Amos Gital's Kippur

In the closing credits of Amos Gital's Kippur, his latest work which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, the director acknowledges Sam Fuller, signaling Kippur's affinity with Fuller's war movies. (Fuller's The Big Red One was also shot in Israel.) Like Fuller's movies, Gital's film draws from his personal experience with combat and is similarly less concerned with polemics (in the case of Kippur, the enemy is an unseen formidable force, gravely underestimated in terms of their ability) and more a dramatization of the experiential aspects of war--what it feels and looks like, up close. One experiences the brutal shock of the Yom Kippur War by identifying with two young men, Weinraub/Liron Levo and Ruso/Tomer Ruso called to serve on Yom Kippur, October 1973. The Yom Kippur war caught Israel by surprise, and this aspect of being unprepared was intensified by an attack carried out on a number of fronts--the borders with Syria and Egypt. The post-war euphoria of the Six Day War (fought in June 1967), a result of Israel's victory which radically reshaped the map of the state, left the country with a heightened sense of omnipotence and strength. (It is difficult to imagine how Israel, so sensitive and committed to national defense, was ever caught 'off-guard'). The calculation to attack on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, was based on the knowledge that it is a day which many Israeli's--even the nonobservant--respect as a day of meditation and introspection. Those not in the synagogue take advantage of the holiday to head for an outing, meaning that it would be all the more diffic ult to mobilize the country for a call to war. The film begins with Weinraub walking through completely empty city streets. Liturgical prayers, slowly increasing in volume, inform that it is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Weinraub's presence in the empty streets suggests visually his separation from that world. The protagonists are of an age at the cusp of full adulthood; Weinraub questions social mores and values (he recommends that his friend read Marcuse and attributes his sense of alienation to society's emphasis on consumerism, claiming his secondhand car as a sign of his protest) and at the same time, both young men express a boyish enthusiasm to partake, finally, in actual battle. They are initially excited with the call to serve, pleased to be of the right age and being given the opportunity to put into practice their intense army training (all Israeli youths devote three full years to the army and then are called periodically for reserve duty). The narrative is all about the shock of confronting the wrenching violence of warfare head on. It i s unfamiliar and disorienting and those who witness it close up--at its vortex--are catapulted into a world marked by fear, anxiety, loss and trauma. In this sense Kippur is a form of descent narrative--where one is forced to confront the underside of civilized society. The film's setting--the era of the 70s--is introduced in a sequence which frames Kippur. Paint colours filmed in extreme close-up run and blend into each other, accompanied by the wail of a lonely saxophone on the film's jazz score. Weinraub and a woman are seen making love on a bed, applying various paint colours to each other's bodies as they do so. The sequence is repeated when Weinraub returns at the end of the film, and seems abstracted from the narrative. Instead of advancing the narrative or closing it in a realist sense, this sequence acts to set a tone of modernist contemplation, suggesting the idea of art and creativity as a form of self-expression that is contrasted to the tragic violence of war. The rivulets of paint running together in the closing sequence recall the colours of battle-- the mud, dust, blood, flesh and khaki tones that merge in the battle scenes. This framing device suggests the film's affinity with the tradition of the European art film, which is reiterated in the film's use of style--longer takes, a combination of a detached camera as well as close, hand-held shots, the use of actual locations and a naturalistic acting style and a formal narrative structure in which lengthy battle sequences are interspersed with discussions between characters in their off-duty time, where they voice their fears and concerns. …

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