History's Broken Wings: "Narrative Paralysis" as Resistance to History in Amos Gitai's Film <i>Kedma</i>

Abstract

Amos Gitai's deconstruction of the Zionist historical narrative in his film Kedma (IL/FR, 2004) generates a narrative paralysis-by displacing events, disconnecting them both their real referents and their normal temporal sequence. This paralysis is tantamount a post-traumatic rhetoric that marks the historical condition, one in which the movie was created as posttraumatic. This rhetoric can be read as subversive because it undermines the linear and teleological hegemonic narratives of both the film and the Zionist ideology that it recounts. The post-traumatic condition is, therefore, political. Thus, the film suggests alternative, if not redemptive, modes of employment that may work through the trauma and create a return reality. Kedma belongs, in terms of its structure, the road movie genre and, as such, is essentially based on movement. It follows the progress of Jewish Holocaust refugees their European countries of origin, via the ship that brings them shore, the Land of Israel, a military clash with the Arabs, and Jerusalem. In the course of this voyage, the refugees, as film characters, are expected participate in the cinematic plot that epitomizes the Zionist narrative: they must forget their erstwhile traumas, overcome the memories of the Diaspora, jettison the Jewish characteristics of their identity, fight the Arabs, and thus be transformed passive Jews warring Hebrews who fight for their lives and their fate. Yet unlike classical road movies that causally progress a point of departure a destination-Kedma's journey is deconstructed and directionless, infused with people who move to and from aimlessly, expressing a journey of obstructed movement characteristic of what Deleuze has called a sensor-motor crisis.1 Following Bhabha,2 who views the linear, teleological narrative movement as the ideological apparatus of hegemony, the obstruction of movement-and its outcome, paralysis-is perceivable as the subversion of and opposition the dominant narrative. Thus this paralysis, attributable the condition of post-traumatic stress disorder, as suggested by Freud,3 is, in this sense, the post-traumatic condition and should be read as one of historical-political resistance. A Journey in Paralysis Kedma's paralysis reflects a struggle between progressing toward the future and the inability make this progress due a post-traumatic condition that has not yet been worked through and cannot be worked through as long as the survivor-characters are compelled move forward and relinquish their past. Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterized by the repeated experiencing of symptoms long after a trauma has occurred.4 Thus, the original event is displaced and set within another experience that signifies it. This causes a state of behavioral block. The way deal with such a block, Freud claims, is reinsert the occurrence in the chain of causal events which it slipped away, i.e., integrate it into a narrative, since post-traumatic stress disorder is actually the deconstruction of a mental narrative that is based on cause and effect. Therefore, a post-traumatic condition is one of narrative failure or the deconstruction of a sequence of events. Such a deconstruction is a way of resisting the coherent linear hegemonic narrative. The first indication that Kedma is a film about movement (and thus one which can be seen as an expression of the failure of movement) is in its title. The Hebrew word kedma alludes movement through both geographical and ideological space: forward toward the future and toward the east, a direction that carries the memory of an ancient past. Kedma is also the name of the illegal immigrant ship in which the film's protagonists begin their travel.5 By starting with the ship sequence, Kedma reveals, ab initio, the paralysis aesthetics that characterize the film throughout. A ship is a space that moves but it is also immobile-its exterior moves but its interior and all its contents remain static. …