Amos Gitai
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Amos Gitai (born 11 October 1950 in Haifa, Israel) is an Israeli film director. His father was an architect whose family name was originally Weintraub. Gitai was studying architecture himself when he was called up to serve in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. While serving in a helicopter rescue crew, Gitai shot 8 mm footage of the war. Gitai has claimed that this served as his entry into the world of filmmaking. On his birthday, Gitai's helicopter was shot down by a Syrian missile on the Golan Heights. This experience had a great effect on his life and forms the basis of his film Kippur, an autobiographical depiction of his war service.
He began his career directing documentaries which showcased his increasingly leftist politics. Field Diary, a critical look at the Lebanon War, was partially censored by the military in 1983, leading Gitai to leave Israel for France, where he would base his working life for the next decade, until the electoral victory of Yizhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords convinced him to permanently return to Israel.
While in France, Gitai directed a series of fiction films which led to great acclaim in his adopted country, the most well-known being Golem and Berlin/Jerusalem, which retold the true story of two women, one German and one Russian, who make their way to 1930s Jerusalem out of a passion for Zionist politics and the mythology of Jerusalem.
Gitai studied in the US, earning a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley in 1986. [1]
Having returned to Israel, Gitai maintained his ties to the French film industry, and produced a series of increasingly acclaimed and successful films. Kadosh (1998) was an attack on the place of religion in Israeli society, and while criticized in Israel for its anti-religious bent, it proved a huge success overseas, garnering new attention for Gitai and Israeli cinema in general.
Kippur (1999) was an even larger event, being Israel's first large scale cinematic depiction of what many consider its most difficult and traumatic war. Critics in Israel and overseas praised its lack of sensationalism and its unsentimental depiction of war. However, it was criticized for historical inaccuracies, most especially its depiction of the Golan Heights as a rainy, muddy landscape. In fact, no rain fell on the Golan throughout the entirety of the Yom Kippur War. Gitai defended his film as truthful recounting of a personal story, and felt that his critics were concentrating on irrelevant details.
Kedma (2001) was a critical retelling of Israel's War of Independence, in which Gitai sought to revise what he saw as many of the myths surrounding Israel's founding. It was less well received than his previous films and went largely ignored in his native country.
Alila (2002) was a step back from the serious nature of Gitai's previous work. It was a tragi-comedy set in a Tel-Aviv apartment house, featuring an Altman-esque array of characters and an all-star Israeli cast.
In recent years, Gitai has directed Promised Land (2004) about foreign prostitutes in Israel, and Free Zone (2005) with American star Natalie Portman. The latter won the best actress award at the Cannes film festival for Israeli actress Hannah Laslo.
Many Israeli film critics believe that Israeli cinema is currently in the midst of a major renaissance, and that the country is finally coming of age in the art of film. They see Gitai's work and his international reputation as one of the major reasons for this phenomenon.
While highly acclaimed overseas, Gitai's films are not always popular with Israeli audiences. While Kadosh and Kippur were both major events in Israel, his other films have not always found an audience in his native country. Some Israeli critics see Gitai's style as too "European" for Israel, and believe he is more in the tradition of French cinema styles such as the Nouvelle Vague. This seems to be borne out by the fact that Gitai's films are considerably more popular in Europe and Gitai is seen as a major filmmaker in France whereas he is still something of an outsider on the Israeli scene.
[edit] Style
Gitai has a very distinct and recognizable style influenced by European cinema and his own interest in architecture. His films tend to involve very long, unbroken shots matched with ambient music and long pauses in dialogue and action. As a result, his films move very slowly compared to today's popular style and tend to create a hypnotic effect rather than shocking the audience with rapid shifts in perspective and mood.
Gitai himself has stated that fictional filmmaking is like architecture, and that he seeks to create an allegorical or archetypal structure to his narrative films. This is very noticeable in films like Kippur and Alila in which long scenes play in a single shot, often without dialogue or music, turning the characters into part of the visual language of the film rather than setting them apart from it. Alila, in particular, only contains about 40 shots in total, an extremely low number for a feature length narrative film.
[edit] Themes
Gitai's films are highly political, something which is unusual in international cinema but not necessarily in Israel, which is a highly politicized society in which open and often harsh political statements are the norm. The major themes of his work tend to be intellectual and didactic, which is in contrast to his extremely visual and non-linear style of filmmaking. His films deal with issues like the existential experience of war (Kippur), the oppression of women by traditional religion (Kadosh), the relationship of the individual to the state contrasted with the relationship of the individual to the family (Alila), and the human cost of realizing political ideologies (Berlin/Jerusalem, Kedma). In many cases, such as Kadosh, Promised Land and Kedma, Gitai's films openly address very distinct political issues such as the division of religion and state in Israel, the exploitation of women by the Israeli sex industry, the historical debate over Israel's War of Independence, and the right of Israeli draftees to refuse military service. Gitai is openly left-wing in his politics and is sometimes accused of going too far in expressing his personal political positions and turning his films into polemics. This was a frequently expressed criticism of Kadosh.
Outside of politics, Gitai's films most frequently deal with the question of human relationships in a sociological context. He examines human groups, often in states of extremis, and their relationship to each other and their society. This fits Gitai's architectural interest, and he often depicts his characters struggling between their individuality and the structures (or strictures) of the society in which they exist.
