Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic

Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic charts current developments within the field of ethics and the role it plays in the study of moving images. It is the first collection of essays of its kind that brings together articles by film and media scholars from three continents, and provides multiple points of engagement of film with present and past histories, politics, myth making, and with core aspects of human subjectivity. The essays cover a wide range of topics, such as the European Union; Europe during World War II and after; film genres; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; early American history, and recent catastrophic events. The collection includes an introductory chapter by Thomas Elsaesser as well as chapters by Kristian Feigelson, Regine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, Anton Kaes, Gertrud Koch, Odeya Kohen-Raz, Lihi Nagler, Judd Ne'eman, Bill Nichols, and Janet Walker. The contributors offer different approaches to the issue of film and ethics and ask whether there are specific characteristics of the moving image, or of film scholarship, that relate to ethical issues; and how discussing the engagement of both narrative and documentary film with representations of the Other, trauma, terrorism, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may contribute to the re-shaping of past and current thoughts on these subjects.

Boaz Hagin is Lecturer at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Trauma, Memory and Fantasy in American Cinema (with Thomas Elsaesser; The Open University of Israel, 2011). Sandra Meiri is Lecturer and Co-Chair of Film Studies at the Department of Literature, Art and Linguistics at The Open University of Israel. She is the author of Any Sex You Can Do I Can Do Better: Cross-Gender and Narrative Cinema (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2011). Raz Yosef is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the BA Program in the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2004) and The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Routledge, 2011). Anat Zanger is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Film and Television and Chair of the MA Program in Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She is the author of Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguises (Amsterdam University Press, 2006), and is currently completing a book on space in Israeli film (Place and Memory in Contemporary Israeli Cinema).