The Death Mask of the Moderns: A Genealogy ofNew SensibilityCinema in Israel

Abstract

T ART OF THE CINEMA, which draws on the multiple significance of moving images as well as on shifts between time and space, represents modernism more than any other form of art. Modernism in all its artistic manifestations looks up to realism in its broader sense, ... [it is] a new kind of realism . . . more realistic, more pure, more concise. . . . Its efforts are directed at exposing, destroying and eradicating all that is perceived by it as flawed and distorted in the normal realistic praxis.' The great renovator of modernism in cinema, Jean Luc Godard, intentionally created in his films an atmosphere of distance and planted in the audience feelings of alienation and even inferiority. His films were made in the spirit of the avant-garde of Brecht, out of an aspiration, naively or not, to create from above--via spiritual, ethical, and intellectual constructs -rather than materialist transformation from below (via the proletariat or the id) [that] characterizes both modernism and the avant-gardes. . .. In both cases, the potentially anarchic forces down below in the mob or the psyche are carefully controlled and directed from above.2 Under the influence of the French New Wave, Israeli film makers adopted a similar mode of cinema in the I960s. But, unlike Godard's from above, the alienation and emotional distance that characterized Israeli modernist cinema ema-