Amos Gitai presents Out of Competition his documentary Why War, a film about war without images of war, built around the correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the possibility of avoiding mass violence.
Amos Gitai is a versatile Israeli artist known for his numerous installations, publications, and theatre productions. He is also a prolific filmmaker, with a portfolio of shorts and around thirty feature films. Often critical of the Israeli government, this year he returns to Venice with Why War, inspired by the 1932 correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the topic of war. The film also incorporates quotes from other writers who have explored the theme of violence, including Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. Rather than offering definitive answers, the film invites viewers to engage deeply, with Gitai’s keen direction encouraging introspection and reflection.
In Why War, to represent violence, you preferred to use Goya’s art or ancient Roman soldiers… And there seems to be a reflection on the continuous spread of images of violence and the possibility that they become entertainment. In a recent interview, you also cited Picasso’s work, Guernica, as a commendable and unforgettable indictment of the brutality of war. Does an artist have responsibilities regarding the violence in the world?
In the 1930s, Guernica was not just a beautiful painting, it was the civic gesture of an artist, Picasso, who was shocked by Luftwaffe bombing of this Basque village, and decided to paint it. Today, we admire the beauty of the work, but we mustn’t forget that Picasso had forbidden it to be shown in Spain as long as Franco was alive. This means that artists have means of sanction. A few years ago, when Spain’s new Prime Minister, a left-wing politician, was elected, he decided to have Franco’s body buried elsewhere than in his kitsch mausoleum. This is the result of the efforts of artists and those who fought for generations against Spanish fascism. Memory is not innocent. The cinema I make is always inspired by the reality in which we live (Kippur, Kadosh, House, Rabin: The Last Day). In Why War, once again, I chose to have a dialogue with the cruel reality that exists in this region. The film avoids showing the iconography and photographs of the horrors of war and destruction that continue to fuel the wars. The idea is to make a narrative film without seeing the war. This correspondence between Einstein and Freud continues my research on how armed conflicts can be avoided, and how it is possible to find peaceful solutions to reconcile distant positions. Around this extraordinary dialogue between two brilliant intellectuals I built a poetic film in which the war is never seen.
When the United Nations asked Einstein in 1932 to choose an intellectual to whom he could pose a single question, his choice fell on Freud. Their dialogue begins with two words, reflected in the title of the film Why War, which have shaped modern discourse on mass violence per...
For me, cinema has a civic mission. This is what I try to bring to my cinematography
With Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf’s accusation that the male gender favors violence, Einstein’s disheartening search for a supranational authority to curb wars, and Freud’s bitter belief that Eros and Thanatos are innate and closely linked impulses, do you think these views are still relevant today?
I also based myself on a text by Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, which she uses to investigate the relationships of domination in sexuality. Susan Sontag responded to this essay with her Regarding the Pain of Others, which also talks about the iconography of war.
The barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 are unforgivable. There is no reason to rape women, to burn people alive. Nothing can justify such crimes, not even a national liberation movement. I often think of Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old pacifist who struggled all her life to get children from Gaza treated in Israeli hospitals. Her body was found burnt in her home on Kibbutz Beeri. Young people have been kidnapped, raped and murdered. The current morbid cycle makes you want to cry. Today, a terrifying ritual has been set, with bombings, the waste of human lives and all the resources of this region, for military conflict, again and again. And the immense tragedy for the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The current Israeli government thinks that the conflict can be resolved by force. But there will never be a permanent solution without a profound dialogue taking into account the suffering of both sides.
So after October 7, I wanted to read and reread some texts to seek help and understand the roots of this human desire to engage in a war and in killing. And in this search this exchange of letters between Freud and Einstein in 1932 was a revelation. The question around which these two great minds found themselves was: why war? Why do people go to war with each other?
Even if I personally started from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the film moves towards a universal reflection that could be applied to the war between Russia and Ukraine, or to what is happening in Sudan. Unfortunately there is no shortage of examples.
I lived alongside ethnic, religious and political divisions, always trying not to get overwhelmed. And for me cinema has a civic mission. That’s what I try to bring to my cinematography. We live in a world in which dialogue has become increasingly complicated and rare, and this favors extreme positions as we also see in many parts of the world. So it’s not a film that wants to give an answer, but to make us all question ourselves.
We would like to delve into the film’s structure and better understand, for example, the role assigned to the chorus and the sung or musical parts. Do they have the same cathartic function as in classical Greek theater? And what is the purpose of interludes such as the one where the woman dives into the sea?
I like your analogy with classical Greek theater. Music plays a very important role in my work, both in my films and in my theater productions. For me, music never has an illustrative relationship with images or texts, but rather a dialectical one. It ‘charges’ the image with another meaning by producing a kind of ‘mood’, the spirit of the work, without being illustrative. For several years now, I’ve been collaborating on my films and plays with Alexey Kochetkov, a magnificent violinist and composer of Russian origin, who became Israeli and now lives in Berlin. It was he who introduced me to the Iranian santur player Kyoomars Musayyebi, who lives in Germany. I also called on Louis Sclavis, a fabulous musician with whom I’ve been working since Kadosh. For Why War, I wanted to hear Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, in particular the piece Lacrimosa, composed of poems by the English poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the First World War. There’s also Maurice Ravel’s Kaddish. For me, these works were a source of inspiration for the film’s poetic and associative structure.
After recent events, is the cautious optimism of West of the Jordan River still relevant? Is it still possible to hope for coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis on the same land? Is it possible to ask Amos Gitai what can be done to free humanity from wars?
I would like to build bridges instead of burning them. We directors, and all artists in general I believe, must not resign ourselves to divisions. On the eve of October 7, I knew that we were in an explosive situation in Israel but this awareness did not cushion the trauma for someone like me who has long been trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to talk through art. It’s what I’ve been doing for years in my films and theatrical works. In Antiquities the traditional role of artists was to be healers, to heal souls. I would like to embrace the idea of the filmmaker or the artist as a healer. I remember what the former mayor of Nablus, Bassam Shakaa, said to me when I made my film Field Diary (1982). I asked him the same question, whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Bassam Shakaa gave me this beautiful reply: “It’s too risky to be pessimistic; we can’t afford it.” I couldn’t agree more. We must remain hopeful in the face of the forces of destruction and nihilism.
