More than Enough: Multilingual Film Exhibition in 1950s Israel

ABSTRACT: This article presents a triad analysis of film exhibition in 1950s Israel, focusing on the showcasing of Yiddish, German, and Arabic films. In addition to offering new perspectives on the heterogeneity of the film exhibition scene during this period, I demonstrate how cinema played a role in challenging the homogenizing impulse of early statehood. To this end, I draw upon newly collected film programming data and largely unexplored archival sources encompassing press and magazine articles, governmental correspondence, meeting minutes, and censorship records. The exhibition histories of the films in question, spoken in languages that were particularly charged with tension and contradictions, reveal breaks and sharp inclines and declines, due in large part to shifting state restrictions. To explain these dynamics, this study traces the changing pathways of these films and sheds light on the manner in which they were shaped by dialectical public contestation.