Between Two Hills: From Hill 24 to Beaufort and the Question of the Political in Israeli Cinema

ABSTRACT:In the second half of the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s, Israeli filmmakers tended to focus on family dramas, all but eschewing the social and political themes that dominatedt Israeli cinema in the preceding two decades. Perhaps in reaction to the Rabin assassination and the terror attacks of the 1990s, which intensified during the Second Intifada, the cinematic gaze seemed to have turned from the battlefi eld to the home as the site of dramatic tension. Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007), which deals with the Israeli pullout from Lebanon in 2000, followed by two other films that dealt with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Shmuel Maoz’s Lebanon (2009), may have signaled Israeli filmmakers’ renewed interest in the political realm as a sphere of change. By comparing these films to early Israeli war films, namely Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), this article seeks to assess whether the new direction heralded by Beaufort does indeed indicate a turn toward the political realm or whether these films in fact continue the apolitical trend of recent Israeli cinema.