ייצוג לשון הדיבור העברית בקולנוע הארץ-ישראלי בשנות השלושים של המאה העשרים

As a starting point to a broader study on the development of the representation of Hebrew speech in Israeli cinema, this paper examines the way Hebrew speech is represented in the first two full-length Israeli feature films, produced in 1932, one of them a silent film and the other with synchronized sound. Modern Hebrew, which had been revernacularized only a few decades before, was still far from linguistic stability at that time, though it was already a spoken language, with notable differences from Classical Hebrew. Cinema was a new medium which, unlike written media, could represent spontaneous spoken Hebrew in recorded sound. One would expect that the new Hebrew-language films would provide a reliable representation of the new Hebrew speech; yet this expectation is not borne out, as this paper shows. In fact, the language presented in these films was influenced to a large extent by the normative approach which strongly preferred the "correct" use of the language over the existing usage. Though cinema was not a national institute, filmmakers, struggling to produce their films without a local cinematic infrastructure, seem to have had strong affinity with the Zionist project and believed in the significance of Hebrew as the national language. Their films apparently played a didactic role of demonstrating how Hebrew ought to be spoken ideally, rather than reflecting contemporaneous Hebrew speech.