© Foundation Munio Gitai, Haifa

Munio Weinraub and Al Mansfeld, Ramat Hadar Housing, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 1959

© Foundation Munio Gitai, Haifa

Still from "Devarim," 1998. Amos Gitai is seated on couch. Directed by Amos Gitai

   November 2008 Field Guide

William Eggleston

Anton Kannemeyer

The Brussels Dream

Lynne Marsh

Frances Stark

Donald Rodney

Oranges and Sardines

Renzo Martens

Dóra Maurer

Sharon Lockhart

Stephan Balkenhol

Terence Gower

Jacques Bedel

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An exhibition opening this month in Munich relates the story of a famous father and his son and, in the process, paints an intriguing portrait of modern-day Israel itself. The Bauhaus trained architect Munio Weinraub (1909–1970) was one of the most important figures during the establishment of Israeli statehood, designing the nation’s first schools, residential homes, and kibbutzes. And his son, Amos Gitai, is just as accomplished—he’s often called the most important Israeli director of his generation, having received international acclaim for House (1978) and Kadosh (1999), which with both humor and poetry explore the dissonance of Israeli life and its realities of occupation and near-constant war. While the exhibition “Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai—Architecture and Film in Israel” delineates Weinraub’s and Gitai’s achievements in very different fields, it also reveals their point of convergence.

Gitai had originally aimed for a life closer to his father’s, studying architecture in Haifa, where he was born in 1950. But when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, he joined the army. Soon after, his helicopter was shot down by a Syrian missile and Gitai made a documentary about the crash and his fellow survivors, using a super-8 mm camera his mother, a Zionist activist, had given him. It was then that he left architecture behind. “I decided that I wanted to relate to the experiences I was going through in a more direct way than architecture,” he has reflected, “and that brought me to making films.”

Gitai’s documentaries and feature films have continually cast homes and buildings as microcosms of Israeli and Middle Eastern society, while exploring themes like exile and homeland, religion and civil society. His 1980 documentary House, which first brought him international attention, focuses on a building in West Jerusalem, portraying loss and reoccupation through the people who live there. In A House in Jerusalem and News from Home/News from House, Gitai explores the history of one dwelling over 25 years, examining the painful Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it exists within and outside its walls.

Although Weinraub’s buildings were tied to the beginnings of the modern Israeli state, his son’s films present a second, more self-critical era, one in which a plurality of experiences—Israeli and Palestinian, European and Middle Eastern—are examined. Still, the social aims that underlined his father’s architectural work remain. “I think the best films are the ones that start when the screening is over; they give us material, they work on our imagination,” Gitai has said. “They provoke us to reinterpret.” The same could be said of Gitai and his father, who have helped establish the aesthetics and identity of a country, a process of self-definition that continues to this day.

Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai—Architecture and Film in Israel,” Nov. 6–Feb. 8, Pinakothek Der Moderne–Architektur, Munich, pinakothek.delpinakothek–der–moderne/ "Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.