Many people loved cinema in Israel, but not as much as the late Uri Klein. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the directors and critics of the new wave in France founded the religion of cinema, or perhaps the church of cinema. This is the cinema and this is its teachings that Uri Klein absorbed. Cinemas As temples of a modern, new artistic religion. And the clear harbinger of the new religion in the Holy Land was Uri Klein. Not Jad, nor Jadek, but Uri Klein, despite all the mistakes he made here and there for 50 years in evaluating certain films and the cinematic works of creators.
I met him for the first time in the winter of 1974-5.
Penkas junction in Tel Aviv.
The famous falafel in the corner.
There are no Akirov towers, there is a dirty class in a new high school.
Klein taught a course for film buffs, I was still in uniform.
There he first introduced us to a film by Jean-Pierre Melville, "Leon Moran, Priest";
There he talked about Truffaut, and someone screened "He Shot the Pianist" - a meeting with a director and a film that is not so easy to sell as art;
John Boorman's "The Hurt Bull", and several other films.
Klein conveyed the love of cinema, the sanctity of high-quality film.
It may be difficult to convey the experience to today's young audience.
The cinema itself, as projected on the 16 mm wheels in the classroom or in the Cinematheque at the Lottery House - how to say - did not look good. It was only two or three years later, in the USA, that I saw again the masterpieces that Uri Klein pointed out and I was able to absorb their special beauty.
And again, "they shot the pianist".
Uri Klein had a unique writing voice of his own, just like his radio voice that was occasionally heard on the radio or on the phone.
His uniqueness raised him at least one floor above the other film critics in Israel.
It is impossible to explain this without criticizing the critics.
Among them are professional film writers at a high level.
But did we thirstily drink their tories?
hard to say.
Even for the thousandth time when he wrote about "Jilles and Jim" recently in the review of the VOD films in the "Gallery" supplement of "Haaretz", you again breathed the air of the peaks of this wonderful work of Truffaut.
It's hard for me to rank which name rolled in his mouth more beautifully - Tripo?
Godard?
Maybe a brarerwell?
These are all pieces of cinematic history that made up Klein's writing personality.
The last toro was about "Eddie King" by Gidi Der.
He rightly said that the audience was not enthusiastic and that the critics were not enthusiastic either, and added, "to say the least."
Except for one visitor.
And it was me, who was very enthusiastic about Eddie King, not to put it mildly.
At one point in my film writing, it seemed to me that "Psycho" was a horror film in which Hitchcock unleashed the horror of the Holocaust, which had probably occupied him ever since he edited footage from the death camps, Bergen Belsen for example.
I picked up the phone to Uri Klein and tried this thought on him, and he did not wave me off.
He reminded me that in one of Hitchcock's late 1940s films, scenes were shot in something like a concentration camp, but in 19th or 18th century Australia.
Sudden death in the showers is not an image that comes out of nowhere.
He talked about his great love for Israeli cinema, which originated in a time when every new Israeli film was an event.
Klein will be remembered among the great figures who created the culture of Israeli cinema and passed away.
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