Raya Morag
Raya Morag (Born on December 15, 1954) in Jerusalem, Israel is a Professor of cinema studies at the Department of Communications and Journalism, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Her research and publications deal with post-traumatic cinema and ethics; cinema, war, terror, genocide, femininity and masculinity; perpetrator trauma; documentary cinema; New German Cinema; Vietnam War Films; Israeli and Palestinian second Intifada cinema; the perpetrator figure and societal trauma in cinema; New Cambodian Cinema; and corporeal-feminist film critique.
Morag is a recipient of Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Grants for her projects on "The Perpetrator Figure and Societal Trauma in Cinema" (2013-2017) and "Cinema of Complicity and the Bystander: 1945-2017" (2018-2022).
Morag received The Hebrew University Rector Prize for 2014, awarded to distinguished scholars for excellence in research, teaching, and contribution to university academic life.
Between 2006-2014, Morag served as an Artistic Director of the Documentary Film Committee at the Rabinovich Fund for the Arts, Tel-Aviv. The Rabinovich Fund contributes considerable support to Israeli films.
Since 2008, Morag writes a cinema column in Haaretz, Literature and Culture.
Her research and publications deal with post-traumatic cinema and ethics; cinema, war, terror, genocide, femininity and masculinity; perpetrator trauma; documentary cinema; New German Cinema; Vietnam War Films; Israeli and Palestinian second Intifada cinema; the perpetrator figure and societal trauma in cinema; New Cambodian Cinema; and corporeal-feminist film critique.
Morag is a recipient of Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Grants for her projects on "The Perpetrator Figure and Societal Trauma in Cinema" (2013-2017) and "Cinema of Complicity and the Bystander: 1945-2017" (2018-2022).
Morag received The Hebrew University Rector Prize for 2014, awarded to distinguished scholars for excellence in research, teaching, and contribution to university academic life.
Between 2006-2014, Morag served as an Artistic Director of the Documentary Film Committee at the Rabinovich Fund for the Arts, Tel-Aviv. The Rabinovich Fund contributes considerable support to Israeli films.
Since 2008, Morag writes a cinema column in Haaretz, Literature and Culture.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (8)
Uploads
Papers by Raya Morag
research, which defines primarily the post-traumatic subject positions
of victim and perpetrator, this paper focuses on the Chinese cinema’s
representation of collaboration during the Cultural Revolution (CR). It
discusses the issue of betrayal inside the real or symbolic family, which
is still unexplored and even overlooked by Chinese cinema research.
Furthermore, it analyzes the prolonged and profound identity crisis
generated by the CR as presented by twenty-first century blockbuster
(e.g. Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home) and independent films (e.g. Wu
Wenguang’s 1966: My Time in the Red Guards and Investigating My
Father) especially through the figure of the collaborator and the
destructive dynamics of betrayal. In these films, the process I term
the ‘doubling paradigm,’ and its ‘doubling effect’ enable the spectator
to come to terms with the dimensions of pain and loss caused by
collaboration, and the ethical repercussions of revolutionary morality.
Following an analysis of the four forms of collaboration which emerge
from this corpus, this discussion points to the potential contribution of
Chinese ‘cinema of betrayal’ to the undertheorized subject position of
the collaborator, beyond the Chinese case.
remarkable renaissance of post-Khmer Rouge (KR) cinema generated
by women directors, which emerged after the KR regime
(1975–79) murdered most of the filmmakers and demolished
almost the entire Cambodian film industry; and, second, to analyze
first- and second-generation post-traumatic autobiographical (or
semi-autobiographical) fiction and non-fiction films that deal with
the almost-tabooi-ized issue of perpetratorhood within the family
(or symbolic family). Defining the term autogenocide will serve as
the basis for an analysis of two prominent films that render narratives
of encounters with low-ranking perpetrators in the shadow of
the ongoing controversy over the remit of the KR tribunal (ECCC) to
try only high-ranking perpetrators. Sotho Kulikar’s fiction film The
Last Reel (2014) and Neary Adeline Hay’s non-fiction film Angkar
(2018) propose postgenocide ethics embodied on a spectrum of
forgiveness from aporetic reconciliation to un-forgiving. It is
through this latter inclination towards un-forgiving that secondgeneration
women’s cinema subverts the first generation’s reconciled
attitude towards the perpetrators, and, most importantly, the
perpetrators’ denial and lack of accountability and atonement.
Thus, the new wave of Cambodian women’s cinema advances the
possibility of cinematic creation of ethical communities, moving
Cambodia towards a culture of accountability.
research, which defines primarily the post-traumatic subject positions
of victim and perpetrator, this paper focuses on the Chinese cinema’s
representation of collaboration during the Cultural Revolution (CR). It
discusses the issue of betrayal inside the real or symbolic family, which
is still unexplored and even overlooked by Chinese cinema research.
Furthermore, it analyzes the prolonged and profound identity crisis
generated by the CR as presented by twenty-first century blockbuster
(e.g. Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home) and independent films (e.g. Wu
Wenguang’s 1966: My Time in the Red Guards and Investigating My
Father) especially through the figure of the collaborator and the
destructive dynamics of betrayal. In these films, the process I term
the ‘doubling paradigm,’ and its ‘doubling effect’ enable the spectator
to come to terms with the dimensions of pain and loss caused by
collaboration, and the ethical repercussions of revolutionary morality.
Following an analysis of the four forms of collaboration which emerge
from this corpus, this discussion points to the potential contribution of
Chinese ‘cinema of betrayal’ to the undertheorized subject position of
the collaborator, beyond the Chinese case.
remarkable renaissance of post-Khmer Rouge (KR) cinema generated
by women directors, which emerged after the KR regime
(1975–79) murdered most of the filmmakers and demolished
almost the entire Cambodian film industry; and, second, to analyze
first- and second-generation post-traumatic autobiographical (or
semi-autobiographical) fiction and non-fiction films that deal with
the almost-tabooi-ized issue of perpetratorhood within the family
(or symbolic family). Defining the term autogenocide will serve as
the basis for an analysis of two prominent films that render narratives
of encounters with low-ranking perpetrators in the shadow of
the ongoing controversy over the remit of the KR tribunal (ECCC) to
try only high-ranking perpetrators. Sotho Kulikar’s fiction film The
Last Reel (2014) and Neary Adeline Hay’s non-fiction film Angkar
(2018) propose postgenocide ethics embodied on a spectrum of
forgiveness from aporetic reconciliation to un-forgiving. It is
through this latter inclination towards un-forgiving that secondgeneration
women’s cinema subverts the first generation’s reconciled
attitude towards the perpetrators, and, most importantly, the
perpetrators’ denial and lack of accountability and atonement.
Thus, the new wave of Cambodian women’s cinema advances the
possibility of cinematic creation of ethical communities, moving
Cambodia towards a culture of accountability.
Yosef investigates the development of the culture of masculinity, sexuality, and nationality in Israeli cinema from the 1930s to the 1990s. He does so not through a chronological historical depiction but by exploring Israeli cinema's role in the creation of national identity and the complex ways the dialectics of heteronormativity versus queerness embodied in conflicts over race and ethnicity shape this identity.
Yosef analyzes the Zionist dream of a new masculinity in Zionist films. Focusing on the Zionist body master narrative, he follows scholars such as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, and David Biale, who describe hundreds of years of European tradition "that associated the male Jew with disease, madness, degeneration, sexual perversity, and femininity" (17). The Zionist films prove the ambivalence that structures Zionist male body politics: Yosef suggests, "On the one hand, the Nazi is the racist emasculator and," referring to Boyarin's famous claim, "on the other hand, the Aryan male is the model for the Zionist hypermasculinity" (36). The Sabra (native-born Israeli) masculinity is therefore a counterimage not only to the old Jewish "feminine" physiognomy and mentality but, in what might be termed a complementary inversion, the fascist-Aryan body image.
One striking characteristic of this Zionist fantasy is its "whiteness." Yosef follows Edward Said and Ella Shohat, among others, in inquiring of Zionism's [End Page 654] Eurocentrism in Israeli cinema: "Zionist films linked the new Zionist manhood and body hygiene as a condition for 'racial' improvement and nation-building" (47). Accordingly, he claims, Zionist society reinforced and legitimized its nationalism through this whitened racism, based on the marginalization of both the external enemy, the Arab-Palestinian male, and the internal enemy, the Arab-Mizrahi Jew.
Two of Yosef's major contributions are his exploration of the construction of the Mizrahi body and sexuality in mainstream Israeli cinema and his examination of the practices of resistance of Mizrahi filmmakers to Zionist-Ashkenazi manhood discourses. Through an attentive reading, he claims that while 1980s and 1990s films address questions of homophobia and gay subjectivity, they are marked by "disavowal of ethnicity in Ashkenazi gay sexual politics and the incorporation of Mizrahi men into stereotyping and sexual objectification" (143).
Beyond Flesh analyzes the quintessential Israeliness embedded in the figure of the soldier in the military films of this period, which mark a crisis in Israeli male subjectivity that, according to Yosef, took place after the 1973 war and was aggravated by the war in Lebanon and the Intifada. This crisis is revealed in the films' representation of the disavowal of the soldier's submission to the Law of the Zionist Father, the soldier's seeking of pain and passivity as a way to act out queer identification with other soldiers, and the cinematic focus on the mutilation of the soldier.
Discussing interracial sex, Yosef points out that as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became more violent, more films transgressed the taboo of interracial sex. Some of the films use these representations to critique the heteronormative national ideology and the identity politics of the Israeli gay community. The author emphasizes the colonial scene of conquest as saturated with fears of impotence, emasculation, and death, as well as sexual fantasies. Following Leo Bersani, the body becomes a battlefield in which anal sex is regarded as a form of warfare.
Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator’s typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of “duel” documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment.
Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors’ moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag’s analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.
Reviews
This compelling book will matter as long as mass atrocities persist. Focused on the Cambodian genocide, Morag addresses a new phase in how we confront such events: films where survivors confront perpetrators face-to-face. These confrontations bring the visceral truth borne directly of human encounter to the fore with consequences both intensely personal and profoundly political.
Bill Nichols, author of Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary.
This book is far more than an illuminating analysis of Cambodian postgenocide cinema, valuable as that is, given the Pol Pot regime’s destruction of the country’s film industry, its artists, and its entire film archive, along with 1.7 million Cambodian lives. Morag ushers us forward to view unique interactions and confrontations between first-generation survivors and top- and lower-level Khmer Rouge perpetrators, made possible by the regime’s overthrow in 1979, its remnants’ defeat and surrender in 1999, and the establishment of the UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal in 2006. The book offers front-row seats to a new genre of post-Holocaust global documentary film, with innovative approaches to the study of genocide, trauma, and gender.
Ben Kiernan, author of The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79.
In Perpetrator Cinema, Raya Morag brings her superb intellect and expertise in trauma and Holocaust cinema to this study of groundbreaking films inspired by Cambodia's Year Zero. Morag brilliantly explores why an ethics of moral resentment undergirds the survivor-perpetrator duels in the cinema of Rithy Panh, Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin, and Guillaume P. Suon, among others, and aptly considers films about sexual violence, among the Khmer Rouge's worst human rights abuses. Documentary scholars and South Asian cinema specialists will find much to praise in this theoretically rich, engrossing work.
Deirdre Boyle, The New School.
Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.
This book draws on psychoanalysis, masculinity studies, and corporeal feminism to explore the bodily experience of defeat. It examines themes and representations of body and sexuality to create a theoretical framework that reveals anew the link between defeated masculinity and nationalism. Building on an original analysis of such varied films as The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, The Tin Drum, and Paris Texas, the author suggests new criteria that highlight the characteristics of post-traumatic cinema.