Amos Gitai

Filmmaker Amos Gitai (born in 1950) served in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 as a reserve soldier, at which time his helicopter was shot down. In 1977 he began directing documentary films for Israel Television. After his film House was censored by the television authorities, and when his subsequent film Field Diary met with much criticism in Israel, Gitai moved abroad. He trained as an architect at the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., 1986) and lived in Paris for many years. He returned to live in Israel in 1993. Gitai's films deal with themes of exile, emigration, and political issues relevant to the current reality in Israel.

In addition, his films explore the boundaries of a critical view from within. His film Berlin-Jerusalem is a shattering view of the Zionist dream, and Kippur is a graphic antiwar film (based on some of his own experiences during the Yom Kippur War). His trilogy Devarim, Day after Day and Kadosh takes place in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem and explores, with a critical eye, societal issues in each of those cities.

A prolific and controversial filmmaker, Gitai is one of the Israeli directors who have received accolades worldwide including prizes at Cannes, the distinction of Cavalier of the Arts from the Minister of Culture of France (1999) and retrospectives of his work have been organized in Europe and at the MOMA in New York City. In Israel, however, his films are criticized for being disjointed, non-linear and critical of Israel. Many say this is due to the jealousy of his colleagues due to his critical success on the international level and the resentment of the critics to his having lived and worked abroad. In Israel, he was the recipient of an achievement award from the Jerusalem Film Festival (2002).

A recent documentary film entitled Gitai – In Search of his Carmel by Ran Tal (2009), was shot while Gitai was researching locations and preparing for his recent feature film, Carmel (which premiered in 2009). This documentary is compelling in that it provides the viewer with insight into Gitai's unique way of creating a film -- his artistic process which is always dynamic and the script which is always developing.

We meet Gitai face-to-face and he talks about his films – 25 documentaries and 16 feature films. He discusses the earlier films that have an emphasis on theme and the later films, such as Free Zone, that experiment with the traditional definitions of narrative and form. Gitai talks about people on the move all around the world, and the fact that his parents were immigrants and how the subject of emigration and immigration fascinates him. We watch as he is creating a scene of his mother, reading from her letters to him from London when he was 10 years-old, talking about how she does not feel at home in any of the places that she has lived – not Vienna, Berlin, London or Paris. This theme of people on the move is a theme that can be seen not only in Israeli films but also in American and European films of recent years.

Gitai – In Search of his Carmel is part of a series of documentary films about "Culture Heroes" and is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

For those interested in reading more about Amos Gitai, a new book has become available -- Amos Gitai: Exile and Atonement by Ray Privett, which can be downloaded free from the website of Cinema Purgatorio.

Kippur by Amos Gitai

In recent years, two anti-war films, Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir, have been big award-winners in Israel. Both were short-listed for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and both have been written about on this blog.

During my recent speaking tour to the USA, I was asked in one college classroom to speak about Amos Gitai's Kippur, also a major anti-war film. Therefore, I am taking this opportunity to share some of my thoughts and the students' thoughts about the film.

Kippur (2000), produced just as Israel was pulling out of the "mud" of Lebanon, where we had been stuck since 1982, is set during the opening days of the Yom Kippur War of October, 1973. But the film does not provide any historical context about that war and does not explain how it began, so perhaps it should be seen as a film about war in general.

Clearly an anti-war statement – there is no heroism or triumph in this film -- the film is a hard-hitting portrayal of the horrors and unrelenting nature of war, and provides the viewer with a visceral experience. It is based on the director’s wartime experiences as a medic in the reserves on the Golan Heights, as the Syrians pushed forward and used the advantage won by the surprise attack against Israel. The film combines documentary reconstruction with fictional elements to portray the story. The characters’ names are taken from the names of the actors portraying them – adding to the authenticity of the film. Klausner plays Klausner and Russo plays Russo. Weinraub, the alter ego of the director, gets his name from Gitai's family name before it was Hebraized. But the realism needs no supporting elements – the battle scenes, shot in real time, are devastating, traumatic, gritty and grimly realistic.

The narrative of the film opens and closes with an erotic love scene in which the main character, Weinraub, is indulging in art-sex with his girlfriend. They use artist’s colors that blend together to cover each other’s bodies. Here, the filmmaker is framing or book-ending the war sequences with performance art, thereby comparing the two and making a comment about how both are frantic, arbitrary and surrealistic. When the siren sounds, Weinraub departs, driving through the eerie streets of Tel Aviv (the streets are empty on Yom Kippur) in his old fiat. He collects his buddy, Russo, and they drive to the Golan Heights to search for their unit. In the chaos of war, they become disoriented.

Along the way, they stop to help Klausner, a doctor whose car has broken down. He asks them to help him get to his airborne rescue unit. Thus, commandeered to work in a rescue unit for the duration of the war, Weinraub and Russo are given the dangerous mission of entering by helicopter into areas under Syrian gunfire to evacuate the wounded and bring them to Israeli field hospitals. They become involved in very difficult and bloody missions, trudging through the mud, pushed to the very limits of their emotional and physical capabilities.

The scenes are shot in real time and the camerawork often reflects the chaos and the perspective of the viewer – as we frantically run to the helicopter or as we view the battlefield from above. Gitai questions the notion of documentary versus fiction when his camera moves from a long shot to an up-close and personal view of the terrible reality in the trenches. There is no discussion of the politics or context of this war. The enemy is invisible and there are few moments of a human story. Basically, this is an everyman's tale and the viewer is led to realize an objective truth about the unrelenting and traumatic nature of war.

No longer the same person, Weinraub eventually returns to his waiting girlfriend. They make love, again in the wash of colors -- a violence of colors that blend together to become the brown of mud -- the mud that the viewer recognizes as part and parcel of the carnage of war.

Gitai's films deal with themes of exile, emigration and political issues relevant to the current reality. In addition, his films experiment with the traditional definitions of narrative and explore the boundaries of a critical view from within. His film Berlin-Jerusalem is a shattering view of the Zionist dream and his trilogy, Devarim, Day after Day and Kadosh takes place in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and explores, with a critical eye, societal issues in each of those cities. A prolific and controversial filmmaker, Gitai is one of the Israeli directors who has received much recognition worldwide.

Watch a clip from Kippur on youtube

Free Zone by Amos Gitai

I recently had reason to view again Amos Gitai's Free Zone (2005), whose lead actress, Hana Laszlo, won a prize for “Best Female Interpretation” at Cannes. The film combines issues dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with women's relationships. Here, Gitai provides a look at the futility of the conflict from a woman's perspective.

In honor of the Passover season, I want to call your attention to the opening and closing sequences. Many of Gitai's films (such as Kadosh and Kippur) are characterized by long, introductory and concluding scenes, shot in real time. Also in this film, Gitai opens and closes the film with extreme close-ups on the women, with an eerie adaptation of two Passover children's songs -- Had Gadya, that tells a tale of violence and cruelty, a metaphor for the persecution of the Jewish people during the Middle Ages, and The Four Questions, that permits the children to ask questions at the Passover Seder. Turning around the Passover imagery, the filmmaker asks explosive new questions – "How long will this circle of horror last? Of persecutor and persecuted, of executioner and victim. When will this madness end?" These questions should concern all of us.

The version of Had Gadya, written by Yehudit Ravitz, was popularized and sung by Hava Albershtein, as a protest song during the period of the first intifada.

 


The film is available for purchase on DVD.