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The Death Mask of the Moderns: A Genealogy of New Sensibility Cinema in Israel(*)
CINEMATIC AVANT-GARDE VERSUS POLITICAL AVANT-GARDE
THE ART OF THE CINEMA, which draws on the multiple significance of moving images as well as on shifts between time and space, represents modernism more than any other form of art. Modernism in all its artistic manifestations "looks up to realism in its broader sense,...[it is] a new kind of realism...more realistic, more pure, more concise.... Its efforts arc directed at exposing, destroying and eradicating all that is perceived by it as flawed and distorted in the normal realistic praxis."(1) The great renovator of modernism in cinema, Jean Luc Godard, intentionally created in his films an atmosphere of distance and planted in the audience feelings of alienation and even inferiority. His films were made in the spirit of the avant-garde of Brecht, out of an aspiration, naively or not, to create "transformation from above -- via spiritual, ethical, and intellectual constructs -- rather than materialist transformation from below (via the proletariat or the id) [that] characterizes both modernism and the avant-gardes.... In both cases, the potentially anarchic forces down below in the mob or the psyche are carefully controlled and directed from above."(2) Under the influence of the French New Wave, Israeli film makers adopted a similar mode of cinema in the 1960s. But, unlike Godard's "transformation from above," the alienation and emotional distance that characterized Israeli modernist cinema emanated from totally different cultural sources.
This strategy of the avant-garde, as well as that of modernism, which also fostered social change from above, "associate[d] the artistic avant-garde with the Leninist avant-garde."(3) The faith of the modernists in social engineering implicated the artists time and again in an unholy alliance with political avant-gardes from left and right. Such was the collaboration of futuristic artists with the Italian fascists: "in all of Europe fascism cultivated the futuristic values: modernism, youth, violence, vigor and heroism."(4) Another case was the strong involvement with the October revolution of modernist poets, artists and, most importantly, the Russian avant-garde cinema. Trotksy stipulated that "the art of this epoch will be entirely under the influence of revolution,"(5) and the famous agitprop cinema groups led by Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein produced...