Steven Spîelberg Jewish Film Archive honors Israeli Film Pioneers

A very special tribute was paid to the pioneers of the Israeli cinema in a two-part program presented in November and December 1993 at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive. The program, devoted to film in the first five years of the state (1948-1953), not only gave audiences a chance to view rare footage from the Spielberg Archive made during this little-known period, but also assembled in person a considerable group of people active in the local film industry at the time. The two evenings were included in the Archive's calendar of events to celebrate the centenary of the cinema.

The concept for the program, a follow-up to the very successful lecture/screening series held by the Archive at the Museum in late 1992, was initially a much more modest one. The original plan had been to hold a brief retrospective of films produced by the late Norman Lourie, a former South African whose company made about a dozen motion pictures in the years immediately preceding and following the establishment of the State of Israel. This idea was modified after a chance encounter with Rolf Kneller, who had been Lourie's cinematographer. Conversations with Kneller revealed that the early Israeli film world, in spite of the fact that it produced scarcely any narrative features, had been much richer and more complex than any existing published sources had indicated.

Baruch Dienar, the screen writer/producer/director renowned for his 1961 feature They Were Ten, had also been frequenting the Spielberg Archive at that time as part of an effort to track down his early output. Both he and Kneller, with whom he had worked on many occasions, agreed to become involved in the embryonic project, scheduled to consist of a session of screenings followed by a discussion with the filmmakers themselves.

The screening session was linked to the Israel Museum's exhibition "To Live in Jerusalem", and was devoted to Jerusalem as seen in Israeli films of the period. Two complete films and excerpts from six more, both fiction and documentary, were screened. The films were presented in roughly chronological order and showed a variety of the city's many faces, from active battle zone to peaceful tourist attraction. Rolf Kneller, much to his embarrassment, was more than amply represented in the program; he filmed five of the eight items, and in one of the remaining three, a color travelogue from 1953, he could be glimpsed with his children visiting Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo.

Largely through Baruch Dienar, who had remained in touch with non-professional actors from his early films as well as with his industry colleagues, many additional contacts were made. It soon became clear that the original idea of a small panel to recall and discuss the period would not suffice to accommodate all the veterans willing to share their reminiscences. Word of mouth and serendipity caused the list to swell still further. Director Dan Wolman telephoned to say that an actor in a film he was about to start shooting was searching for a film in which he had appeared in 1951, but had never seen? The actor, Yitzchak Shillo, had starred in that film, Out of Evil, under the name Yitzchak Schulman, before going on to lead roles in Israeli features and a Hollywood career as Michael Shillo. When he visited the Spielberg Archive for the preliminary interview to which most of the other participants submitted, Shillo watched Out of Evil, his first film, for the very first time.

The pleasure of such rediscoveries was tempered by sadness. Lazare Bianco, a prolific filmmaker who had deposited his negatives at the Spielberg Archive in 1984, responded most enthusiastically to the invitation to participate and seemed genuinely overjoyed to be remembered. A follow-up call was answered by Bianco's wife, who said her husband had been hospitalized. A month before the evening he had hoped to attend, he passed away. Several family members represented him at the event, which was officially dedicated in his memory.

Apart from Dienar and Kneller, the panel also included Sinai Leichter, representing the institutions that had commissioned such a large proportion of the films of the time, Edgar (Eddie) Hirshbain, a cinematographer and later producer/director who took his first professional steps in the late Forties, and Zvi Spielman, now proprietor of the Israfilm company, in 1952 a schoolteacher somewhat reluctantly persuaded to take a job at the newly-opened Herzliya Film Studios, run by his mother-in-law, Margot Klausner. Others, including actors and cinematographers, were seated in the audience and contributed recollections at appropriate points.

The evening was both informative and entertaining, with serious appraisals of the conditions under which films were made combining with some hilarious anecdotes that were equally telling. One of the highlights came late in the evening, when the discussion turned to Deadline for Danny (scripted, produced and directed by Baruch Dienar, photographed by Rolf Kneller), a sero-comic parable that dealt with Israel in the austerity period through the story of a cow under sentence of death for failing to produce milk and the boy who goes to extreme lengths to save her. Tales of the problems encountered in production because of the film's bovine co-star had the audience in stitches (Zvi Spielman recalled that the smell lingered on at the studio for months afterwards).

Also present was Uri (Frumkin) Marom, who had played a small role in Deadline for Danny, as Danny's older brother, but would later have a profound effect on Israeli film production. Over two decades after the film was made, Marom was instrumental in setting up the Fund for the Encouragement of Israeli Quality Films, of which Baruch Dienar was the first head.

Though a single evening could only reveal the tip of the iceberg and clearly signalled the beginning, rather than the end, of a fascinating project, it did suffice to draw some initial conclusions about the filmmaking climate of the time. Though propaganda was the primary reason for official support of the film industry, and the private sector was in its infancy, the talents harnessed for this effort were too innately creative to be satisfied with mere propaganda and contrived, through obstinacy and subterfuge, to raise the artistic level and make their goal, above all, the production of good films.

Almost all the participants volunteered further assistance and rare materials in their possession. Screenwriter/director Michael Elkins supplied a collection of clippings relating to his film career, and Rolf Kneller deposited a collection including both films and scripts? Research on the period is continuing, with work already begun on a publication that will attempt to shed more light on this period of Israel's film history.

Hillel Tryster, Senior Researcher, Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive