Israeli Cinema Embraces New Identities ‘It’s Not Just the Language That’s Changed, but the Way We Look at Ourselves.’
By Joan Dupont
Summer in the city is not all about light entertainment. Israeli cinema has been captivating Paris audiences, especially with the release of two films that made their debuts in Cannes. “Vals im Bashir” (Waltz with Bashir), Ari Folman’s bold animated documentary, towered over the Cannes competition – and is stirring new audiences. Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s “Shiva” (The Seven Days), which opened the Critics’ Week, has since been shown at the Israeli film festival in Marseille and at the Paris Cinema festival.
Folman’s film conjures up images from his youth as a recruit in the 1982 Lebanese war. The Elkabetzes’ “Seven Days” is about mundane violence that brews in a household after the death of a young man: during the seven days of traditional mourning, an embattled family eats, sleeps, prays – and argues.
Ronit Elkabetz, 42, is Israel’s Meryl Streep. Before directing her first film in 2004, “Ve’Lakhta Lehe Isha” (To Take a Wife), in which she played Viviane, shackled to a man she doesn’t love, she was a sensation as the lawless mistress in Dover Koshashvili’s comedy “Hatuna Meuheret” (Late Marriage). Recently, she was the moving heroine of Eran Kolirin’s “Bikur Ha-Tizmoret” (The Band’s Visit), nominated for the Academy Awards.
In “Seven Days,” she is once more Viviane, unhappily joined to a husband who refuses divorce. But now she is accompanied by a chorus of brothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts, a troupe of clamorous relatives brimming with old grievances. The film hums with cries and whispers, dreadful confessions, and seizures of complicity, wild laughter.
Ronit admires her younger brother Shlomi, 35, who writes and directs alongside her. Given to eloquent monologues in French, she cedes center stage to Shlomi, who is more comfortable in English. They don’t always agree – she is the optimist; he the skeptic.
“Shlomi and I knew when we made ‘To Take a Wife’ that we wanted to reunite this family in another film. During that time they are stuck together, these seven days and nights of traditional mourning, they have a chance to get it all out – so much has been repressed.”
Shlomi added: “And it’s not that they don’t love each other, but they have problems with their love.” He continued, “They are living in conflict, not just between the individual and the group, but there’s an inner conflict. So we have a cinema that is self- critical. If we accepted ourselves, our country, we wouldn’t criticize it so much.”
“Seven Days,” made in a rich blend of Hebrew, Arabic and French, is inspired by their family history. “The language mix you hear in the movie – that’s our society: a minimum of two languages, and we speak with our bodies,” Ronit said.
Ronit and Shlomi’s parents, Moroccan Jews, brought up their children in Haifa, in a household where French, Arabic and Hebrew were spoken. And like many Israeli filmmakers, the directors, who could not make their films without Israeli and French funding, live in several cities – Tel Aviv, Paris, New York.
Shlomi finds that Hebrew today is more vivid, supple. “We use the language better today, and writers, too, know how to use it better. The melange sounds sensual. People say they can smell the language in our films.”
“It’s not just the language that’s changed, but the way we look at ourselves,” Ronit added. “Time has passed: Israel is 60 years old. We’ve gained something. And perhaps one day, we will finally understand that we have to love ourselves in order to love each other. We have to open that door, to exist beyond the conflict. For we’ve grown up under the eye of the camera, we’ve been filmed from the beginning. So, it was hard to pick up the camera and film ourselves. Now, we’ve stopped looking at ourselves through the eyes of others and started looking at ourselves with our own eyes. That’s what’s new.”
“Yes, Israeli cinema used to portray us the way foreigners perceived us,” Shlomi said. “We were dominated by Europe. But our culture is a Middle Eastern culture: the day that Israel stopped rejecting this cultural inheritance, Israel became a more natural place. To be part of this place today, we have to be a little bit Arab.”
Ronit looks forward to the day when there will be a burgeoning of Palestinian cinema. “The day that we all can get together to create will be extraordinary: we want to create with them. Everything begins there, respect, looking each other in the eye. We can speak about ourselves intimately now because we accept each other – and maybe we like each other more. So doors have opened.”
The filmmaker Vivian Ostrovsky is a programmer for the Jerusalem film festival, created by Lia van Leer, the next stop on the circuit for Folman and Elkabetz’s films. Ostrovsky cites a cluster of initiatives that have helped Israeli cinema, including the Jerusalem and Haifa festivals that showcase Israeli films and the Israeli Film Fund, “which used to fund patriotic, boring and badly made films,” but for the past decade, under Katriel Schory, “is exporting films like Eran Riklis’s ‘The Lemon Tree,’ an Israeli-German-French co- production.
“There’s also the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, headed by Renen Schorr in Jerusalem, and Ma’ale, a very good Orthodox film school – probably the only religious film school in the world. There was a new Cinema Law (2001) that provides more money for films, such as ‘The Syrian Bride.’ And TV: Channel 2 and cable TV funded Eytan Fox’s ‘Walk on Water.’”
These days, Israeli cinema, which is now also popular in Israel, is no longer identified with the jokey movies of the early days, known as “bourekas” (donuts), or ethnic comedies, nor is it fixated on stories of strife. Films like “My Father, My Lord,” which takes place in an Orthodox milieu, and stars Assi Dayan – himself a groundbreaking filmmaker – delve into the heart of communities, reveal hidden worlds. Movies are made in many genres, from light to dark, with few taboos. Yet, not far off is the din of conflict.
In August, the Locarno festival will honor Amos Gitai, pioneer and architect of modern cinema, with a Golden Leopard for his career; in October, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will screen his documentaries. These and features such as “Kadosh” have paved the way for others, including Palestinian filmmakers. Gitai’s fight for freedom of artistic and political expression has given voice to Israeli filmmakers: his latest, “Disengagement” with Juliette Binoche, has its denouement in the occupied territories, during the forced withdrawal of Israeli occupants.
“When I started with documentaries like ‘The House’ [1980], I felt quite isolated,” Gitai said in a telephone interview. “The environment was hostile to strong films that dialogue with reality. We had to reinvent the form. ‘Kadosh’ was the first Israeli film selected at Cannes after an absence of 35 years; next, ‘Kippour’ was selected, which proves that if we make strong films, they will find their way. Israel is such a dramatic place, it lends itself to translation into cinema, and today our cinema is made up of different voices, styles, and ideas.”
Raphael Nadjari is a young director who has made films in New York, Jerusalem and Paris, and competed at Cannes. Now he is completing a two-part documentary for the French/German channel Arte on the history of Israeli cinema. “The first part is on the pioneering period from 1935, the early Zionist films like ‘Oded the Wanderer’; the second, from 1982 to today,” he said.
What has changed, Nadjari says, is that cinema is vital today because it is no longer under the sway of ideology. “There is a new subjectivity in films like Ronit’s,” he said. “Cinema is no longer didactic; it’s about intimacy revealed. As for Folman’s ‘Waltz With Bashir,’ it could have been made in 1980 – except that he made it from the point of view of the individual.
“I don’t make movies as an Israeli, and nobody can put a label on Israeli cinema. Yet of course,” he added, “this new subjectivity is very Jewish.”
Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.
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