Fragments* Jerusalem
Six hours in duration and still unfinished, Fragments* Jerusalem weaves the story of one man's family through five
centuries of Jerusalem's history. But, in the telling, the film becomes more - it becomes a rich examination of
film itself and its relationship with memory. At one point, the director Ron Havilio states with regret, "I
did not manage to interview her (his grandmother) on time. Things she told me are fading from my memory."
You get the impression that Havilio conceived of this project as a five year old. Chapter One (one of seven chapters
finished so far) named Mamila, an area of Jerusalem, shows footage of Havilio as a small boy and his family on
an African holiday - you get to see many far flung places when your father is part of the Mossad - while Yiddish
Mambo music plays, flickering images of a 1950s Jerusalem, Jewish and Arab shops existing side by side, strike
me as a visual cross between Brooklyn and Paris. Elsewhere, the Champs Elysees itself takes over the screen, lit
up beautifully at night, while Edith Piaf sings amongst the din of traffic noise.
"I look at Jerusalem first in the time dimension," says Havilio. "And second, in the space dimension.
But it's not an objective point of view. My space dimension is different from the places I've been to outside of
Jerusalem looking back at Jerusalem -- Istanbul, Paris, Africa."
I've never been to Jerusalem. And yet I feel as if I could not get lost there, so thorough is Havilio's exploration
of the city. I can now close my eyes, and picture the streets - such is the power of the film's images, combined
with the richness of the music, and Havilio's poetic, sensual, and very personal narration. "Cool air rises
from the deep cellars beneath the pavement," he says, while you see the sun rays shining, penetrating into
a damp looking, dark, and narrow cobblestone alley, with fresh food vendors lining the sides. Maybe it's the incredible
length that forces the movie, the city so deep into the consciousness - whatever it is, I seem to forget where
I am, that Vancouver waits for me outside. Imagine the beauty - the early morning traffic moving across the screen
in the shadow of a great stone wall richly captured in the early light in a bluish-gray hue, with greenery along
the bottom of the wall, and the top of the wall, the upper part of the screen, lined in gold from the flood of
the rising sun.
"In Berlin, it was winter, it was February," says Havilio, during our interview in the gorgeous Sun Room
on the 14th floor of the historic Hotel Vancouver, "Some people told me they just went in, and they didn't
want it to finish. They just wanted it to continue after the six hours were finished. They wanted to stay in those
streets of Jerusalem." (EDIT)
"The movie is advancing. You can't stop it." (EDIT)
City of Loss
"The palm tree is no longer there," Havilio notes, upon comparing a series of pictures of the same spot
taken over great periods of time. It seems an insignificant detail, but Jerusalem is a city that notices just one
tree missing. It is Jerusalem versus Time played out again and again, the rest of the Earth a bit player in this
great drama. Accounts of the city ravaged by a plague in 1832, an earthquake in 1927, the War of Independence in
the '40s, and the ongoing wars between the Jews and the Arabs ever since -- the tip of the iceberg.
In a travelogue, the great French writer Flaubert writes that "a curse seems to float above this city."
Yet, in spite of it all, Jerusalem absorbs it all, and seems to go on unfazed. "No country has been more destroyed
over and over again in wars than this one," says Havilio, in the film's narration, "and despite all that,
no other country has so preserved its ancient heritage."
"BUT we have to hurry if we wish to enjoy our eyes, behold, progress that great deceiver…" Fragments*
Jerusalem presents a strange duality - on the one hand, you are presented with a Jerusalem that has been the same
for centuries upon centuries. But it is also a city that is disappearing, that has already vanished. "The
city has a very modern side to it," says Havilio. "But I was more interested in trying to reconstruct
and revive part of the past. Jerusalem is continuing to change. There was a screening just two months ago in Jerusalem,
and some people came to me after the screening and said, 'Wow, that's the Jerusalem I remember.' And suddenly,
I realized that it's gone. This Jerusalem is not any more. It's changing very fast. So, of course, what I've kept
is a particular Jerusalem. What I've tried to keep on the film, and record, is a timeless Jerusalem. A Jerusalem
which has this quality of so much history, so much past, so much memory -- that's the one I was looking for."
This timeless, unchanging Jerusalem provides the backdrop for a modern, living Jerusalem. The most surreal scenes
include the strange presence of a municipal cleaning crew at 4 in the morning, and a carnival at night seen immediately
after scenes of rubble - there's an incongruity to seeing merry amusements with the abandoned, burnt out buildings
in the background. The modern Jerusalem dies again and again, and the old one lives forever. How does a city that
has been waiting for the end ever since its beginning invest in the future?
(EDIT)
Like Music Like Wine
If anything conveys the wonderful pluralism and the unique geography that was Jerusalem, it is the music. In Fragments,
music comes in again and again to provide relief -- so often hauntingly beautiful Arabic, Turkish, and Greek music
- and other music, all mixed up - half Yiddish, half Western, altogether untraceable in space and time.
"It's hypnotic," says Havilio. "It also gives a feeling -- because finally, though many stories
are sad and the hardships of life and war and destruction -- the music makes you want to continue to live. The
music has a life power … Different music has different meaning for me, personally, in my own life. They are connected
to my own personal experiences, and special moods that I have been in. And which I am reminded of. So I've used
a lot of different types of music in the film -- in the same way that I've used a lot of different kinds of images.
And I've tried to unify it in the theme. I've used photos from the family album, photos documenting the city, archive
footage, personal films, drawings, travelogues. In the same way, I'm using the music as a document itself, as a
powerful experience in itself. Sometimes, it fits the image and sometimes it contradicts the image. But it's there,
and you can't miss it. It's not too support, it's not illustration -- it's one of the basic elements. This is why,
in this case, it would have been much easier for me to take a composer, and get him to compose music for the film.
But that wouldn't work, because I needed the authentic old records -- the music which has the quality of an archive
footage, the quality of an old photo, something which is alive and is no more. These people are dead. Most of the
people who make the music in my film are not alive anymore."
When I hear the music and I close my eyes, the past is almost real again.
"Because music is extremely powerful." (EDIT)
The Kingdom of the Shadows
(EDIT) At least 70 hours of film were shot specifically for this movie. Seven chapters are finished, and three
more are expected. I ask Havilio, when he has all this footage, what does he do with the leftover material that
can't be included in the film? Does it become someone else's fragment?
"I look at all those images as fragments, memories," says Havilio. "So whatever I shot becomes,
immediately after I've shot it, archive footage. It's not like when you shoot for fiction, so you have a story,
and you're trying to realize a story. It's almost timeless, but it is supposed to be timeless. In a sense, I tried
to go back to the origins of cinema, like Lumiere. At the beginning of cinema -- what is film? Film is a few seconds
of memory recorded, a few seconds of reality recorded, out of hours, days, months, years of living, you see. In
fact, the film I should have done it one hour of black, and then three images, and then another hour of black,
and then three images. But nobody would see the film. The idea is that black is like the silence in music, so that
there's no image. Nothing. Black is forgotten. Now most of the past is forgotten. It's gone."
"I feel a strange fascination with ruins, stones, and the silent world of the past," says Havilio in
the film. Jerusalem unfolds in a million shades of gray. Cracked, yellowy photos fill the screen. A whole life
vanishes, and only a journal survives. 1992 -- Jerusalem covered under a blanket of snow - where does the white
go, when the snow melts?
It's overwhelming to contemplate.
"It's over. Any minute, we speak now. She was here, she brought us into this room, just before, we were in
the elevator, it's gone. You'll forget it. You won't remember it."
But I might remember the room.
"You may remember this room a bit longer. And as long as you keep the cassette, you'll have some more to keep
on remembering. But the cassette will eventually disappear to, 'cause it's magnetic."
Ashes of Time
It is the 1920s. Passers-by still throw pebbles at Absalom's tomb. Photos blend together. The same place - it's
a painting centuries old, it's a recent photograph, it's a yellowed old photograph. Is there anything to photograph
that has not already been photographed? At the very same time of day, in the very same place, with the sun in an
identical place in the sky, at the same temperature, with the same breeze, someone else was taking the same photograph.
Where are we? Today is a wide place.
"The streets have become entangled in the confusion of the ancient layers of construction," the narration
continues.
Everything changes. Nothing changes. Everything remains the same. Nothing remains the same.
We cannot remember yet we never forget.
(EDIT)
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