Rene — The Cinema of Avi Mograbi
Topic(s): Art/Politics | Comments Off on Rene — The Cinema of Avi MograbiRépliques. Filming the Enemy
The Cinema of Avi Mograbi
Written by filmmaker and writer Jean-Louis Comolli
Translated by Sally Shafto
http://www.cahiersducinema.com/article536.html
From film to film, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi has constructed an incomparable oeuvre in world cinema. To name but four of his films, which with their echoes and leitmotifs, operate like a musical fugue: How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1996), Happy Birthday, Mr Mograbi (1998), August (2001) and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005). Each film is in the present of the political and military situation in Israel, but also in the affective present, both engaged and old-fashioned, of the Mograbi home, place of political debate, and of the Mograbi house, small family enterprise of cinematographic production.
Each time, it’s about a film to be made, what we conventionally call a documentary, here and now, in the present situation, Israel and Palestine, military occupation and Intifada, religion and politics, colonization and the attacks. But above all, it’s about Avi Mograbi, those like him and the others – different and alternately alike, playing the role of enticing demons. And the filmmaker does battle, via telephone, with these voices, which sometimes ask him to film, and sometimes dissuade him from doing so; he hesitates, to film despite everything/ not to film despite everything? The film that we see is the story of the difficulties encountered in its making, rendering it both indispensable and impossible. Or almost.
All Mograbi is in this almost. Because there will be – despite everything – film. On the edge of renunciation. Or rather on the edges, since there are two borders (at least): from the interior of Israel and from the interior of occupied Palestine. Mograbi is animated by a fundamental instability that pushes him to cross borders, interiors, exteriors, symbolic, mental, but also stylistic, in a series of departures and arrivals captured in the standing around at checkpoints. The explosive mix of agitation and the feeling of marking time that characterizes his films resonates (or reasons) with the well-developed mania, which is born exactly there where Mograbi wants to film.
Let us consider the first of these films, begun several months after the assassination of Itzhak Rabin (November 1995), How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon. Mograbi tells the camera, in a frontal shot, brow pitted against the camera lens, how he gave in, over the course of shooting, to what he calls Sharon’s “charisma” (at the time in full electoral campaign to gain control over the Likud party – the right- and its president Bibi Netanhayu). During a first period, Tammi, Mograbi’s wife, pushes him to make this film on what they both believe will be “Sharon’s swan song,” except that the same Sharon doesn’t let him come near; in a second phase, there is a turnaround: Sharon is often encountered and filmed by Mograbi; even better, he opens up with bonhomie to the exercise at hand, while Tammi rebels more and more openly against continuing the film, until finally she leaves her husband; and he, for his part, allows himself to practice stammering hysterical slogans of the radical right, screamed until nausea by rock fans with side-curls.
It is this “charisma” which leads to the rapport of documentary with “the enemy” (Sharon is at the helm of the fraction between enemy and adversary). Rapport, i.e. complicity of timetable and performances. Great are the chances that, via the succession of kept or missed rendezvous that is a film shoot, the human dimension is raised and even the very humanity of a political man whose crimes cannot however cease to horrify: the reminder of the Sabra and Shatila massacres haunt the film – as if to prevent us from giving in, when our turn comes, to the Sharon “charisma.”
Malaise, unresolved contradiction: door ajar by which we enter into the complexity of Mograbi’s cinema. Two tenses govern the course of the film through this itinerary of decline. There is the present of énonciation (Mograbi faces the camera: questions and doubts). And there is the past of énoncé, in a series of backward moves showing the progressive stages of Mograbi’s downfall.
These two tenses intersect and go so far as to become confused. The first, that of verbal narrative, presents itself as the tense of critical conscience: Mograbi distances himself with this past, which will have both ruined his marriage and permitted his film. The second, the tense of narrative in actions and situations, is a prior time, where what Mograbi does and sees and what transforms him occurs only gradually, with each new meeting with Sharon. A tense completed, where all is played out; and a time to become, a destiny not yet accomplished. The customary teleology linked to the flashback (the past confirms the present) is here paradoxically reversed. All is finished, Mograbi tells us, facing us. And yet, the film tells us, it’s all in the process of happening – and who knows? Nothing is played out cinematographically even if all is said narratively. It is that the documentary part of the film (the shoot of an electoral campaign with the “real” Sharon and some others, equally “real”) carries the possibility of refuting fiction’s contribution to it, as already played (Mograbi’s downfall, his separation from his wife). The film is presented as a future, within the finished film. Parable for gestation. The mise en abyme is going into labor. Filming separation in order to be done with separation.
This system returns in the following films: Mograbi facing the camera, confides his doubts; he holds several contradictory roles ; there is always a film in the process of being made and always endangered; and the question “how to hate the one whom one doesn’t stop filming?” becomes “how to not film those that one can only fight and that perhaps one will not stop hating while filming them?”
Questions of cinema. Which take their meaning in the case of documentary, in the measure where this other that one can and cannot both hate and film is not an actor blithely performing a role, but a political animal having the power to change the course of hundreds of thousands, of millions of lives. This responsibility alone changes the filmmaker’s course into a test. Mograbi films himself like the first to suffer from it. The tourniquet of questions is suffering: to film from one side? From another? From both? Together? To want to film and to not be able to? To be able and to not want to? To fulfill the commission or to resist it? Yes, this is an embarrassed cinema. This embarrassment is filmed; it makes the movie. Mograbi’s questions return like a metaphor for the hesitations of Israeli society. The contortions of cinema echo those within the society itself. What is filmed is precisely Mograbi’s obstinacy to make a film of the Israeli-Palestinian War-without-peace. For Mograbi, filming is only to realize a desire of the cinema in so far as it is the this desire to be with, to be tied. Desire less and less bearable to those who are filmed. The violence done to the war, it is the film.
To be together you need to be (at least) two. But here, no body becomes a couple. And certainly not with the camera. Filmic divorce. Isolated, the unique can only succeed in division, in the same way that filming can only be the fierce attempt to deny separation. If Mograbi’s cinema tirelessly undertakes to get involved with that which wants nothing to do with it, it is more and more difficult for him to film Israeli citizens who tolerate less and less being filmed. It remains to be asked if such is not the reason for his relentless pursuit to film them. The return of an undeniable malaise: malaise of the spectator; because there is something unbearable to see filmed what doesn’t want to be filmed, a fortiori if this reticence makes the movie. We see at work the naked violence of cinema, the gesture of bringing the film into the world, the narrative going uphill all the way, to the zero point of representation. The direct violence of a cinema that would begin by revealing how it can or cannot be made. The body of the film appears thus exhibited on the screen like a body (an organism) with a thwarted future. This is what I can expect as spectator. A film in suffering of which I suffer in my turn. All this rhetoric of orders and gestures that tries to prevent the filmmaker from filming, that jostles his camera, leads to a tearing of the spectator from the tranquility of a representation exposing itself ideally to him, if I dare to say, with no missteps. Here the cinema has become problematic.
Actor, sound engineer, cameraman, director, citizen: with each new film the figure of “Mograbi” overdoes it, while at the same time the gesture of auto mise-en-scène proliferates. From the heart of the documentary approach comes an extraordinary fictional dimension. Tied to a story that is urgent (each of the films is attached to a historic moment, to a political present: something rare and painful), but that is also linked to the cardinal points of cinematographic ambivalence, this endless turnstile of “true” and “false,” of “performance” and “reality” (as in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be). Documentary evidence and fictional strength are here embraced.
How? In August, Mograbi’s answer passes by two mechanisms of repetition: on the one hand, the insistence of a request (he doesn’t give up) and on the other, one a deconstruction of hysteria. How to be just in a world where all is false? Pain, anger, rage are simulated. And the feelings, false. To leave hysteria and go towards cinema, Mograbi returns to the true inscription of documentary. It is the series of trial takes with the actresses, filmed (they as well) very frontally, performing or repeating sufferance and rebellion. These sequences function like a laboratory of the experimental impossibility of sorting the true from the false, otherwise in referring them to the correctness of the performance.
Because hysteria here is not something private: the entire society has gone mad. This general disturbance doesn’t spare the body of the film: sped up, reversed editing (those who should come near move further away; those who were together pull apart; those who were headed somewhere now only retreat: anti-cinema), split screen, grotesques citations from archives… Mograbi enters into a rhetoric of rage. The film stock (here the strip) is a sensitive skin that bristles when what is shown doesn’t work. The symptom affects the film’s form, its surface, its breathing. The film as a sensitive organism displays something of the prevailing malaise.
In Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, Mograbi filmed by Mograbi is no longer exactly the same. When he telephones (again) about the film in progress, it is in a wider shot and with a sole interlocutor (whom we understand to be a Palestinian). A faceless voice insisting coldly that death is worth more than a thousand humiliations. Mograbi hears without flinching this external voice that becomes a dialogue with himself. The contrast is great with the violence that he meets at each confrontation with these Israeli soldiers filmed in spite of themselves. In these ferocious showdowns, the world filmed by Mograbi seems however to become again coherent, that is divided: the ordinary barriers resume their position, each in his bubble more or less armored, not in the shelter of the other but in the shelter of the menace that there would be to think the other. Just as the soldiers want neither to see nor to hear, the tourist guides comment on the collective suicide of Massada or of Samson’s heroic gesture killing himself with the Philistines, without comprehending how much these gestures rhyme, whether one likes it or not, with those of the suicide-bombers. It is truly a question of looking and hearing: to the guides who ask one of their flock to close their eyes in order to see, to blind Samson who asks god for the strength to kill again, Mograbi contrasts the logic of cinema – seeing in spite of everything which prevents seeing, hearing what one doesn’t want to hear.
On this point, and with a gentleness of which one wouldn’t have believed him to be capable, Mograbi doesn’t give up; it is the choice of life against death – the choice of cinema. He says it timidly to his Palestinian interlocutor. And his film says it strongly to those Israelis who teach the cult of death, obviously heroic, to their children. I don’t bring up haphazardly the question of heritage and of filiation. It is certainly the profound framework of Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. And the filmmaker Mograbi always appears as the son of his father, the director of Mograbi cinema, a name known all over Israel. Fathers, sons. Transmission will be accomplished by cinema rather than by war.
In November, l’ACRIF organizes on the Ile-de-France numerous screenings of Avi Mograbi’s films. For further information: call 33 (0)1 48 78 14 18.
NOTES
1. The title comes from the biblical passage where Samson addresses the Lord: “Lord, God, remember me and strengthen me, only this once. So that I may avenge but one of my eyes, avenge upon the Philistines.” Tr. note.
2. This is the problematic of “filming the enemy.” What Mograbi does with Sharon, Michel Samson and I refused to do with Jean-Marie Le Pen; we refused to continue accompanying him, to film him in the very fascination that he exerted (1992-1993) on the media.
3. In Happy Birthday, the identities divide the subjects and the film itself: with the producer Segal always elsewhere, Mograbi vacillates between all the positions and the film itself, divided into three films simultaneously underway. In August, the figure of Mograbi splits into three agencies. He is his wife (pink towel knotted into a turban), his troublesome sponsor, and himself. This triplicity results in a series of quarrels that irresistibly become the body of the film. When these three characters meet up in the same scene, a split screen tears the screen asunder, isolating the bodies in the interior of a same unity of time, of place, and of action. The torn screen redeems the solitudes. The quarrel is the center of the film become form.
4. The author here capitalizes on the double meaning of tourniquet in French as both turnstile and bandage. The former meaning exists in English, but has become rare. Tr. note.
5. Feelings attributed to the widow of the Israeli terrorist settler Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Muslims in the shooting attack in the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron, February 25th, 1994.
6. The Zealots, the last resistants to the Roman invader, decided to kill themselves rather than to surrender, in the year 73 AD.
N° 606, november 2005, p.70-72.