Dedicated to my mother in lockdown overseas.

A film by Ariane Littman

French narration, with subtitles in English, German and Hebrew, (6:30′)

Script: Ariane Littman & Ora Maimon Pilewski

Editor: Ora Maimon Pilewski.

Performed during the lockdown by Ariane Littman & filmed by Kalia Gisele Littman Cohen. Archival footage filmed by David G. Littman. Produced by Studio 11. French Narrators: Tali Boublil & Ariane Littman. Sound Design and Music: Marcelo Pilewski. Colorist: Alina Romanova. Bootke Color Studio, Tel Aviv. (French & English speaking, English, German and Hebrew subtitles).

© Ariane Littman 2020

Historical Background:

After the fall of Jerusalem and Judea to the Romans in 70 CE, the fortress of Masada remained the last rebels’ stronghold. Following several months of siege, the rebels committed collective suicide in an ultimate gesture of freedom on the spring of 73 CE. Not one living soul remained to fall into the hands of the Romans, or so believed the last fighter.

But Josephus Flavius writes that: “an old woman escaped, along with another who was related to Eleazar, in intelligence and education superior to most women, and five little children. They had hidden in the conduits that brought drinking-water underground while the rest were intent upon the suicide-pact.” It was these women who conveyed the story to the Romans when they entered the fortress at dawn: “…Seeing no enemy, but dreadful solitude on every side, fire within, and silence, they were at a loss to guess what had happened…the noise came to the ears of the women, who emerged from the conduits and gave the Romans a detailed account of what had happened, the second of them providing a lucid report of Eleazar’s speech and the action that had followed.” Josephus Flavius, Of the Jewish War, Book VII, Chap VIII

Masada – HerStory was inspired by the forgotten rebellion of two women against their leader, Eleazar Ben Yair. In the present movie, five women pay homage, each in her own special way, to these two women and to their alternative choice.

At sunset, Masada wrap herself again in a cloak of mystery.”Here stand mountains round about, congealed and silent. They are eternal witnesses, ever intelligent, seeing everything always, hearing everything always, and knowing how vain the toil of the climbers has always been.”  (Yitzhak Lamdan, Masada: A Historical Epic 1927).

The movie: 11:11′ (extract on site: 1:38′)

Cast:  Hagar Dagan (flutiste), Maya Yogel (dancer), Yaeli Tai (singer), Alexandra Lavastine (mummy), Sigal and Avner Weissbein (mother and son).

Cinematographer: Talia (Tulik) Galon, Editor: Ora Maimon Pilewski, Aerial Photographer: Aviv Kegen, Camera assistant: Lior Mamon, Photographer: Gal Mosenson, Costumes designer: Lera Lemberg, Hebrew Narrator: Sigal Weissbein, Original score and lyrics: Hagar Dagan and Yael Tai, Sound design and music: Marcello Pilewski, Location sound recordist: Ishai Ilan, Makeup:  Idit Ayala Alajem, Post Production: Colorist: Yair Nahson, Visual Effects: Omri Grossman, Studio: Bootke Color Studio, Location: Masada, A UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the Judean Desert.

Map of Masada by Dom Augustin Antoine Calmet, France, 1672-1757, After Jean Doubdan, Siege et Prise de Massada par les Romains, Etching. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner

After The Watchman
From The Wounded Land Series

This work relates to Alexander Zaïd as the symbol of The Valley (Ha’Emek) and its Zionist Ethos. After the Watchman is part of the Wounded Land Series, a series triggered by the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and the Second Lebanon War (2006). A body of work which deals with the metaphoric healing of visible and less visible wounds inscribed in the geography of the landscape, the city and the body.

In the work After the Watchman, Ram Atkin Matzliach, performer and a student in medicine, uses 200 sterile gauzes to dress the majestic equestrian bronze sculpture of Alexander Zaïd, healing of  wounds, past and present of The Valley of Jezreel, the Biblical site of numerous historical battles.

Incidentally, the performance took place on July 10^th 2018, precisely 80 years after Alexander Zaïd was left bleeding to death on the side of the road.

Alexander Zaïd and the monument in Sheikh Abreikh:

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Jewish farmers established the first villages and Kibbutzim in the Valley of Jezreel, the site of important biblical battles.

A prominent figure of the Second Aliya, Alexander Zaïd, an orphan, emigrated at the age 18 from Vilna to Ottoman mandated Palestine in 1904. He became a prominent pioneer, one of the founders of Kibbutz Giladi and of two Jewish self-defense organizations, Bar Giora and Hashomer. In 1926 he settled with his family in Sheikh Abreik with the mission of overseeing and protecting the land belonging to the Jewish National Fund.

On July 10^th 1938, Zaïd was ambushed and shot dead by Qassem Tabash from the al-Hilaf tribe.

A bronze monument was erected in his memory on the hill of Sheikh Abreik near Beit She’arim, the lost 2^ndcentury AD Jewish city and necropolis, he incidentally rediscovered.

Today, the watchman on his horse overlooks a wounded valley crisscrossed by motorways under construction, as a future planed controversial civil airport might further wound the Valley.

A film by Ariane Littman

Performed and filmed in Sheikh Abreik/ Bet Shearim, Jezreel Valley, Israel

Produced by Studio 11 in collaboration with Beit Hankin Gallery in Kfar Yehoshua

Performer: Ram Atkin Matzliach

Aerial Cinematographer: Aviv Kegen

Cinematographer: Talia (Tulic) Galon

Still Photographer: Gal Mosenson

Editor: Michal Gassner

Original music: Omer Gonen-Haela, bansuri improvisation based on The Song of the Valley, (Natan Alterman, D. Sambursḳi, 1934)

Additional Music & Sound design: Marcello Pilewski

Colorist: Adar Raviv

Post Production Studio: Bootke Studio, Tel Aviv

I would like to thank the Zaïd family, The Israel Nature and Parks authority, The Beit Shearim National Park and the Emek Izrael Regional Council as well as Ayelet Hertswolf, Orna Atkin Raviv and Neta Haber from Beit Hankin Gallery in Kfar Yehoshua for making this project possible.

All rights reserved © Ariane Littman 2018

More specifically, the video The Spring (2015) is based on a sewing performance held at full moon in July 2013 by the spring of Lifta, a village where its Arab Palestinian women were notorious for their bridal dresses and artistic embroidering needle-works.

The sewing of dressed Wounded Land maps since 2009 came to embody a sick “patient“ in dire need of healing. The dressed maps are made of fragments from ‘Closure Maps of Jerusalem and the West Bank’ and were first ‘operated’ in 2004 in the midst of the Second Intifada as repeated suicide bomb attacks ripped apart the western side of Jerusalem. A protective wall was erected and while dramatically reducing terror attacks, it altered the movement of Palestinians entering the city from Ramallah and the West Bank.

Lifta: historical background

Known in the Bible as Nephtoah, the village of Lifta was a border between the Israelite tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Populated by various people throughout ancient times, the village had been repeatedly invaded by armies on their way to Jerusalem. A prosperous village under the British Mandate, one tenth of the land was owned and inhabited by Jews and the rest by Arabs. Yet, Lifta was not spared in the wake of the Arab-Jewish hostilities of 1947- 48 as the Jewish paramilitary organization of the Haganah fought to secure the western exit of the city during the Siege of Jerusalem. The Arab villagers fled, never to return and Lifta eventually remained deserted.

Since, squeezed between two highways, the uninhabited village of Lifta, like countless vestiges of past civilizations in Jerusalem, stands as a silent wound in the landscape.

The video: “The Spring” 2015

At full moon, in the deserted village of Lifta, to the sound of a magic flute, a woman sews by the pool a dressed map of Jerusalem she has found inside the spring. Evoking mythic weavers and Lifta’s seamstresses, her patient and diligent needlework brings to life the mummified spirit of the place that awakens at dawn, metamorphosing into a young maiden, the future weaver of life.

Written, directed  and produced by Ariane Littman

Cast: The Seamstress: Ariane Littman

The Mummy: Naama Grinstein

Director of photography: Talia (Tulik) Galon

Second camera: Irit Sharvit

Editor: Tamar Gan-Zvi

Picture designer and colorist: Roee Liron

Original Music composed and performed: flutist Hagar Dagan

Sound Design: Marcelo Pilewski

© All rights reserved to Ariane Littman

Background:

The de-construction and re-construction of  ‘Closure Maps’ of Jerusalem in the ‘Wounded Maps‘ were first created in 2009. In 2011, I sewed one in the Old City of Jerusalem and another one in 2012 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

The Cabaret Voltaire had been the very birthplace of the Dada movement in 1916, a revolutionary art movement that stood against the horrors of WWI. It seemed to me the ideal place to re-enact the ‘healing’ process of this meditative sewing.

Whilst creating the ‘Wounded Map‘ of Jerusalem, I realized that I could discard all mapping conventions, producing instead absurd maps. This, similarly to Tristan Tzara who in 1917 had randomly used cut-out words from a daily newspaper to create his first Dadaist poem.

I incised the maps, reshuffling their codes and borders, removing their hegemonic power while reassembling them anew. In doing so, whilst reinventing new symbolic border-scapes, I felt I could overcome the paralyzing effect of violence experienced as a civilian facing situations over which he/she has no control.

The Video:

DADA-Jerusalem incorporating extracts from ‘DADA’, a film by Greta Deses awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1967, brings together the Dada spirit behind the deconstruction and reconstructions of the ‘Wounded Maps‘ of Jerusalem.

Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to make a Dadaist Poem’ creates the link to the deconstruction and reconstruction of the maps in the studio. The black and white paintings by Dada artist Georges Grosz connect to the paintings by veteran Israeli artist Zvi Tolkovsky.

Recitation of Hugo Ball’s ’O Gadji Beri Bimba’, his first abstract phonetic poem, relates to his ‘Elefantenkarawane, first declaimed at the Cabaret Voltaire in June 1916 and re-enacted in Deses’ movie.

The sewing of the Wounded Maps in Jerusalem and in Zurich weaves the thread of DADA-Jerusalem, a film in homage to the artists whom in reaction to the horrors of WWI created the DADA movement at the Cabaret Voltaire.

Created in times of conflict, DADA-Jerusalem revives the timeless Dadaist spirit as best described by Hans Arp:

“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.”

Hans Arp in Dadaland, extract from Hans Richter: Dada, Art and Anti-Art, 1964

Credits:

Script, director and producer: Ariane Littman
Editor: Tamar Gan-Zvi
Original Music & Soundtrack Designer: Marcello Pilewski
Cinematography:
Performance in Jerusalem Old City (2011): Yair Tsriker
Performance at the Cabaret Voltaire (2012): Martin Burr
Performance in the studio (2013): David Atzmi
Extracts from ‘DADA’ a film directed by Greta Deses, awarded the Palme d’Or – Best Short Film in Cannes Film Festival (1967)
First abstract phonetic poem by Hugo Ball: O Gadji Beri Bimba (1916): recited by Daphnee Littman-Cohen
Paintings by Artist Zvi Tolkovsky

My thanks to Nicholas and Manfred Deses for allowing me to use extracts from Greta Deses’ movie: Dada (1967) as well as the Cinémathèque Royale of Bruxelles for making it available in a digital format.
A special thanks to Daphnee Littman-Cohen for her recitation of Gadji Beri Bimba and to artist Zvi Tolkovsky for the use of his paintings of Jerusalem.

The post DADA-Jerusalem 2014 first appeared on Ariane Littman.]]> https://ariane-littman.com/2012/08/the-green-thread/ Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:10:30 +0000 http://174.120.82.66/~arianere/?p=360   The video ‘Green Thread’ (2012) is related to a performance I did in November 2011  in the Old City of Jerusalem. Dressed in white, with a skirt made from ...

Cartographic maps are to Ariane Littman the raw material, the content, and the inspiration of her artwork.

The field, which she encounters as a freelance news photographer during the years 2005-2008, becomes the physical space where reality is processed and later projected into new imaginary spaces in her studio. There, she can alter the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by removing borders and separation walls, boldly deconstructing the hegemonic power inscribed on the maps.

Dwelling within competitive narratives Littman proposes, in her performance-video works, a critical reading of maps in which her body becomes the very site of an embodied cartography where geographic and artistic boundaries collapse.

This movie reviews Ariane’s inventive uses of maps as it follows her to the edge of the city of Jerusalem in her perambulatory routes triggered by the Second Intifada, in a quest to transcend borders and fear.

At the end of her peregrinations in the conflicting spaces of Border Land, Ariane, longing for healing, projects herself into the new fictional spaces of Wounded Land. There in a Sisyphean process, she bandages and sews with a green thread the collective wound that runs through the geographic and human landscape of the Holy Land.

http://blogmarks.net/user/sbrothier/marks/tag/israel

The tree had been uprooted and replanted years ago to beautify the walled landscape around the checkpoint. However it hadn’t survived this dreary environment and there it stood, dead, yet majestic in its bareness, an impassible witness to the flow of Palestinians and Israeli cars driving around it in some mysterious dance devoid of violence. The tree, carrier of many symbols, personified a silent casualty in the midst of this contested landscape. Filming the tree at dawn, the dressing ended at sunset. Curious onlookers stopped and watched as I carried on. Towards the end of the performance, I instinctively bandaged my feet, both as a protection from the thorns but also as an act of identification with the dressed tree. Upon ending the dressing, I stepped back; the tree looked magnificent in the reddish light of dusk. Dressed in white like a bride, it seemed to rejoice. Reuniting with Mother Earth, its loose straps of bandages dancing in the wind reaching towards the moon and the kites flying high over Hizma.

The next morning, to my amazement all the bandages had disappeared and no one, not even the Palestinian man flying his kites above the bleak naked tree, could tell me whom had stripped off the tree from its bandages. Two years later, in March 2014, I saw that the dead olive tree at the checkpoint had been replaced by a coloured sign with a huge howling wolf and little white houses with red roofs standing on a green hill.

In the video created in 2012, I decided to make a tribute to mothers on both sides of the wall, so I contacted Ruth Wieder Magan and Salam Abu Amneh and both immediately agreed to participate. Ruth sang Ladino and Hassidic songs and Salam, Palestinian traditional songs.Their voices, soothing me as I dressed the olive tree, wept for the dead olive tree and for Jerusalem, the mother of all cities, now surrounded by new walls.

Video: “The Olive Tree” 12:52′

Script, director and producer: Ariane Littman

Cinematographer: Ran Aviad

Editor: Tamar Gan – Tzvi

Soundtrack designer: Marcello Pilewski

Original Music and melodies: Ruth Wieder Magan and Salam Abdu Amneh

The present work is the first of a series of performances that symbolizes the wound that runs within the human body and through the landscape. Here in ‘Sea of Death’ the bandaged body suggests both the slow death of the Dead Sea and human finitude.

Carried out at sunset, the performance took place on the shores of the Northern side of the Dead Sea, not far from Qumran. Known since Biblical times, it is an imposing site where life, death and healing coexist. Supplying balms used for Egyptian mummification, it later became a well known health resort during the Herodian period. Today the Dead Sea is rapidly dying as a result of enhanced industrial extraction of its minerals, a serious drop of its water level and sinkholes.

During the performance Irit Amar, currently practicing water therapy in a hospital in Mexico, wrapped up my body with sterile bandages until I was gradually immobilized and eventually disconnected from my environment as my eyes, ears, nose and mouth were covered up as well. Mummified and prisoner of this ‘cocoon’ I was then carried into the Dead Sea by two men working on the premises. Before parting from me Irit released the bandages that kept my two hands tied together, leaving me to drift away, diving within my thoughts into the Sea of Death. In this state of intense vulnerability, I recall thinking of mothers and wars, pain and wounds, death and useless hopes.

December 2010

Cinematography: Brian P. Hendler , (9:18′)

Editing: Michal Shachnai Yaakobi