The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman (6 page)

“Fetus?” says Pilar, as she leans to whisper translation to two teachers.

“Fetus as a symbol, a metaphor,” Ruth explains to her, knowing well both the story and its conclusion.

“Therefore,” continues Moses, “in recent years I have been using two cameras, and even three, to explore the realm of reality in search of the fetus that can never be forgotten. First I collect available morsels of reality, rare or commonplace, and then my scriptwriters and I choose the ones that can be strung together into a story.”

A tense silence falls among the film teachers, who try to fathom the depth of thought and technique while also eyeing the chocolate cake that has been placed in the middle of the table. Darkness deepens in the narrow windows, and for a moment Moses imagines he hears an echo of his words in the roar of a nearby ocean.

But when the housekeeper brings the coffee, the tension lifts. The visitor looks around with a reassuring smile, as if he'd been jesting all along, and those present respond in kind. Idle conversation has begun, a packet of slim Spanish cigarillos is passed around. Moses takes one, sucks the smoke with pleasure.

Prior to the screening, de Viola takes his guests on a quick tour of his little empire, the film archive that occupies the chilly basement of the barracks. First they visit the film lab, dominated by an old-fashioned editing table, still apparently in use, with film on its reels. Then they go to the modern editing rooms and see the big AVID computer and a row of screens. From there, they head for the up-to-date sound studio, where the dubbing is done, and then the director of the archive leads them down a narrow, chilly passageway, and on its shelves, instead of shells and bullets, are reels of old celluloid film. Before they ascend from the cellar, the host takes them for a peek at a small museum of the history of the barracks. Amid pictures on the wall of officers who killed one another in the Spanish Civil War dangle a few rusty pistols from the same era.

“Can they still shoot?” asks Ruth.

“Can they?” The priest laughs. “Maybe, but at whom? The dead are dead. And the living want to keep on living.”

two

T
HEY ARE GREETED
with applause as they enter. The screening room is small, but the guest prefers a small and crowded hall to a big one half empty. Every seat is taken, and several young people are sitting on the stairs. Can it be, wonders Moses, that everyone here is a student or a teacher? But then he notices a few heavyset senior citizens in the room. It turns out that the provincial administration extended support to the retrospective on condition that the film archive set aside seats for old people from the area.

De Viola begins with words of appreciation, and an announcement. The first two films will be shown in the small hall, but the third,
The Train and the Village,
will be screened in the evening in the big auditorium. As is customary, before the lights go down, the director is called upon to say a few words of introduction. Moses keeps it short, to lessen the burden of translation, not failing to mention his surprise at the decision to open the retrospective with such an early, rudimentary film, one made more than forty years ago and whose concept, let alone details, the director can barely remember. Therefore, he tells them, in everyone's interest, it is best not to offer explanations that will turn out to be inaccurate. He also issues a warning: “Even if the film, in your opinion and also mine, turns out to be amateurish and full of holes, I will try to defend it to the best of my ability, but on condition that you will treat me with mercy.”

Laughter ripples through the room. The priest raises his hands in a display of piety and says, “Don't worry, even though artists are not allowed to ask for mercy for the fruit of their imagination, compassion and forgiveness are plentiful around here.” He motions to dim the lights.

The opening credits appear in Spanish, replacing the original Hebrew. The editing facility in the cellar is clearly capable of high-caliber work. The screen is flooded with glaring, undiffused Israeli sunlight as the names of the filmmakers—actors, editors, set designers—drift among old buildings of Jerusalem. The name of the scriptwriter, Shaul Trigano, tarries long on the screen, fading only as the camera focuses on a noisy old Chausson, a clunky French-made bus popular in Israel in the 1960s; it was eventually retired from service, and the chassis were used as storerooms at building sites.

From the toxic black smoke belched by the bus emerges the name of the director, Yair Moses, also in Spanish transliteration; it is towed behind the Chausson as it pulls into the old central station. Moses is wondering if it was he who decided to stretch the screen time of his credit or if the Spanish film editor took it upon himself to immortalize the director's name until the first passengers exit the bus.

And now he senses that the woman who sits beside him in the dark does not recognize herself in the village girl wearing the flowered mini-dress and straw hat and clasping a cardboard suitcase to her chest as she makes her way out of the bus station. He whispers, “See what a cute dress we picked out for you,” and she seems puzzled. But then a jolt of memory prevails, and she watches her character approaching passersby, asking directions in a voice not her own in a foreign tongue, and she turns to Moses, half smiling, half panicked.

Who would have thought that such an ancient film would be dubbed in Spanish, the Hebrew soundtrack a dim echo in the background? “What can we do about this?” he whispers to the archive director sitting to his right. “I can't explain a film if I can't understand a word that's spoken.” “Of course you can,” the priest says to calm him, “it's still your film, and even if you can't recall the dialogue, you'll be able to recognize the thrust of the film. And besides, my friend”—he touches the guest on the knee—“although the film you made at the beginning of your career may seem naive or primitive to you now, it nevertheless contains religious truth. It was not by accident that we chose it to open your retrospective.”

The words
religious truth
put Moses oddly at ease. Yes, why not? Perhaps it's when you skip the dialogue that forgotten details of directing and cinematography come to light. He settles comfortably into his chair and grins at Ruth, who, having recognized her youthful self, leans eagerly forward, as if to embrace it. It is now clear that owing to its flimsy plot, the film will unfold at a snail's pace and give its heroine plenty of time to reach her destination. But walking is not easy. She keeps shifting her suitcase from hand to hand; suitcases in those days did not have wheels, and Moses insisted that suitcases carried by his characters not be empty, to heighten the authenticity of the act. Toledano's loving camera clings to the village girl who makes her way through the divided Jerusalem of the sixties—a provincial city but content within its clear boundaries, so that even an ugly concrete wall stuck in the middle of a street to mark a border between two countries doesn't perturb the young woman walking by, accompanied by soft music. She pauses to read the Hebrew street signs, asking directions in Spanish. Moses takes note of inventive camera angles and interesting bits of montage that offer images of Jerusalem before the Six-Day War, including streets and buildings that no longer exist and vacant sites built up in later years, like the field where the president's house went up; it is virgin land in this old film, strewn with rocks and thistles.

The young woman descends the steps of a stone house and rings the doorbell, and Moses is shocked to discover himself opening the door—a thin young man with wild hair, naked to the waist, a pipe in his mouth. The priest casts him an impish glance.
Yes, it's me,
nods the director, who hopes, but is far from sure, that this was the only time he cast himself in a film, since the shift from one side of the camera to the other undermines his control and authority. But in this beginner's film his acting part was small and brief, and the Spanish voice they've given him sounds more like yelling. He thinks of asking de Viola to tell him what he is saying, but the priest is glued to the screen, and Moses doesn't want to break the spell.

Yes, even without the dubbed dialogue, it's clear that the careless young man knows the visitor on his doorstep and doesn't deny his promise to put her up at his house. Except someone got there before her, a woman emerging now from the bedroom in a flimsy bathrobe, a tenant, a lover, and the hostile look she shoots at the newcomer stops the girl cold. Humiliation and confusion flush her face, enhancing its beauty. Which is perhaps why the young man shows signs of doubt and regret, opens the door wide for the village girl to enter, and carries her suitcase into the hallway, and it seems this will be a story about two girls in a rented apartment, competing for the kindness of a mixed-up young man. But the lodger in the skimpy robe is unwilling to share her rights. She sends the young man to get the visitor a glass of water, and when he is gone a conversation ensues between the two women, of which Moses cannot recollect a word, but whatever is said, it is strong enough to convince the guest to give up her claim, enabling the screenwriter to derail the plot from a banal story into a strange and different one, a story that will struggle to be meaningful and credible.

Moses' performance is not over. As penance for breaking his promise to the girl, he carries her heavy suitcase in the harsh white Jerusalem light that Toledano favored in their early days, failing to understand how many subtle and important details he was bleaching out.

To rest his arms, the young man places the suitcase on his head, taking a few hesitant steps that suggest, at least in the mind of the director, that he regrets that the extra room in his flat was not saved for this attractive young woman but rented instead to a bony, depressive tenant. Moses is shaken at the sight of his childhood street on the Spanish screen, and of his parents' house, with some of its furnishings removed to give the camera room to maneuver.

“Wasn't that your mother?” whispers Ruth as the camera slowly closes in on the woman of the house, indeed his mother, an impromptu actress in her own living room, which thanks to camera angles has never looked larger.

In the 1960s, his mother took early retirement from public service so that her husband could be promoted into her job, and the free time tempted her to take part in her son's directing adventure, first by reading the script and suggesting minor changes, then by persuading Moses' father to offer their house as a filming location. In those years, the filmmakers preferred to cast amateurs, not merely to save money but also because professionals who'd been trained as stage actors were prone to theatrical excess. Perhaps out of gratitude to his mother for turning her house into a set for a dubious movie project, Moses gave her a part in the film. His mother rose to the adventure over the objections of his nervous father, and the opportunity provided by her son to become a fictional character added joy and excitement to the last years of her life.

A long time has passed since her death, yet it pains Moses that Trigano's script aged his mother beyond her actual years. They not only whitened her hair but also added wrinkles to her face that he is sure had never been there before. Yet she retains the wise humanity of a lonely old woman who offers shelter to a confused young woman in exchange for housework and personal services. This, as the film progresses, will prompt the old woman to evolve from a recipient of care into a caregiver, an angel of mercy for a woman more impaired than she is. Through the convolutions of the plot, that woman, despite her disabilities, will herself come to the aid of a dying man, who will assume a mission of his own and with superhuman effort postpone his death. With the remnants of his strength he will drag himself at night to a shabby cafeteria in the empty bus station, not to sip the last drink of his life, but to lift the spirits of the village girl who had come to the capital filled with hope and who now waits for the first bus to get her out of there.

For this was Trigano's vision: everyone who receives therapeutic care can and must become a caregiver. And as this simplistic, seemingly unfounded idea circles in scenic waves of black and white, crafted long ago by a young director, the original title of the film flashes in Moses' memory, and he whispers it to his companion.

T
HE FILM'S DIRECTOR
sits in the last row, with de Viola beside him in the aisle seat; this way it won't be hard for him to get to the stage at the end of the screening. Meanwhile, his heart beats faster at the sight of his mother, her voice faintly audible under the Spanish dubbing. She is giving instructions to the new lodger, who unpacks her suitcase in Moses' childhood room and emerges in a lightweight shirt and shorts from a bygone era—very short and baggy, with an elastic waistband. She had arrived in Jerusalem only an hour ago, at the invitation of a young man who raised her hopes, and now, weary and dejected, she wields a mop and pail in the home of a sick old lady.

The two converse incomprehensibly, and the director notes that even at the dawn of his career, he could create a natural flow of dialogue. The Spanish dubbing is so sophisticated that it almost seems not to be the work of actors in a sound studio but that the Israelis had been hypnotized to speak another language. No wonder the audience feels at home with the foreign characters, and little Jerusalem, in the black-and-white of the 1960s, is perceived in the province of Galicia as a familiar and likable city.

Moses recalls that this early film was awarded a prize by the city of Jerusalem, but the prize didn't help draw an audience, and after two weeks in the theater, it had to cede its place to a hard-hitting action movie. His father, who was distressed to see his wife as an actress, even more so to see her as an old lady with white hair, was unabashedly delighted that the film was no longer playing, but his mother was upset that not everyone she knew had seen her. She, who never shied from self-criticism, had become a fan of her fictional character, and repeatedly praised her son for the quality of his direction, perhaps to hint she was ready for another role.