Israel Memorial Day

Posted on April 18, 2010 by admin

Tonight, at 8PM starts the Israel Memorial Day – the day that commemorates the Israeli soldiers fallen in the wars and military actions in the defense of Israel, and the victims of the terror attacks against Israel and Israelis. For the people of Israel and for their friends.it’s a day of reflection and a day of remembrance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncdtJfvXrQI&feature=related

(video source lvisser87)

It is the day when all that divides us should be put apart. We, Israelis, may differ in customs and place of birth, in the ways we pray or the ways we honor the tradition of our people, in the ways of life and in our political opinions – tonight and tomorrow we are united in the respect we pay to those who have made the supreme sacrifice so that we can live free in our country.

(video source adm613)

The clips below show some aspects of the ceremonies that take place each year in Jerusalem on Memorial Day. The opening ceremony takes place at the Western Wall, the last remain of the Temple that once stood in the center of the Jewish capital. The next morning cemeteries in the whole country fill in with the relatives and comrades of the fallen soldiers with the central ceremony taking place in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbmcZrdLSTU

(video source ionisraelMedia)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ez75GI9SrI&feature=related

(video source ionisraelMedia)

At 11AM on Memorial Day the sirens in the whole country sound for two minutes. All traffic and all activities stop, and the whole nation stands in silence, in respect for the fallen.

(video source EverywhereTrip)

Then, at evening, the closing ceremony marks the end of Memorial Day and the of the festivities of the Israel Independence Day. This is life in Israel – sorrow and joy coming together, mourning is followed by the celebration of national freedom.

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‘La Juive’ at the Israeli New Opera

Posted on April 17, 2010 by admin

I doubt that the applause at the end of ‘La Juive’ can sound so strong and enthusiastic any place in the world but in Tel Aviv. The last act of this opera recovered from the 19th century repertoire of Grand Opera stages a powerful drama than resonates strongly with the Jewish identity epic. The year is 1414 and the Jew Eleazar and his daughter Rachel are condemned to die because of the forbidden love of Rachel with the Christian prince Leopold. She can save herself if she converts, and her father, a believer Jew asks her whether she is ready to renounce the faith of their ancestors. She refuses and is led to the gallows. The judge and cardinal Brogni asks Eleazar one last secret before he goes to his own death – where is the cardinal’s daughter, lost many years ago when Rome was plundered, and apparently saved by a Jew, is she living? ‘There she is’ Eleazar answers pointing to the flames that are engulfing Rachel’s body and revealing with the last accords of the musical score the hidden secret that triggered the whole tragedy.

source http://www.israel-opera.co.il/

The libretto of the opera belongs to Eugene Scribe, and at its first staging in 1835 ‘La Juive’ sent a strong message against racial and national prejudice in a France that was building a state and a society based on the principles of the French Revolution, but was far from having overcome all its demons, a fact that will be proved by the Dreyfuss case several decades later. It is the best known opera of the 36 composed by Fromental Halevy, a composer who played a big role in the development of the Grand Opera genre. The characters of Eleazar, the rich Jew who faces a hostile society and of his beautiful daughter Rachel who fails for the treacherous prince Leopold are direct descendants from Shakespeare’s Shylock and Jessica. The dilemma of the Middle Ages Jew whose faith puts him in mortal danger, the need to protect his daughter, symbol of Jewish purity and continuity from the temptations of the outer non-Jewish world but especially from the passions of love, even the stereotype of the rich Jew holding the financial power and using it with thirst of revenge, all these remind too strongly ‘The Merchant of Venice’ to be just a coincidence.

Halevy - source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Juive

The Israeli New Opera took over a production of the Zurich Opera directed by David Pountney. The British director renounced the original setting of the opera at the beginning of the 15th century and worked on a concept that places the action in the century and the country where the opera was created – France’s 19th century. The excellent set designed by Robert Israel with a rotating stage with two deep spaces and two frontal panels is fluid and expressive. To enhance the 19th century Grand Opera feeling Pountney brings in the set dancers dressed as Degas ballerinas (another building block of the Grand Opera experience) but also uses some of the anti-Semitic caricatures of Degas to illustrate the atmosphere of prejudice and repression that surrounds the Jewish community and heroes in the opera, as well as hinting to the continuity of racial and religious prejudice in history.

source http://www.israel-opera.co.il/

The concept works pretty well. ‘La Juive’ speaks in an articulated manner to the post-Holocaust audiences, and the moral dilemmas of the heroes resonate well with a mostly Jewish audience in Tel Aviv. However, the music is (and always was) a challenge for the modern representations of such pieces of the genre. ‘La Juive’ has a few remarkable musical moments, and at least two dramatic scenes of high quality that put it on the best place in the world repertoire (the final act I described and the Seder night scene in the second act), but also a lot of flat musical moments, uninspired dancing interludes (which Pountney tried to fill in with grotesque costumes and dancing style) and most than all is very, very, very long – three hours and 45 minutes. Adding this to the fact that the  singers are not best inspired (or at least they were not in yesterday’s performance, with the exception of Jessica Pratt’s Eudoxe, the wife of Leopold the rest were quite mediocre) – the overall experience was mixed. One may still want to catch one of the performances in the next couple of weeks especially for the opportunity of seeing David Oren directing – we missed him yesterday as he was feeling sick, but even directed by his assistant the orchestra sounded better than in most other representations we heard in the last years.

(video source mazzone1)

There is no filmed moment or recording from this performance that I could find on YouTube, so I went looking for some of the available recordings with big performers from the past and present. I found two versions of the beautiful area of Eleazar ‘Rachel, quand du Seigneur’. The first one is part of the last session of recordings of Caruso in Camden 14th September 1920, the second belongs to Roberto Alagna from 1997.

(video source MUEZZAB)

Details of the upcoming performances and distribution can be found at http://www.israel-opera.co.il/Eng/?CategoryID=337&ArticleID=705.

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‘Glass’ at Litvak Gallery

Posted on April 17, 2010 by admin

A new art gallery opened in Tel Aviv in December, and news about the new exhibition ‘Glass – Trends in Contemporary Glass Sculpture’ started to make their way to the media. I visited yesterday the gallery and exhibition and it was a quite pleasant surprise and experience.

the Litvak Gallery

The gallery is located at the first floor of the tower building behind the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. From the museum plaza cross the street on the pedestrian bridge and you get just to that level. (At the ground floor you can find the Toto restaurant – one of the best in Tel Aviv).

(video source LitvakGallery)

I was not very enthusiastic about the exhibition space. It is limited, it lacks natural light, and the internal organization of the exhibition was not too balanced, with one larger room and two smaller ones interconnected by corridors that succeeded to be crowded despite the gating function that selling tickets for every half hour is performing. I can predict that for the last month of the current exhibition, as word spreads about the quality of the art that is exposed the situation will get worse.

(video source LitvakGallery)

Yet – the art is wonderful. It is a show not to be missed by art lovers who happen to be close to the artistic and cultural hub of Israel. The gallery gathered works of 23 of the best living artists who chose glass as their principal medium of expression. Selected works of the best artists in the branch were brought to the exhibition, and some were created especially for this event. The principal trends in the field are represented, and so are many of the principal centers of glass art who operate world-wide including Murano, Bohemia, and Providence, Rhode Island. All the show is worth being looked at attentively, visited and revisited, but I especially loved the cosmic vegetation forms created by Dale Chihuly (well known to the Israeli public from his 2000 exhibition at the Tower of David in Jerusalem), the elegant shapes of Davide Salvadore and Lino Tagliepietra that succeed to create aesthetic amazement but also anxiety at the same time, the human figures imprisoned in glass by Ann Wolf and the sophisticated forms and effects Julius Weiland and Jirina Zertova.

(video source LitvakGallery)

A special space was created for Lucio Bubacco‘s work ‘Eternal Temptation’ – a meditation in glass with Biblical ambitions, with in a style that combines baroque with modern kitch. The documentary clip above of one of the several accessible to the viewers of the exhibition in the last hall, sharing some of the production secrets of part of the artists in the exhibition. The audio-guide is also excellent, each artist is presented with essential details and information about his background, activities, and exposed works and I recommend not to be missed. The exhibition is open until May 15, and the Web site http://www.litvakgallery.co.il/ also includes useful information (but only in Hebrew for the time being).

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it’s twilight time

Posted on April 16, 2010 by admin

It was twilight time in Herzlya, and Liliana directed me to take a few photos at the corner of our street. Here is one of them.


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Lucian Pintilie’s ‘Unforgettable Summer’

Posted on April 15, 2010 by admin

It is interesting to judge what place ‘O vara de neuitat’ (An Unforgettable Summer) plays in the too short cinematography of Lucian Pintilie and to speculate about why he had chosen to make this film in 1994, his second only after the fall of the Communism which had practically silenced for two decades the creative voice of a director who debuted in the 60s and could have become in a different constellation one of the most important creators of the European cinema. While most of his films after 1990 deal either with the Communist era or its repercussions in the process the Romanian call ‘transition’ this film as well as ‘Tertium non datur’ made in 2005 (his last by now) connect with the more remote past of Romania, the first half of the 20th century. Both deal with the actions of the Romanian army beyond the borders of today’s Romania, both happen in remote places, and place the moral dilemma of the Romanian officers in the center of the action.

There is one more element in the making of this film that is worth mentioning. The film is inspired by a story written in the 50s by a Romanian writer who was then belonging to the Socialist Realism style (but later became a political oponent and a refugee). So here we have Pintilie, the most famous dissident film-maker of Romania picking up a story written in the Communist era – maybe in a demonstrative manner that tells in a most authoritative voice that bridges with the past should not be completely blown-up.

‘The Unforgettable Summer’ is a anti-war drama on the road open by Kubrick‘s ‘Paths of Glory‘. Yet it has also another classical source in the Romanian cinema – Liviu Ciulei’s Padurea Spanzuratilor, the first Romanian movie to have won a major prize at the Cannes film festival. Pintilie’s film, with the moral dilemma of the officer hero, making eventually the right decision with the major risk for his career and even life has a lot of similarity in theme and form.

The cinematographic approach is simple and direct. The film is beautifully filmed, with attention to the detail, and a fluent story telling. Music also plays a role in the narrative structure, the whole action happens between the opening French Can-Can music and the closing ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ and in the meantime nothing too nice happens. The horror of the violent actions that happen or are suggested to happen on screen is balanced by the innocent view of the child whose story telling leads the action. Here the innocence is also under pressure as in many other films by Pintilie, so is the destiny of principal heroine superbly acted by Kristin Scott Thomas, who together with her partner on screen Claudiu Bleont give life to the couple of heroes. Her actions cannot cut off sufferings or fix evil, they can only postpone by a second the sentences of history. Is it too much, is it too little? The open question is left to the viewer to answer.

Here is the film as I found it on youTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaaGk1vwYkc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4vNoXBcpX0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeZ6yEp-Eis&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpPpjgwTM3Y&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kWYCZ3n6yE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwOh9-5olok&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52AAKekdZ58&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2oay5YDXs4&feature=related

(video source CinemaRomanesc)

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The Maltese Week /2 – Economy and Tourist Guides

Posted on April 14, 2010 by admin

It was not easy to prepare this trip. I usually try to read as much as I can from the Internet, and also buy at least one good tourist guide (green Michelin if possible) if not more than one. No way to find any book on Malta in Israel, not even in the ‘Memsi’ (the Israeli Automobile Club, peer of the AAA) stores. I was not more successful in the first few bookstores I entered in the US. It’s only by ordering on Amazon that I could eventually buy the two books (one coming with a good map as well) that I used during the trip.

This actually tells part of the story of the Maltese tourism and economy. Also Malta welcomes more than one million tourists a year for a population of 400,000 inhabitants, and although tourism is the #1 source of income for the Maltese economy the archipelago is still not only minuscule on the map but also unknown or at best little publicized on the boards of the holiday agents in Europe and world-wide. The level of services is somehow lower than for example in the Greek islands, but then the concentration of landscape and history is at least equal, and there is vicious circle that waits to be broken. More tourists would mean more money which would mean more and new services and infrastructure.  Also bigger crows, too big maybe? It is a small island and there is a limit in the capacity of the incoming flow. Yet, my feeling is that the breakthrough in the Maltese tourism is yet to come. Most of the tourists, by the way, are coming from the UK attracted by the English-speaking tradition and the driving on the correct side of the road – but I could see many Italian, German, Spaniards. And yes, Valletta was quite crowded even in the out-of-season first days of April.

What about the rest of the economy? With limited resources of water Malta cannot ensure more than 20% of its food. Vegetable gardens and cereal fields are visible, but the agricultural surface is limited. Local limestone is used for construction works and it’s yellow surfaces provide the appearance and ‘local color’ of the buildings. The strategic position at the crossroad of the Mediterranean naval roads and two hospitable harbor areas in the North and in the South of the island made of Malta a good place for naval workshops. However this industry decreased since the British naval basis left the area, and the tentative of turning them into aircrat repairs shops seems to have only partially succeeded.

Malta Story

So what’s left? of course, the factories of dreams – the film industry. Natural and historical landscape, English speaking teams, lots of extras with little work to do and plenty of time to spend on the set, the sea around – all these make of Malta the ideal place to make historical, or adventure, or aquatic films. ‘Malta Story’ with Alec Guiness and ‘Spartacus’ with Kirk Douglas are just two of the classical films made in Malta. MFS (the Meditarenean Film Studios) are well known in the industry. I did not get to visit them, but I heard that the sea film studios are unique. For a compensation in the coffee-shop in Mosta where we stopped in the first day and from where we watched part of the Easter parade the walls were decorated with the posters of many of the classical films ‘Made in Malta’.

Spartacus

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The Maltese Week /1 – First Impressions

Posted on April 13, 2010 by admin

Malta is a place one must go for a vacation. There are numerous things to visit and experience, and one week is barely enough to see the majority of them, as you will see from my stories to follow. There is a lot of history – from the very ancient to the Medieval times until the modern and contemporary era. It’s a deeply religious place and religious art lovers should get ready for a feast when they go to Malta.  It is inhabited by an interesting  and unique people that belongs to both the European and the Mediterranean space. It is not a place necessarily to return for a second vacation.

There are two big islands in Malta – Malta itself and Gozo and a third minuscule one between them with exactly six inhabitants, one being a policeman. The total population is of about 390,000.

People used to the Mediterranean landscape will find the setting familiar. Malta is situated as the same latitude as the North of Israel, and the stony hills and sub-tropical bushes look quite similar to the ones in the Holy Land, somehow greener than central Israel. The rain average is the same and there are no rivers on the islands, so there must be some underground reservoirs.

The feeling of deja vu stroke me as soon as I got into the first city I visited in the first day of my stay in Malta – the city of Mosta. There is very little new construction and development in Malta, and only in the coastal hotels areas. When people build in the cities they still use the limestone blocks in a very conservative manner, so new building looks strikingly similar to old one, and only the level of degradation of the facades tells something about the age of the construction. They also do not seem to demolish, when a house stops being used it is simply abandoned, and not demolished to make room to a new one – quite strange for an island which is a minuscule point on the map of the Mediterranean.

Yet, beauty and style can be found in many places, and I will get back telling a few things and bringing some photos to prove it later. To start with I will just tell that balconies seem to be a national passion and they come in different shapes and color and break the cubical structure of the Mediterranean villas that can be seen in many other places.

The feeling of familiarity is enhanced as soon as you can hear the Maltese language. It is a Semitic language, close and sounding very similar to Arabic, but written with the Latin alphabet. Some Italian influence (Sicily is only 90km North of Malta) rounds a little bit the sounds, but overall the landscape and the language combined make the Maltese cities and villages look very similar to the Arab areas in Israel. It’s just that instead of minarets here we get churches, and many of them, and beautiful ones.

It’s a deeply Catholic country and religion played an important role in it’s history and continues to play an important role in the life of the inhabitants nowadays. I’ll get back to this in a later episode.

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Ashes and Movies – The Holocaust Films

Posted on April 11, 2010 by admin

As the Holocaust Memorial Day starts in Israel, I found in the weekend edition of Yediot Aharonot a list drawn by Yehuda Stav and Yehuda Nuriel of some the most important films dedicated to the Holocaust. It’s certainly a personal list, and other may have different preferences, I personally found some surprises but I thought that it’s interesting to bring it up and this is the appropriate moment to do so.

(video source UnitedOffensiveIII)

Elen Klimov’s ‘Idi i smotri’ (Come and See) from 1985 tops the list – they call it the greatest war film of all times and one of the best on a Holocaust theme.

Next comes Paul Mazurski’s adaptation from 1989 of Bashevis-Singers’ Enemies: A Love Story. It’s actually a post-Holocaust drama dealing happening in post-war America. I saw recently a stage adaptation at the Gesher theatre.

(video source EvenstarDreamer)

Another splendid screen adaptation was inspired by Giorgio Bassani’s novel Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini brought to screen by Vittorio de Sica in 1970.

I have not seen Sidney’s Lumet’s The Pawnbroker staring Rod Steiger from 1964 – this was for me the first surprise on the list.

Interestingly enough the Yediot Aharonot critics did not include Roberto Benigni La vita e bella in their list (a miss in my opinion) but rather preferred to point to the lesser known first version of Jakob, der Lugner (Jacob, the Liar) of the East-German director Frank Beyer as the most original treatment of the Holocaust in the comic register. A second film staring Robin Williams followed in 1999.

The Shop on the Main Street made in 1965 by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos is not only a small and moving human story, but also one of the best films of the short-lived new wave in the Czechoslovak cinema cut off by the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkRpa3lZaJE

(video source isaiasgarde)

I did not know that in 1955, four years before making ‘Hiroshima, mon amour’ Alain Resnais had authored one of the first documentaries about the Holocaust – Nuit et Brouillard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAH3RTRlCHY

(video source GusHammond)

Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) does not need any explanation – it is probably the most famous and most viewed film about the Holocaust and the director’s best in my opinion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itR0-I9idXk

(video source klappozita)

And yet the highest on my personal list is Polansky’s The Pianist. Like Spielberg, Polansky put the best of his talent in the service of making this masterpiece dated 2002.

(video source sweetshark3)

Claude Lanzman’s Shoah could not be missing from the list. It’s a huge, overwhelming documentary which in 1985 succeeded to catch on film many of the stories of the survivors.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeO89EgDWrM

(video by kurish666 )

The newspaper list ends with another film I knew nothing about previously Le Chagrin et la Pitie – a documentary by French director Marcel Ophuls who in 1969 smashed some myths presenting the extent of the collaboration of the French in the Final Solution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UqjQ55AEE0

(video source giuliodeluise)

I would like to add to the list one film made in France in 1998 by Romanian-born director Radu Mihalileanu – Train de vie. It is not a perfect film, but it has a strong and original idea.

Posted in documentary, Holocaust, movies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Film: Xiang ri kui (Sunflower) – China, 2005

Posted on April 10, 2010 by admin

The key scene of this wonderful film about a father-son relationship happens towards the end. The father, a former painter whose life and career were crushed by the political troubles of the Cultural Revolution that China went through four decades ago visits the newly opened exhibition of his son’s paintings. He walks through the paintings which like in a time travel bring back the emotions of his son uneasy growing up. Then he stops in front of one work, representing the double portrait of child with blurred features and huge deep hunting and hunted eyes near the portrait of a man whose traits are hard to distinguish, hidden like by fog. The two portraits seem unrelated, but yet we feel that the boy’s uneasiness is related to the man’s portrait absence of clarity. The visiting father sits on a bench. Then his son joins him. Without a word the father extends his hand to his son as a sign of congratulation. It’s almost the only sign of father to son tenderness in the whole film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsqYcM9oQZQ

(video source keane43)

As many good movies ‘Sunflower’ can be read and interpreted at multiple levels. It is the story of a relationship between a father that is taken away from the child to find him back nine years later, a father who tends to dominate and control his son’s life beyond ‘normal’ father to son care, in an attempt to realize through his son’s talent and artistic training the destiny that was refused to him because of the convulsions of history. At this level the film is wonderfully helped by a team of actors were Bin Li and Joan Chen have the leading roles of the parents, and three different actors represent the phases of development of the boy, with Wang Haidi playing the key mature period. Another reading goes beyond the immediate dialogs and makes us reflect to the relation between individual and history in a country which underwent such profound transformations as China did in the last half century. History and politics play all the time a role in the film, they are present in the background even if politics are not openly discussed. A radio or TV set seem to be permanently open, family relations or lodging depend on low scale policies, and the very premises of the film are derived from a huge political event. On this perspective the relation between father and son may become a symbol of the relation between the older and newer generations of China, a country were new ways find their place and replace the older methods in economy and in the life of its citizens. In a country and tradition were elders are respected and order is the supreme governing principle, the story of a rebellious son has a stronger connotation. The title itself of Yang Zhan’s film can be interpreted in multiple ways – the presence of sunflowers in the action is paralleled by a picturesque resemblance of the flowers brought on screen with the famous sunflowers painted by Van Gogh, the supreme master of art rebellion.

At the end the father disappears completely from the life of his son, making him absent at the childbirth of his grandson in what seems to be a gesture of supreme sacrifice knowing his obsession with the life of his son continuing ans repairing his own life and the destiny of the previous generations. Yet, sunflowers are present, and we feel that in the life and spirit of the new generations there is a lot of what the elders induced. An almost Confucianist conclusion to the story of the relation between father and a rebellious son.

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Romanian Easter Traditions in Rome

Posted on April 1, 2010 by admin

Rome in the week before Easter is full of tourists, many of whom came in the city for the Easter celebrations, and at the same time special cultural events are being organized supplementary to the traditional religious services and manifestations. The majority are of course Catholic, but an unexpected surprise occurred to me today when near the Santa Maria del Popolo church I saw a poster announcing an exhibition of Romanian Easter painted eggs organized in collaboration with the Accademia di Romania in Rome and the Romanian Peasant Museum from Bucharest.

It is actually more than a painted eggs exhibition, although the tradition of beautifully ornamenting eggs is an original form of art by itself which would have indeed justified a full exhibition.

The opportunity is used to bring in more selected objects that belong to the same space of religious arts and traditional habits where the painted eggs also belong, although not all have a direct relation with the Easter holiday and celebrations

There are traditional shirts for example, out of which I liked alot the one below.

A few icons on glass are exposed and some are really exquisite like the one below whose Last Dinner subject is also quite well fit for the occasion.

I hope that my Christian friends enjoyed this short description of the exhibition. I wish them all a Happy Easter!

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