2008 animated autobiographical film Waltz With Bashir.