I’d never watched Millionaire Matchmaker before; most of my knowledge of the show comes from commercials during Top Chef (which, if you didn’t see, is headed for D.C.). Is Patti Stanger going to be a bossy yenta? Or is she an awe-inspiring matchmaker who makes so many Shidduchim—official couple recommendations—that she deserves her own gold-foil version of the Book of Life? How many matches would she need? I ask my wife, who replies, “You should Google Shidduch, I think you need three,” before returning to her phone call with her mother, with whom she is discussing the competitive world of Temple preschool applications, leaving me to wonder: Is Patti a genuine shadchan (I just found that word using Google), or just a nudge?

Patti begins by reviewing the videos for her clients. DVDs, rather; back when I used a matchmaker, you see, I had to choose between VHS and BETA. The first client is Douglas (above), an eco-clothing designer who is looking for a man that will follow him around all day, like a puppy. We know Douglas is concerned with the environment because he drives a Prius. I know I am concerned about Judaism because I watched Waltz With Bashir. I’m already over him. Patti quickly diagnoses Douglas as narcissistic and scolds him: “Looks fade, and dumb is forever.” OK, Patti, I liked that one.

Douglas goes on his “master date” with David from Guam, who is clearly too nice for him. They start with a hot-air balloon ride. That’s a point against Patti—what kind of Jewish matchmaker would let them do something so dangerous? There’s a lot of hot air in that balloon, and they also used some of it to float! Get it? Later, Douglas chastises David for wanting to order beef and pressures him to order chicken. Douglas continues to insult his date to his face and later admits he doesn’t know exactly why “meat that comes from red animals is much more damaging to the environment.” Cut to Michael Pollan quietly weeping into his pillow.

Nicole, the other millionaire client, also has some eco-business, and also drives a Prius, so now I’m thinking everyone in L.A. just adds “eco-” to their job title. Nicole is South African and has the accent to match. Patti thinks she’s too masculine and plans to give her a signal at the mixer if she forgets she has a “va-jay-jay.” Patti then describes what her rules are for a first date: “You can kiss but you can’t put it in any hole.” There should be a little “bzang!” sound effect every time Patti blows your mind with one of those snappy comments.

During the show’s amazingly vapid and stale mixer, the men that approach Nicole can’t figure out where she’s from, and I feel ashamed as a North American man. Really, gents, you can only think to discuss her accent? Are you actually trying to make her uncomfortable? After a painfully shallow dinner party, Nicole chooses Bruce, the “eco-friendly James Bond.”

Bruce and Nicole take a Toxic Tour, though I have to wonder about the eco-friendliness of two people using a bus to tour Los Angeles. After, at dinner, Bruce can’t understand if Nicole is saying Baroque or Barack, because American guys can’t understand foreign accents. At the end of the date, he leans over for a kiss, and she awkwardly laughs in his face. That’s flat-out mean. Like, junior-high mean!

After my wife patiently endured my pausing and multiple rewinds, she asked me to search one more term: Tzedakah. These two Millionaires hang an eco-shingle on their door, but when it comes to giving, they can’t seem to step out beyond their driveway. I will say that Patti has taught me more about righteously fulfilling obligations by attempting to give some charity to these mostly unlikable characters. But I don’t predict any inscriptions in the Book of Life this week.

The film, co-directed and –written by an Israeli and a Palestinian, was submitted after winning Israel’s Ophir Award for best picture. It is set in Ajami, the largest Arab neighborhood in Jaffa, and begins with a 13-year-old Arab boy witnessing a revenge murder.

The Israeli nominee in 2007 was Beaufort, and in 2008 it was Waltz With Bashir. Senior Writer Allison Hoffman wrote about both last October. And Sara Ivry interviewed Bashir director Ari Folman for the Vox Tablet podcast.

Nine Foreign Language Films Advance in Oscar Race [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences]

Related: War Movies [Tablet Magazine]
Soldier’s Story [Tablet Magazine]
Sources of Hope, Amid A Divide [NYT]

Earlier: Israel Submits Arabic-Language Film for Oscars

“Everything can burst here tomorrow morning, and you just never know,” said Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund, a government-backed nonprofit that provided financing to both Folman and Maoz. “You cannot say the Second Lebanon War triggered these projects—it was a sheer coincidence.” And, he insisted, there was no master plan, just a desire to let a generation of filmmakers who had all served in the first, controversial Lebanon war—what Maoz calls the “Lebanon generation”—explore the lasting effects of combat on Israel’s young.

“What isn’t a coincidence is that we are all obsessed with this war,” said Amy Kronish, the former curator of Jewish and Israeli film at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. “But the film fund’s policy is to fund every feature film, if possible, that’s worth funding—they won’t say to a director, we had a film about this already, we won’t fund you.”

Theoretically, all three films could have come out at the same time. Cedar, a former paratrooper, and won financing in early 2006 from the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, another government-sponsored film fund, and wrapped in June of that year, weeks before the start of the 34-day second invasion. The film, which Cedar began writing while sitting in a military jail after refusing to do reserve duty, captures the final days of the occupation of an ancient fortress in southern Lebanon, just before IDF troops pulled out in 2000. Folman, a writer for the Israeli version of In Treatment, began his script for Bashir around the time of the pullout, after he requested early release from his reserve duty as a writer for IDF safety-instruction movies on the grounds that he needed therapy for PTSD stemming from his experience at the front in 1982. In the spring of 2006, he presented Schory with a 10-minute pilot for an animated film exploring his struggle to remember what exactly he did during the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and released his film last year, just ahead of the Gaza invasion, triggering a heated national debate about the nature of responsibility and memory.

Maoz, a production designer and cinematographer who made his living for years shooting music videos and commercials, wrote his screenplay in a four-week burst in 2006. “I said to myself, you are over 40 and you need to do something with yourself—you are not a young director, and it’s now or never,” Maoz said in an interview last week. He began shooting in 2007, but completion of the film was delayed after the death of one of his producers. Chronologically, his movie belongs at the beginning: it describes the experience of four soldiers manning a tank on June 6, 1982, the first day of the first Lebanon invasion. Set entirely inside the claustrophobic metal walls of the machine, it captures the narrow experience of soldiers whose only view on the carnage is through the sight of a scope—cracked by a missile, for good measure—and who wind up having to bear the brunt of making life-or-death decisions while their feckless commanders sit considering abstractions in safe war rooms, far away.

Now, Maoz—who once told Variety that he watched the news coverage of the second Lebanon War with the uneasy sense that they were filming his script—bears the burden of being in the shadow of his compatriots. Both Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir were huge successes both domestically and abroad, garnering laurels at international film festivals along with consecutive nominations for the best foreign-language Oscars, Israel’s first since the early 1980s. (Folman, who lost the Academy Award race to a Japanese film, won Israel’s first Golden Globe.) “If they’d come out in the same year, maybe one would have succeeded at the expense of the others,” Cedar said.

Lebanon, which is set for theatrical release in America early next year, won the top prize last month at the Venice film festival, but was edged out for best picture at Israel’s Ophir awards, which means Maoz won’t have a shot at a foreign-language Oscar statuette. “In the beginning I thought it was bad luck to be number three,” said Maoz. “But I know that millions of people will see it, and I don’t have reasons to complain.”

Related:

Time of Favor [Tablet]

Fortress of Solitude [Tablet]

Soldier’s Story [Tablet]

So, while the City to City sidebar went ahead quietly, with a screening of Danny Lerner’s film Kirot—the story of a Russian sex worker in Tel Aviv, played by, of all people, Olga Kurylenko, better known as the most recent Bond Girl—critics were apparently stampeding to make it into an afternoon screening of Lebanon, which has now rocketed to the top of the acquisitions wish-list for anyone hoping to repeat, or perhaps even improve on, Bashir’s Oscar showing. Poetic justice, irony, or both? While we wait to hear what Naomi Klein thinks, feel free to watch the Lebanon trailer (in Hebrew—though, as Matt Goldberg notes on the film blog Collider, it’s perfectly clear what’s going on even if you’ve disappointed your ancestors terribly by forgetting everything you ever learned in Hebrew school):

‘Lebanon’ and ‘Single Man’ are Suddenly Hot in Toronto [Risky Business Blog]
War and Drugs in the Cross Hairs [NYT]

In September 1982, Christian supporters of President Bashir Gemayel, enraged by his assassination, massacred hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut while Israeli soldiers surrounding the camps did nothing to stop the brutality. Director Ari Folman was among them, but found, years later, that he had no recollection of the events he’d witnessed.

That realization sent Folman on an investigation, interviewing friends and peers about what they did and saw during the war in an effort to jog his own memory.

The breathtaking result of Folman’s exploration is Waltz With Bashir, a vibrantly animated, wrenching film—part memoir, part documentary—that has thrilled audiences around the world since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. It has already started racking up awards and has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign film.

We spoke with Ari Folman in his hotel in New York where he was promoting Waltz With Bashir about the challenges of making this film, his favorite scenes, and the cinematic legacy he hopes to leave his children.

The orchard scene:

“The Airport”:

The waltz:

Film stills and clips from Waltz with Bashir courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

To judge how greatly Israeli cinema has changed, and how greatly it needed to, consider that the Film Society of Lincoln Center recently showed a retrospective in honor of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, comprised exclusively of pictures from the past seven years. I think this chronological limit is a little strict. As the people at the Film Society know, you could program a substantial Israeli series going back, perhaps, to 1992. But as most cinephiles would agree, stretching from there to 1948 lies a celluloid desert, where the good films seem as rare, and as wondrous, as rocks that give water.

This was the paradox of Israeli cinema: Jews had achieved so much in film industries elsewhere in the world, yet took so long to do much of anything within their own state. That the wait is now over seems unquestionable. At home, the commercial success of Israeli film is unprecedented. In 2000, almost nobody in Israel went to see Israeli cinema; out of a total of ten million movie tickets sold, 9,964,000 were for foreign films. Today, Israeli movies sell a million tickets a year. Abroad, the critical success of recent Israeli film is equally impressive, with Or (2004) and Jellyfish (2007) both winning the award for best first film at the Cannes festival, The Syrian Bride (2004) taking awards at Locarno and Montreal, and Beaufort (2007) winning the Silver Bear at Berlin. Now that Waltz with Bashir has gained strong reviews (and international distribution) at the most recent Cannes festival, it’s a good time to ask: Why was Israeli film so slow to develop? And what conditions had to be satisfied before it could flourish?

Scene from Beaufort

The answer to the first question begins with a problem of scale. Whereas people talk about national cinemas, you don’t hear much about, say, the cinema of Chicago. It’s possible for Chicago to have a theater scene, but a city of three million, by itself, would struggle to sustain an art form that’s as labor and capital intensive as film. For the first dozen years of its existence, Israel had about half the population of Chicago—and a high percentage of those people were engaged in agriculture.

So Israeli film started out with a structural handicap, but it also was hobbled ideologically. From the earliest days of film production in the yishuv, Zionism regarded film primarily as a propaganda tool. There is nothing unusual about that—everywhere you look in the twentieth century, you find political movements and governments using film to promote their agendas. The first notable fiction film produced in Israel was solidly in this tradition: the military drama Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955). Because Israel had so little resident filmmaking expertise, the producers had to import much of the talent for this picture, including a British director, Thorold Dickinson. Although he was a gentile, Dickinson was deeply committed to the State of Israel—a circumstance that makes his view of the production all the more telling: “These very right-wing people had written this script…. Highly nationalistic types, and I wouldn’t let any of their ideas into it.”

That’s how it went, during the long Age of Leon Uris. And even once Israeli filmmakers began to turn out a greater number of entertainments, they still liked retelling the national story, in a way that would lift the heart if not rouse the martial spirit. So, in 1964, Israeli cinema produced one of its early breakthroughs, Sallah Shabbati, a comedy by Ephraim Kishon about a North African Jewish family that had been brought to the safety of Israel. You could read the film as a clever inversion of the myth of heroic Israel, in which the charmingly shiftless Sephardim are made more sympathetic than the Ashkenazim who had rescued them. The twist, of course, is that the Sephardim finally learn to be Israeli heroes themselves.

Poster for Sallah Shabbati

Out of Sallah Shabbati came a lineage of lesser Israeli films: comedies of misbehavior and reassurance, which often involved some form of reconciliation between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. And Sallah Shabbati was important in another way as well: It launched the career of the producer Menachem Golan, who with his partner Yoram Globus would go on to make, among other films, Kazablan, Lemon Popsicle, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, Death Wish II, Ninja III, Nine Deaths of the Ninja, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, Superman IV, Death Wish V, and, of course, Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear, starring Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, and Molly Ringwald. In the 1970s and ’80s, despite the occasional Beyond the Walls—a tough-minded prison drama, involving both Israelis and Palestinians—the world’s working definition of “Israeli cinema” was Golan-Globus Productions.

So how did Israel progress from this kind of filmmaking toward a cinema that is now respectable, and even admired?

I think it took a conjunction of three factors. First, Israel had to develop a film culture—one that was aware of international cinema and its artistic possibilities. Second, it needed filmmakers who were determined to be a part of this international cinema, not on a commercial but on an artistic plane. For short, we’ll call them auteurs. And third, it needed to create institutions that would support these filmmakers. In retrospect, we can see that all three of these factors coalesced in the years between 1979 and 1981—by coincidence, between the time of the Camp David agreement and the first Lebanon War.

The turning point for establishing a film culture came in 1981, when Lia van Leer founded the Jerusalem Cinematheque. For her, this was the culmination of a quarter-century of effort. Beginning in the early 1950s, when she and her husband Wim had started showing films in their home in Haifa, van Leer traveled to international festivals, bought prints, founded an Israel Film Archive, set up a Tel Aviv film club, and established the Haifa Cinematheque. At last came the decisive institutions: the Jerusalem Cinematheque, and in 1984 its offshoot, the Jerusalem Film Festival. The principal film and television school in Israel, named for the American producer Sam Spiegel, was founded in Jerusalem only a few years after the Festival. If you want to know how Israel became the only country in the world where Andrei Tarkovsky is a popular filmmaker, the answer comes down to Lia van Leer.

For the birth of the Israeli auteur, the key date was 1980. That was when a twenty-nine-year-old former architecture student from Haifa, Amos Gitai, persuaded Israeli television to let him make a film titled House. This was his first feature-length work: a documentary about the renovation of a private residence in Jerusalem for its new Jewish owner, starting with images of Palestinian construction workers coming in from the West Bank at dawn, and finishing with a visit to the house by the elderly Palestinian doctor who had lived in it until 1948. When the producers saw what they’d bought, they not only declined to broadcast the film, they confiscated it. However, the wily and determined Gitai had the foresight to have retained a videotape transfer of House, which he carried around to festivals in Europe.

Eran Riklis directing Clara Khoury in The Syrian Bride

So an act of censorship launched the career of Israel’s first auteur—a filmmaker who wanted to be known both for a critical engagement with his world, and for an intelligent, self-aware approach to the formal problems of filmmaking. I can’t say that Gitai has always succeeded, but by being prolific and adventurous and intermittently brilliant, he gave Israel its first consistent presence on the international circuit, and provided an example that many others would follow.

For the third crucial element—institutional support—the key date is 1979, when the Israel Film Fund went into operation. Its progress was slow; from 1979 through 1992, the organization funded an average of only three to five films a year. But then, in the early 1990s, came a sudden expansion of activity, made all the more remarkable by the challenging nature of the movies the Fund was willing to support. In recent years, these have included, to mention just a few, Gitai’s harsh dramas of ultra-Orthodox life and military service, Kadosh and Kippur; Joseph Cedar’s troubling tale of a family drawn toward the settlers’ movement, Campfire; Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s sad and satirical fable of immigrant, non-Jewish labor, James’s Journey to Jerusalem; Eytan Fox’s breakthrough, gay-themed films, such as Walk on Water; Eran Riklis’s melancholy comedy of a Druze family divided by a border, The Syrian Bride; and even features by Elia Suleiman (Chronicle of a Disappearance) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now), extraordinary Palestinian filmmakers from Nazareth. The Age of Leon Uris clearly had ended. The fact that a government agency helped bring it to a close is a testament to the seriousness, intelligence, and democratic spirit that can be found, despite everything, in Israel.

I can give the same praise to the New Foundation for Cinema & TV, which the government established in 1993. Like the Fund, the Foundation has supported extraordinarily challenging films—in this case, almost all of them documentaries. But this funding has been useful to fiction film production, since many notable Israeli directors, such as David Ofek and Alexandrowicz, have jumped between the two modes.

The introduction of cable and commercial television in the 1990s provided another kind of subsidy for Israeli film artists: regular work. A director such as Nir Bergman can now go back and forth between film, with Broken Wings, and episodic television, with In Treatment. More recently, another important development has been the success of the Israel Film Fund in securing co-production money, especially from France, Germany, Canada, and Australia.

Scene from James’s Journey to Jerusalem

The cash is useful in itself. Perhaps even more useful is the overseas distribution that accompanies it.

So the old paradox of Israeli film has been laid to rest, and new paradoxes have taken its place. Israeli film has become more commercially viable by being more artistic. It has become truer to itself by being more international. It has become more self-assured by being more critical.

The strongest evidence of these changes is to be found not in the box-office reports or the lists of awards, but in the films themselves, such as Alexandrowicz’s James’s Journey to Jerusalem. In that movie, the character of the cynical, conniving old Sephardic father is named Sallah—in homage, the director has said, to Sallah Shabbati. Israeli film can now be self-referential—which means that Israeli film must now, at last, exist.