Amos Gitai: Israel’s One Man New Wave, Filmic Architect
He looks a lot like that eccentric genius detective on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, doesn’t he? But he’s not.
Israeli director Amos Gitai is probably his nation’s most influential filmmaker. Film critics say Gitai is leading the currently-blooming renaissance in Israeli film, with the Village Voice calling him Israel’s “one man new wave.”
Since the start of his career in 1974, Gitai has directed documentaries, shorts, and feature films that have brought him eleven wins on top of an additional twelve nominations from film festivals around the world. Most recently his film Free Zone, which starred Natalie Portman, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival.
But, as often is the case, what the art world applauds is less-easily digested by mainstream Hollywood film-goers. Gitai’s movies are unique, toying both with storytelling and cinematographic techniques. He eschews the same old story structure — exposition, rising action, conflict and then resolution (think of the mountain chart from high school English classes). Instead, Gitai mirrors reality, offering one big chunk of existence, where all of the characters are both good and bad, conflicts go unresolved, and polished happy endings simply don’t exist.
As far as his unique cinematic style is concerned, Gitai possesses a sense of confidence that doesn’t rely on cheap tricks to keep the audience’s attention. Instead of short, cliched shots that jolt the viewer’s focus, Gitai empowers the viewer to decide where to look within the shot through long, hypnotic takes that create a voyeuristic effect.
But before he became a filmmaker, Amos Gitai was trained and worked as an architect. This helps explain his movies, which aren’t stories as much as they are cultural edifices–beautiful things that tell of a particular place and time but resonate far beyond that place and time.
And they should be approached as such.
A good architect has a natural eye for style and knows how to comment on society indirectly. Gitai’s films are visually stunning and loaded with social criticism. Like a pillar, frieze or pediment, his individual shots and scenes serve as points of interest and beauty in his films, instead of merely as place-holders for plot points in a storyline.
If it were not for the Yom Kippur War, Gitai most likely would have followed his original career path. His father had been an architect and Gitai received his PhD in architecture from UC Berkley — architecture made sense. But after helping move wounded soldiers from Israel’s battle fields to hospitals by helicopter (if you’ve seen Kippur, this should sound familiar), Gitai decided, as he revealed in an interview with the BBC, that “architecture is maybe interesting for another country, another life, but it’s a bit too formal an exercise for me.”
From that point on, Gitai decided he wanted to make films that would “touch a nerve” with his countrymen, and by “touch a nerve” he meant flaunting his left-wing ideals. From the beginning, politics have fueled his films, and continue to do so, as he highlights the horrors of war (Kippur), the oppression of women (Kadosh), the human loss involved in the settlement of Israel (Kedma), and the failings of the nation’s social structure (Alila).
Despite his political assuredness, however, Gitai’s subjectivity and his honest portrayal of humanity transcend politics and give his films universal art-house appeal.
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