A house with more baggage than your ex. Four decades of occupation, one crumbling wall at a time.
House is the story of a house in West-Jerusalem: abandoned during the 1948 war by its owner, a Palestinian doctor; requisitioned by the Israeli government as "vacant'; rented to Jewish Algerian immigrants in 1956; purchased by a university professor who undertakes its transformation into a patrician villa... The building site is like a theatre in which the former inhabitants, the neighbours, the workers, the builder and the new owner all appear. Israeli television censured the film. "Gitai wants this house to be both a symbol and something very concrete; he wants it to become a character in a film. He achieves one of the most beautiful things a camera can register 'live', as it were; people who look at the same thing but see different things - and who are moved by that vision. In this crumbling shell of a house, real hallucinations begin to take shape. The film's central idea is simple and the film has simply the force of that idea, no more, no less."
Direction
Gitai turns a renovation into live political archaeology.
Cinematography
The camera as witness to people seeing parallel universes.
Director
Amos Gitai
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made during Gitai's self-imposed exile after his earlier documentary was censored; House was his artistic return and his most radical formal experiment.
The 'live' quality Gitai achieves—people talking past each other in real time—predicted decades of 'both sides' documentary filmmaking while refusing its false balance.
FR
