31/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: The Israeli director offers a kaleidoscopic film essay on war, fuelled by a historic exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud

(© Giorgio Zucchiatti/La Biennale di Venezia/Foto ASAC)

What fuels the human need to destroy and kill? Israeli director Amos Gitai, who has repeatedly explored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back home in his films, widens his gaze and offers a kaleidoscopic film essay on war, fuelled by a historic exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. “Why War [+see also:
film review
interview: Amos Gitai
film profile]?” is their, and also Gitai’s, question in the Venice out-of-competition title of the same name.

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Cineuropa: You open with a memorial to the hostages of 7 October. Had you already planned this film before the abduction, or was this the initial motivation to start the project?
Amos Gitai: The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October are unforgivable. Nothing can justify such crimes, not even a national liberation movement. Young people were kidnapped, raped and murdered. And there is the immense tragedy of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The Israeli government thinks that the conflict can be resolved by force. But there will never be a permanent solution without a profound dialogue. So, after 7 October, I wanted to understand the roots of this human desire for war. The letters between Freud and Einstein were a revelation. Between 1931 and 1932, the League of Nations asked Albert Einstein to choose an intellectual with whom to discuss a question. Einstein chose Sigmund Freud. And the question that these two great minds found themselves exploring was: why war? Why do people go to war with each other?

Your past filmography consists of movies dealing with specific war zones and experiences; now, you have gone one step beyond this and made a movie about the intrinsic human motivation to go to war. What interested you in looking at the bigger picture?
The cinema I make is always inspired by the reality in which we live. Once again, I chose to have a dialogue with the cruel reality that exists in this region. The idea was to make a narrative film without seeing the war. I used a text by Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, in which she investigates domination in sexuality, to which another essay by Susan Sontag, Regard­ing the Pain of Others, responds – and it also talks about the iconography of war. We are not condemned to war and violence; on the contrary. But it is true that in some ways, it is the easiest solution and, at the same time, the most terrible. A lot of cinema has already talked about the war and continues to do so. I wanted to take on another challenge and explore another narrative approach.

Besides Einstein, Freud, Sontag and Woolf, you also include the Roman attack on Jerusalem as a reenactment. Is there a special, historically developed gaze on war that you wanted to include?
Even if I personally started from the Israeli-Pales­tinian conflict, the film moves towards a universal reflection that could be applied to the war between Russia and Ukraine, or to what is happening in Sudan. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of examples. I have lived alongside ethnic, religious and political divisions, always trying not to get overwhelmed. And for me, cinema has a civic mission. We live in a world in which dialogue has become increasingly complicated and rare. So it’s not a film that aims to give an answer, but rather to make us all question ourselves.

Freud talks about the human condition of striving for power, and how the inequalities of society and its needs fuel war. Do you feel there is hope for pacifism, or is that an egalitarian utopia?
I would like to build bridges instead of burning them. We directors – but all artists in general, I believe – must not resign ourselves to divisions. On the eve of 7 October, I knew that we were in an explosive situation in Israel. But this awareness did not cushion the trauma for someone like me, who has long been trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to talk through art. It’s what I’ve been doing for years in my films and theatrical works. In antiquity, the traditional role of artists was to be healers, to heal souls. I would like to embrace the idea of the filmmaker or the artist as a healer.