“Khamishia,” a five-part movie recently released in New York and elsewhere through the country, is the first film made entirely in Israel. As a pioneer attempt, William Schack finds, it has certain expected deficiencies, but it offers nevertheless some sharp glimpses of life in a country where the pioneer is still a contemporary hero.
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Khamishia, a quintet of short films wholly made in Israel, with English dialogue and narration, opened in New York early in May. As the first work of Israel’s first studio (in Herzlia, seven miles north of Tel Aviv), it is hardly surprising that Khamishia has nothing in common with such polished films as Quartet and Trio except the idea for format and title (“Quintet”). But it does not court the comparison, and to force it would be unfair. Actually, according to Yehoshua Brandstatter, executive producer of the film, these five shorts are no more than tentative efforts, a testing of the company’s limited resources; he was dubious about showing them publicly at all, and no one was more surprised than he at the generally high praise they have received from the reviewers.
After such candid self-appraisal, it seems churlish to point out that for a good deal of its length Khamishia is the work of only intermittently talented, almost amateur writers, actors, directors, and technicians. Avoiding the temptation to go off on sightseeing tours, the scripts are slight, without firm structure, and abrupt in their transitions. The tendency is to cling almost claustrophobically to the environs of each particular story, taking little advantage of the mobility of the camera. Sometimes the clear sharp sunlight of Israel is rendered effectively; at other times it appears a smudged gray, in one sequence turning a flock of the region’s beautiful black goats with their glossy flanks into a ghostly mass of the Absolute Goat. Lighting of indoor scenes is often haphazard.
But Khamishia has an unaffected simplicity of spirit that somewhat redeems its ineptitudes. And it will have a diverse appeal for American audiences beyond its intrinsic merits as a movie. Zionists will be interested to see how reality squares with propaganda, and may take satisfaction in the film as the product of a new industry. (Early movies were only photographed in Israel; they were developed and supplied with the sound track, for both music and dialogue, elsewhere, usually in the United States. It took from two to three, years to complete a feature-length film, and the producers were largely deprived of control over their work.) For those who have lived in or visited Israel, Khamishia is a kind of letter from home. Who cares about the misspellings, the bad syntax, the slovenly handwriting? What counts is the news, and the snapshots. Khamishia is also rewarding for its implicit expression of Israel’s moral and social ideals, just as American movies, even in their exaggerations and falsehoods, reflect some of the fundamental dreams of America. What are the corresponding dreams of Israel?
Israel still likes to think of itself as a country of pioneers—which it is and is not, just as America is and is not the land of two cars in every garage. The basic pioneer virtue is to live the “simple life,” and in Khamishia the “simple life” is identified with life on the land: the film hardly notices manufacturers, businessmen, shopkeepers, bankers, professional men, or even mechanics or laborers. Only in one of the five parts—“We Chose Life,” which is not a story but an illustrated lecture on the growth of the country—is there any indication that there is pioneering to be done in many fields other than green fields. (Quite free of conventional rhetoric, and well spoken, this short is good propaganda if ineffectual cinematically.) But as there is no symbolism in statistics, it is in the story films—simple tales simply told—that the ideals of the pioneer can be conveyed most persuasively.
In “Song of Israel” the simple life is pastoral. The film is meant to be a dramatization of a shepherd’s love song, but the admirable singing by Sharona Aron and the charm of the song itself outweigh the fragmentary pictorial projection. This is in effect hardly more than a series of magic lantern slides, of stills.
In “Son of Sulam,” the simple life is that of the Arab fellah, with its eternal cycle from sowing to harvesting. Sulam is said to have been the home town of the heroine of the “Song of Songs,” so that the slender tale of the courtship and marriage of the daughter of a fellah and the son of a Bedouin is in the great tradition. The romance has no ups and downs and little forward momentum; it merely takes place as part of the cycle of nature. But the very bareness of the story helps to convey something of the primitive life of the village. The cast consists almost entirely of local Arabs who seem to be living their normal lives rather than acting; and the dominant characters in the one or two dramatic scenes which carry what story line there is are entirely persuasive. “Son of Sulam” also suggests another pioneer ideal—that of facing reality with patience and understanding. Since there are some 150,000 Arabs in Israel (and 40,000,000 on all the penetrable frontiers), the film seems to say, let us show them as they are, not in relation to ourselves, but at home in their own village; and let us show them, too, at the fundamental task of tilling the soil and at their simple pleasures, celebrating a marriage, dancing. And the incidental music is lightly folksy without the clichés of Orientalism.
The laudable effort to be objective, however, was the cause of one very weak point in the continuity. After a quarrel with his father during harvest time, the bridegroom disappears for a day or two, to return suddenly with a combine, which handily cuts and threshes the remaining stand of grain. Everybody is happy; the marriage festivities can go on. But the spectator is puzzled. Where does a penniless Bedouin lad get such a mighty piece of apparatus? Most likely the youth made a barter deal for the use of the combine with Jewish farmers in nearby Merhavia. I am told that some such explanation was originally contemplated, but it was ruled out to avoid the suspicion of propaganda. Yet if trustful relations do exist between Arab and Jewish farm neighbors, and the government is encouraging them in every way, they could properly have been portrayed in a movie which seeks to be an honest if limited reflection of Arab life; the way to avoid the tone of propaganda is to portray such relations with art, not to ignore them.
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The setting for “Deadline for Danny” is again on the land, where the people living the simple life are apparently dairymen; at any rate, a miniature cattle fair gets a good deal of amusing footage and there are other proud shots of those fine, full-bodied cows Jews have cross-bred out of the spindly native breed and Holland bulls; Holsteins are the Marilyn Monroes of pioneer Israel. The story concerns the affection of a boy for a cow with which he has grown up. A crisis arises when she suddenly stops giving milk and the shortage of fodder in the country makes it necessary for the family to call in the butcher. Danny goes up to Jerusalem to see “the government” about getting fodder and is given a royal—or is it democratic?—run-around, filling out forms in triplicate in every department. (This is handled in the trite technique of a speeded-up repetition of the motive with only a change of face spouting “Triplicate!”) Back home again, Danny tootles his pipes of Pan in a gay melody. No luck—the cow is not catalyzed to give milk. Then he tries a mournful ditty and—presto!—it works. Enter the Israeli wisecrack: “Sure she likes sad music. After all, she’s a Jewish cow.” But that is only one break in the general tone of the piece, which strives with considerable success to match the purity and wholeheartedness of the boy.
The last of the tales, “Jonathan and Tali,” tells of a Yugoslav Jewish mother who loses track of her two children during the war, only to suffer fresh heartache when she finds them later in Israel, for they are happy in their adoptive homes, they do not remember her, and what has she to offer them? It is a common tragedy of the postwar years, and perhaps it is not stretching a point too much to think of this film, too, as projecting the pioneer virtue of facing harsh realities. For the mother, after her first impulse to snatch up her children regardless of their wishes and of the effect on the kindly foster parents, decides to go away herself until she can provide a proper home. It seems to me, however, that the poignant story goes astray in this conclusion, for the real drama would be psychological, not economic—it would be in the mother’s winning back her children spiritually, not by candy and toys. Yet with Shoshana Ravid, a charming young Habima actress, playing the lead, the story is still a moving one; and she is assisted by half a dozen other professionals of various degrees of competence.
I have said that “We Chose Life” is a lecture. In “Son of Sulam” there is also an off-screen narrator: none of the talk of the characters comes through on the sound track. In “Jonathan and Tali” one of the characters serves in part as a narrator. I wonder if this irritating technique was used so freely in Khamishia because only the narrators speak English without an accent. The idea of the film being “spoken in English,” as it is billed, came from the box-office. Seeking a wider audience than the home market can provide, the producers felt that, because of the complete unfamiliarity of non-Jews and even of most English-speaking Jews with Hebrew speech, the usual method of presenting foreign-language films, with English titles superimposed on the pictures, would not be acceptable. It was a daring idea, however, to have English spoken in the film, since few of the actors available could speak it fluently; and it is astonishing that the thing comes off as well as it does. My tolerance of foreign accents may be high, but I think I was listening to these actors as if they were speaking English naturally as a second language, as so many Israelis do (to meet us foreigners on our own ground). We therefore cannot be too demanding. But even if we accept this speech, we must remember that we are not getting the actors full power; a man who has to think consciously of the movement of his tongue and lips cannot command the subtleties of phrasing or even the spontaneity of body movement which are an integral part of an actor’s style.
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Khamishia came from a studio a little over three years old, so inadequately staffed in every department that it had to hire a general studio manager in Europe and to call on Unesco to lend it the services of two Englishmen to act as chief of laboratory and chief of sound equipment. It has still to build a suitable roster of screen playwrights, actors, directors, and technicians. Nevertheless, Mr. Brandstatter, who produced The Promised Land some twenty years ago and organized the Herzlia studios, has plans to produce other films with stories so indigenous to Israel that they could not be filmed as effectively elsewhere. These would draw on contemporary sources, such as life in the farm colonies, as well as on Biblical themes. Meanwhile, two feature-length pictures are to be completed this year. A company named Sadoth is using the facilities of the studio to produce Every Stone a Mile, a story of the last phase of the English Mandate in Palestine, while another group, Sicor, with the participation of Israel Motion Pictures (producers of Khamishia), is at work on Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. This latter film, drawn from Israel’s war for independence, is described as grimly realistic, “without hora dances, visits to kibbutzim, or propaganda lectures.” It was grim, too, in the making: during the scenes shot on location in the Negev, on the site of an Egyptian-Israeli battle, every man carried his gun.
Khamishia has been received cordially, but it is doubtful that a successor having the same faults and the same merits would fare as well. Israeli producers are aware of this, and are striving for pictures which will compete on the world market wholly on the basis of quality.
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