Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.1
Abstract:
In my presentation, I consider State of Suspension (2008), a film by Dutch cultural theorist and filmmaker Mieke Bal and Israeli filmmaker Benny Brunner, which is “a drama examining the psyche of contemporary Israel, sixty years after independence and Palestinian catastrophe al nakba”. The film is a composite of experimental documentary, consisting of satirical performance, music and poetry (based on the Israeli national anthem and the Declaration of Independence), complemented by the historical archival footage and interviews of people ranging from holocaust survivors to al nakba survivors, from refugees to settlers, and from peace workers to fierce nationalists.
In my analysis, I address the artistic and aesthetic means of the film ‘as inquiry’ of intercultural relations in the context of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The artistic interventions to the everyday life of the Israelis—Jews and Arabs—reveal the mentality of people who experience both the fear and the normalisation of violence as a daily reflex. The close reading of the film attests, how violence operates at multiple levels and how traumatic historical events continue to shape the inner, interpersonal, socio-cultural, and generational worlds of their subjects. Art is considered as having its share in giving a shape to the complexity of historical reality and imagination is concerned as a social force towards thinking and acting for non-violence.
