Notes on 8 mm. Works from the 1970s

The 8MM film works digitalized decades later. The low quality was there from the start. Based on one take, they thus unify the duration of the activities performed with the shooing time. It was a common artistic preference of that period. I was in my teens at the time, in the very early stages of shaping my poetic language. The Material Film and the Body Art concepts from the mid-'70s influenced me by their concern with a literal and factual attitude. The figures performing and assisting in these works are colleagues from this period: Efrat Nathan, Michal Na'Aman, Yair and Alon Garbuz, and the composer Aryeh Shapira. The camera belonged to Raffi Lavie, and his hut in the orange grove in Ramat-Gan was the edit place.

The central theme in these works is the body and the limitation imposed on its movement. This issue has been addressed again in my work throughout most of the years to follow. In "Golem" this is the attempt to draw on a wall a precise circle without the help of devices. In "Roof", the figure must advance in a sitting position while resting on the palms of the hands, on the edge of a 6m high roof. The motion of the cone paper hat on her head externalizes an arc wider than the small arc concealed in the inner concussion occurring in the body advancing in this seated position on the roof railing. In "Flexion" the figure is busy searching for necessary objects at hand (book, dictionary, stationery, paper) without changing her position on the bed. Here, the motion of the cone hat also externalizes the tiny movement of the figure on the bed. In "Kozo Okamoto Pumpkin Head" the figure is dressed in a rigid plastic outfit that hinders her motion and prevents the accurate performance she tries to do with a ball and rhythm drum. In "Basket-Bread-Newspaper" too, the body and the restriction of movement are at the center: Batsheva Getter, short of breath and with a drooping shoulder, is struggling up the street with a heavy shopping basket, a loaf of bread, and a newspaper that she passes from hand to hand as she tries to settle her breath. The camera follows her at a fixed distance, stopping or moving on when she resumes her slow pace.