Even though socially engaged Israeli film has seen the rise of much more radical and bolder authors, such as Nadav Lapid (Policeman) and Roe Rosen (Tse), Gitai remains one of its most vital figures



What Amos Oz is to today’s Israeli literature, Amos Gitai is to Israeli film. Over the last three decades he has made many documentaries and feature films whose artistic procedures combine personal and political experiences and systematically measure the length and width of Israeli history and society, their contradictions, search for identity, tensions and dynamics. In regards to what is currently happening in Israel, to speak about Israeli film is almost impossible without paying attention to its socio-political component. “You look somewhat suspicious to me”, said an Israeli soldier to the director, taking his passport during the filming of the documentary Field Diary and threatening to destroy his camera. The result was simultaneously ironic, fragmented and hallucinatory, as well as surprisingly lyrical, no matter whether Gitai observed the Palestinian women mourning their destroyed olive trees or the Israeli government officials burying the remains of a Jewish hero from the 1st century in a desert.

Even though Gitai’s first documentary about a Jewish family that moves into a deserted house owned by Palestinians who have moved away (Bayit), was censored by Israeli TV, the banality of evil became the author’s main preoccupation, whether he was researching the eternal conflicts between those who move in and those who move out (i.e., the motif of compulsory eviction of Israelis from their houses built on the Gaza Strip in the pulsing Disengagement), or their small and large wars, myths and historical delusions. What Robert Carradine was in Fuller’s The Big Red One, (a vessel in which to contain a synthesis of the director’s war experiences), so was Liron Levo in Gitai’s Kippour the author’s intellectual alter ego Weintraub, who admires Marcuse and rejects materialism. Of course, Sam Fuller’s name in the closing credits of Kippour is not merely a banal homage. Fuller appears in four of Gitai’s films (Golem: The Petrified Garden, Gibellina, Metamorphosis of a Melody, Milim), even though there are some other filmmakers in his documentary opus.

Let us remember Coppola in American mythologies and the Palestinian film maker and activist Elia Suleiman in War and Peace in Vesoul, with whom he shares an almost identical political ideology. Since the time when he made the remarkable chamber film Kadosh, which deals with the position of women in the ultra-orthodox Jewish society which only cares about her reproductive organs, Gitai always liked to observe his heroes within the spaces that they live in, following their eternal conflicts and travels. In Promised Land a group of Estonian prostitutes are on their degrading way to the Promised Land of Israel. They are constantly on the move, as is the author’s camera – it never stays motionless. In the opening moments of Disengagement, his strangers share a cigarette in a speeding train after realizing they have much in common, while Juliette Binoche leaves the comfort of Avignon to visit the unstable Gaza Strip, where her daughter lives. In Free Zone, the genius Hanna Laslo drives Natalie Portman towards Jordan to meet the mysterious American who deals in suspicious activities. But the author is most interested in Portman’s profile from which a stream of tears incessantly falls, only to stop for a moment and then fall again. She cries for the whole region.

Sometimes he does not even leave the space of the building in Tel Aviv (Alila), even though he remains politically awake, more playing the role of an accurate observer than a pedantic moralist. Such a treatment of space is not surprising to those who know that Gitai studied architecture. That is the reason for his obsession with long shots and a moving camera that precisely demarks the area of conflict, often done in one continuous shot. At the same time, Gitai likes to raise heavy issues but pretends as if he does not care about the answers. His films are often contradictory, uneven and sometimes exaggerated. On rare occasions he is utterly controlled and calm (watch Jeanne Moreau’s face in Plus tard). But his films are not easily forgotten. Even though socially engaged Israeli film has resulted in the rise of much more radical and bold authors, such as Nadav Lapid (Policeman) and Roe Rosen (Tse), Gitai remains one of its most vital figures. (Dragan Rubeša)