Abstract
Yael Munk analyzes the Israeli anti-war film, Avanti Popolo (1986), and argues that its director, Rafi Bukaee, focuses on the enemy perspective in order to work through his own perpetrator’s trauma as a reserve soldier. Utilizing both the film and an interview from the director as analytical basis, Munk makes the convincing case that the surrealistic narrative of Avanti Popolo as well as its emphasis on the enemy is proof that Bukaee is processing his own trauma from the war and is commenting on the role of the Israeli military more generally. Using a discrete, more chronologically distanced, and more socially uncontested war in Israel to tackle this issue, Bukaee manages to evoke compassion, humanism, and pity for all those involved in war, including the perpetrator, as Munk displays.
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Films
2001: A Space Odyssey. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA, 1968.
Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA, 1979.
Avanti Popolo. Directed by Rafi Bukaee. Israel, 1986.
Beaufort. Directed by Joseph Cedar. Israel, 2007.
Beyond the Walls. Directed by Uri Barabash. Israel, 1984.
Birth of a Nation. Directed by D.W. Griffith. USA, 1915.
Cup Final. Directed by Eran Riklis. Israel, 1991.
Every Bastard a King. Directed by Uri Zohar. Israel, 1968.
Field Diary. Directed by Amos Gitai. Israel, France, 1982.
Lebanon. Directed by Samuel Maoz. Israel, France, Germany, United Kingdom, 2009.
On a Narrow Bridge. Directed by Nissim Dayan. Israel, 1985.
Platoon. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA, 1986.
The Deer Hunter. Directed by Michael Cimino. USA, 1978.
Waltz with Bashir. Directed by Ari Folman. Israel, France, Germany, USA, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, 2008.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my research assistant Sigal Yona for her precious work, my friend Ms. Maayan Miloh, Rafi Bukaee’s widow for the various conversations we held about the film, and Ms. Michèle Driguez from the Montpellier Festival in France for providing me with a copy of the original interview quoted in this article.
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Munk, Y. (2019). Rafi Bukaee’s Avanti Popolo : Telling the War from the Traumatized Perpetrator’s Perspective. In: Tholas, C., Goldie, J., Ritzenhoff, K. (eds) New Perspectives on the War Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23096-8_4
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