The Frame as a Sacred Space, The Film as Sacrifice

When the creator creates a world, he decrees upon himself to remain outside his creation. An invisible screen separates him from his characters, allowing them autonomy. Therefore, the thought of the Temple as a place where the Creator and His creation meet is a thought that breaks through the screens, an almost impossible thought. Perhaps this is why the world could not bear this encounter, and the two Temples did not endure.

But the longing for this encounter remains. And what if cinema can offer a new way to experience it?

The Film as Sacrifice: From Skin (עור) to Light (אור)

In an almost prophetic way, before the digital age, photographic film was made of organic material – from the flesh and skin of animals, exposed to light. Skin that turns into light.

This idea reminds me of my dear Aunt Maya, a great photographer who used to say that in this world light and darkness are intermingled, but her role is to search for the sparks of the future "Hidden Light" (האור הגנוז). She knew, as stated in the Book of Zohar, that in the firmament there is a "Yeshiva of the Messiah," and only those capable of turning darkness into light and the bitter into sweet are accepted into it – and this was the whole essence of her work. She would talk about the portion of Genesis, where God clothed Adam and Eve in "coats of skin" (כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר)... But in the Torah of Rabbi Meir, she would add, it was written differently: "coats of light" (כָּתְנוֹת אוֹר). Rabbi Meir, whose name attests to him (Meir - illuminates), already lived in the perception of the future, where the soul is not clothed in a body, but in light.

Perhaps this is the secret of the act of photography, as Aunt Maya said: the moment when the skin (the photographic film) is exposed to the light, and turns into an image that reveals the holiness within the everyday. Can a work of art be a kind of "sacrifice" (קורבן - Korban)? Not in the sense of victimization, but in the original sense of the word – Lekarev (לְקָרֵב - to bring close). To bring the Creator closer to the created, the creator to the viewer, the spirit to the matter.

The Frame as a Sacred Space

If the film is the sacrifice, then the frame is a sacred space, where the encounter takes place. It is an intimate, "inter-soul" space, where the soul of the creator addresses the soul of the viewer. It is a living encounter between two particles of eternity, like the two cherubim that were in the Holy of Holies.

The physical descriptions of the construction of the Tabernacle and the Temple in the Torah are full of supreme creative secrets. The scientist Isaac Newton studied the structure of the Temple as a miniature model of the structure of the universe. Why do we, as creators, not study these secrets? Why not try to translate this soulful architecture into cinematic language?

Perhaps such cinema, a sacred cinema, can create in the viewer a new sense, a "vacated space" (חלל פנוי) in the soul, a place where there is room for an encounter with the inconceivable, and reawaken the longing for that primary encounter.