Shlomi Elkabetz on maintaining suspense in one room for Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
February 28, 2015
The filmmakers on the set of ‘Gett.’ Photo by Amit Berlowitz
It’s no small feat to create an intense drama in one room for the duration of a feature length film. But Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem stands as one of the best examples of such a drama that you will ever see (Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem shows how to make a powerful, resonant drama using one setting — a film review). In the film, the brother and sister directing and writing duo Shlomi Elkabetz and Ronit Elkabetz present a married couple in Israel who have arrived at such an impasse they can no longer communicate. The wife, Viviane, played by Ronit — who is also a major acting force in Israel, wants a divorce, but the husband (Simon Abkarian) does not. Since he is orthodox, they need to address this before a rabbinical court of three rabbis. In Israel, for devout marriages, the only way out is a ceremony called a gett. These getts have long been secretive affairs that happen behind closed doors where wives are treated as property of the husband. If the woman wants a divorce but the husband does not, the rabbis cannot grant the gett, which makes for a Kafkaesque version of divorce proceedings.
If you have never heard about such a thing, it’s only because the subject has been taboo in Israel. Speaking via phone from Los Angeles, the brother of the filmmaking team notes that there would have been no way he and his sister could have made this movie 10 years ago, when they began a trilogy of movies in tribute to their mother. The first film, 2004’s To Take a Wife, was more autobiographical, he notes. In it, Viviane is a young woman who only dreams of divorce while trying to raise three children with an unloving husband who married her for tradition’s sake. The second film, 2008’s 7 Days follows the same family, as its familiar loveless conflict continues during the seven days of shiva after the death of a loved one. With Gett, however, they decided to write Viviane a different ending. “We call it the imaginary biography of her in the sense of what would have happened if a woman like our mother would have gone for a divorce trial in Israel,” says Elkabetz.
In their film, as noted in the still image of trailer at the end of this article, the trial lasts a long time. Still, there have been divorce trials in rabbinical courts that have lasted as much as 20 years, notes the filmmaker. Elkabetz understands reality can be stranger than fiction, so to allow the film to have more of an impact, he and his sister tried not to make their movie as extreme.
“One of our initial thoughts was that we were not going to take the worst case because there are horrible cases. We tried to take cases where there is no violence, there is no physical abuse. The kids are grown. Everybody left home. She’s an independent woman. She has her own salary. She wants only one thing. She just wants to be free, and we took this case and said, What happens if we put this case in the Israeli law system? Let’s see how the Israeli law system copes with that one woman who wants to be free and wants to get a divorce where the husband says, no.”
The film has since become a phenomena in the sibling’s country. It opened in Israel at the end of September 2014, and it’s still in theaters. The co-director admits that he and his sister never saw this interest coming. “It became like a political movement,” he says. “It was beautifully accepted, and it was on the news everyday in every media, in the late edition, in the state papers and on the blogs and on the Internet. The film was endorsed by ministers, by parliament members, and the most amazing thing that happened was that the chief rabbi from Israel was repeatedly asked, ‘Have you seen, Gett? Have you seen, Gett?’ His response was always, ‘I never went to the cinema, and I don’t go to the cinema, so I didn’t see Gett.’ And he was repeatedly asked and asked, and he eventually came back … and he said, ‘Listen, we have decided to screen Gett in the annual rabbinical convention this year.'”
The debate in Israel has been intense to change matters. The result of that screening can be read in this short article: “Rabbis cry gewalt after watching Israeli film ‘Gett.'” To sum it up, the rabbis at least acknowledged they have an image problem on their hands. Elkabetz says since no cameras have ever been allowed to document a gett, and they are not open to the public, he and his sister interviewed people who have been through one. But the drama in their film is a fiction based on characters they have followed for 10 years.
Some may wonder how can a nearly two-hour film in one room, with nearly the same characters, ever offer a tightly paced drama. “I don’t want to be pretentious and say we always know what we are doing,” offers Elkabetz. “I don’t want to say I have a key to make it happen, but we knew that the story is very radical, and we knew that we are facing a sort of a mission to make it happen from second to second.”
He notes that dialogue was important but not so much what is said as what the characters do not say. “We were very attentive to what is happening around us on the set and in the script,” he says. “We were trying to listen very carefully to what the characters are saying, but even more to what they’re not saying because our main character doesn’t talk in this film.”
Visual presentation was also important. As these characters are trying to defend different points of view, the filmmakers came to a smart decision in how to present them visually in the space. “Our first important decision was not to take a master shot in this film,” reveals Elkabetz. “We didn’t take a director’s shot, which describes the whole picture. We said we’re only going to place the camera where the characters are sitting, meaning we’re only going to see what somebody sees, so the whole film is basically shot from the different points of views from the characters in the court, meaning you’re
always in a subjective place and you change your stance from one minute to another or one second to another, and by that we hope that we will have the ability to stretch the room because the minute you change the point of view, you change your opinion, and we change the whole atmosphere, and we change the whole essence of one moment, adding to it many different complexities and adding a sort of tension. The tension between the characters could be transferred from what they see and how we think they are interpreting what they are experiencing.”
The key to capturing the drama of varying perspectives, especially those in an intimate life together like a marriage, is subjectivity, not objectivity. “We hope by eliminating objectivity, we create a more truthful, a more suspenseful moment for each one of the characters and eventually for the whole situation,” notes Elkabetz.
The filmmaker adds that he and his sister had doubts they could pull this off, but they allowed that to challenge them. “We went into this film with a lot of good fear, I would say, because we had all these questions like would it be possible to stay in this room for an hour and a half and could we hold the story and still engage people, and if they’re not engaged, we can’t make them think about it.”
He again brings up the importance of subjectivity, not only in the characters of the film, but also acknowledging that every audience member in a movie house brings their own baggage to 
a film. There is always a subjective view outside, looking in. “We can’t make them be involved,” says Elkabetz of the audience. “We want people to be intellectual about it, and we want people to be emotional about it. We want the cinema to turn into a court where each one of the spectators that are coming to the cinema are taking a stand from a very internal point of view, so in general that was our idea for the shoot.”
Putting the film together in editing was another element. Early in the shooting process, the sibling filmmakers knew they had to test out their approach in the editing room. “What we did was we shot three days in the manner that we wanted to shoot, and we went into the editing room, and we edited one scene to see if the method of shooting that we want to do is working, and we were very pleased with what we saw. We didn’t understand completely what we saw, but it worked. It was suspenseful, and it was personal, and it was global, and it was public.”
In the end, they also had an array of perspectives to put together in a certain way, which was its own challenge. “We shot over 110 hours, and the film has over 1,300 cuts,” he says. “Just in the span of over seven days we shot 40 hours, and we have 60 cuts in the film, so there is this thing that we had to discover ever day when we came to the set and we really tried to pay attention to. I mean, we loved what we saw, and we hoped that it would work as a whole, also. I think it’s hard for every filmmaker. You have an idea, but the final results is almost a mystery, so combining everything together to see how it works as a whole is something that nobody has the answers for, of course. If we did, all films would be amazing and great, but the question is investigating the moment and pinpointing the crucial moments for certain circumstances.”
Even when watching this film alone at home, in preparation for an introduction of the movie during the Miami Jewish Film Festival, this writer could tell there were moments that the subjectivity of the audience had been so powerfully harnessed, that you could feel the moments when the audience might react to the images. Elkabetz admits he and his sister knew they created a potent film, but they could have never anticipated the reaction they witnessed at Cannes when the film premiered at the director’s fortnight. He says people were shouting at the screen. “In the moment when they are asking Elisha, ‘Are you going to give her a divorce?’ not only in the end, but throughout the film, people are saying, ‘Yeah, give it to her, give it to her!’”
As Gett went on a tour of film festivals, Elkabetz witnessed an array of reactions at different points of the movie. “People are laughing and people are reacting in various different moments,” he says. “For me, the only experience that is like it is a moment when I was a kid, when I used to go to the cinema with my dad, and people were very noisy. They speak to the screen, they speak to the characters, and it’s an experience. In my other film, 7 Days, people laughed a lot, but this film, there is something else that makes the audience really active, in many ways, so throughout the film, there’s a lot of clapping, there’s a lot of laughing. We expected the reaction, but we didn’t know the reaction was going to be … so intense.”
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You can read more of my interview with Shlomi Elkabetz in the “Miami New Times” art and culture blog “Cultist” by jumping through the blog’s logo below. He talks about pulling back the curtain of these secret ceremonial divorce trials and the surprising response the film has received in his country and around the world:
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem runs 115 minutes, is in Hebrew and French with English subtitles and is not rated (nothing really offensive in its material, except some raised voices, maybe). It opens Friday, Feb. 27 in the South Florida area at O Cinema Miami Beach and the Coral Gables Art Cinema, which has also invited noted film scholar and author Annette Insdorf to introduce the film during its 6:30 p.m. screening, on Saturday, Feb. 28. It opened in U.S. theaters on Feb. 13 and is scheduled to open in many more through April. To find theater listings, click “theaters” after jumping through this link. Images in this article are all courtesy of Music Box Films, except where noted.
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem shows how to make a powerful, resonant drama using one setting — a film review
February 26, 2015
In their new film, the Israeli sibling writer/directors Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz, pull a sort of magic trick in cinema. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem closes out a trilogy of films following the same characters over a period of 10 years. But this film stands on its own for all the drama and tension created in one room. Earning a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign language film, the sibling team of directors from Israel also wrote the script together and Ronit, a notable actress from Israel, plays the lead, as she did in the previous two films of this trilogy, To Take a Wife (2004) and 7 Days (2008). In Gett, she once again plays the role of Viviane Amsalem, who in the previous films endured the tension of a loveless marriage, and now finally takes concrete steps toward divorce. However, in the religious state of Israel, a divorce — or a “gett” in Hebrew — must be agreed upon by the husband, as tradition holds that a wife is the property of the husband, and her devout husband Elisha (Simon Abkarian) has refused to grant her the divorce. With this imbalance of power, a gett stands more as a ceremonial affair rather than a real trial. It is even adjudicated by a court of three rabbis. The directors focus on this imbalance of power and make it the crux of the film’s drama to powerful effect.
The movie runs 115 minutes and the drama unfolds almost exclusively in the rabbinical courtroom. The only other setting is the anteroom where some small but important exchanges also happen between characters. But the directors do not waste a second in this movie. There is all kinds of tension between all of the movie’s characters, be it the husband and wife, Viviane and her lawyer (Menashe Noy) — who is implied early on to have an affectionate relationship with his client — and everyone between the varied trio of rabbis who try to sit in judgment but come to empathize with Viviane as the trial drags on (I won’t spoil its length).
Viviane has no complaint about her husband except that she does not love him. This is not a woman complaining that her husband beats her or cheats on her, which heightens the stakes in an interesting way, making Elisha’s denial for divorce all the more disturbing. This becomes a battle of wills for something bigger than personal differences, which is hard to deny between these two who yell at one other almost every time they have an exchange in the film. You get a picture of a marriage long frayed, although Elisha is not presented as a mere plot device; he is a man with a conflicting and powerful array of feelings. There’s anger, but there’s a devoted sense to tradition favoring patriarchy. In that sense, the film calls attention to the problem of tradition as adapted for civil matters, especially the absence of a woman’s voice in tradition, making the film a powerful feminist commentary on a patriarchal system.
On another level, Gett presents a tightly knotted drama where the viewer is also forced to consider perceptions and the impossibility of presenting a person to another person that is fair to that person being held up for scrutiny. This is much more than he-said/she-said argument that drives the film’s tension. The writing by the two directors shows a brilliant capacity to create drama by withholding information. Too often, Hollywood screenwriters concern themselves with characters explaining how they feel, what they will do, that it saps the drama of mystery, but Gett shows how valuable mystery is to drama, as the directors never bog down the pace of their movie to explain the differences among the characters. Instead, they allow them to gradually reveal their issues through action.
There are also a great, varied array of witnesses who offer their own perspectives, some of whom gradually reveal flaws about themselves as they try to judge the couple. All of them, down to the court aide (Gabi Amrani) are efficiently drawn characters, carrying heavy burdens of perspective. It also comes across in the creative framing and the varied angles the directors find when presenting these various characters, reflective of new points of view. Gett is a very deliberately crafted film that never feels overcooked. By turns hilarious and disturbing, Gett stands as one of the most remarkable films I saw last year. To create suspense in such a simple, enthralling way while making such a strong statement for women’s rights will surely blow many viewers’ minds.
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem runs 115 minutes, is in Hebrew and French with English subtitles and is not rated (nothing really offensive in its material, except some raised voices, maybe). It opens Friday, Feb. 27 in the South Florida area at O Cinema Miami Beach and the Coral Gables Art Cinema, which has also invited noted film scholar and author Annette Insdorf to introduce the film during its 6:30 p.m. screening, on Saturday, Feb. 28. It opened in U.S. theaters on Feb. 13 and is scheduled to open in many more through April. To find theater listings, click “theaters” after jumping through this link. Music Box films provided an on-line screener link for the purpose of this review, and I introduced this film at one of its screenings during the Miami Jewish Film Festival.
You can also read an interview I conducted with Shlomi Elkabetz, which was just posted by the Miami New Times art and culture blog Cultist by jumping through the blog’s logo below. He talks about pulling back the curtain of these secret ceremonial divorce trials and the surprising response the film has received in his country and around the world:
O Cinema opens 3rd theater in Miami with ‘Birdman’
November 6, 2014
Miami’s O Cinema is once again expanding. After setting up a movie house in the artsy district of Wynwood in February of 2011, O Cinema opened another movie in Miami Shores in October of 2012. This Friday, it will take charge of a third movie house in the northern part of Miami Beach. It’s an old movie house built in 1968 and once owned by Wometco and later the Regal Group.
I sat down with O Cinema’s co-founder Kareem Tabsch, in one of the cinema house’s 304 seats, at the front of the theater. It’s a large space with a mezzanine and is fitting of the aspirations of one of several Miami-area indie art houses. Tabsch says the City of Miami Beach has long hoped to bring art and culture to an area that already has plenty of great restaurants and lies just blocks from the beach. “It’s part of a lot of things there,” Tabsch says. “They just redid the fountain up the street, on 71st, Normandy Circle, the band shell is being activated.”
Tabsch notes that when he and his business partner Vivian Marthell started O Cinema, they hoped to usher in a new era of film culture to the community. “Why we did it from the beginning, which is what we believe in, is that there are plenty of film lovers or people who want to see quality independent cinema in the city, but they don’t have the opportunity … There is a critical mass for film. 
All the arts in Miami have reached these new levels,” he says, referring to the art scene in Wynwood, the Adrienne Arsht Center, a massive theater and concert hall in Downtown Miami, and the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, among other new cultural destinations in the city that have popped up in the last decade or so. “But film was kinda held back in a sense, as far as critical mass. You had stuff going on in the ’70s and the early ’80s with Nat Chediak’s theaters in Coral Gables and the Fendelman Brothers in the Grove.”
He also brings up the ’90s, when Miami had the Alliance Theater in Miami Beach and the Absinthe House in Coral Gables, the owners of which later expanded to the Mercury in North Miami, in the early 2000s. The Mercury would only last a couple of years, and all those theaters soon shuttered. The only mainstay, as far as indie/art/world and retrospective cinema was concerned, was being programmed by the Miami Beach Cinematheque, which is now celebrating its 11th year in operation under founding director Dana Keith, who has been booking special screenings in Miami Beach since 1993. “I always give Dana at the Cinematheque props because he’s held it down for the longest,” says Tabsch.
Tabsch also notes that he has a great working relationship with Keith and neither see the new O, which is located more than 60 streets north of MBC, as competition. Tabsch brings it back to North Beach as opposed to South Beach, which has its own culture and scene. Tabsch says it’s all about giving the area its own indie cinema. He also notes that he is very aware of the demographics of the community, including the fact that there is a high concentration of Brazilian and Argentinian families in the area. “Going to the movies is something that should happen within your community,” he offers. “It’s a part of your life. It’s a part of your culture. You want to walk to your movie theater. You don’t want to drive 20 minutes away. For a very long time in Miami, all you could do was just drive. For the first time in 15 years we will be providing, 52 weeks a year, seven days a week, cultural programming in North Beach. You will be able to come and see an indie movie every day of the week, and I think that’s gonna be a huge part of the growth of the neighborhood.”
You can read more of my conversation with Tabsch and plans for the new theater in this week’s “Miami New Times,” out on newsstands now or on-line at the weekly paper’s art and culture blog Cultist. Jump through the banner below to access it:
The opening night screening of Birdman is already sold out, but the film will play there until Nov. 13 (Update: due to technical issues the O Cinema premiere of Birdman was postponed. It now opens Friday, Nov. 21, and the cinema is honoring tickets from Nov. 7 for any Birdman screening at O Cinema Miami Beach). For screening details, visit here. Then, the theater will host The Theory of Everything (details). Read my review of Birdman here: ‘Birdman’ lampoons Hollywood with humorous, hyper-real, hero-hating satire. I loved that movie.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau talks about bringing personal experience to his role in ‘1,000 Times Good Night’
October 23, 2014
It requires a subtle sort of acting to pull off the complex dynamic between the husband and wife at the center of the new film 1,000 Times Goodnight. But Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Juliette Binoche rise to the task, riveting the film with performances that allow silence to speak volumes and outbursts to inform their profound baggage of unresolved issues. Binoche plays Rebecca, a war photographer motivated by a righteousness that leaves little room for her family, which also includes two daughters. Coster-Waldau is the weary father and husband, Marcus, reluctantly supporting her choice of career. His concerns for her safety and her perfunctory performance as a mother is upended when she barely survives a suicide bombing in Afghanistan that she was chronicling for the “New York Times.”
I spoke with Coster-Waldau via phone, while he was on break from shooting Season Five of “Game of Thrones” (he plays the “Kingslayer” Jaime Lannister) in Seville, Spain. For a 15-minute chat we had a chance to go pretty deep, so this article actually expands on an article I wrote for the art and culture blog “Cultist” operated by the “Miami New Times,” which you can read by jumping through the blog’s logo below:
I was offered to ask him one “Game of Thrones” question, but what I really wanted to do was go deep into how he made this relationship so real and sympathetic. Between the director’s restrained tone, which allows the actors to say more about their feelings when they are not talking, and the dynamic performances, the carefully constructed dramatic arc of the film is an analysis of a relationship held together by fraying threads. When I asked the Danish actor about how he approached Marcus’ feelings for his wife, he notes a Catch 22 in their relationship. “I think they stopped, a long time ago, to communicate about the things that are the most important to them,” he says of Rebecca and Marcus, “and then, with her, it’s easier not to talk about what she’s doing, where she’s going, what the job was that day. It’s easier for him not to hear about it because it would make him more worried maybe. But it’s also, I think, at the very core of why they no longer can be together because they’ve lost the ability to be a couple, to communicate and all that.”
The film is actually based on the real life experiences of the film’s director, Erik Poppe. What is interesting about what he does with this movie is that he only presents a couple of intense scenes of action involving Rebecca, which inevitably resonate back home. Though both moments are adrenaline-fueled scenes of compelling action, Poppe is more interested on the effects of those instances of violence and trauma on the family of the photographer. In his director’s statement, he admits that, during his own chronicling of war zones, his relationship suffered. “I had a strong relationship with the woman whom I shared my life with, but it couldn’t sustain the choices I’d made,” he says.
This marks the most personal film by the Norwegian director, and he was quite open with the cast about that. Coster-Waldau says though the scenarios were up-dated for today’s headlines (Poppe was in Cambodia in the early ‘80s, among other places), the repercussions of Poppe’s career choice, including a zealous righteousness to affect some good in conflict zones for the innocents, had vivid effects back home. “He’s had to deal with those exact conflicts with his wife, where he would be in these situations where he could die and wouldn’t be able to call home for weeks, and it takes a toll,” states the actor. “It’s really tough on the people who are left behind, and sometimes you’re so driven and you’re so focused that you kind of forget. You forget, or you kind of push it aside because you have to.”
That passion and focus, a sort of entrance to a zone that calls for a vision sometimes blinded by an intensity for the work that excludes the family, can be quite traumatic to those outside that area of ego. Back to Poppe’s director’s statement, he even says, “my ego was bigger than my love [for my wife].”
Binoche channels that potently in her character. In one scene, Marcus confronts her about her work and she reacts as if she was caught in an infidelity. “She’s also quite passionate. She can’t help herself,” notes Coster-Waldau. “Yes, there’s the whole — which is very important — that she wants to make the world aware of these horrendous things that go on in these horrible places. There is also that thing that happens that it’s really her passion. It’s those moments when she’s doing her job that she can lose herself a hundred percent because she’s quite good at that, and in a way that’s what she does, she gets in there and she gets the shot. When she removes that part of herself, she removes part of the essence of who she is. Clearly, it’s worth it. It’s worth it that she got it out, and she took these pictures that no one else would take, and it has positive change for these kids or these families or refugees, but at the same time there is also negative consequences for not only her own relationships with her family but also for her kids. They suffer, and if that worked objectively, you’d say, yes, it’s for the better, but for those two kids and her husband, it’s not.”
The emotional struggle this brings to the family is quite vivid in 1,000 Times Good Night. For Coster-Waldau, the feelings do not seem foreign to him. He speaks with an enlightened wisdom that comes from his own experience as a family man who must balance his own passions outside of his personal life. “He loves his wife,” he notes about Marcus’ struggle to compete with her calling. “What happens early on in the movie, of course, when she gets into the explosion, is that suddenly that thing happened that he’s been living with, and that he just accepted and wanted to ignore, and of course this is a movie, so of course it’s life and death, but I think that it happens in many relationships where you change, and people change, and we don’t necessarily change together, and we change in different directions.”
Though he is but an actor, Coster-Waldau knows some of the difficulties that arise at home when he focuses on his work, which also includes being away from his family for some time, and he brought that to his role as Marcus. “It’s all those discussions, all those conflicts that were interesting to talk about,” he says, “and then, of course, in my own life, because I also have two daughters myself. I am the one who travels most of the year doing what I do … and I could use those discussions we’ve had in this movie. In this case, in the movie, I’m the guy who’s left behind, so it was interesting.”
Again, Coster-Waldau brings up personal experience in relation to the film. “I’m a father myself,” he adds. “I have two daughters, and there’s something about that whole discussion of what does it mean to be a parent. A good parent is not necessarily a woman or a man, and can a father be as good? You would think it’s an obvious thing, but I think that a mother is more of a parent than a father in some ways, and I think I like to explore that because that’s something that’s very much a part of my life, being a father.”
1,000 Times Good Night runs 117 minutes and is not rated (contains violence and language). It opens in South Florida this Friday at the Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables and the Tower Theater in Miami. It’s opening across the U.S. right now. To see other play dates across the nation, visit this link.
‘David Bowie Is’ inspires a look at his many personas in “Miami New Times”
September 18, 2014
Of course real David Bowie fans know that the 67-year-old rock icon frequently called “the chameleon of rock ‘n’ roll” has been so much more than Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke. As a Bowie fan, I felt inclined to break him down to 13 other personas (including his “just a member of the band” phase with Tin Machine, as pictured above in 1990). All longtime Bowie followers know he has made inconsistency an art form. After all, isn’t David Bowie a facade for David Robert Jones? So I threw together a listicle for the Miami New Times’s art and culture blog “Cultist” ahead of the national, one-night-only screening for David Bowie Is. You can read it and see lots of videos, by jumping through the “Cultist” banner below. I open with a Bowie anecdote few have probably heard about from director John Landis:
I’ve had a chance to preview David Bowie Is. Though I won’t review it, suffice to say Bowie fans who have not had the chance to see the exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where it premiered last year will love it. The documentary, directed by Hamish Hamilton with Katy Mullan, does not directly focus on Bowie but on the bits of Bowie ephemera that make up the internationally acclaimed David Bowie retrospective exhibit. The directors provide some nice insight into the persona that is and was David Bowie. The film, shot during the exhibit’s last day at the V&A, connects the dots between his many reinventions through things like costumes and hand-written lyric sheets, reflective of the essence of the exhibit. It also features speeches by the curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, and celebrities like Jarvis Cocker.
Focusing on particular periods of Bowie’s 50 years of recording and performance history, the film does not dwell on the popularly known Bowie such as Ziggy or his “Let’s Dance” era, which could tire the diehards, but really examines the minute details that actually reverberate across his career. For instance, a nice amount of time is spent on a rare short film called “The Mask,” which Bowie stared in as a mime. It’s premise, about a shoplifter who steals a mask that makes him popular when he wears it and the tragic karma that befalls him, may sound familiar to those who understand the strain Bowie felt to committing to his Ziggy persona for those two years of lengthy touring in the early ’70s.
I won’t spoil anything else beyond that. Below my signature and the film’s trailer are the only screenings in Miami. The O Cinema screening has sold out, however.
David Bowie Is plays one night only on Sept. 23, coinciding with the exhibit’s only U.S. visit in Chicago, at many U.S. theaters. In South Florida it will play at Miami’s Tower Theater, which has two screenings, one at 7 p.m. and another at 9:15 p.m. (get tickets). The O Cinema Wynwood screening at 9:15 p.m. has already sold out. For screenings in other parts of the country, visit this link and put in your zip code.
Brontis Jodorowsky on the psychomagic of ‘Dance of Reality,’ training for ‘Dune’ and a future with director of ‘Táu’
June 13, 2014
The way Brontis Jodorowsky explains it, his father’s new film, The Dance of Reality, is much more than a cinematic adaptation of the memoir of the same name. After all, his father, Alejandro Jodorowsky, is the man behind “Psicomagia” (Psychomagic), a form of therapy through art. His memoir, published in Spanish in 2001, stands as an example of that. Though it features cruel stories of abuse the director suffered as a child, it is less a fact-based memoir and more an “imagined autobiography” that becomes a sort of redemption for his family.
Speaking via Skype from his home in Paris, Brontis, who in the film plays the role of Jaime Jodorowsky, the grandfather largely responsible for the traumatic upbringing of his father, offers insight into the film and the purpose of it as mystical therapeutic device. He speaks soothingly and builds on his statements explaining the psychomagic behind the film. “I have my father, the public figure that you know. He’s my father. But I also have another father that is the private man, and I also have another father, which is the archetype of the father inside of me that is built up with Jaime, Alejandro and also with me being a father. So there’s a father figure composed by different experiences, and inside this father figure, we have this very negative part, character, father figure, that’s only negative. That was Jaime, my grandfather. So by doing this process of remaking the story and giving him a chance through the movie to humanize, to take off the costume of the domestic tyrant and open his heart, we transform a negative part of the father archetype in our family story into a character that is not a saint but has a different aspect and that can change, you see, that can progress. A heart can be opened, so the father figure in our family tree, genealogy, changes, so we’re transmitting to our children and grandchildren another vision of what the father is.”
The bond between Alejandro Jodorowsky and his son is profound. It comes out beautifully in this new film, the director’s first feature in 23 years. It also comes out in a documentary about the director’s efforts to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune as a movie. Jodorowsky’s Dune captures one particularly raw moment where the elder 
Jodorowsky seems still a bit haunted by the fact he had his the 12-year-old son train for years to prepare for the part of Paul Atreides, yet the film was never shot (Brontis calls this an example of a “private message” from his father). Brontis looks on the bright side. “Yeah, well, you know, what I acquired during those two years of training was so useful afterwards in my actor’s life, especially all the [physical] training part because that taught my body to learn, which is the most important thing that you can learn: is how to learn, so afterwards, when I went to do theater, I always worked in a very physical type of theater. My body was always involved, but I had a trained body that could learn … It was not a waste of time.”
Jodorowsky’s cinematic version of Dune would have been the first ever attempt to adapt the 1965 novel. Though Jodorowsky made great efforts to gather collaborators like H.R. Giger, Orson Welles, David Carradine and Pink Floyd as just some of his “creative warriors,” every Hollywood studio he presented his grand treatment, which included the script by Dan O’Bannon, storyboards by comic book artist Moebius and lots of detailed concept art by Giger and and Alex Ross, they balked at his ambition, which included no fixed limit to the film’s runtime. “They were afraid of him,” says Brontis, “of his personality, so it wasn’t a problem that it was two hours, three hours or five or 10. How long is Star Wars? Too long, much too long.”
Brontis continues, noting that there was also a fundamental cultural conflict between the source of Jodorowsky’s unrestrained creativity and Hollywood’s bottom-dollar attitude. “Also, I think this is an American thing, that Americans don’t want the success to come from outside, so I think that in a way, they saw the project, but I can’t be sure of this, maybe it was just paranoia, in a way, 
I sense they saw the project, and I think they saw that, wow, maybe that would be a kind of future for movies, and they said, well, why give it to him? Let’s take the ideas and do it ourselves. Instead of doing one movie, we’re going to do this, that and that … I think it’s part of the movie industry’s history. It’s a world of artists and crooks at the same time, of people who dream wonderful things and big bank accounts both at the same time,” he says with a laugh.
Despite all that, the future has been good to the Jodorowsky family, and you will be hard pressed to find a creative clan with a more positive and creative drive, fulfilled with their place in the universe. Brontis has mostly worked in theater, but only recently returned to cinema. In 2012, he acted in Táu, a film shot in the same Mexican desert where his father shot El Topo, in which the younger Jodorowsky made his acting debut alongside his father. With Táu, under the direction of Daniel Castro Zimbrón, for the first time in his life, Brontis took the lead role in a movie. The collaboration went so well, they plan to begin a second film together, later this year. “Now we’re going to do another one that we start shooting in November or December that’s called the Darkness,” he reveals. He notes that it has already been work-shopped at Morelia, Toulouse and most recently at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
During his visit to the Miami Beach Cinematheque, he will introduce Táu at a rare U.S. screening, as the film was never picked up for distribution in the United States. Then it’s on to Speaking In Cinema, an hour-long chat with “Village Voice” film critic Michael Atkinson and “Miami Herald” film critic Rene Rodriguez , who both wrote their own positive reviews of The Dance of Reality (click on their names to read their articles).
It will be interesting to watch how the critics work with Jodorowsky, who says he is looking for having a little more time to deal with questions for Dance than usual screenings allow. “I’ve done quite a few festivals now, and there’s always a Q&A,” says Brontis, “but sometimes it’s just 20 minutes, so I just have time to answer one question.
There is much more with both Jodorowskys in other articles I’ve written. The titles of the articles below are hot links where you can read more (except for Alejandro’s quotes, no quotes overlap):
Brontis Jodorowsky to Speak in Miami Beach: “Miami Must Have Some Rock ‘n Roll”
Pure Honey Film Bits: Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky replies to my questions via email, Part 2 – Spanish version
Alejandro Jodorowsky on Dune Documentary: “There’s Nothing Crazy About a 14-Hour Film”
Legendary Director Alejandro Jodorowsky on The Dance of Reality, Dune, and Fatherhood
The of course, there are the reviews:
Jodorowsky heals psychic wounds with fabulist recreation of childhood in ‘Dance of Reality’
Film Review: ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ celebrates the creativity necessary to do justice in sci-fi cinema
This interview was done to coincide with this weekend’s second installment of “Speaking In Cinema.” Both Jodorowsky’s Dune and The Dance of Reality are now playing at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, which is hosting the event. Brontis Jodorowsky will present The Dance of Reality in person on June 14. On June 15, he will also introduce Jodorowsky’s Dune and Táu. On Tuesday, June 17, at 7 p.m., Brontis will join “Village Voice” film critic Michael Atkinson and “Miami Herald” film critic Rene Rodriguez for the Knight Foundation-sponsored series “Speaking In Cinema” to discuss this film and other works by Jodorowsky. A meet-and-greet party at the Sagamore Hotel ends the night. Tickets for each screening and the event can be found by visiting the calendar page of mbcinema.com.
Brontis Jodorowsky (Left) and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Photo by Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky
It was deadline day, and like magic, after almost a month waiting for his response via email, the legendary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky finally responded to my questions about Jodorowsky’s Dune and his new film The Dance of Reality. As our last correspondence notes, he prefers to communicate in Spanish, so I asked these questions with the help of my Independent Ethos partner, Ana Morgenstern, who is originally from Mexico (from the city were Jodorowsky shot El Topo, no less). Again, the Chilean-born director replied with wit and poetry. Ana noted to me the translation hardly does this poet and intellectual guru justice, so below, you will find Jodorowsky’s email in its uncut, original Spanish.
I presented the English version in the “Miami New Times” art and culture blog “Cultist.” I have already used some of the material from the email in this piece, which should appear in print in this week’s issue of the paper. Jodorowsky’s eldest son, Brontis Jodorowsky, also contributed (more on our chat , done via Skype, will appear in “Cultist” and “Independent Ethos,” like last time). To read the English translation of my correspondence with the elder Jodorowsky, visit Cultist by jumping through the image below:
I did the best I could with the translations— and, like last time, I think they came out pretty good— but for those who speak Spanish fluently (as many in my city of Miami do), the best way to read Jodorowsky’s responses is in his native Spanish:
Hans Morgenstern: La danza de realidad es una pelicula fuerte, crees que va mas alla de una autobiografia?
Alejandro Jodorowsky: ………..Es una autobiografía de la misma manera que “El Topo” es un wstern o “La Montaña Sagrada” un film de alpinismo. Me apodero del genero autobiográfico para profundizar en una gran variedad de temas.
¿Crees que sea un comentario sobre ideologia politica, religiosa o personal?
………………. La realidad no es una suma de alguna de sus partes, es un todo interactivo. Todo es político, todo es religioso, todo es personal, todo es todo. Yo no filmo un trozo de pastel, filmo el pastel entero.
¿Que esperas que la audiencia se lleve consigo despues de ver La danza de la realidad?
……… La finalidad de todo arte verdadero es revelar al ser humano la belleza de su propia alma.
Estoy interesado en tu opiñion sobre el documental de Dune.¿>Que te gusta o que cambiarias del documental?
………….. Opino que su director Pavich es un ser luminoso, puro, bien intencionado. Su documental es producto de un apasionado sueño. Nada que ver con el cine industrial. Y como su filme es la realización de un sueño, tiene la perfección de los sueños: no hay nada que quitarle ni nada que agregarle.
¿Sufres de algún resentimiento de que Dune no se haya completado, aunque sea un poco?
………. De ninguna manera he sufrido. Para mí el fracaso es solo un cambio de camino. Los dos años de la preparación de Duna cambiaron mi vida, fue una experiencia sublime. En mi alma, mente, corazón, sexo, realicé el filme. Solamente faltó filmarlo: un mínimo detalle. Esta falta de sufrimiento resulta de mi formación en las artes marciales. Morir en un combate no es perder el combate. No cuenta el resultado, cuenta la acción que hiciste para obtenerlo, lo hayas obtenido o no. Batallar sin cobardía es el único triunfo de un héroe. Yo me lancé en ese proyecto sin cobardía, sin limites, con una inmensa audacia. Aunque no se filmó, siempre tuve la sensación de haberme realizado.
¿Duneno se haya filmado basado en los planes originales, otros largometrajes han sido influenciados por Dune, ¿es posible entonces que te llamemos el padre del renacimiento del cine de ciencia ficción?
……..Si Dios te lanza un dulce que no le has pedido, no seas tonto, abre la boca. Me pueden llamar como quieran, hasta acepto que me digan madre del tío del pato Donald. Si esos epitetos son producto de una admiración cariñosa que sean bienvenidos. Yo por mi parte lucho por no definirme ni tampoco exaltar mi ego.
Después de haber visto el documental, uno de los temas que salieron a relucir fue la preparación extrema de tu hijo, Brontis. ¿Crees que haya afectado tu relación con el?
…… La preparación que le dí a mi hijo, es la misma que yo me había dado a mí mismo. Practiqué artes marciales durante muchos años. También meditación zen. Brontis y yo tenemos una relación que atraviesa el abismo padre-hijo, para establecer lazos de amorosa igualdad de niveles. Tenemos una profunda amistad.
¿Crees que hubo algún grado de auto-sabotaje al imponer el tiempo del largometraje? En otras palabras, al decir que el largometraje de Dune pueda ir de 12 a 20 horas. ¿no crees que eso cancela cualquier consideración seria por parte de estudios de Hollywood?
…..He vivido siempre adelantado al tiempo, unos 30 años en el futuro. La juventud actual, recien ahora está viendo La Montaña Sagrada y comprendiéndola. Yo tenía la razón, no era ninguna locura pensar en un filme de más de 14 horas de duración. Hoy en día se filman trilogías como el Hobbit y series de Televisión que pueden durar centenares de horas.
¿Cómo afectan las decisiones de financiamiento al arte cinematográfico?
…..Ahí está el problema: al convertirse el gran arte del cine en industria, de golpe se pudrió. Ya no fue más arte, sino un entretenimiento bobo, lacayo del sistema, limitador de conciencias, infantilizador. Se lo comío la horda de productores ávidos de dolares, estrellas egómanas, distribuidores cobardes, técnicos ladrones, criticos pagados, inculcadores solapado de ideas politicas, vendedores de cigarrillos, champaña, marcas de automoviles y publicidad turistica. Los filmes, presos en las salas de cine, se ahogan. El cine de arte está por nacer y ser exhibido en los museos, con el mismo honor con que se exhiben los cuadros y esculturas.
This interview was done to coincide with this weekend’s second installment of “Speaking In Cinema.” Both Jodorowsky’s Dune and The Dance of Reality are now playing at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, which is hosting the event. Actor Brontis Jodorowsky will present The Dance of Reality in person on June 14. On June 15, he will also introduce Jodorowsky’s Dune and another film he stars in, the rarely seen Táu, directed by Daniel Castro Zimbrón. On Tuesday, June 17, at 7 p.m., Brontis will join “Village Voice” film critic Michael Atkinson and “Miami Herald” film critic Rene Rodriguez for the Knight Foundation-sponsored series “Speaking In Cinema” to discuss this film and other works by Jodorowsky. A meet-and-greet party at the Sagamore Hotel ends the night. Tickets for each screening and the event can be found by visiting the calendar page of mbcinema.com.
Independent Ethos 