sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

Though stating that “ambivalence may be internal or personal, reflecting the individual blind spots
or discomfort…toward a forthright identification with her sexuality or culture,” 4 Lebow also stresses
that,
“Ambivalence is a running subtext…and it is, I argue, a result of mutual, if at time
competing, historical survival strategies…considering that all the films [that she is
studying] were made in an era and in geopolitical context where visibility and forthright
identification were generally…considered signs of pride and self‐acceptance…the
films…still straddle a zone of unintelligibility." 5
In Please Love and Home is You – documentaries which are also 'First Person' films – Aya and
Yaelle’s lesbian and Jewish identifications are assumed and explored, yet in different ways: whereas
Aya and Yaelle explicitly verbalize their lesbian identifications, they make no direct reference to their
Jewish affiliations. At the same time, when focusing on familial homophobic prejudices, the films
subtly insinuate that it is stemming from, and associated with, a particular ethnic background that
stands behind the rejection of the women’s relationship – a rejection exclusively acted out by, and
ascribed to, Yaelle’s father, in the films. Aya and Yaelle live in Israel, a place often depicted as a haven
for out Jewish people, and contrasted from its neighbouring middle‐eastern countries on that basis. 6
Dwelling within the discursive realm of the Hebrew, the women avoid any overt enunciations
regarding the diverse charged approaches and accents with which they arrive to it. Generally, the
films thus naturalize the speaking protagonists’ migrations to, and positions in, Jewish‐Israeli national
culture’s allegedly native tongue, by framing their linguistic rapports as an intimate exchange of
personal feelings. And yet, in the scenes that grapple with homophobia, much ambivalence,
confusion, and pain, arise: these scenes are crucial for our henceforth examination.
In the following pages, we argue that Please Love and Home is You differentiate between two
genres of identification performances: the first, which Aya takes on, demonstrates verbal
competence and visual coherence attesting on her stable location in a place she can name and call,
and the viewer can clearly recognize as, home. The second, enacted by Yaelle, embodies intricate
and subversive, dramatic and performative, tactics, which speak to her placement as an immigrant
within the predominant discursive settings and conditions appearing in, and employed by, the films.
To that end, a series of close‐ups on Yaelle’s subversive struggles are at the heart of Home is You and
Please Love, and respectively, of this essay. In these close‐ups, the filmic lens centres cinematic
events of miscommunications between Yaelle, who appears on the screen, and her parents who are
removed from it, they all intensely negotiate the crisis of familial homophobia over the phone. It is,
finally, this cluster of abundantly mediated audio‐visual accounts on homophobia in the family that
serves as the litmus paper for tracing, and decoding, the films’ constructions of, and differentiations
between, the women’s diverse Jewish ethnic affiliations. Yaelle’s close‐ups thus pave the path to
challenging the hegemonic and homogenising Jewish‐Israeli national culture of the Hebrew that the
films foreground and reiterate. But let us begin from the beginning.
The opening scenes discussed above position us as spectators not only of a film, but also of
performances: a theater show that Yaelle and Aya codirected, and Aya and Yaelle’s marriage
ceremony. In both performances, Yaelle commits herself to Aya and endorses her instructive
benevolence. In the absence of a Rabbi, it is the will to discover and display personal truths which
weds Aya and Yaelle, in turn structuring not only these ritualistic scenes, but the film as a whole.
Whereas Yaelle divulges the utmost inner and ominous layers of her precarious self, Aya listens,
narrates the occurrences, and sings her own written music as their soundtrack: Aya’s vocal and
verbal activity thus pieces and composes the messy materials that Yaelle utters and stutters, striving
to supervise the smooth casting of the latter's expressions into accessible and intelligible knowledge.