The curator Eli Schvadron selected Israeli videos in a bid to illustrate the state of audiovisual production in the country circa late 1980s and early 1990s. He mapped out the pieces into three main groups: there are videos produced by TV channels under government tutelage, advertising the Zionist dream’s consensus; departing from utopia, the videos in the second set discuss national conflicts, i.e. the tense relations between Jews and Palestinians, Arabs and Israelis, and between Jews and their own recent pat of Holocaust; and finally, the third set features videos made from a more individual, personal standpoint, often using makeshift equipment, and closer to what is commonly called video art.
artists
Works
- Healing 80
- The DolphinAmikan Shosberger
- Blue DreamArik Dor Davidovitch
- Sadum HusseinArik Dor Davidovitch
- The Missing PictureAsher Talim
- Ma Kara - What's Wrong?Avaraham Heffner
- Hiroshima Through AushwitzHoni Hameagel
- Straight to The PointNisim Tahar, Uri Milles, 1989
- Audio-Visual PortraitTamar Raban
- Two MusiciansYigal Perry
Curator's text 1990
Video making is Israel - Three approaches
Israel's TV stations are under some government control and are subject to sensorship. Cable TV, which will be worse free of govermental overlook, is just doing it's first steps, so that it's impact on creative TV is of minor importance for the time being.
Video productions is Israel can be divided into three categories. The first, are tapes produced by the TV stations themselves. There are three of them, not incluind the Cable TV: the Educational Channel - which began it's broadcasting years before the regular TV - the main channel, and Channel 2 - relatively new, with still "experimental" programme, the status of which is not quite clear. Now it should be the task stations of manifest the "National Concensus": the Zionist dream, the hope of developing a new and just society. But, as a matter of fact it is not the "National Consensus"or the "Zionist Yutopia" that stirs the minds of Israeli intellectuals, creators, artists and even TV programme director nowadays. It is the "National Conflicts" that they are interested in: Conflicts between immigrants from the Levante and North-Africa and immigrants from Europe and Anglo-Saxon countris; conflict between the will and need to remember the evils of the Nazis towards the Jews and the will to forget "Old Europe" and the Holocaust.
Video tapes and programmes dealing with these conflicts are the second category of video creation in Israel, and are quite frequently shown on regular TV programmes and even commissioned by them. The technical facilities used vary from school equipment to the greatest studios in the country including the facilities at the TV stations themselves.
The fact that these tapes (and films) - with their message of criticism and "cul-de-sac" feeling - find their way so easily into the programme of the official media, has surely something to do with censorship laws. Now, the third category includes all those "fridge" tapes made with rather poor technical facilities, where the individual state of mind regions and where the extreme and the "avant-garde" find their expression. To sum it up in one sentence this third category belongs to the Video-Art.
Nor that Video-Art in Israel has it's place way out of the Video-Art done elsewehere, but in attempting to characterize the works done here. I would describe the Israeli Video-Art as more "narrative". Of course there are exception to his rule, such as minimal works trying to study one element of the medium, which were not selected for this presentation, but the majority of works are narrative. Their subject is mainly descriptions of personal dilemmas, personal state-of-mind, personal feelings which is often where "narrative" arts find themselves. The surprinzing factor about these works is in their total ignoring of the everyday political and social problems - problems which invade every aspect of personal life in Israel. Some of the tapes speak English, not Hebrew - and this glancing at foreign pastures cannot be explaned only by the lack of galleries, museums and screening places which show video-art. In comparing the development in video-art and other narrative arts in today Israel, the difference becomes almost inexplicable. In almost every film producted in the country, a jewish boy falls in love with a lovely Palestian girl - the basic history for a greek tragedy. Their love will not have a happy end. Every writer will describe the strange religious people of Jerusalem with strange black "uniforme" in constrast to the atheist-man-of-the-world person, who has an ambivalent attitude subject in today's Hebrew literature and other narratives arts - even painting. The critics talk about "the second generation of Holocaust survivors": that is the sons and daughters of the survivors itself, who learn about their parents past from indirect sources. Their parents are unable or/and unwilling to look back. Joining is an effort to create a new society where a Holocaust would not happen again. But in Video-Art you can hardly find any traces of these subjects.
The selection brought to your Festival is mainly based on the third categories described above. In making the choice we preferred those tapes which have a direct stattement about these "National Conflicts". In an original but not always clear enough way. Not all tapes "first rate" from the technical point of view.
However we found all of them intrusting if not provocative. Still our way of looking at them is an insider - I hope you will share the interest and fascination in looking at them.
Uri Lipshitz & Eli Shvadron
8th Fotoptica Internacional Video Festival. 09 a 15 de Novembro de 1990. p. 63 e p. 64.