In 1980, Amos Gitaï was commissioned by Israeli television to produce a documentary about a house in West Jerusalem, telling the story of its inhabitants – Palestinian before 1948, Israeli afterwards. The result, House, was so incendiary that it was banned from broadcast and Gitaï went into artistic exile in France. In 1998, he made A House in Jerusalem, a follow-up to House that checked in with the subjects of the first film while widening the scope to their family members and neighbours, and he completed the trilogy in 2005 with News From House/News From Home, making a sort of Arab/Israeli version of Granada Television’s Up! series.
In 2023, Gitaï was invited by Wajdi Mouawad, the Lebanese-Canadian playwright most famous for Incendies (adapted for film by a pre-Hollywood Denis Villeneuve in 2010) who is now artistic director of Paris’s théâtre national – to adapt the trilogy for the stage. This production transferred to London’s Barbican Theatre for two performances in September, and Gitaï’s film trilogy played alongside it at the Barbican Cinema.
In House, as Serge Daney noted, “Gitaï wants this house to be both a symbol and something very concrete.” At first, the focus is on the concrete; formally, these are quite conventional documentaries, not essay films. All three films are largely successions of monologues delivered on the spot, in the house, on the street, on archaeological sites in Jerusalem, and finally in a Palestinian house in the hills outside Jerusalem.
The films present a sort of cross-section of Israel/Palestine society. The Jews in the films are – unexpectedly – mostly not Eastern European Holocaust survivors but Zionist migrants from Iraq, Algeria, the US, and Western Europe who made aliyah at various points between the 1920s and 1970s; the last ones to arrive were inspired to make the move by the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They tell Gitaï about the logistics and finances involved with moving into the house – how the house was “abandoned” during the Nakba, requisitioned by the Israeli government, and sold to them; how they borrowed money to buy it, split it with other families, and so on – as well as feeling spiritually fulfilled in Israel, in a Jewish homeland away from the consumerism of Western societies. It would almost be compelling if it weren’t for their lack of feeling for the Palestinians they displaced. One woman even says that she has no desire to change history.
At the same time, the house is in the process of being renovated, and the film pays close attention to the Palestinian workers who are working on it. This work puts them in a contradictory position: they rely on work in Israel for money as they denounce its expropriation of Palestinian property and territory. Menacingly – though he seems not to realise it – the Jewish contractor tells Gitaï that he fired a Palestinian worker when he realised that he was taking part in anti-Israel protests.
It’s the Palestinian workers who tell Gitaï about the house’s former owner: a member of the Dajani family – one of Jerusalem’s four or five most prominent Arab families before the Nakba. Gitaï finds the owner, Dr. Mahmoud Dajani, and brings him to the house. It’s a remarkably sober moment, though no less chilling for it. Dajani points out the new additions that have been built and new houses on the street. He explains that he left after the Deir Yassin massacre. If he “abandoned” the house, as the Israelis put it, it was only under direct threat.
Unavoidably, the play’s house takes on provocative metaphorical dimensions which are only partly expressed in the films themselves. In A House In Jerusalem, Dajani’s son says that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like a house in which the Israelis have kicked out the Palestinians and then opened the window a tiny crack and said “Let’s talk.” Obviously, the Palestinians won’t talk until they’ve been let back into the house.
Not just the house but the film’s form also begins to feel symbolic – or maybe symptomatic. The monologue form is not always the most cinematically (or theatrically) compelling but it serves a function insofar as it mirrors the wider conflict: each side makes its case, speaking mostly to itself and maybe some imagined neutral arbiter of justice, but never to the other side, with whom there can be no dialogue.
Yet there’s more to it than that. As a Palestinian says in A House in Jerusalem, “Everybody says what they want but the truth exists.” What truth are they talking about? In the most ambiguous and compelling moments of the films and the play, a cross-cutting issue to the Israel/Palestine and Arab/Jew issues comes into focus: the dimension of class.
The fact emerges, eventually, that the neighbourhood the house is in was built in the late 19th century by German Templars and was occupied mainly by them and wealthy Arabs, the Dajani family among them. To some extent, the Dajanis have retained their status. Dr. Dajani’s son and his family appear to live in relative comfort in East Jerusalem and have obtained Canadian citizenship. A son now living in Amman is also mentioned; we are told he is wealthy enough to buy the original house – if the Israelis would ever sell to him. Gitaï also tracks down a Dajani relative who is downright glamorous, who lived much of her life in Lebanon and Kuwait and presents herself as a modern, secular, liberated woman. Though they are clearly the victims of grave injustice, the Dajanis seem to have landed on their feet.
The Palestinian stonecutters and their families stand in stark contrast. Decades after the Nakba, they are living a hand-to-mouth existence in small houses outside Jerusalem. The most devastating – and infuriating – moments are theirs. In A House In Jerusalem, the stonecutter from the original House describes finding his family’s land during the 1967 war and bringing a grape back for his father from their old tree. His father burst into tears. Later, near the end of the film, Gitaï interviews the family at their home. The son tells Gitaï that he has built a new home for his family but without the proper permits – which might actually be shakedowns from the Israeli military, police force, and planning office – and the Israeli government is threatening to demolish his house. “You’re making a film about the past,” he says, “but this is happening right now.”
The play drives this point home in a few ways. The first is staging. Two towers of scaffolding frame the stage, symbolising the house under construction, while in the centre of the stage, for the duration of the play, even as a succession of actors delivers their monologues around them, the Palestinian workers patiently chip away at stones. We can never forget that the house is not (or not only) the Promised Land but a place built on labour. Toward the end of the play, this point is driven home. A scrim drops down in front of the stage and Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker Reads and Asks” is projected onto it. The poem begins: “Who built Thebes with its seven gates? / Books say it was kings. / Did kings hew and haul the rock?” Finally, as the play ends, Dr. Dajani ruminates on stage as the final images of the original House are projected on a screen behind him: the stonecutters, working away.
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