The unending labour of Amos Gitaï’s House | Little White Lies

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The unend­ing labour of Amos Gitaï’s House

17 Oct 2024

Words by Daniel Glassman

Stage set with metal scaffolding, props, and performers in costume
Stage set with metal scaffolding, props, and performers in costume
Fol­low­ing a short run at Bar­bi­can Cen­tre, Amos Gitaï’s land­mark film series turned the­atre pro­duc­tion charts the his­to­ry of a sin­gle house in West Jerusalem and what it reveals about Israel and Palestine.

In 1980, Amos Gitaï was com­mis­sioned by Israeli tele­vi­sion to pro­duce a doc­u­men­tary about a house in West Jerusalem, telling the sto­ry of its inhab­i­tants – Pales­tin­ian before 1948, Israeli after­wards. The result, House, was so incen­di­ary that it was banned from broad­cast and Gitaï went into artis­tic exile in France. In 1998, he made A House in Jerusalem, a fol­low-up to House that checked in with the sub­jects of the first film while widen­ing the scope to their fam­i­ly mem­bers and neigh­bours, and he com­plet­ed the tril­o­gy in 2005 with News From House/​News From Home, mak­ing a sort of Arab/​Israeli ver­sion of Grana­da Television’s Up! series.

In 2023, Gitaï was invit­ed by Waj­di Mouawad, the Lebanese-Cana­di­an play­wright most famous for Incendies (adapt­ed for film by a pre-Hol­ly­wood Denis Vil­leneuve in 2010) who is now artis­tic direc­tor of Paris’s théâtre nation­al – to adapt the tril­o­gy for the stage. This pro­duc­tion trans­ferred to London’s Bar­bi­can The­atre for two per­for­mances in Sep­tem­ber, and Gitaï’s film tril­o­gy played along­side it at the Bar­bi­can Cinema.

In House, as Serge Daney not­ed, Gitaï wants this house to be both a sym­bol and some­thing very con­crete.” At first, the focus is on the con­crete; for­mal­ly, these are quite con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­taries, not essay films. All three films are large­ly suc­ces­sions of mono­logues deliv­ered on the spot, in the house, on the street, on archae­o­log­i­cal sites in Jerusalem, and final­ly in a Pales­tin­ian house in the hills out­side Jerusalem.

Three young men standing on rocky terrain against a mountainous backdrop.

The films present a sort of cross-sec­tion of Israel/​Palestine soci­ety. The Jews in the films are – unex­pect­ed­ly – most­ly not East­ern Euro­pean Holo­caust sur­vivors but Zion­ist migrants from Iraq, Alge­ria, the US, and West­ern Europe who made aliyah at var­i­ous points between the 1920s and 1970s; the last ones to arrive were inspired to make the move by the 1973 Yom Kip­pur War. They tell Gitaï about the logis­tics and finances involved with mov­ing into the house – how the house was aban­doned” dur­ing the Nak­ba, req­ui­si­tioned by the Israeli gov­ern­ment, and sold to them; how they bor­rowed mon­ey to buy it, split it with oth­er fam­i­lies, and so on – as well as feel­ing spir­i­tu­al­ly ful­filled in Israel, in a Jew­ish home­land away from the con­sumerism of West­ern soci­eties. It would almost be com­pelling if it weren’t for their lack of feel­ing for the Pales­tini­ans they dis­placed. One woman even says that she has no desire to change history.

At the same time, the house is in the process of being ren­o­vat­ed, and the film pays close atten­tion to the Pales­tin­ian work­ers who are work­ing on it. This work puts them in a con­tra­dic­to­ry posi­tion: they rely on work in Israel for mon­ey as they denounce its expro­pri­a­tion of Pales­tin­ian prop­er­ty and ter­ri­to­ry. Men­ac­ing­ly – though he seems not to realise it – the Jew­ish con­trac­tor tells Gitaï that he fired a Pales­tin­ian work­er when he realised that he was tak­ing part in anti-Israel protests.

It’s the Pales­tin­ian work­ers who tell Gitaï about the house’s for­mer own­er: a mem­ber of the Dajani fam­i­ly – one of Jerusalem’s four or five most promi­nent Arab fam­i­lies before the Nak­ba. Gitaï finds the own­er, Dr. Mah­moud Dajani, and brings him to the house. It’s a remark­ably sober moment, though no less chill­ing for it. Dajani points out the new addi­tions that have been built and new hous­es on the street. He explains that he left after the Deir Yassin mas­sacre. If he aban­doned” the house, as the Israelis put it, it was only under direct threat.

Unavoid­ably, the play’s house takes on provoca­tive metaphor­i­cal dimen­sions which are only part­ly expressed in the films them­selves. In A House In Jerusalem, Dajani’s son says that the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict is like a house in which the Israelis have kicked out the Pales­tini­ans and then opened the win­dow a tiny crack and said Let’s talk.” Obvi­ous­ly, the Pales­tini­ans won’t talk until they’ve been let back into the house.

Not just the house but the film’s form also begins to feel sym­bol­ic – or maybe symp­to­matic. The mono­logue form is not always the most cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly (or the­atri­cal­ly) com­pelling but it serves a func­tion inso­far as it mir­rors the wider con­flict: each side makes its case, speak­ing most­ly to itself and maybe some imag­ined neu­tral arbiter of jus­tice, but nev­er to the oth­er side, with whom there can be no dialogue.

Yet there’s more to it than that. As a Pales­tin­ian says in A House in Jerusalem, Every­body says what they want but the truth exists.” What truth are they talk­ing about? In the most ambigu­ous and com­pelling moments of the films and the play, a cross-cut­ting issue to the Israel/​Palestine and Arab/​Jew issues comes into focus: the dimen­sion of class.

Aerial view of a residential neighbourhood with terracotta-tiled rooftops, surrounded by trees and greenery.

The fact emerges, even­tu­al­ly, that the neigh­bour­hood the house is in was built in the late 19th cen­tu­ry by Ger­man Tem­plars and was occu­pied main­ly by them and wealthy Arabs, the Dajani fam­i­ly among them. To some extent, the Daja­nis have retained their sta­tus. Dr. Dajani’s son and his fam­i­ly appear to live in rel­a­tive com­fort in East Jerusalem and have obtained Cana­di­an cit­i­zen­ship. A son now liv­ing in Amman is also men­tioned; we are told he is wealthy enough to buy the orig­i­nal house – if the Israelis would ever sell to him. Gitaï also tracks down a Dajani rel­a­tive who is down­right glam­orous, who lived much of her life in Lebanon and Kuwait and presents her­self as a mod­ern, sec­u­lar, lib­er­at­ed woman. Though they are clear­ly the vic­tims of grave injus­tice, the Daja­nis seem to have land­ed on their feet.

The Pales­tin­ian stone­cut­ters and their fam­i­lies stand in stark con­trast. Decades after the Nak­ba, they are liv­ing a hand-to-mouth exis­tence in small hous­es out­side Jerusalem. The most dev­as­tat­ing – and infu­ri­at­ing – moments are theirs. In A House In Jerusalem, the stone­cut­ter from the orig­i­nal House describes find­ing his family’s land dur­ing the 1967 war and bring­ing a grape back for his father from their old tree. His father burst into tears. Lat­er, near the end of the film, Gitaï inter­views the fam­i­ly at their home. The son tells Gitaï that he has built a new home for his fam­i­ly but with­out the prop­er per­mits – which might actu­al­ly be shake­downs from the Israeli mil­i­tary, police force, and plan­ning office – and the Israeli gov­ern­ment is threat­en­ing to demol­ish his house. You’re mak­ing a film about the past,” he says, but this is hap­pen­ing right now.”

The play dri­ves this point home in a few ways. The first is stag­ing. Two tow­ers of scaf­fold­ing frame the stage, sym­bol­is­ing the house under con­struc­tion, while in the cen­tre of the stage, for the dura­tion of the play, even as a suc­ces­sion of actors deliv­ers their mono­logues around them, the Pales­tin­ian work­ers patient­ly chip away at stones. We can nev­er for­get that the house is not (or not only) the Promised Land but a place built on labour. Toward the end of the play, this point is dri­ven home. A scrim drops down in front of the stage and Bertolt Brecht’s poem A Work­er Reads and Asks” is pro­ject­ed onto it. The poem begins: Who built Thebes with its sev­en gates? / Books say it was kings. / Did kings hew and haul the rock?” Final­ly, as the play ends, Dr. Dajani rumi­nates on stage as the final images of the orig­i­nal House are pro­ject­ed on a screen behind him: the stone­cut­ters, work­ing away.

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