Amos Gitai: chronicler of Israel

Twenty years ago, the Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by a Jewish fanatic – a blow from which the Middle East peace process has never recovered. The Israeli director Amos Gitai puts the tragedy in context in his film Rabin, the Last Day and in an installation with the telling title Chronicle of an Assassination Foretold.

Brussels loves Amos Gitai. Last year, the Galeries cinema organised a retrospective of his films, as well as an exhibition of other work by the committed Israeli artist. This year, his installation Chronicle of an Assassination Foretold is one of the highlights of Bozar's Summer of Photography. In the installation, Gitai looks back at the murder of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. He combines archive footage, earthenware, and photographs with excerpts from the film he presented at the Venice Film Festival: Rabin, the Last Day. There is a considerable emphasis on the political and social context that led to the murder. In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Shimon Peres and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. A year earlier, they had signed the Oslo Accords, which awakened hopes of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. Jewish extremists reacted with unprecedented fury to Rabin's policy: he was spat at and taunted. On 4 November 1995, following a huge peace demonstration in Tel Aviv, he was murdered by a Jewish extremist.

"When Rabin was shot, on the fourth of November 1995, I felt that a page of Israeli history had been turned," says Gitai. "I always felt that this particular part of the world is...like a volcano. On a world scale, it's not the biggest conflict: in the last two years, more people have been killed in Syria than in one hundred years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it has a very strong symbolic power for different reasons. First of all, it's really a collision between a Western-oriented society and the Orient. This little territory is also the birthplace of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Together, these three religions radiate very strong iconographic images all over the planet, although the distance between the sea and the river Jordan is less than a hundred kilometres! So this tiny territory has great symbolic value."

ENDLESS FEUILLETON
Gitai used to make socially critical documentaries before causing a big stir in 1999 with his first feature film, Kadosh. In the wake of that restrained portrait of two women who were regarded as inferior by their ultra-Orthodox Hassidic environment, he became a familiar figure at the leading film festivals. He has never been afraid to commit himself or to take on political issues. "The problem of the artist, of the film-maker, of the writer, is what to do when you live next to a volcano? What artistic form can you propose? What is the right distance? Because you're in the middle of a very dramatic situation, a kind of endless feuilleton, you have to impose a perspective. This is not easy, because everybody wants you to represent politics. Some want you to be extremely politically correct and reject anything that contradicts their positions. This obliges you to be very rigorous and tough, in order not to accept or submit to a kind of compromise position. You have to respect the other. You have to show the suffering of the other, not just of the Israelis. And at the same time you have to construct a perspective."

"So a few years ago we decided to make this project on the assassination of Rabin as a kind of a gesture about memory. In the hope that sometimes when you resurrect memory, it can create movement. But we have to be modest about it: art is not the most efficient way to change reality. Politics or machine guns have a much more direct effect. But sometimes art has some delayed effect. It conserves memory when big powers want to erase it. Because they call for obedience, they don't want to be disturbed, they don't want dissent. But if artists are loyal to their inner truth, they produce works which voyage in time. They don't always have immediate effects; sometimes they have delayed effects. I hope that this is something that we do with this multi-format presentation: a movie, an exhibition, and a play about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin."

Gitai is adapting Chronicle of an Assassination Foretold to Bozar and Bozar to his installation. "I like to create a dialogue with the space. When I walked into Bozar, I felt that the space for my exhibition was a relatively calm space. We need to create an atmosphere, a mood for this exhibition. So we'll close the arches and we'll have it dark and control the lighting. We'll install a diagonal wall, so that the visitor can immediately be aware of the main elements. Fragments which are taken from the scene of Rabin's assassination. We have a projection on the wall on the left, and then have some elements on the right: research documents dealing with the incitement campaign against Rabin and pamphlets of that period. As soon as you walk in, you will see a good chunk of it and then it invites you to continue, to wander in the space and to hear the whispers of different feelings."

Gitai is hoping for critical viewers. He won't be happy if you just swallow everything unthinkingly. "Visitors can make their own interpretation. They are legitimate interpreters and not just consumers of the artist's work. You know, we can talk about it, we can make assumptions, but I think that finally when the work exists – and this is true about movies, about painting – our own interpretation is only partial."

CHRONICLE OF AN ASSASSINATION FORETOLD
17/6 > 4/9, Bozar, www.bozar.be
SCREENINGS: RABIN, THE LAST DAY 13/6, 19.00 (in the presence of the director) HOUSE 21/6, 19.00 A HOUSE IN JERUSALEM 21/6, 20.15 NEWS FROM HOME/NEWS FROM HOUSE 22/6, 20.00, Bozar, www.bozar.be