The Decline of the Kibbutz Dream in Oded Hirsch’s Hallucinatory Video Art

• In Event: Reading, Representing, and Creating the Nation—Zionism and Literature

Abstract

Oded Hirsch has enjoyed critical acclaim for four films that combine performance art with unusual cinematography to creatively comment on both personal and collective aspects of his kibbutz years and his rather bleak assessment of the kibbutz future. Each installment in this cerebral, compassionate, and at times almost hallucinatory series depicts a strange, seemingly senseless labor undertaken by silent individuals and groups often leading to dubious, or anticlimactic, outcomes. One of the most powerful of Hirsch’s potent gestures to his father’s generation is evident in "Habaita" (2010) wherein twenty-one women and men in their sixties gaze fixedly toward an unseen horizon. They stand passively in an anchored boat surrounded by the Kinneret’s waters against a hazy, almost indeterminate landscape. These dignified and vaguely mysterious figures are as motionless as the boat they stand in, mouths tightly pursed, expressions hauntingly oblique. "Habaita" stealthily destabilizes the signifiers of immigration, homeland, and the lasting achievements of rootedness. In contrast, "Tochka" offers notably greater movement and a deeper sense of environment, opening on a scene of muddy laborers whose absurdly outsized kova tembels shield their eyes from view. Discordant and hollow labor-related sounds are heard but nobody speaks: that pervasive absence of human speech is just one of the features of Hirsch’s aesthetic pointedly reduce any notion of individuality or personality. Bearing unwieldy buckets strung haphazardly at their hips and hauling an absurd collection of rusty agricultural tools, the men struggle stoically in a foggy landscape. A strange behemoth-like construction arises over the landscape, perhaps a parody of the stockade and watchtower practice of settlement of early days. In Hirsch’s rich visual language, that grandiose image captures the kibbutz’s quixotic history; the impossible abundance and ultimate indeterminacy of what was attempted in its essence. Hirsch's work represents one of the most creatively stirring and elegiac responses to the fading socialist achievement of Israel's past.

author

• Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Louisville