AbstractsSociology

Hollywood has frequently deployed an oppositional logic as a means of fostering an idealised notion of American nationhood. This is something that is widely acknowledged throughout film scholarship. Significantly less critical attention, however, has been devoted to the ways in which idealised conceptions of Americanism have been enunciated through the cinematic mobilisation of nations that are seen as being aligned with or culturally and politically similar to the United States. This thesis examines the functionality of alignment and parallelism in the construction of American nationhood by tracking the evolution of Hollywood’s various representations and invocations of both pre-historical and present-day Israel. While Israel has seemingly been a minor presence in Hollywood cinema, this thesis argues that there is a long history of Hollywood deploying images of Israel as a means of articulating an idealised notion of American national identity and negotiating anxieties peculiar to contemporaneous American society. This argument is developed through readings of The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (William Wyler, 1959), Exodus (Otto Preminger, 1960), Cast a Giant Shadow (Melville Shavelson, 1966), Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977), The Delta Force (Menahem Golan, 1986), and Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005). The films selected for analysis encompass a range of genres, represent productions of various scale and ambition, and also span the entire history of Israel’s existence as a state. Moreover, they undoubtedly constitute the most significant of Hollywood‘s imaginings of Israel by virtue of the prominence of each film’s original source material, the stature of the filmmakers and actors responsible for each film, and the degree to which each film penetrated the cultural consciousness. The mobilisation of Israel that pervades this eclectic group of films effectively demonstrates one of the more surreptitious ways in which Hollywood has historically constructed and circulated dominant notions of American national identity. Advisors/Committee Members: Brooks, Jodi, Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW, Langford, Michelle, Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW.