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Reflections of War

\"Kippur,\" the first Israeli movie to grace the New York Film Festival, tackles the traumatic war that was previously taboo in Israeli cinema.
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November 2, 2000

As violence continued to flare in Israel, director Amos Gitai remembered a day when he stood in a downpour on the Golan Heights and recreated the bloodiest battle of the Yom Kippur War. Bundled in a thick coat, his woolen cap pulled low, his shoes caked with dirt, Israel’s most controversial filmmaker barked orders into a megaphone as the old Centurion army tanks belched smoke and cut ugly swaths in the mud. Extras screamed, armored vehicles lurched, faux-amputees writhed.

For the internationally acclaimed writer-director, the din and the chaos elicited an unpleasant sense of deja vu. “Kippur,” the first Israeli movie to grace the New York Film Festival, tackles the traumatic war that was previously taboo in Israeli cinema. It also revisits the horrific week in October 1973 that psychologically scarred Gitai and turned him into a filmmaker. “I’ve never gotten over it,” the former paratrooper concedes. “I don’t think it’s possible to make closure of such an experience.”

Like “Kippur’s” protagonist, Weinraub, Gitai was a 22-year-old college student when the sirens announced the surprise attack by Arab nations on Yom Kippur 1973. With an army buddy, he jumped into an old Fiat and raced toward the front, trying in vain to catch up with his unit. Almost by accident, he hooked up with a helicopter search-and-rescue team that flew into enemy territory to evacuate the wounded. Gitai captured the grisly chaos on a new Super-8 camera, his very first, an early birthday present his mother had given him days before.

“It was a big shock for me; the wounded and the people burning inside tanks,” he told The Journal. “My camera was a way for me to synthesize what I was seeing.”

His war lasted five days. On Oct. 11, Gitai’s 23rd birthday, missile and machine gun fire pierced the helicopter and sent the vehicle crashing to the ground. The engineer’s head was impaled upon the engine, the co-pilot was also killed and a soldier ran from the cockpit on the stumps that remained of his legs. Blood poured from a hole in Gitai’s back where a bullet had lodged just a millimeter from his spine.

The violent incident changed the course of his life. Gitai, the son of a Bauhaus architect and German refugee, eventually abandoned his architecture studies to become a filmmaker – a better way to “touch nerves and apprehend society,” he says. After his first three documentaries were censored by Israeli television for criticizing the government and the military (“House,” for example, focused on Arab flight from Israel in 1948), he lived for seven years in self-imposed exile in Paris.

Not once did he consider making a movie on the Yom Kippur War. “I had nightmares,” admits Gitai, now 50. “I wasn’t ready to make a film about my experience.” The change came in 1993, when the homesick director moved back to Israel to find Yitzhak Rabin negotiating peace. The time seemed right for Gitai’s kind of war movie: “I had seen a lot of films that aestheticized war, but I didn’t want pretty explosions,” he says. “I wanted to convey the exhaustion.”

“We evoke heroism a lot during a war,” he told Cahiers du Cinema, “but the profound sentiment that dominates is fatigue… I think that one day, problems in the Middle East will resolve precisely because of this fatigue.”

Director Sam Fuller (“Steel Helmet”) used to say that if you want to make a war movie, you have to prepare yourself for war. Gitai took the advice as he battled to bring his script to the screen. First there were the officials of Israel’s Quality Film Encouragement Fund, who had refused to finance his provocative movie, “Kadosh,” about the oppression of women in ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim. The same officials promptly rejected “Kippur,” citing problems with the script.

Then there was the army’s aviation chief, who was suspicious of Gitai and didn’t want to lend him any equipment until he learned the director was a veteran.

Finally, the cameras rolled last winter; recreating the war at the very moment of unprecedented peace talks between Israel and Syria felt historic for the cast and crew. But the talks have since disintegrated, and violence sweeps the country. Gitai, at least, hopes “Kippur” will serve as a caveat for both Arabs and Jews. “They will see what is the price of war,” he says. “They will see the enormous waste of life and resources.”Israelis, so far, have been enthusiastic about the film, but the most important screening for Gitai was the first, a small showing for the survivors of that long-ago helicopter crash. “I was nervous,” he recalls. But after the screening, the helicopter’s pilot, who had saved the others by manually steering to a crash-landing, approached Gitai with wet eyes. “In the manner of pilots, who don’t speak much, he said, ‘You told the truth,'” the director recalls. “That, for me, was the highest praise.”

“Kippur” screens at 8 p.m. Nov. 11 at Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills and 8 p.m. Nov. 19 at Laemmle’s Town Center 5 in Encino. The theatrical run begins Nov. 22 at the Town Center 5 and Laemmle’s Monica in Santa Monica.

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