The Interplay Between Money, Memory and History in the Making of International Co-production: The Case of the Film: The Fifty Years War: Israel and The Arabs

This paper explores the struggle over symbolic representation through the economics of documentary film production. This theme will be examined in light of the changes that are now taking place within the audio-visual industry, most notably the shift from being a national sector to being a trans-national and even global enterprise. The paper discusses how the tendency toward global outreach creates an economic interdependence among various national broadcasters. This interdependence breeds interaction and collaboration which are reflected, in turn, in the contents of audio-visual products being produced and as a result in the ways in which "history" is being conveyed.

This argument will be made through the examination of three different versions of the same documentary film. The documentary (all 3 versions of it) is called The Fifty Years war: Israel and the Arabs. To make this series possible, funding from three separate sources was secured, with each funding source being accorded the right to use the produced footage to construct its own version of the final product. The completed series thus exists in three distinct versions, British, American and Middle-Eastern. Given the splitting of the final product of these co-productions into several "national" versions, this contents-dependence becomes translated into `reality' being presented differently in the different national versions.