 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... "With its overlapping images, faces, landscapes, countries and civilisations (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 the Golem is a film which takes marks. Marks of themes for a film to come and the necessary cinematographic operations. Marks for a film still in its shell, 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 superposition 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 embodies."
Yann Lardeau, "Les Films d'Amos Gitai", unpublished |
