Jerusalem in Israeli Cinema

Jerusalem is simultaneously a real physical place and a cultural object loaded with narratives and images. Cinema records and moulds the various voices and changing modes of Jerusalem into a collective unconsciousness. This book, the first to deal with Jerusalem in Israeli cinema, unravels the cinematic writing of the city.

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Jerusalem is simultaneously a real physical place and a cultural object loaded with myriad narratives and images. Cinema as a social institution records and moulds the various voices and changing modes of Jerusalem into a collective unconsciousness. This book, the first to deal with Jerusalem in Israeli cinema, aims to unravel the cinematic writing of the city as traces of memory inscribed in its symbolic geography. Through early film to contemporary – Israeli and international, fictional and documentaries, television series and experimental video art – the book examines the city’s landmarks. Highlighting not only Jerusalem’s iconic sites, such as Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the book also explores spaces that lie between the private home and the public sphere, road blocks and the exilic home for both Jews and Palestinians, women wandering in the city and outside of it, refugees and Zombies. How is Jerusalem, a city eternally between the heavenly and the earthly, characterized and depicted? Throughout the various plots and images from Leaving Jerusalem by Railway through My Michael, Cemetery Club, Inferno and JeruZalem, constant movement is evident: the wandering and journeying movement of exiled figures to and from Jerusalem and the movement between times: histories, archives and images transforming according to social and cultural shifts.While Jerusalem is a spatially and temporally existing place, the book exposes the mythological Israeli space, and the cracks that have appeared in it.