Israeli Film Culture through Its Paratexts: A New Cinema History

In the introduction to his co-edited anthology Looking Past the Screen (2007), Eric Smoodin asks us to imagine an alternative mode of film historiography to the one most present in global cinema studies.Scholarship, he argues, "has at least since the mid-1950s been dominated by the study of the film itself, often organized around genre, nation, or authorship." 1 This foregrounding of "representation" as a category encompassing "the images and narratives that make up the text," has in turn led to the sidelining of interest in other categories meaningful to the formation of cinema history: those of industry, including the mechanisms of production, distribution, and exhibition; of regulation, both external and internal to the film business; and of reception, which speaks to the makeup of actual audiences, where/how they consumed films, and what recollections they have from the experience. 2 Not only that, but in the process of looking away from these categories, film historiography also paid little attention to the types of data that may inform our knowledge of industry, regulation, and reception: primary sources other than the films themselves, which "will most typically be on paper (and on microfilm and the Internet) as the material evidence left, for instance, by fans, censors, critics, and government officials." 3Abandoning these materials-and more broadly, the archive that holds them-has resulted in a self-imposed myopia whose effects on our historical understanding of cinematic phenomena have been highly detrimental.It is with acute awareness of this cost that Smoodin calls for exploring a possible "film scholarship without films," 4 which may complement as well as correct the discipline's prevalent norms.Smoodin's call served to both reflect upon and further galvanize "an emerging international trend" within film studies, often referred to as "new cinema history." 5 Originating from such seminal American-centered scholarly literature as David Bordwell,