Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Filmmaking in Israel can be traced to the early twentieth
century with the documentation of the land by solitary
pioneers, such as Murray Rosenberg’s The First Film of
Palestine (1911) and Ya’acov Ben-Dov’s The Awakening
Land of Israel (1923). Commissioned by Zionist organizations,
these films were screened in front of Jewish
communities worldwide. They showed an embellished
image of the land, emphasizing its redemption by the
Zionist movement by beginning with images of ruined
Jewish historical sites in a desolated land and culminating
in lively images of new towns in the Jewish yishuv
(settlement).
The more prolific filmmaking of the 1930s focused
upon Jews who had shed their Diaspora ‘‘nonproductive’’
way of life in favor of communal life and agricultural
labor, reflecting the predominance of Zionist
socialism. The major filmmakers of this period, such
as Baruch Agadati (1894–1976) and Nathan Axelrod,
were Russian-Jewish immigrants strongly influenced by
Russia’s October Revolution (1917). Agadati’s This Is
the Land (1933) is dynamically structured along the
lines of the montage sequences of Dziga Vertov and
Sergei Eisenstein, contrasting an arid past to a present
filled with a vast multitude of Jews, of industrial plants
workingatfullsteam,culminatinginacalltoleavethe
cities in favor of collective agricultural work on the
kibbutz. Axelrod’s travelogue Oded the Wanderer
(1933) emphasizes the social and material progress
that the Zionist socialist project has brought to the
region. This theme also dominates Aleksander Ford’s
(1908–1980) Sabra (1933), which deals with a drought
that sparks an escalating conflict over water between a
socialistJewishcommuneandanArabtribeheadedbya
ISRAEL
despotic sheikh. The conflict is resolved when water
gushes from the Jews’ well for the benefit of all, and
is followed by a Soviet-styled epilogue showing tractors
ploughing the land, superimposed with the silhouettes
of agricultural workers marching toward a utopian
future.
Following World War II, the Holocaust became a
major theme in the cinematic forging of national identity,
by presenting Israel as the last haven for persecuted
Jews (while later presenting the state as besieged and
facing annihilation). These films, aimed at justifying the
need for a Jewish state following the Nazi atrocities, were
invariably concerned with the integration of the recently
arrived immigrants through their transformation by
working the land within a collective. Earth (Helmer
Lerski, 1946), for example, offers a plethora of images
panning an open and fertile land that enfolds the protagonists,
infusing in them a sense of liberation from the
terrifying past of the ghettoes and death camps still
resonating in their minds.
CINEMA SINCE STATEHOOD
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 amidst
war with the surrounding Arab countries generated deep
sociopolitical changes, mostly due to the doubling of the
Jewish population within three years of independence
(1949–1951) following the massive immigration of
Jews from Islamic lands. Prime Minister David Ben-
Gurion (1886–1973) shifted his party’s Zionist socialism
to a centralizing policy termed mamlachtyut (statism),
which allowed for the rapid industrialization of the country
in the course of absorbing the massive immigration.
However, this policy resulted in the correlation of ethnic
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