Urbanism and Cinema – The Case of  Jerusalem (M.A. Research Seminar)

Prof. Anat Zanger

The topic of this seminar is Jerusalem: a city whose walls and stones are imbued with a history of longing and desire, fact and fiction, power struggles and bloodshed. Many different and variegated images have been used to describe Jerusalem in literature, poetry and photography. The cinematic medium, as well as that of television, have similarly reiterated the images of the heavenly and earthly city through their cameras and plots. This seminar seeks to examine the manner in which Jerusalem has been captured on film, television and internet screens in both Israeli and international visual culture. How might we define a 'cinematic city' and what is Jerusalem's uniqueness as a city portrayed through film? Do international representations of the city differ from those depicted in Israeli film and television? What are the links between religious, cultural and economic institutions to the city of Jerusalem and its representational spaces? How might the dominant narrative of the city be characterized and what "other" voices are sounded beyond it – Orthodox? Secular? Women? Jews? Palestinians?

The seminar will focus on a number of significant films and articles and direct the students towards developing their own topic-related research. Some of the issues to be examined are the relevancy of different research methods of the city as they pertain to urbanism and cinema (de Certeau, Leach); Utopia, historiography and the archive (Elsaesser, Kaes, Aran and Gurevitch, Yerushalmi, Bourdieu);  Secular space and sacred space (Eliade, Ora Limor,, Larry Abramson, Zanger). The films and television series to be discussed include: My Michael, Three Days and a Child, The Garden, In Jerusalem, Someone to Run With, Seven Minutes in Heaven, James' Journey to Jerusalem, Abuleleh, Jerusalem Cuts, Indoors, HaZoref ("The Goldsmith"), Shtisel, Srugim ("Knitted"), World War Z, Jeruzalem and several other short films and diary films.

The first part of the seminar will consist of reading various theoretical and methodological texts and discussing them through a number of key films. The second part of the seminar will include personal and group instructions of the individual projects, based on the theoretical tools presented during the first part, as well as further texts presented by students in class. In the third and conclusive part of the seminar, the findings of each project will be presented in class in preparation for the writing of each respective article.