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Coalitzia, video film, 2006. Trailer. from Elad Larom on Vimeo.



The project "Coalitzia" consist a six chapter story which formulates one theme. A garbage man in Amsterdam finds by no coincidence a gun, and looks for its owner which reveals to be a key figure in town. We, like the main character, are not fully presiving the motives of that nonsense search except the garbage man's curiosity in power. The format is black and white video which inscribes style wise with the Neo Realism movement of the 60's and 70's and in that since misleading and timeless. "Coalition" has, like its name many layers of meanings from the name of the main character to the broader perception of the word - an endless playful game between the micro and macro world, between a real and fantasy and between truth and lie. "Coalition" is a craving for times that are gone. Times when cinema had a real social-political rule and in that sense, it is conceptually self aware: homage of looking at the past and mirroring the present The media It seems at the moment that our world of defining media has collapsed in cultural sense. As technology advance, the media change and the cultural value follows. Now is the time when all are artist: new music records are produced in private homes on private computers, movies are made by millions on small hand cameras, reality became fiction and fiction reality, a world of images –it seems like everybody in the western culture is a potential artist. The increasing value of the individual created an enormous inflation in the objects of art, an inflation that no personal individual can cope with and never the less the cultural market. The best example for that is the wide and enormous range of information that is available on the internet. That information revolution our society went through is still unperceived in all the social and political aspects. The individual world crashes under hundreds of television channels which provide, on the surface, a paradise of information, but on the deeper level a "social control holocaust".


Coalitzia, Chapter 1, The hermit, Video, 2006. from Elad Larom on Vimeo.




Coalitzia, Two mirrors, Video, 2006. from Elad Larom on Vimeo.







A lost world of media
Quatre cents coups, Les (1959) François Truffaut:
Antoine Doinel is a Parisian adolescent. His parents do not show much interest in him. He skips school to go to the movies and play with his friends. He discovers his mother has a lover. Antoine steals a typewriter, which leads to his suspension from school.

Accattone (1961) Pier Paolo Pasolini:
Pasolini's first film is a painfully realistic study of a pimp in Rome. Vittorio Accattone has never worked a day in his life, and has apparently made a good living prostituting his female companion, Maddalena. But her arrest begins his decline; hungry, he begs from churches and even visits his estranged wife and son. When Stella, a lovely and unbelievably innocent peasant worker, enters his life, Accattone tries to find a way, honest or not, to bring back good fortune...

Uccellacci e uccellini(1966) Pier Paolo Pasolini:
On an empty road, an old man is walking with his son. They meet a crow that can speak. They are changed into monks and Saint Francois sent them to preach for hawks and sparrows. A reflexion about idealism.

Bande à part (1964) Jean-Luc Godard:
Two crooks with a fondness for old Hollywood B-movies convince a languages student to help them commit a robbery. Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (1969) Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Unusual gangster story, in which a small-time pimp Franz, who is torn between his mistress and Bruno the gangster sent after him by the syndicate that he has refused to join. Things are turned on their head when Franz and Bruno become friends, to the point that they even share Franz's girlfriend Joanna. But Joanna soon becomes bored of Bruno, and when he plots a bank robbery, she reports it to the police before Bruno's scheme to kill her can succeed. Bruno is shot dead by the police, but the lovers manage to escape.

Signe du lion, Le (1959) Eric Rohmer:
Director Eric Rohmer was a founding father of French cinema's New Wave and Le Signe Du Lion (literal translation - The Sign Of Leo) was his first full-length feature. It bristles with the movement's independent spirit - deeply personal, DIY filmmaking that substitutes traditional cinema's slavish obsession
to plot with the sentient drama played out in Pierre's head. As his situation shifts, the musician's intellectual and animal instincts grapple over which course of action to take. Hand-held, flowing camerawork and improvised dialogue brilliantly convey his emotional flux and the film provides a compelling insight into fate, fortune and the human condition.

Germania anno zero (1948) Roberto Rossellini: Edmund - a boy trying to survive between the ruins of Berlin right after WWII. His family is as ruined as the city he lives in: his father is confined to a bed, his older brother fears prosecution for his Nazi past and his sister is a prostitute. Just like everybody else, Edmund manages to get some money from selling the things he finds here and there on the ruins; until one day he runs into his old school teacher: an old man who still preaches the Nazi ideology and defends the elimination of the weak. Influenced by those ideas, Edmund poisons his own father. This is a powerful film that shows like no other the horrors of war (and the Nazi insanity) that inevitably destroy the lives of the ordinary inhabitants of the city. Rossellini, with his keen eye for detail (and his unique taste in composition), makes an impressive portrait of a chaotic city of empty ruins and basic survival.

Umberto D. (1952) Vittorio De Sica:
Umberto Domenico Ferrari, an elderly and retired civil servant, is desperately trying to maintain a decent standard of living on a rapidly dwindling state pension. But he's up against his tyrannical landlady, who keeps demanding rent that he can't pay (while renting his room out to prostitutes during the day), and his only friends are the pregnant housemaid and his little dog Flike...

Language and deference
What plays a bigger part in a man's life of communication then his mother language? A key aspect of "Coalition" is the deference between the main spoken language and its suraundings.the contrast seems outrageous yet tends to be bizarre and lucid. The subcultures and the multinational is a living fact in political landscape of now days. It is possible for a culture to live inside a culture and stay detached from it. The use of Hebrew language on
the clear Dutch landscape is troubling. It is troubling because of its casual use, its lightness, as if to say that all the inhabitants of Amsterdam are speaking Hebrew amongst each other. Yet the voice is of separation, and a bubble life, of a culture inside an ultra individual social ground, one which might be unnatural or can enhance a feeling of twisted reality, a dream, and a charade. Is Amsterdam in "coalition" a real place or a metaphor? Are the characters real of false? And why all seems displaced: Israelis in Amsterdam and Amsterdam in Israel. The fishing method In order to catch potential risks to power ,governments, federal buries and private organizations use this method to prevent what is suppose to happen, to be a step forward from the risk. The procedure is simple: find the ground in which the risk can evolve and then, send a trigger to push the risk into action, and in the moment of truth stop and eliminate it. One can simulate it to exploding a bomb in a secure measure. In 1995 Israeli prime minister Rabin was murdered by an assain .this assain was well known to the secret services and was triggered to do the action by that exact fishing method but was not stopped on time, or maybe wasn’t intended to be stopped. This method is a way to find out for real who and what is the real risk, who has what it takes to challenge for real. In the same way in "Coalition", Mr.Ziscowitch offers a gun and waits for Coalitzia, who picks it and is willing to do the act. In that way it is a classical fatalistic narrative. Mixed media As a result of the contemporary media situation the eckeletic use of media formats came natural in "coalitzia" Is it a long movie or a TV series? It is both driven its sources from new wave cinema and also pays its tribute to now day’s television sires such as The Sopranos and Curb your enthusiasm. The television and cinema logic are blended into one.

Coalitzia as a private sublimation
What is the aim of "Coalitzia"? It is a private skeptic yet realistic view of a decadent culture and of an endless historical round. My motive was to understand that a political battle, as right as it may be, might fail in its living environment. The idealistic battle is lost in advance, the feeling of the minority of man in this existence in abstract way, but also in the human game sense is very present in our life. Our inability to make a real change is frustrating and disappointing. It comes to my mind thinking of the collapsing of all those 20 century ideologies, those that mad leaders tried to apply on entire nations: communism, Nazism, and even nowadays what we call a democracy is a crumbling concept .so this is the age when ideologies are vanished, and we stay with cruel facts of life, with a mafia-like world, one which the only law that is present is a simple exhibition of power. So back to Alfa male theory? The need for power or strength is something we all need in our life, in Coalitzia I tried to understand my personal need, the endless journey of wanting to gain power, and never the less being able to keep it .so this is also the motive of the main character: he is fascinated with the ability to hold so much power. The simple form of power such as demonstrated by Mr.Ziscowitch is appealing, but also the deeper implications of that power: self control, focus and the ability to materialize ones wishes in real life. The profit/hermit position as a motive and a way to live: The main character mixes of high and low roles, is the contrast of being one that knows more about reality and at the same time having a low status in reality that of a garbage cleaner . In that gap Colitzia lives, and in that gap I as the creator live.



Colitzia poster and layouts were designed by Liron Ross

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