Back to the future: territory, utopia and affect in Israel through the argentine gaze

DÉBORA GALIA KANTOR

Congreso; AJS 52nd Annual Conference; 2020

Association for Jewish Studies

In the last decade the representation of Jewishness in argentine cinema has progressively migrated from fiction to non-fiction, shifting the narrative locus from identity (prevalent in the New Argentine Cinema of the 1990s) to subjectivity and subject. This process has brought forward new aspects of the Jewish experience, problematizing biography and affect, rethinking the dynamics of the ties between Israel and the diaspora (the Argentine diaspora)-?questioning the Jewish map? in terms of Caryn Aviv and David Shneer (2005)- and reexamining core subjects of Jewish contemporary life, such as the memory of the Holocaust, the cultural and political consequences of the privatization of the kibbutzim (the end of the kibbutz as utopian experiment) and the ethical tribulations This paper aims at exploring these aspects in two recent films: Nosotros, ellos y yo (Nicolás Avruj, 2015) and Pervomaisk (Florencia Reznik, 2018). These films emerge from a larger corpus of argentine first-person film essays (La parte automática, Ivo Aichenbaum, 2012; Shalom bombón, Sofía Ungar, 2016; Los territories, Iván Granovsky 2018) that make Israel the setting and landscape of journeys where both the subjects and the history and (political and religious) traditions they ?inherit? are put into motion.