Arts & Entertainment
Combat Zone
Oscar-nominated Israeli film probes soldiers' fears.
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish News
oseph Cedar's learning curve has
been impressive. The New York-
born Israeli filmmaker has made
only three feature films to date, although
each has been the Israeli representative to
the Academy Awards.
From his intelligent but uneven first
feature Time of Favor (2000), through
his sophomore effort Campfire (2004), to
his latest film Beaufort (2007) is a series
of quantum leaps in assurance, control
of tone, creative use of screen space and
sheer cinematic intelligence. (Beaufort,
which earlier this year was the first Israeli
film to gain Oscar nominee status since
1984, lost out to The Counterfeiters, the
Austrian entry about Jewish forgers forced
to aid the Nazis.)
Cedar's steady improvement is not an
accident.
"Every film is the result of some lessons
and conclusions that are drawn from the
one made before it:' the 39-year-old Cedar
says. He offers as an example the transi-
tion from Campfire to Beaufort.
"Campfire is very accurate, almost too
accurate [in its depiction of the settlement
milieu]; and because we cut it in the cam-
era, when we got to the editing there was
almost nothing left to do:' Cedar explains.
"I felt that on my next film I needed to
be a little more flexible. When we began
talking about Beaufort, I knew we'd have
a larger budget. I felt I could have done
something more controlled or tried some-
thing riskier."
He opted for the latter, creating an
intensely claustrophobic film about
an Israeli unit defending the medieval
Crusader fortress of Beaufort, inside the
Lebanon border, in the days before the
Israel Defense Forces' withdrawal in 2000.
Working with a small cast in an almost
suffocating confined location — the mod-
em fortifications built atop the ancient
walls — Cedar creates a profoundly dis-
turbing portrait of young men walking a
knife-edge between death and fear.
The confining nature of the location
actually was a liberating experience for
the Orthodox Cedar, who is married to
an Israeli journalist and has two small
children. "Actually, the single location gave
me more flexibility:' he says. "It made me
more willing to explore a story with some
Pho to cou rtesy Kino In te rna tiona l
j
The combat film Beaufort is a dramatization of an Israeli military mission to
evacuate an ancient Southern Lebanese mountaintop fortress held for 18 years.
risk. There was something intuitive about
Indeed, reading the novel, which won
the way the film progresses. We were cre-
Israel's highest literary prize, is a very
ating until the final day of editing."
different experience from seeing the film.
The flexibility didn't start during shoot-
The novel — which has been published
ing. It really began in the writing process.
by Delacorte ($24) in the U.S. as Beaufort,
Beaufort marks the first time that Cedar
translated by Evan Fallenberg — explores
has written a screenplay in collaboration,
the lives of the soldiers in the fortress in
and he readily admits that working with
great detail, individualizes them with a lot
award-winning journalist Ron Leshem
of backstory, frequently taking them off
was a different experi-
the mountaintop. By con-
ence than writing alone.
trast, the film never strays
Although the film's
farther than a few hundred
credits say that their
yaids from the fortifica-
script is an adapta-
tions.
tion of Leshem's novel
Although all three of
Im Yesh Gan Eden ("If
Cedar's feature films are
There Is a Garden of
based to some degree in
Eden"), in fact, Cedar
fact, Beaufort is by far the
says, the screenplay
most tied to historical
came first, or almost
events, in part because of
simultaneously.
a writing process in which,
"It's not an adapta-
he says, "Ron had accu-
tion in the conventional
mulated so much research
sense he says. "The
material about the story
project really started
that we had to digest what
with a newspaper piece Filmmaker Joseph Cedar
he had rather than invent."
Ron wrote, about 6,000
As a result, he says, "All
words long. We met and decided to make
the events are as real as a film version can
it into a film, and while we wrote the
be, but the characters are fictitious. The
screenplay together, Ron was writing the
three television journalists in the film are
novel, too. But what you have is the same
real people portraying themselves, and we
historical events in two very different ver-
even took the texts they speak from actual
sions, with very different emphases, the
reporting they had done at the time."
same names but not the same characters:"
The emotions the soldiers are feeling in
the film also are very real ones for Cedar.
He was stationed in southern Lebanon for
nine months between 1987 and 1989. He
was barely 18.
"It is only as someone in his 30s that I
have begun to understand he says. "As
a young person, I had no idea what was
happening to me. The actors in the film
are mostly that age, so I tried in a short
period of time, in the few months we
were on location and shooting, to allow
the characters to go through the process
I went through over some 15 years, a pro-
cess that goes from denying your fear [of
dying] to admitting your fear, to accepting
it as a survival tool."
Beaufort has already been on the festi-
val circuit, winning Cedar the Silver Bear
for best direction from the Berlin Film
Festival last year. Although the film has
been well received critically, there have
been a few naysayers who object to the
presentation of the enemy as, essentially,
an invisible presence, or to the film's lack
of rhetorical contemplation of the moral-
ity of the conflict. Cedar shrugs off these
criticisms as beside the point.
"One of the basic choices we took was
that we were placing the entire story in
the outpost," he says. "We don't show the
soldiers' civilian lives; we don't show the
enemy. Not showing the enemy helps us
to examine the randomness, the inevita-
bility of the situation they're in. I like the
limitations. [They] forced us to reach for
the heart of the story. I see it as a story of
survival. We could have made an entirely
different film. Ron wrote the novel as an
almost entirely different story"
The story he chose to tell is the one
that your average infantryman knows.
"Soldiers at the ground level don't have the
whole picture he says. "They're closed in
both physically and mentally. At best, they
hope to survive."
Another Jewish combat veteran-turned-
filmmaker, Samuel Fuller, said it best in
the closing lines of his World War II mas-
terpiece, The Big Red One. Fuller wrote,
"The only glory in war is surviving, if you
know what I mean." ❑
Beaufort screens 7 p.m. Friday and
Saturday and 4 and 7 p.m. Sunday,
April 25-27, at the Detroit Film
Theatre in the Detroit Institute of
Arts. $6.50-$7.50. (313) 833-4005
or www.tickets.dia.org .
April 24 • 2008
B21