Although Amos Gitai made several short films between 1971 and 1980, he considers House (1980) his “first finished film from a formal perspective.”[1] In relation to form, Gitai, in interviews, acknowledges a correspondence between architecture and cinema, and criticism of his films often identifies their architectural qualities.[2] This impulse speaks to two biographical details: in 1979, Gitai completed his PhD in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley; and his father, Munio Weinraub Gitai, studied architecture at the Bauhaus. House addresses on several levels the interaction between cinema and architecture. First, in terms of subject matter, it is literally a film about a specific house, its history of ownership, and its partial demolition, reconstruction, and renovation over time. Second, on the level of authorship, it is the film that led Gitai to redirect his vocational ambitions from architecture to film. And third, through its formal choices, it self-consciously reflects on how cinema, like a building, can structure varied experiences of the same space. Across these levels, the film reflects on its own medium as it also aims to represent another.

“The house [to which the title of the film refers] is located at 14 ‘Each Generation and Its Master’ Street,” an English subtitle announces. This fortuitously apt translation of the name of the street, Dor Dor ve Dorshav, resonates with the film’s story of the house’s generations of residents, since, from generation to generation, residency of the house depends on territorial mastery.[3] A Palestinian family, the Dajanis, occupied the house until the violence of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War forced them to flee the neighborhood. After that, the Israeli state controlled the house and rented it to an Algerian Jewish couple. In the present tense of the film, we see the house undergoing renovations for its future occupant, an Israeli professor of economics. These renovations provide the setting for the contending views of the Israeli owner and contractors and of the Palestinian stonemasons and construction workers.

Tracing the house’s history of ownership proved contentious; and Israeli television, which had originally commissioned the film, ultimately shelved it. Galvanized by the challenges of making House, and then rescuing it in the face of strong negative reaction by its funders, Gitai, despite his new university degree, moved away from architecture and into cinema. Among the challenges of making the film, Gitai lists these “essential questions”: “how do you juxtapose the points of view, how do you pass from one character to another, how do you structure a film without resorting to voice-over, using only editing.”[4] These questions are also architectural, as juxtaposition with Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “Montage and Architecture” shows.

For Eisenstein, the experience of both film and architecture involves following a path through a series of images, but whereas the film spectator remains motionless before the path constructed by the montage, the architectural spectator’s movement through space produces the sequence of images. To illustrate, Eisenstein quotes at length the description of the Acropolis of Athens in Auguste Choisy’s 1899 Histoire de l’Architecture. Choisy guides the reader through the Acropolis’s spatial structure and its history, emphasizing such qualities as the counterpoint between wholistic symmetry and diversity of detail; the predominance of “more picturesque” oblique views over the “more majestic … calculated exception” of the view en face;[5] and a layout that allows different structures to dominate the attention (e.g., first the statue of Athene Promachos, then the Parthenon) so that no one structure (“the gigantic statue of the goddess”) keeps the attention from doing justice to relatively smaller features (the Porch of the Caryatids adorning the Erechtheum).[6]

Similar principles structure the montage of House, but to a different end. In Choisy’s account, diversity of detail ultimately reinforces and enlivens the wholistic symmetries, and the Acropolis creates a harmonious aesthetic experience that directs attention evenly so that one space need not compete with another for attention. House, in contrast, takes as its subject inequalities in attention allotted to different spaces and experiences, even as it also follows such principles as counterpoint, symmetry, and diversity of detail. Consider two symmetrical, extended tracking shots filmed from vehicles moving down a street and aimed at the houses lining it. Both appear during the interview with the contractor and include his voice-over. The first shows the neighborhood of the title house; the second a refugee camp near Yatta, Hebron. A “diversity of details” signaling the wealth of the title house’s neighborhood (well-maintained foliage; large houses set back from, and above, the street, their private yards walled off) and the relative poverty of the camp (sparse foliage, small buildings abutting the street) disrupts the powerful symmetry of the rhyming tracking shots. The vehicular tracking shots themselves are “calculated exceptions” that stand out from the film’s other framings and its sound design. They include, unlike any other sequences, extensive use of non-diegetic music, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells,” made famous by its use in William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist. There is also a “calculated exception” involving lighting: the most common lighting design — natural sunlight — points up the pre-dawn darkness when, before the setting shifts to the work site, an early sequence features some of the workers taking the bus at 4 a.m. to get to the site of the house’s reconstruction. Later we learn that one of the stonemasons working on the house returns from his eight-hour workday at 10 p.m.

The paired tracking shots and the anomalous predawn sequence count as ways Gitai works out “how to structure a film without resorting to voice-over.” The contrasts between the relative wealth of the Israelis and the straitened circumstances of the Palestinians function formally as well as ideologically. The “essential questions” Gitai identifies concerning points of view and “pass[ing] from one character to another” transpose a problem of scale (the way the large Athene Promachos might distract from the smaller Caryatids) into one of rhetoric: the title of the film refers to an Israeli house, but the time scale of the story expands to include its original history as an unceded Palestinian house. And the Palestinian labor of quarrying rocks — breaking them with spikes and hammers because explosives aren’t allowed — in the Hebron Hills occupies the screen space and soundtrack in the important beginning and ending sequences. Israelis dominate within the world of the film, but the film’s discursive strategies shift attention and understanding to the Palestinians.

Filmmaker and critic Serge Toubiana writes that House “only poses one question: ‘Who lived there before?’”[7] The film’s emphasis on the title house’s history continues a theme of Eisenstein’s and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on parallels between cinema and architecture. Since, like cinema, architecture involves following a path, it is a temporal medium as well as a spatial one; and considering it together with cinema brings out its temporal aspects. After he follows Choisy’s path through the Acropolis, Eisenstein turns to a Mexican church “built on the site of an ancient pagan temple.” He writes, with Marxian irony, “The wise colonizers and missionaries did this so that the new faith should not lose the popularity of an already familiar spot and so as to use the well-trodden paths of pilgrimage to other gods for its own, Catholic, purposes.”[8] Eisenstein’s “well-trodden paths” to a “familiar” spot, the “popularity” of which new builders can direct toward new ends, resonate with the “tactile” and “optical” habits Walter Benjamin identifies as common to the distracted, mass reception of both architecture and cinema in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” For Benjamin, both cinema and architecture are “received in a state of distraction and through the collective.” He writes, “Buildings are received in a twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely [taktisch] and optically …. Tactile reception comes about not only by way of attention but also by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing rather than attentive observation.”[9] For Benjamin, artworks — and especially films — have a responsibility to instill habits of perception that are adequate to the demands of their time. He saw his own time as requiring a perceptual apparatus that could forego slow, reflective contemplation to absorb the shock effects of urban and industrial life. He took cinematic montage to be the preeminent art form for reshaping perceptual habits to include this capacity.

Gitai’s film about a literal house brings out the intricacy of Benjamin’s argument. Toward the end, during the interview with the house’s pre–1948 owner, Dr. Dajani, some high-angle shots afford a substantial, but by no means complete, view of the construction site. But overall, the film withholds establishing shots, never allowing sustained, optical contemplation of the site in its entirety; instead, we see a variety of partial views from varied angles. Just as tracking shots were matters of morality for Jean-Luc Godard, the ethics of this film coalesce around the establishing shot or, more precisely, its absence. The film renders porous the bounds of the house, which, in its state of construction, never encloses a defined space: the house does not end at its walls, which a stonemason is taking apart, checking, and rebuilding, and we never see a clearly pictured property line. The space of the film includes the house’s neighborhood, the neighborhoods of those who are working on it, and the quarry where workers break apart stone for its reconstruction. The extent of the house remains unclear. The first shot of it features a sign similar to the “No ­trespassing” sign that frames Citizen Kane: “Danger. Building site. No entry.” And like Orson Welles’s title character, Gitai’s title house changes aspect, depending on who is talking about it and which moment of its existence they are discussing. This temporal and spatial fluidity of the film’s very subject suggests the departure from contemplative stillness that Benjamin highlights. But it also solicits reflection at another, diachronic level: the house cannot be cut off from history. New generations, new “masters,” and new habits replace, but do not erase, the old.

Gitai’s film, like Benjamin’s essay, contemplates new and old together. Their coexistence and unresolved contention attach to other unstable dichotomies. The film represents the house through images and words, visible construction site and invisible history. Images, like the “Danger” sign, are at once literal and figurative. The mason explains his work — he is checking a wall to determine whether it is durable and can be left as is or is degraded and in need of reconstruction. His words literally describe something concrete: a stone wall. We can also take them figuratively to mean that the soundness of the house is not only an architectural question, but also a political one: How to build a stable home? Just before interviewing the stonemason, Gitai interviews the house’s Israeli contractor, who nostalgically reminisces about joining the militant socialists in his youth. Gitai asks, “What is socialism?” to which the contractor responds, “It’s very simple. First and foremost, it’s a love of Israel and doing a maximum of work, especially construction, building the country.” Intercut images of the Palestinian construction workers doing the actual labor on the house, which is in a neighborhood where they cannot live, emphasize the contractor’s inadvertent deformation of the meaning of “socialism” and of Israel’s early idealism. Deconstructing with images the contractor’s claims, Gitai’s “architectural” filmmaking associates itself with the mason checking the soundness of the stones that bear the weight of the structure. The documentary House is renovating the country cinematically by excavating and documenting its cracks. The placement of Gitai’s archive at Stanford University, far from Israel, speaks to the difficult audacity of this work that begins with House. 

endnotes

1. Serge Toubiana, The Cinema of Amos Gitai, trans. Kimberley Lewis (Paris: Lincoln Center/Cahiers du Cinéma, 2005), 21.  ↩

2. See, for instance, Anselm Franke, “Introduction: Amos Gitai’s Cinema as Architecture,” in Amos Gitai: News from Home, ed. Anselm Franke (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006), 17–20. See also Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul Willemen, Arthur Miller, Annette Michelson, et al., Amos Gitai: Architecte de la mémoire [Amos Gitai: Architect of memory] (Paris: Gallimard/La Cinémathèque française, 2014).  ↩

3. For some of Gitai’s thoughts on the name of the street and its translation, see Toubiana, The Cinema of Amos Gitai, 26. In A House in Jerusalem (1998), the second film in the House trilogy, several interviewees offer their own translations. ↩

4. Toubiana, The Cinema of Amos Gitai, 21.  ↩

5. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, ed., Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 2, Towards a Theory of Montage (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 63.  ↩

6. Ibid., 65.  ↩

7. Toubiana, The Cinema of Amos Gitai, 106. ↩

8. Glenny and Taylor, Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 2, 67. ↩

9. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 119–20. ↩