Page - 118 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

solitude, the movement of the camera and light suggest that for Menachem home is a space of instability and isolation. By comparison, two of the wedding scenes feature lively, unpredictable camerawork, with the camera dizzyingly encircling the stage upon which Menachem and his band perform, alternat- ing direction and constantly changing in frame focus and size. The light is also brighter, warmer and inconstant. Camerawork and light coupled with the joy Menachem expresses in the shots indicate that the wedding acts as a space of emotional release. However, the relationship between the interior and exterior physical spaces is not so simple, and it is precisely in breaking down that rela- tionship between the home and the outside world that Madmony and Yacov convey the cinematic space as a manifestation of the inner struggle. One such moment of breakdown occurs in the third wedding scene, preceded by and in- tercut with Geula lying in the hospital with her health at its most critical. In the scene Menachem is on-stage singing about joy, but his eyes convey deep sor- row.28 The camera is situated frontally and low down, engulfed in the crowd of wedding guests, characterized by an unstable drifting and intensified by clinical lighting. Together these features create a sense of uncertainty and drowning and thereby enable us to resonate with Menachem’s pain but also to continue to understand the external physical space of the wedding as a site at which his inner space is renegotiated just as his pain is put into music, into art. The editing of the film serves to reconcile that inner space with time, creating a fab- ric in which his consciousness and personal relationships are blended into the present moment. Memory is no flashback but instead integrated into the inner reality of the character. It functions on one plane, as a united space in which Me- nachem can understand his past self and thereby renegotiate his relationship to the present and the future, for his daughter. A scene where Menachem’s deceased wife appears to him in the kitchen, as he sits alone, is crucial: there is no obvious aesthetic break between the two figures; it appears they share a single space (figs. 5 and 6). In preserving the unity of the two realities that the characters share – life and death – through one physical space, the film externalizes Menachem’s inner re- flection and reconciliation. This seamless outside-the-box perspective on space and time (as a united entity, contrary to logic) brings Madmony and Yacov’s work closer to that of Andrei Tarkovsky, for example, on a humble aesthetic level. In Geula the filmmakers shift the conflict to the personal experience of faith, rather than represent a more general(izing) and rather conventional narrative 28 The music in the film is the part of the narrative. In this particular scene Menachem’s song is a call for the “joy that does not depend on anything”. See Geula (Joseph Madmony / Boaz Yehonatan Yacov, IL 2018), 00:47:39–00:48:00. 118 | Milja Radovic www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1