I’m putting together an itinerary for my return trip to Israel in June. Last year, I focused on interviewing experts who could teach me more about the history of the kibbutz, especially the changes of the last 20 years. This trip, I’m hoping to visit many of the unique communities in Israel—not all of them kibbutzim—that have taken up the ideals, a century later, of the kibbutz movement’s founders, and are carrying them into the future. I’m hoping to blog about my impressions for the entire month of my trip.
I recently came across this fascinating enterprise—the Vertigo Dance Troupe’s “eco-art village”—that brings together two of my passions: the creative arts and ecological literacy. I’m hoping to connect with some of the principals and learn more about their plans… and maybe try my dance moves under the stars in their geodesic dome!
Here is an interesting article about Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the Negev, right near Gaza, that has dwindled down to about 60 residents and 26 members. Because of the relative peace of the past few months, they have launched a P.R. campaign to attract new residents, pointing out the tranquillity (when rockets and mortars aren’t falling on a community whose name translates as “Vineyard of Peace”) compared to city life. Their promise: “a traditional kibbutz just like the good old days.” Plus, free university tuition.
These were the words that kept running through my mind as I watched Lavi Ben Gal’s delightfully eccentric, utterly original and often laugh-out-loud funny movieEight Twenty Eight. To call it a “documentary” doesn’t do justice to Ben Gal’s creative vision, for that word suggests a straight-up journalistic-historical approach to the material, where the writer-director has produced a cinematic concoction that is far more subjective, self-conscious and deliberately elusive—part personal essay, part memoir, part commentary on the slippery art of making movie memories of the past. And it’s damn fun to watch.
I’ve yoked this film under my sub-genre of “privatization cinema”, but even here, Eight Twenty Eight defies categorization. Nitzanim, the kibbutz were Ben Gal grew up, on the coastal plain between Gaza and Tel Aviv, has undergone some form of shinui (or “change”), but we’re never told when or what. We just discover the evidence of the change as the director goes wandering around the kibbutz after years of living in Tel Aviv and only visiting infrequently; there are Thai guest workers and the dining hall is run by Russian-speaking contractors and kibbutzniks set up second-hand shops on the grounds of their home.
Ben Gal has both a goal and a deadline in his journey home: he has received a letter from the kibbutz managers, after turning 28, that informs him that he has a year to decide whether he wants to be a member or not. The film chronicles that year, as he tries to match his memories of the past with the kibbutz he now encounters. His interior monologue, at times Woody Allen-like in its self-conscious worrying, narrates this journey, as he admits that “memory—especially my memory—shouldn’t be relied on 100%.”
His focus as a filmmaker falls not on quotes and opinions from traditional interviews but rather on obscure yet poetic details of the kibbutz that evoke memories (a patch of grass, the junk yard he once played in, the various pathways through the kibbutz, the way his father walks, a photo from 1914 of his grandmother as a young girl in Poland, the faded pattern of her playing cards) and seemingly random moments from the quiet lives of the remaining members. Nitzanim, caught in Ben Gal’s lens, feels like a ghost town at times. And yet it still comes to life for the seasonal round of collective festivals, although even here the kibbutz struggles: by the end, the members celebrate Passover as individual families, not a community, and have to rely on the Thai guest workers for entertainment at Shavuot. “The ceremonies keep happening,” Ben Gal observes, “as if without them, the kibbutz would cease to exist.”
Ben Gal is comically ambivalent about his memories of these festivals, during which the children play a prominent role in dances and songs. “As a kid, I loved and hated them,” he recalls, and then, as he films youngsters practicing the “Dance of the Four Species”, he says in a deadpan delivery: “Thanks to this dance, I discovered my allergy to figs.”
Later, he goes to the kibbutz synagogue to film elderly members preparing to mark Rosh Hashana and panics when he realizes that they’re expecting him to stay as the tenth Jewish male to make up the minyan. Even when “The Mexicans” arrive to fill the quota, Ben Gal worries it will look bad if he slips away. When he visits the kitchen where he once did a monthly shift, the hired staff who now run it invite him inside to film but then think he’s weird for shooting footage of the floors and the pots. “Do you think he speaks Russian?” one hired worker asks another about Ben Gal. (He does apparently, or at least got the sequence translated.) “I think he’s cuckoo. Tell him to leave—he’s getting in the way.” The scene is both absurdly hilarious and touching: the filmmaker, already ambivalent about whether to stay or go, is not wanted on his own kibbutz even by the hired help. At least the crusty old gatekeeper of the kibbutz, whom Ban Gal feared as a child, encourages him to remain and raise a family.
Throughout, kibbutzniks offer suggestions to Ben Gal on how to make his movie: Add this subtitle, Film me for 30 seconds, Now stop. Other people direct the film as much as he does, and the fourth wall between the filmmaker and his subjects constantly dissolves, just as the line between his memories and his present-day encounters begins to blur. The most astonishing moment comes when Ben Gal—who says he never lived in his parents’ home, but always in the communal children’s houses—is told by his mother and father that, no, in fact he did live with them for at least three years while growing up. And yet he has no memory of this time.
Both the filmmaker’s journey and the movie conclude with… well, I couldn’t possibly give away the ending. I can only say that it feels perfectly suited to the unique mood and character of both this wonderfully eccentric film and its creator. Track down Eight Twenty Eight and see it if you can.
Here is a curious news article about a talk given by an economics prof in the States. He had lived on a kibbutz, but became disillusioned with socialism and later even progressive politics—and became a libertarian who promotes individual rights and minimal government. He claims his changing beliefs are based on “empirical evidence”, but they might also be “blamed” on the progression from liberalism to conservatism—from dreams of utopia to skepticism about radical change—that often seems part of the aging process. Despite my hopes for a cooperative future of peace and sharing, I sometimes hear my Inner Cranky Old Man coming through when I talk these days, too.
The Hula Valley extends into the northernmost reaches of Israel, what’s often called the “finger of Galilee”, and borders Lebanon and the Golan Heights. It’s a stunningly beautiful landscape of rolling hills, swamps drained and tilled into lush fields and orchards, and the earliest (and best conserved) flow of the Jordan River, all shadowed by the snowy peak of Mt. Hermon. It was the picturesque backdrop to my life and work for nearly eight months on Kibbutz Shamir. The fiery, lingering sunrises and sunsets are still burned into my memory—and, for that matter, the photo at the top of my blog.
It’s also home to the kibbutzniks of Kfar Giladi, one of the first communal settlements in the area, founded in 1916. Nine decades later, Giladi voted to privatize in 2003. Since then, the landscape—on the opposite side of the valley from Shamir—has remained the same, but the life of its members has changed. Keeping the Kibbutz, a new (and as yet unreleased) documentary from two young American filmmakers, charts those changes and some of the disappointments felt by kibbutzniks left behind by privatization. Co-director Ben Crosbie was born on the kibbutz but moved to the U.S. at age three and visited occasionally growing up. In 2007, he returned to Giladi with his co-director, Tessa Moran, and let their cameras roll as kibbutzniks talked candidly about their feelings and the increasingly market-driven, individualistic management of their once-communal home.
The film (Crosbie and Moran generously sent a preview copy to me) begins with a quick introduction to the history of Giladi and the early ideals of the kibbutz movement: the philosophy of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”; the communal child-rearing; the socializing in the dining hall; the collective harvests in the cotton fields. Flashforward to the present: the children have long since moved into their parents’ home, the dining hall is half-empty, day labourers are hired to do field work (and cotton is no longer grown), and everyone gets a different wage—just like the rest of the world.
Many of the kibbutz films I’ve watched seem to follow the famous stages of grieving: Degania (anger and bargaining); Kibbutz(depression). In Keeping the Kibbutz, we get to see kibbutzniks who have reached that fifth and final stage—who have accepted, however reluctantly, the changes that have overtaken their community but still look back with fondness and nostalgia at the unique communal society from which they all emerged.
The film does a sumptuous job of evoking that nostalgia without lapsing into sentimentality, thanks in large part to the humour and honesty that the handful of main interview subjects bring to their experiences. Throughout, the filmmakers juxtapose archival footage and photos with similar contemporary images of farm and fisheries workers, children and parents, to show that for all the changes, there is a continuity of life and community on Giladi.
During the filming, two of the older residents get told that their wages are being cut or their services are no longer needed on the kibbutz, and we see their pangs of self-doubt (or bemused resistance on the part of puckish Frankie, a former lager lout from South Africa who came to Israel to dry out and ended up marrying a kibbutznik) that accompany the loss of the identity they had formed working for their community. Giving retirement-aged members meaningful work was always a key part of the original kibbutz ideal. In fact, the optical factory where I worked at Shamir—and that has since become a multi-million-dollar international enterprise—was originally created as a make-work project for oldsters.
“I’m like excess baggage,” says Frankie when he reads the “Dear John” letter from kibbutz management. “Only you can take care of yourself and your needs,” one of the managers later tells him. He just shrugs and says, “I hate the word ‘money’.”
Uzi, another member, gets laid off from his repair job on the kibbutz—even though he is never given a chance to explain the reason the repair shop never shows a profit in its accounts is because, for decades, the kibbutz wasn’t supposed to make money and therefore fudged its accounting in various ways. “I like to do things for people,” he admits. “This is my god. I don’t need religion.”
In a later scene, Uzi takes one of the filmmakers for a glider ride high above the Hula Valley and viewers get a panoramic sense of why the kibbutz members are so deeply attached to this landscape, so reluctant to leave, even as their community changes from its original ideals. The film is filled with beautiful images of the kibbutz and its hilly environs, evocatively backed by a gorgeous piano and guitar score by composer Preston Hart.
“I love the kibbutz,” says Uzi’s wife, Kathy, who arrived as a volunteer in 1968 and married into Giladi. “It breaks my heart that it has to change. I’m sad that my children grew up in a special society that doesn’t exists anymore.”
But she says these words with a smile on her lips, and not a bitter one. She seems to have accepted the changes, adapted to them even (she “buys” and then runs the kibbutz store), and the film ends with a scene of a backyard barbecue in the last light of dusk, with friends and laughter and a sense of community that has altered perhaps but hasn’t fully disappeared. The old socialist principles have been shed, but the members are still “keeping the kibbutz”.
Check out this trailer for the documentary and watch out for the film at festivals in the coming year…
