DEEPER THAN OBLIVION

Table of Contents (PDF)

“This intriguing collection of essays provides a perceptive and thought-provoking look at Israeli cinema and its relations to Israeli society. It contains various approaches to the cinematic contemplations of ‘trauma’ in Israeli film, which shed new light on the fundamentals of the Israeli experience in the past decades. In going beyond the commonly discussed canon of Israeli films, the articles in Deeper than Oblivion illustrate the contour of a novel framework for the reading of Israeli cinema and its cultural significance. It is an essential addition to the growing scholarship on Israeli culture.”

OFER ASHKENAZI, Koebner-Minerva Center for German History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

“This timely collection offers a spectrum of critical perspectives on Israel’s past and present through the lens of its cinema. In addition to examining a wide range of reactions to trauma and memory, the essays explore the tension between fiction and documentary, space and identity, and aesthetics and politics. The engaging book reveals the richness of Israeli cinema and its astonishing resonance for us today.”

ANTON KAES, Department of German, University of California, Berkeley, US, and author of Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War

“This collection of sophisticated articles exposes how Israeli cinema navigates the web of traumas that constitute the collective national memory as well as threaten the coherence of the familiar Zionist meta-narrative. Discussing traumas of wars, the Naqba, the Holocaust, the trauma of the perpetrator, of immigration and of dislocating others, of terrorism, of occupation, and of guilt and responsibility these articles offer critical reflection on Israeli histories and cultures.”

ORLY LUBIN, Chair of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University, Israel

RAZ YOSEF is Senior Lecturer and the chair of the cinema studies B.A. Program at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (2004), To Know a Man: Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Israeli Cinema (2010, in Hebrew), The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (2011), and co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (2011).

BOAZ HAGIN is Lecturer at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is author of Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2010), co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (2011), and co-author with Thomas Elsaesser of Memory, Trauma, and Fantasy in American Cinema (2012, in Hebrew).