Somewhere in Tel Aviv, in 1970, a 26-minute short called Sex was shot and swiftly banned. It vanished almost as soon as it appeared. The director, David Avidan, already notorious as a poet, provocateur, and cultural saboteur, had done what few in Israel dared: he treated film as a philosophical weapon. Around the same moment, Jean-Luc Godard was dismantling cinema in Paris; Andy Warhol was filming sleep as endurance art; the Oberhausen Manifesto in Germany had declared “Papa’s cinema is dead.” Israel, too, had its underground avant-garde. And then it buried it.
Avidan began as one of Hebrew poetry’s enfant terribles, a Beat-inflected surrealist whose work collided eroticism, technology, and apocalypse. When he turned to film, he carried that same impulse to destroy and rebuild form.
Split (1969) was his first cinematic detonation: a fifteen-minute, self-reflexive short described as “a film about the need to get rid of film.” It fragments its own making, collapsing image and language until the boundary between cinema and text disintegrates. Avidan’s camera treats the frame like a page; editing becomes punctuation. The result is not storytelling but semiotic implosion, cinema turning on itself, chewing through its own syntax.
His follow-up, Sex (1970), pushed even further. Avidan stages a filmmaker searching for a missing script, a woman, and perhaps meaning itself. The film’s structure mimics erotic pursuit, promise, delay, disappearance, and its imagery oscillates between performance and confession. Israeli censors deemed it obscene and banned it outright. What survived were whispers: screenings in art circles, a few frames preserved in archives, and the reputation of a poet who had made the country’s first truly radical film.
Avidan’s cinema reads like a dialogue with the ghost of Godard, except more nihilistic, more linguistic, less romantic. If Godard used montage to ask how images mean, Avidan asked why we still need them at all.
To understand Avidan’s isolation, one must remember the cinematic map of the late sixties. Across Europe and America, the medium was imploding from within: Pasolini interrogating Catholic guilt, Warhol testing boredom, Kenneth Anger conjuring occult pop. Even the Soviet bloc had its dissident visionaries.
In Israel, meanwhile, cinema was still national duty. Films like Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955) or He Walked Through the Fields (1967) served as mythic reinforcement, heroic narratives of birth and sacrifice. Against that backdrop, Avidan’s experiments were heresy. His films spoke an international visual language, yet in a country anxious about cohesion, the avant-garde was seen as decadence.
Censorship in Israel functioned less as moral panic than as social quarantine. The banning of Sex didn’t spark outrage or intellectual debate, as in France or Italy. It simply erased the film from public consciousness. Avidan was not prosecuted; he was ignored. That silence was more effective than scandal, it smothered an entire cinematic possibility.
In retrospect, Avidan’s work looks like a fork in the road that Israeli cinema refused to take. While France produced the New Wave and Japan its anarchic New Cinema, Israel turned inward toward the comfort of commercial bourekas comedies or state-funded war dramas that affirmed collective identity. The infrastructure for experimentation never materialised. There were no art-house grants, no film schools pushing aesthetics beyond propaganda.
Other Middle Eastern filmmakers proved that avant-garde art could exist even under pressure. In Egypt, Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (1969) fused modernism and myth with hypnotic precision. In Iran, Abbas Kiarostami’s early shorts in the 1970s quietly redrew the border between fiction and reality. Israel, wealthier and freer than both, produced instead a long silence.
Avidan’s contemporaries, Uri Zohar with Hole in the Moon (1964), Jacques Katmor with A Woman’s Case (1969), briefly flirted with the avant-garde, then turned elsewhere or vanished. Zohar became religious. Katmor faded after Venice. The nation’s flirtation with experimental cinema lasted less than a decade.
Why did this strand die so quickly? Partly because avant-garde art depends on the idea of individual vision, and Israel in its formative decades privileged the collective. Early cultural policy sought cohesion over complexity; art was expected to build the state, not question it.
Avidan’s films violated that unwritten contract. They were private, erotic, confrontational, closer to psychoanalysis than to patriotism. His images of bodies and breakdowns mirrored a country uneasy with both. In psychoanalytic terms, Israel’s early cinema externalised trauma as heroism; Avidan internalised it as desire and fragmentation. The national superego rejected him.
That repression had artistic consequences. By shunning its experimental vanguard, Israeli cinema postponed its own modernity. Only in the 1980s and 1990s with Amos Gitai’s architectural allegories or Eytan Fox’s psychological realism did the country’s film culture begin grappling with identity through form rather than slogan.
To watch Split or Sex now, when fragments surface in retrospectives at Oberhausen or the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, is to glimpse the outline of an alternate film history. You see an Israel that could have been part of the global counterculture: a cinema not of collective myth but of radical subjectivity.
Had that trajectory continued, the Israeli New Wave might have paralleled France’s or Czechoslovakia’s: politically charged, formally adventurous, emotionally raw. Instead, the avant-garde was treated as a contaminant. The nation wanted heroes, not hermeneuts.
This absence shaped global perception. For decades, Israeli cinema was regarded as provincial until Gitai, Dover Kosashvili, or Nadav Lapid restored a measure of artistic danger. The irony is that Avidan’s work anticipated them all. His films already contained the DNA of self-critique and aesthetic rebellion that later filmmakers would rediscover under different names.
Every culture has its buried cinema. Italy’s censored Pasolini, Spain’s suppressed surrealists, America’s lost queer underground. In Israel, that repressed id takes the form of Avidan’s half-forgotten shorts. Their re-emergence in festivals and archives functions almost like a Freudian return: the disavowed material of desire, language, and rebellion coming back to haunt the national image.
What their disappearance reveals is that modern Israel, so obsessed with image-making, once produced an artist who tried to destroy the image and paid for it with erasure.
When retrospectives now resurrect Split or Sex, they are more than historical curiosities. They are evidence that Israeli cinema once touched the radical nerve of its era and recoiled. Avidan’s “lost avant-garde” reminds us that film history is not a straight line of progress but a map of cultural repression and rediscovery.
Perhaps every nation gets the cinema it can psychologically bear. In the late sixties, Israel could not yet bear the mirror Avidan held up, that is, a mirror where meaning splintered, bodies defied order, and film confessed its own futility. Half a century later, those shards still glint.
References
Avidan, D. (1969). Split [Short film]. Israel Film Archive.
Avidan, D. (1970). Sex [Short film]. Israel Film Archive.
Israel Film Archive – Jerusalem Cinematheque. (n.d.). Sex (1970). https://jfc.org.il/en/movie/56887-2/
It Couldn’t Be Better Than This: Short Israeli Avant-Garde Program 2. (2023). Tel Aviv University Film Festival. https://www.taufilmfest.com/program_ct/it-couldnt-be-better-than-this-short-israeli-avant-garde-program-2
Miller, G. (2021, February 18). The films of Israeli poet and enfant terrible David Avidan. MUBI Notebook. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-films-of-israeli-poet-and-enfant-terrible-david-avidan
Tofano, G. (Director). (1969). Matzor [Siege] [Film]. Israel Film Center Archive.
Zohar, U. (Director). (1964). Hole in the Moon [Film]. Israel Film Center Archive.
Katmor, J. (Director). (1969). A Woman’s Case (Mikreh Isha) [Film]. CineTel Films.
Oberhausen Short Film Festival. (1970). Festival Catalogue – Experimental Section. Oberhausen, Germany.
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