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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Nuzhat al Fouad (2005). Qahiri (Muhammad Bakri) and Tamara (Efrat Gosh) in the hospice. All images courtesy of Judd Ne’eman.
I learned early to differentiate art from politics. But the best Israeli films are inseparable from the political forces that shape them. Yehuda “Judd” Ne’eman’s films sharpen this sense of an artistic enterprise enmeshed in the life of the state and its culture. Fresh, original, sometimes even prescient, they summon the mind into the interface between politics and art: the place from which poets, prophets and pariahs all come.
Ne’eman’s earliest documentaries evoke a vision of original possibilities broken by the struggle for land and power. Bedouins of Sinai (1971–72) offers a glimpse of quotidian Arabic life on the edge of cultural change. Bits of religious texts interlace with girls herding goats, men racing camels and smoking around a fire. What things mean in this culture must be delicately, patiently uncovered—like the Bedouin woman who lifts her veil of coins just far enough to sip her tea. Observation on Acco (1975) looks into a world fallen from the relative innocence of Bedouins. Made for Israeli TV, the film shows the mutual estrangement of disinterested Jews and ghettoized Arabs in the ancient city of Acre, framed ironically by the story of a Jewish woman hospitalized for depression in a crusader fortress used as a psychiatric hospital. Looking beyond the wall of her confinement, she says, “I always loved this city because it symbolized for me integrated Israel. . . . I grew up thinking all human beings are the same.” Ne’eman’s third documentary, Seaman’s Strike (1981), and a short feature film, The Night the King was Born (1983), expose corruption within the state and its people, articulating the filmmaker’s dismay at their failure to live up to their own early promises.
Ne’eman’s most important features look directly into sources of Israeli malaise to uncover the betrayal of cherished ideals. The suicide of a young trainee and the guilt and confusion of his commanding officer in Paratroopers (1976–77) expose the ruinous hardening of young people to pain—both suffered and inflicted. Fellow Travelers (1982–83) and Streets of Yesterday (1985–89) explore the guilt and shame borne by their Jewish protagonists because of the state’s mistreatment of Palestinians. The power of a tainted collective past to contaminate the personal present; the sense of betrayal by the apparatus of one’s own state; the evolution of a perspective in which irony cannot muffle outrage: these are the givens of Ne’eman’s work.
In the 15 years between Streets of Yesterday and his latest film project, Not Like Poetry (2005), Ne’eman produced a significant body of work as a film historian and critic. A seminal essay called “The Death Mask of the Moderns: A Genealogy of New Sensibility Cinema in Israel” (1999) argues that after decades of constructing iconic images of a Zionist utopia and “new Jews,” and of mythicizing Israeli warriors, films became agents of political critique. In the alienated protagonists of Israeli modernist cinema of the ’60s and ’70s, Ne’eman sees the adult children of the ’48 warriors, both half in love with violent death in combat because their fathers and uncles had heroically risked their lives to create the state, and critical of a society willing to sacrifice its sons while insisting that it values the preservation of life.
Elsewhere Ne’eman analyzes other sources of collective distress. He finds in “shadow cinema” the guilty residue of Zionist contempt for diaspora culture, and by what he calls the “inability of Zionist ideology to acknowledge the survivors’ plight as victims.” He examines ancient assumptions about fertility and bloodshed that may underlie violent combat in film. He describes the apocalyptic myth-historiography of films about conflict between Arabs and Jews and between Eastern and Western European Israelis. And he argues that massive combat wounds in film may imitate the opened and vulnerable bodies of women in childbirth, may even imply a radical feminization of male subjectivity. In these sophisticated essays, enriched by history, anthropology and philosophy, one hears the voice of a critic who sees through cinematic surfaces into the anguish and bitterness of contemporary experience in a dangerous, unjust world. One also hears compassion in this voice; Ne’eman served the IDF reserves as a combat surgeon for 14 years. All his work is about trauma; he sees Israel, simply, as “the locus of trauma.”
Within the critique, finally, one feels a very old, disappointed love. George Sand believed that when “humanity is outraged” in us, “indignation” becomes “one of the most passionate forms of love.” Ne’eman’s work pulses with indignation. He speaks for “outraged humanity” without forgetting his passion for the land and its peoples—and without overlooking the catastrophe that has overtaken them. His films speak to our national dilemma as well as his own.
