Biography, history, territories

House, or Baït according to the common transcription of the Arabic and Hebrew words, is the story of a house in West Jerusalem. The home belonged to a Palestinian family until the war in 1948 that, with the founding of the state of Israel, forced its owners into exile. At the time of the filming, the house is in the process of being enlarged. The film features the voices of the successive owners and renters (from 1956 onwards) and also that of the previous owner, Mahmud Dajani, a Palestinian doctor who must live with the errors of the radicalism of his defeated compatriots. Some neighbours recount their memories. A Palestinian worker denounces his working conditions and Israeli domination of the occupied territories.

Two years earlier Gitai had directed what he himself called his    last film on architecture, Architecture, which was shot in Haifa. The International Style, which his father the architect Munio Weinraub Gitai (1907-1970) followed, is denounced by means of a comparison with vernacular forms of construction.

This film examines the legitimisation of the violence used against the Palestinians: It is the story of the occupier’s inability to face up to his own actions, taking refuge in abstractions (God, the Nation, Security) and turning that into a mechanism for legitimising what he does , in the words of Gitai. The filming began three months before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The film describes the escalation of violence and how it becomes installed in people’s mentalities. The takes are long and the film is made up of sequences that are dramatic units in themselves. Various sequences are devoted to a visit with the mayor of Nablus, who is under home arrest. The dramatic argument resides in the confrontation between the witness-filmmaker (the small crew behind the camera) and the police forces (the army) and the revelation of the effects that nationalist propaganda has on young Israeli soldiers.

This film is an inquiry into the methods of rationalisation and exploitation used by multinationals in today's global economy. The example studied is a pineapple-producing company with headquarters in Honolulu , a distribution subsidiary in San Francisco , and croplands in Hawaii , although cultivation is in the process of being outsourced to the Philippines . The voices are those of the people involved in this system: upper and middle level management, foremen and workers, in the fields and in the packaging facilities. Part of the “packaging” is also the Christian moral propaganda that allows order to be maintained without physical violence. 

Shot one year after Pineapple, this documentary is an uncomfortable look at the extreme forms of modern slavery existing in Thailand: prostitution and the trade in labourers hired for jobs in the Persian Gulf. The film gives a voice to the people who benefit from this exploitation. It also attempts to overcome the silence imposed on both prostitutes and emigrant workers. Enslaved bodies are given words under coercion. The film points out the obstacles to these people telling their story, a minimum condition of identity and a means towards emancipation.

Eighteen years after his first feature film, Gitai returned to the locations of House and resumed his investigation: the time of a generation has passed, Mahmud Dajani is now dead, his son has adopted Canadian nationality and his granddaughter says she is moving to Canada. The film’s territory has become larger, it is now about several houses instead of just one. An Englishman and a Swedish woman have moved into the neighbourhood. Palestinian workers , Gitai comments, discover Jewish archaeological sites that will later be used to justify the expulsion of the Palestinians.

On October 11th, 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, the helicopter Gitai was aboard was shot down by a missile. The film reconstructs the episode and the circumstances surrounding it, beginning with the declaration of war. Kippur is one of the best examples of the war film genre in recent filmmaking. The war is shown to be a present time inscribed in people’s gestures, a present that takes over bodies and impregnates biographies. The images have a great physical presence; the sound is imposing, horrific. I tried to create an ongoing bombardment of sound. I wanted people to feel that the episode is beyond the camera’s control, that it exceeds our field of vision , states Gitai. 

At the beginning of this film, a sign says: This film, House , has been filmed three times over the past twenty-five years. This tends to make one think that the three films devoted to this house in Jerusalem are but one. Gitai suggests as well that the cinematographic story absorbs the time period. The film is shown to be akin to a construction taking place over time and history. In the words of the filmmaker: In a way, documentaries are something like a human archaeological site, I think this is the function of documentaries in general: to excavate, to make the plan as a whole appear, to reveal the structure masked by the present (…). Layer by layer we see the characters arriving: workers, owners, people bringing little things, fragments of memories, events, photographs.