Amos Gitai is frequently photographed with his head tilted down, eyes gazing up at the camera, an enigmatic half-smile creasing his lips. It is an odd, vaguely disquieting pose that suggests a smug, secret knowledge, an arrogant certainty.

Then you meet the acclaimed filmmaker, whose movies have explored subjects from foreign prostitutes in Israel (Promised Land) to Tel Aviv intellectuals (Devarim) and women in haredi society (Kadosh), and suddenly you realize that what looked like arrogance in a photograph is actually the expression of a man who—despite his artistic achievements—is painfully shy, compulsively polite and a bit uneasy with strangers.

An international film festival favorite, Gitai has been repeatedly honored by the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival. And his 2000 film Kippur, a thinly fictionalized account of his experiences as an officer during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was the first Israeli film to play the New York Film Festival. Yet Gitai has only been nominated once for the Israel Film Academy’s best director prize, for Kippur, and he didn’t win.

This seeming contradiction is just one of the many that follow Gitai—arguably Israel’s most famous director. Yet ambiguity and gray areas are the source of inspiration for his films.

Gitai is a poet of stalemate. As befits a filmmaker whose native land and home is Israel, whose principal subject is the fate of the Jewish state in the modern world, Gitai’s dramas and documentaries—which add up to over 35 films in total—are portraits of a dynamic, even violent stasis. (If such a state sounds like an oxymoron, compare today’s headlines from the Middle East with those from 40 years ago. Same crises, new names.)

Even when choosing a subject outside of Israel, such as in his latest work, One Day You Will Understand, which takes place in Paris, ambiguity and ambivalence are the driving forces of the story. Centering on the half-Jewish, half-Catholic Bastien family, One Day is an intriguing, understated film—this despite the explosive issues at its core: how to remember and convey the horrors of World War II.

The film, adapted from an autobiographical novel by Jerome Clement, centers on the reaction of the family to the 1987 Klaus Barbie trial. Victor (Hippolyte Girardot) neglects his business as he becomes obsessed with tracing the history of France’s Nazi Occupation and the roundups that swept his mother’s parents into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Rivka (Jeanne Moreau), his mother, is both drawn to and repelled by the memories—and refuses to help her son. His sister, Tania (Dominique Blanc), tries to dissuade Victor, defending her mother’s silence and even a letter written by their father, a Catholic, declaring himself “an Aryan.” In the end, Rivka does not confide in Victor; she can only tell her parents’ story to his children.

Contradiction is also hard-wired into Gitai’s visual style. Since the mid-1990s, when he made his Three Cities trilogy of Devarim (an adaptation of Ya’akov Shabtai’s novel Past Continuous about the lives of three Tel Aviv men in their thirties and forties); Yom Yom (about a middle-aged couple in Haifa, where Gitai was born); and, most strikingly, Kadosh (set in the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem), Gitai has structured his narratives through the use of very long takes that keep his protagonists in the center of the image, no matter their struggles to escape.

The result is a portrait of men and women, uprooted Jews, held in check by an assortment of countervailing forces ranging from family to faith, economics to terrorism. His best works possess a combination of forcefulness and dry, subversive humor that grows organically out of his endlessly looping camera movements. In Gitai’s War of Independence film, Kedma, about European Jewish refugees who sail to Palestine only to risk their lives fighting for the Palmah, there is Andre Kashkar, a nebbishy Holocaust survivor. At the end of the film, Kashkar is trapped onscreen for an exhausting 10-minute monologue-rant about Jewish suffering, unable to escape the camera no matter how hard he dashes toward the frame line. That final shot, with Kashkar becoming increasingly agitated by the moment, his tirade rising in hysteria as he runs back and forth, combines tragic intensity with a sort of nihilistic farce.

That combination works even better in a scene from Kippur. The film’s protagonist (named Weinraub in tribute to the director’s father, Munro Weinraub, and played by Gitai regular Liron Levo) is a young Israel Defense Forces lieutenant who is unable to join his unit in the chaos of the 1973 war. He ends up attached to a helicopter unit that picks up wounded soldiers and rushes them to hospitals. Midway through the film, we see Weinraub and others carrying a wounded pilot on a stretcher through a field of mud, struggling with the weight of their human burden and the sucking, clinging muck that pulls at their feet. Gitai shoots their agonizingly slow progress in a single take of some five or six minutes with a telephoto lens that flattens the foreground and blurs the background.
It’s a key moment in his film universe. The harder the men struggle, the less they seem to advance. In their increasing anxiety, they finally dump the victim off the stretcher and into the mud, a moment at once horrifying and funny.

When a character escapes from the confines of the frame and, by metaphor, the society, the result is a subdued exhilaration, profoundly moving but only guardedly optimistic. This is seen in his 1999 film Kadosh, about haredi sisters Malka and Rivka. Rivka is married and childless; Malka is in love with a secular Jew, but is forced to marry someone from her community. One sister breaks with her family and leaves Mea Shearim (and the screen). That freedom has been won at the expense of the other sister’s life.

Gitai’s characters interact with one another in “real” time and space, held in a trapped orbit, emphasizing their inability to escape one another’s gravitational fields of emotions. As a result, even his dryly funny Tel Aviv film (the only one of his movies that the director himself appears in), Devarim, is about the self-obsession of a small circle of intellectuals as they tear at one another; as a reflection of some aspects of that city’s artistic ambitions, the film might make a barbed but not unaffectionate riposte to the celebrations of Tel Aviv’s founding.

These men are, essentially, victims of what the director sees as the insularity of much of Israeli society, an unfortunate byproduct of the nation’s smallness, with its gaze turned constantly inward as a result of being an island surrounded by enemies.

Gitai’s comments on israel in his movies, and his left-wing political stances, have led to storms of controversies in his native country, though his work is popular in Europe, particularly in France.

“He is exceedingly courageous…,” the great Egyptian filmmaker Yusef Chahine once said of Gitai. “He dares to go very, very far.”

Recently, Gitai has been the subject of detractors on the left, “because I depicted the settlers with some sympathy in Disengagement,” he says. The 2007 film about the evacuation of Gaza follows two estranged siblings, Ana (Juliette Binoche) and Uli (Levo), who reconnect to look for the daughter Ana gave up at birth 20 years earlier. The search takes them to Gaza during the tumultuous expulsion of the settlers.

Gitai shrugs off the complaint with a rueful smile. “I’m used to hearing that from the other side, that I show the Palestinians too sympathetically,” he notes. “I’m not in agreement with the settlers or the Palestinians. But I’m sympathetic to them as human beings. I’m against marginalizing people [in my films] merely because I disagree with them.” (That same understanding of human emotions inDisengagement is evident in Kadosh, where Gitai shows as much sympathy for theharedi husband under pressure to divorce Rivka as he does for the two sisters.)

The seeming contradictions that inhabit Gitai are, he says, the logical outcome of his parentage. “My mother [Efratia Margalit] was born in Israel—Palestine at the time—to Russian Jewish parents who came in 1905,” the 58-year-old director says. “She is as Israeli as you can get, a member of the first generation to speak Hebrew from birth.”

By contrast, his father, a prominent architect and teacher of architecture in the early days after Independence, was a refugee from Hitler.

“He…escaped from Berlin where he was active in the Bauhaus,” Gitai says. “You could spot him immediately on a building site because he was wearing a hat, a tie and a suit jacket. He was an immigrant all his life.”

Gitai smiles broadly and adds, “I would say I’m a product of both. I like to remind Israelis that we are all second-generation immigrants.”

The polarity of Gitai’s upbringing befits a filmmaker who, almost from the start of his career, has courted controversy. His 1980 documentary House, about the disposition of a West Jerusalem home abandoned by its Palestinian owners in 1948, then requisitioned by the Israeli government, was banned for being overly sympathetic to the Palestinians by the same Israeli Broadcast Authority that funded its making. Kadosh was lambasted by Orthodox commentators for its portrayal ofharedi women as victims of an oppressive, patriarchal brand of Judaism. He triggered a near riot at the Western Wall when he filmed a scene of Natalie Portman kissing an IDF soldier there for Free Zone; there is no such scene in the final film, which follows two Israeli women (one of them played by Portman) on a road trip of sorts.

Gitai began his studies by following his father into architecture, completing a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. But he was also fascinated by film and made many amateur films while a student. Initially, he drifted into documentaries while working for Israeli television. Gitai’s camerawork has its roots in these early cinéma vérité-style films.

Unsettled by his experiences in the Yom Kippur War and disillusioned by the suppression of House, Gitai went into exile, settling in Paris for two years. (Today, he travels between Israel, France and the United States for his work.) In France, determined to be a filmmaker, he sought out a circle of like-minded people that included Hollywood maverick Samuel Fuller (like Gitai, a Jew and a combat veteran, albeit of World War II), Bernardo Bertolucci and great cameramen like Henri Alekan and Renato Berta. The latter two now frequently work with the Israeli director.

And Gitai still alternates features with documentaries.

“All of Gitai’s fiction films are based either on autobiographical experience or the experiences of people close to him,” says Larry Kardish, senior curator at the film department of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who curated a series of Gitai documentaries last fall. “There’s a deep biographical relationship between his fiction films and it comes out in the documentaries.”

As an example, Kardish points to Kippur and War Memories, a documentary made of footage that Gitai shot during the Yom Kippur War. “When you see the footage he shot as a soldier, including footage of the helicopter crash in which he was wounded, you see the connection instantly,” Kardish says. Similarly, the groundwork for Disengagement can be found in The Arena of Murder, about Gitai’s investigation into the Rabin assassination three weeks after the event, when the filmmaker traveled through Israel recording his encounters with people.

“Gitai is a filmmaker whose work is inflected by the realities of Israel and anti-Semitism today,” Kardish adds. “I think he feels his fiction films are so real that they deserve a documentary-like treatment.”

When asked about the role the Shoah plays in his films—he has alluded to it directly only in One Day, Berlin-Jerusalem, Valley of the Wupper and Kedma—Gitai characteristically refers back to his understanding of events that took place before he was born.

“As a child growing up in Israel after Independence, I heard the stories told by people who came to my parents’ house,” he recalls. “Abba Kovner, who was in the rebellion in the Vilna Ghetto, and Chaika Grossman, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, were friends of my family. My mother was sent by the Yishuv after the war to work with the survivors…. My mother wanted me to know their stories….”

In a larger sense, he says, “the Shoah is the shadow behind all my films. Jewish history is filled with displacement, persecution and violent resettlement. How do we keep our humanity?”

In his most recent dramas, particularly Disengagement and One Day, there is a new note of optimism in the way Gitai’s characters interact with the camera. One Day is both a departure and a throwback. The film harkens back to his Cities trilogy with their portrait of Israeli society as a claustrophobia-inducing zero-sum game. The Bastiens are as trapped by the past as the protagonists of earlier films were by the present. However, where the long takes in Cities and Kedma froze characters in the frame, the recent films offer a different visual context, with actors and camera movement alike permitting a more fluid relationship between on- and offscreen space.

Of course, that optimism is contingent and precarious. Perhaps the most hopeful answer that Gitai’s films can offer is the humanity in the series of uprooted, flailing, fallible individuals at the center of his work, struggling to break free of his camera’s intimate and intimidating gaze. H

 

Finding Gitai
One Day You Will Understand, Amos Gitai’s latest, is available on DVD from Kino International (212-629-6880; www.kino.com). Kino also distributes the DVDs of most of Gitai’s recent dramas, including Kippur, which many consider his best work to date. Gitai’s earlier films and many of his documentaries are available from Facets Multimedia (773-281-9075; www.facets.org). Gitai has his own Web site atwww.amosgitai.com.