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11:00 - 12:30
Kedma (2002), excerpts
Cinema is a craft
A process of elaboration and articulation
Of different strata
Sometimes in documentaries
We are archaeologists, we excavate
Stratum after stratum
At the bottom we find a bone or a piece of a house
And then the house becomes a film
But in another city
Jerusalem.
And the story of immigrants on a boat
As in Kedma
The coast opposite
A kind of silhouette
The crest of Carmel emerges from the sea
Those who came,
And perhaps also those who wanted to come
But did not come
And will not come.
Amos Gitaï, Mount Carmel (Gallimard, 2003)
Guest speaker, Sylvie Lindeperg
Historian, professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, director of the Centre d'études et de recherches en histoire et esthétique du cinéma (CERHEC), her research focuses on the links between cinema, memory and history, with particular emphasis on the Second World War period.
Films : Berlin-Jerusalem (1989); Kedma (2002); Plus tard tu comprendras (2008). Fiction
Berlin-Jerusalem (1989)
Else Lasker-Schüler and Mania Shohat go their separate ways towards Jerusalem, a mythical but also very real city, which they will have to confront... Based on the biographies of these two women, a German expressionist poetess and one of the first Russian Zionists, the film travels back and forth between the steamy cafés of Berlin in the 1930s and the hills of Jerusalem. Berlin-Jerusalem or the story of shattered utopias.
As the trial of Klaus Barbie gets underway, Victor, who lives in Paris, discovers that his mother Rivka has always kept silent about her suffering and the persecution her family suffered during the Second World War and the Occupation. He sets out to reconstruct this memory. Adapted from Jérôme Clément's autobiographical novel Plus tard tu comprendras, published by Grasset in 2009.
Kedma (2002)
" How do you make fiction out of a founding myth ? For America, Hollywood invented the Western. For Israel, Amos Gitaï made Kedma. [...] To tell us that, from the founding of Israel in May 1948, a staggering effort to transform a people's fate into destiny, a much more delirious reality was at hand. And Gitaï, in the heat of his impressive melancholy, spares no one: neither the soldiers of the British mandate [...] nor the fighters of the Palmach, the Jewish underground army [...] It would have been necessary to make an unheard-of nation and not a state like any other. For Gitaï also says this : that the question of Israel is not the Jewish question. And that utopias usually end badly. As for the Arabs, the film's other major displaced persons, Gitaï doesn't give them any extra heroism, any extra martyrdom. Youssouf, an old peasant bothered by Jewish soldiers, starts shouting [...]. Later, Janusz the Jew, disorientated by the fighting, starts screaming [...]. We're still here, in this nightmare, soliloquy against soliloquy. "
