Uri Zohar - May he rest in peace

Uri Zohar, a brilliant comedian, artist, filmmaker, and actor, died recently. In his memory, I went to an event at the Jerusalem Cinematheque – film director and historian, Alon Gur Arye, was speaking on Zohar’s life and work.  There is no doubt that he was a genius, and could have contributed so much more to Israeli culture and society.  However, his career was cut short when, in a surprising turn of events, he became ultra-orthodox in the late 1970s. 

Uri Zohar directed some wonderful serious films.  But he will be remembered for the form of parody which he created, in which he attacked the sacred cows of Israeli society. 

Born in Tel Aviv in 1936, he grew up spending his summers on the Sheraton beach of north Tel Aviv – today that beach is known as Mitzitzim beach, named in honor of his famous beach comedy, Mitzitzim (Peeping Toms, 1972). After serving in the entertainment troupe of the Israeli army, he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. An irreverent comedian, Zohar lived in the bohemian, cultural world, performing in theater, film and radio. During the 1960s and 1970s, he became one of the central figures of the Israeli filmmaking scene and he is well-remembered as a director/scriptwriter/actor in films which portray his beatnik lifestyle, spontaneity and cutting sense of humor.  He directed 11 feature films and numerous shorts, and was the first film director chosen to receive the prestigious “Israel Prize” for his cultural contribution to Israeli life.  There were so many voices, however, opposing his receiving the prize that he graciously turned it down!

I have chosen here to talk about a limited number of Zohar’s films – his first solo directing effort: Hole in the Moon (1965), the trilogy of beach comedies that he made at the end of his filmmaking career, and the 1980s compilation film, Lool, made from his earlier Israel TV sketches.

Hole in the Moon was a comic satire, using improvised episodes which illustrate the clash between reality and fantasy.  The film is a parody of several genres of filmmaking including the idealized Zionist style, westerns, Fellini and gangster films. In a surprisingly political sequence, Arab actors ask the filmmakers (in the film-within-a-film) for better roles because they are tired of always being portrayed as the bad guys.  The filmmakers agree, turning positive into negative, black into white, and the Arabs are given the role of pioneers, singing Zionist songs while they work on the land! The film marked a major transition in Israeli cinema to an openly rebellious and individualist approach.

Uri Zohar’s trilogy of beach comedies included Peeping Toms (Mitzitzim, 1972), Big Eyes (1974) and Save the Lifeguard (1977).

Peeping Toms is the story of a beach bum who never grows up. Guta (played by Zohar himself) is a confirmed bachelor, living the life of an aging beach boy, spending his days renting out beach chairs, selling sodas and chasing young peeping toms from the windows of the women’s dressing area. His friend Eli (Arik Einstein), married with a child, is a pop singer and very successful with women.  Guta is envious of his friend, secretly yearning for a wife, yet approaching women in a rough manner.  On the other hand, Eli envies Guta his freedom and uses Guta’s beach house for his one-night stands. 

With Peeping Toms, Zohar has created the ultimate antithesis of the pioneering films which idealized the self-sacrificing and larger-than-life heroism of the kibbutz enterprise.  Here he dedicates an entire film to a self-indulgent character portrayed by himself, who is the embodiment of the individualistic, irresponsible adult who manages to avoid the commitments of mature life. He is a pathetic figure, beset by sexual anxieties.  Disinterested in living by the rules of society and unable to function according to those rules, the hero’s milieu consists of Tel Aviv beach front life, authentically evoked, in which there are no inhibitions.  Although not successful at the box office when it was originally released, Peeping Toms has become an Israeli cult film, perhaps due to its total embrace of the secular lifestyle and its portrayal of the hedonistic and vulgar beach milieu.

In Big Eyes, the follow-up to Peeping Toms, Zohar again centers his attention on the adult male, still living his life as an adolescent, building his relationships on lies and trying to obtain more than he is capable of holding on to. A comic drama, this film is about love, jealousy and ambivalence in human relationships. Again, starring himself and his friend, Arik Einstein, Zohar has portrayed two very different male friends – the married man in conflict about remaining faithful to his wife, and the bachelor wanting to be a family man.

Zohar’s final film, Save the Lifeguard, reflects maturity and honesty.  It deals with a devoted family man who treats his wife with love and tenderness, while grappling with his need for the attentions of other women.  Zohar plays a sexy lifeguard on the Tel Aviv beach, still tenderly in love with his wife. Somewhat jealous of his bachelor friend, he also makes passes at the girls on the beach.  Hilarious situations arise when his disapproving father-in-law hires an American girl to try to seduce him and bring back photographic proof of his exploits.  Although the domestic issue is seen in a comic light, the film has serious moments and sentimental overtones.

Lool (Chicken Coop) was a compilation of Israel TV vignettes or sketches which had been made by Uri Zohar, Boaz Davidson, Arik Einstein, Tzvi Shissel, and others. The TV sketches were produced and broadcast in the late 1960s and were compiled into a film in the 1980s. Each sketch included wonderful songs sung by Arik Einstein and Shalom Hanoch, archival footage from the TV archive, and brilliant comedy sketches.  In the best-known sequence, Uri Zohar and Arik Einstein satirize the basic fabric of Israeli society, a society built of many layers of new immigrants, all of whom have come from varied lands. Uri Zohar and Arik Einstein appear as early Jewish immigrants from Russia, who, as they arrive, kneel down to kiss the land of Israel. There are two local Arabs (also played by Zohar and Einstein) who are smirking at the new arrivals, mumbling in a gibberish mixture of Arabic and Hebrew.  As the next group of newcomers arrives (again Zohar and Einstein), then the earlier wave of immigrants (now old-timers) smirk and make fun of them.  Thus, the Polish Jews laugh at the Yemenite Jews and their exotic foods, and the Yemenites make fun of the “professor this and professor that” of the German Jews, and so on.  In this sequence, which has been shown repeatedly on Israel TV over the years, Zohar and Einstein have succeeded in satirizing the “veteran” Israelis who look down upon the traditions, behavior and speech patterns of each new wave of immigrants.  Moreover, in playing all of the characters, they represent a composite of all Israelis, so many of whom have gone through the immigrant experience.

Having made a complete shift from the milieu and culture of his upbringing to the hedonism and self-indulgence of Tel Aviv beach life, Zohar decided to make another, more significant change in 1977.  Negating the secularism and arrogance which he had embraced so wholeheartedly, he left the world of film to become a newly Orthodox Jew.  Zohar came full circle, from his university studies to the secularism and satire which shattered the myths of his parents’ generation, then to the more mature filmmaker who used vulgarity as a rebellion against religion and tradition, and finally to the middle-aged adult who found solace and an end to his existential searching in the form of study and commitment which brought him to the practices and spirituality of the ultra-Orthodox. 

Zohar’s authentically Israeli film style, as seen in his slang, his creativity and his spontaneity, has left a lasting impression on Israeli filmmaking.