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| Eyal Sivan | |
|---|---|
| Born | Haifa, Israel |
| Residence | France |
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Occupation | Filmmaker |
Eyal Sivan (born 1964) is an Israeli filmmaker and critic noted for his harsh critiques of Israeli policies.
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Born in Haifa, Sivan attended school in Jerusalem, but dropped out to pursue photography. Though he found work as a fashion photographer in Tel-Aviv Sivan left Israel in 1985 for Paris, where the political climate was more tolerant of his views. 1 His first film, Aqabat-Jaber, passing through, released in 1987, follows the daily life of Palestinian refugees at the Aqabat-Jaber camp in the West Bank. The film won numerous awards. With his next movie, Izkor: Slaves of Memory (1991) he wins prestigious prizes, and sets the route for his future work, starting the conflict with Israeli state apparatus. In Izkor Sivan inquires the ways of instrumentalising the memory in Israeli educational system and dispels the "teleology" of the Zionist super-narrative in his foundational tenets - linearity and coherence. The politics of remembrance, the term introduced by the historian Raul Hilberg, is reexamined by Sivan on the issue of Jewish state and its politics. How is it possible that the people who have made out if their collective memory not only a cult but a culture capable of repeating similar crimes towards others today.
The very concept of recollection implies its dialectic complement - the forgetting. Memory is a canvas onto which a triple negation is painted: the negation of diasporic culture of the Jews, the so-called "negation of the exile"; the negation of Judeo-Arabic culture and the Westernisation of the Israeli societial framework; the negation of Palestinian naqba, the catastrophe which followed in 1948 after the formation of the state of Israel. On the basis of such triple negation a "competition of victims" ensues, which lays the martyrdom of Israel a point of reference towards which all the other ones become if not irrelevant, then certainly belittled and minorised into insignificance.
Sivan's Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (2004), shot with Palestinian author Michel Khleifi, represents the embodiment of the banality of evil in Israeli army. By traveling across the border established by the UN Resolution 181 they meet an Israeli soldier with philosophic inclination, who loves Kafka and who..blindly follows orders and bears no doubt in them. Although the movie explicates no similarities on the Nazi and Zionist realities, they are more than implied. What Sivan targets, on the other hand, is not principally Zionism in particular, but the Zionism is taken as a close and well-known exemplar of refusing to recognise the permanent existence of the banality of evil.The film led to the accusations by a prominent french philosopher Alain Finkielkraut that Sivan is a self-hating Jew and that the portions of the film dealing with the Holocaust had been plagiarized.
Claude Landzmann, the filmmaker of Shoah (film), opined that
| “ | I think that he mocks the Palestinians, he has no compassion for them. It is a bad film, fastidious, irritating, Holocaust-denying, profoundly immoral, and dishonest, and it centers around a single connecting thread, which is this Route 181 that has never existed. He neglects to say that on 15 May 1948, the day that the state of Israel was created, five Arab armies invaded the country, and there were 6,000 deaths among the 600,000 Israelis that made up the country. The markers of dishonesty: we never know where we are, in wastelands, no man’s lands, we never see Israel, we do not know who is speaking, not a single name is given in the film. In Mr. Sivan’s films, the witnesses do not sign their testimonies.2 | †|
Further investigation of the universality of the banality of evil is continued in Sivan's two latest films. I Love You All (2004), film on the surveillance and the control in DDR also speaks about it - representing extreme and almost unbelievable image of a society which has acquired one super-narrative and developed a system which makes it impossible to even speak on the possibility of anything outside it. Citizens K. (2007). is a story of the political success of the Kaczynski brothers (Jarosław and Lech) in Poland, though on the first look much brighter social satire, in its essence showing in which ways one obscure, conservative and backward idea (nationalism in this particular case), skillfully manipulated and popularised in the market and the media, can gain roots and spread to the point of being throned as unquestionable truth and the non-recognition of omnipresent and inherent danger of dispersing evil.
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