AMOS GITAI: THE CITY TRILOGY
The cinema of Amos Gitai is a journey through the mystical landscapes of Jewish memory, an innovative commentary on the religious and historical traditions of his people, and, at the same time, a subversive and critical look at the social realities of modern-day Israel.
Starting in 1973, when he made his first films in super-8 to the present, with thirty documentaries and seven feature films to his credit, Gitai, a restless and creative spirit, has journeyed cinematically to many places around the world, travelling with his images in an unending quest for self-knowledge. His travels steadily progress along an axis of memory-identity-emigration, naturally revolving around the issue of exile. After all, Gitai himself lived in exile from 1982 to 1994: his critical stance on Israel's aggressive politics towards its neighbors; his radical views surrounding the problematic co-existence of Arabs and Jews; and his distinct approach to religious tradition and holy texts, brought him into conflict with the authorities and made him, practically, persona non-grata in his own country.
His work is characterized by a personal style and a cinematic form both authentic and original, transcending the traditional dividing lines between fiction and documentary, and creating new borders between them, since it succeeds in infusing a breath of reality into the representational process.
Upon his return to Israel in 1994, he made the films Devarim, Yom Yom and Kadosh, the "city trilogy", a portrait of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem respectively, where, through ordinary stories from everyday life, the collective and personal destiny are superbly intertwined. Gitai's insightful, tender, subversive and ironic view of emotional impasses, his use of melancholic internal landscapes, the identity problems and the "empty" life of his heroes in Devarim and Yom Yom seem to recede in his last film, Kadosh. Impressing both audiences and critics at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Kadosh is a harsh cinematic commentary on the uncontrolled power of an unyielding religious law, that has a strangle-hold on the lives of the film's heroes, "choking" their emotions.
Amos Gitai, a top-ranking Israeli filmmaker, and one of the most important artists of our time, has always kept his cinematic compass steady. With moral integrity, narrative daring and personal fortitude, he has searched the labyrinths of historical memory for the identity of a torn and "exiled" homeland, in the biblical sense of the term, watching from up close and sharing in the passions, the fears and the desires of his people.
Selected Filmography
(English titles )
1977 Political Myths (documentary)
1980 House (documentary)
1981 Wadi (documentary)
1982 Field Diary (documentary)
1985 Esther
1989 Berlin-Jerusalem
1991 Golem: the Spirit of Exile
1991 Wadi, Ten Years Later (documentary)
1993 The Petrified Garden
1994 Give Peace a Chance (documentary)
1995 Devarim
1997 Kippur: War Memories (documentary)
1997 War and Peace at Vesoul (documentary)
1998 Day After Day
1999 Sacred (Kadosh)
|
|
