“On both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, the pain of others is denied”

In a Venice Film Festival that is rarely affected by the rise of extremes, both on and off screen, it is not in vain to turn to a specialist on the subject. A veteran of the Yom Kippur War (1973), an architect by training, and the author, at 73, of a body of work that mixes documentaries, fiction, theatre and visual arts in the same interrogative whirlwind, Amos Gitaï presents, out of competition, Why War, during the festival which ends on September 7.

With this film essay, freely adapted from Why war?the 1933 pamphlet bringing together the letters exchanged between physicist Albert Einstein and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in 1932, the Israeli filmmaker continues to believe in the powers of art and dialectics, as he opens up to Monde.

When did you discover the correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud?

During my doctorate in architecture, in Berkeley, in the United States [au milieu des années 1970]. I then left it aside for a long time, until I was hospitalized in January: I came across a copy of the book that belonged to my mother, and I felt the need to adapt it. The Savagery of October 7 [2023] – the rapes, the kidnappings… – was a big shock.

I think very often of Vivian Silver, burned alive in her home on Kibbutz Be’eri by Hamas. This 74-year-old woman was helping Gazan children get treatment in Israeli hospitals… Then the nightmarish destruction of Gaza, the tens of thousands of victims, the false belief of Netanyahu and his fanatical government that they can achieve anything by force… All this pushed me to realize Why War. I have never known such a destructive period, not even during the Yom Kippur War. However, since my first film, House [1980]I try to create areas of dialogue, in cinema as in theater.

What is the content of this dialogue?

In 1932, Albert Einstein, at the initiative of the League of Nations, approached Sigmund Freud to ask him a question: why do these intelligent animals, called humans, need to wage war? Why can’t they find solutions without killing? His position is almost Marxist, he denounces the military industry and big capital.

Freud responds by probing the depths of the human soul, split between two contradictory drives: to preserve and destroy, Eros and Thanatos… At first, he remains optimistic about the power of culture to work against war. Then he changes his mind, to the point of saying that it can do nothing, or almost nothing.

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