House / Home

House / Home

Image
Larry Abramson, Home I, 2004, 100x80cm coll. Discount Bank 2004-HOM-01-C (3).jpg

House / Home

14
Spring 2023

Issue Editors:

Vered K. Shemtov, Eitan Kensky

"House," Montage, and Architecture

Author:

Karla Oeler
In the 1930s both Sergei Eisenstein and Walter Benjamin identified and elaborated formal and phenomenological correspondences between cinema and architecture. This essay takes their generative speculative comparisons of these distinct art forms as a framework for analyzing and understanding some of the stylistic qualities of Amos Gitai’s 1980 documentary House.

House Trilogy (1978‒2005): Staging Co-existence and its Failures: An Intermedial Approach

Author:

Claudia Polledri
Rémy Besson
Over a period of twenty-seven years (1978–2005), Amos Gitai directed a trilogy dealing with the cultural, political, and social consequences of the renovation and redesign of the same house located in Jerusalem. We consider intermediality an interesting way of looking at this corpus of nonfiction films. This way of thinking offers a framework to help us come to terms with the conditions of the possibility of living a shared experience. The purpose of this paper is to explore this trilogy as an intermedial milieu. We seek to understand: What sets this milieu in motion? What mediations are

The Testimonies of the Land: Amos Oz’s and Amos Gitai’s Journeys in the Land of Israel

Author:

Adia Mendelson-Maoz
This article discusses and compares Amos Oz’s Po va-sham be-eretz Israel ( In the Land of Israel) and Amos Gitai’s Yoman sade ( Field Diary), which bring an extensive exploration of the Land of Israel just before and during the initial phases of the First Lebanon war in 1982. As a major author of Israeli literature and as a talented “auteur” in Israeli cinema, Amos Oz and Amos Gitai listened to and observed Israelis, settlers, and Palestinians and filed their reports with their audiences. This article highlights their similarities as authors, as well as their differences in perspectives on the

Excavating Memory: The Archaeological Imagination in Amos Gitai’s "A House in Jerusalem" (1998) and Rutu Modan’s "Tunnels" (2020)

Author:

Barbara Mann
Israeli memory culture has evolved in recent decades, from the more openly critical voices of the New Historians in the 1990s — which viewed history as something that could be revised, even corrected, with the introduction of new information and perspectives — to the more recent, postmodern view that any appreciation of the past may always remain flawed and partial at best. Israeli cultural expression has been shaped, in turn, by this evolving sense of the past in relation to both collective and personal memory. Two examples in this essay serve as tethers for how this process has evolved. Both

’I Am Civil War’: On Haim Gouri's Poetics of Concealment

Author:

Arie Dubnov
Using Haim Gouri’s 1960 poem “I am Civil War” as its departure point, this essay aims to offer a historically anchored reading of Gouri’s “poetics of concealment” — a playful, purposeful use of poiesis as a means to disguise uncomfortable truths and as a mode of “aphasia,” blocking historical knowledge. The argument unfolds through several stages. After looking at Gouri’s early career and the unresolved tension between Gouri the “reporter” and Gouri the “witness,” the essay reassesses the transition we see in his poetry from an earlier collectivist “we” to a new, seemingly ­personal “I.” From

The Unhomely in the Literature of S. Yizhar

Author:

Iris Milner
This essay explores the representations of the Israeli home in the writings of the prominent Israeli writer S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky, 1916–2006). Although the concept of the new Jewish home as the symbol of the Zionist metamorphosis is a major theme in Hebrew literature, Yizhar’s fiction contains few descriptions of houses and people’s homes, and he remains detached from, and skeptical about, this rhetoric and ideology. A sense of “uncanny strangeness” (Kristeva), which undermines the very idea of homecoming, imbues his rare, yet highly significant images of the home. This essay