Amos Gitai: Israel’s One Man New Wave, Filmic Architect
He looks a lot like that eccentric genius detective on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, doesn’t he? But he’s not.
Israeli director Amos Gitai is probably his nation’s most influential filmmaker. Film critics say Gitai is leading the currently-blooming renaissance in Israeli film, with the Village Voice calling him Israel’s “one man new wave.”
Since the start of his career in 1974, Gitai has directed documentaries, shorts, and feature films that have brought him eleven wins on top of an additional twelve nominations from film festivals around the world. Most recently his film Free Zone, which starred Natalie Portman, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival.
But, as often is the case, what the art world applauds is less-easily digested by mainstream Hollywood film-goers. Gitai’s movies are unique, toying both with storytelling and cinematographic techniques. He eschews the same old story structure — exposition, rising action, conflict and then resolution (think of the mountain chart from high school English classes). Instead, Gitai mirrors reality, offering one big chunk of existence, where all of the characters are both good and bad, conflicts go unresolved, and polished happy endings simply don’t exist.
As far as his unique cinematic style is concerned, Gitai possesses a sense of confidence that doesn’t rely on cheap tricks to keep the audience’s attention. Instead of short, cliched shots that jolt the viewer’s focus, Gitai empowers the viewer to decide where to look within the shot through long, hypnotic takes that create a voyeuristic effect.
But before he became a filmmaker, Amos Gitai was trained and worked as an architect. This helps explain his movies, which aren’t stories as much as they are cultural edifices–beautiful things that tell of a particular place and time but resonate far beyond that place and time.
And they should be approached as such.
A good architect has a natural eye for style and knows how to comment on society indirectly. Gitai’s films are visually stunning and loaded with social criticism. Like a pillar, frieze or pediment, his individual shots and scenes serve as points of interest and beauty in his films, instead of merely as place-holders for plot points in a storyline.
If it were not for the Yom Kippur War, Gitai most likely would have followed his original career path. His father had been an architect and Gitai received his PhD in architecture from UC Berkley — architecture made sense. But after helping move wounded soldiers from Israel’s battle fields to hospitals by helicopter (if you’ve seen Kippur, this should sound familiar), Gitai decided, as he revealed in an interview with the BBC, that “architecture is maybe interesting for another country, another life, but it’s a bit too formal an exercise for me.”
From that point on, Gitai decided he wanted to make films that would “touch a nerve” with his countrymen, and by “touch a nerve” he meant flaunting his left-wing ideals. From the beginning, politics have fueled his films, and continue to do so, as he highlights the horrors of war (Kippur), the oppression of women (Kadosh), the human loss involved in the settlement of Israel (Kedma), and the failings of the nation’s social structure (Alila).
Despite his political assuredness, however, Gitai’s subjectivity and his honest portrayal of humanity transcend politics and give his films universal art-house appeal.
TJC Director Up for Oscar Nomination!
The director of Time of Favor, one of our feature films this month, could soon be up for an Oscar nomination! His newest film, Beaufort, has just been named Israel’s official entry to the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film category.
Typically, though, the decision was surrounded with controversy.
Beaufort is actually the Israeli Academy of Film and Television’s second choice, after Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit, reports the Jerusalem Post. The latter film was not eligible for the Foreign Language Film category since more than half of its dialogue is in English. The Israeli committee made an appeal to the Academy Awards to reconsider, but the decision to disqualify The Band’s Visit was confirmed.
Since Beaufort won the second highest number of votes at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s version of the Oscars, it was the next in line for the honor. However, according to a previous article in the JPost, many Israelis “believe Joseph Cedar’s film has a better chance at winning an official spot as an Oscar nominee – and ultimately the best chance at winning Best Foreign Language Film.”
While Beaufort is about an IDF unit stationed at the Beaufort outpost in Lebanon just before the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Time of Favor [HaHesder], Cedar’s first feature film — which premiered in 2000 — investigates the sometimes troubling intersection of militarism and religious extremism in the IDF’s Hesder program, whose enlistees spend part of their time in the army and the other part learning in yeshiva.
Time of Favor won several Ophir Awards and launched Cedar as one of Israel’s most important — and most controversial — new directors.
Stalin: Most Think Ruthless — One (Jewish) Woman Thought Lover
Joseph Stalin murdered millions of Soviet Jews, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped him from having an affair with a Jewish woman, possibly marrying her, and caring for her daughter until the day she died. The Communist government kept the love affair secret for over fifty years, but a historian recently discovered a letter in the basement of the Russian Communist party’s headquarters that read:
Dear Comrade Malenkov!I am the daughter of Ana Rubinstein, the former wife of Comrade Stalin.
As he is in ill health, I ask you to let me see him. He knows me since I was a child.R. Sveshnikova (Kostiokovski). If it is not possible to see him, I ask you to grant me an audience on a very urgent matter.
Date: 04.03.55
Ignoring the fact that he murdered 20 million people, Stalin still wouldn’t have been the ideal lover. He was short, his face was covered in pock mark scars, and his arm was crippled from a childhood accident. His personality, as you might have guessed, wasn’t much better. He was severe, easily angered, and extremely paranoid.
Yet Rubinstein apparently loved him anyway, and this discovery raises questions: Could it be that Stalin’s Jewish lover had something to do with his creation of the first Jewish homeland? Did the tyrant create a wannabe Zion just to impress his girl?
If not, Stalin’s motivations for creating a Jewish state in Siberia are hard to pin down. It could be understood as a good-intentioned act, gifting the Jewish people independence and a state of their own–which certainly doesn’t seem characteristic for a ruthless leader. Or, it could be seen as an anti-Semitic plot to rid Russia of Jews by pushing them far away, into the middle of nowhere.
Either way, his plan failed. In Search of Happiness is a poetic documentary that looks at what life is like in modern-day Birobidzhan, the capital of this Soviet Jewish state, where the small population is ever-dwindling. The film offers poignant cinematography that shows swampy farmland and little boys playing soccer around a community cow. Blending these contemporary shots of the backwards society with archival footage of hopeful Jews rushing west, the film shows how a community, that never really blossomed, has devolved into a disappointment.
Stalin’s love-life, like a homeland in Siberia, didn’t fare much better. His first wife died two years after they were married, and his second wife committed suicide. Historians speculate that Stalin and Rubinstein met in between these two marriages, in Saint Petersburg around 1917. At the time, Rubinstein was already divorced, had a daughter, and was working for the Bolshevik underground.
As years passed, their relationship must have sweetened, because, while hundreds and thousands of Jews were being deported and murdered by Stalin’s government, Rubinstein was living a comfortable life on Vasilievsky Island, next door to the home of the nation’s leaders. Years later, when her daughter applied for a job as an engineer at a classified institute, she was hired immediately — despite the fact that a secret KGB decree had just been issued not to hire Jews.
There’s more to suggest that Stalin and Rubinstein had a thing. To this day, the Russian secret service won’t give up the name of the street that Rubinstein’s daughter lived on in Moscow.
And nothing screams sexy-Stalin affair like governmental secrecy.
The Holocaust — And the Jews — in Iran
Iranian media coverage of the Holocaust has increased 100 percent, thanks to a miniseries that represents the first non-Holocaust-denying television program to air in recent memory. “Iran’s version of ‘Schindler’s List,’” according to the AP, Zero Degree Turn follows the story of fictional character Habib Parsa – who is based on the stories of several Irainian diplomats during WWII, who administered counterfeit Iranian passports to Europe’s fleeing Jews.
The mere existence of the TV series is astounding, given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent Holocaust denial conference – not to mention the country’s fraught relationship with Israel (embodied in Ahmadinejad’s promise to “wipe” Israel “off the map”).
Caught in the middle of all this has been Iran’s own Jewish population. Most people probably assume that the country no longer has any Jews around, but its Jewish population of 25, 000 represents the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East. And as
And it’s possible that the show is meant to assuage that specific community. “The show’s appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran’s leadership to moderate its image as anti-semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make – that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish People,” claims the AP.
And it’s not just in conferences and diplomatic halls that Iran has displayed an attitude that puts Jews on edge and questions the Holocaust’s historicity. Indeed, many in the population participated in a government-sanctioned a national cartoon contest that awarded prizes to submissions that best mocked the Holocaust. School children were then bused to a museum, where the winning drawings were exhibited.
On the face of it, Zero Degree Turn seems to be turning the tide of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. The AP gleaned valuable testimonies from various Iranian viewers of the miniseries that suggest a burgeoning sympathy for the Jewish plight. “Once, I wept when I learned through the film what a dreadful destiny the small nation had during the world war in the heart of so-called civilized Europe,” said Tehran bank teller Mahboubeh Rahamati. Similarly, grocery store owner Kazim Gharibi commented: “Through this film, I understood that Jews had a hard time in the war – helpless and desperate, as we were when Iraq imposed war on us.”
While some Iranians are finally willing to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust, they’ve immediately put that change of perspective to use in claiming that Israel is comparable to Hitler. So, for a country that once looked askance at the true history of the Holocaust, Zero Degree Turn has become acceptable programming only because it forges this connection.
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In Search of Happiness and a Sustainable HillelNot to be confused with Will Smith’s latest blockbuster The Pursuit of Happyness, the Soviet-Jewish-homeland-chronicling documentary In Search of Happiness differs in subject matter, style, and context from its similarly-titled contemporary analogue. However, it, too, chronicles the journey of a man struggling to survive in a world of unfavorable odds.
Set in Josef Stalin’s Jewish state – the “Jewish Autonomous Region” of Birobidzhan established in 1934 – In Search of Happiness explores Boris Rak’s quest for life’s meaning in the face of his alternative Jewish homeland’s decline.
Regrettably, Boris and his wife, Masha, are the last living descendants of the community’s original settlers. It turns out that Stalin’s plan – moving all the Jews into one corner of Siberia – wasn’t good for the community’s prosperity.
And now the major Jewish communal entity on college campuses, Hillel, is realizing that its own approach to creating defined Jewish spaces in Russia has been similarly ineffective. Hillel held two four-day conferences in Russia to discuss a new strategy for promoting community: “a chain of open-space events,” said newly-appointed Hillel Director for Russia Leia Berlin, declaring that “by next September, we must reshape Hillel from its current closed-club model, where people gather in our premises.”
It’s an interesting contrast: Stalin, not the biggest fan of the Jews, created a closed territory and Judaism didn’t survive there. Hillel, ever working for Jewish growth and renewal, created closed spaces for Jews to gather and is now admitting the approach didn’t work.
Back in Birobidzhan, the elderly Boris reflects upon the disappearance of Jewish religious practices and culture in the erstwhile “alternative Zion.” It’s a warning sign of how bad things can get: His home is decorated with crucifixes, and the couple even keeps a herd of pigs in the backyard. And though he still remembers his Yiddish, he prays to Jesus, because “he was a Jew.” Throughout all of this, the viewer is reminded that Boris and his wife represent the strongest remnants of Birobidzhan’s Jewish community.
To avoid such a grim future for the Jewish community, Hillel is constructing a more-inclusive model that seeks to engender widespread community involvement from both Jews and non-Jews. Hillel thinks it can best promote Jewish growth by not creating groupings that are exclusively Jewish.
In the Ukraine, plans for a public Hillel Cafe are already underway. In Moscow, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has awarded Hillel a grant to fund a “Jewish Fashion House” that will foster Russian Jews’ interest in clothing design.
With these seemingly-promising new initiatives, Hillel just may turn things around in the FSU. Of course, they might have reached these conclusions earlier if they had looked to Stalin’s efforts at Jewish community building. The Jewish campus organization was ironically emulating that famous anti-Semite’s model.