Benjamin Freidenberg is a film director who graduated with honors from the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School Jerusalem. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Department of Romance Studies and lectures at the Bezalel Academy's Screen-Based Arts Department. Supervised by Dr. Yona Hanhart-Marmor, his dissertation focuses on film language research developed in Post-WWII France inspired by the intersection between literature and the arts. Parallel with his work in the film industry, he studied linguistics for a bachelor's and master's degrees. Supervised by Prof. Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, his thesis dealt with the linkage between historical linguistics and the development of the filmic craft, specifically targeting the syntax and semantics of film. This interdisciplinary study which engages linguistics and cinema studies, involved the research of semantic changes in verbs indicating object movement and comparing it with historical changes in the meaning of camera movement in films.  Among his research interests: historical syntax, aesthetics, metaphor and metonymy, visual vs. textual aspects of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya and ancient Asian script.

 

Member of the Israel Film Academy and contributor to film preservation projects at the Israel Film Archive in the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the Judaica Division Images Collections of Harvard University. Recipient of the America-Israel scholarships for outstanding artists and the International Association of Film & Television Schools' prize for outstanding filmmakers and scholars.