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The director attempts to answer the question "why war?" in an inventive way, by quoting from an exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s.
By HANNAH BROWN JANUARY 8, 2025 03:50
A scene from the film ‘Why War.’
(photo credit: Dan Bronfeld/Agav Film)
One brilliant phrase I find myself quoting year after year is by the critic Paul Valéry, who wrote, about a century ago, “Everything changes but the avant-garde.”
I’m mentioning this quote again in connection with Amos Gitai’s latest film, Why War, which was shown at the Haifa International Film Festival and is playing in theaters around Israel. The title asks a question that will always be relevant, especially now, of course.
The director attempts to answer it in an inventive way, by quoting from an exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s. The movie manages to trivialize the quoted text with cliched stylistic flourishes that make their debate seem inane, but which lovers of the ever-unchanging avant-garde style may find meaningful.
A movie in French
Right off the bat, one annoying aspect of the movie is that it’s in French. Gitai has worked with French actors frequently in the past, and the French have consistently been the biggest fans of his work, so from his point of view this makes sense, but if there’s one thing we know about a correspondence between Freud and Einstein, it’s that it was in German.
There’s nothing really wrong with translating it to French except that in Gitai’s hands, the French translation lends itself to aphoristic posturing of ideas that are crisp and to the point in the English translation of their letters, as they likely were in the original German.
The movie starts off with a sequence relevant to the current war, in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. As several female soldiers walk by, an ambulance passes and a group does yoga to honor the former hostage Carmel Gat, who was murdered this summer by Hamas. The camera veers off into the model of a terror tunnel that was built in the square to make the public more aware of the hostages’ plight.
But soon, we’ve moved 2,000 years back in history, to the time of the Romans and the destruction of the Second Temple, as texts from Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War are read and soldiers fight and die. In case you weren’t aware, this makes the point that wars have been going on for a long time in this region.
Much of the rest of the movie features shots of the actors playing Freud (Mathieu Amalric) and Einstein (Micha Lescot) reading aloud from their letters. Their correspondence was initiated by the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, which asked Einstein to discuss the question of why war kept happening with anyone in the world, and Einstein chose Freud.
They debate the physical aspects of war (Einstein) versus psychological aspects (Freud), including the arms industry, war profiteering, and how humanity’s violent nature can be controlled. Freud puffs a cigar and talks about wanting “to liberate humans from the threat of war.” He seems to have most of the good lines, as he chides the physicist for his astonishment that it is so easy to make people enthusiastic about war, and naturally references his theories about the death instinct.
WHILE THERE have been successful films that are essentially a conversation between two people sitting across a table – Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre comes to mind – this exchange of bon mots in French seems especially static and irrelevant.
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The monologues are interspersed with scenes that don’t connect but are meant to emphasize the points Einstein and Freud make. There is footage of a French actress (Irène Jacob, who starred in Gitai’s recent film, Shikun) checking into a hotel room, watching the news, and talking to her son on the phone. There’s also an operatic choir that, at one point, performs the kaddish prayer in Hebrew.
Jacob wears an orange slip dress and writhes around under a sheer white cloth on the beach, which may represent a shroud – I wish I were making this up, but I’m not – and the dress slips off and she wades nude into the surf. Later, she writhes on one of the stone slabs at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, which makes a fairly obvious point.
In another scene, Jacob very slowly dyes her hair red on camera, smearing the dye on her face and body so that it looks like blood. Two Israeli actresses who have acted in several of Gitai’s films, Keren Mor and Yael Abecassis, stand around and hug. It seemed to me they were meant to represent mothers of hostages offering each other comfort.
Texts by Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, all in French, are quoted, and later there are scenes set in an actors’ dressing room, where two Ukrainian actors who are a couple debate whether they should raise children in their war-torn country.
Unlike virtually all the thinkers he quotes and references in Why War, Gitai actually fought in a war, the Yom Kippur War, where he was wounded when a helicopter he was riding in was hit by a missile fired from Syria, but he doesn’t add any insights based on his own military service.
He dramatized this experience in the movie Kippur (2000) and ends this film with an image of a soldier looking out over green fields from a helicopter from that movie. But if you haven’t seen Kippur or don’t know about the director’s biography, the image will mean nothing to you.
Gitai is one of Israel’s most prolific filmmakers, with 68 directing credits (including for short films) to his name, and deserves respect for managing to make nearly one feature film per year, even during periods when the Israeli film industry was in the doldrums. Abroad, he is without a doubt Israel’s most acclaimed director. In person, he is warm and self-deprecating.
Every time I see one of his films, I hope for the best, but I have enjoyed only parts of one or two of his movies. To return to Valéry’s quote, everything changes but the avant-garde – and Amos Gitai.
English (US) ·