Constructing a Film Theory Wasteland: Israeli Discourse on Moving Images before the 1970s

ABSTRACT: Discourse on moving images in Israel before the 1970s is remembered as having been sparse and of little value. Some have claimed that there were few publications on the topic, that intellectuals refrained from writing about a medium that lacked prestige, that there were no histories of cinema, and, particularly, that the history of local filmmaking had been forgotten. Until the late 1960s, they claimed, cinephiles seeking knowledge about moving images in Israel were trapped in an "arid desert" or "desolate wasteland." Thanks to the growing body of scanned and indexed publications, we can now reevaluate these impressions. This article shows that there were in fact lectures, discussions, books, and numerous articles on film theory and history in Hebrew before the 1970s, including prestigious publications and works by important intellectuals and histories of local and world cinema. It considers several reasons for the impression that the discourse on moving images was a "wasteland," including the distancing of 1980s academic film studies from its predecessors, the way knowledge about film was presented, and a discourse that instilled frustration in its cinephile readers and constructed itself as lacking.