the national and the popular in israeli cinema
In the contemporary scene of cosmopolitanism or globalization,
the United States is adominant force. e combination of nancial
fortunes, military might, and the spreading of Hollywood products by
the new technologies of communication spurs concern about American
imperialism. Anthony Birch noted that “the French and the Americans
have been the two peoples […] most condent that their forms of
civilization and their concepts of good government were suitable for
export.”[
] Susan Hayward refers to political claims of universal values
by noting that “universalism, although based in equality, has inherent
within it political cultural empire-building. e concept of nation and
nationalism becomes, therefore, aconcept mobilized in relation to, and
as acounteraction against universalism. As an oppositional concept,
nation is based in an assumption of dierence.”[
]
In arecent book entitled Virtual States: e Internet and the
Boundaries of the Nation State, Jerry Everard examines the place of
nationalism against the background of the global spread of the internet.
He argues that while the new technologies of global communications
have diminished the state’s role in the goods and service economy, in
today’s climate of change and uncertainty, people are turning to nation-
alism and engaging in regional conicts over identity. e internet’s
ability to ignore political borders has created, in his words, new needs
for boundary-making processes, and ways of identifying the self from
the other, “us” from “them”.[
]
One of the most inuential texts in the recent cultural discourse
of nationalism has been Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities,
subtitled Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Ander-
son’s denition of anation says: “it is an imagined political community–
and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”[
] e notion
of “sovereign” is self-evident; in Anderson’s words, “nations dream of
being free… e gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state”
(p.7). “Limited” it is, because as Anderson put it, “No nation imagines
itself coterminous with mankind” (p.7). Furthermore, the geographical
sense of nite boundaries also implies aparticularist identity in oppo-
sition to claims of universalism. Anderson’s critical contribution lies in
the notion of an imagined community, which underscores the role of
imaginary texts in the construction of national identity. Nationalism,
then, is both aquest of peoples to assert their independence– aquest
translated into historical events ranging from social reforms to wars
and revolutions– and also asource of identity, an identity dened by
paradigms of the national culture like myths, values, historical memory,
which are expressed by or constructed in narratives, images, and other
works of artists and cultural institutions.
[7] A.Birch, Nationalism and National Integration,
London 1989, rpt. 2002, p.13.
[8] S.Hayward, op.cit., p.3.
[9] J.Everard, Virtual States: e Internet and the
Boundaries of the Nation State, London 2000.
[10] B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, subtitled
Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
2nd ed., London 1983, p.6. e source of the quote is
in the text.