AnatZanger

ZIONISM AND THE DETECTIVE:

Imaginary territories in Israeli popular
cinema of the 1960s

Thefilms Moishe Ventilator and The Blaumilch Canal are the vehiclesfor an examination of the writing of the Israeli territory through the sjmholic representation ojthat space:
a map. At the centre of the plot of bothfilms is a detective who pursues a missing map and,
in doing so, reveals the dialectic between a territory and the writing of this territory, or
between homeland and the "correct" map. All this is at the pivotal period cftime in Israel's
history just prior to andfollowing the Six Day War. Using observations on space and power
by Foucault, Marin, Mitchell, and Aitkin and Zonn, among others, the paper introduces a
socio-semiotic and visual analysis of the dialectic between imaginary and symbolic practices
of Israeli territory.

While detective stories seek to narrate the crime that started it all, the political
Zionist wishes to narrate a future that will end it all.
(Eisenzweig 9)
Space and place have always been significant elements in Israeli identity; they are,
however, constantly renegotiated as conditions change. Almost 2,000 years of Jewish
exile had created a gap between the idea of "the Israeli place" and the way in which this
perception materialized. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, the inherent
friction between these two elements increased. The noted French-Jewish philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas, in a discussion on the idolatry of landscape and place, observed that
"Judaism has always been free with regard to place" (233, qtd. in Mitchell). W. J. T.
Mitchell, however, identifies, as of the 1970s, a change in the perception of place and
space and claims that the codification of the Israeli landscape points to an ideology of
"territorial mysticism enforced by bullets and bulldozers" (223).
The Israeli cinema contains expressions of this friction, that is the idea of the Israeli
"place" and its concretization in a specific form, in different layers plot, characters,
dialogue and music but mainly in the way in which it "writes" not only the outward
appearance of a place, but also the optical subconscious of the space itself. In this paper,
I shall focus on the tension between the concept of place as one independent of the actual
geographical localization and its concretization through the reality of the Israeli state,
which was encapsulated in the cinematic writing of territory during the 1960s, a significant decade in the history of modern Israel. Through a critical analysis of two Israeli
films created during this short time span, I shall trace this tension, as well as the interplay
of the concepts of Zionism and place. In this case, Zionism refers to the practical
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Voi 3, No. 3 November 2004, pp. 307-317
Carfax Publishina
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http://www.tandf.co.uk/joumals DOI: 10.1080/1472588042000292376

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movement in Europe that encouraged immigration to, and settlement in, the Land of
Israel, while place refers to a cultural formation of both imaginary and political perceptions of territory.

Zionism and the forbidden Act

The two Israeli films employed as the framework for this discussion belong to the subgenre of what might be called the Zionist detective films. The earlier film is Moishe
Ventilator (Uri Zohar, 1966); the later one is Ta'alat Blaumilch (The Blaumilch Canal;
Ephraim Kishon, 1969). Both these films borrow the familiar conventions of the spy
thriller or detective story to assist them in dealing with questions of national identity.
Moishe Ventilator plays explicitly with the James Bond tradition (including superiors and
agents) throughout the film, while The Blaumilch Canal alludes to the traditional British
detective film, although the allusions are by and large implicit. Both films are intertextually related to the detective film genre in the way the mysteries are structured, the
costuming, the music and in the archetypal characterization of a detective. In addition,
and in line with the traditional mythical structure, the essential confiict at the moment
of the denouement is not resolved but disguised as the resolution of another confiict (see
Levi-Strauss). Underlying both plots is a contentious encounter between the Zionist
narrative and the thriller or detective story. By placing the Israeli territory at the centre
of the mystery, the two films direct their narrative economy at the fiery issue of the
Israeli identity, its main features and its limitations.
Similar to Tony Bennett and Janet Wollacott's identification of the literary and
cinematic texts of the James Bond series as an allegory of Britain's relations with its colonies, the two films under discussion here can be read as negotiations about the nature of
Israeli identity. To do this, it is necessary to examine closely the way in which Israeli
territory is inscribed in the films. This occurs in both films at the level of cinematic
space, by recording light and darkness and through the symbolic representation of the
same space, that is, the map.
The inscription of the territory in both films involves two misfits who undertake
subversive activities that the Israeli establishment subsequently adopts by default. In
both films, the energies of the detective plot are directed towards revealing the crime,
that is "the forbidden act", and discovering the perpetrator. In both, the detective
story is located "in the expanses of Israeli bureaucracy and operations", to use Orly
Castel-Bloom's formulation in Dollj City, represented by the military establishment or
by municipal officialdom. In each of the films, the protagonist is an individualist, an
eccentric misfit who deviates from accepted norms and performs an act considered
subversive by society. Nonetheless, both films end in an official ceremony in which
the establishment adopts the results of "the forbidden act", endowing it retroactively
with legitimacy and even considerable honour. In Moishe Venilator, a private in the
army, by the name of Moshe Privas, receives a citation for excellence from his
commander for his participation in an operation, the nature and circumstances of
which are, however, classified. In The Blaumilch Canal, the municipality takes credit
for a broad canal that an escaped mental patient named Blaumilch has dug along
Allenby Street, an important thoroughfare of Tel Aviv, upon which sailboats now
cruise. At the same time it repudiates Blaumilch, the man responsible for the canal. In

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this way, in both films, "the forbidden act" is dnematically rewritten and revised in
order to maintain the necessary social discipline and order.

The invisible borders of the map

The mystery around which each of the films revolves is a map a graphic device that
inscribes a territory. Since these maps and the way they are presented constitute the
focal point of the analysis, it is necessary to deal, however briefly, with the notion of
"map" and to define it and its cinematic functions. "Maps have an aura of scientific
precision, an aura that seems so natural that we tend to think that the map and the
territory are one and the same" (Portugali 44, my translation). Under the entry
"cartography", The Hebrew Encyclopedia (1978, vol. 30) notes that the aerial photograph
describes what is visible, while "the map describes essentially what is known" (qtd. in
Portugali 44). Cartographers enable us to look at a special kind of "image of the
world", whose size prevents the eye from seeing it in its entirety. Nevertheless, as
Louis Marin discerned while speaking of maps, "a figure [such as] a 'geographical map'
is a sort of schema that produces an entire group of possible narratives" ("City's
Portrait" 206). In this respect, a map is not a representation of geometrical relations
but a narrative in itself (Wood, in Meiraz 8); or as Italo Calvino put it when describing
the atlas of Kublai Khan: "The atlas reveals the shape of cities that still have no shape or
name" (133).
The map shows us, then, the world as we know it; and what we know includes what
we believe to exist, what we think exists, what we want to exist, and what we hope
exists. The map offers us, in this respect, a territorial "image of the world", and as such
it constitutes a component in the definition of homeland, as does the nation's language,
flag or monetary units.
Locations, places and spaces in the cinema serve not only as passive backgrounds for
the events that take place but also constitute a powerful agent that structures the cinematic experience. Space functions as a "sign of reality", a sign "which speaks geography,
memory and meaning" (Aitkin and Zonn 20). In this context, the presence of a map as
part of the represented world in a film is not only the reflection of a territory but the
territory itself, as a semiotic entity in the time-space dimension of the film. The map
a highly significant component of the Zionist narrative occupies a place of pride in
the detective story in both the films under discussion. At the same time, a rather interesting dialectic exists between the territory and its inscription, between the homeland
and an "accurate" map of it.
Moishe Ventilator opens with a top secret meeting of James Bond-type agents, in
which commander M, played by director Uri Zohar himself, sends his agent 000 (Shaike
Ophir) to Israel on a secret mission. Dressed in a wetsuit and holding afiashlight,000
tries to crack a safe. The background music, familiar to us from James Bond and Pink
Panther movies, changes into musical phrases from an old Israeli song: "We've not yet
eaten, we've not yet had a drink, our throats are dry" (once sung by Zionist pioneers
and youth movement scouts before meals). Agent 000 succeeds in cracking the safe and
then gets ready to eat. The door opens and Private Privas (Ya'akov Boudo), holding a
flashlight, enters the room to investigate the "suspicious sounds" he has heard coming
from the offices of the unit's headquarters. A fragment from a map is lying on the fioor

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the map that 000 has removed from the safe and Privas picks it up, along with a
couple of pencil stubs, a piece of paper and some screws.
In The Blaumilch Canal, a municipal clerk named Ziegler (Nissim Azikry) is sent
on a similar mission: to find a certain map in the archives of the roads department of
the Tel Aviv municipality. There is rhythmic music in the background and Ziegler, in
a black fedora, steals into the archives to look for the map of the digging along
Allenby Street. The door opens and the head cleaning lady (Rivka Michaeli) comes in
and urges the clerks in the archives to help the man find the map of central Tel Aviv.
Ziegler suddenly finds himself in possession of several maps, none of them the "right"
one.
In both scenes, the Zionist "detective" accidentally obtains a map, or a part of one.
Private Privas, nicknamed Moishe Ventilator, is a dedicated soldier with an obsession
for eliminating waste. On guard duty "somewhere in Israel" he collects pencil stubs and
pieces of rope and paper, just as he collected the fragment of the lost map. This map,
which proves to be of singular importance, will lead to a complicated chase to locate and
retrieve it, involving the "bad guys", commander M and 000, as well as the "good guys",
the undercover agents of the Israeli secret service. They have also been sent to that same
unit "somewhere" in the country. All of them are now after Privas, who hasn't the
slightest idea why. The good guys get the map after Privas discovers it in his army boot:
he always pads his boots with pieces of paper to protect his feet. Privas, the deviant
"other", is finally transformed into a regular guy like all the other soldiers: the map has
served as his ticket into "Israelihood". His rite de passage concludes with a parachute
jump, together with a crack paratroopers unit. As for the map itself, its identity remains
"classified", and unknown, even at the end of the film.
In The Blaumilch Canal, Kishon tells a story about City Hall and the way in which Tel
Aviv is turned into a "Venice of the Near East". Blaumilch (Bomba Zur), who has
escaped from a rehabilitation centre for mental patients, has acquired a powerful and
noisy jackhammer and begins to dig a canal along a Tel Aviv thoroughfare. His first
project is at the busy AllenbyBen Yehuda intersection. The police don't ask too many
questions. Instead, they cooperate with him in closing off certain streets. Blaumilch's
initiative brings down chaos on the building department of City Hall and succeeds in
arousing city officials from their torpor. The municipal bureaucracy demands action. No
relevant development plans for the Allenby intersection can be found in the office of the
city engineer, but, in order to save face and hide the fact that they have no idea about
what is happening, the city officials announce that they have approved the digging.
Blaumilch continues digging until he reaches the sea, at which point water pours into the
large canal what was once Allenby Street. At the official ceremony dedicating the
opening of the canal, the mayor and his entourage present the canal as the fruit of their
own initiative, ignoring Blaumilch completely. Ziegler objects vociferously to the
whole deception: there was no municipal plan and Blaumilch did everything singlehandedly. He thus threatens the hegemony of the city officials and is taken away by the
police in an ambulance, while Blaumilch, again single-handed, begins a new dig, this
time in front of Tel Aviv's city hall. As in Moishe Ventilator, here too the narrative
revolves around the search for a map, this time a map of the Allenby Street construction.
By offering an alternative geography for Tel Aviv, as a city of gondolas and canals, the
film creates a discourse that counters the municipality's policy, thus threatening the
established structure of the city.

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The mayor and the municipal employees who surround him are located in an "upper
world" in which they rule the city through the forces that represent them the police.
The "underworld", an anarchic world sketched by Blaumilch with his hydraulic
compressor, reveals another, unknown perspective of the city that forces its inhabitants
to seek their way in the bureaucratic and convoluted labyrinths that have evolved. Their
efforts are accompanied by the incessant roar of Blaumilch's compressor. The upper
world is characterized by a hierarchy, labour unions and fruitless discussions. It is set off
against the underworld in which individuahsm and hullabaloo prevail. The two are
connected by the police, by the people who live in the vicinity of the excavations and,
naturally, by Blaumilch himself. Throughout the entire film, Blaumilch does not utter
so much as a word. The narrative alone presents him as someone who operates according to his own view of the world, and without any recourse to bureaucratic procedures,
thus rendering them null and void.
In the wake of the new excavations, both the police and the neighbours join the
"imaginary order" of Blaumilch's "underworld". The mayor and his entourage also visit
the excavation site, and when during this visit the mayor falls off a huge pile of sand,
Blaumilch is the first to come to his aid. Thus, not only do the noise and digging disrupt
the municipal order, they also threaten the hierarchy that structures it that is, its
grammar. By his spontaneous excavations, Blaumilch challenges the traditional hierarchy and roles: he turns orderly municipal space into an unplanned and disturbing space
in which it is no longer possible to define objects by their familiar names. In addition to
his acts, Blaumilch's silence, a mute protest against the language and its rules, serves to
militate against them. In accordance with the logic of Foucault's heterotopic space
(1986), familiar and unfamiliar objects and spaces are set side by side. Just as in
Calvino's Invisible Cities or Borges's "Ton, Uqbar, Orbis and Tertius", disparate entities
coexist in this film: sea water with a courtroom, canals with urban foliage, labyrinths
together with erroneous maps, the gibberish of the neighbours imitating the noise of the
excavations with police discourse, and Ziegler's cries, heard intermittently through the
loudspeakers together with the mayor's speech.

Was there a map?

The ceremonies at the end of the two films inform us of the response of the establishment to the central conflicts revealed in the films. At the end of Moishe Ventilator the
commander shakes Private Privas's injured hand. The establishment has awarded the
hero legitimation as his name reverberates over the loudspeaker system of the army
base, along with the names of the camp's nurse and its three so-called "artistes" (played
by the popular comic trio Hagashash Hachiver, lit. "The Pale Scout"). According to the
detective narrative, Privas has made a contribution to state security by preventing the
map which he had inadvertently placed in his shoe from falling into enemy
hands. Just as he remains in total ignorance of the significance of the operation in which
he has taken part, so the viewer remains in total ignorance of the identity of the map
and the territory it represents. By shaking his hand at a military ceremony, the establishment, through its representative, has embraced "the other". At the same time.
Private Privas pledges absolute secrecy, thus creating an imaginary front of national
unity.

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The ceremony at the end oi Blaumilch is the inauguration of the canal under a banner
bearing Theodor Herzl's famous words: "If you will it, it is no dream." Ironically, the
municipal establishment gives complete legitimacy to Blaumilch's actions, but leaves
Blaumilch himself beyond the pale, still intent on fulfilling his own, individual interpretation of Herzl and to do so with his own hands. The irony is even stronger when we
remember that Herzl, the first to articulate the idea of the Jewish State in his treatise
Altneuland, placed great importance on the idea of coordinated building: he envisaged a
"Central Office for Municipal Building" that would concern itself with planning and
coordination throughout the Jewish State-to-be (Bein).
Blaumilch's fierce desire to dig underneath the streets of Tel Aviv has threatened
the accepted hierarchy. By creating referents of the territory the canals that have
no signifiers no map he has threatened the system of meaning. The rhetorical
energy of the film has been dedicated to discovering the authority, that is the map that
will endow Blaumilch's subversive activities with legitimacy. In the absence of any such
map, the municipal establishment has come to terms with the anarchistic referent by
"rewriting" the imaginary space that is, by inscribing Venetian canals into the Tel
Aviv lexicon. Furthermore, just when the district court, which has been mobilized to
help the municipality, is discussing the excavations, the sea threatens to inundate the
courtroom. The signified or the referent Tel Aviv's seawater is the antecedent of
the signifier the endowment of judicial sanction.
In both films, as we have seen, the territory and its inscription play major roles. In
Moishe Ventilator, the hero prevents the "baddies" from getting the second half of the
map. A map does exist, but the territory to which it refers is unknown, as is the reason
for its importance. Uri Zohar imports James Bond and his agents into the film in order
to introduce a national discourse into the film in the shape of national unity and patriotism. Native-born Israelis, members of the Sephardi community and new immigrants
present a united front and include, as well, one outsider who will later be turned into
an accepted member of the unit. In the genre of the musical comedy, which functions
as an intertext in this film, existing tensions are never resolved. Here the "singing Zionist detective" sweeps all of the conflicts under the carpet, thus presenting a temporary
Utopia of national and social unity. In The Blaumilch Canal, the protagonist's excavations are carried out in Tel Aviv without a blueprint or a map. Despite the opposition
of the establishment, both Ziegler and Blaumilch continue to seek the truth about the
past, each in his own way: Ziegler continues digging in the city archives, and Blaumilch
continues digging in the city streets, this time right in front of City Hall. The detective
genre operates in this film as an intertextual framework in order to examine the territorial discourse of Zionist hegemony, while the establishment points out the impossibility of any Utopian or anarchistic order, a la Rousseau, in the new state of Israel.

The role of territory in Zionism: dream and practice

In both films the map functions as the central metonymy despite the fact that the
maps themselves, with their coordinates and contour lines, are absent from the cinematic space. In Moishe Ventilator the map does not relate to a territory; in The Blaumilch
Canal the map is one that does not exist for a territory that has already become a fact.
Louis Marin, in his book Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, claims that the

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deconstruction of the presentation of spatial discourse through a map permits one to

reveal the ideology that structures these maps ("City's Portrait" 201). The absence of
any concretely identified maps in both of these films is highly significant and, in the
social and cultural context in which both of them were produced, their absence is symptomatic. The subject of territory has been related to political Zionism since the founding
of Zionism as a national goal, at which time territorial autonomy was proposed as the
solution to the problems of the Jewish people. Spatial organization has universal meaning as a social force, as Foucault pointed out, but the issue of territory has a special
meaning for the Jewish nation. Concepts such as space or territory are thus tied both to
the significance of power on the one hand and to Jewish history on the other.
Relations of territorial anomaly have characterized the connection between the
Jewish people and the Land of Israel from time immemorial. For almost 2000 years of
Jewish exile, the "Land of Israel" functioned as a displaced signiHer severed from its
referent. As a result, an imaginary territory, which served as the object of desire, was
structured. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (98) examined the link between the people of
Israel and its land and discerned in the practices of various Jewish groupings in the
diaspora those elements that produced the territorial discourse even in distant lands.
They note that the transfer of loyalty from the place itself to loyalty to "a memory of the
place" was the crucial step in accepting and overcoming the loss of the land.
The territory, its inscription and its legitimation are, therefore, of long-standing,
though fluctuating, importance in the history of the people of Israel. As such, they nourish Israeli identity even today. It is no wonder then that the narratives of both Moishe
Ventilator and The Blaumikb Canal are woven around this issue. Nor is it merely fortuitous that both Rims use the genre of the mystery story or thriller. The detective story,
by its very definition, as noted by Uri Eisenzweig (in his discussion of the stories of Israel
Zangwill), is a narrative that wants to tell itself again through another story. The detective is activated by his desire to explain what has already happened the crime. Political Zionism, for its part, does not want to tell the story of the past but to erase it. In
this way, it cancels out the circumstances that endowed it with an autonomous space:
the diaspora, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. It would appear that even after the establishment of the state, the Zionist narrative wanted to hide its past. As in the stories of
Zangwill from the end of the nineteenth century, so, too, in Moisbe Ventilator, the detective narrative points to the impossibility of reaching "the source": the specific circumstances surrounding the finding of the lost map, along with its identity, are concealed
for the benefit of a Utopian narrative of national unity. In The Blaumilch Canal,
Blaumilch's autonomous penetration into municipal space and the creation of an alternative space is rectified by the appropriation of the project by the municipality and the
displacement of its source: Blaumilch is ignored at the ceremony and the absence of the
map is concealed by its replacement with another map, found by chance in the municipal
files.
The fact that both of these films were made in the 1960s, one the year before the
Six-Day War and the other two years after it, is also of significance, historically and
socially. The Six-Day War is considered by many scholars, such as Medding, Kimmerling, Horowihz and Lissak, and Zuckermann, as a significant turning point in the history
of the State of Israel. Their research distinguishes the existence of both a pre-1967 and
a post-1967 social order. For Kimmerling, the link between the crisis of identity and the
blurring of the state's borders originates in the fact that the 1967 borders were replaced

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with an outlying, undefined space. Moreover, as discerned by Adas and Ben Bassat,
political discourse in Israel before 1967 focused on the "State of Israel"; after 1967, it
focused on the "Land of Israel". The secret of the strength of the Jewish people during
the long years of exile was, among other things, the distance between "here" and
"there". With the establishment of the state, when the territory changed from being
"The Promised Land" to that of a contested territory, there was a rupture between the
ideological and the bureaucratic systems. There was no alternative but to "inscribe"
other places, like Venetian Tel Aviv or "invisible maps", as suggested by the two films.
The "correct map" is the engine propelling the two films. Since in the reality of the
Middle East the contours of this map had not yet been precisely defined when these films
were made, it is no wonder that it appears in both of them as "the missing element". As
Benedict Anderson notes in his book Imaginary Communities, the map is a vital component
in the building of a nation. In Israeh films that seek to present the territorial aspect as
part of the structure of national identity, a concrete map cannot exist except in the
"blind space" of the viewer: the space created in the cognitive gap between pictures
moving on the screen and their reception and reconstruction in the viewer's brain.

Notes
The idea of "Israeli place" is opposed to the Israeli place as a concrete place. In Gurevitz
and Aran's terms, the idea is "the big place" and its materialization, the physical reality, is "the small place".
Theoretical works on Israeli cinema identify the popular "burekas" genre ("a social realism a la Hollywood" Ne'eman, 1998, 41) as one that operates in parallel to the
national cinema (Ne'eman, 1979 and 1998, Shohat, Ella 1991 [1989]). Interestingly,
by adopting the detective genre and the satirical mode, the two films discussed here
relate simultaneously to both traditions popular and national of the Israeli
cinema of the 1960s.
By "the British tradition" (of both spy-thrillers and detective films), I refer mainly to
the James Bond series which includes Dr No (1962), From Russia with Love {\ 963), GoldJinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965); and Inspector Clouseau, the character created by
Peter Sellers in the series The Pink Panther.
As mentioned by Tony Bennett and others, there are differences between the detective
films and the spy thrillers. Dennis Porter's expanded definition, however, includes the
Bond series in the detective genre: "'Detective novel' will therefore be employed here
as a generic term for all novels whose principal action concerns the attempt by a
specialist investigator to solve a crime and to bring a criminal to justice, whether the
crime involved be a single murder or the endeavour to destroy a civilization. Neither
the type of crime committed nor the type of legal or extralegal agent involved in pursuing the criminal determines a given novel's relation to the formula. It is the course of
the action alone that does it" (1981: 5, qtd. in Bennett and Wollacott 81-82).
Uri Zohar's film, in which we have several songs sung by the well-known Israeli group
Hagashash Hahiver, might also be dubbed The Singing Zionist Detective.
In this sense, these two films have a dialogue with films such as Uri Zohar's Hor
balvanah (Hole in the Moon) and Assi Dayan's Giv'at halfon ejna ona (Hallfon Hill
Doesn't Answer) (1967).
See Bordwell (229) on the "scenographics" of cinematic space.

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On male rituals in Israeli cinema, see also Miri Talmon. On the cinematic world of
the native-bom Israeli as revealed specifically in Uri Zohar's other films, see the article by Renen Shor.
Ziegler is the only clerk interested in discovering the truth of the matter. As a result
he is fired.
The literal meaning of the film's title, and of the main protagonist, Blaumilch, is "blue
milk", as pointed out to me by Yehuda (Judd) Ne'eman. One can add that the colours
connoted here blue and white are the colours of Israel's flag, thus adding
another element to the context of national identity in the film.
On the subject of heterotopic space in Borges and Calvino in particular, and in postmodern fiction in general, see McHale and Soja.
The master plan for Tel Aviv's transportation system (Collin and Zahavi) can serve as
an example of this Utopian approach.
See Nurith Gertz's study of the "other" in Israeh cinema of the 1970s and 1980s (chap.
S). The two films discussed here appeared prior to this trend in Israeh films.
See also Richard Dyer's study of the musical and Utopia.
In this context, see Yehuda (Judd) Ne'eman's study of Utopia and dystopia in the
Israeli cinema (1993).
On the issue of Israeli borders see Kemp. (2000)
See Yagil Levy and Yoav Peled's discussion. In this context one should mention the
transformation of the term "green line" in cartographic discourse in Israel. The "green
line" was the term used for the demarcation line, drawn in green on Israeli maps,
established by the ceasefire between Israel and its neighbours in 1949, and it functioned as the international border until 1967. With Israel's occupation of the territories after the 1967 war, what had previously been an almost hermetic border became
an internal administrative line of demarcation. In time, the "green line" disappeared
from official maps, making it difficult to distinguish between the borders of the sovereign State of Israel and Israel's military administration of the West Bank territories.
SeeMieraz(122).
"Blind space" is a term coined by Pascal Bonitzer. See Michal Friedman's discussion of
this concept in the context of double labyrinth films.

References
Aitken, Stuart C , and Leo Z. Zonn (eds.) Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of

Film. Lanham Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.

Attias, Jean-Christophe, and Esther Benbassa. Israel Imaginaire. France: Flammarion, 1998.
Bein, Alex, 1978, The First Zionist Congress. The World Zionist Organization (WZO)
2nd Edition.
Benedict, Anderson. Imagined Communities. London: Verso 1991.
Bennett, Tony, and Janet Wollacott. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero.

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Macmillan, 1987.

Bonitzer, Pascal, Le Champs aveugle. Paris: Cahiers du Cinema/Gallmard, 1882.
Bordwell, David. "Camera Movement and Cinematic Space." Explorations in Film Theory.
Ed. R. Burnet. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. 229-246.
Borges, Jorge-Luis. "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Labyrinths: Selected Stories &S>ther Writings.
Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964. 3-18.

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Eisenzwieg, Uri. "Space and Narrative: Zionism and Detective Fiction in the Writings of
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1960s I S R A E L I P O P U L A R C I N E M A
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AnatZanger is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Film & Television at Tel Aviv University. Among her subjects of interests are Israeli Cinema, Mythology and Cinema, Gender,
Cinema and Landscape. Her book By Way of Repetition is forthcoming in Amsterdam
University Press, She is currently completing a book on Israeli cinematic space. Address:
Film & Television Department, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978. [email:
zanger@post.tau.ac.il]

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