Tamar Ashuri



London School of Economics

England

t.ashuri@lse.ac.uk



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.