This book examines several Israeli fictional and non-fictional films, and how their portrayal of landscape and territory provides a unique perspective on Jewish and Israeli identity. The book demonstrates how space in film is not only a 'container' for events in the plot, but an event in and of itself, since space and place are significant elements in the on-going negotiations regarding Jewish and Israeli identity. Films capture more than just the outward appearance of a place: they also record a web of unruly traces of economic, social, and political systems. Almost 2,000 years of Jewish exile created a gap between the idea of 'the Israeli place' and how the modern State of Israel has actualized that idea. Israeli cinema contains layered expressions of this issue, and, in this book, place and space function both as the subject matter of the analysis and as a theoretical tool. This innovative perspective will enable readers to discern themes significant both to contemporary culture (maps, borders, checkpoints, and military zones) and Jewish mythology (garden, desert, water, Jerusalem, and sacred space). Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema includes references to Israeli literature and art, and it interweaves observations from the fields of visual studies, cultural studies, mythology, and Jewish thought to create a thought-provoking analysis. *** "Given the number of important, critically recognized Israeli films, this is a welcome book. ...Zanger's attention to the place of minorities--including women, Mizrahim, and Arabs--within Israel greatly enchances the book's timely appeal. Recommended." - Choice, Vol. 50, No. 08, April 2013

In this collection, leading scholars in both film studies and Israeli studies show that beyond representing familiar historical accounts or striving to offer a more complete and accurate depiction of the past, Israeli cinema has innovatively used trauma and memory to offer insights about Israeli society and to engage with cinematic experimentation and invention. Tracing a long line of films from the 1940s up to the 2000s, the contributors use close readings of these films not only to reconstruct the past, but also to actively engage with it. Addressing both high-profile and lesser known fiction and non-fiction Israeli films, Deeper than Oblivion underlines the unique aesthetic choices many of these films make in their attempt to confront the difficulties, perhaps even impossibility, of representing trauma. By looking at recent and classic examples of Israeli films that turn to memory and trauma, this book addresses the pressing issues and disputes in the field today.

Jerusalem is simultaneously a real physical place and a cultural object loaded with myriad narratives and images. Cinema as a social institution records and moulds the various voices and changing modes of Jerusalem into a collective unconsciousness. This book, the first to deal with Jerusalem in Israeli cinema, aims to unravel the cinematic writing of the city as traces of memory inscribed in its symbolic geography. Through early film to contemporary - Israeli and international, fictional and documentaries, television series and experimental video art - the book examines the city's landmarks. Highlighting not only Jerusalem's iconic sites, such as Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the book also explores spaces that lie between the private home and the public sphere, road blocks and the exilic home for both Jews and Palestinians, women wandering in the city and outside of it, refugees and Zombies. How is Jerusalem, a city eternally between the heavenly and the earthly, characterized and depicted? Throughout the various plots and images from Leaving Jerusalem by Railway through My Michael, Cemetery Club, Inferno and JeruZalem, constant movement is evident: the wandering and journeying movement of exiled figures to and from Jerusalem and the movement between times: histories, archives and images transforming according to social and cultural shifts. While Jerusalem is a spatially and temporally existing place, the book exposes the mythological Israeli space, and the cracks that have appeared in it.

Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films challenge traditional representations of Israel and its people, while also appealing to audiences around the world. Gershenson introduces an innovative conceptual framework of adaptation, which explains how filmmakers adapt global genre tropes to local reality. It illuminates the ways in which Israeli horror borrows and diverges from its international models. New Israeli Horror offers an exciting and original contribution to our understanding of both Israeli cinema and the horror genre. A companion website to this book is available at https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/ (https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/) Book trailer: https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw (https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw)

Going beyond a discussion of political architecture, Walled Life investigates the mediation of material and imagined border walls through cinema and art practices. The book reads political walls as more than physical obstruction, instead treating the wall as an affective screen, capable of negotiating the messy feelings, personal conflicts, and haunting legacies that make up “walled life” as an evolving signpost in the current global border regime. By exploring the wall as an emotional and visceral presence, the book shows that if we read political walls as forms of affective media, they become legible not simply as shields, impositions, or monuments, but as projective surfaces that negotiate the interaction of psychological barriers with political structures through cinema, art, and, of course, the wall itself. Drawing on the Berlin Wall, the West Bank Separation barrier, and the U.S.-Mexico border, Walled Life discovers each wall through the films and artworks it has inspired, examining a wide array of graffiti, murals, art installations, movies, photography, and paintings. Remediating the silent barriers, we erect between, and often within ourselves, these interventions tell us about the political fantasies and traumatic histories that undergird the politics of walls as they rework the affective settings of political boundaries.

This book retells the history of Israeli film in the 1960s and 1970s in sex scenes. Through close readings of the first sex scenes in mainstream Israeli movies from this period, it explores the cultural and social contexts in which these movies were made. More specifically, it discusses how notions of collective identity, individual agency, and the public and private spheres are inscribed into and negotiated in sex scenes, especially in light of the historical events that marked these decades. This study thus pushes away from the traditional academic perception of Israeli film and opens up new ways of understanding how it has developed in recent decades. It draws on a growing international body of academic literature on the cinematic representation of sex in order to illuminate the particularities of the Israeli context in the 1960s and 1970s. Apart from film scholars and scholars of Israeli film, this study also addresses readers interested in Israeli cultural history more broadly.

The rise of digital media and globalization’s intensification since the 1990s have significantly refigured global cinema’s form and content. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those promulgated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.