Amos Gitai Retrospective

One Day We Hope We’ll Understand – A Tribute to Amos Gitai

There’s no better time to revisit the works of pre-eminent Israeli filmmaker, Amos Gitai, than now, since the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip (which began in Dec 2008 and stopped with an uneasy ceasefire by Jan 2009 with over 1,300 deaths). Gitai’s long career in films (he was born on Oct 11, 1950), of 42 features in over 25 years, has always been predicated on capturing or recording for posterity the trauma of his region. It’s only symbolic that this tribute to a persistent gaze at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occurs when the warring tension has reached another high.

As Gitai once said: “Israel is an odd country: every time you are in a position to put that symbolic relationship in order, it slips away, as if reality was mobile, in permanent transformation. With recent events, we have seen that after 50 years of suffering it was time to find peace, that in fact a new cycle was beginning. The dominant feeling in Israel is frustration, like that of a missed encounter. I am conscious of being only one individual inside that great mechanism, maybe a witness, almost in the Hitchcockian sense of the term, like the witness of a crime…At the same time, Israel is a touching country – there is something about it that is very real and direct, things are tough and uncamouflaged, rather exposed. All of that calls for a powerful vision.”

When we asked Gitai what he would like to represent his oeuvre, he selected Kippur (2000), the Border Trilogy – Promised Land (2004), Free Zone (2005), Disengagement (2007). To that we added the latest One Day You’ll Understand (2008).

Kippur is a touchstone for Gitai. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 interrupted his architectural studies. He was then in his early 20s and had a scholarship grant to make a film about architecture. Gitai’s memory of shooting Super-8 footage in helicopters while in a medical unit inspired his future career. After that he told the scholarship committee that he no longer wanted to make a film about architecture. He wanted to make a film about the war.

Beginning with shorts in the early 70s, Gitai moved to documentaries in the late 70s and finally his debut fiction feature in the mid-80s. These films persistently dwelled on themes such as homeland and exile, religion, social control and the notion of paradise. His work was characterised by long takes with few but significant camera movements.

Kippur, a biographical film about Gitai’s own experience in that war, marked a departure in two ways. To get the sense of danger on the battlefield, the image was instead constantly moving and chaotic. It also became his most expensive film up till that point, breaking his own formula of low budgets and quick shoots in four weeks.

Gitai said: “Kippur in Hebrew means reconciliation. But etymologically, it also means: for the game. If you want, it is: one is dead or alive. There is also the religious meaning, the day of reconciliation, of forgiveness. On Yom Kippur, a cock is killed – the kappara – so as to erase our sins.”

With Promised Land, Gitai begins his Border Trilogy with another departure. For some time, Gitai had been considering the new digital technology and he finally took that step with the aid of cinematographer, Caroline Champetier. In a way, reflecting the frenetic chaos of Kippur, the two-handheld-camera set-up, is jarring and disorientating, bringing us to experience the fear of women sold into prostitution.

The title, Promised Land, is simply ironic, as the Russian and Estonian girls are first smuggled into Israel, then auctioned like cattle, before being deployed for sex work. There is a scene of the women being washed and hosed down, an eerie visual echo from the survivor tales of the Holocaust camps.

The next film, Free Zone, reinforces the subject of borders that Gitai is dwelling on. As he said: “In the Middle East, borders are a real issue. It’s always physical borders, political borders, which lead to mental borders. I’ve become interested very interested in borders – how they are crossed, who and what crosses them… Free Zone, it’s about the voluntary transfer of a car across the Israeli-Jordanian border.”

Gitai also observed: “I’m interested in these pockets of freedom in the Middle East where people of different origins can mingle and find things they can do in common. I’m interested in observing how people of the region are connecting to other people through everyday activities, and not only through political gestures. At this point, we have been deceived continuously by the big politicians. It’s necessary to start with the little details and maybe through these details we can transform our situation. Buying a car, fixing it, crossing the borders, sharing a story, a meal together…I’m interested in free zones where things like this can happen.”

With Disengagement, Gitai brings us to a few years before the present, specifically, the 2005 military-enforced disengagement of Israeli settlers from Gaza. A tale of a reuniting pair of siblings who return to Israel to find the sister’s daughter who was abandoned at birth 20 years ago, the film reflects the trauma of a people who have to abandon the land, again another mirror reflection of an earlier people who were forced off their land.

In the latest film, One Day You’ll Understand, we see a French Jewish family’s suffering, their struggle with secrets and denials regarding Nazi persecution. The son’s struggle is in understanding his Jewish past that his mother is adamant about leaving alone. For Gitai’s cinema, his cycle of memories seems to spin continuously, that the more you remember seems to bring out the more that needs to be remembered.

As he stated: “On October 11, 1973, I almost died in a helicopter that was hit by a missile. And I can say that I was in that moment, in an almost Hitchcockian sense, the witness of a sort of crime or of a sort of war. The fact that I came out alive put me in a unique situation – that of having a kind of debt regarding that accident that left me alive when, statistically, it qualifies as a miracle. I understood that I had to take on that role of witness, and that I had to make my annual report on the things that I see, on the transformations of my country.”

- Philip Cheah
(written January 14, 2009. War is over if u want it.)