מורכבותו של סאלח שבתי כטקסט קולנועי

Sallah Shabati (Israel, 1964), written and directed by Ephraim Kishon, has been a controversial film for half a century. While it was perceived, mainly by early critics,as a biting satire on the Zionist establishment, later reviewers saw it as an Orientalist“burekas” comedy that flattered the audience. On the one hand, it was received at the time as presenting its Mizrahi protagonist in a rather captivating manner, and on the other, it has been rejected by contemporary critics as defaming the Mizrahim since it depicts them as suffering from mental, social, and political retardation. The purpose of the article is to explain how the film, as a complex cinematic text, enables a resolution of these conflicting attitudes.While carefully analyzing the film as a cinematic text against the background of Israeli cinema of its time, and examining the cinematic tactics and strategies it employed, the article shows that critics have not asked the right questions over the years. It determines that Kishon’s main objective in Sallah was to nullify Hebrewness and present Hebrew subjectivity as a phantom identity, that is, as non-existent in practice in the Israeli space, while maintaining the superior status of the Ashkenazi Zionist elite within it. This goal was achieved in the film in full