House / Home

Over a period of twenty-seven years (1978–2005), Amos Gitai directed a trilogy dealing with the cultural, political, and social consequences of the renovation and redesign of the same house located in Jerusalem. We consider intermediality an interesting way of looking at this corpus of nonfiction films. This way of thinking offers a framework to help us come to terms with the conditions of the possibility of living a shared experience. The purpose of this paper is to explore this trilogy as an intermedial milieu. We seek to understand: What sets this milieu in motion? What mediations are staged by Gitai in these three films? The study of the trilogy itself and of the “blockages” that we see taking shape in it led us to use another expression than “living together” that could render conceptually the limits and frictions staged in the films. The term “co-existence” seems to us to be more appropriate to account for the aspects evoked by Gitai in the Bait trilogy.

Israeli memory culture has evolved in recent decades, from the more openly critical voices of the New Historians in the 1990s — which viewed history as something that could be revised, even corrected, with the introduction of new information and perspectives — to the more recent, postmodern view that any appreciation of the past may always remain flawed and partial at best. Israeli cultural expression has been shaped, in turn, by this evolving sense of the past in relation to both collective and personal memory. Two examples in this essay serve as tethers for how this process has evolved. Both Amos Gitai’s film trilogy House and Rutu Modan’s graphic novel Tunnels engage what I call “the archaeological imagination,” a mode of artistic exploration in which the tensions between surface and depth, between the present and the past, affect formal structures in each work.

This essay explores the representations of the Israeli home in the writings of the prominent Israeli writer S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky, 1916–2006). Although the concept of the new Jewish home as the symbol of the Zionist metamorphosis is a major theme in Hebrew literature, Yizhar’s fiction contains few descriptions of houses and people’s homes, and he remains detached from, and skeptical about, this rhetoric and ideology. A sense of “uncanny strangeness” (Kristeva), which undermines the very idea of homecoming, imbues his rare, yet highly significant images of the home. This essay investigates Yizhar’s magnum opus Yemei Ziklag (1958) in conjunction with his autobiographical novel Mikdamot (1992), both of which present detailed descriptions of Jewish and Arab houses, portraying their material and symbolic instability and the threat they embody, thus associating unhomeliness with the problematics of Jewish-Arab coexistence. The essay points to Yemei Ziklag’s intertext, the story of King David’s escape to the city of Ziklag, with its own figure of the instability of the home, as the primal scene in a chain of Yizharian depictions of homelessness, at the core of which lies the recognition that no home is safe and that today’s home may well become tomorrow’s ruin (and vice versa).