2024-04-13 14:46:18
From the windows you can see the flowering bosquettes in Salzburg’s Mirabell Gardens. In the many light-flooded rooms of the Villa Kast adjacent to the castle park, you can marvel at the new, unexpectedly figurative, sometimes surrealistic-looking sculptures by Tony Cragg. Against this magnificent backdrop, the small studio space is easy to miss.
Abstract drawings hang on the walls, powerful strokes with a graphite pencil, colorful balls of pastels on yellowed paper or torn newspaper pages. Only slowly, little by little, faces appear from the scribble. Frightened, suffering, traumatized faces.
Amos Gitai drew the pictures in the fall of 1973, under the direct influence of the Yom Kippur War. The young architecture student from Israel, son of the Bauhaus architect Munio Weinraub, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, had just completed military service. He and two fellow reservists wanted to celebrate Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holiday, when suddenly the sirens in Haifa wailed on the afternoon of October 6, 1973.
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With a surprise attack, Egypt and Syria attacked the state of Israel in order to retake the occupied Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Gitai and his comrades set out to “find the war” and headed north. They were unable to join their former unit, but at the Ramat David military air base they were recruited as paramedics from the air rescue service. For five days, they flew killed and wounded soldiers from the battlefield in Golan as part of a seven-man unit.
After being shot: rebirth on your birthday
On the sixth day, which was Amos Gitai’s 23rd birthday, a Syrian rocket hit the rescue helicopter. The co-pilot was killed, the pilot managed to crash land on Israeli territory, and all other occupants of the helicopter were seriously injured. “I was born on the same day and at about the same hour and almost killed,” is how Gitai described his feelings after the shooting.
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When he was able to leave the hospital after a few days, a new life began for him, an afterlife as an artist. Especially as a filmmaker and screenwriter who has never let go of these experiences, who has dealt with the Yom Kippur War again and again.
Gitai’s drawings, which are now exhibited in the classicist Villa Kast – the headquarters of Thaddaeus Ropac’s Salzburg gallery – are intuitive representations of these war impressions. On October 22, 1973, under pressure from the United States and the United Nations Security Council, a ceasefire was reached. But in little more than two weeks of war, thousands of soldiers on both the Israeli and Arab sides had been killed.
Amos Gitai, „War Requiem 9“, 1973
Source: Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul © Amos Gitai/Photo Charles Duprat
Gitai obsessively sketched the faces of the victims to capture the memory of what he saw and felt, of the humanity that fell by the wayside. The drawings were shown publicly for the first time in 2023, most recently in the show “Kippur, War Requiem” at the Tel Aviv Museum. There, supplemented by projections of the films that have made Amos Gitai one of Israel’s internationally best-known directors.
With the Super 8 camera in the battlefield
The seeds for this were sown by Gitai’s mother Efratia, who was born in Palestine as the daughter of Zionist Russians. She gave her son a Super 8 camera when he completed his military service. During the helicopter missions, the soldier Gitai experimented as a war reporter, so to speak. In the classic 15-meter cassette length of 3:20 minutes, documentary film fragments were created of soldiers in tanks, people running on the battlefield, helicopter shadows on muddy ground, a parachute drying on the clothesline.
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Under the title “Super-8 – Real-Time Impressions” they were supposed to be the first part of a trilogy. In 1994, the director collaged the documentary film “Kippur: War Memories” from this raw material. In 2000, the feature film “On the Day of Kippur” followed, which approached the trauma of war on a fictionalized level.
Even the ceramics that are in showcases in the Salzburg exhibition can be seen as reflecting this theme of life. 50 years after the fateful weeks of war in 1973, Gitai tried to make the faces stored on faded eight-millimeter film strips, in pastel chalk drawings and in his memory become plastic again: now using almost abstract, graphically glazed sound reliefs.
Israeli director Amos Gitai in 2022
Quelle: Roberto Serra – Iguana Press/Getty Images
With his extensive work, Gitai became a ruthless chronicler of the Middle East conflict, passionately committed to peace between Israel and Palestine – and repeatedly critical of Israeli politics. After his film “Field Diary” about the Lebanon War was censored by Israeli television in 1982, he went into exile in France for ten years. He has been commuting between Paris and his hometown of Haifa since 1993.
Hope for dialogue
He has won numerous awards and made around 60 films. At the last Berlinale, Gitai presented his latest: “Shikun” is based on Eugène Ionesco’s play “The Rhinos,” in which a fictional community transforms into a herd of pachyderms under the influence of totalitarian ideas.
Gitai has turned the story to the current threat to Israel’s social diversity. He believes in the power of civil resistance and is an outspoken opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, accusing it of “turn the country into a religious autocracy”. The coexistence of peoples and religions is the essence of Israeli society.
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The release of the film and the Tel Aviv exhibition were overshadowed by the Palestinian Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and the war in the Gaza Strip that continues to this day. Gitai reported in interviews that friends of his children were also kidnapped, raped and killed during the attack.
“There is no mercy, no forgiveness, no explanation for something like this.” Gitai also sees this barbarism as anti-Palestinian because it “destroys the only possible perspective, dialogue between the peoples.” Given the bloody outbreak of the Middle East conflict, he is reminded of the time 50 years ago.
Amos Gitai, „War Requiem 5“, 1973
Source: Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg, Seou©Amos Gitai/Photo Charles Duprat
After half a year of war, the conflict appears more insoluble than ever. Amos Gitai’s pastel drawing “War Requiem 5” from the fall of 1973 seems like a symbol. Two faces, one en face, one in profile, come together to form a single one, as is similar to what we know from Picasso portraits.
One face is blue, suggesting the Israeli national colors, the other is green, like the color of Islam. But one eye stares lifelessly out of the black socket, the second lowers its gaze, darkened. Bewilderment, anger and sadness, turning away and turning towards – the picture is open to interpretation. Also for the hope that people can get closer to each other again and talk to each other instead of shooting at each other.
“Amos Gitai. War Requiem”, until May 11th, Galerie Thaddaeus RopacSalzburg
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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