Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

I show that Israeli film director Nadav Lapid’s cinematic narratives cohere around what he presents as an intolerant social commons that characters in his films seek to escape in vain because they are so thoroughly constituted in and through these social frameworks. I argue that gestures of escape in Lapid’s films reflect a growing trend by artists and intellectuals on the Israeli political left who, like Lapid’s heroes, have sought to renounce the collective social order. In Lapid’s films, such gestures of escape are always ironic, beset as they are by the protagonists’ enmeshment in the very aesthetic and social workings they seek to disclaim. His films thus offer a meditation on the figure of the Israeli cultural or political dissident, who occupies an ambivalent role in Lapid’s work as both critic of, and participant in, the moral disintegration his film diagnoses broadly across the spectrum of Israel’s politically fraught social and artistic fields.