Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series

Israel: Uri Zohar b.1935 Dan Wolman b.1941 Michal Bat-Adam* b.1945 Amos Gitai b.1950 Ari Folman b.1962 Eran Kolirin b.1973

Palestine: Michel Khleifi b.1948 Ali Nassar b.1954 Elia Suleiman b.1960 Rashid Maskarawi b.1962 Annemarie Jacir* b.1974 (* indicates noted in International Film Guide)

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In 1969, five years after its first issue, a brief report on the preceding year in cinema for Israel first appeared in the International Film Guide (IFG). An average of 14 Israeli produced features were being released each year through the 60s and 70s with several 'quality' features selected for a short review in IFG, often with a note on a selected director. These annually published reports and reviews were written by journalists and critics including Dan Fainaru for Israeli cinema for more than three decades (1980-2012). Annual production peaked in1972 at 29 features, of which 18 were local productions, 8 foreign and 3 co-productions.

IFG correspondents at times reported the lack of interest by Israeli exhibitors, presumably based on their assessment of audience potential, in publicly releasing foreign language (and even Israeli) art films following their screenings in the Jerusalem and other European film festivals. The government had a continuing policy of encouraging foreign film production in Israel through rebates. The first short entry for Israel appeared in the sixth issue of IFG in 1969. Entry was only extended to Palestine in IFG's world survey for the first time in 2009. Between 2010 and 2012 a total between forty to forty-four films of all lengths and formats were produced in all the Palestinian territories (Shafik 287).

While the Palestinians continue to struggle to achieve statehood [….] Palestinian filmmakers have enjoyed remarkable success internationally for much of the last decade. Ever since the first Palestinian feature film was made - generally recognised to be Michel Kheifi's 1987 Wedding in Galilee* – the likes of Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention and Henry Abu-Assad's Paradise Now*) have eloquently and artfully captured the elusive existence of a people rendered homeless on their own land ( IFG 2009 p.355).

The Film Centre of the Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry responsible for the professional and financial condition of the film industry was concerned to improve the quality of films being made for international circulation to be selected from submitted scripts based solely on artistic merit assessed by a public committee with the Film Centre advancing funds to a chosen producer. Recognising the conservatism of an older audience, the then recently founded Israel Film Institute and the establishment of a cinemathèque network in the interests of stimulating creative individual filmmaking talent and the nucleus of a younger, more aware, audience. The industry had to wait several decades to be financially stabilised after many ups and downs when in 2000 the Cinema Law was finally legislated. The much-discussed legislation rescued from what looked like further cuts with half the future taxes to paid by commercial tv broadcasters to be directed to subsidise the film industry.

Philosophy graduate, subsequently film director and actor, Uri Zohar (above,1935-2022) as a director, popular television star and icon of bohemian broadcasters, is credited for initiating the New Sensibility art movement in Israeli cinema in the 60s and 70s. Whereas Zohar “reinforced provincial lifestyle and the glare of the Israeli sun [seeing] these elements, even vulgarity, as authentic”, his contemporaries depicted the Israeli character in a European light.“ The low budget productions in black & white were mostly filmed and set in modern and secular Tel Aviv. The movement was influenced by European modernist styles of the French New Wave, Italian neo realism and were also “inspired by East European art films while dealing with private concerns of sexual desire in defiance of collectivist state ideology” (Ari Ofendengden quoted, Wikipedia).

Zohar wrote and directed an avant garde satire, A Hole in the Moon (1964), considered a kind of manifesto for the movement, together with a drama based on a short story by A.B. Yehoshua, Three Days and a Child (1967), considered precursors to about 30 New Sensibility features, 1969-76. Zohar also directed a “Beach Trilogy”: Metzitzim/Peeping Toms (1972), Big Eyes (1974), and Save the Lifeguard (1977), shot in Tel Aviv as a Mediterranean rather than European city. Zohar was the first Israeli filmmaker to capture the intensity of the light in Israel. “The existential emptiness, which is one of the main [concerns] of the New Sensibility, was integrated in Zohar's films, mainly in the Beach Trilogy, into a very authentic and specific Israeli perspective (Schweitzer).”

Poster for Big Eyes (Uri Zohar, 1974)

In denial of his cinematic past with its rejection of institutional Zionism, Zohar described it as the dark period in his life, in 1978 giving up his career as actor and filmmaker to become an Haredi rabbi. Shani Kiniso (q.v.) considers that Zohar's “inclination towards universality, obscured and oversimplified the Israeli experience which plagued Israeli cinema for thirty years,” can be traced back to the films of the New Sensibility movement.”

Parallel to the movement was the rise of the Bourekas film (named after a form of savoury food) with comedy and melodrama focused by ethnic and culture clashes on screen, to become an immensely popular genre in Israeli cinema in the 60s and 70s.

Dan Wolman (above) who occupies a special place in the annals of Israeli cinema as the “consummate independent,” was born in Jerusalem in 1941. Described as “an intriguing introvert,” Wolman 'disappeared' overseas in1968, enrolling in the Film Institute at New York City College, majoring in film at New York University and then teaching film at the School of Visual Arts in 1971 and years later teaching at Tel Aviv University. He made four award winning short films between 1965 and 1969. Established in the medium, Wolman returned to Israel where real recognition came in writing and directing his first two features. He made the first two of his 15 'personal' features, in the mode of the 'New Sensibility' with a perspective of individual freedom for his characters, implicitly rejecting the atmosphere of social conformity in Zionist ideology then evident in much of Israeli artwork further heightened by messianic fervour following Israeli victory in the 1967 Yom Kippur war (Shani Kiniso).

The Dreamer (1970), seen as Israel's first personal feature, is about a young man working as an orderly in a nursing home who makes sketches of the residents and unsuccessfully tries to sell them at an art gallery. He rarely speaks and is teased in the street by children as an eccentric while befriending an elderly woman resident. This becomes the film's main focus. Made with “a touching sense of poetry” as an existential drama, it failed in Israel but was nevertheless submitted as the Israeli entrant in the Cannes film festival.

In this atmosphere of conformity the New Sensibility “was like a breath of fresh air” (ibid). My Michael (1974), is based on “an important work of Israeli literature” by Amos Oz which had been translated into 12 languages. The story involves a young couple who frequent intellectual circles in Jerusalem in the 50s. Their turbulent relationship is heightened by the woman's nostalgically obsessive memories of her friendship with Arab twins made more difficult by the social and political situation looming in divided Jerusalem prior to the1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Over the years Wolman in his personal films* continued to take strong independent positions In Hide and Seek (1979), the first Israeli feature film to portray a homosexual relationship, here between a boy and his teacher, is interwoven with his parents' involvement in underground political activity during the British occupation in 1948. Ben's Biography (2004) is the story of a complex relationship between a sensitive bookeeper and a down-to-earth married woman intrigued by Ben's unusual behavioural traits. In Foreign Sister (2000) Naomi is the successful wife and mother in a bourgeois household who suddenly finds at 50 that her life is collapsing under the weight of sheer ordinariness until her husband employs Nigist, an illegal Christian Ethiopian immigrant, as housemaid, drawing Naomi's life in a whole new direction. In Tied Hands (2006) a desperate mother's turbulent search in the streets of Tel Aviv for marijuanaa to ease her ailing son's pain, confronts her with truths about her past. Gei Oni (Valley of Strength, 2010), an historical epic that interweaves the story of the first wave of Jewish European migration to Palestine at the end of the 19^th century with an unusual love story between a Russian immigrant and a native Jew.

Wolman's second film based on a novel by Amos Oz, Judas (2022), develops into an off-beat coming of age story, in which two protagonists, a student on hard times and an elderly man with a caustic outlook, brought together by a live-in arrangement, get to discussing the student's stalled thesis on Jewish views about Jesus's humanity. At the same time the student becomes involved in a relationship with the elderly man's mysterious daughter-in-law. In Wolman's most recent feature, Murders Too Close, Loves Too Far (2025), an investigator probes the secret behind the murder of two police officers.

In addition to his 15 personal features, Wolman has directed a number of TV dramas, documentaries, theatre productions and also four commercial assignments for the international market including two teen comedies, immensely popular both home and abroad, of the Lemon Popsicle series, and Nana (1984) with only the title and setting borrowed from Emile Zola, made as an erotic comedy with superior production values achievable with a Golman-Globus financed budget : cinematography by Jean-Pierre Aumont and a score by Ennio Morricone.

Initially following in his father's footsteps by qualifying as an architect, beginning with an early interest in filmmaking with an 8mm camera, Amos Gitai (above) established an international presence in politics and the arts from the mid- seventies. A good deal of it was spent working tirelessly in frequently chosen exile in France. Exile enabled access to the means to continue film work from the early feature length documentary essays in the late 70s-early 80s, extending to more than 50 documentary features and shorts, 15 fictional features, 30 installations and performances. Gitai also authored many books.

“As an Israeli, I believe - politically speaking - that the conflict in the Middle East can only be solved when Israel recognises the rights of the Palestinians. But as I am no politician, I convey my opinion through film, which is my medium. I show the situation of [both] Jews and Arabs in my films,” (1981) a hope probably extinguished by an assassin's bullet in '95.

A paradigm of Gitai's approach in seeking a language of film more fit for his purpose in filming a self- devised exemplar for a new form of documentary film language. It coalesced in a number of journeys through the Israel-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in Field Diary/Journal de Campagne (1982) during the months leading up to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. “Through encounters (not always very welcome) with Israeli soldiers, interviews with Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees, relentless observations of the everyday minutiae of occupation in the towns and villages, and long-held travelling shots […] of the disputed landscape, Amos Gitai has fashioned a remarkable work which examines in his own words, “how violence against the Palestinians is legitimated”... [This he does] by bringing a very different kind of gaze to bear [without commentary] on a subject and region which have already been saturated by the media. Indeed, his whole approach is an implicit critique of the typical televisual approach...Instead he deals with the situation on an everyday level [while providing] a framework of historical and political reference which treats the Palestinian cause with a respect and depth of understanding usually denied in the Western media” (Petley).

Instead, a kind of dialogue is set up between filmmaker and viewer in which the filmmaker proposes a way of making sense, but simultaneously invites the reader/viewer to check the proceedings. This in-between way of proceeding – in between intellectual and mood manipulation – is rather difficult to describe […] The scene comes alive as our relation to the seen is activated [shown in long held sequence shots] as a significant component of our viewing experience. The cognitive value of the scene changes as we work with the whole range of materials on offer... (Willemen 166).

Willemen identifies different ways Gitai in his films assumes an audience that is cinema-literate in the sense that they are as interested in concentrating on the way audiovisual discourse is formulated, as much as they are interested in finding out how social relations have shaped whatever is being filmed. The films do not presuppose that we are only concerned with looking judgmentally at the strangeness of others. “People are represented as shaped by social existence in all its contradictoriness, with all the consequent possibilities for change that such a view implies, since the social itself is presented as a field in constant flux. Nothing is more alien in a Gitai film than the populist presentation of oppressed people as idealised victims” (ibid 171).

In the context of documentary practice, its lessons are applied equally to fiction beginning with Gitai's first fictional feature, Esther (1986).

A subtle orchestration of time and space can be used to convey a sense of place, opening up the setting, the cityscapes and landscapes, to an awareness of historically accrued meanings. Gitai achieved this in Esther, by setting a biblical story in a recognisable and memory-laden part of contemporary Haifa, giving the viewers ample opportunity to savour the political sense generated by the mobilisation of this particular place for this particular story (Willemen 172).

Willemen notes that Gitai gives particular pride of place to the role of iconography and expressionistic lighting in his next feature Berlin-Jerusalem (1989) in conjuring up the Weimar period, in this case, deploying subtle stylisation through re-staging rather than filming the story in its historical location as in Esther. This sensitivity to the deployment of setting in the mise-en-scène to the requirement of making meaning in each of the wide-ranging spread of subject and theme across 15 fictional features is a special quality of Gitai's work as writer-director. This commitment to conveying a sense of time and place can be found, for example, as the common thread linking in what are, on the face of it, Gitai's most fully contrasting narratives forming a displaced bookending of his fictional oeuvre. The representation of the extreme trauma of combat in conveying his own experience of military service as a member of a helicopter rescue squad during the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Kippur (2000) at one end, and the poetic “peek into the souls” of a group of Jews and Arabs living together as a small community, forming a forgotten enclave in the 81 minutes of Ana Arabia (2013) filmed in a single shot in Gitai's most fully stated preference for the long take.

More than four decades later with his latest film The Road to Jericho (2026), Amos Gitai is again filming on the road on which he filmed Field Diary, attempting to highlight the plight of those in the Occupied West Bank. Gitai is exploring his own role in tackling, as ringside observer, the issue of the West Bank. Only international pressure has kept it open, “the litmus test is how far the international community will go to protect the rights of the people of Khan al-Ahmar,” a Palestinian village between Jerusalem and Jericho targeted by Israeli settlers. In a clip from an interview with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin during the false dawn of the mid-90s Accords,

Rabin was very simple, very sober. He wanted an agreement and was prepared to put all the questions on the table which was decapitated by his assassination – it's all gone. Everything has been destabilised and in the hands of those who don't want peace. This is absolutely the worst time in my life – three years in a state of shock at the levels of violence and savagery we are seeing. I make films when I'm moved and disturbed by something that's always the trigger. I first visited Khan al-Armah ten years ago and was touched by the perseverance and dedication of the Bedouin village community.

NAZA (2026), a film co-produced by 'The Guardian', spotlights the role of the Israeli military in the bombing of Gaza orchestrating the ratio of the number of Palestinians that will be necessarily killed in order to kill one Hamas terrorist. It should never be forgotten that it was World War 2 that, in essence, marked the systematic mass targeting of civilian populations from the air for the first time, in the 'strategic fire bombing' of Dresden and Tokyo by allied aircraft. In the case of the latter in March 1945, the estimated death toll of 80-100,00 over two nights, exceeded the total estimated death toll in the bombing of Gaza and the West Bank over 4 weeks. What is perhaps as equally disturbing about the revelations in NAZA is the attitude revealed by at least some of those with the responsibility for operating the technology in Tel Aviv. Were the crew in the Enola Gay laughing as they released the A Bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Jake Wilson concludes in his review of NAZA, 'The Age' (10/10/26):

At the climax of this compact and precisely shaped film, shadows lift to the extent of allowing us to witness certain things for ourselves. But overwhelmingly, the experience of NAZA is that of being submerged in a night without end.

The Road to Jericho (Amos Gitai, 2026)

Far from a polemic, The Road to Jericho has been described as more like a tone poem. “I don't believe art changes reality. What art can do is scratch memory and that's important. Machine guns and money move the world, but so do ideas.” The critique in 'Dmovies' online, following its Venice Film Festival premiere, notes that Gitai's movies have become increasingly experimental and free form, “The Road to Jericho is beginning to resemble those of Jean-Luc Godard, especially in his final decade.” The Gitai quote above about the role of art is reiterated early in the film which is driven by political, literary, filmic and music references.

Set on a kibbutz, Kfar Aza, bordering the Gaza Strip, The Boy (2023), was the third short film written and directed by Yahav Winner who was murdered in their home by Hamas terrorists bursting across the border on that fateful morning of October 7, 2023. Yahav managed to stall the terrorists sufficiently to allow his wife, Shailee Avary, to flee carrying their daughter, and hide. Yahav had just completed shooting and begun the editing of his first feature film with Avary, also a filmmaker.

Shani Kiniso, an Israeli film critic, curator and writer delivered a 'manifesto', subsequently published as an essay in which he suggested that The Boy could serve as a prelude introducing a new aesthetic for “an intangible cinema” to fully capture the horrors of October 7.” Kiniso described the opening sequence of The Boy as “prophetic [….] arguably one of the most remarkable in Israeli cinema.” Winner insisted that in making the film there was a profound gap in Israeli cinema since the beginning: the conspicuous absence of peripheral regions and towns like Kibbutz Kfar Aza and the Gaza Envelope region which he was intent on correcting in The Boy.

The Boy follows a father and son, Aviroam and Barak, dealing with the daily reality of rocket fire and regional combat. While Aviroam tries to maintain a calm daily routine, Barak struggles with intense emotional strain until tensions reach a boiling point one night.

Palestine

Like Jordanian and Lebanese cinema, Palestinian film enjoyed a considerable boom and international success on the festival circuit, despite the stalled peace process and continued deterioration of the social and political situation in the Occupied Territories under the Palestinian Authority since the second intifada in 2000. The question remains why Palestinian cinema flourished while the country's crisis deepened? There is clearly no simple answer to this. To begin with, most Palestinian features since Michel Khleifi's Wedding in Galilee (Urs al-Jalil 1987) may be loosely classified as auteur or art house. Since the first intifada in 1989 33 movie theatres in the Occupied territories in 2015 had crumbled to 3 with none left in Gaza,[....] Yet despite the unfavorable conditions and limited resources there is an increasing number of Palestinians, particularly in the less privileged areas, who have become involved in filmmaking, many making their first steps, due to the more flexible and cheaper digital technology available. Nevertheless, Palestinian full length film production and distribution continue to be almost completely detached from the homeland. Many of the more recognised Palestinian directors, whether born in Israel or abroad, have acquired other nationalities and are largely based outside the region.

Still, It must be stated that against all odds, Palestinian film, which started as an anti-colonial endeavour and since then has been roped into the Arab-Israeli conflict in different ways, has at last been able to develop into a sophisticated and cinematically conscious presence […,] This does not mean that earlier tropes related to culture, tradition, and resistance, including martyrdom, have been discarded, but they have been channeled into a more critical vision. The first who paved the way for this development was certainly Michal Khleifi (q.v.)...National and cultural self-assertion through images of resistance fighters [and] martyrs.... gave way to helpless patriarchs, rebellious daughters, and aggressive young men...This trend includes the trope of the spoiled wedding that appears from Wedding in Galilee (q,v,) to Rana's Wedding (al-Quds fi Yaumin akhar, 2002) by Hani Abu Assad. Annemarie Jacir's two full length fiction films Salt of This Sea (Miha hadha al-bahr, 2008) and When I Saw You (Lamma shuftak, 2012) are focused on women's stories, tackling two controversial women's issues, refugees and the right of return. Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention (Yaddun ilahiya, 2002) is far more radical [than previous such films] in its deconstruction of the notion of martyrdom.

The more recent trend towards black comedy is evident in Rashid Masharawi's Laila's Birthday (Id milad Layla, 2008) and a play with genre to confound the absurdity of a national unity in view of the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian film, Ajami (2009), with the different strands of the story seemingly unrelated until culminating in a violent dénouement that exposes the different links.

The immediate message, Viola Shafik concludes, seems to be that whatever the protagonists, both Palestinians and Israelis, try to do, there is no way of escaping the tightly knit net of relationships and common entanglements.

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Shani Kiniso “Toward an Intangible Cinema: An Appeal to Israeli Filmmakers,” a lecture subsequently published in Off-Screen magazine 12/1 or 1/12/23 available online

Dan Fainaru, Zeev Rav-Nof, Annual Reports on Israel Cinema, International Film Guide 1972-2012; Reports on Palestine Cinema IFG 2009-2012

Paul Willemen “Bangkok-Bahrein-Berlin-Jerusalem: Amos Gitai's Editing” in Looks and Frictions Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory BFI 1994

Julian Petley “Journal de Campagne/Field Diary” Monthly Film Bulletin, also interview June 1985 Various

Various The Films of Amos Gitai, interviews National Film Theatre BFI 1985

Viola Shafik “Palestine: National Cinema Without a Homeland” pp. 287-97 Arab Cinema History and Cultural Identity 2016

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NOTE - Renumbering is still due to take place

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links.

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema