Contemporary Israeli Film
Filmmakers find a uniquely Israeli voice.
By Saul Austerlitz
After a lengthy gestation period, the Israeli film emerged
from its womb in the 1990s, moving into a period of remarkable artistic growth
and international legitimacy. Whereas once the idea of the Israeli film had
been associated with third-rate dramas and sophomoric comedies, the emergence
of young filmmakers like Eytan Fox, Dover Kosashvili, Shemi Zarhin, and Eran
Riklis, along with the continued success of Israel’s most prominent director,
Amos Gitai, meant that cinematically speaking, Israel was a cultural backwater
no longer.
Amos Gitai
Gitai, who had first come to prominence in 1982 with Field Diary, took center stage in
Israeli film in the 1990s while remaining true to his idiosyncratic,
ever-varied interests. Gitai’s films alternated between an interest in the way
Israelis live now and an in-depth exploration of Israel’s short, tumultuous
history. For the former, Gitai sought to avoid the yuppie melodramas favored by
filmmakers like Nir Bergman (Broken Wings,
2002) and Savi Gabizon (Nina’s Tragedies,
2003), turning his eye to heretofore ignored subgroups like the residents of
Jerusalem’s Mea She’arim district in Kadosh (1999), and the Sephardic working
class of Tel Aviv in Alila (2003).
At the same time, Gitai turned back the pages of Israeli
history to such national turning points as the Yom Kippur War in Kippur (2000) and the 1948 War of Independence in Kedma (2002),
seeking to invest the past with the immediacy of the present. Kippur, possibly Gitai’s masterpiece,
was a deeply unusual war film, one more attuned to the confusion of war, and
its dispersal of peacetime pursuits, than the traditional combat movie. Never
content to make the same film twice, Gitai was condemned to a career of uneven
peaks and valleys. While Kippur was
considered one of the best Israeli films of the era, Kedma, Alila (2003), and 2005’s Free Zone (co-starring Natalie Portman)
all received less-than-stellar reviews. Nonetheless, Gitai remained the don of
Israeli directors, his restless artistry an inspiration to a generation of
younger filmmakers.
New Filmmakers
In the late 1990s and the beginning of the millennium, a new
generation of Israeli filmmakers moved to the fore. These filmmakers were more
sophisticated, more polished, and better trained than their predecessors, and
their influence spread throughout the Israeli film industry, which suddenly
found itself the subject of considerable international interest.
Under
the influence of directors like Fox, Kosashvili, and Keren Yedaya, Israeli film
concerned itself seriously, for the first time, with the nuances of the
country’s diverse, ramshackle society. There were films about the lives of
Georgian thirty-somethings looking to escape from the stifling wing of parental
authority (Kosashvili’s Late Marriage, 2001), Sephardic teens bowed under
the burden of familial responsibility (Shemi Zarhin’s Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi,
2003), a working-class mother and daughter forced to turn to
prostitution as a last-ditch response to impending poverty (Yedaya’s Cannes
prize-winner Or, 2005), and middle-class families
struggling with loss (Nir Bergman’s Israeli Oscar-winning Broken Wings, and Savi Gabizon’s Nina’s Tragedies). There were Yemenites (Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi), Russians (Yana’s Friends, 1999),
Christian Africans (James’ Journey to
Jerusalem, 2003), Israeli
Arabs (The Milky Way, 1997), and the ultra-Orthodox (Ushpizin, 2005).
An Aversion to Politics?
What these films generally avoided, however, was the most
dramatic, most all-encompassing aspect of Israeli life from the early 1990s
forward: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the abortive Oslo peace process.
“Palestinian” was a word rarely heard in Israeli film, with most top-flight
Israeli films concerning themselves with internal housekeeping rather than matters
of diplomacy.
Instead, narrative filmmakers left the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to
documentarians, who took up the reins with aplomb. In films like Yoav Shamir’s Checkpoint (2003) and Avi Mograbi’s How
I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997) and Avenge But One
of My Two Eyes (2005),
Israeli filmmakers wrestled with the moral complexities of occupation and
endless conflict. Best of all was David Ofek’s haunting No. 17 (2003),
which sought the identity of the mysterious seventeenth victim of a Tel Aviv
suicide bombing, finding in one lost soul a key that unlocked a world of
loneliness, suffering, and solitude buried at the heart of Israeli life, made
only more unreachable by violent death. The current conflict was not the only
subject of interest to Israeli documentarians, of course; films like Nitzan
Giladi’s In Satmar Custody (2003), Yaron Zilberman’s Watermarks (2005), and Dani Menkin’s 39
Pounds of Love (2006)
investigated the lives of Satmar Hasidim, a Viennese women’s swim team from the
1930s, and a courageous survivor of muscular dystrophy.
New Themes and Styles
Even taking into account their political hesitancy, it was
the narrative filmmakers, though, who contributed the bulk of the exciting new
films emerging from Israel. Young Israeli filmmakers adapted freely from
European and American film technique while retaining a uniquely Israeli
perspective. Among the younger set, Eytan Fox staked out ground for himself as
one of the few narrative directors interested in depicting that most central of
Israeli institutions: the military. In both Yossi
& Jagger (2002) and Walk on Water (2004),
Fox set his story among soldiers, torn between duty and desire. Groundbreaking
for his depictions of gay eroticism (a major taboo in conservative Israeli
society), Fox managed to use his films’ risqué sexuality as a cover for their
stinging critiques of Israeli militarism.
Keren Yedaya, who won the Camera d’Or for best first film at
the 2003 Cannes Film Festival for Or,
was more concerned with women than men, and the lives of Israelis far removed
from the elite units of the military. Yedaya’s technique owes a great deal to
auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni and Tsai Ming-liang, with Or’s rigid framing and deliberate lack
of camera movement harbingers of a more austere, spartan style than had
previously been utilized by Israeli filmmakers. Or’s innovative style was matched by its interest in the forgotten
members of Israeli society, those who slip through the cracks. Yedaya was
interested in the travails--and traumas--of women burdened with the weight of
the world.
Georgian
immigrant Dover Kosashvili was similarly interested in the unfamiliar lives of
Israelis who did not fit the middle-class Ashkenazic stereotype. His Late Marriage documented some of the
mystifying customs of the closely huddled Georgian community in Israel. Late Marriage was a well-wrought tale of
tradition colliding with desire, but instead of demonizing the former, as most
American films might have, Kosashvili honors Georgian Jewish custom while
simultaneously reflecting its stultifying airlessness. Late Marriage thrives on ambiguity: Is protagonist Zaza’s marriage
to a woman selected by his parents a blessed commingling of desire between the
older generation and the younger, or a callow, cowardly act of kowtowing to
authority? Kosashvili does not tell us, and his coyness helped make Late Marriage one of the best films to
emerge from Israel in recent memory.
Along with Kosashvili, Yedaya, and Fox, the other major
filmmakers of the past 15 years were veterans Shemi Zarhin and Eran Riklis and
newcomer Joseph Cedar. Cedar, an NYU-educated American immigrant, made
Hollywood-esque thrillers flavored with an impressive knowledge of Israeli
cultural history, especially of the religious type. Religious Zionist
messianists figure centrally in his Israeli Academy Award-winning Time of Favor (2000), and the settler movement is similarly featured in Campfire (2004). Riklis’ career betrayed a wide-ranging interest in
storytelling, from the musical biopic Zohar (1993) to the bittersweet Lebanon
war drama Cup Final (1991) to the eye-opening depiction
of Israeli Arab life along the Syrian border in The Syrian Bride (2004).
Zarhin’s Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi was
a tender evocation of teenage anomie, its insight benefiting from its careful
analysis of working-class Sephardic life.
In the past fifteen years, Israeli film has grown into its
own skin, finding its unique subject matter, style, and mise-en-scene. During that time, Israel has become a world center
of filmmaking, with one of the most vibrant groups of young filmmakers of any
country. For Israeli filmmakers, though, the burning affairs of domestic life,
and the ever-looming Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are too immediate for
distraction and mindless entertainment to rule the day. Israelis look to films
for a chance to wrestle with their country’s demons, and this seeming
limitation of Israeli film has become, in the end, its salvation.
Saul Austerlitz is a
writer and film critic in New York.
