Clara Hakedosha. Ari Folman and Ori Sivan. Israel: 1996.
Ha-Chayim Al Pi Agfa. Assi Dayan. Israel: 1992.
My quest for apocalyptic Israeli film seemed doomed. After searching high and low, I was forced to conclude that Israeli filmmakers, on the whole, don’t care to confront scenarios about the end of the world. Family dramas and tales of daily life abound–but in the Holy Land, high-scale disaster films are practically nonexistent.
The first factor in this phenomenon, I imagine, is cash. The Israeli film industry runs on a shoestring, and young filmmakers are always encouraged to lower their production expectations if they’d like a shot at getting their film made. Massive explosions, onslaughts of the plague, and ice storms ravaging tropical coasts are definitely out of the question.
Eventually, though, I turned up two Israeli films that do evoke apocalypse–and that suggest a more convincing reason for the genre’s sparsity. Both daily-life dramas themselves, they imply that to many Israelis, doom is just too close to the everyday to warrant fictionalizing on the big screen. Few viewers wish to watch calamity that’s genuinely close at hand. Fewer filmmakers apparently wish to approach it. And when they do, their doomsday scenarios are frighteningly close to the world we live in.
Ha-Chayim Al Pi Agfa (Life According to Agfa) gazes straightforwardly into the very near future: the film, made in 1992, opens with the caption “One year from today.” Set in Tel Aviv, Agfa follows a day in the lives of twelve characters who cross paths in a pub called Barbie. In an early scene an elderly couple enters the pub, misguidedly trying to buy their granddaughter a Barbie Doll. The pub owner, Daliah, explains that Barbie is actually named after the well-known Israeli Abarbanel Mental Health Center. And indeed, as the film unfolds, its characters present a crossection of modern Israeli malaise and anguish. Daliah is in love with a man that will never be hers; elsewhere we meet a mentally-ill young woman who fears time alone, a cancer patient who is told his days are numbered, a waitress addicted to cocaine, and a violent police officer who doesn’t try to hide his promiscuity from his girlfriend.
Clara Hakedosha (Clara the Saint), made in 1996, echoes Agfa’s futuristic gaze, opening with the title “1999.” By contrast, though, Clara Hakedosha is a vision of strange events in a barely recognizable Israel. The film begins as an innocent story of love between thirteen-year-olds: Tikel is the frustrated leader of a small gang of young rebels, and Clara is a timid new immigrant from Russia. Then we, and Clara’s new friends, find out that she is clairvoyant. The rebels waste no time capitalizing on her talents, at first satisfied using her to predict the contents of the upcoming math exam, then scheming to put Clara’s powers to work masterminding a revolution in their school.
Despite Clara‘s chronological proximity to the real world, its surreal setting suggests that it doesn’t quite take place in the here-and-now. It’s unclear where in Israel we are, but a good guess is that we are looking into a forgotten hamlet somewhere in the Negev. The school is located beside a huge industrial plant, where most of the town’s residents make a living. Thick smoke pours out of the plant’s immense chimneys, and kids play outside the plant, around the railroad tracks, or in the local swamp\xe2\x80″an odd anachronism, considering Israel has been swamp-free since the early twentieth century. The heroes live in a part of town called “The Chimney Neighborhood” which consists of colorful Lego-like projects.
Whether set in a backwater development town or a flourishing city, both films contain suggestions of Zionism’s dissolution–hints that Israel’s national ideology can no longer provide psychological sustenance for its people. Agfa features a scene in which the pub’s Palestinian kitchen worker, Samir, was recently beaten up by Israeli soldiers. When they discuss the incident, Daliah asks him to be careful, mentioning that she recently read that Zionism is history’s most irritable national movement. Clara is at once more overt and more ambiguous: the junior high school in which it is set is named after Golda Meir, and features a ghastly statue of the once-Prime Minister, standing at the end of the school corridor. The statue, painted red, portrays a hunch-backed, almost melted Golda. During their failed revolution, Clara’s friends set fire to the statue and hang it in the middle of the classroom. One wonders whether this constitutes protest against the Zionist Movement or just generic rebellion against the school. Either way, in both films it’s clear that Zionism is, like the statue, distorted and crumbling.
Both films set their characters’ conflicts against increasingly calamitous national problems. As darkness falls on the pub, Agfa‘s motley crew gathers there for a night very different from all other nights. A group of young combat soldiers sitting in the pub are being loud and obnoxious. They don’t appreciate the songs that the house pianist and ad-lib poet has chosen. His dark lyrics hint at what is to come: subversive and left wing, he unabashedly criticizes the IDF and its mistreatment of the Palestinians. The unfaithful policeman of our previous aquaintance forces the increasingly rowdy soldiers to leave the pub. In the very early hours of the morning, as business grinds to a stop, the soldiers return for revenge. They storm the pub with machine guns and hand grenades, leaving no one alive. The ending is a paranoid fantasy–but, the film implies, it’s closer than we might like to think.
Even Clara‘s more fantastic doomsday is rife with hints of the real world. A local television show devotes an episode to the hazards of a nearby town’s nuclear plant. Partway through the film, we meet Clara’s uncle, who once possessed powers similar to his niece’s–and his, we learn, were due to spending a little too much time in the nuclear zone back in Russia. Shortly afterward, Clara foresees an earthquake and the citizens flee the town. The film ends with our two young protagonists sitting in a dark movie theater, watching a film about natural disaster and making out as the theater slowly collapses upon them.
In Clara Hakedosha the world is surely coming to an end, but we aren’t told why. Agfa‘s message is all too clear: the array of characters represents Israeli society as a whole and together, it suggests a dark prophecy of Israel’s growing ability to consume itself–no less relevant now than twelve years ago. There’s no thrill in either apocalyptic scenario: their unmistakable relationships to the here-and-now make them more like vehicles for exploring current fears than truly futuristic fantasies. And the disasters themselves hit frighteningly close to home: in neither story is it a human enemy that brings on doomsday. Rather, both feature, however obliquely, catastrophes of Israelis’ own making and seem to fear that their society contains the seeds of those disasters.\t
They differ, though, over whether anything can be done about it. By the time Clara foresees the mysterious earthquake, the film’s unexplained doom is already on its way. Not so, it appears, in Agfa; shot in black and white, the film shifts to color for its final moment. The camera pans slowly across newly developed photographs shot on Agfa film by the pub’s bartender that night. Our view moves toward a window looking out on Tel Aviv’s rooftops. It’s a final frame suggesting hope. The film’s events may not come true after all\xe2\x80″but it’s up to us to prevent them.
