Category: Film / Video

Commissioned by Steirischer Herbst Festival 2020

The film examines the roles of silence, silencing and listening in the politics of dominant national narratives and how socially accepted violence is constructed through the disciplines of witness testimonies in historical trauma studies and in post-colonial and post-Holocaust discourses.

The artwork reconstructs three piano performances of the 20th century avant-garde: John Cage’s seminal work 4’33 in the late 1970s, where the intended silence was interrupted by an Israeli audience’s spontaneous performance of a nationalistic song; the radical composer George Antheil’s confrontation of his audience with a loaded gun in a concert in Budapest in 1923; and the first documented art performance of a piano demolition by the Wiener Gruppe in 1959. The three events function as hallucinatory allegories to contemplate the complex dynamics between the historical witness and society.

This triangulation of performer-sound-audience is reflected in a recent real-life event, where the testimony of an Israeli soldier as a violent perpetrator in the occupied territories, was discredited and denied by the state. This negation of culpability sidelines the story from the real victims and exposes the soldier’s moral ambiguity.

Written and Directed by Dani Gal
Camera: Itay Marom
Produced by: Kirberg Motors and Blood Mountain Projects
With: Itay Tiran and Dulcie Smart

Dani Gal in conversation with David Riff
Steirischer Herbst – Paranoia TV, 2020

Commissioned by Staatsgalerie Stuttgart on the occasion of the Bauhaus centennial, this staged television-style interview with Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe depicts the architect late in his life, confronted with his time as the final Bauhaus director, and his refusal to take a political stance amid pressure from the newly established Nazi government and communist students. The interviewer confronts Mies about his unwillingness to take a political position amid pressure both from communist students and the newly established Nazi government. Focusing on the events that led to the closure of the Bauhaus by the Gestapo in 1933, including Mies’s meeting with Alfred Rosenberg, his meeting with a young Gestapo officer in an attempt to keep the Bauhaus open under the Nazi regime, and his interest to continue his practice in Germany, the film questions cultural notions of modern architecture as an aesthetic reflection of progressive humanistic values.

By examining the nature of the relationship between Mies and the Nazis, insight is gained not only into the climate of the last days of the Bauhaus and its clash with fascist forces, but also into historic and contemporary principles of morality.

A fictionalized account of Wiesenthal and Speer’s meetings, that uses dialogue based on their letters. Speer first wrote to Wiesenthal in 1974 after his release from prison, in an effort to accept some responsibility for his war crimes. His public admission of his moral misconduct impressed Wiesenthal, and they began a correspondence that lasted until the early 1980s.

Despite their profoundly contrasting personal histories, they shared common interests—both were trained architects and successful authors. They pursued their unlikely friendship despite controversy and occasionally visited each other. Gal takes this strange relationship as a starting point for a meditation on how historical events are recalled, recorded, and distorted.

Commissioned for the 54. Venice Biennale

On April 11, 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann began. He was tried in an Israeli court and charged for committing crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was convicted and executed by hanging on May 31, 1962. On a night, between the 31st of May and the 1st of June 1962 shortly after the execution and the cremation of the body, a group of police officers sailed on a boat 6 miles off the shores of Jaffa port. Their mission was to scatter Eichmann’s ashes into the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The purpose of the highly secret mission was to ensure that there could be no future memorial and that no nation would serve as his final resting place. Based on an interview Dani Gal made with Michael Goldman, a Holocaust survivor who was one of the policemen on the boat, the film re-enacts the scene of the group of policemen sailing on a dark foggy night with Eichmann’s ashes in a jug of milk.

Camera: Itay Marom
Production: Jonathan Dowek
With: Yaron Mottola, Moris Cohen and John Fulton

Book of the Machines, Dani Galʼs new film, explores the fear of and fascination with the other by looking at automatons, primitive mechanical robots popular in the 19th century. Close-ups of these exoticized figures and their racial stereotypes are accompanied by excerpts from Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon (1872), which describes a society that has banned all machines after recognizing that they might take over the world. This resonates with today’s debates on AI and its potentially demonic powers.

Written and Directed by Dani Gal
Camera: Itay Marom
Voice: Alix Martin

Eleven American foreign policy experts from think tanks, military offices and the CIA, describe their perspectives on American foreign policy. These conversations, which revolve around such issues as Islam, the military industrial complex, American wars, cyber security and the notion of freedom, provide a soundtrack for scenes from an entire day in Washington D.C. The camera gaze over the city is mundane and banal. Monuments, nature and people, are given the same focus. This manner of filming the city provides an alternative to the iconic imperialistic cinematic representation of the American Capital.

By juxtaposing these non-iconic images with oppositional voices of strategy makers, those who promote certain agendas to the U.S. government, and others who harshly criticize it, the audience can take a distanced and critical view of America as a dominant hegemony or as an empire in decline. Electromagnetic fields in the city were recorded during filming as sound and then mixed with the general ambiance of the scenes. These sounds, which can only be heard using a special device, serve as a metaphor for the hidden forces that create what is called American power.

The video documents Hedy Epstein during her visit to South Germany where she returned to her village and stayed for two nights in the house she was displaced from as a Jewish child in 1939.

In the interview, Epstein is talking about her childhood in Nazi Germany, returning to Germany after the war, the Palestinians right of return, her attempts to enter the Gaza strip, her activities in the West bank, Hunger strikes and more.

The Video documents a visit to the Palestinian village Al Midya. The village which is located in the west bank, was used by the Israeli film director Ram Loevy, as a set for his film Hirbet Khiza (1978). This film was an adaptation of the controversial classic novella by the same name, by the Israeli author S. Yizhar, in which he describes the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their village by the Israeli Army during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

In the visit, Gal interviewed locals who remembered the film production, and the controversy surrounding its production. He screened the original film with a performance by a live translator, the rapper and actor Tamer Nafar, for the villagers. The resulting documentation was edited according to the original film narrative.