The Death of Fantasy is an Opportunity for Imagination

Imagination and fantasy play a central role in society. They allow us to visualize alternatives, options of better worlds to strive for. They can make our fears and the challenges we face tangible, thereby giving us space to deal with them and think of solutions. Films about the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts have tried over the years to develop these imaginations and fantasies to allow us to envision possibilities for repair, reconciliation, connection, healing, and peace. Films such as Behind the Bars, Avanti Popolo, Cup Final, and The Band’s Visit are not fantasy films in the classic sense, but they are films that have allowed us to fantasize about a different reality. A reality of dialogue, cooperation, brotherhood, and closeness between Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians (directly or indirectly). To imagine how we can heal our wounds and live as a tolerant society, with compassion for the other as well as for ourselves.

The gradual disappearance of films about the conflict from the local feature film scene attests to our failure as a society to dream, imagine alternatives, and strive for them. The almost complete disappearance of conversations about peace talks and coexistence symbolizes the stagnation of our society in the last twenty five years, since the summer of 2000, when former Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared that “there is no partner” and the perception that “there is no one to talk to” has become fixed. October 7 was not supposed to cause a sobering realization that there is no point in promoting a peace process because the other side only wants to slaughter us. This is the perception that has been promoted in Israeli society since the failure of 2000. On the contrary, it should have been understood that Israeli society’s failure to imagine an alternative to managing the conflict and its unwillingness to imagine a solution for over twenty years (with few exceptions) is what led to this total collapse. If anything, October 7 should have been followed by a call to awaken the imagination—to the existing urgency to reimagine peace as a possibility.

In fact, the main failure of Israeli society is also related to the Oslo Accords themselves, and to the inability of the leadership, but mainly of the Israeli public, to imagine peace even then. Israeli society holds on to a mistaken and problematic perception of what “peace” is. Songs, plays, films, and others, imagine peace as a kind of “instant” utopia. Like pouring a little water into powder and voilà –  coffee. “I was born for peace that will just dawn on us,” songs tell us. “Once we recognize each other’s humanity and see that we are not so different, there will be peace immediately,” movies tell us. In the public imagination, the peace process is something actually lacking in process. 

Thus, Israeli society lacks patience. The connection between peace and security has created a feeling that the Oslo Accords have failed to fulfill their role of bringing security in the short, immediate term. Peace, by definition, is the opposite of war and violence, but in reality, the peace process is exactly that – a process. It takes patience and time, even when violence continues. This doesn’t mean that peace has failed or that there’s “no one to talk to.” It means that it takes time, and that if we persevere and continue, over the years, the violence will decrease, there will be more understanding, more dialogue, more “peace.” As Rabin said, paraphrasing Ben-Gurion: “To continue to fight terrorism as if there is no peace process, and continue the peace process as if there is no terrorism.” This is seemingly a paradox: how can there be peace if there is still war? This complexity requires our imagination, our ability to illustrate through culture, art, and entertainment the ability to persevere, to believe, to not give up. To be strong, not in the sense of defeating the enemy, but in the inner strength to stand up to violence and continue to believe in peace, despite everything. This is a peace that will not “just dawn on us,” but that will be built, step by step, over decades, until our children or grandchildren can live it to the fullest.

Israeli cinema has failed in its ability to imagine this insight, in its ability to communicate and evoke emotion through it. It is bound and captive to the simplistic notion of immediate and utopian peace, and is unable to imagine it any other way. Since the collapse of the Oslo process, the few films made about the conflict have failed to change the situation or offer an alternative, but they have offered interesting images of a different kind and addressed the fantastical dimension in a unique way.

Children’s Fairy Tales on the Battlefield

Dr. Yael Munk (film researcher) argues in an article from 2011 that “Lebanon films” are characterized by nostalgia for the innocence of youth, their lost purity and beauty. But why do Lebanese films from the first decade of the 21st century lament the death of youth? Munk interprets the image of the tank in a sunflower field, which marks the end of the film Lebanon (2009, directed by Shmulik Maoz), as a symbol of the painful memory of something pure that has been irretrievably shattered: it is no longer possible to look at the beautiful field with an innocent eye; the tank is stuck in it like a traumatic memory. Indeed, Lebanon is replete with poetic images, but its analysis reveals that the lament for lost youth also has broad socio-political implications. The lost innocence, expressed through images associated with fantasy and children’s fairy tales, actually signifies the shattered hopes for peace.

In Lebanon, a ray of light penetrating the tank from the top hatch is a common image. The film’s protagonist, Shmulik (Yoav Donat), looks up, and for a moment the darkness in which he is immersed is illuminated by a bright ray of light that floods his face and those of his friends. The image brings to mind artistic-religious imagery, mainly because of the upward gaze and the light shining from “the heavens.” In one of the film’s climactic moments, light penetrates the tank as the body of a dead paratrooper is removed, and a voice coming from the radio device refers to the body as an “angel.” In the chaotic and upside-down world of Lebanon, the word “angel” means the body of a dead soldier. But instead of ascending to heaven, the angel descends into a tank, a kind of poetic and symbolic hell.

Lebanon creates its poetic world, among other things, with the help of the military-like jargon it uses. This credible but exaggerated language lends a poetic and surreal layer to the events. For example, a phosphorus bomb becomes “exploding smoke”; the destination the soldiers are supposed to reach is called “Saint Tropez,” the tank is called “Rhino,” the combat unit is called “Cinderella,” the commander whose voice is heard on the radio device is “Cornelia,” the wounded soldier is a “Flower,” and the enemy is a “Cricket.” The code words (some of which were taken from military jargon and some of which were invented especially for the film) are intended to emphasize the abstract, surrealistic dimension, as if taken from a fantasy or a children’s fairy tale. They create a dissonance between the signifier and the signified. Thus, when the paratrooper is wounded, the commander calls out over the radio, “I have a flower, I have a flower,” and later, when he dies from his wounds and his body is being evacuated, the radio transmits, “An angel is rising, an angel is rising.”

The clear symbolism, perhaps even deliberately crude, is intended to transport the viewer from the hyperrealism of the bloody, harsh, and cruel images to the realms of surrealism and fantasy. In this context, Lebanon belongs in a sense to extreme cinema, a cinematic style that depicts extreme images and situations in a graphically blunt manner, explicitly presenting physical and mental violence. However, in addition to and sometimes instead of evoking disgust and horror, these extreme and cruel images take on a poetic tone. This poetics of cruelty invites discussion of moral issues and man’s tendency toward violence and evil. The cinema of the extreme, sometimes referred to as the cinema of cruelty, gained popularity in the West in the late 1990s and in the beginning of the 21st century, and European and American cinema began to incorporate aspects of it into both horror and thriller films as well as art films. Lebanon‘s connection to extreme/cruelty cinema is expressed in its blunt depiction of horror and the surrealistic and poetic connotations it imparts, which add subconscious aspects to the image of extreme realism.

This strategy of combining elements from the fantasy genre and even children’s fairy tales with the context of violence and harsh reality characterizes not only Lebanon, but also a number of other films about the conflict since the collapse of the Oslo process. Ajami (2010, directed by Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti), for example, despite its realistic stylistic tendency, also flirts with fantasy, with the world of children’s fairy tales and, most of all, with comics. In the film, Nasri (Fouad Habash) is a boy whose hobby is drawing comics. He also narrates the beginning and end of the film. Nasri’s comics and narration bridge the violent world of reality with the harmonious world of his illustrations. In retrospect, we discover that Nasri was killed and what we heard throughout the film was the narration of a dead child. Nasri’s voice emerges from the world of the dead, addressing the viewers and asking them to close their eyes, imagine, and then open them. His narration is sometimes accompanied by his comics, which recreate events that took place in the film or, alternatively, describe his memories or thoughts of better, more beautiful and harmonious times. The dimension of comics and fairy tales appears in Ajami as a kind of escape from the violence and difficulties generated by the stubborn conflict.

Comics as a bridge between the violent world of reality and the harmonious world of imagination | From the film Ajami, 2010, directed by: Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti

With the collapse of the hope for peace, filmmakers lost the ability to create a space for closeness and peace in “reality,” and therefore new films about the conflict tend to invent an imaginary, utopian, poetic world that attempts to repel violence and nullify it, or turn it into a naive expression of childhood. This is also the case in The Band’s Visit (2007, directed by Eran Kolirin), which depicts a world that behaves like a fairy tale, unanchored in place and time, thus creating a fantastical alternative to the violence and hatred that exist outside it. But this imaginary world collapses, unable to hold its own.

In Lebanon, the combination of elements from children’s fairy tales with military jargon and the image of a tank in a field of sunflowers creates tension between naivety and horror. In Ajami, Nasri is a kind of ghost hovering over the film, and his spiritual presence lends a mythical dimension to everything that happens in it, but Nasri’s illustrations ultimately also depict the violence around him, and as in Lebanon, here too the innocent world of childhood is corrupted and tainted. The ambivalence created by this combination of innocence and violence and the depiction of a corrupted fairy-tale world produces images that mourn the innocent hope for peace that has been violently murdered. In this context, the post-Oslo conflict films not only speak of the inability to create a space and time for dialogue, peace, and innocence, but also point to the impossibility of even imagining such space and time.

The End of Fantasy, an Opportunity for Imagination

Thus, the films of the early 21st century about the conflict constitute a kind of “requiem for peace,” an elegy for the naive hope for utopian peace that prevailed in Israeli society.

However, there may be a positive side to departing from this conception of peace – a value in attempting to understand the concept of “peace” in new ways, less unambiguous, deterministic, and immediate, ways that recognize that peace is a process and that violence, paradoxically, will continue to be part of reality, part of our lives, even during the long and painful period of peacebuilding. Hopefully, it will fade away throughout years of action, healing wounds, dialogue and mutual communication.

Part of the necessary work is imagining. The inability to imagine a peace process in a way that is not childish or fantastical is a serious problem not only for cinema, but for Israeli culture and society as a whole. In this sense, the idea of “the death of peace” in cinema has a double meaning. While it refers to the “requiem” films of the early 2000s, it also constitutes a positive call to finally bury the simplistic, utopian, and misleading concept of “peace” in Israeli society and to adopt a new concept that views it as a long-term process that requires perseverance to ensure a more equal, better, and safer society for future generations. 

Israeli culture in general, and Israeli cinema in particular, must find ways to reimagine peace. October 7 demands that we do so, because giving up on imagination means giving up on the future, and giving up on the future means choosing death.