One of the few surprises of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony was the snub of Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” the animated film about the First Lebanon War that seemed poised to win Israel its first ever statuette for best foreign film. Instead, the Oscar went unexpectedly (some might say inexplicably) to the Japanese film “Departures.”

But despite the Academy’s mysterious selection process, the widespread critical acclaim of “Waltz With Bashir” shows that Israeli cinema is a force to be reckoned with. Both “Bashir” and Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” — which snagged an Oscar nod in 2008 — represent the wider prominence of Israeli cinema on the international film scene. Historically neglected, Israeli cinema has seen a renaissance in the past decade, with Israeli films cropping up regularly on the festival circuit, including five at the current Tribeca Film Festival.

Now seems like a good time for a critical re-evaluation of this often neglected national cinema. Enter French-Israeli filmmaker Raphael Nadjari, whose 210-minute-long documentary “A History of Israeli Cinema” enjoyed its world premiere at the 59th International Berlin Film Festival in early February. Astonishingly, the sold-out audience was deterred neither by the running time nor that the film dealt with cinematic artifacts largely unknown outside Israel.

Nadjari, whose 2007 film “Tehilim” screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, divides “A History of Israeli Cinema” into two parts. The first spans the years 1933 to1978, starting with the earliest films made by European Jews in Palestine during the British Mandate. The second part covers the years 1978 to 2005 and examines the wave of films dealing of political issues and the trend toward a more personal approach to cinema.

Nadjari tells the story through interviews with film professionals, critics and intellectuals — including Amos Gitai, Joseph Ceder, Avi Mograbi, Yehuda Ne’eman, Menachem Golan, Moshe Ivgy and Zeev Revach — and extensive use of film clips, which are woven into a kinetic and engaging documentary that invites the audience to share in the process of discovery.

What makes “A History of Israeli Cinema” so successful is the engagement that Nadjari achieves though an almost Talmudic dialectical process — the way that the confluence of voices and visual quotations often refer back to and reflect each other. In the film, Nadjari eschews narration and remains hidden behind his sources. In person, however, he is eminently talkative.

Nadjari arrives late for our meeting, dressed casually in black. His sympathetic face is set off by a short coif, and light beard and rectangular black-rimmed eyeglasses. Nadjari carefully measures his words and speaks in eloquent — if not always grammatically flawless — English with lilting accents of French and Hebrew.

Nadjari was hardly an expert on the subject of Israeli cinema when the French TV channel ARTE approached him about making the film. And he never imagined that the finished product would end up running three-and-a-half hours. As Nadjari plunged into a full exploration, the format of his film changed. “It became the story of our gaze, our look on things, he said. You share in the development of our own consciousness.”

From the beginning, Nadjari wanted his film to be analytic. “The film is not a showcase. To me, the Israeli cinema is like an invitation to think about the function of cinema,” he explained. “Should cinema continue to raise all the questions of man, of woman, social, ethical, ethnical, religious, non-religious? It’s amazing to see the high quality of debate in a cinema, which is much more interesting because it is kind of the way our imagination works, and is sometimes not quite conscious.” One walks away from Nadjari’s film amazed that Israeli cinema is such an open forum for multiple viewpoints and perspectives, given the country’s never-ending religious, ethical and geopolitical conflicts.

While we never get to hear Nadjari’s opinion explicitly in his film, his guidance is evident in the care with which he weaves together interviews and archival footage. He sees himself as mostly glossing the terms of the debate and attempting a definition. “Probably I’m trying to make a pshat,” he said, referring to a method that Bible scholars use to understand the text. “Trying to define things is trying to disambiguate and to show the complexity.”

In the course of the film, filmmakers and scholars sit around, debating terms and fighting to reinvent definitions. “Whatever is in motion, whatever doesn’t have a form, is always reinventing itself. That’s what’s unique about it.” Nadjari said: “These films are crazy. They are leftovers of fictions that can’t negotiate to build a national history. It’s so interesting to see how deconstructive all this is. Like every time you want to have an idea, it gets deconstructed. Next time you have an idea, it goes in debate.” This constant flux of a national art form that continually struggles to find its identity makes Nadjari’s subject elusive. In keeping with this sentiment, Nadjari urges that his film is not the definitive history of Israeli cinema: “To me, this film is a step in the research.”

Nadjari says that the technical aspects of Israeli filmmaking have often overshadowed the issues the films themselves raised. “We’re talking about the build-up of a conscience,” the filmmaker continued, “on a place that struggles to find its ethic. So it’s really interesting in the sense that we see a cinematography that some people could call boring — but in fact they didn’t see it, because people, when they go to films, are obsessed with efficiency.” He compares Uri Zohar’s classic “Hole in the Moon” to the work of French film pioneer George Méliès, a director whose appeal exceeds the craft of his films: “It’s not well written, it’s not well said. But it’s so beautiful.”

The historical fact that Israel missed out on the chance to pioneer the art of film is crucial for Nadjari, who says that Israeli cinema was aware from the first that it could not be original. But this late start was far from a disadvantage; it just created new opportunities. “If Israeli cinema could not be original, it tried to become exemplary. And if it couldn’t be exemplary, so it tried to become unique. And if it wasn’t able to be unique, then it tried to expose contradictions,” he explains that the insecurity and restlessness of Israeli film makes it an elusive subject for documenting. “It will always go out of your hand because it has no form and in the end - it will always be original. That’s the funny thing; in the end it will always be exemplary.”

Where does Nadjari sees Israeli cinema heading in the future? “What it clear to me,” he said, “is that Israeli cinema will start again. And in that sense, Israeli cinema will take an extremely different position, contradict completely everything. Israeli cinema was only interesting when it decided to propose a dialectical access to its meaning, in the sense that each filmmaker would enter in the eternal questions of ‘What are we? What should we be? Where are we heading to? Where are we coming from? What is our identity? What is our hope? What is our despair?’” Nadjari explains that the debate of the “function” of Israeli cinema encompasses philosophy, entertainment, nation-building and propaganda.

Nadjari interprets the recent Oscar excitement surrounding “Waltz With Bashir” as illustrating the point. “What does it mean?” he asked rhetorically. “That it’s the definitive achievement of Israeli cinema? But it cannot be this.” This is but another facet of Israeli cinema that makes it so fascinating to observe, this constant rush to produce the definitive statement. “That’s what I like — because these films are each time a breakthrough. Breakthrough after breakthrough.”

My wrap-up of the 59th International Berlin Film Festival is up at the Anthem Magazine site:

With an astonishing number of recent and soon-to-be released films being shot in Berlin (including The Reader, Valkyrie, The International and Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Inglorious Bastards) the German city seems to be enjoying a renaissance as one of Europe’s film capitals. Indeed, the mood carried over to this year’s installment of the International Berlin Film Festival, which unreeled from February 5 – 15….READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

The following article was originally published in the Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com).

A.J. Goldmann

BERLIN - Mauerfall (“wall fall”) is what the Germans call it – part of their rich vocabulary to discuss the fate of East Berlin.

As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches this November, the 59th Berlin International Film Festival paid tribute last week with a series of films that presaged the collapse of socialism.

“After Winter, Comes Spring,” a special program of films produced in Eastern bloc countries in the final decade of the cold war, included features, documentaries, animated films, and experimental ones from East Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Romania, the former Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. After screening in Berlin, the 15-film series goes on a national tour.

The curator, Claus Löser, is an East German native who dismisses the notion that these films explicitly predicted the fall of Communism. “These films are documents of discontent and resistance,” he says in an interview. “Of course, they are not prophetic films in a way of seeing exact historical changes. It’s more abstract.” The films, he adds, “have a healthy amount of disrespect and struck a new note by documenting in film the advent of change.”

Dieter Kosslick, the festival’s director, makes an even bolder claim: The series shows “how artists can seismographically sense changes ahead of time and incorporate these” into their films, he told German news agency Deutsche Welle.

Above and beyond exhibiting works that are prescient, Mr. Löser intends the series to pay tribute to unsung films and to show that Eastern bloc cinema of the 1980s was producing great art on a level with David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Peter Greenaway. “The central mission of this program,” he says, “is to remind about a forgotten chapter of history.”

The best-known work is the Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “A Short Film About Killing” (1987), expanded from an episode in his 10-hour-long, “The Decalogue,” about a man who commits a senseless murder and is, in turn, executed by the state. The film equates capital punishment to murder.

“It’s a good example to explain the relationship between artistic and political messages,” says Löser, adding that Kieslowski uses the double killing to represent a laconic and frozen society.

Other filmmakers took a surreal approach to representing social ills and the desire for change. A prime example is director Gábor Bódy’s “The Dog’s Night Song” (1983), a beautiful film that offers no easy answers. A disconcerting portrait of a Hungarian town thrown into disarray by the arrival of a new parish priest, the film is a web of fragmented and often intersecting narratives: The audience follows a wheelchair-bound veteran of the 1956 uprising unable to commit suicide; an astronomer who moonlights in a punk band; the abused wife of an explosives officer who runs away to join the band; and their son, who films his world with a German tourist’s Super 8 camera.

“This film is from the East, but it plays with postmodern terms,” Löser says. “You find it in the storytelling, in the changing of the point of view. And you feel very much that something is wrong in this society. The heroes of the film are looking for something, but they don’t know exactly what it is.”

Many of the films in the series use metaphor to treat themes of occupation and resistance. One such film is “The War of the Worlds – Next Century” (1981), from Polish director Piotr Szulkin, a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells’s classic that can be read as a parable for life under a dictatorship. It is unlikely that the references to existing social conditions were lost on the original audience. What is surprising, however, is the parallel with Don Siegel’s paranoid classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), which also used alien invasion as a metaphor for communist occupation.

While there was relative artistic freedom in Hungary and Poland by the 1980s, cinema in East Germany and Romania was still heavily censored. Some films were banned outright, such as Rainer Simon’s “Jadup und Boel” (1980), about the memory of World War II in a fictional East German town. It was the last film shot at East Berlin’s DEFA studios and only released in 1988. Simon did not curry favor with the authorities by pursuing realism and avoiding veiled references to current woes.

“Filmmakers are part of society,” says Löser, “so they reflect existing moods. A lot of these films were forbidden for some years because these films had too much reality and that was dangerous for the [Communist] Party.”

In East Germany, some directors avoided censorship by making documentaries, which came under less scrutiny than fiction films. One such film is “After Winter, Comes Spring” (1987), by Heike Misselwitz, the nonfiction film about women in East Germany that lends its title to the series.

“It’s a masterpiece as a film, not only as a political document,” says Löser, who described seeing it for the first time at the 1988 Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, exactly a year before the city’s uprisings, which quickly spread to Berlin. “One segment of the audience burst out in applause and the other segment was completely mute, because there were a lot of government officials in the audience,” he says. Löser was applauding.

“I was happy, of course, because we always had the hope that maybe a change will come and that it might be possible to work in East Germany as an artist and to stand with an open mind,” he says.

The obscurity of the films in the series stems in part from how few directors made films with the same passion after the Iron Curtain fell. (The notable exception is Kieslowski, who continued working until his death in 1996.) Others, Löser says, ceased to find inspiration in a changed world. “It was a great artistic problem if you worked for years and years under very complicated circumstances, and these circumstances vanish. The idea that you are now free to do what you want is wrong. You need to find new coordinates for your work.”

My article on the Culinary Cinema event at the Berlin Film Festival has been posted (finally) on the Gourmet website. It’s short and sweet, so enjoy!

“Lovers of food and film might want to mark their calendars for next February 5–15, when for the third year in a row, the Berlin Film Festival will offer Culinary Cinema, a series of screenings paired with dinners inspired by the films and prepared by hotshot chefs. This year, after reliving the thwarted dinner party of Luis Buñuel’s 1972 classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie…[READ FULL ARTICLE]

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The CineStar in the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz

Stargazers wait by the entrance of the Grand Hyatt

An installation of one of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno videos

Actress Tilda Swinton and director Julien Issac at the press conference for their documentary Derek, about the British filmmaker Derek Jarman.

Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai and French actress Jeanne Moreau after the press screening of “Plus tard, tu comprendras”

Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz pose for papparazzi at the press conference for “Elegy”

Isabella Rossellini, Guy Maddin and Jody Shapiro discuss “Green Porno” and “My Winipeg”

The 55-year-old Rossellini

If the Feuilletonist has of late been more silent than God, it is the fault not of laziness or fatigue, but rather competing obligations. As of a week ago, I was reporting on the 58th Annual Berlin International Film Festival, zipping around town to attend screenings, fight my way into crowded press conferences, and beg press agents for the rare interview.

My coverage of the 10-day festival is divided among various magazines. To start, there’s a lenghty festival overview / wrap-up at Anthemmagazine.com.

Secondly, I contributed a story on Isabella Rossellini’s small screen directorial début, “Green Porno,” for Wired.com.

Visit the website of The New Republic for an in-depth analysis of the film and video work of French director Michel Gondry, whose new film “Be Kind, Rewind,” opened nationwide this past Friday.

As a supplement to that feature, a Q&A I conducted with the quirky and charming filmmaker has been posted as well.

On the horizon is a feature on a food and film series that brought Michelin chefs to cater gourmet meals inspired by films with gastronomic themes, which should appear sometime this week at Gourmet.com.

Even though I was not accredited as a photographer at this year’s Berlinale, I still managed to steal a few surreptitious shots of the festival’s stars. I’ll be posting a selection of photos from this year’s Berlinale shortly. So, stay tuned!

-Adam