The turning point in Frank Borzage’s magnificent The Mortal Storm (1940), one of the first Hollywood films to condemn Nazism, is a scene in which a professor in southern Germany, Roth, witnesses a book burning. Alone in his study at night, he sees the light from the fire dancing on his walls and goes to a balcony to watch the scene below. From street level, we see a young man denouncing the writers whose books are being thrown into the flames. Cuts back to Roth’s reactions reinforce the scene’s spatial—and moral—oppositions.
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Gitai makes this point most strongly through long takes that embed characters in their milieu. The Nazis first appear in the film—signaling that the action has likely shifted to the 1930s—in a single take: we see thugs in a cafe passing out leaflets and hurling anti-Jewish epithets while the camera pivots around Else and her son, standing together yet very much alone. Realizing that the Nazis are now an inextricable part of her country—not a “nightmare [that] will go away,” as her boyfriend says—Else begins to see that she must leave. After the book burning (which follows the death of her son), she goes immediately to a train station and buys a ticket to Zurich. (Gitai’s father, a Bauhaus student who was working with Mies van der Rohe in Berlin in 1933, took a similar route through Switzerland to Palestine.)
Gitai is neither a Jewish nationalist nor the “self-hating Jew” I heard an audience member call him during his 1989 Chicago appearance. Rather he presents here the inherent contradictions of early Zionism. The other character living in 1920s Berlin is Tania, a fiery revolutionary who’d been part of a Minsk commune, then fled after participating in an assassination attempt. Once in Palestine, she helps found an early kibbutz. Tania is now a peace-loving idealist, while Else moves to Palestine not out of idealism but because she has nowhere else to go. (Gitai’s father went there only after the Swiss began returning Jewish refugees to Germany.)
Citing the story of David and Bathsheba, Gitai has observed that the characters of the Old Testament are “no angels.” He’s also expressed a fascination with utopias—and their failure. Soon, in fact, Tania’s kibbutz decides to seize some additional land from Arabs, over her protests. Every action to improve things also involves a loss, and no one is all right or all wrong (save the Nazis). Making a powerful implicit argument for peace, Gitai offers a realistic vision far removed from the moral oversimplification and sentimentality of a film like Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic, The Bicycle Thief.
The film’s final long take begins when Else enters, we hear an offscreen explosion, and the camera follows her as she walks through a city, the explosion triggering a movement forward through history. It recalls the most famous act of Zionist terrorism, the deadly 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel. Soon we see graffiti dated 1962 and newer-model cars and hear news reports (on a sound track that also recapitulates sounds from the opening) of 1989 Arab-Israeli clashes. By all accounts Jerusalem is a city in which different historical periods are more visible than most; the ending of Gitai’s film equates space with time and conflates the inexorability of history’s progression with the horrors of violence. When Else leaves the frame, the camera continues through the city: human lives are temporary, and our protagonists have vanished into the past.
Directed and written by Amos Gitai.
With Lisa Kreuzer and Rivka Neuman.
