At a time when an Israeli-Palestinian conflict is waking up which has never really ended, it is advisable to go for a walk in the Julien-Cain alley of the National Library of France (BNF), which exhibits a part there. archives donated to the institution by Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. Director of fascinating film essays dedicated to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated on November 4, 1995 by a religious activist, the director had accumulated a number of written and audiovisual documents of prime importance which he wished to share with the institution.
As caught by a diasporic spirit educated by anti-Semitism never to rest in the same place or to deposit his goods in the same basket, the “sabra” Gitai, major figure of the Israeli cinema and tireless militant for peace for forty years, distributes his archives to the four corners of the world. The French Cinematheque, the Swiss Cinematheque, the University of Standford in the United States, the National Library of Israel have already collected its materials. Singularity of this artist, whose cinema itself, inhabited by politics, is an archive. Do not forget that House (1980), his very first documentary, already carried this archaeological vocation, by focusing on a simple house whose history covered that, problematic and torn, of the country. For Gitai, the artist is always a creator who walks through history and who often gives it shape.
The archives deposited at the BNF are proving to be of burning interest, today as excessive colonization, racism, and the cold policy which instrumentalizes them lead to explosion and chaos. The material, centered around the assassination of Rabin, takes note of this shift in Israeli history where not only the country tramples its protective vocation (a Jew kills another Jew), but where the right and the far right are deliberately derailing the peace process carried by the legitimacy of the former soldier Rabin.
Visual and sound fragments
Three films – Let’s give peace a chance (1994); The Arena of Murder (1996); Yitzhak Rabin’s Last Day (2015) – provide here some 30,000 documents (scripts, press articles, minutes of the commission of inquiry, locations and versions of films) collected over twenty-five years of work. That is a relatively modest volume of paper, but nothing less than nineteen terabytes of hard drives containing 150,000 files which gave librarians a cold sweat.
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