Birth of a Golem

A series of scenes about the creation of the golem. This film constitutes the first part of a trilogy on this mythical figure of Jewish legends and was filmed like a notebook, during the research done by Amos Gitai and Tonino Guerra on the subject. Little by little, the notebook takes on a life of its own…

NOTE

With its overlapping images, faces, landscapes, countries and civilizations (India, America, the former Soviet Union, Israel), its superimposition of sounds, voices, languages, texts, songs and music, of yesterday and of today, its intertwining of fiction and documentary, of the historically true and of the legendary, Birth of a Golem is a film which sets on example: of themes for a film to come and the necessary cinematographic operations; an example for a film still in its bshell, where the still unhatched shapes are both unfinished and intertwined... The title telescopes two operations: the birth of a film and the identification of a golem. This superimposition is not immaterial: it suggests that the golem has no other body than the film itself. In other words, it is only a fiction – the incarnation of an idea, a moral concept. A film is only that, whatever moral it happens to embody.

Yann Lardeau: Les Films d’Amos Gitai, unpublished