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61www.cmstudies.org 50 | No. 2 | Winter 2011
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Modern memory is fi rst of all archival. It relies entirely on the
specifi city
of the trace, the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of
the record-
ing, the visibility of the image.
Pierre Nora1
It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably,
from searching
for the archive right where it slips away.
Jacques Derrida2
T
he Israeli documentary fi lm Wasted (Nurit Kedar, 2006) opens
with archival
footage of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Minister of
Defense Ariel
Sharon visiting the Beaufort fortress on June 6, 1982, after it
had been captured
by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the First Lebanon
War. Beaufort, a
mountain fortress in Southern Lebanon, was established in

1150, during the Cru-
sades. In the context of the First Lebanon War, the fortress had
served as a Palestin-
ian military stronghold from which settlements in northern
Israel had been shelled.
1 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Realms of
Memory: The Construction of the French Past (Les
lieux de mémoire [1992], ed. Pierre Nora), trans. Arthur
Goldhammer, ed. Lawrence D. Krittman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), 8.
2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Mal
d’archive: Une impression freudienne [1995]),
trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 91.
Abstract: One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary
Israeli cinema is the
number of fi lms that explore repressed traumatic events from
the First Lebanon War—
events that have been denied entry into the shared national past.
This essay analyzes
Joseph Cedar’s fi lm Beaufort (2007), arguing that the fi lm
exposes a traumatic rupture
between history and memory. Yet at the same time, Beaufort
nostalgically expresses an
impossible yearning for lost archival collective national
memory.
by RAZ YOSEF
Traces of War: Memory, Trauma,
and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s
Beaufort

Raz Yosef is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the
Film and Television Department at Tel Aviv University,
Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities
and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (Rutgers
University Press, 2004), and his work on gender, sexuality, and
ethnicity in Israeli visual culture has appeared in GLQ ,
Third Text, Shofar, Framework, and Camera Obscura. He is
currently completing a book entitled The Politics
of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema
(Routledge, forthcoming).
04_Yosef_061-083_CJ_50-2.indd 6104_Yosef_061-
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Cinema Journal 50 | No. 2 | Winter 2011
62
Its capture followed one of the war’s most famous battles, and
it came to represent Israeli
control in Lebanon. The media accompanied Begin and Sharon
to the fortress, where
they hastened to report that there had been no fatalities in the
battle for Beaufort, even
though the word was already out that a Golani commando offi
cer and fi ve other soldiers
had fallen in the fi ghting. The Israeli media talked of the fi
ghters’ “supreme heroism”
and “utter commitment,” without mentioning the heavy losses
suffered by the IDF.
The name of the fi lm, Wasted, recalls the Vietnam War, where
“to waste” someone
came to mean “to kill” them. Thus, the fi lm, as Judd Ne’eman

notes, creates a linkage
between the United States imbroglio and defeat in Vietnam and
Israel’s failure as it got
stuck in what came to be known as “the Lebanese swamp.”3 In
contrast to the Israeli
statist media, which emphasized the heroism of the capture of
Beaufort, the fi lm re-
veals and restages repressed and private traumatic memories
through the testimonies
of eleven soldiers who served there six months before the IDF
pulled out of Lebanon
in May 2000. The soldiers are haunted by the ghosts of the war:
they remember the
images, the sounds, and the smells of the battlefi eld; they
remember a war in which
they never saw the enemy. One of the soldiers asks, “Who are
we guarding? What are
we guarding? There’s only darkness. We started to get the
feeling that we were only
guarding ourselves. Why am I here?” Their memories are of
horror, paralyzing fear,
and death.
At the heart of the fi lm stands the trauma of the destroyed
body of the killed or
wounded male soldier. Israeli war fi lms of the 1950s and
1960s repressed this trau-
matic vision. In those fi lms, the warrior who sacrifi ced his life
on the nation’s altar was
represented through the myth of the “living dead,” the soldier,
whose physical body is
absent, dead, yet nonetheless present and alive in the imagined
national consciousness.
Through the mythic metaphor of the “living- dead” soldier, the
national culture of war
confi rmed its preparedness to sacrifi ce victims.4 The existence

of the individual was
subsumed by the collective, and the death of the warrior was
endorsed and justifi ed
by being given a greater and more general national, and thus
transcendent, mean-
ing. Nationalism, like religion, argues Benedict Anderson,
“concerns itself with the
links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-
generation. . . . It is the
magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.”5 Ella Shohat
argues that in Israeli
war fi lms, “[t]he death of the protagonists . . . is allegorically
compensated for by the
rebirth of the country—the ultimate protagonist of the fi
lm[s].”6 Or, to put it in terms
of the body, the real death of the individual, and the
materiality of the male body—its
skin, fl esh, blood, bones—are disavowed and incorporated into
the process of the na-
tional body’s rebirth. In He Walked Through the Fields (Yosef
Millo, 1967), for example,
the death of the soldier, Uri, is not shown on screen. The
spectacle of his dead body
3 Judd Ne’eman, “All Family Movie” [in Hebrew], Ma’ariv,
April 27, 2007. All translations from Hebrew are by the
author unless otherwise noted.
4 On the metaphor of the “living- dead” soldier in Israeli
society and fi lm, see Hanan Hever, “Alive Are the Dead and
Dead Are the Living” [in Hebrew], Siman Kriah, no. 19 (1986):
190; and Raz Yosef, Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculini-
ties and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2004), 48–53.
5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refl ections on

the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
1991), 11–12.
6 Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of
Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 59.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 62 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
63
is replaced by a freeze- frame image of Uri’s surprised face
seconds before he is killed.
The cinematic freeze- frame becomes a metonymic signifi er for
the threshold between
life and death, and constructs the national myth of the “living
dead.” The frozen image
of Uri’s face dissolves into an image of the sea, from which
new immigrants to Israel
are arriving. Individual death is suppressed by its incorporation
within the national
continuity. The sacrifi ce of Uri’s life while blowing up a
bridge has assured the safe
arrival of Jewish immigrants and paved the way for the
establishment of the imagined
national community of Israel.7 According to Anderson, the
creation of an imagined
national community is founded on the simultaneous and shared
existence of people
who do not know one another personally, and have not met face
to face. Therefore, the
more blurred the individual identity of the object of memory

is, the greater the power
of national and collective identity and identifi cation.
Individual death is detached from
the soldier’s body and, thus, can serve as a source of identifi
cation for all.
Wasted exposes the trauma of the soldier’s dismembered body
that had been hid-
den from view by earlier nationalist war fi lms.8 “You see
people being blown up, you
see people screaming,” says one of the soldiers. “When I’m
treating their wounds, at
some point I have to touch the wounds, expose them. . . .
You’re covered in blood, and
then you take out your bandage to bandage him up, you try to
open it but it’s slippery
from the blood, and you put it in your mouth to rip it, and
you’ve got the taste of your
friend’s blood in your mouth.” In between the soldiers’ chilling
descriptions of the
pounded and lacerated male body, Kedar inserts clips of male
dancers wearing khaki
pants and tight black tank- tops over their well- toned muscles.
These male bodies crash
to the fl oor, twisting and writhing against the background of
phosphorescent light-
ing—similar to military fl ares—to simulate the hell of the
battlefi eld. The beautiful,
perfect, and whole bodies of the dancers stand in contrast to the
horrifying images of
the shapeless, pulverized, and helplessly wasted body described
in the soldiers’ testi-
monies (Figure 1).
Traumatic Recollections. Wasted insists on representing the
trauma of the soldier’s

mutilated body although, according to Cathy Caruth, trauma is
an unrepresentable
experience. Trauma is “a response, sometimes delayed, to an
overwhelming event or
events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive
hallucinations, dreams, thoughts
or behaviors stemming from the event.”9 One of the central
features of trauma is its
belatedness: the trauma victim cannot grasp or represent the
traumatic event at the
time of its occurrence, and so the traumatic experience
continues to haunt the victim
over and over. In other words, there is a repetition of the
traumatic event, which can
7 For a full analysis of this fi lm, see Nurith Gertz, Motion
Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Open
University Press, 1993), 63–94; and Judd Ne’eman, “The Fields
of Dominant Fiction,” [in Hebrew] Sadan: Research
in Hebrew Literature 5 (2002): 401–415.
8 A similar notion appears in the fi lm Kippur (Amos Gitai,
2000), which critically exposes the materiality of the soldier’s
bodily pain. Raz Yosef, “Spectacles of Pain: War, Masculinity
and the Masochistic Fantasy in Amos Gitai’s Kippur,”
Shofar 24, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 49–66. See also Judd Ne’eman,
“The Wound: The Gift of War” [in Hebrew], Israel:
Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel—History, Society,
Culture 14 (2008): 105–126.
9 Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in
Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), 4.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 63 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM

64
only be represented, understood, or known after the event itself.
Trauma is thus a
crisis of knowledge and representation.10 The traumatic event
is not repressed, but
returns in a deferred action to consciousness. The Freudian
concept of “deferred ac-
tion” ( Nachräglichkeit ) refers to a fi gure, an experience, or a
secondary scene that comes
too late, that reenacts the scene that has already taken place,
thereby constructing
it as a scene that is emotionally important or meaningful. In
other words, trauma is
established through a relationship between two events: a fi rst
event that is not initially
necessarily traumatic, because when it occurs it is still too soon
to comprehend its full
signifi cance, and a second event that may not be inherently
traumatic in itself but
that triggers a memory of the earlier event, which is only then
fi lled with traumatic
signifi cance.
In keeping with this understanding of trauma, Wasted does not
focus on the cata-
strophic event itself, but rather on the shocking emotions and
experiences as remem-
bered by the soldiers, and on the ways that the interviewees
express themselves. For
instance, one of the soldiers relates, “Sometimes, when I’d

light a cigarette a long time
later, that smell would rise up in my nose again . . . [a] smell
that’s hard to forget . . .
[a] pungent smell, a burnt smell. . . . It was a vision that I
didn’t want to remember and
10 On trauma as a crisis of representation, see Shoshana Felman
and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge,
1992); and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996).
Figure 1. The dancers’ perfect, muscular male bodies in Wasted
(Kedar, 2006; courtesy of Nurit Kedar).
083_CJ_50-2.indd 64 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
65
that I can’t forget.” The appalling smells and images of
scorched fl esh return involun-
tarily to the soldier’s consciousness and become a traumatic
memory only in relation
to a different time and place, the smell of the cigarette
reenacting memories of the war
that now, in a deferred action, take on a traumatic meaning. The
soldier wanted to for-
get, not to know, not to remember the ordeal of the defi led
body in real time. Thus, the
threatening event continues to haunt him and repeatedly

reappears both in his dreams
and in his everyday life. He says, “It’s unbelievable that you’re
there, and that’s what
you’re seeing. Sometimes I see myself going up to my position,
I don’t remember ev-
erything that happened there, but I want to remember.” Another
soldier says that “it’s
like becoming part of a fi lm, really, a fi lm,” and “basically,
what you see there is like
stuff from the fi lms . . . war fi lms.” Another soldier testifi es,
“I’m running for my life
and I’m unable to run.” For the soldiers, the battle is
remembered as a nightmare, or
a war fi lm. Like a viewer at the cinema, the soldier sees
himself trapped in a sequence
of horrendous images that unfolds in front of his eyes.
The soldiers’ traumatic recollections do not necessarily consist
of linear relations
between cause (the traumatic event) and effect (its
representation in memory), between
the referent in reality and the sign that represents it. Rather,
fantasy and the uncon-
scious play a central role in the formation of the soldiers’
catastrophic memories of the
historical past.11 Janet Walker describes the connection
between reality and fantasy in
cinematic representations of traumatic memory as
“disremembering”: “The process
described by psychological literature as that of conjuring
mental images and sounds
related to past events but altered in certain respects shall be
termed ‘disremember-
ing.’ Disremembering is not the same as not remembering. It is
remembering with a
difference. . . . Disremembering can become urgent when events

are personally un-
fathomable or socially unacceptable. Disremembering . . . is a
survival strategy par
excellence.”12
The soldiers’ traumatic memories are “disremembered”
memories: they are dis-
continued recollections, constructed by forgetting, and altered
by fragments of fantasy.
Disremembering makes it possible for the soldier to talk about
and represent an event
that is too threatening to experience directly. Memories of this
kind testify to the very
unrepresentability of the event that the soldier is trying to
remember. It is no coinci-
dence that the director Nurit Kedar chose to interview the
soldiers on the artifi cial set
of the feature fi lm Beaufort ( Joseph Cedar, 2007) that fi
ctitiously re-created the famous
military post. Kedar points to the central role of cinema—as a
kind of fantasy—in
representing the unrepresentable and in exposing muted
traumatic memories.
Wasted marks one of the most striking phenomena in
contemporary Israeli cin-
ema: fi lms that explore repressed traumatic events from the
First Lebanon War,
11 On the role of fantasy in the construction of traumatic
memories in cinema, see Susannah Radstone, “Screening
Trauma: Forrest Gump, Film and Memory,” in Memory and
Methodology, ed. Radstone (New York: Berg, 2000),
79– 107; Thomas Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as Mourning
Work,” Screen 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 193–201;
and E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and

Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2005).
12 Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the
Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 17, 19.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 65 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
66
events that have been denied entry into the shared national past.
Another such fi lm
is Beaufort (winner of the Silver Bear at the 2007 Berlin
International Film Festival
and a nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film), which is
based on a best- selling novel by Ron Leshem, If There Is a
Heaven (2005), itself based
on the memories of soldiers who served at Beaufort in 1999–
2000. Beaufort deals
with the trauma of the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000,
and with the sol-
diers’ anxieties and fears that they have been abandoned by the
army and the state
on the isolated outpost. Another fi lm that explores repressed
traumatic events is
Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), an animated
documentary based on video foot-
age that describes the journey taken by the director—who is
also the fi lm’s central

character—in search of his lost and forgotten memories of the
horrors of the First
Lebanon War, in particular of the massacre in the Sabra and
Shatila Palestinian
refugee camps. Finally, the fi lm Lebanon (2009)—which is
based on the traumatic war
memories of the scriptwriter- director, Shmuel Maoz—portrays
the attempts to res-
cue a group of Israeli soldiers who were trapped inside a tank
in a Lebanese village
that was surrounded by Syrian commando forces. The fi lm
documents the distress
and anxiety of the soldiers who observe the horrors of the
battle outside through the
tank’s gun sights.13
The First Lebanon War left searing marks on Israeli national
memory. The longest
and most controversial of all Israel’s wars, it started in 1982
with what was meant to
be a short two- or three- month operation—euphemistically
called “Operation Peace
for Galilee”—with the objective of protecting Israel’s northern
settlements. The war
ended three years later, in June 1985. However, it was only
after eighteen years that
the Israeli government declared a fi nal withdrawal of all IDF
forces from Lebanon.
When the war began, it enjoyed wide support from the Israeli
public, but this dimin-
ished as the extent of the battles, their true objective (bringing
about a new political
order in Lebanon and the Middle East), and the number of
casualties came to light.
It was a political war that weakened the Israeli right and led to
Begin’s resignation as

prime minister and his departure from politics. It was a war that
aroused widespread
opposition, with the public asking whether the war’s objectives
had been met, whether
Israel’s presence in Lebanon was necessary, and whether the
cost in terms of casual-
ties was worth paying. As the IDF became embroiled ever
deeper in the problems of
Lebanon’s internal politics, public opposition intensifi ed,
reaching its peak after the
massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatila. The war would later
be known as “a war of choice” and “the other war.”14
13 On Israel’s First Lebanon War, see, for example, Giora
Rosen, ed., The Lebanon War: Between Protest and Compli-
ance [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1983);
Runik Ruzental, Lebanon: The Other War [in Hebrew]
(Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1983); Ruvik Rosenthal, The Family
of the Beaufort [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim,
1989); and Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War,
ed. and trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1984). On the Israeli media coverage of the First
Lebanon War, see Nurith Gertz, Myths in Israeli Culture:
Captives of a Dream (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000).
14 For more on this fi lm and the representation of the First
Lebanon War in Israeli cinema of the 1980s and early
1990s, see Shohat, Israeli Cinema, 256–260; Nurith Gertz, “The
Medium That Mistook Itself for War: Cherry Sea-
son in comparison with Ricochets and Cup Final” (1998), Israel
Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 153–174; and
Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 148, 164.

083_CJ_50-2.indd 66 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
67
The First Lebanon War has featured in a number of Israeli fi
lms, such as Rico-
chets (Eli Cohen, 1982), Fragments (Yossi Zomer, 1989), Cup
Final (Eran Riklis, 1991),
and The Cherry Season (Haim Buzaglo, 1991). These fi lms are
critical of Zionist ide-
als and the Israeli government’s belligerent policies, and they
aspire to offer a “left-
ist” political portrayal of a war that exacted a heavy price from
both sides of the
Israeli- Palestinian confl ict. However, the fi lms are ultimately
subservient to a pro- Israel
“liberal- humanist” ideological perspective. From this
perspective, the fi lms mostly de-
scribe the Israeli soldier’s psychological deliberations and
pangs of conscience. This
soldier is represented as an “enlightened” occupier who “shoots
and weeps,” sensitive
to and identifying with the Palestinians’ suffering, and feeling
and seeing himself as
persecuted.
Ricochets, for example, purports to demonstrate the Israeli
soldier’s moral suprem-
acy. On the one hand, it sketches out an optimistic fantasy of
the relations between
the Israeli soldier and Lebanon’s Shiite refugee population: Effi
, one of the soldiers,

gives some chocolate to a Shiite woman, who gives him some
cherries in return. On
the other hand, the fi lm also portrays the political situation as a
dead end. In one
scene, Georgie, the army cook, explains the complexities of the
situation in Lebanon
to Gadi, the new offi cer: “The Christians hate the Druze and
the Shiites—so do the
Sunni and the Palestinians. The Druze hate the Christians, the
Shiites and the Syr-
ians. . . . The Sunni hate whoever their bosses tell them to hate,
and not only do the
Palestinians hate everyone else, they hate each other as well. . .
. And they’ve all got
one thing in common: they all hate—and you’ve no idea how
much—us Israelis.”
This comic representation of Lebanon’s sociopolitical
dynamics leads to the fi nal
and seemingly “correct” conclusion that Israel is the innocent
victim of the Arabs’
irrational hatred.15
Other fi lms, such as Cup Final and The Cherry Season were
more radical in their cri-
tique of the First Lebanon War. As the Israeli fi lm scholar
Nurith Gertz argues, “just
as Ricochets portrays the justice of the Israeli cause and Cup
Final repudiates it, Cherry
Season portrays Israeli justice as utterly irrelevant and the war
as utterly perverse[.]”16
And yet, rather than telling the Palestinian story, the aim of
these fi lms is to ease the
liberal consciences of not only their viewers but also their
directors, who belonged
to the Israeli peace camp. Israeli cinema of the 1980s and early
1990s represents the

embarrassment and helplessness of the Israeli left after it had
recognized the Palestin-
ian other as the victim of Jewish- Israeli oppression. The
failure of the war, and the
traumatic events associated with it, are not fully addressed and
mourned by the Israeli
cinema of that time.
In revisiting the traumatic and unspoken recollections of the
First Lebanon War,
the fi lms Wasted, Beaufort, Waltz with Bashir, and Lebanon
are less concerned with the
15 Dorit Naaman also points to the ways recent post- Oslo
Israeli cinema has distanced itself from concrete reality and
from realism as a style. While Naaman argues that this distance
ignores the Israeli- Palestinian confl ict and avoids
charting a clear notion of borders, I suggest that in the fi lms
discussed in this article, this rupture marks a radical
and traumatic break from national collective memory and
history. Dorit Naaman, “Elusive Frontiers: Borders in
Israeli and Palestinian Cinemas,” Third Text 20, no. 3/4
(May/July 2006): 511–521.
16 Gertz, “The Medium That Mistook Itself for War,” 170.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 67 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
68
history of the war than with the private and subjective

experiences and memories of
the soldiers who fought in it. They describe combatants for
whom time has stopped,
who are haunted by the horrifying images of the battlefi eld,
sometimes even after the
war has ended. Their emphasis on the subjective dimension of
memories and expe-
riences of the war distances these fi lms from the war’s
historical context—which is
represented only partially and sometimes hazily—and leads
them into an atemporal
zone marked by symbols and private hallucinations. Drawn
away from the continu-
ities of national history, the fi lms enter an ambiguous world of
individual allusions,
a mysterious world signifi ed by the displacements and
repetitions that characterize
dreams and fantasies. These fi lms point both to the tremendous
need to remember
and represent one of the most traumatic wars in the history of
the State of Israel and
to the diffi culty of doing so.
To an extent, the specifi c forms taken by memory in these fi
lms—the distance
between memory and history, the subjective and personal nature
of memories, and
the diffi culty of representing and capturing the past—have
been analyzed, albeit in a
different context, by the French historian Pierre Nora.17
Despite its title, Nora’s “Be-
tween Memory and History” is less an analysis of the relations
between “history” and
“memory,” and more a melancholic refl ection on the loss of
the tradition of national
historical memory.18 “Memory is constantly on our lips,” Nora

claims, “because it no
longer exists.”19 In analyzing why memory “no longer exists,”
Nora describes a num-
ber of stages of loss. He begins with “primitive” or “archaic”
societies, whose memo-
ries were “real” and through which values were transmitted
from one generation to
the next. These were societies that connected people with their
ancestors and to “the
undifferentiated time of heroes, inceptions, and myths.”20 With
the collapse of these
societies and the subsequent “acceleration of history,” people
became detached from
“real” memory and were forced to enter the world of history.
Here, Nora contrasts
history and memory:
Memory is life, always embodied in living societies. . . .
History, on the other
hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete,
of what is
no longer. Memory is always a phenomenon of the present. . . .
History is a
representation of the past . . . [ it] calls for analysis and critical
discourse.
Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context. . . . Memory
is rooted in
the concrete: in space, gesture, image, and object. History
dwells exclusively
on temporal continuities, on changes in things and in the
relations among
things. Memory is absolute, while history is always relative.21
17 Nora, “Between Memory and History.” This is the
introductory article to a multivolume collaborative project over-
seen by Nora on the national memory of France.

18 For critiques of Nora’s romantic nostalgia for national
collective memory, see for instance Naomi Greene, Land-
scapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999),
130–158; Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests
and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 96–97.
19 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 1.
20 Ibid., 2.
21 Ibid., 3.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 68 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
69
Despite the basic distinction between them, Nora argues that the
traditional idea
of the nation enabled proximity between history and memory.
He believes that na-
tional historical memory—or what he terms “history-
memory”—provided a sense of
unity and continuity, a dimension of “sacredness,” which had
previously characterized
the “real” memory of traditional societies. Aspects of the
nation such as “the politi-
cal, the military, the biographical, and the diplomatic were all
pillars of continuity.”22

However, with the post- Enlightenment disintegration of the
idea of the nation as a
sacred entity based on shared values and traditions and the rise
of the secular multi-
cultural society, historical memory lost its national role. As a
result of the decline of
the idea of collective national identity, history lost its mission,
its pedagogical purpose,
and its sacredness. History was no longer the essential link
between the past, the pres-
ent, and the future; it ceased to be imbued with the “collective
consciousness” and no
longer served the nation: “history became a social science; and
memory became a
purely private phenomenon.”23
Thus, Nora claims, private memories replaced collective
national memory. Such
personal memories express the experiences and ensure the
continuity not of the nation
but rather of various social groups. These groups, which are
united through common
historical experience or by religious or ethnic affi liation, are
dependent on private
memories for their communal identity and solidarity. When
memory departs from
the realm of the nation, Nora argues, it undergoes a shift “from
the historical to the
psychological, from the social to the individual. . . . As a result
of this psychologiza-
tion, the self now stands in a new relation to memory and the
past.”24 While the his-
torical memory of the nation offered a spontaneous connection
with the past, today
people depend on private memories in order to make sense of
their identity. Thus,

they experience memory as a duty. This duty to remember
drives people to create
archives, “places of memory” (lieux de mémoire) aimed at
preserving each and every
trace or fragment of the past. Paradoxically, however, these
places—from museums
and monuments to symbolic ceremonies and festivities—
actually distance us from the
past. Places of memory stop time, thus creating a discontinuity
that separates us from
what came before. “Places of memory,” writes Nora, “have no
referents in reality; or,
rather, they are their own referents—pure signs. This is not to
say that they are without
content, physical presence, or history—on the contrary. But
what makes them lieux de
mémoire is precisely that which allows them to escape from
history.”25
Nora’s account of modern memory largely accords with the
structure of memory
in Beaufort, a fi lm which reveals and highlights a rupture, or a
discontinuity, between
history (or national historical memory) and memory. Yet at the
same time, the fi lm
nostalgically expresses an impossible yearning for lost
collective national memory. In
the fi lm, the war is represented as the private memory of a
distinct social group—the
combat unit that manned the famous outpost in the fi nal months
before the IDF’s
withdrawal from Lebanon—and not as collective memory, as a
lived and practiced
22 Ibid., 5.

23 Ibid., 6.
24 Ibid., 11.
25 Ibid., 19.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 69 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
70
tradition that conditions Israeli society. The period surrounding
the withdrawal is rep-
resented as traumatic for the soldiers, who feel that they have
been abandoned by the
army and the state, have lost their national purpose and identity,
and have been ex-
cluded from the nation’s historical memory. This detachment
from national collective
memory pulls the fi lm into a world marked by a persistent
blurring of the historical
context and by private and subjective impressions, a timeless
world of dreams, hal-
lucinations, and myths. However, the trauma of abandonment,
which both produces
and marks the distance from the national shared past, arouses in
the soldiers, especially
the unit’s offi cer—and indeed in the fi lm itself—anxieties
about the loss of masculine
national authority and domination. Faced with the absence of
national supervision
and collective historical memory, the unit’s offi cer, Liraz

Librati (Oshri Cohen), feels
personally obliged to remember the national past. He constructs
Beaufort as a “place
of memory,” a kind of national archive, so as to give meaning
to his identity. However,
the protagonist’s archival desire for the national past, his
nostalgia for a lost collective
memory, is rendered impossible by the traumatic distance
between national history
and memory. Beaufort thus mourns the loss of collective
memory and bears witness to
the collapse of historical national memory in Israel.
Forgotten Army. The withdrawal from Lebanon damaged the
IDF’s status both
within and beyond Israel. Most of the Israeli public, which had
become tired with
what it saw as pointless military fatalities in Lebanon, and
which refused to continue
sacrifi cing human lives for control over territories outside
Israel’s borders, supported
the full and unilateral withdrawal of IDF forces from the
“security zone” in southern
Lebanon. The army’s leadership opposed the withdrawal
because the retreat of a
large army with plentiful resources in the face of a relatively
weak enemy such as
Hezbollah might have undermined the IDF’s image in the eyes
of both Israeli sol-
diers and citizens, as well as in the eyes of the enemy. In
March 2000, Prime Minister
Ehud Barak gave the order for an immediate withdrawal. The
IDF was pleased with
how the withdrawal proceeded, especially in bureaucratic and
operational terms:
it was a fast exit that took less than forty- eight hours, with no

loss of life, following
the dismantling of a great deal of equipment. However, neither
the army nor the
government was able to prevent the Palestinian public and the
wider Arab popula-
tion—or even Israelis to some extent—from seeing the
withdrawal as shameful for
Israel. The IDF was perceived as a humiliated and defeated
army that had lost its
power and the aura of courage and heroism associated with it
for so many years. The
IDF’s image as a failing army was also highlighted after the
second Intifada broke
out in September 2000, when IDF Chief of Staff Moshe
“Boogie” Ya’alon said, “We
have renewed our power of deterrence. We have compensated
for the outcome of
the withdrawal from Lebanon.”26 Ya’alon’s comments
emphasize the idea that the
violent suppression of the Palestinian Intifada was intended to
counter the image
of the IDF’s defeat—an image that had been dismissed from the
offi cial national
26 Nachum Barnea, “It Is Possible,” [in Hebrew] Yediot
Aharonot, May 30, 2003, 8. For a historical analysis of the
Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and its consequences for the
Israeli army and society, see Lev Grinberg, Imagined
Peace, Discourse of War: The Failure of Leadership, Politics
and Democracy in Israel, 1992–2006 [in Hebrew] (Tel
Aviv: Resling, 2007), 228–232.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 70 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM

71
narrative—and to restore a sense of national unity to Israeli
society and revive its
belief in the power of the army.
Beaufort expresses fear of the loss of the Israeli army’s
authority and dominance
in light of the approaching withdrawal from Lebanon. The fi lm
does not deal with
the actual historical event but rather focuses on the soldiers’
subjective experiences
and sense of anxiety, expressing individual and traumatic
experiences and memo-
ries of the war that had previously been denied entry into the
national historical
narrative. The withdrawal from Lebanon is described in the fi
lm as traumatic for
the soldiers, who feel as though they have been abandoned both
by the army and the
state, and by the Israeli public. These combatants, who were
brought up on heroic
myths of sacrifi ce and death, feel that their national mission
has lost its way and its
purpose, and that they have been forgotten on foreign soil. They
feel like victims
of a national and political confl ict, with nothing to do but wait
for the politicians to
determine their fate while the enemy kills them almost daily. At
the beginning of the
fi lm, the soldiers are physically trapped on the mountain
because the access road
has been mined; the only way in or out of the post is by

helicopter. Ziv Faran (Ohad
Knoller), a bomb disposal offi cer, arrives at the outpost in
order to clear the road.
For the soldiers, his arrival carries the promise of fresh
supplies reaching the moun-
tain and of having some contact with the world beyond. The
commander of the
unit, Liraz, and his second- in- command, Oshri (Eli Eltonyo),
welcome him: “Have
you come to rescue us?” they say, in a mixture of jest and
desperation. Frightened
by the constant shelling of the outpost, Ziv asks with concern,
“Is it always like
this?” Liraz and Oshri reply sarcastically, “No, until you arrived
everything was fi ne.
Welcome to Beaufort!” (Figure 2).
Figure 2. “Welcome to Beaufort!” (Kino International, 2007;
courtesy of Joseph Cedar).
083_CJ_50-2.indd 71 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
72
The spatial layout of the Beaufort outpost refl ects the soldiers’
feelings of helpless-
ness, entrapment, and isolation. The distance the fi lm takes
from Israeli nationalism
leads it to represent Beaufort not only as a historical site, but
also, if not primarily, as a
site detached from a specifi c time and place, a twilight zone

between reality and myth,
past and present, life and death. The outpost is made up of an
intricate network of
narrow and winding underground corridors. As they make their
way through them,
the soldiers look like laboratory mice running through a
twisting and claustrophobic
maze. The soldiers sleep in beds hanging from the ceiling of a
long container that
they call the “submarine,” a name that highlights their
detachment from the external
world (Figure 3). Just like in a “submarine,” the soldiers are
dependent on technologi-
cal equipment in order to maintain contact with the outside
world. Aboveground, the
outpost is made of many concrete layers that have been added
over the years, appear-
ing to bury the soldiers alive (Figure 4). The concrete walls
block the cinematic frame
that closes in on the soldiers, restricting their movement in
space. Much of the time
the outpost is cloaked in heavy fog, which impedes the soldiers’
visibility and their
spatial orientation. It also gives a sense of anti- realism to a
place that is simultaneously
constructed as real and imagined, that exists and does not exist.
The space of Beaufort can be described in Michel Foucault’s
terms as a heteroto-
pia. In contrast to a utopia, which is a site that doesn’t really
exist, even if the condi-
tions required to make it materialize are clear, a heterotopia—
which literally means
“other place”—is a real place, a site that subsists in time and
space, a place that exists
and yet does not exist. One of Foucault’s examples of a

heterotopia is the ship—or in
the case of this fi lm, the “submarine”—which is in itself a
closed space, while at the
Figure 3. The internal space of the Beaufort outpost: Koris in
the “submarine” (Kino International, 2007;
courtesy of Joseph Cedar).
083_CJ_50-2.indd 72 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
73
same time fl oating on an infi nite sea. Heterotopias are part of
the social order, refl ect-
ing and reinforcing it, while also inverting it. According to
Foucault, heterotopias are
“sometimes like counter- sites, a kind of effective enacted
utopia in which the real sites,
all the other real sites that can be found within our culture, are
simultaneously repre-
sented, contested and inverted.”27
Because it is a conquered space, the Beaufort outpost reinforces
the Israeli national
and ideological order. At the same time, though, its workings
are disrupted and it lacks
a clear purpose. According to a notice hanging in the outpost,
the purpose of this
space is “[t]o protect the northern border of the State of
Israel.” However, because
they cannot see the enemy, the soldiers do not understand what

they are protecting or
from whom. The Beaufort outpost represents military law and
order and is supposed
to control the space that surrounds it, but in fact it is a chaotic
and claustrophobic
space that functions in an entirely disorderly and confused
fashion, a space that is con-
stantly on the defensive. The outpost is an enclave within
enemy territory that abides
by the rules of the State of Israel, yet it is also detached from
it, or has perhaps even
been abandoned by it. Foucault claims that heterotopias are
“simultaneously mythical
and real.”28 In one scene, one of the soldiers, Tomer Zitlaui
(Itay Turgeman), ironi-
cally describes their purpose on Beaufort: “We’re guarding the
mountain to make sure
it doesn’t run away.” The mountain of Beaufort is
simultaneously marked as real and
mythological. The soldiers’ presence makes it real, as if the
mountain would not exist
if they were not there. Foucault also discusses cemeteries as
heterotopic spaces that
27 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (“Des espace autres”
[1967]), trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1
(Spring 1986): 24. For further discussion of Foucault’s
heterotopia, see Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to
Los Angeles and Other Real- and- Imagined Places (Oxford,
UK: Blackwell, 1996), 145–163.
28 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.
Figure 4. The external space of the Beaufort outpost: concrete
layers that seem to bury the soldiers alive
(Kino International, 2007; courtesy of Joseph Cedar).

083_CJ_50-2.indd 73 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
74
exist and do not exist: they contain the remains of the dead
along with the fact of
their death or non- existence. In one episode in the fi lm, Ziv
wanders around the sur-
real space of Beaufort. Scared and confused, he loses his way
in the winding labyrinth
of corridors until he eventually fi nds himself aboveground,
where the outpost is im-
mersed in a thick fog. In addition to the living soldiers, the
outpost’s guard positions are
also manned by mannequins dressed in army uniform. These are
ersatz “living- dead”
soldiers, designed to deceive the enemy and draw their fi re.
However, Ziv thinks that
the mannequin is a real soldier, and starts talking to it. The
mannequin is charged with
the effect of the Freudian uncanny, the “living dead,” both
familiar and friendly, while
at the same time alien and threatening.29 Between the sandbags
and the fortifi cations,
Ziv meets Zitlaui, who calls him from his guard post: “You got
lost? . . . You’ve come
far away, as far as you can get. You only come here by
mistake.” Zitlaui concludes their
conversation by howling like a wolf, in keeping with the morbid
graveyard atmosphere

of the scene.
Throughout the fi lm the soldiers are portrayed as children who
have been aban-
doned by their parents. When Ziv arrives at Beaufort he asks the
soldiers, “Do your
parents know you’re here?” Even Liraz, who calls his soldiers
“my children” a num-
ber of times during the fi lm, is represented as an abandoned
child. (“My mother
hasn’t known where I am since I was nine.”) These sentiments
of abandonment are
constructed in the fi lm as a crisis in the relations between
fathers and sons, and also
between soldiers and their commanders, who are perceived as
defeated men who
have submitted to public and political pressure to avoid military
action against the
enemy, and who are therefore neglecting their soldiers. The
failure of patriarchal
military authority to take care of its “children” makes the
soldiers anxious about
their loss of power and the decline of masculine heterosexual
dominance. “We’ve
become an army of pussies! They’re shafting us, wasting our
men, and your answer
is protection?!” protests Liraz stridently to his commander,
Kimchi (Alon Aboutbul),
who refuses to initiate combat so close to the withdrawal. Liraz
asks for permission to
go out “with the children” and fi ght the enemy: “Why isn’t the
IDF reacting? If we’re
retreating then let’s go, give the order, we’ll get in the vehicles
and get the fuck out of
here. If we’re staying, and I don’t see us leaving right now,
then let us do our job. . . .

You stand here like an idiot and get hit by a missile. We’re
bankrupt. Four old ladies
beat us. They’re right!” From Liraz’s perspective, preventing
the soldiers from fi ghting
places them in a passive and “feminine” position that is seen as
unheroic, humiliating,
and castrating, a position that is represented as threatening to
male heterosexual dom-
inance and autonomy. The soldiers’ masculinity is not only
endangered by the enemy,
but also by women: the Four Mothers movement—or, as Liraz
calls them, the four “old
ladies”—a protest movement, founded in 1997 by four female
residents of northern
Israel whose sons had served in Lebanon, with the aim of
bringing about the IDF’s
29 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. Alix Strachey, in
Sigmund Freud: Psychological Writings and Letters, ed.
Sander L. Gilman (New York: Continuum, 1995), 120–153.
Yael Munk has also referred to the Freudian uncanny
in her analysis of Beaufort. Yael Munk, “The Privatization of
War Memories in Recent Israeli War Films,” in Miri
Talmon and Yaron Peleg (eds.), Identities in Motion: The Israeli
Cinema Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press,
forthcoming).
083_CJ_50-2.indd 74 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
75

withdrawal from Lebanon. In a different scene, Zitlaui describes
the “Four Mothers”
movement as “four old whores who don’t know shit about the
army and who are tell-
ing lies to the whole country.” According to the soldiers, the
women’s protest against
the war has feminized the army, which in turn has undermined
the fi ghters’ military
and masculine worthiness and has disconnected them from the
paternal authority of
their commanders.
The trauma of abandonment, which creates and signifi es the
rupture between the
soldiers’ personal experience and national history, is
represented, therefore, as a crisis
of heterosexual masculinity. This crisis, which has befallen
Israeli masculinity just prior
to the withdrawal from Lebanon, compels Liraz to assume the
position of the failed
father and to try and reconstitute masculine military national
memory. Liraz is repre-
sented as a cold and determined offi cer who is steadfastly
faithful to the army and its
national mission (Figure 5). Even though, or perhaps precisely
because, he is aware that
he and his comrades are merely sitting ducks for the enemy, he
does not question the
importance of the soldiers’ presence on the mountain. As the
unit’s medic, Idan Koris
(Itay Tiran), observes, “Liraz is just what the army needs here.
Someone who’ll thank
them for letting him be in charge of this mountain.” Liraz
refuses to accept the news
of the impending evacuation of the outpost and rejects his
historical role as the last

commander of Beaufort. He says, “I don’t deserve to be the one
who fl ed from Beau-
fort.” He fanatically sustains both the myth of the heroism of
the soldiers who con-
quered the mountain and the memory of those who fell in the
battle. In one scene,
Ziv—whose father fought at Beaufort and whose uncle died in
the battle to capture
it—tells Liraz and the other soldiers that an order had actually
been given not to
Figure 5. Liraz, the commander of Beaufort (Kino
International, 2007; courtesy of Joseph Cedar).
083_CJ_50-2.indd 75 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
76
capture the mountain, but that it appeared not to have reached
the soldiers. “They
could have come up here without a battle and without
casualties,” he says. Defend-
ing the honor and bravery of the soldiers, Liraz replies, “You
could say that about
every battle. The fact is that the troops fought here like men!”
Liraz sees himself and
his soldiers as carrying on a dynasty of combat soldiers. He
calls the mannequin sol-
diers “reinforcements” who are “doing their job.” He sees them
as ghosts of soldiers
whose death leads continuously to the future of the nation, just

as the names of all of
Beaufort’s fallen soldiers are engraved on the huge memorial
board that hangs in the
outpost’s canteen. Through their deaths, these “living- dead”
soldiers direct the lives
of Liraz and his generation who are carrying on the legacy of
male warriors and the
national heritage. Liraz commemorates and remembers the
heroic soldiers, gives their
lives and deaths a national meaning, shapes himself through
them, and sees himself
as if he were them.
Moreover, Liraz wishes to pass down this legacy to the next
generation of com-
bat soldiers. When his soldiers ask him about the impending
evacuation, he answers:
“Look, calm down. We’re not leaving so quickly. I think your
children will be here
too.” By creating an intergenerational linkage, Liraz hopes to
heal the crisis in relations
between fathers and their combat soldier sons. He produces a
narrative of masculine
historical memory by which the second generation is
continuously linked to the past
generation, thus “making sense” of its national (male) identity.
Liraz therefore sees
himself as responsible not only for looking after his soldiers
but also for guarding the
patriarchal national memory that has been preserved,
accumulated, and stored within
Beaufort. Toward the end of the fi lm, a few hours before the
IDF troops leave Beau-
fort, one of the soldiers says to him, “Try to imagine the
mountain without the out-
post . . . just nature, no memory of anything.” Liraz is unable

to imagine it. For him,
Beaufort is not just another military outpost but rather a “place
of memory,” a kind
of national archive. He desires to fi nd a forgotten heroic
national past in this archive,
a trace of the lost patriarchal origin that would enable him to
defi ne and attribute
meaning to his own identity.
Archive Trauma. However, the archive is not a place that
innocently and neutrally
preserves and contains the past. Rather it is unreliable,
selective, and incomplete, and
is based on excluding and repressing traumatic content that
threatens to return from
it.30 In the case of Beaufort, the trauma is that of paternal
abandonment, which signi-
fi es the discontinuity between the past and the present, between
history and memory;
this is precisely what Liraz tries to repress. In Archive Fever,
Jacques Derrida writes that,
“Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the
word ‘archive.’ . . . Noth-
ing is more troubled and troubling.”31 His examination of the
archive begins with the
30 On the relation between trauma and the archive, see Ann
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality,
and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003); Herman Rapaport, “Archive Trauma,” in
Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge,
2003), 75–96; and Diana Taylor, The Archive and
the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
31 Derrida, Archive Fever, 90.

083_CJ_50-2.indd 76 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
77
Greek arkhe that “names at once the commencement and the
commandment.”32 It names at
once “the principle according to nature or history, there where
things commence—physi-
cal, historical, or ontological principle—but also the principle
according to the law,
there where men and gods command, there where authority,
social order are exercised in
this place from which order is given—nomological principle.”33
The archive yearns to
return to the origin, to discover the primordial memory, to
preserve the past, to fi nd
and possess the moments of beginning that appear to us as a
kind of truth. However,
preserving the past is always violent. The archive, which
decides what is worthy of be-
ing remembered, thereby determines which things will be
forgotten. In other words,
the archive’s desire to rescue and document the past, to possess
human memory once
and for all, cannot be satisfi ed without the perpetual threat of
silence, without the pos-
sibility of forgetting.
According to Derrida, the excessive, infi nite, and inexhaustible
passion of the ar-

chive to return to the moments of the beginning is
fundamentally linked to the Freud-
ian death drive, which seeks to destroy the archive. The death
drive is a destructive,
aggressive, and violent force that encourages forgetfulness,
amnesia, and the negation
of memory. It is “anarchivic” or “archivolithic”: “If there is no
archive without con-
signation in an external place which assures the possibility of
memorization, of repeti-
tion, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that
repetition itself, the logic
of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains,
according to Freud, indis-
sociable from the death drive.”34 According to Freud, repetition
compulsion is acting
out without remembering, repeating without recollecting.
Following Freud, Derrida
argues that the archive is established through repetition
compulsion, which is related
to the death drive. Time and again we return to the archive, to
the memory of the
past, in order to confi rm and preserve it. Yet there is no
repetition without the death
drive, without violence, without the possibility of forgetting
traumatic content that
would sabotage the archive’s desire to return to the absolute
beginning, to return to
the original past event. Therefore, the death drive is a violent
force that simultaneously
generates and destroys the archive. The archive is self-
contradictory in that it must
necessarily incorporate forgetting, and because it is produced by
repetition compulsion
of both memory and forgetting. We are destined to make this
“fatal repetition,” and

thus we cannot control the archive; we cannot place ourselves
outside the archive and
say, “that is the correct and true meaning,” or, “that is exactly
how things happened.”
We are forever included within the archive, trapped in the
repetition compulsion of
remembering and forgetting the past.
However, the national archive does not recognize the violent
repetition that struc-
tures the archive and represses the fact that the archive can
never be complete and
fi nal. “The archive,” summarizes John D. Caputo, “has also
come to mean the house,
arkheion, where the records are stored, a house overseen by
archons, the keepers of the
32 Ibid., 1.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 10–12.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 77 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
78
house, the patri- archival powers that be who supervise and
control the archive. That
is why there is always the danger of a ‘politics of the archive,’
. . . the feverish control

that is exercised by institutional authority, above all by the
state, over archival mate-
rials, the politics of . . . the ‘offi cial story.’ Political power
requires control over the
archive, the monitoring of memory.”35 It is a power that “aims
to coordinate a single
corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements
articulate the unity of an
ideal confi guration. In the archive, there should not be any
absolute dissolution, any
heterogeneity or secret which could separate, or partition, in an
absolute manner.”36
Derrida argues that this power lies at the basis of nationalism—
the desire to kill and
burn the other’s memory, to silence and delete all traces of
traumatic events within
the archive.
In Beaufort, Liraz is a kind of archon, the gatekeeper of the
Beaufort archive, super-
vising and controlling the memory stored within it. He longs to
make his version of
the memory of the battle into the authoritative, normative, and
nomological version.
He wants to see it as the origin and the law for everyone else,
and he exercises power
and control over the other’s archive in order to oppress and
repress alternative inter-
pretations of past events. As a “patri- archival” power, he
insists on the patriarchal
heritage of the war, and because Ziv’s version of the capture
of Beaufort questions
the myth of the national memory of heroism and sacrifi ce,
Liraz rejects it outright.
In one episode, Liraz’s commander tells him about his own
personal traumatic expe-

rience from the time that Beaufort was captured: “I was
wounded before the battle
even started. I was lying in the APC, hearing on the radio about
how my friends
were being killed.” “Yes, but you conquered it like heroes!”
Liraz replies. “At least
you fought! There was an enemy, a goal, a purpose. You took
the most important
mountain in Lebanon.” Liraz seeks to exclude threatening
specters that have not
been properly addressed or suffi ciently mourned, and he tries
to impose a national
meaning on both the dead and the living. He wants to control
the archive, to protect
and preserve the national past, to remember it in order to
produce a complete and
coherent masculine national identity for the generations of fi
ghters that preceded
him, for himself, and for those who will come after he has gone.
Koris is the only soldier who openly contradicts his
commanding offi cer’s authority
and his attempt to repress traumatic events—Ziv’s unnecessary
death, and the soldiers’
abandonment: “The man just died for no reason. I still haven’t
understood what he
died for. And why aren’t we allowed to talk about the
evacuation at all? Are we stupid
children? . . . I want him [ Liraz] to stand up like a man and to
tell us to our faces that
in two weeks the Hezbollah’s going to be sitting here, and that
everything the IDF
is doing now is bullshit.” Liraz is a “boyish- man,” a boy who is
not yet a man, who
desperately longs to assume the role of the failed father, to
become a fi gure of paren-

tal authority for his soldiers, to heal the rift between national
historical memory and
35 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:
Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 265.
36 Derrida, Archive Fever, 3.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 78 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
79
personal memory. However, his desire to seek out the lost
patriarchal origin, to return
again and again to the memory of heroism, which is seen as the
unique archive of the
“truth,” is always violent and includes the forgetting of
traumatic events that threaten
to unsettle the offi cial national narrative that is stored in the
archive. In other words,
Liraz wishes to return to the national archive and, from a meta-
archival perspective,
to a point outside the archive where one can supervise and
oversee the extraction of
“true” meaning from it, without acknowledging that this
repetition compulsion must
always be violent and based on forgetting and repression.
Liraz’s efforts to return to
and sustain the national myth and to identify with the paternal
position necessarily in-

volve repeating the repressed trauma of abandonment that is
preserved in the archive.
Therefore, he has no structural control over the archive; he is
incorporated within it,
trapped in the repetition compulsion of both remembering and
forgetting. He is un-
aware of this fatal repetition and is fated to blindly reproduce
the past and to act out
the traumatic event of abandonment without remembering it.
Liraz’s reaction to the wounding and death of four of his
soldiers demonstrates
this notion of repeating the trauma of being abandoned by the
father without re-
membering it. When Ziv arrives at the outpost, he refuses to
disarm the mine that is
blocking the access road to Beaufort, saying that it is too
dangerous. Liraz rebukes him
and orders him to carry out the mission. He tells Ziv, “I know
it’s dangerous. . . . Who
asked you anyway!” The order is fi nally given, and Ziv
embarks on his mission. Later
on, Liraz apologizes for his outburst, and tries to assume a
position of paternal au-
thority when he volunteers to keep guard over Ziv while he
neutralizes the mine, and
also by calling him “youngster.” Ziv, however, resists the
infantile position in which he
has been placed, and in turn calls Liraz “child,” thus pointing
out the young offi cer’s
unattainable aspirations to take on the role of the father. Ziv
succeeds in clearing
the route, but pays with his life when the mine explodes and
kills him. Paralyzed and
shocked, Liraz is unable to drag himself away from the
horrendous sight of Ziv’s

mutilated body. Liraz has failed in his parental role; he
abandoned his “son” and sent
him to his death. The traumatic event of the abandonment is too
overwhelming, and
it is not recorded in his consciousness. Liraz represses the
catastrophe of Ziv’s aban-
donment only to return to it once again when Zitlaui is killed by
a rocket that hits his
guard position. Liraz rushes to the bombed- out guard post but
arrives too late to save
Zitlaui. The fi lm marks this scene as a kind of fantasy: we see
Liraz falling asleep and
then waking up in a panic and running to his friend, who has
already been hit. Thus,
Liraz phantasmatically repeats the prior traumatic experience of
abandonment,
which was too shocking to be given meaning as a trauma. In his
fantasy, Liraz acts out
the trauma of abandonment that he did not want to remember.
He tries once more
to take the role of the father, but again fails to save his “son,”
who ultimately dies.
Later in the fi lm, two scenes that depict the wounding and
deaths of other sol-
diers reproduce the structure that had appeared in the two
earlier scenes, thus re-
inforcing the notion that Liraz compulsively repeats and acts
out the trauma of
abandonment without recalling it. While recovering Zitlaui’s
body, Oshri, Liraz’s
second- in- command, is wounded when a rocket lands just
outside the outpost. Lying
083_CJ_50-2.indd 79 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM

80
bleeding on the ground, Oshri calls out to Liraz to rescue him.
Once again, though,
Liraz stands paralyzed in front of his abandoned comrade,
observing him from the
outpost and unable to offer assistance. Liraz is incapable of
coping with the trauma
of abandoning his “son” (he even refuses to leave Beaufort in
order to visit the in-
jured Oshri in hospital), but is doomed to repeat the tragic event
once more when
another soldier, Yonatan Shpitzer (Arthur Perzev), is killed by a
rocket fi red at the same
guard position that Zitlaui had been manning when he died.
None of the soldiers had
wanted to guard that cursed post, and Shpitzer had only
volunteered after persistent
pleading by Liraz. Before Shpitzer’s death, taking leave of his
usual cold and distanced
self, Liraz had tried to get closer to Shpitzer, to cheer him up
and offer some paternal
support for his frightened “son.” The scene in which Shpitzer is
killed is also marked as
a kind of dream: Liraz has fallen asleep for a few minutes, and
he wakes up in a panic
to see the smoldering outpost and the dead body of his “son.”
Having sent his “son” to
die at the cursed guard position, Liraz now runs toward him,
desperately calling his
name. Once again, though, he is too late. The traumatic

experience of abandonment
by the father keeps on returning phantasmatically to haunt Liraz
while he wishes to
forget that which must be remembered.
The fi lm thus points to the intergenerational trauma that returns
from the ar-
chive to haunt the protagonist: the son, who identifi es with the
role of the parent,
repeats the trauma of abandonment infl icted upon him by the
father, and fails to
step into the paternal position. This intergenerational trauma is
also given expres-
sion through the song that Shpitzer sings before he dies. The
song is called “Fathers
and Sons,” and the chorus contains the line, “A father is crying
over a son is cry-
ing over a father.” In another scene, Liraz is watching a
television interview with
Ziv’s bereaved father. At one point in the interview, the father
looks directly into
the camera, that is, at Liraz, and says, “You could blame the
army, the generals,
but the army isn’t really responsible for my son. They don’t
know him at all. I am
responsible for him. I brought him up. Apparently, I didn’t
bring him up well. . . . I
feel as though I abandoned my child.” In contrast to the
bereaved father, Liraz does
not take responsibility for the abandonment of the soldiers and
tries to censor and
repress the traumatic phantoms that return from the archive.
Beaufort Fever. Liraz insists on remembering and
commemorating the national
past, and continues to deny the trauma of abandonment until

the very last moments
of the fi lm. When the order is given to evacuate Beaufort,
mines are laid throughout
the outpost, turning it into an enormous powder keg. When all
the preparations
for the explosion have been completed, Liraz is told that the
evacuation is to be de-
layed twenty- four hours. Koris warns of the danger to the
soldiers who remain on the
mined outpost, and is angry at his commander, whom he sees as
lacking the courage
to evacuate them. “They’ve left us exposed!” he says. Liraz
denies that they have
been abandoned: “If need be, an entire army will come and get
us out of here. . . .
They wouldn’t abandon us!” Koris shouts at him angrily, “You
think that anyone
cares about us?!” to which Liraz painfully admits, “I cannot
abandon this mountain.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 80 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
81
Something is physically holding me back.” Liraz is suffering
from archive fever, from
a painful desire for the unattainable origin. As Derrida puts it,
It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably,
from search-
ing for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after

the archive,
even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it
anarchives itself.
It is to have compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the
archive, an
irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a
nostalgia for
the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.
No desire,
no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition
compulsion, no
“mal- de” can arise for a person who is not already, in one way
or another, en
mal d’archive.37
Liraz’s archive desire is an infi nite passion for absolute law, an
interminable pas-
sion to return to the very beginning, to the apparently original
event of the glorious
capture of the mountain, an irrepressible and sick nostalgia for
the heroic memory
of the past of Israeli national masculinity. Little wonder that
during his last night at
Beaufort, Liraz raises the Israeli fl ag up the fl agpole on which
it had previously been
lowered. Repetition is a necessary part of Liraz’s unique and
select archive; it keeps
that archive alive. However, this repetition compulsion leads to
the death drive, to the
violence of forgetting the trauma, which returns from the
archive and prevents Liraz’s
passion from returning to the most archaic place of “absolute
commencement.” In
other words, the death drive is a violent force of forgetting that
generates the archive,
while at the same time working in silence and under

concealment to destroy the ar-
chive. It bears “the possibility of putting to death the very
thing, whatever its name,
which carries the law and its tradition.”38 Because the
traumatic specters that are stored in
the archive sabotage Liraz’s efforts to “settle all accounts,” his
desire for the lost origin
is thus a desire that can never be satisfi ed. The Beaufort
archive is a heterotopic space
that resists any attempt at homogenization of the past. It
disrupts the protagonist’s en-
deavors to produce a unifi ed and continuous narrative and myth
of national memory,
and emphasizes the discontinuity between collective and
contemporary memory. The
death drive at work in the archive acts against the intentions of
its maker.
And indeed, at the end of the fi lm, the Beaufort archive
explodes and is de-
stroyed, eliminating any chance of closure or totalization of
past events (Figure 6).
Liraz watches the burning outpost from a distance as is it
consumed by fi re and
turns to ash (Figure 7). Liraz’s burning archival passion is
destroyed by the same
aggressive force that created it. In other words, the law bears its
own death. All that
remains of the archive are the ghosts of the mannequin
soldiers and the memorial
board with the names of Beaufort’s fallen. They too go up in fl
ames, remnants and
traces of the silenced trauma that haunts Beaufort and the
protagonist.
37 Ibid., 91.

38 Ibid., 79.
083_CJ_50-2.indd 81 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
82
Figure 6. The burning archive: the explosion of Beaufort
outpost (Kino International, 2007; courtesy of
Joseph Cedar).
Figure 7. Liraz’s “archive fever”: gazing at the burning
Beaufort outpost (Kino International, 2007; cour-
tesy of Joseph Cedar).
083_CJ_50-2.indd 82 1/27/11 9:09 AM1/27/11 9:09 AM
83
In the fi nal scene of the fi lm, the soldiers leave Beaufort and
Lebanon. They hug
one another emotionally and call their parents to tell them
excitedly that they have
come home. Liraz is the only one not to share in their joy. He
walks down the road by
himself, removes his heavy protective fl ak jacket and military
overalls, leans forward,
places his hands on his bent knees, breathes out heavily and

cries, as if nauseous, or
maybe sick—sick with archive fever.
Beaufort expresses a melancholic nostalgia for a lost mythical
world through the ar-
chival sickness of its protagonist and his feverish desire for the
memory of the national
unity of a paternal community free of internal divisions.
However, the traumatic loss
of collective national memory ruptures the continuity between
past and present, indi-
cating the decline of Israeli national memory. ✽
This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (
grant no. 133/10).
083_CJ_50-2.indd 83 1/27/11 9:10 AM1/27/11 9:10 AM
Chapter 4
Selecting an Appropriate Speech GoaL
SPEAK
© 2011 Cengage Learning
5/27/2014 12:20 PM

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft,
Windows, Windows Vista and other product names are or may
be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or
other countries.
The information herein is for informational purposes only and
represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the
date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to
changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a
commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot
guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the
date of this presentation.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS,
IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN
THIS PRESENTATION.
1
The mind is
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
~Alexander Graham Bell
5/27/2014 12:20 PM
other countries.

THIS PRESENTATION.
2
Audience Adaptation & Analysis
Your speech goal must be based on both
Audience analysis
Audience adaptation
This step in the speech-making process is rooted in what
communication scholars refer to as uncertainty reduction
theory. Even though effective speakers continually adjust their
analysis of their audience and adapt their speech accordingly
throughout the speech-planning and speech-making process,
these steps begin at the point of determining your specific
speech goal.
Audience Adaptation and Analysis:
Your speech goal must be based on both:
Audience analysis which is the study of the intended audience
for your speech
Audience adaptation which is the process of tailoring your
speech’s information to the listeners’ needs, interests, and
expectations
Action Step 1: Select a Speech Goal that is Appropriate to the
Rhetorical Situation

Brainstorm and concept map for topics
Analyze your audience
Analyze the rhetorical situation
Develop a speech goal statement tailored to your audience and
occasion
5/27/2014 12:20 PM
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THIS PRESENTATION.
3
Exhibit 4.1
The Rhetorical Situation
You must determine your specific speech goal in light of the
rhetorical situation, the reason your speech needs to be given
(exigence). As Exhibit 4.1 illustrates, these circumstances
include the speaker (you), the audience, and the occasion (the

setting, including the purpose, audience, expectations, and
location).
5/27/2014 12:20 PM
other countries.
THIS PRESENTATION.
4
Subject & Topic
A subject is a broad area of expertise
A topic is a narrow, specific aspect of a subject
Our speech topics should come from subject areas in which we
already have some knowledge and interest.
A subject is a broad area of expertise (e.g., movies). A topic is
a narrow, specific aspect of a subject (e.g., how the Academy
Awards nomination process works; the relationships among

movie producers, directors, and distributors; or how technology
is changing movie production).
A topic is a narrow, specific aspect of a subject
5
Identifying Potential Topics
Listing subjects
Brainstorming for topic ideas
Concept mapping for topic ideas
You can identify potential subjects for your speeches by listing
those areas that (1) are important to you and (2) you know
something about.
Identifying Potential Topics:
Listing subjects
Brainstorming is an uncritical, non-evaluative process of
generating associated ideas
Concept mapping is a visual means of exploring connections
between a subject & related ideas.
6
Exhibit 4.2
Concept Map

The exhibit shows how concept mapping allowed the speaker to
think more deeply about a general topic idea that she had
brainstormed and develop several more specific topics that
could be used in shorter speeches or in speeches with different
audiences.
7
Analyzing the Audience
Demographic audience data
Because speeches are presented to a particular audience, before
you can finally decide on your topic, you need to understand
who will be in your prospective audience. During your audience
analysis, you will want to develop a demographic profile of
your audience that includes age, gender, socioeconomic
background, race, ethnicity, religion, geographic uniqueness,
and language.
Analyzing the Audience #1:
Demographic audience data helps you…
choose a specific topic and the main ideas you will present.
discover how your audience is similar/different from one
another and from you.
develop appropriate listener-relevance links
Demographic data consists of:

Age: What is the age range of your audience, and what is the
average age?
Education: What percentage of your audience has a high school,
college, or postgraduate education?
Sex: What percentage of your audience is male? female?
Socioeconomic background: What percentage of your audience
comes from high-, middle-, or low-income families?
Occupation: Is a majority of your audience from a single
occupational group or industry, or do audience members come
from diverse occupational groups?
Race: Are most members of your audience of the same race, or
is there a mixture of races?
Ethnicity: What ethnic groups are in the audience? Are most
audience members from the same cultural background?
Religion: What religious traditions are followed by audience
members?
Geographic uniqueness: Are audience members from the same
state, city, or neighborhood?
Language: What languages do a significant number of members
of the audience speak as a first language? What language (if
any) is common to all audience members?
Knowledge of subject: What can I expect the audience already
knows about my subject? How varied is the knowledge level of
audience members?
Attitude toward subject: What can I expect my audience’s
feelings to be about my subject?
8
Analyzing the Audience

Not only will you want to understand the demographic makeup
of your audience, but you will also want to learn about the
average knowledge level that your audience members have on
your subject, their interest in the subject, their attitudes toward
the subject, and their perceptions of your credibility.
Knowing this information will help you reach your goals of (1)
forming reasonable generalizations about your audience and (2)
adapting your speech to embrace subject-related diversity.
Analyzing the Audience #2:
Subject-related audience data helps you…
determine your audience’s knowledge.
establish your audience’s interest in your topic.
determine your audience’s attitudes toward your subject.
understand listeners’ attitudes toward you as a speaker.
9
Methods for Gathering
Audience Data
Surveys (two-sided items, multiple-response items, scaled
items, open-ended items)
Informal observation
Asking questions
Making educated guesses

Although it is not always possible, the most direct way to
collect audience data is to survey the audience. A survey is a
questionnaire designed to gather information directly from
people. Different types of surveys gather specific types of data.
1. If you are familiar with members of your audience, you can
get much of the important data about them simply by observing
them.
2. If you are invited to speak to a group you are unfamiliar
with, ask your contact person to answer the demographic
questions given in Exhibit 4.5.
3. If you can’t get information about the audience in any other
way, you will have to make educated guesses based on indirect
information such as the general makeup of the members of a
community or organization.
10
Using Audience Data Ethically
As a speaker, you must steer clear of inappropriate & inaccurate
assumptions about your audience.
Avoid marginalizing and stereotyping
Recognize & acknowledge the demographic diversity in your
audience.
To demonstrate respect for everyone in your audience, you will
want to avoid making inappropriate or inaccurate assumptions
based on demographic or subject-related information you have
collected.
Marginalizing is the practice of ignoring the values, needs, and
interests of certain audience members, leaving them feeling
excluded from the speaking situation. Stereotyping is assuming

all members of a group have similar knowledge levels,
behaviors, or beliefs simply because they belong to the group.
You can minimize your chances of marginalizing or
stereotyping by recognizing and acknowledging the
demographic diversity your audience analysis reveals.
Demographic diversity is the range of demographic
characteristics represented in an audience. For example, the
average age of your audience may be 65, but some listeners may
be significantly younger or older.
11
Analyzing the Occasion
What are the special expectations for the speech?
What is the appropriate length for the speech?
How large will the audience be?
Where will the speech be given?
When will the speech be given?
Where in he program does the speech occur?
What equipment is necessary to give the speech?
The occasion of the speech is its setting, which includes the
purpose, audience expectations, and location. The answers to
these questions about the occasion should guide your topic
selection and other parts of your speech planning.
12
Selecting a Topic &Writing a Speech Goal
Review your list of topics to select one, using audience
adaptation & analysis.

Once you have chosen a topic, you can write a general & a
specific speech goal.
As you review your list of topics, compare each to your
audience profile. Are some topics too simple for this audience’s
knowledge base? Too difficult? Are some topics likely to be
more interesting to the audience? These types of questions will
help you identify topics that are appropriate for the audience.
Then consider the occasion. Are some topics too broad for the
time allotted? Do some topics fail to meet the special
expectations? These types of questions will help you identify
the topics that are appropriate to your setting.
Once you have chosen your topic, you are ready to identify and
write the general speech goal you hope to achieve in the speech
and then the specific goal that is tailored to the public speaking
situation.
The general goal of a speech is its overall intent. Most speeches
intend to entertain, to inform, or to persuade. By contrast, the
specific goal, or specific purpose of a speech, is a single
statement that identifies the exact response the speaker wants
from the audience.
The occasion usually dictates the nature of your general speech
goal. A specific speech goal, however, must be carefully crafted
because it lays the foundation for organizing the speech. These
guidelines can help you craft a well-worded specific goal.
Phrasing a Specific Speech Goal: Guidelines to Help You
Develop a Well-Worded Specific Goal
Write a draft of your general goal using a complete sentence
that specifies the type of response you want from your audience.
Revise the statement (and infinitive phrase) until it indicates the
specific audience reaction desired.

Make sure the goal statement contains only one idea.
Revise the statement until it describes the precise focus of your
speech.
13
Exhibit 4.5
General & Specific Speech Goals
A good specific goal statement is important because it will
guide your research as you prepare the speech. Once you have
completed your research, you will expand your specific goal
statement into a thesis statement, which will be the foundation
on which you will organize the speech.
The exhibit gives several examples of general and specific
informative and persuasive goals.
14
Exhibit 4.5
General & Specific Speech Goals
A good specific goal statement is important because it will
guide your research as you prepare the speech. Once you have
completed your research, you will expand your specific goal
statement into a thesis statement, which will be the foundation
on which you will organize the speech.

The exhibit gives several examples of general and specific
informative and persuasive goals.
15
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
~ Benjamin Franklin
16
Chapter 3
Listening and Responding Effectively
SPEAK
In this chapter, we discuss five different types of listening, how
you can improve your listening skills, and guidelines for
providing a constructive and ethical speech critique.
12/16/2015 1:32 PM

other countries.
THIS PRESENTATION.
1
The mind is
Nature gave us one tongue and two ears so we could hear twice
as much as we speak.
~Epictetus
Learning Outcomes:
1. Why is it important to study listening in a public speaking
course?
2. What is the difference between listening and hearing.
3. What are five different types of listening?
4. What strategies can you employ to improve your listening
skills?
5. How can you constructively critique speeches you hear?

12/16/2015 1:32 PM
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THIS PRESENTATION.
2
Hearing & Listening
Hearing is the biological process that occurs when the brain
detects sound waves…
Listening is the process of receiving, attending to, constructing
meaning from & responding to spoken or nonverbal messages.
Communication is the process of creating shared meaning. For
communication to be effective, the speaker must present the
message clearly and compellingly. Equally important, however,
is that the listener understands and accurately remembers what
was said.
Listening is important because 50 percent or more of our time in
communication is spent listening. Effective listening is a key to

success in most occupations. To be an effective communicator
you must understand and practice effective listening skills.
Hearing is the biological process that occurs when the brain
detects sound waves…
Listening is the process of receiving, attending to, constructing
meaning from, and responding to spoken or
nonverbal messages.
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THIS PRESENTATION.
3
Emotions and Listening
To listen effectively, you must be calm and interested.
Other emotions impede listening.
Watch for emotional triggers that hinder listening.

Types of Listening
Appreciative listening
Discriminative listening
Comprehensive listening
Empathic listening
Critical listening
Types of Listening:
In an appreciative listening situation, your goal is simply to
enjoy the thoughts and experiences of others.
In discriminative listening, your goal is to understand the
speaker’s meaning conveyed in other ways than the words
themselves (e.g., nonverbal cues).
In comprehensive listening, your goal is to understand,
remember, and recall what has been said.
In empathic listening, your goal is to be a sounding board to
help another sort through feelings.
In critical listening, your ultimate goal is to evaluate the worth
of a message.
12/16/2015 1:32 PM
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THIS PRESENTATION.
5
Improving Your Listening Skills
Effective listening is a complex process made up of five steps:
Attending
Understanding
Remembering
Evaluating
Responding
Improving your listening skills:
Attending is paying attention to what the speaker is saying
regardless of extraneous interferences.
Understanding is the ability to assign accurate meaning to what
was said. Sometimes we may not fully understand a speaker’s
message because the speaker uses unfamiliar words or complex
concepts and sometimes we might miss the emotional intent of
the message.
Remembering is being able to retain and recall information we
have heard.
Evaluating is critically analyzing what is said to determine its
truthfulness, utility, and trustworthiness. Critical analysis is
especially important when the speaker expects you to believe,
support, or act on what was said. If you don’t critically analyze
what you hear, you risk going along with ideas that violate your
values.

Responding is providing feedback to the speaker about what is
being said
Exhibit 3.1 (p.33) gives excellent examples of effective
listening behaviors and ineffective listening behaviors.
6
Guidelines for Attending to a Speech
Get physically ready to listen
Resist mental distractions while listen
Suspend judgment while you hear the speaker out
Identify the benefits of attending to the speaker’s words
To be an effective listener, you need to train yourself to focus
on what people are saying regardless of potential distractions.
These techniques can help you do this.
Guidelines for attending to a speech:
Get physically ready to listen.
Resist mental distractions while you listen.
Suspend judgment while you hear the speaker out.
Identify the benefits of attending to the speaker’s words.
7
Guidelines for Understanding
and Remembering
Determine the speaker’s organization
Ask questions
Silently paraphrase key information
Observe nonverbal cues
Take good notes

Guidelines for Understanding and Remembering:
Determine the speaker’s organization
Ask questions
Silently paraphrase key information
Observe nonverbal cues
Take good notes
8
Preparing a Constructive Critique
Effective critiques …
communicate specific observations
begin with positive observations
follow observation statements with explanations
are phrased so that it’s clear they reflect your personal
perceptions, not “truth”
A constructive critique is an analysis of a presentation that
evaluates how well a speaker meets a specific speaking goal
while following the norms for good speaking and that
recommends how the presentation could be improved.
Preparing a Constructive Critique:
Effective critiques …
communicate specific observations
begin with positive observations
follow observation statements with explanations
are phrased so that it’s clear they reflect your personal
perceptions, not “truth”

Exhibit 3.2-3.3 & 3.4 (pages 36 & 37) give excellent examples
of ineffective & effective comments about the content of a
narrative/personal experience speech
9
General Criteria for a
Constructive Critique
Content of the speech
Structure of the speech
Delivery of the speech
A constructive critique is an analysis of a presentation that
evaluates how well a speaker meets a specific speaking goal
while following the norms for good speaking and that
recommends how the presentation could be improved.
Content of the Speech:
Does the speaker establish common ground and adapt the
content to the audience’s interests, knowledge, and attitudes?
Does the speaker seem to have expertise in the subject areas?
Does the speaker have high-quality sources for the information
given in the speech?
Does the speaker reveal the sources of the information ?
Are the sources relevant? recent? varied? distributed throughout
the speech?
Does the information presented explain or support each of the
main points?
Are presentational aids appropriate and well used?
Is each main point supported with breadth? depth? listener

relevance?
Structure of the Speech:
Does the introduction of the speech get attention, establish
listener relevance and credibility, and lead into the topic?
Has the speaker stated a clear goal for the speech?
Are the main points of the speech clearly stated, parallel, and
meaningful?
Do transitions lead smoothly from one point to another?
Does the information presented explain or support each of the
main points?
Does the speaker use language that is appropriate, accurate,
clear, and vivid?
Does the speaker use a compelling style?
Does the conclusion summarize the main points and end with a
clincher?
Delivery of the Speech:
Does the speaker sound intelligible? conversational?
expressive?
Is the presentation fluent?
Does the speaker look at the audience?
Does the speaker use appropriate facial expressions?
Were the pronunciation and articulation acceptable?
Does the speaker have good posture?
Does the speaker have sufficient poise?
10
Learn how to listen and you will prosper – even from those who
talk badly.
~ Plutarch

11
36 THE CONCEPT OF NATIONAL
CINEMA
BY ANDREW HIGSON
This article is based
on a chapter from a
PhD thesis which I
am currently
preparing. I would
like to acknowledge
the work of Thomas
Elsacsser in enabling
me to develop some of
the arguments
advanced here.
Susan Barrowclough,
'Introduction: the
dilemmas of a national
cinema', in
Barrowclough, ed,
Jean-Pierre Lefebvre:
The Quebec
Connection, BFI
Dossier no 13,1981,
p 3 .
A L T H O U G H T H E T E R M 'national cinema'is often used
to

describe simply the films produced within a particular nation
state, this
is neither the only way in which the term has been used, nor is
it, I want
to argue, the most appropriate way of using the term. This
article is not,
however, intended as an examination of any historically
concrete
national cinema. It is intended instead as an exploration of some
of the
implications of using the term 'national' in discourse about
cinema (the
film industry, film culture), moving towards an argument that
the para-
meters of a national cinema should be drawn at the site of
consumption
as much as at the site of production of films; an argument, in
other
words, that focuses on the activity of national audiences and the
con-
ditions under which they make sense of and use the films they
watch. In
so far as reference is made to historically specific national
cinemas, most
of my examples will relate to British cinema (and, of course,
Holly-
wood), but I would hope that much of what I have to say is
generalisable
to other national cinemas - at least those of Western Europe - as
well.'
The concept of national cinema has been appropriated in a
variety of
ways, for a variety of reasons: there is not a single universally
accepted
discourse of national cinema. In general terms, one can

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