Amos Oz: a documentary

A few nights ago, I watched a DVD I’d ordered, released in 2008 by a Greek production company, that profiled author Amos Oz. It’s a fascinating complement to Oz’s memoir, one that offers insight into both his creative process as well as his thoughts about the historical and even future importance of the kibbutz ideal.

Amos Oz at work: black pen or blue pen?

As a writer, I enjoyed the chance to hear the famous novelist talk about his working rituals. How he wakes early and goes for a brisk half-hour walk in the desert, near his home in Arad, around 5 or 5:30 am, before settling down at his basement desk to write, in longhand, until noon or one. Then, after lunch and a siesta, he explained, “I come back and destroy what I’ve done before.” To maintain the flow of his process, though, he tries to end each writing day in the middle of a sentence, which he can then complete and continue the next morning.

“I am a domestic writer,” said Oz, one who is interested in exploring the family—”the most mysterious institution in the world.” “I don’t begin a novel with an idea,” he continued. “I begin a novel with a character. I hear voices. … The first sentence is the most difficult. Where does the story begin?… It’s like beginning relationship with a total stranger.”

He keeps two pens on his desk. One is black; the other, blue. “One is to tell the government to go to hell,” he said, with a smile. The other—the blue, I have to assume—he reserves for his storytelling, with  its ambiguities and ambivalence, without the rhetorical certainty of his political prose. Those two sides of the writer, he feels, need to be separated. Still, his novels may serve a social good, even if that’s not why they are explicitly written. “We learn about the internal life of the Other,” said Oz about the function of literature. “And [through reading] there is a certain chance that we might become better neighbours.”

Late in the documentary, he offered a humorous summary of his 32 years as a member of Kibbutz Hulda. How he had rebelled against his conservative father, at the age of 15, by running away to the kibbutz. How—speaking the elevated language of a boy raised in the city by polyglot Europhiles—he came across as a”funny bird” to the more rough-hewn kibbutzniks.

“I had a tough time integrating with the local society,” he recalled, “because they were tough farm boys and beautiful farm girls.”

How, as he began his career as a young writer in his 20s, he asked the kibbutz for a day, free from the work rotation, to focus on his creative output. How the membership had to debate this proposal in the general assembly and finally vote yes or no. (To their credit, the kibbutzniks granted Oz his day of writing—and then more time as his reputation and sales grew.) How, once he became a source of revenue as an author, the kibbutz authorities even offered him the help of two elderly members “to increase production”, as though his novels and stories were like factory widgets that could be manufactured with greater economies of scale. How, when he needed seclusion to finish a book, he would simply make a request to the kibbutz secretary and be granted money to pay for a quiet hotel room away from the community. And how, once he had to relocate from the kibbutz to Arad because of his youngest son’s severe asthma, he “lost that sense of a big family.”

It’s significant, I think, that the documentary ends with a long monologue from Oz, narrated over a silhouette of the author walking through the last light of a desert dusk, about the fall and rise of the kibbutz:

“The kibbutz movement is in a big crisis. Part of this is an external crisis resulting from the fact that socialism is not popular anywhere in the world. I believe for some people there will always be an attraction in a way of life that is like an extended family, where people share everything, where people carry the highest degree of mutual responsibility. In terms of human experience, for me, as an individual, as a writer, it’s like the best university I ever attended. I hope and believe that the kibbutz will have a revival… Maybe in another time. Maybe in a different country. We live now in a world where people work harder than they should work, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don’t really want, in order to impress people they don’t really like. This leads to a certain reaction, and this reaction will bring back some kind of voluntary collective experience.”

Review: Kibbutz

When my DVD copy of the documentary Kibbutz arrived in the mail late last year, I was so busy that I didn’t have time to put it into a player for a couple of weeks. When I did, I was disappointed that it had gotten damaged during its journey from Israel to the West Coast of B.C. The film's producer quickly mailed a new copy. This time, I immediately popped it into my computer at work to make sure it functioned, so I’d be ready to view it when I had more free time. An hour later, I had watched the film in its entirety—and become so engrossed in the account of the slow, sad unravelling of Kibbutz Hulata that I nearly forgot to pick up my daughter at daycare!

Kibbutz, released in 2005, is one of the first examples of what I call “privatization cinema”—that’s why it gets to claim the simple name of its title. Interestingly, while other films chronicle the debate around and prelude to the vote to privatize on different kibbutzim, Racheli Schwartz's documentary tracks instead the stages of grieving and disillusionment that follow Hulata’s decision to reduce its communal commitment to its members. What makes Kibbutz so affecting is the personal intimacy and extended context that Schwartz brings to the material. In fact, it was originally subtitled “A Personal Diary.”

A member for 30 years, the filmmaker isn’t just a visitor offering a snapshot by an outsider of her kibbutz. Instead, her film follows various members (including her  own family) over the course of five years—three older women, from the founding generation, become symbols of the kibbutz’s lost ideas and abandoned history, as they die off, one by one. Schwartz, who asks people questions from behind her lens, admits early on that “making the movie helped me to decide to stay.”

It can’t have been an easy decision. Her film opens memorably with the story of a laid-off citrus worker, a member of the kibbutz, who hanged himself from a tree overlooking the orchards where he once worked. These same orchards are later sawed down for being unprofitable. Schwartz captures remarkably revealing footage of a privatization consultant, hired by the kibbutz, going through a list of enterprises and expenses and telling kibbutz managers how many employees to lay off and which operations to shut down. “The kibbutz was the main way to make settlement possible,” the financial advisor tells Schwartz later. “At some point, it was finished.”

The filmmaker has an ear for such memorable quotes. “We are going through a process of breakdown,” says one member. “They stole the kibbutz from me,” announces another. One kibbutznik wonders if the fact that Hulata—located south of Shamir and named after the Hula Valley—was built on the absorption of underprivileged reason was partly why it has failed to thrive in the hyper-capitalist 21st-century. “Since the changes on the kibbutz,” he laments, “people only talk about money.”

Schwartz also has a keen eye for images that carry symbolic weight. When managers decide to first privatize and then shut down the communal dining room, her camera lingers on the skinny cats looking vainly for scraps and then fixes on the stopped clock in the empty hall. She reveals how the simple act of growing shrubs becomes for many members a defiant act of walling themselves away from their neighbours. She interviews an employee of the kibbutz laundry, his salary slashed because his labour is now deemed menial, who has turned to religion because he feels his kibbutz has turned its back on his own family, and yet he still saves the loose shekels he finds in his machines and gives them to families more needy than his own. (His own son, affected by the changes, also tries to commit suicide.) She observes a music teacher packing her car full of wind and string instruments and driving off, before narrating: “A kibbutz that has reached the point that it has to sell its musical instruments has lost its way.”

It’s a powerful, damning sentiment in a beautifully wrought documentary that offers a deeply personal yet rigorously researched perspective on the privatization debate. I don’t know if you can generalize from the experiences of Hulata to all kibbutzim, but those communities still considering the prospects of privatization would be wise to watch this movie and learn from the mistakes documented so powerfully in its images. For anyone curious about the film, check out the trailer below...

Review: Degania: The First Kibbutz Fights its Last Battle

 Degania: The First Kibbutz Fights its Last Battle is a documentary with a definite point of view—the film’s bittersweet subtitle should make that clear—like a Michael Moore film without the presence of the lumbering U.S. agent provocateur. It is also a fascinating account of a watershed moment in the 100-year history of the kibbutz movement: the decision by members of Kibbtuz Degania A, the original communal settlement in Israel, to privatize their community in 2007. This news broke internationally, as the world finally took notice of the changes that had been transforming kibbutzim over the previous 20 years. It also became used — by free-market bloggers around the Internet — as the final nail in the rhetorical coffin of socialism.

Yitzhak Rubin’s 56-minute account of the last days of Degania as a fully communal kibbutz begins, curiously, with scenes of American Christians getting baptized along the banks of the Jordan River, not far from where Kibbutz Degania Aleph was founded. The movie then outlines the founding myth and storied history of this influential community (including its vital and valiant role in the War of 1948) through interviews and archival footage. But it soon makes clear that changes are afoot. Despite nearly a hundred years of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (and relative wealth compared to other kibbutzim), some members and leaders at Degania have been lobbying to alter the fundamental egalitarian structure of their community.

Here, the movie excels at letting viewers play fly-on-the-wall to the heated debates and civil strife caused by the public (and private) debate that precedes the vote to privatize—how it sets brother against brother, friend against friend, neighbour against neighbour. As one anti-privatization member asks, Why do members who want to privatize need to irrevocably change what is unique about Degania, when anyone who wants to live in a private neighbourhood can simply walk out the gates and find a “normal” community like that anywhere in Israel or the world.

Despite the radical origins of Degania, in 2007 its more bourgeois trappings are what make people want to stay: its slowed-down rural life, its sense of family, safety and security, where kids can run free and parents know that someone will bring their children home, amidst a world (and a country) of potential danger and uncertainty. It’s pretty clear that the filmmaker sides with the traditionalists of Degania, but we still get to see the arguments of the other side, led by kibbutz director Shai Shoshany (who I interviewed last year). Even for longtime residents, like Yoya and Alan Shapiro (a daughter of a Degania founder and her American-born husband), the choice is tough: they know that many of the younger members want change or they might leave.

Finally, the filmmaker takes us right into the final pre-vote general assembly before balloting on the proposed initiatives. Shoshany asks Rubin, the director, to wait outside and not film the proceedings, but the canny filmmaker keeps his camera rolling and captures memorable footage of the turbulent back and forth of this all-important historic debate. This is how a dream ends: democratically and divided. (That said, in Degania and other kibbutzim, a vote to change the economic structure of the community requires a super-majority, usually 75 to 80%, rather than 50% plus one.)

In the end, the anti-privatization members lose the vote and must accept the will of their peers. In 2007, Degania introduced differential salaries and other free-market initiatives to their once communal economic structure. When I visited last year, I only had a chance to interview Shai Shoshany, the kibbutz director, so I got little personal sense of how the privatization plans have panned out for the other kibbutzniks. That said, I did come across this interesting news video, shot a year after the vote, which suggests that the Shapiros, originally resistant to the changes, have seen benefits to their community—or at least accepted the inevitability of change.

In any case, this film is a vital document both as a historical record of the first and best-known kibbutz and as an incisive sociological unpacking of how privatization occurs in such democratic communities. It’s well worth watching as Degania marks 100 years since its founding with a year of celebrations and a huge three-day ceremony in early October, when Israeli president Shimon Peres and members of cabinet will visit Degania and help to honour the occasion.

Degania can be purchased or watched as pay-per-view online here. As I was looking for links, I also came across this fascinating footage from 1937 of Degania from the Spielberg Jewish Film Archive. The narration is perhaps typical of its time—a bit over the top—but it makes for fascinating viewing on the centenary of the first kibbutz. Whether it has fought its last battle, I leave up to others to debate...

Review: Inventing Our Life

If you see just one movie about the kibbutz, it ought to be Inventing Our Life: Kibbutz—The Fourth Generation. (I'm not saying you should just watch one kibbutz movie; in fact, I've seen five in the past few months, with two more on the way—but I realize everyone may not be as obsessive about the history and future of the kibbutz as I am.) 

The catch? The film isn’t finished yet.

Toby Appleton, the producer/director, kindly mailed me a “rough cut” of her 82-minute documentary, while she continues to drum up funding to complete post-production. But “rough cut” doesn’t do justice to the diamond she has created. Inventing Our Life  is a remarkably compelling work of documentary filmmaking that deserves the widest possible audience.

All of the other kibbutz documentaries I’ve seen so far have been informative, even provocative and well worth watching. However, they tend to focus on an individual community and then contrast its pioneering days with its present struggles. Appleton’s film takes a wider view and examines the kibbutz movement as a key thread within the greater tapestry of the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. And yet for all this long view, the film still speaks with an intimacy that strikes an emotional chord in the viewer, thanks to the anecdotes and opinions of the kibbutzniks she interviews. It’s a fine balance between macro-narrative and micro-narrative that Inventing Our Life walks masterfully.

After about 10 minutes of introductory interviews, the storyline loops back to the anti-semitic pogroms in Russia that motivated the Zionist movement and the early founders of the kibbutz to settle Palestine, illustrated by classic footage from a 1920s Zionist propaganda film. Later, members of Kibbutz Sasa, founded by Hashomair Hatzair youth-group pioneers from the U.S., describe their kibbutz-style training camp in New Jersey and then how stories from the Holocaust only steeled their determination to found a Jewish state. Even here, the documentary doesn’t shy from potential controversy:

“This was an Arab village,” one  of the founders of Sasa recalls of their arrival to the kibbutz site in 1949. “We had serious qualms about coming to an abandoned village where people’s lives had been uprooted.”

The rest of the film carefully walks viewers through the kibbutz heyday in the 1950s and 1960s (and the vital role of kibbutz soldiers in the Six Day War), while acknowledging that a failure to help assimilate the waves of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries in the years after Independence helped lead to the kibbutz movement’s isolation from the rest of Israeli society, especially after the right-wing and anti-kibbutz Likud came to power in 1977.

The rise of a more capitalist-inclined “me generation” in the 70s and 80s is charted, as well as the financial shock of hyper-inflation and then burdensome debt loads in the mid-1980s, all of which resulted in an entire generation of young kibbutz-born members deciding not to return to their communal homes.

Here, the movie takes on even more complex tones as the issue of privatization (or “renewal”) is raised. We see the question from multiple perspectives, in multiple communities. If the movie has a main focus, it is on Kibbutz Ein Shemer, which is in the midst of hammering out a privatization proposal and debating it amongst its members. Still other kibbutzim appear throughout the film. Kibbutz Hulda, by contrast, has already closed down its dining hall and voted to privatize as a way to draw back young members. Kibbutz Sasa nearly came to the same decision but decided to remain resolutely communal; as one member says, paying different wages for different wages is a “red line” (or what another kibbutznik calls “the Jerusalem issue”) that can’t be crossed: “Anything else, then don’t call yourself a kibbutz.” 

Appleton also profiles members of “urban kibbutz” Tamuz in Beit Shemesh about their  revisioning of the original kibbutz ideals within an urban context focused on social justice and education. “We are somewhat like Degania in the first days of Degania but more anarchistic,” observes one Tamuz resident. “Cities are where most Israelis live,” says another,  “so cities are where real social change must occur.”

One of the strengths of the film is the insight of its articulate interview subjects, which include everyday kibbutzniks but also poets (Avraham Balaban, Eli Alon), philosophers (Avishai Margalit, Yochanon Grinspon) and storytellers (Rakefet Zohar). An ingenious narrative “trick” used by Appleton is to give people’s names, occupations and then indicate which generation of kibbutznik they are but not reveal, until the final few minutes of the film, whether they have remained on their kibbutz or not. Even the composition and lighting of these various interviews are beautifully rendered.

In the end, Inventing Our Life offers a bittersweet homage to the history and future of the kibbutz, one that balances lamentation for its lost ideals (“All dreamers end up on the floor,” says one of the poets) with the possibility for change and the vital importance of the entire project. “I think the kibbutz was the most interesting thing to happen in this country,” says Margalit, “because human beings lack serious experimentation in their lives. I think this was the most dramatic experiment and the most important one.”

Despite the breadth of my own research, I learned a great deal and was fascinated by the archival footage that Appleton unearthed. More impressively, both times I watched the film, I found myself tearing up with emotion by the end, as the “children of the children of the children of the dream” describe the importance of the kibbutz and its altruistic philosophy to their own sense of identity. I challenge any viewer not to be moved by this fine, fine work of documentary art.

And if there are any philanthropists out there who want to invest in an almost-finished doc, drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with the director.

That’s all for now—I’m halfway to my goal of 100 blog posts to celebrate a 100 years of the kibbutz. More film reviews to come…

The Geek Kibbutz

Today, I was polishing up my presentation for Thursday, titled "Look Back to Galilee: What a Century of Kibbutz Life Can Teach Canadians about Co-operation and Community," when I took a break, surfed through some YouTube kibbutz videos and came across this gem: "The Geek Kibbutz".

Maybe I'm brain dead from reading and writing and not enough sleep (we could use a metapelet in my house these days!), but I found this spoof of kibbutz documentaries just the comic relief I needed. It certainly looks like the filmmakers had fun producing their low-budget mockumentary homage to computers and kibbutz life.

Review: HaZorea

While academic studies have tracked the extent of changes on Israel’s kibbutzim over the past 20 years, for the best window into how those changes have been debated and how they have affected the lives of individual kibbutzniks, I’ve turned to documentary film. Over the past decade, a new sub-genre of Israeli filmmaking could earn the label “privatization cinema”—mostly documentaries, but also some fascinating fictional work, too. I’ve watched four already, and am looking forward to the upcoming release of a fifth. Each offers a different perspective and has helped me triangulate the emotional nuances of changing life in these communities.

One of the first I saw was HaZorea, a documentary produced and directed by Ulrike Pfaff, a former volunteer from Germany (now studying to be a police detective), who did several tours of duty on the kibbutz of that name. (Curiously, I discovered that linguist/political critic Noam Chomsky also spent a month on Kibbutz HaZorea with his wife in 1953; he is a controversial Jewish critic of Israeli foreign policy but retains fond memories of kibbutz life.) Pfaff returned to HaZorea for two weeks in September 2007 to film 50 hours of interviews and footage with a crew of three and a budget of about $25,000.

I watched the film three times as I prepared to give a post-screening talk about Pfaff’s documentary and the general changes to the kibbutz movement at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival last November. The film offers what feels like an objective glimpse at the lives of the kibbutzniks at the time and some of the anxiety around potential changes to the lifestyle of the kibbutz. (HaZorea was still a traditionally communal kibbutz but in the midst of debating and voting on privatization measures; the documentary ends with the results of that vote—SPOILER ALERT!—in which the changes are not approved.) There is a slow-paced, casual atmosphere to the movie as a whole that reflects the languorous mood so typical (and so attractive) of kibbutz life and so at odds with the speed-tweaking pace of a city like Tel Aviv.

While Pfaff includes interviews with many kibbutzniks, young, old and middle-aged, two become the focus of the narrative: Hanna, one of the German-speaking pioneers who founded HaZorea, and Oriel, a “son of the kibbutz” who now lives in Tel Aviv and has returned to decide whether or not to become a member. (Pfaff actually returned to Israel to film two days of footage and interviews with Oriel, once she heard of his situation, because he was the perfect vehicle for the documentary’s drama—a kibbutz sitting on the fence between past and future.) “The kibbutz is a paradise for children and old people,” Oriel says, reflecting nostalgically about his freedom growing up in HaZorea’s “society of children”. “And for dogs!” quips Ran, a friend who still lives on the kibbutz (and provides much of the movie's comic relief).

But the young adults and the middle-aged couples (and even, more reluctantly, the older residents) in the movie all seem to want changes to the communal rules that have guided their lives. When I spoke to Pfaff via Skype, she admitted that her own main criticism of the movie was a failure to find and interview those kibbutzniks—who remain in the majority—who don’t want changes to their community. She also admitted that while reaction to the film has largely been positive, criticisms have come from both ends of the spectrum.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to make a really objective film because in the end I can decide by editing what I want to put and what I don’t,” she told me. “There are other people that didn’t think it’s objective. [One viewer] was very, very mad at me about this movie. He said that I did it too negative and not objective. And there was another girl, born on the kibbutz, and she said it was too romantic and too positive about everything. So I think probably it is not possible to do it objective.”

Still, whether objective or not, HaZorea does a wonderful job of capturing both the pioneering spirit of the kibbutz founders, the charms and frustrations of one community’s current incarnation, and the uncertainty faced by the young people who will lead Hazorea into the future.