Deeper than Oblivion

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. 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. 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).

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.

• AcknowledgmentsChapter 1: Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and Israeli CinemaBoaz Hagin and Raz YosefChapter 2:Postscript to Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation Ella ShohatChapter 3:Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu GhraibDiane WaldmanChapter 4:The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann TrialAnat ZangerChapter 5:The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. MograbiShmulik DuvdevaniChapter 6:Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s BeaufortRaz YosefChapter 7:Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan's “Trilogy” Yael MunkChapter 8:Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second IntifadaRaya MoragChapter 9:“Our Traumas”: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen DaysBoaz HaginChapter 10:History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni Chapter 11: Last Train to the HolocaustJudd Ne'eman and Nerit GrossmanChapter 12: Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli FilmYael Zerubavel Chapter 13: “Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and MemoryJanet WalkerNotes on ContributorsIndex