While the critical discussion of minor cinema habitually concerns the representation of minority groups, to date, little effort has been made to address the aesthetic, and above all, the ethical implications of the term. For it is the textual disposition of the minor film and the singularity of its audience mode of address which stand out and distinguish it from the rest. Such films engage the minor use of cinema’s major language only to invoke its shortcoming, and in so doing, usher in an ongoing erasure of representation and its effected collective imagination. In that sense, minor films do not simply portray the stories of minor subjects, they question the efficacy of representation as such.
Without doubt, the most significant phenomena to emerge out of Israeli cinema in the last two decades is what can be termed minor national films. Yet, can a film be minor and national at the same time? Are we dealing with a contradiction of terms?
The proposed presentation brings the discussion of minor cinema into dialogue with a tradition of Jewish thought, a dialogue which informs my reading of the intellectual, cultural, and ethical position proclaimed by the films with the aims of theorizing the very possibility that Israeli minor films can be read, rather counterintuitively, as both minor and national. The upshot of this position is of consequence for our understanding of the cultural processes that shape and reshape the Israeli experience in the present historical juncture.