The Israel Film Service Collection

Comments on Israeli Culture, Episode 3: Not on Bread Alone

25 Minutes, 2000
Genre:
Documentary

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Production:Shai Harlev, Boris Maftsir
Production Company:Israel Film Service
Photographer: Dror Lebendiger , , Avi Abramov
Languages: Hebrew, Russian
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Subtitles: Hebrew

A 6-episode series, produced by the film service for the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, which seeks to clarify the local cultural field for creators from the Soviet Union in Israel. First-rate cultural researchers lead a multifaceted dialogue with local creators, about influences that shaped the identity of Israeli culture and its products, theater, art, dance, poetry, music, architecture and literature.
The third episode, “Not on Bread Alone,” simultaneously deals with the tension between religiosity and secularism and identifies points of entry between the worlds.
It examines culture’s attempts to interpret religious concepts and the spiritual world’s response to these attempts.
The artists participating in the third episode are Bat-Sheva Ensemble, Yehoshua Sobol, Shmuel Hasfari, Roman Kunsman, Martin Holth, Ofira Henig, Dov Kantorer, and Rina Yerushalmi.
“Not on the Bread Alone” opens with a powerful dance piece performed by the Bat-Sheva ensemble from the show “Anaphasa.” Anaphasa [denotes a backward response after the division of cells] caused a public uproar when it was first performed in 1993 due to the freedom the Bat Sheva ensemble took to criticize religious symbolism through dance.
A similar change took place in European art. The hegemonic power of the Christian Church over the interpretation of symbolism, semantics, and mythology of religion cracked when innovators like Dante Alighieri interpreted the symbolism of Heaven and Hell.
Mia Kaganskaya is convinced that a culture without metaphysics has no life. Gideon Ophrat traces Israeli culture’s path from atheism to the adaptation, out of the absence, of a new hero: God. Younger generations of creators seek art that can interpret Maimonides and Dostoyevsky alike, and the Israeli art field grapples with spiritual questions, with God becoming part of its vocabulary.

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