Framing the Sex Scene: A New Take on Israeli Film History

Naomi Rolef

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110694796
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

This book retells the history of Israeli film in the 1960s and 1970s in sex scenes. Through close readings of the first sex scenes in mainstream Israeli movies from this period, it explores the cultural and social contexts in which these movies were made. More specifically, it discusses how notions of collective identity, individual agency, and the public and private spheres are inscribed into and negotiated in sex scenes, especially in light of the historical events that marked these decades. This study thus pushes away from the traditional academic perception of Israeli film and opens up new ways of understanding how it has developed in recent decades. It draws on a growing international body of academic literature on the cinematic representation of sex in order to illuminate the particularities of the Israeli context in the 1960s and 1970s. Apart from film scholars and scholars of Israeli film, this study also addresses readers interested in Israeli cultural history more broadly.

Part I: Setting the Stage: The Sex Scene and the Search for an Alternative Historiography

In part I, I outline the theoretical foundations of my work. Along with the role ascribed to sex and its cinematic representation, I also explore the value a discussion of the sex scene would offer for our general understanding of Israeli film. A thorough review of academic writing about Israeli fiction film reveals the dominant paradigm within which this film history is typically perceived. After presenting the theoretical basis for an alternative approach, I trace some major perceptions through which the individual, society, and subjectivity have and continue to be constructed in Israeli culture.

1 Qu’est-ce que la sexualité?

Foucault’s writings, and particularly his trilogy, The History of Sexuality, have inspired a large number of studies on the representation of sexuality in film and other media. My own work is no exception. The existing body of work using Foucault’s trilogy is considerable enough to include a variety of schools, with conflicting definitions of sexuality and its manifestations, and very different ideas of the “archaeological excavations” to be undertaken.¹ We must begin, then, by delineating what in Foucault’s work serves as the basis for my own. I rely primarily on the trilogy’s first volume, The Will to Knowledge (La volonté de savoir), drawing both on his theoretical approach and some of his historical observations.

A central principle introduced in The Will to Knowledge is that the relation between sexuality and perception is not one of discovery, but of formation. In Foucault’s (translated) words:

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (Foucault, 1990 (1976), pp. 105–106)

No less important is the acknowledgement that sexuality was primarily perceived as a “natural given”, and remains so – something that allowed it to play a major role in the definition of truth and subjectivity.

According to Foucault, the scientific discourses which have constructed “new technologies of sex” since the eighteenth century inherited and modified pre-existing Christian discourses. The exigency of normality, inherited sin, and problems of life and illness inherited questions of the afterlife (ibid., p. 117). With such theological roots, sexuality came to possess considerable weight: “[S]ex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful or dangerous, precious or formidable” (ibid., p. 56).² Another significant development is the historical evolution of the discourse of sexuality. This prefigured the expansion of psychoanalysis, in which the repression and silencing of sexuality became a central feature. Sexuality carried truth, and its dangers were attributed to its repression (ibid., p. 128).

The discourse of sexuality which Foucault describes here has two combined objectives. The first is the attribution of subjectivity. The second, which derives from the first, is the definition and differentiation of social class. The sexualisation of the human subject “was a political ordering of life, not through the enslavement of others but through the affirmation of self” (ibid., p. 123), and Foucault emphasises that this was a constitutive act, rather than a repressive one. As such, he argues, it served the middle class, which came to see its sexuality as “something important, a fragile treasure, a secret that had to be discovered at all costs” (ibid., p. 121). The sexual body became “the indefinite extension of strength, vigor, health and life” (ibid., p. 125). In that respect, “the intensification of the body” and “techniques for maximizing life” (ibid.) gave substance to the middle-class subject.

Nevertheless, sexuality did not remain the exclusive domain of the middle class: “[T]he nineteenth century witnessed a generalization of the deployment of sexuality, starting from the hegemonic centre. Eventually the entire social body was provided with a ‘sexual body’” (ibid., p. 127). Nonetheless, it would be wrong to talk about the “universality of sexuality” (ibid.). Foucault reminds us that the middle class had repeatedly demarcated a difference between itself and other classes in order to maintain its own unique identity (ibid., pp. 127–128; see also p. 124). Different criteria were used in the deployment of sexuality toward different classes. The middle class used them as a tool for subjugating the lower classes (ibid., pp. 126–128). Still, Foucault emphasises that the act of “granting” sexuality to the lower classes marked their emergence, existence, and visibility in the public sphere (ibid., pp. 121, 126–127).

In conclusion, I adopt from Foucault the proposition that sexuality is not discovered but constructed, and that in Western culture it came to represent something fundamental, a natural given truth – the very essence of subjectivity. Furthermore, I accept his argument that repression became a central trope in the discourse of sexuality, that sexuality supplements social visibility, and that, as the mark of subjectivity, it can accentuate or undermine the humanity of the subjects it is ascribed to.

Crucial for us is Foucault’s delineation of the link between subjectivity and identity. Because sex is, simultaneously, the essence of subjectivity and the bearer of social visibility and identity, the traces of “inner” subjective experience also provide evidence of “external” identity. Descartes’ famous declaration, “I think, therefore I am”, is transformed within this social discourse into: “I feel, therefore I am”. Cinematically, this means that construction of sensual subjectivity sensed by the viewer correlates with the materialisation of identity.

It is clear that Foucault’s historical observations relate to Western Christian civilisation. Can we apply them to a society that is neither predominately Christian nor, in my opinion, Western? Though not a part of the West, Israel and the societies that have evolved in it have never been completely isolated from the Western Christian world. Contemporary Israeli culture stands in a peripheral position to Western cultures, and inherited its discourse of sexuality and repression.

I make a number of departures from Foucault’s approach. Foucault supported his claims using verbal and textual phenomena. In that respect, we already depart from his approach in applying his theory to other media.

Another difference involves the purpose and intentionality of the objects analysed here. Foucault describes the power in question as coming “from below” – it emerges from a multiplicity of relations (ibid., p. 94), is produced from moment to moment, and comes from everywhere (ibid., p. 93). However, he concentrates on the authoritative discourses of science and philosophy.³ Although I refer to (authoritative) academic discourse in my work, the cinematic medium of fiction film is my main point of reference. As far as the modern history of sexuality is considered, in his efforts to portray the historical background of psychoanalysis and the “theory of repression”, Foucault focuses on practices that relate to sex in pathological terms. Such practices are of little relevance to my work.

The implication of this last observation, seemingly mundane, are best understood by considering the proliferation of these pathological sexual concepts in some schools of film studies, under the influence of what Noël Carroll called the “psycho-semiotic approach” (Carroll, 1988, p. 9).⁴ In the psycho-semiotic school, and its many offshoots, the cinematic experience is described as the manifestation of subjectivity. The nature of this subjectivity and the relations between viewer and screen are defined exclusively in terms of sexual pathology: voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and so on. In addition, cinematic imagery is “de-coded” into sexual objects, and the phallus is often “discovered” as part of the process of interpretation. Subjectivity is regarded as essential, and sexuality is the key to this essence. But this framework is not innate to film itself. Film is located in the matrix of relations which, according to Foucault, produces power, but is not necessarily subordinate to the authoritative terminology of psychoanalysis. The connection between subjectivity, sexuality, and the screen can be made using a different vocabulary and set of assumptions, as demonstrated by an alternative approach: neo-phenomenology. Here, too, subjectivity is central to relations, and sexuality (or rather, carnality and eroticism) is perceived as its medium.⁵ Yet it is not confined as a signifier bound to pathological terms. Rather, it designates intensified sensuality. I follow the example of the neo-phenomenological approach, not by limiting myself to instances of intensified sensuality or its absence, but by diverging from psycho-semiotic discourse in my discussion of subjectivity and sexuality in film. I am not interested in uncovering phallic symbolism, or diagnosing any pathological conditions. In that respect, Foucault’s observations regarding pathological sexual terminology are of little relevance to my work. I refer to this vocabulary directly in the relevant context, but I do not adopt it, or use it for the films I discuss.

I will return to The History of Sexuality in my discussion of the perception of history. First, however, I define which concrete manifestations of sexuality in film I will be discussing.

2 The Sex Scene

I define the cinematic sex scene as a sequence in which sexual activity is played out. But this simple description does not allow us to classify what constitutes a sex scene. The matter is complicated by the fact that, in mainstream films, the sexual act itself is effectively absent. The depiction of sex has been a subject of moral/legal debate and censorship long before the invention of motion pictures.¹ Because of limitations on what may be shown, and the restriction of “graphic” imagery to pornography, implicit ways of depicting sex proliferated in motion pictures from their beginning. Consequently, the suggestive aspect of mimetic depiction is very present in any discussion of sex scenes. As Williams observes, “[m]ovies both reveal and conceal” (Williams, 2008, p. 2). More specifically,

Sex is an act and more or less of “it” may be revealed but […] it is not a stable truth that cameras and microphones either “catch” or don’t catch. It is a constructed, mediated, performed act and every revelation is also a concealment that leaves something to the imagination. (ibid.)²

What is revealed and what is concealed in the mainstream cinema may, to a certain extent, be described in concrete terms, since its parameters are predetermined, circumscribed by legal restrictions and corresponding industrial standards and ratings. Current rules dictate that, in mainstream cinema, some things may be presented, but not visually. The result is a split between imagery and narrative. A sex scene is defined as pornographic if its imagery is explicit and the sexual act is visible. A contemporary mainstream sex scene will not include such visual content. At most, it will present the viewer with implicit imagery. The narrative, on the other hand, leaves no room for the imagination. Viewers are left with no doubt that a sexual act is taking place, or at least being attempted – even if all they see onscreen are the pre- or post-coital moments.

Like other national cinemas, sexuality first appeared in the Israeli cinema in implicit form, both in imagery and narrative. The move from implicit to explicit narration of sexual acts in Israeli film can be traced to the early- to mid-1960s. In the few feature films produced in Israel in the 1950s, several female characters were marked within the diegesis, rightfully or wrongfully, with a heavy suspicion of doing “it”.³ Otherwise, the closest Israeli film came to “it” was a comic scene in A Tale of a Taxi (1956, D: Larry Frisch), where a soldier meets a young woman in a barn for a roll in the hay, and her attempt to embrace him is frustrated by his jerky movements.⁴ Things changed rapidly from the mid-1960s. Within a short time, sex had become part of dramatic compositions, not just sporadically but generally. The international trends that enabled the appearance of more “explicit” content in mainstream cinema (which meant explicit narrative and implicit imagery) arrived in Israel a strikingly short time after the local film industry finally succeeded in establishing itself and producing films on a regular basis.⁵ Coincidentally or not, industrial maturity arrived shortly before the sex scene became part of the picture(s).⁶ Over the next five decades, sex scenes became a consistent element of Israeli film. As a flexible poetic component, such scenes were adjusted in terms of form, content, and affective impact, in order to comply with the genres they were being integrated into. In both respects, Israeli cinema is similar to other national cinemas in which such explicit content – which remains somewhat implicit – is not overtly restricted.

From a historical perspective, we must acknowledge that this process took place within a system of constraints, as Israeli films were subject to state-sanctioned restrictions. On the basis of censorship laws introduced by the British authorities in Palestine in 1927, Israel established a review board for film and theatre, with the authority to ban films or limit their viewers by age. The board’s mandate was relatively expansive, and included “public morality”. The representation of sex was one of aspect by which films would be judged, though by no means the only one (Shalit, 2006, pp. 105–107; Almog, 2004, pp. 1146–1147).

While distributors of imported films often removed “indecent” segments of films before submitting them to the board (Shalit, 2006, pp. 107–108), local filmmakers had to deal with the board throughout the production process (ibid., pp. 143–144). Local films were scrutinised more stringently and held to a higher standard by the board and other authorities, on the premise that they educated the public, and out of concern that they would represent Israel negatively abroad (ibid.). As a result, filmmakers complained that the amount of nudity and sex approved by censors for foreign films concurrently served t...

Índice

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Setting the Stage: The Sex Scene and the Search for an Alternative Historiography
• Part II: The 1960s: Comedy, Victimhood and Paradise Lost
• Part III: The 1970s: War, Protest and Youth
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Film Index
• Subject Index