Published: 15 November 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Half a century on, The Big Dig is a landmark of Israeli cinema, both in terms of its technical innovations as well as its insights into Israeli society.
A few weeks ago, the Israeli Ministry of Transport announced yet another delay to the opening of the first Tel Aviv light rail Line (The Red line) that was scheduled to open in November. The light rail project, which has had many challenges, was approved in 1996 and the original opening was scheduled for 2012.
The deadline for the other two lines (Purple and Green) is 2027. According to a report by the daily business newspaper The Marker, there are 1300 active construction sites that block many of the Tel Aviv’s main roads and dramatically reduce parking spaces.
For decades, the residents of Tel Aviv have been feeling like the residents of Allenby Street who, in the 1969 satire The Big Dig, endure traffic jams, constant road work and a municipality in chaos.
In Ephraim Kishon’s film, which is being screened at JIFF next month, Kazimir Blaumilch, a mentally ill man with a digging compulsion, escapes from an asylum and begins digging a ditch in central Tel Aviv. After stealing a jackhammer and compressor, he proceeds to dig-up one of Tel Aviv's busiest traffic junctions in front of the legendary Mugrabi cinema.
City officials assume the dig is a part of the city’s plans and order the municipality and the police to help. Complaints from local residents, whose lives become a nightmare due to the noise and traffic jams, lead to infighting among city departments.
To complete the work before the upcoming municipal elections, the city sends an army of construction workers and heavy equipment to help Blaumilch, transforming an annoyance into a disaster.
By the time city officials realise what’s happening, it’s too late: Allenby Street is connected to the Mediterranean Sea and a canal is created. The mayor declares, in a grand opening ceremony, that Tel Aviv has been turned into the “Venice of the Middle East”.
Beside capturing the noise and traffic chaos that have been part of Tel Aviv in the past 60 years, Kishon’s film captures brilliantly some of characteristics of Israeli culture: disorganisation, “plan as you go”, obsessive entrepreneurship, blame game in failure and fighting for credit in success. Some of those characteristics are what helped make Israel the “start-up nation” and others have made daily life in Israel a “municipal disaster” (a term from the movie).
However, the making of the film itself was proof that there was room for civic professionalism and excellence in modern Israel. Kishon insisted that Allenby Street and a 30-metre-long canal be constructed in Herzliya Studios.
The massive studio set allowed Kishon an optimal use of the cameras, enabling the first use of crane and dolly tracking shots in Israeli cinema history. In doing so, he brought a touch of Hollywood and launched a revolution in film production in Israel.
Kishon, a Holocaust survivor born in Budapest, emigrated to Israel in 1949 to escape the Hungarian Communist regime. Having arrived without any knowledge of Hebrew, he mastered the language so quickly that by 1952, he began writing a satirical column in the Hebrew daily Ma'ariv.
He wrote the column for about 30 years, and during the first two decades published a new column almost every day. The script of The Big Dig was based on a satirical short story he wrote for the column in 1952 - only three years after he arrived in Israel.
Kishon’s entry into cinema was an immediate success. In 1964, he wrote and directed his first film Sallah Shabati. A comedy about the chaos of immigration and resettlement in an Israeli transit camp, the movie achieved international success, including a nomination for the 1964 Oscars in the category of Best Foreign Language Film, and winning a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film. The movie also introduced Chaim Topol to international audiences.
This success in the context of the Israeli government’s mistreatment of immigrants in the 1950s can still teach us a lot about the roots of the Israeli spirit of entrepreneurship and also the mistrust many Israelis still feel towards the government, even when they have been successful in their own lives.
Kishon wrote and directed three more movies before his death in 2005. The most successful was The Policeman (1970), which he based on the small role of the policeman who tried to control the crowd in The Big Dig.
In an ironic historic twist, as Kishon’s popularity declined in Israel in the late 1970s, his work started achieving huge success in (West) Germany. In Germany alone, sales of his books have reached 34 million, and counting. A Monopoly game based on The Big Dig and the struggle against bureaucracy is still a bestseller in Germany.
This is the first year that JIFF has featured a vintage Israeli film. I can’t think of any better movie to do it with. It is a film that, more than 50 years after its release, is still relevant and funny, captures the Israeli essence so cleverly and also launched a revolution in film production in Israel.
Photo: Chaim Topol, playing mentally ill escapee Blaumilch, in The Big Dig, from 1969
