Surveilling a Middle East of the Heart

The Cinema of Amos Gitai (for Yaqeen Hammad, 2014-2025)

“The God Mother,” Krystina (11/98)

“Art flies around truth but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.”—Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

'“Art, like science, is a means of assimilating the world . . . Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth that is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities.”—Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“I am trying to change the world.”—Jean-Luc Godard

The centrality of literature and art to human understanding is self-evident throughout Rollo May’s oeuvre. Like the psychoanalytic misfit and eventual exile Otto Rank, May understood fellow artist types as miners and conquistadors of oceans both within and beyond. Astonishingly, it’s an awareness that eludes the profession of psychology almost completely. Nietzsche, in a preface to his book, Twilight of Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, imagines himself also a psychologist (“one with ears even behind ears”), citing Dostoyevsky as the only psychologist from whom he has learned anything of consequence.

I expand here on a Rollo May Consortium piece discussing the work of Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. An early draft of this essay was written shortly after attending a retrospective of Gitai’s work, Beyond Boundaries: The Cinema of Amos Gitai at Harvard Film Archive in 2000. Uneasily received in his homeland and not especially known in mine, Gitai is admired in Europe for his reflections upon diaspora and ethnicity and a keen sensitivity in documenting the paradoxes and travesties of history, peoples, and time.

The foci of Gitai’s films vary widely. Biblical themes (Esther, Golem—The Spirit of Exile), documentary (American Mythologies, The Arena of Murder), and history (Berlin-Jerusalem, Kadosh) are all incorporated within the purview of the filmmaker’s camera eye. We are returned, repeatedly, to landscape as point of reference as we witness the struggles, yearnings, and follies of peoples and races against the backdrops of Nature and Time—humankind’s fleeting, restless sojourn within Eternity and Space.

Uprootedness, exile, and violence (masquerading almost reflexively as brazen self-righteousness) are prominent among Gitai’s themes. I attempt here to underscore the manner in which the inward reckonings of such artists unfold on planes wholly other than political discourse or rhetoric. This understanding (in Islamic traditions, it is held to be the “greater jihad”) became a cardinal one for Rollo May, too, as he matured as both thinker and man. Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence was significantly underwritten by the horrors of the Vietnam War.

American Mythologies

American Mythologies (1981) is a meandering, low-budget documentary—an assemblage of images made at the time of Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy to office. The film interweaves conversations with Jane Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, a Los Angeles fashion designer, and a programming executive for NBC with assorted documentary clips as Gitai traverses the breadth of America. He interviews a Native American woman in the midst of the squalor that surrounds her dilapidated home on the reservation, questions her about life and culture and what has been lost. She appears spent by years of indignity, hardship, and the utter emptiness of existence. Void of all spontaneity, this woman is unable to mourn or, perhaps, even grasp the annihilation of ancient rituals and ways with which she, a descendent, has for a very long time been unacquainted.

Gradually, an awareness emerges that America is neither as “free” nor well-intentioned as many might wish to believe. A sort of authoritarian “free” enterprise constitutes its own form of mind and monetary control, violence, corruption, and greed. William Blake’s “mind-forged manacles” managed to cross the Atlantic alongside those freedom-seekers of yesteryear, prevailing insidiously into these modern times. Stratagem and packaging, Gitai seems to suggest, play a critical role in the American ethos. The film ends in People’s Park in Berkeley as we listen to the jive, colloquial, uniquely intelligent rap of a young black man who articulates with astonishing insight precisely this point.

It’s a theme seems to have obsessed Melville as well. Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, may be read as an extended rap upon the American mystique and con game. Could it be that those Blakean chains are personified by the shadowy figure of Fedallah in Melville’s great novel, Moby-Dick? He and his “Parsee crew” are smuggled aboard Ahab’s ship, remaining hidden below until the whale hunt begins in earnest. Like the killing machines of our governments, Fedallah is both a worshipper of fire and harbinger of doom. And so the ship sails on into the “heart of that infinite forlornness.” An overabundance of fire, Melville forewarns, yet utterly inadequate light. The Confidence-Man sold terribly, and Melville never attempted another full-length novel. May takes up Melville’s posthumously published Billy-Budd, Sailor in Power and Innocence—a meditation as relevant today as upon its 1972 publication in its Melvillian scrutiny and depth.

Esther

Esther (1986) retells a scriptural tale of ancient antisemitism. Shot conspicuously in an abandoned Haifa slum from which Algerian Arabs had once been forcibly removed, the film’s ironic implications are palpable. During the reenactment of an ethnocentric text revolving around persecution, resistance, and revenge, the ominous roar of Israeli jet planes can be heard periodically punctuating the biblical narrative. Time and myth are conflated. The camera wonders episodically from a sparse, almost biblical, setting to glimpse the modern urban scene.

The Jewish feast of Purim celebrates a collective memory of this story, as Esther and her uncle Mordechai outwit the Jew-hating Hamen, prevailing in the final hour upon a distracted, ineffectual king in order to bring about a villain’s demise. Gitai, however, does not stop with the Sunday school rendition but continues to relate the fuller narrative. Mordechai, not satisfied with Hamen’s execution, would put to death each of Hamen’s sons and innumerable potential aggressors as well. In short, the once victimized now wantonly plunder and murder. As the film ends, the actors deconstruct into their truer identities, each in turn saying a few words about their own story, who they really are. Some of the actors are European émigrés; others are natives of Palestine and Israel. The role of Mordechai is played by Mohammed Bakri, an esteemed Palestinian actor and director deeply influenced by “the suffering of the Jewish people” who has grown increasingly outspoken and frustrated in his efforts to effect reciprocal understandings. The sensitive viewer is drawn into the radical complexity of things far beyond facile presuppositions concerning either/or.

Gitai comments:

“In many ways, this is a film about memory—memories which are reflected through image and songs, through tales and music; memories stored in the songs of the Yemenite Jews who crossed the Arabian desert and reached Jerusalem about three generations ago; memories kept alive in Palestinian exile songs.”

—Amos Gitai

A truer narrative transpires on the far side of radicalized politics played out upon a world stage with its state-sanctioned agendas, slogans, and rhetoric. “The new sounds are there if someone wants to listen,” observes the transcendent, short-lived jazz icon Eric Dolphy—close friend to, and intimate collaborator of, musical legends John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. Anguish is not ethnocentric, nor is violence. It’s a psycho-spiritual insight one encounters in Coltrane and Mingus as well.

Speaking at a retrospective of his work at the Carpenter Center in Harvard Square, Gitai notes that Esther received only a single screening in Israel where he was accused of having rewritten the story in the interests of polemics. Bible in hand, Gitai disclosed that the narrative was, in fact, more complex and psychologically profound than the abridged adaptation on which too many schoolchildren are reared. The filmmaker had, in fact, left out the most lurid parts.

Amos Gitai strikes me as a man admirably obsessed with vision, image, and aesthetic renderings of truth—an attentive observer of ethico-religious values, acts, and divides. There can be no easy answers, but dimly perceived Western lacunae and prejudice lead only to what we have perpetuated and witnessed far too often before: heartache and death, rage and revenge, and always further heartache and corpses. Asked about his homeland’s neglect of his work, Gitai is commendably succinct: “I have my work to do. I will settle accounts with Israel later on.” Gitai’s film was made in 1986, it should be noted, long before the horror of October 7th.

Arena of Murder

Gitai’s collage-like and elegiac Arena of Murder (1996) incorporates documentary reportage with poetry and memory, autobiography and history, graffiti and scripture as the filmmaker returns to the land of his birth in the aftermath of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by a political extremist. The Israeli rock group to which Gitai regularly returns appears, possibly, a bit off-putting at first but gradually earns admiration as the lead singer speaks through songs (and in between them as well) of his admiration for the slain leader, a man who had evolved from war hero to pacifist. The youth reflects on the prospects for the future of the Middle East if respective parties are unable to build upon Rabin’s vision of peace and, in knee-jerk reaction, return to self-serving agendas and oversimplified storylines of old. “If an old man like Rabin can do it, then we can do it, too,” he tells his youthful fans as he proceeds to sing a sort of love song to the fallen prime minister.

Bill Clinton’s moving expression of sadness and affection in the face of Rabin’s death is surreally captured in a television newsroom. This heartfelt yet eerily stylized outpouring of grief elicits a difficult-to-pinpoint discomfiture many of us had hoped a talented politician might one day allow us to outgrow. One senses that Clinton’s convictions are neither so thoroughgoing nor deeply felt as were Rabin’s; there is not quite the sense of this man having wrestled with angels and prevailed. Still, Clinton’s dismay is not insincere. Gitai captures this ambiguity and incompleteness with a single shot of a long row of monitors all broadcasting that same poised, photogenic face. We recall that once we had a reasonably good actor in the White House and may lament that we’ve taken such a notable step down.

Golem—The Spirit of Exile

And so it goes. Gitai’s Golem—The Spirit of Exile (1992) transposes the biblical story of Ruth into modern-day Europe, drawing inspiration from the cabalist legend of the Golem as protector of exiles and wanderers. Set in Paris, the film includes a cameo appearance by the Italian auteur Bernardo Bertolucci and incorporates the stunning imagery of Henri Alekan—master cinematographer who had worked with Renoir, Cocteau, and acclaimed German director Wim Wenders as well. Dialogue meanders between French, Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Palestinians as well as Jews become emblematic of the turmoil of dislocation and prejudice. The film, not unlike the text on which it is loosely based, intimates that life itself is an experience of wandering and exile. Only a compassion that cuts beneath ethnic/racial/national divides can hope to repair, if only momentarily, the ontological breach.

“Call me Ishmael,” the hallowed first words of Moby-Dick. A book, among an infinity of other things, about fixed ideas and attempted possessions gone very, very wrong. Ishmael is, perhaps, the quintessential outsider and exile, and we have already witnessed the manner in which psychological/philosophical paragons like William James and Rollo May hold outsiders in the highest regard. In the Hebrew bible, Ishmael is the son of Hagar and an aged Abraham, and Isaac’s older half-brother as well. He is banished to the wilderness in accordance with Sarah’s wishes where Hagar mourns her son’s imminent death due to thirst and starvation:

“And she sat over against him, and lifted up her voice, and wept. And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her: 'What aileth thee, Hagar? Fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast by thy hand; for I will make him a great nation.”

—Genesis, 14-18

In Islam, Ishmael is held as prophet and progenitor of the Arab peoples, ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. His progeny, too, have come to be a great nation. It’s a disturbing irony that “Project Esther” is the nomenclature affixed (more likely in ignorance than moral outrage or literary refinement) by a Heritage Foundation laying down governmental policies in order, purportedly, to fight antisemitism. The organization has, in fact, been planning the present cruelty of alien projections and deportations for some time. The project is both pretext and platform underwriting the incarceration and ejection of those who would dare to contradict state-sanctioned Orwellian illiteracy and “newspeak.” Vox reports that it was, in fact, penned by evangelical Christians with virtually no Jewish input at all. Gitai, by way of estimable contrast, speaks with an authenticity and will to truth neither rhetorician nor party animal seems remotely able to match. “Thinking is great fun,” I recall Rollo May musing one evening, “if you know how to do it.” Rollo paused momentarily before placing his hand on his breast; “I mean thinking with the heart.”

Kadosh

Kadosh (1999), the Hebrew word for “sacred” or “holy,” explores the interminable religious laws and shibboleths that obtain within Mea Shearim, an insular, ultra-orthodox neighborhood in the heart of Jerusalem. Here, fanatical and self-righteous mores and codes are invoked to break up a genuinely loving but childless marriage even as matrimony is foisted on another woman where sex (there is no polite way to say it) is quite simply rape. It’s intriguing to observe the contrasts between sex scenes within the film itself and across the Gitai’s work broadly. I’m not aware that Americans have anything to compare in subtlety or scope.

The story ends in tragedy for a genuinely pious woman who is abandoned to loneliness and shame yet more ambiguously for another who leaves a slavishly obedient and violent husband, pausing as the sun rises and sets over the Temple Mount. Perhaps she will find her way out of the myopia of mindsets and rules of religions that, at their worst, govern and distort very nearly every facet of life; perhaps she will emerge into the greater consciousness and world. As we behold the beauty of this ancient and war-torn land, the majesty of its religious structures and sites, words sent in a letter by Van Gogh to his brother, Theo, come to mind: “The best way to know God is to love many things.” Jesus had said it as well; there may be life after death after all.

Kippur

Kippur (2000) is a semi-autobiographical retelling of Gitai’s personal experience in what is known, from one side, as the Yom Kippur War—a conflict in which the helicopter on which he flew rescue missions over Syria was shot down by enemy fire. On the way to the front, Weintraub (a fictional representation, likely, of Gitai himself) discusses Marcuse and over-consumption with his friend Russo—less philosophically inclined, though clearly more sanguine and sturdy. As the conflagration erupts, chaos envelops all, all refined thought and would-be heroics obscured by the bedlam of war. What begins for Russo and others as a chance to defend their nation by putting antagonists forcibly back in their place bogs down in a nightmare of stagnation, horror, and death.

It was in the aftermath of this event (the downing of a helicopter in which Gitai was called upon to attempt some sectarian good in this troubled part of the world) that he decided to exchange a degree in architecture at U.C. Berkeley for a camera as a means of repairing the world. Kippur, the Hebrew word for “atonement,” connoting—much like “greater jihad”—an exacting work of self-examination. “I did not want to spend my life designing shopping malls in occupied Palestinian territories,” Gitai later reflected. If only adversity would more commonly yield such psycho-spiritual fruit. Dylan, of course, had said it as well: “If God’s on our side, he’ll stop the next war.” It’s a goal toward which we and the upper realms, in tandem, might profitably work.

Beyond Boundaries: The Films of Amos Gitai

Amos Gitai: Photographs and Artwork

Musical codas, i and ii

Here is a stirring Patti Smith rendering of Dylan’s Masters of War about the atrocities of war and its exploitation by those who wield power in order to advance wildly misguided (and, far too often, egregiously self-serving) interests. In Patti’s passionate, searching words:

“Sometimes when everything seems pointless, hopeless, out of reach I turn to music. Thank the stars for Bob Dylan who gave us the best of his youth with songs like this. My son Jackson on Telecaster. Tony Shanahan on bass. Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. Lenny Kaye on Stratocaster. I was a bit hoarse but the heart was strong.”

—Patti Smith

Patti Smith performing Dylan's "Masters of War"

Smith’s rendition of Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall on the occasion of the 2016 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm (a performance I’ve watched many times) is equally moving. John Urbain (the collage artist and close friend whose art, alongside Krystina’s, adorns this Rollo May Consortium) loved to point out that our mistakes are what render things real. Be this as it may, we may thank God or Whom or Whatever for turned-on voices and congregants like these.

Art credit

The God Mother is a haunting painting by Mele, the child artist within Krystina, whose poignant story we have already briefly introduced to Rollo May Consortium readers and about which we will share more over time. Another outsider spirit and artist type with much of urgency to communicate to orthodox minds and an insufficiently sentient world. I will say a few words about The God Mother, in particular, in an accompanying note. Like Yaqeen Hammad, the 11 year old girl to whose memory this piece is dedicated, Krystina is a long-suffering reminder of love in the face of humankind’s frequently brutal inhumanity to child, woman, fellow being and man.

References

Gitai, A. (1981). American Mythologies. Finland/Israel. Epidem, A.G. Productions.

Gitai, A. (1986). Esther. UK/Austria/Netherlands/Israel. Agav Films/Channel Four, ORF, Ikon, United Studios Herzlia.

Gitai, A. (1992). Golem—The Spirit of Exile. Israel/Netherlands/Italy/France/Germany/ UK. Agav Films, Allarts, Nova Films/Rai2, Groupe TSF/Canal+, Friedlander Filmproduktion, Channel Four.

Gitai, A. (1996). The Arena of Murder. Israel. Agav Films.

Gitai, A. (1999). Kodosh. Israel/France./Italy. Agav Hafakot, M.P. Productions/Le Studio Canal+, Mikado Films.

Gitai, A. (2000). Kippur. Israel. Agav Hafakot.