Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!"
That declaration of the immortal Soviet filmmaker Dziga-Vertov also sums up the attitude of Israeli documentary-maker Dan Geva, who has come to Baltimore as a Schusterman Visiting Artist. The Schusterman program aims to connect Israeli artists of all kinds to universities and museums, and through these institutions to a larger American audience. The articulate and aesthetically adventurous Geva, who believes, with Dziga-Vertov, in the power of documentary images to shatter complacent presumptions, is an apt candidate for making the program's dream come true. He echoes Vertov's demand for "Conscious people, not an unconscious mass, ready to yield to any suggestion!" And he takes up Vertov's slogan, "Down with the scented veil of kisses, murders, doves and conjuring tricks!"
As part of a packed itinerary, Geva and his wife and creative partner, Noit, have taken up residency at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Geva is hosting a Thursday night series of contemporary Israeli documentaries at MICA's Brown Center (Falvey Hall) while also teaching two classes in partnership with MICA's video and film arts department and the film and media studies program at the Johns Hopkins University. In addition, he will be screening films at John Hopkins University Hillel in early March and at Goucher College in the spring.
American art-house audiences who have seen recent Israeli fictional films such as "Jellyfish" and "The Band's Visit" and the Israeli animated memoir "Waltz with Bashir" have come to expect a sometimes fierce, sometimes lyrical iconoclasm from this tiny country's native cinema.
Geva aims to bring Baltimore audiences the news that in the past six years, Israeli documentary-makers, rarely showcased in this country, may be creating their own "New Wave." A student and teacher of film history as well as a director and teacher of filmmaking, Geva doesn't use that term lightly. He has too much respect for French New Wave giants such as Jean-Luc Godard and Geva's own particular hero, Chris Marker, the mastermind of the avant-garde 1964 sci-fi classic "La jetee" (remade by Terry Gilliam as "12 Monkeys") and such avant-garde documentary classics as "Sans soleil" (1982).
Geva says that when he met with the notoriously elusive Marker to discuss the master's 1960 film about Israel, "Description d'un combat," Marker told him "the fate of the world will be decided in Israel." If the fate of the world can be decided in a country, the aesthetics of that country will be critical.
"When I talked to Marker," Geva says, "I knew we were both Dziga-Vertov people. It's something that crosses over generations and political and cultural agendas. It helps us see that art can be a shelter from the vulgar everyday notion of things." Dziga-Vertov made documentaries that question surface meanings and foster a healthy distrust in what is merely "visible." His work continues to teach filmmakers, in Geva's words, that "there's another level of meaning, beneath visibility. The documentary must try to decipher that meaning."
In his masterpiece, "Man With a Movie Camera," Vertov sets a prototype cameraman loose in an unnamed Soviet city. When he depicts a skilled female laborer swiftly putting together cigarette packs, she isn't being exploited - she's showing off her expertise. The camera becomes an agent of modernity and the director an engaged comrade who shares his tricks and know-how with the audience.
" 'The Man With the Movie Camera' is the Bible: it holds all the principles," Geva says. "A lifetime would not be enough to know them all. Just when I think I understand it more, I crack my head on it. But even then it gives me a masochistic pleasure!"
Dan and Noit Geva have tried to bring Vertov's questioning and experimentation to films as different in mood, subject and tone as "Fall" (2003), a portrait of dancer Deborah Bertonoff at age 80; "What I Saw in Hebron" (1999), a subjective look at a historical trauma, centered on the 1929 massacre of Jews in Hebron (and Noit's grandmother's survival, thanks to the help of Arab neighbors); and "Think Popcorn" (2004) featuring Geva as his own man with a movie camera, traveling through Israel and attempting to get his countrymen to speak the truth about matters such the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
Geva and his wife have selected films for Baltimore audiences that reflect their questing sensibility. With a streak of rueful humor that leavens his ardor, he says they programmed for MICA according to "the ultimate criterion: We picked films we liked. Of course, one of the films is our film ["Description of a Memory"] and we like it, but more important, we have to live with it."
This Thursday comes "No. 17," which Geva says fulfills their desire to present Israel to American audiences from "an inside point of view" that is also "cinematically fresh, very entertaining and philosophically very deep."
"No. 17" started with a news item about the terrorist bombing of an Israeli bus en route from Tel Aviv to Tiberias. The 17th victim was unidentified and interred in an unmarked grave. The filmmaker, David Ofek, "a very talented and educated director, decided to search for No. 17's identity and make it an emblematic case." Ofek's investigation became his chance "to define the existential and emotional situation of Israel at that time, when terrorist attacks were occurring every other day, and the whole country was aching. [Yet] it doesn't view Israel as some kind of innocent being - the movie says that Israel has a part in that situation." The movie became, in Geva's eyes, "this really amazing, intimate portrait of Israel, which also shows how ridiculous the Establishment can be." For Geva, it's "an extremely strong detective story - very Sherlock Holmes," yet also connected to the cutting-edge verite of British filmmaker Nick Broomfield (best known here for "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer").
On Feb. 18, Geva will present "Description of a Memory" (2006), his response to Marker's "Description d'un combat" - in effect, an imagistic dialogue between Geva and Marker about the state of the Jewish state 46 years after Marker's movie. Geva notes that Marker's film had several titles. "Description d'un combat" was a homage to a Franz Kafka's story, but Marker called it "Description of a Struggle" in English and, in Hebrew, a title that would have been literally translated as "The Third Side of the Coin."
"We are taught that, like a coin, there are two sides to everything," says Geva. "Marker was saying there are more than two sides." Geva's English title, "Description of a Memory," is perfect, because Marker's movies rest on memories - he is, as Geva says, "a cosmonaut of time." His long view lets him transcend "labels such as Democrat or Republican, liberal or right-wing, Orthodox or Reform." So does Geva's aesthetic perspective. His movie incorporates such personal experiences as his youthful friendship with a man who became a Gaza settler. Although Geva considers himself a secular, radical artist, he says that "some values come before" politics or ideology, such as friendship.
Marker has withheld his movie from exhibition ever since 1967, because he disapproved of Israel's conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. But in a sweeping act of generosity, he encouraged Geva to mine the images of "Description d'un Combat" to create "Description of a Memory" - and to do it without consultation. "I knew I had to answer his challenge with my own challenge," says Geva. What the Israeli director sought, and found, was "the fourth side of the coin."
"No. 17" screens Thursday and "Description of a Memory" Feb. 18 at MICA's Brown Center (Falvey Hall), 1301 W. Mount Royal Ave. Dan and Noti Geva will introduce the films and answer questions afterward. Admission is free.