Israel has not produced a single master filmmaker—no Leone, no Bergman, no Hitchcock. When I was writing my book The Story of Film, I wanted to include Israeli films but ended up deciding not to, just as I didn't write about movies from my native Ireland. Neither country had contributed enough.
Over the years I'd seen decent Israeli movies about the class conflict between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, about generational conflict and identity crisis. I had liked films by Assi Dayan and, in particular, veteran documentarist Amos Gitai. Many of cinema's great directors—Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Abraham Polonsky, Steven Spielberg—have been Jewish. But not Israeli.
Why this underachievement? First, Israel is young and small. Second, its arts ministry does not seem to value film—just 5 per cent of the culture budget was allocated to this most expensive of arts in 1995. Third, the non-emergence of a Leone or Hitchcock means that talented young Israelis have had no significant role models. Lastly, perhaps, Israeli filmmakers have been hampered by feeling the insecure, harried weight of their country on their backs.
The recent Israeli film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, just released on DVD, shoulders such national burdens, and if I were writing my book now I would include it and its writer-director-editor Avi Mograbi. Like many of the best middle eastern films, it is a documentary—its director's fifth. And like many such films, it is fuelled by a sense that Israel is committing a crime against Palestine. Avenge But One of My Two Eyes starts on a chilly dawn on the bleak mountain of Masada and unfolds into a brilliant cinematic essay about the causes of moral blindness.
Some scenes are familiar. A Palestinian deliveryman tries to enter a controlled zone and is forced to talk up to a watchtower; a sick woman's relatives plead with Israeli soldiers in a tank who talk back to them through a loudspeaker. Mograbi and his cameraman are alert to the absurdity of such conversations, and use them to establish the mode of the whole film. A recurring scene is Mograbi himself, late at night, at home with the television switched on, talking on the phone to his Palestinian friend, who for security reasons is revoiced by actor Shredi Jabarin. Their conversations have none of the urgency of those of the deliveryman or the sick woman's relatives, yet are compelling. The friend seems to say that, at this stage of the second intifada, life is hardly worth living, and is therefore easily sacrificed.
The west has been convulsed by the realisation that some people in the Islamic world are prepared to kill themselves in order to be heard. The intellectual strength of Mograbi's film—its shock, if you like—is that it turns this convulsion back on Israel. It asks, "But aren't we prepared to kill ourselves too? Isn't suicide what our myths of persecution are about?" In the opening scene, shot with a handheld camera in cold blue morning light, birthright tourists—American teenagers and many others—are shown on top of the Masada cliffs, overlooking the Judeans desert. They are told the 1st-century story of the 900 zealots who killed themselves there rather than submit to the Romans. The tourists are then asked what they would do—kill themselves too, or surrender?
Soon Mograbi cuts to Israeli children learning the story of Samson. His film's title is taken from Samson's entreaty to God—to let him avenge one of his eyes against the Philistines. Just as the teenagers absorb the sense that their forebears performed a heroic suicide, so now these children absorb a far older myth about killing oneself for a lofty principle. Israeli novelist David Grossman called Samson "the first suicide-killer" in his non-fiction book Lion's Honey, so Mograbi's may not be an original idea. But his film has no commentary, and the point is made by showing rather than telling. The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein said that, in film, 1+1=3. Two ideas, when brought together, can produce a third idea—in the mind of the viewer. This is what happens in Mograbi's film, where the proposition "death is preferable to domination" is shown to be one of the key ideas underpinning the Israeli state.
The camera-work in Avenge But One of My Two Eyes is sometimes uncomfortably wobbly. Near the end, in an encounter with young Israeli soldiers, Mograbi loses his rag and yells at them to grow up. I was initially moved, but later wondered whether this extraordinary release of anger served the film well. It could be argued that the soldiers are rude because they have been taught that Israel's enemies are ignoble by the very suicide myths that Mograbi has been depicting. If so, then 1+1=3 again. Right-wing Israel hated this film and some members of the Jewish diaspora are likely to accuse Mograbi of being antisemitic. Politically he is brave. But it is also clear that, cinematically, he is innovative. Avenge But One of My Two Eyes is one of the great essayistic films of modern times, ranking with the work of that most thoughtful filmmaker-essayist, Chris Marker. Its people speak in Hebrew. It is subtitled in English but also, unusually, in Arabic. For a film about dialogue, this is appropriate.
