On
October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur
Day. In Kippur, director Amos Weinraub Gitai
provides an autobiographical account of a small portion of
the war. He focuses on two reserve soldiers, Weinraub (played
by Liron Levo) and Ruso (played by Tomer Ruso). Ordered to
go to the front, they drive toward the Golan Heights, but
get so held up in traffic that they cannot reach the assigned
unit, so they accept a plea from Dr. Klauzner (played by Uri
Ran Klauzner) to drive him to the military hospital at Ramat
David. However that road is also blocked, so they end up forming
a medical rescue team. Lest anyone imagine that the film is
an Israeli counterpart of Saving
Private Ryan (1998), the mission is to evacuate
fighter pilots who have been shot down so that they can receive
treatment at the hospital. Whereas M*A*S*H (1970)
focused on events in a military hospital after the arrival
of wounded soldiers, Kippur goes directly to the battlefield,
where war is ongoing and, similar to the opening bird’s eye
scene of Regeneration
(1998), shows fields littered with corpses. However, Kippur
takes us directly to the bodies. We view horrors doubtless
similar to those that Henry Dunant saw at the Battle of Solverino
in 1859, inspiring him to form the Red Cross, the Israeli
counterpart of which is called the Red Star of David. We follow
the search for the survivors, who are given morphine, fed
intravenously, and have tourniquets applied, either on the
ground or in the helicopters that take the wounded to the
well-run if understaffed military hospital. Knowing that their
lives are in danger every day, the soldiers in the rescue
team bare their innermost thoughts -- the physician, for example,
misses his birthmother, who died of a broken heart because
he stayed with adoptive parents in Belgium when she emerged
from a concentration camp at the end of World War II. The
most poignant incident in the film occurs when a wounded soldier
is caught in the mud; the four stretcherbearers fall into
and get stuck in the mud, repeatedly dropping the wounded
soldier, who ultimately dies from the mishandling. After five
days, the helicopter used by the medical unit is shot down.
Those who survive are picked up by another helicopter, including
Weinraub and Ruso, who become patients at the hospital and
thus end their role in the war. If ever there was a film to
dramatize the barbarity of war, Kippur is the
one. How could any leader blithely go to war after seeing
the carnage in this film? By actual count, the three-week
war produced 12,581 deaths or soldiers missing in action plus
26,968 wounded. For his courage in expressing his views through
film over the last two decades, Gitai was censored and even
forced to leave Israel from 1982 to 1993. But his anti-war
sentiment evidently is not based on a philosophical commitment
so much as an empirical observation that war is a chaotic
enterprise that produces fatigue and sadness while accomplishing
little. As a movie that raises consciousness of the need for
peaceful ways of resolving conflict, the Political Film Society
has nominated Kippur, which began its Los Angeles
run on December 1, for an award as best film of 2000 on peace.
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