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By PAUL BRENNER
Beyond patriotic banality and handy CNN updates, war -- whether in Iraq, Israel, or the Golan
Heights -- is an uncontainable force that is beyond easy explanations or narrative development.
Israeli director Amos Gitai's wrenching war film, "Kippur," available on DVD through Kino Video, is the war film taken
to absurdist, surreal extremes. "Kippur" takes place during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, following a helicopter rescue unit
trawling for casualties in the Golan Heights. Gitai, a veteran of that war, brings a sense of war's monotony and
futility to this work, negating Hollywood style heroics and good guy/bad guy theatrics. The compositions are long shots
and long takes, heroes and villains are absent. The rescue crew are figures on a landscape, grasping their stretchers,
locating the wounded seemingly and random, and hoping aboard a quickly departing helicopter -- worker ants going about
their tasks before an explosion smites them down. Sequences are painful to watch -- an extended scene of the rescue crew
trying to remove a wounded soldier from a muddy swamp and getting bogged down in the mire, one character hanging his
head from a helicopter in flight as the Golan landscape passes by below like Kubrick's Jupiter space sequence in "2001,"
the admission of the wounded into a hospital with the supervising physician checking out each soldier like a mechanic
sizing up automobile repairs.
"Kippur" being an Israeli film, Gitai could have easily weighed in on the side of the Israeli government but Gitai not
only chooses to show no battles but blame any enemies. The object of war in "Kippur" is to survive and get through the
chaos stoically and retain sanity. As a pilot who has narrowly escaped death remarks, "They wanted me to fly to Tel Aviv
to take Moshe Dayan to the front. I told them that he should go to the nearest bus station." |
