THE BOX PEOPLE
I recall a children’s fairy-story about a little boy who didn’t want to see anything that was threatening to him and so put a box over his head. I think he fell off a cliff.
Today we’d call him a boycotter.
Two of the most seasoned travellers to the Land of the Box People are Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, both fine film-makers, but neither of them new to campaigning to get the work of fellow artists banned, censored, tossed into the flames of uncreating bigotry, made as though they never were.
Their justification for this most unforgivable of all acts of artistic betrayal follows the usual pattern. The artist in question must be an Israeli. The artist in question - or the institution showing, screening, stocking or performing the work of the artist in question - has ‘links’’ to a monstrous regime (which has to be Israel) and is therefore ‘a silent accomplice’ to terrible acts (which have to be Israeli). The artist in question (who must be an Israeli) does not create art as other creators do, to make life more endurable for everyone, but has only one aim and that is to cover up his country’s crimes. This - in order to discredit any impulse to make beauty or seek truth in the country that must be Israel - the Box People call art-washing.
For the slightest whiff of art-washing the Box People have the most sensitive noses. Their latest find is The Phoenix Cinema in Finchley which had already, before the Loach-Leigh intervention, been defaced for agreeing to screen a short festival of Israeli films, including Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre. Thus do the brute philistine defacers and educated doorkeepers of the culture work hand in hand, to ensure that the rest of us remain jammed into our boxes. Thou shalt not see what we deem it ‘unacceptable’ you see.
There are politicians who are artists and artists who are politicians, but they wont be good at both. Each is the enemy of the other, for politicians have beliefs and artists don’t. Whatever faith an artist had before he made the painting or wrote the novel, he will lose by the time the work is finished. This is the provisional, forever changing, all doubting, nature of art and its highest justification
If Loach and Leigh possessed the true freedom of spirit of the artist they would be demanding the right of all artists to be seen and read, partly to acknowledge the autonomy of art - its capacity to thrive in the most uncongenial of climates - but just as importantly because it impoverishes them to elude narratives foreign to their own.
Once you allow politics to determine what should be seen and what shouldn’t, you take the side of the oligarch against art.
But is there something in particular about Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre that Loach and Leigh cannot bear to see, or let us see? Will the film make it just a little bit more difficult to argue that Israel and Israel alone is the source of all evil? Will the sight of the murder of innocent Israeli children clutter up the simple tale they have to tell? Is their view of the world so friable that an alternative will leave it in ruins?
But I forget: they have no view of the world: they wear a box on their heads.
Closer still and closer every day they walk to the edge of the cliff.
Recently I was having a discussion about ‘art’ not being a conscious act, but from the subconscious (and collective unconscious as Jung describes it). The subconscious is not rational or logical but communicates with symbols and archetypes. The recent rise in antisemitism is dangerous because the archetype of the “evil Jew” is easily resurrected and very powerful, particularly in times of chaos like today.
After the October 7 attacks, I rewatched the Exodus movie to refresh my knowledge of the founding of Israel in the chaos following WWII and the Holocaust. I found myself yearning for the archetype of the feisty, courageous secular Jew fighting for basic human dignity and security.
Leon Uris’s story was very inclusive and optimistic and evoked the archetype of the young, ‘Puer aeternus’ David confronting the Goliath of world ostracism and discrimination. How dramatically these archetypes have shifted over the years as modern Israel has prospered and Arab Palestinians have floundered reverting from a powerful Goliath to hapless martyrs crushed beneath the boot of the ‘Zionist’ Goliath.
Art is the process of making subconscious forces and symbols conscious. To censor art is to promote propaganda which is disguising conscious motives as something deeper. Israel currently is engaged in numerous wars and is in danger of losing the battle of archetypes influencing the “hearts and minds” in the world’s narrative. This is a battle Israel cannot afford to lose.
Indeed. No true artist would want to ban another artist. These are not artists, these are politruks. And the fact that they wanted to ban even a film about the massacre at the music festival says it all.