The Postcolonial Function of Television's Virtual Space in '90s Israeli Cinema

Abstract

The reflexive mode of our postmodern era has demonstrated that a combination of the media in films can sometimes be critical in turning a seemingly innocent text into a subversive one. This essay examines the postcolonial role of television in Israeli fiction films made in the last decade of the twentieth century, arguing that the content of the television screen as it appears in these films functions as a Deleuzian ligne de fuite (line of flight) to the narrative. According to Deleuze these lignes de fuite enable their displaced heroes to escape the more rigid frames that circumscribe all the necessary formal stations in one's life such as school or university, as well as the more flexible frames that encompass those stations embedded in one's subjectivity such as love, longing, and daydreams.1 An analysis of these television texts as juxtaposed to their respective narrative context seems to confirm the existence of a latent imaginary undermining the State's dominant culture, an imaginary related to the denied space of the Diaspora, which to date, has not been given the opportunity to appear due to the Zionist policy of negation of exile.2 As mentioned above, this essay's theoretical approach is a postcolonial one. However, as Ella Shohat contends: Israel is not a Third World country by any simple or conventional definition [but] it does have some affinities and structural analogies to the Third World, analogies that often go unrecognized even, and perhaps especially, within Israel itself [. . .] European hegemony in Israel [. . .] is the product of a numerical minority in whose interest it is to downplay Israel's Easternness, as well as its Third Worldness. 3 This specific conjuncture creates a certain form of internal colonialism for Oriental Jews,4 as they see themselves doomed to an internal exile in their own country. The post-Zionist critical discourse that appeared in Israel in the mid-eighties, deconstructs the Zionist into its distinctive components, tending to relate to the several individual ethnic groups living within the State of Israel as imagined communities, bearing little or no relation to the existing hegemony.5 This tendency was well demonstrated in Israeli cinema in the 1990s, a decade clearly delimited by the end of the first Palestinian uprising (Intifada) in 1989 and the beginning of the second one (known as Intifadat El Aksa) in 2000.6 During this decade a number of Israeli films related to the television screen in an unusual way. Not only did the television's contents oppose the situation existing outside the film diegesis at a given time, but it also provided a space for the screening of the protagonists' subjectivity, sometimes offering enigmatic visions that were in fact his own encoded version of his critique of the surrounding reality. Finally, the television screen offered these imagined communities a glimpse into what is culturally referred to as immoral or abject, being either the forgotten past in the Diaspora or imagined visions of an alternative political order in their new country. In fact, the films analyzed in this essay succeed in realizing their wish to invert this apparently official information channel and use it for their own purpose, converting it into a path of resistance to hegemonic oppression. Through the figuration of television in the films, the communities disengage from the State's official policy and establish the delineation of their new relationship to the State, a relationship limited only to their sharing of the same geographical territory. The Micro-Politics of Television The traditional function of television had been to serve as an organizing feature in homes, cities, and nations.7 However, by the end of the twentieth century, television had become a synonym of ambivalence. On the one hand, it brings the world into our most intimate spaces, but at the same time it also invites us to peep into other people's intimate worlds. …