The new phenomenon that Gidi Der represents in Israeli cinema is daring. It is not typical for filmmakers in Israel to deal with big issues, the epic stories of the people of Israel. And here, Gidi Der, who is remembered from his good films in the past "Eddie King" and "The Ushpizin", attacks the Temple in the movie "Legend of Destruction". He claims that the appearance of the film, at the beginning of the summer, gave new impetus and dynamism to the whole discourse of Tisha B'Av. The date of remembrance that seems archaic all these years, a story of lamentations to which the modern Israeli citizen does not connect, suddenly seems touching.
But what surprised me more was the fact that Gidi Der himself is connected to the events of the destruction of the house, as if they were recent political happenings. When I wrote to him that I was deterred by the entire physical compound of the Temple Mount, and that for me the Israeli settlement as a whole is the Temple, he did not rule it out. "There are opinions that in a sense the days of Messiah have already come. You can feel it on Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv, when everyone is walking on the road and ignoring the laws, and there is peace and tranquility between everyone and everyone."
"You put your hand in the fire," I wrote to him. "It's a kind of hobby like that," replied the director, who makes sure to emphasize that he is completely secular and does not kiss mezuzahs.
He is 57. His first full-length film, "Eddie King," was still steeped in the sensations of the era when movie theaters were temples.
It was released almost 30 years ago, in 1992, and introduced for the first time to the audience the two stars who dominated local cinema in the last generation - Shuli Rand and the late Ronit Alkabetz.
His founding film experience was in New York.
"I saw Griffith 'Intolerance' at St. John's Church," Der recalled when we met in August at the Bookworm Cafe, outside, in the terrible heat of Tel Aviv.
"The candles were not extinguished (which remained lit from the prayers). The organ continued to play. It is a film that cost about $ 2 million 105 years ago. The film ate up for Griffith all the profits from 'Birth of a Nation.' "In the cross and angels. I realized I was seeing Mass. Cinema is a mythical cult, associated with faith."
"A story of great corruption and huge gaps."
From the movie "Legend of Destruction",
"Rolling washing machine"
Unlike his sons and grandsons, Gidi Der lives in peace with the legendary exploits of his father, Avraham Der.
He speaks of it with admiration, and is in no hurry to make a buck about it as is customary with leftists, who are looking in their family for some grandfather or great-grandfather to whom crimes against humanity can be attributed.
Dr. Sr., who died two years ago at the age of 96, was the first commander of the Jewish spy network in Egypt, whose exposure was known as the "bad business."
He was a Yemeni with a solid English background, who spoke five mother tongues.
Gidi depicts a man with a terrifying Mizrahi look, devoid of any fear.
"Arab," he says of him, and can detail incidents of heroism that censorship did not include in the "bag of lies."
When you hear how he acted and what his father's abilities were, you have no choice but to hope that a few more of this breed remain in the right places, which determine the fate of the country.
His mother, 86, is one of the first daughters of Kibbutz Ginegar.
The mythological names from the old kibbutz are familiar to him.
Der inherited from his father the willingness to face challenges, and not be deterred anymore when he was a child from a violent confrontation that could lead to beatings. His film "Legend of Destruction" appeals to all types of audiences, but it probably works hard on religious viewers who see it as a reflection of political current affairs, with a red-color warning of "civil war." "That's where we go," I heard a well-known religious man say, as I left the Jerusalem Cinematheque for the film's premiere.
The film was released about a month after the formation of the Bennett-Lapid government.
The fear that some elements have managed to instill in the national-religious elite against civil war has played a role in the politics of the past six months.
"I can describe to you the process of making, because it is very unique. Usually - how do you make a film? Write a script, get funding, film it pre-production-post-production and do editing, sound, music, final image. Frame. With me. All the processes took place, but not in that order, "says Der as we wait for a carrot cake, and in Rabin Square huge queues meander at the entrance and exit to the plague tents.
"It was like a washing machine rolling all the time. You can't make a movie like that. My partner says that's why I keep getting involved. How do you plan when you have no idea what you want yourself? When a painter plans to paint, he does not know exactly. The plan. "
"I'm terribly alone, and like him."
The father, Avraham Der // Photo: Ancho Gush-Gini,
Magri cut out spent
What stood out to me after seeing the film, is that the creator took the biggest myth of the Jews in the last millennium, the destruction of the house, and makes it out of a film. It takes courage. Not typical of Israeli directors.
"It's I do not know. My problem is excess daring. It is not always good. I first charge and shoot, and then check on who and what happened. Nor did I charge alone. My father always told about the Italians: the officer got up and shouted, 'Come on. ! After me! ', And all the soldiers applaud him and shout at him:' Bravo! '. I do not shout' Kadima ', but storm quietly. "You were a filmmaker, it's not lost."
It's like Corona, it's going to accompany me all my life.
"I hope the Corona will not be such a thing. I remembered you were among the few who praised the film. 'Eddie King' is not daring? I was in jazz music. At what point did I realize I would not be what I want to be. I fell for cinema, the so-called - I came across it.A close friend took me to play an 8mm film, and I was amazed at this Katim thing.
Age 22 ".
What movie was it?
"'Chose Who.'
Yes. It was a hit then.
"With all the postmodernism of the eighties. Today you look at it, it doesn't work."
Alan Rudolph was Robert Altman's deputy.
"True. I'm interested to see it today. The social theme of cinema also attracted girls. Because after that I went to a party at Camera Obscura, there were matters, and I said, 'Buena, cinema is much better than jazz. It's a social business.' "I realized that in cinema technique is not like in music, where without crazy technique you have nothing to offer. Technique in cinema is a more abstract matter. It's how you look at the world through the same keyhole that is your perception."
Cinema also has the dictatorial trip. That you gather people around you and tell them what to do.
"Yes. I was the best at it. Within a second I caught it. Two months after this movie I went to Beit Zvi, and two months later I had already left. There were psychic matters of discipline with Gary Bilu, but I said, 'I will sit in class and learn how to make movies for three years? "Only one thing do you learn to do, and that's doing. 'I know that from music."
So you are not an educational figure for film students.
"It depends on the person. I'm terribly alone, and I'm becoming more and more like my father in this matter. That's what my mother says. He had a last operation before he retired, in Paris. After the affair, he left the army, the intelligence, the Mossad. He would only get jobs. Privacy. It was in '56. He made a small operation. "
And even before we got into the details, I realized that Sheder, like all his contemporaries, grew up not only on "Choose Who", but also on Vim Wenders. Today he is unable to withstand Vanders' films. I fought for the honor of the "American friend," but he's more of Werner Herzog's party. "When I left Beit Zvi, I made my first film with Shuli Rand and Moshe Ivgi. I was 22. Half an hour, 16 mm. To this day I am proud of him. I positioned myself as an absolute dictator. I fired someone in a second. "Then I developed a method that I call myself 'enlightened dictator': I am so dictator, that anyone can say what they want and that's fine."
Despite what the priests did.
Pedro Almodóvar // Photo: Reuters,
"Religiosity, not religion"
Shuli Rand goes with you from your first day at the cinema. How would you define it, stage artist? theater? Theater? Undoubtedly one of the greatest arts in the history of the country.
"The greatest. No one reaches his level."
And you have Uri Zohar. And here, these two giants, Rand and Uri Zohar, come to the conclusion that secularism in Israel has reached a dead end and repent.
"Shuli Rand comes from the national-religious world, his father wins the Israel Prize. Moderate people. He left it in favor of the secular world. They are different. Uri Zohar went for the edge of secularism, for absolute return, and I say this with love and admiration. Not in the section of Contempt. It got to a place where there was nowhere to go. It became empty. To the edge, I think, something was missing. He came from a religious background. And there were other reasons, I can not go into all of them. He found his place. I remember the moment he went And surfed, and I also remember the reconnection between us, which brought all this business back in. The Uspizin brought it back.
"I lived in Ness Ziona Alley when my first child was born. I hear a familiar shout from outside. Shuli comes up, and suddenly I see Dos Haredi. His parents were not Haredi. A few days later we decided to make a film together, and I told him 'We'll do it in your territory, because You can 't come to my territory.' "I saw the point that you can see it when you are outside of Israeliness. Because when you are inside you take everything for granted. Suddenly I saw that all the great directors, almost all of them, Christianity did not leave them. It is inside their cinema. Coppola. Martin Scorsese."
Fellini. Let's say that name.
"Certainly. Everyone. It's there. Almodóvar too. It does not matter that he is gay and anti and what the priests did to him. They did not change place. We cut a place. We have a dichotomy, Total Loss. Especially with the Ashkenazim. We cut from exile one hundred percent. We cut a physical place. Israel is the biblical, original place, but it is also drowning in secularism and the sand. A very thin ground of one hundred and fifty years, which I regard as the most brilliant of Judaism ever. From Zionism, from 1880. This chapter of the Bible is the most impressive chapter of the Bible.
You see Zionism as another chapter in the Bible.
"In Jewish culture.
In the Jewish Corps.
If it was a chapter in the Bible, it would be bigger than David and of all things. Things happened here that the mind does not tolerate in this respect. The Israeli-Jewish-Hebrew narrative is not normal. If there is no God, one should invent it for such a thing. The events? The Holocaust, the establishment of a state and the conquest of all. And technology and language and the army. These are indescribable achievements. There are no such events in the Bible.
The only things that compare to this are the parting of the Red Sea and Mount Sinai.
Absolutely mythical events.
The historical interest in them is not at all clear.
"So I look at these filmmakers, and I ask - what about me? Christianity has faded there. But it's still there. Liberal secularism is a very thin membrane over this thing. Do you agree with me?"
the breakthrough.
Ronit Alkabetz // Photo: AFP,
In America and Sweden you enter the church buildings at universities, and you discover empty shells. There is no cross and the whole visual. Only external skeleton.
"What is it, there is no cross ?! In Nirvana he goes with a cross. A rocker, with drugs, and he goes with a cross. With us, can there be such a thing as an Ashkenazi rocker going with a Star of David? Neither as a flower nor as a laugh."
I can actually see such a thing.
"Rare. Maybe now it's starting. Because something's happening, Israeliness has come to an end. I felt that with the whole biblical story of Zionism - it still lacks significant depth.
You look at Fellini and ask 'how do I relate to this?'.
I have no access at all.
"Bible - yes. And not all the two thousand years to this day; everything in the middle - I have no access."
From the Bible to the Palmach.
"And in the middle I can not even read it. It is a different language. Heroes you do not know, a language you do not know. I was exposed to it at a relatively young age. Not that I became a smart student, but I realized I must strive there if I am an Israeli director, I must touch the heart of "Israeliness. And that heart is below the present. If I want to get to the top. I do not preach to anyone."
So basically Uri Zohar, who is considered a great creator, just scratched the surface.
"In his Zionist, secular phase, he only scratched the surface. He did something terribly important on the surface, which is also important. But he did not touch the bottom. At all. One of the results of lack of contact with the sources - is that you suddenly fly and repent. "And I am against repentance. That is not what I am striving for. When I speak of connecting to my sources, I speak almost the opposite of it. I am looking for the direction in which Israeliness should go."
What does it mean to have a fusion of the religious world here and what we call secularism?
"Fusion is complex. I tell filmmakers, you can make films about the occupation, that's fine. Personal films. I do not underestimate at all, I speak seriously. But the question is whether you can also touch the culture you live in. Without these matters of To please the Europeans, or your left-wing sense of justice. Where is Israeliness itself? What do you ask about it? Its essence. And not just criticism. In the Ushpizin it is how not to pass criticism. Artistic with them. "
Learn about accessibility.
Federico Fellini // Photo: EP,
The thread that may tear
Ben Batih, Abba Sikra, who of course stars in "Legend of Destruction", seems to be connecting to the criminal gallery in your films. Plus faith and fanaticism.
"His criminality comes from fanaticism. But fanaticism and fanaticism are not the same thing. Jealousy is a word that basically expresses appreciation. It has become a derogatory word. Jealousy for the name - in religion it is one of the highest ranks that can be reached.
" I will give you a basic background on that period. That I understood and opened my mind. The world in the first century is pagan. The whole. The Romans, the Hellenists. There is a small group of Jews in the world, most of them in Judea. We were the only monotheists. What does the pagan say philosophically? There are many gods. Whose authority controls? Of fate. Hence the Greek tragedies. Fate rules everything, always. What you are, is your destiny. If you were born poor - there is nothing to do, low caste. Were you born rich? Do not feel guilty. The gods are subject to the authority of fate.
"What do the Jews say, and especially the Pharisees? God created the world, he is omnipotent. He is characterized by wanting justice. Genesis, Exodus, Shabbat, living, widow, orphan, tithe. Socio-economic justice. Without socio-economic justice. "
Do you link Judaism to a utopia?
"Communist? It does not mean absolute equality, but there should be some justice among the Jews. If there are terribly rich rich people who abandon the poor - and this is what happens in Judea at that time, you have sickening wealth - then the Romans rule. They take the upper classes and enrich them more "They are completely corrupting them."
Queen Bernice and her friends.
"Obviously. She's the head."
She really was not in my mind.
"I raised her. Because her father is better known, Agrippa I. But she was strong there, in my opinion, and I was looking for a woman figure. The whole group of aristocrats, and the high priesthood bought with money at this point - it's a story of very great corruption and huge gaps. The door of the people that will come to the temple, and these need it to allow them the temple.
"Who are the Sikhs? The fringes of Beit Shamai. Warm-hearted young people, who say that if you want justice you need to take action. Ben Zakai is a realist. He says, 'We can't blow up the whole business here, because it's going to end badly. The Sikri say, 'We will stab the rich in the street. Without politics, we will rob the rich, and divide the poor. ' They are kind of left of the eighties. Bader Meinhof, violent left. "
So you tell a story of revolution.
"Absolutely. The temple here is a symbol of corruption. A sense of a system that is deteriorating. It cannot last long. You cannot have a system without reasonable mutual guarantee."
You come and stand in front of the speeding train of civil war and command: Stop?
"I think our situation is quite dangerous. The problem in this situation is that you do not know when the thread will be torn and everything will get out of hand. A lot of voices on the religious right see it. And you can not blame them for leftism. In the second house they had prophecies of destruction. "Prophecies of Destruction. How did Josephus and Ben Zakkai know how to say to Vespasian - 'You will be the Emperor of Rome'? .
Der believes that the zealots of the destruction of the house are being slandered because they lost. History is of the winners. The film is powerful because not only does it revive the theme of the Temple on the Temple Mount, but because it establishes a Jewish society and a Jewish world in a sovereign Land of Israel.
We see an unaware message that every day some research is published on this or that aspect of Zionist settlement colonialism.
His film crushes all these theories in its wake like a cockroach.
The picture is of a people who rebelled in their land time and time again in empires and conquerors, two thousand years ago, and even today.
He has no problem unequivocally defining Josephus Flavius as a traitor - he would not have arranged a public trial for him in the movement's nest.
"Josephus wrote a very accurate history, but he was a traitor. Unequivocally. Imagine a Jew passing by the Nazis and writing for Hitler the history of the world. All the facts are true, except the interpretation."
Shuli Rand in his first film appearance // From the movie "The Poet",
Presenting the Romans in fact as the Nazis, visually it reminds them.
"I tried to present them as bad as I could. I was not so successful, because the Jews did all the work alone.
" The founding fathers had a vision, on the religious frontier. We - without vision will not survive. It faded, in my opinion because we had reached such great achievements, that seemingly this thing was over. With a civil war, and more with the Arabs around - how will we survive? In Spain it was terrible and horrible, and ended in a dictatorship of years. But they're still fine. We will not hold.
"Our luck is that the Arabs are fighting us. Now, because they are fighting less, we are in trouble. As Vespasian says of the Jews, do you remember in the film? 'Do not get close. Let them eat each other. Once we get closer, they will unite.' That we should leave quietly, we were not here today. "
Still, you are talking about the Temple as a topical thing, and that is a polarizing question.
"I'm going crazy. I think in six days Dayan led it. They did something catastrophic. You conquered the Temple Mount and in the end you gave up on it? In whose name did you give up? Not all this country was established for this thing. It's part of the narrative. Three times a day, "for the next year in Jerusalem" - to this square kilometer, the craziest in the world, on which the most blood is shed. For on the same way that the Romans came and sang to us, God then went in the opposite direction and conquered the whole world. "