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Director Yigal Bursztyn’s experimental short is based on Baruch Spinoza’s book of the same title. Spinoza dubbed his philosophy, ‘the geometrical method’; as such, and quite fittingly the film’s most visually prominent element is indeed geometry. Bursztyn explores four scenes as they play out, simultaneously, on four balconies in the same building. The camera shoots the events statically, and with no movement whatsoever coupled with the passage of time, Bursztyn uses jump cuts to take us from one setting to the next. The building, itself, is a microcosm of Israeli society whose members occupy each of the four balconies: there’s the solitary author, the young woman and her spouse, the large family who live with their grandmother, the elderly couple; and later, also some undocumented Arabs with IDF soldiers on their tail who eventually detain and deport them.
The film’s stylised look and feel gives it the air of a silent comedy – a clear nod to Jacques Tati’s work, whereas the use of balconies as cinematic frames is also a shoutout to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, Rear Window.
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For more information about the rights holders, please visit the relevant collection page, or contact the Jerusalem Cinematheque – Israeli Film Archive (RA) offices.
We have the utmost respect for all rights holders’ copyright and put great efforts to track down any and all intellectual property owners for the purpose of seeking and obtaining permission to use their materials featured on the website.
Any and all materials are used in accordance with clause 27a of the 2007 Copyright Act. If you believe that your rights as intellectual property and copyright owners of any material featured on this website have been compromised, then you may contact the Israeli Film Archive via email with a cease-and-desist notice, requesting that the material in alleged copyright infringement no longer be used. When contacting the archive, please state the merit to your copyright ownership claim, as well as your full name, email address, and telephone number, with a link to the relevant webpage.