The Department of Cinema and Media Studies Presents, as Part of The Marva West Tan Lecture Series:
On Private Media and the State Project
Laliv Melamed
Assistant Professor of Film Studies
University of Groningen
October 5, 2023 | 4:00 PM | Cobb 307
Reception to follow in Cobb 310
About the Lecture
In the early 1990s, Israeli television began dedicating Memorial Day air time to videos produced by the grieving families of soldiers killed in the line of duty. When these videos first appeared during a period of growing Israeli discontent with the occupation of southern Lebanon, they were widely perceived as a challenge to the state, reclaiming the dead from Israel’s militaristic memory culture by resituating them in intimate domestic contexts via mediated commemorations.
By tracing an emerging private media system of freelance filmmaking, privatized television, state institutes of care, and grassroots campaigns, I reveal how these videos nevertheless evade a fundamental critique of Israeli militarism, which is instead invited into the familiar space of the home. These intimate connections of memory and media exploit bonds of kinship and reshape larger relationships between the state and its citizens, enabling a collective disavowal of colonial violence.
About the Speaker
Laliv Melamed is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of Groningen. She writes on sentimental politics, governance and media and specializes in nonfiction media and documentary. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023). Her other writings appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (forthcoming), Discourse, American Anthropologist Review, New Cinemas, Millennium Film Journal. In 2020, with the break of the pandemic, she launched a collaborative project titled Society for Sick Societies published by Social Text online, and co-edited Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Towards an Inventory (Meson Press, 2021). Currently, she is working on a book project on military optics and aspects of state secrecy, titled Optics of Opacity: The Cultural Imaginaries of Operative Images. In addition to her academic career, Melamed is a film programmer. She works for Docaviv Film Festival, and has curated programs for The Left Wing film club and Oberhausen Film Festival.