The Jar and the Blade: Fertility Myth and Medieval Romance in Israeli Political Films

Abstract

Beginning with Ram Loevy's 1978 television film Khirbet Khiz'ah, Israeli filmmakers became preoccupied with questioning the ideology of nationhood that had long shaped both the Zionist project in Palestine and the preceding generation of Israeli cinema. Earlier Israeli cinema, even as it expressed a belief in historical a ffinities between Jews and Arabs and in a shared sense of oppression at the hands of Europe, had portrayed Zionism as a civilizing and modernizing mission in a backward land, a notion that came under question in the New Cinema. Both generations of cinema exhibit, in their iconography and narrative, the contours of Near Eastern fertility myths and medieval Holy Grail romance containing motifs that arose in Zionism's professed mission of enhancing the fecundity and productivity of the land. The 1980s cinema drew in particular on a second cycle of Grail romance that stressed the failure of the mythic quester in a languishing land.