Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema

✍ Scribed by Rachel S Harris; Dan Chyutin

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 443
• Series: New Directions in National Cinemas
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Film came to the territory that eventually became Israel not long after the medium was born. Casting a Giant Shadow is a collection of articles that embraces the notion of transnationalism to consider the limits of what is Israeli within Israeli cinema.

As the State of Israel developed, so did its film industries. Moving beyond the early films of the Yishuv, which focused on the creation of national identity, the industry and its transnational ties became more important as filmmakers and film stars migrated out and foreign films, filmmakers, and actors came to Israel to take advantage of high-quality production values and talent. This volume, edited by Rachel Harris and Dan Chyutin, uses the idea of transnationalism to challenge the concept of a singular definition of Israeli cinema.

Casting a Giant Shadow offers a new understanding of how cinema has operated artistically and structurally in terms of funding, distribution, and reception. The result is a thorough investigation of the complex structure of the transnational and its impact on national specificity when considered on the global stage.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Israeli Cinema Beyond the National: An Introduction / Rachel S. Harris and Dan Chyutin
I. My Israel: Transnational Imagining in a Time of High Nationalism
1. “I Have a Great Passion for Americans”: The Juggler and the Question of National Cinema / Dan Chyutin
2. Longing for Hollywood: Israeli Beauties on International Film Stages in the 1950s and 1960s / Julie Grimmeisen
3. New Frontiers: Creating a Nation through the Israeli Western / Rachel S. Harris
4. The Rust of Time: The Apparition of Memory in David Greenberg’s Sha’ar Ha’guy (1965) and Much’shar Bli Rosh (1963) / Shmulik Duvdevani and Anat Dan
II Palestinian Cinema “Made in Israel”
5. Transnational Imaginings in Salt of This Sea (2008) and Villa Touma (2014) / Ariel M. Sheetrit
6. Here and There, Now and Then: Nations and Their Relations in Recent Palestinian Cinema / Mary N. Layoun
7. Five Broken Cameras and the Metonymic Sixth Camera: Time, Narrative, and Subjectivities in Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras / Yaron Shemer
III. To See with Foreign Eyes: Catering to the Expectations of a Transnational Audience
8. Moments of Innocence and Fracture: Fantasy and Reality in Two Documentary Visits to Israel / Ohad Landesman
9. Two Israelis in the “Mecca of Motion Pictures”: Golan, Globus, and Cannon Film’s Transnational Enterprise / Zachary Ingle
10. “A Chance to Hear Some Hebrew”: American Jewish Film Festivals and the Transnational Flow of Israeli Film / Josh Beaty
11. Perpetuating Victimhood as a Jewish Identity?: The Case of Popular Israeli Cinema Today /Yaron Peleg
IV. Denationalizing the Local and Projecting into the Global: Disrupting Israeliness through the Transnational
12. Of National Homes and Despotic Symbols: Network NarrativeFilms, Global Cities, and Crossings of Local Paths / Nava Dushi
13. Fantasies of Other Desires: Homonationalism and Self-Othering in Contemporary Israeli Queer Cinema / Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef
14. Hagar Ben-Asher’s The Slut as the First Israeli Transnational Feminist Film Text / Yael Munk
V. Bringing the Global into the Local: Transnational Encounters in Contemporary Narrative and Form
15. Encounters and Interspaces: The Place of Germany and Germans in Israeli Cinema / Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann
16. Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Rise of Israel’s New Extremism / Neta Alexander
17. The Exchange: Reinventing Israeliness through Koreanness / Pablo Utin
List of Contributors
Index