#279 / Editorial: A Week at the Movies
This week, we’re also bringing you the first installment of a four-part series by Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac. In “Bitter Love. Israel or the Shores of Intimacy,” Israel is not portrayed as a cause to champion, a subject of study, or a country to be judged from afar, but as an intimate and contradictory presence that entered the narrator’s life very early on through vacations, books, the Jewish Scouts, the radio, maps, bereavements, and romances. In the first episode of the series, it all begins in Eilat, amid the deceptive innocence of a family’s exotic experience, before the child gradually discovers that this seemingly carefree place is also a hotbed of existential and political anxiety, and that collective history intrudes upon personal memory.
It is in the darkness and air-conditioned coolness of movie theaters that our feature invites you to seek refuge. First, a look back at the rave reviews that French critics had reserved for Nadav Lapid’s Yes, before the tide turned. Laure Abramovici examined the director’s heroic stance—somewhere between a deconstructed sabra and a prophet of doom—right down to its contradictions. Next, as the perfect complement to the emptiness of idleness, the Jewish Museum in Berlin hosted an exhibition early this year dedicated to the 220 hours of audio recordings made by Lanzmann and his assistants during the preparatory work for Shoah. We are republishing the interview with the exhibition curator, and remind readers that the recordings are finally available on the exhibition page. Finally, thrill-seekers will delight in (re)reading David Haziza’s essay on the incursions of Jewish demonology into cinema: dybbuks, golems, zombies, and werewolves leap off the screen and may just inspire a night of movie-watching.
As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of articles we’ve published over the past five years. On the topic of cinema, you can read or revisit, for example, Jean-Baptiste Thoret’s article on Joseph Losey’s The End of Robert Klein or Danny Trom’s piece on Gremlins, directed by Joe Dante and produced by Steven Spielberg.
