Freedom shall be our shroud.
Flavius Joseph
Whether he is directing fiction or documentaries, Amos Gitai questions, listens : as Serge Toubiana remarked, his role is that of watchman or a look-out, observing the field where the powers-that-be act out their plans. Gitai has too much respect for the real to impose a particular point of view. His rigor, in confronting the trap of images, the liberty he takes in his approach, have created serious difficulties for him in Israel : serious enough that he chose to avoid TV censorship by keeping a large distance from it for over ten years, between 1982 and 1993, a period during which he continued to work as a critic. It was towards the end of this period that he created in Italy, first in Gibellina in 1992, and then at the 55th Venice Biennale, in June of 1993, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness.
This theatrical performance of spoken and sung oratorio, borrows for the most part, from The War of the Jews, where the historian Flavius Joseph tells the story of the destruction of the Jewish sovereignty by the Roman empire during the first century BC. Amos Gitai has always appreciated the complexity of this work. Because Flavius Joseph, as his name indicates, has a foot on both sides. Son of an important family of religious clerics, he is active in the first Judeo-Roman war as commander in chief of the Jewish troops in Galilee. Captured, he manages to save his life by working for the Roman Empire - an empire, which did not exclude, quite to the contrary, the glorification of oppressed peoples. Following in Joseph's footsteps, Gitai went off to Massada to film, where the ruins of the fortress defended by the last Jewish patriots stands. According to the historian, who is our sole source concerning these events, the besieged Jews committed suicide after a resistance movement that went on for three years in order to escape forced slavery. In this dialogue that shouts through the centuries and is orchestrated by Gitai, the voices echo, murmur and clamor, sing, make music, move from one language to another, embodying one power, then the other, occasionally clouding over the lines between the two : in this rustling of voices where French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arab and English echo and answer each other, how can one possibly situate an identity ? Seven narrators embody the exiles from the different countries represented in the story. Four of them take turns speaking the words of the main actors. Amongst them are Jérôme Koenig (who will be playing the role he created at Gibellina). Jeanne Moreau will join him for this unique occasion, first at the 2009, Avignon Festival at the Carrière de Boulbon, then in the Odeon theater's Grande salle.
