Four years ago, I participated alongside Nachman Ingber and Uri Klein in the program “Kabbalat Shabbat” together with Tsotva dedicated to filmmaker Danny Wellman, who just recently completed a new film at the age of 80. “One of the things that annoys me sometimes when I read about Danny Wellman is that in some of the reviews the word ‘modest’ appears”, Klein said. “And I don’t like that word. I don’t like that word in the context of art. I don’t believe that there is good art that is modest. Danny doesn’t make modest films. Danny makes films that may have a degree of simplicity, sometimes, maybe a degree of reduction, Because of the conditions in which he makes his films. But there is no modesty in them. There is pretentiousness in them. There is boldness in them. There is courage in them. There is strength in them… He is truly the last of his generation.”
The beautiful words that Klein dedicated to Wellman also describe well his own work as a film critic, who three days before his death still had time to eulogize the director Bob Rapelson (he is the only one who used to, and got a place, to write obituaries about film personalities close to his heart that most of the public today does not know). In Klein’s writing there was boldness, and courage, and strength, and pretension. But when talking about the person himself, the title “modest” comes up again and again.
I have been following his writing since he was the film critic for the time newspaper in 1987, and it has always fascinated me and enlightened my eyes, even when it angered me. In his writing there was a great love for cinema and a wide and deep knowledge, years before the Internet began to make available to us the information that flowed from every text he wrote. And he knew how to create fruitful and interesting links between the things he knew – like short courses in cinema.
More than that, he had a cohesive worldview, and he looked beneath the surface of the films as cultural, moral and political texts, broke them down into their elements, and more than once brought out the truth that was hidden there. Therefore he was to me what Pauline Kyle, whom he often mentioned, was to American film lovers. So I paid him a secret tribute. For some time in the nineties, I wrote from New York for “Yediot Ahronoth” under a pseudonym, and made up pseudonyms for myself from the initials of Uri Klein – Ariela Kartzner.
But in a personal sense he was much more approachable than Poland Kyle. The first time I dared to talk to him as a young writer in a Jerusalem newspaper – it was at the Jerusalem Festival many years ago – I was surprised by how pleasant, friendly and non-condescending a conversationalist he is. His writing was sharp and sometimes merciless, and when he butchered films by Israeli creators it could hurt especially, because his opinion was more important than any other opinion. It was important precisely because it came from a great love for cinema.
This love has been there since he was a little boy, as he recounted in an article he published in 2010. If I remember correctly, it was only in the 2000s that he started writing in the first person, and sharing his cinematic memories with the readers. But the intimate relationship to movies has always been there. Therefore his reviews were a kind of works of art in themselves. Yes, writing a review is certainly easier than making a film, and hurt filmmakers who dislike critics in general and Klein specifically will not like the comparison. But many of Uri’s texts enrich the viewing of good films, and often, as has already been written before, are more interesting to read than the less good films they dealt with. That’s why they stand on their own and deserve to be collected into a book, as he himself did in 1982 with Ze’ev Rav-Nof’s reviews for “Masek Gedol: Great Creators and Their Films” (a book I returned to again and again).
In recent years, when more women began to make films and the awareness of the female point of view in cinema, and about cinema, grew and expanded, there were more times when I disagreed with Klein’s point of view. I have devoted to this disagreement several angry posts on Facebook, some of which I even developed into texts in “Time Out”. Thus, for example, I could not remain silent when in 2017 he chose “the 40 films and a little more that shaped the map of international cinema in the last four decades”, and not only did he not include a single film by a female director, but he specifically stated “I believe it is more correct and honorable not to include a film in the list which I don’t particularly like or appreciate, like, for example, ‘The Piano’ by the New Zealand director Jane Campion, and it has no unique historical importance to me, just because a woman directed it.” I was alarmed, because in my view – as a viewer, as a film critic, and as a woman – “The Piano” is a substantial work, one that defies examination. So I wrote a post in which I listed eight reasons why the film should have been included in the list, And it evolved into my own list of ten outstanding films by female directors (Fortunately, it has greatly expanded in the five years that have passed since then).
But from the beginning I felt the need to respond to Klein’s texts, not only because of the status he acquired as the top film critic in Israel, but because these were essential texts for me. And even when I thought he was wrong, his writing was always probing and thoughtful and had integrity. In 2014, he posted a text about how, on repeated viewings, he had changed his mind about some Israeli and foreign films he had killed in the past, and sailed on “The right of a visitor to change his mind“. That’s why I hoped that a day would come and he would change his mind about some films made by women, or at least recognize that his identity as a critic also has a gender aspect.
I want to end with a personal anecdote. Once over a cup of coffee at the Locarno festival I told Uri a childhood memory. My mother often told me about a movie she loved, “Lily” with Leslie Crone, and sang me the theme song. But precisely on the day that “Lily” arrived for a one-off screening at the Moshav’s People’s House, my father decided that we would go to visit my mother at the maternity hospital (I had a brother), and refused to promise that we would return in time for the movie. When we got back from the maternity hospital, I ran to the public house and managed to see the last ten minutes, but I didn’t understand anything. This old frustration, I reasoned, might explain my obsession with cinema. His eyes lit up, and he said it was quite amazing because he has a similar childhood story, from the same age and about the same movie. When “Lily” arrived in Israel in 1953, he went with his parents to see it at the Esther Cinema in Tel Aviv, but there was a glitch and the screening was canceled. Since that day, I felt that we both belonged to a secret cinematic fraternity of “Lily” frustrations.