Jerusalem was burning

History repeats itself, we’re told. Or it doesn’t quite repeat, but it rhymes. Or time is a flat circle. Or if we don’t learn history, we’re doomed to repeat it.

Well, yes, that’s right. They’re right.

We’re presented with the basic idea — that we human beings tend to repeat patterns, not only on a small scale but grandly as well, and that often those patterns, played out over a society, can end in disaster — because history, generally speaking, proves it to be true.

That’s what the Israeli producer, director, and writer Gidi Dar tells us in the film “Legend of Destruction,” which will be presented across the state, the country, and the world in the days leading up to Tisha B’Av, and on the fast day itself. (See below.)

It’s a film about the destruction of the Second Temple, and Jerusalem, in 70 C.E., based on the work of the historian Flavius Josephus —né Yosef ben Matityahu, and commonly known as Josephus — talmudic stories, and other sources.

All the images in this story are among the approximately 1,500 oil paintings by David Polonsky and Michael Faust that make up “Legend of Destruction.” (Courtesy of Legend of Destruction)

Josephus was there when it happened.

It’s a grim story, and a warning to us not to repeat the history it dramatizes; in another way it’s a metastory about making an old art form — movies — new. It’s a story of bitter internecine rivalry leading to the sinat chinam — the senseless hatred — that we’re told was the cause of the Temple’s destruction; it’s a work of art created through intense collaboration.

To talk about “Legend of Destruction” is to talk about both form and content, in a way that’s unusual for a movie. So let’s start with the content.

When he decided he wanted to tell the story of the destruction of Jerusalem, “I started with Josephus,” Mr. Dar said. “He was a great historian — possibly the first great historian — and he was there, physically there, when it happened. He was very accurate. When Josephus said there was a battle somewhere, you dig there, and you find that there was a battle there. On the factual level, he was amazing.”

But even the driest history is more than a list of facts. There is no such thing as pure objectivity. “Josephus was not objective, even though the facts were true. Facts are just part of the story. Look at the difference between CNN and Fox when they tell the same story.

“Josephus was appointed one of the commanders of the Jewish army, based in the Galilee,” Mr. Dar said. “The Romans came, his army was destroyed, and Josephus was captured. He gave a prophecy to Vespasian,” who was commanding the Roman army, “that he was going to be a king.

“There was a prophecy that Jerusalem could only be destroyed by a king.

“Eventually Vespasian released Josephus,” who had been his slave, “and then adopted him.” That’s how the Israelite went from being a son of the priest Matityahu and became a son of the house of Flavius, Vespasian’s family. “He became an adviser to Vespasian about the Israelites,” Mr. Dar said. “It would be like an Israeli general being captured by Iran and advising Iranians about how to fight Israel. There’s a word for that,” he said rhetorically. “Traitor.

“So using Josephus’s work would be like making a movie about the Second World War based on the work of Hitler’s biographer. He might have been a great historian, but he couldn’t be objective.

“Josephus had to defend his own treason,” Mr. Dar said.

There was also something else, another thread that runs through the movie. “Josephus came from a very rich family, and that was part of the problem in Jerusalem. The city was rife with the very rich and the very poor. There were huge gaps between them, and that created huge tension and anger.

“At times the aristocracy even cooperated with the Romans against the poor.

“Josephus didn’t understand where all the rage was coming from. He was part of the problem, and the problem was that the rich didn’t care about the poor at all. So it all ended by blowing up in their faces. The rebellion started, and it was directed toward high society. The rich people were the first to get killed. And then the different factions of the zealots” — the groups of poor people who found solace in religion, and were driven by their understanding of that religion to fight violently to insure theological purity — “started fighting each other.

“This might have been the first class war in history,” Mr. Dar said.

“When I first started with ‘Legend of Destruction,’ I was going with Josephus, but then I opened myself up to the Talmud, which told it in a different way.

“A big block in the Talmud is legends of the destruction. Unlike Josephus, the talmudic sages did not care so much about facts. They were very fluid with the facts. Very easygoing with them. But they did care very much about what had caused the situation, while Josephus entirely did not care.

“The sages thought that the reasons for the destruction were spiritual, moral, social, and economic. They saw that very clearly. They said that there had been a powder keg of political and economic and social tension, and that it had exploded.

“The Talmud says that the rich loved the money and hated each other. Many of the legends in the Talmud were about differences between the rich and the poor. They describe profligate lives, private armies, palaces with acres of gold on their roofs, people who couldn’t see how filthy rich they were or that other people had nothing to eat.

“So in the movie, I eventually decided that it was much easier to tell the story, which covers four years in an hour and a half, not relying just on Josephus.

“In this movie, I do something that I am very proud of. I reconnected with my tradition and heritage. The narrative tradition. The storytelling tradition.”

The movie, which is told from a few different points of view, “is our own game of thrones — but it is real. It is much deeper. As a secular person, it is important to connect myself to my own narrative.”

“Legend of Destruction” first was released in 2021, in Israel; an English-language version opened in New York last month. The Israeli version won four Israeli Academy Awards, for best artistic design, editing, soundtrack, and original music.

“It is a story about a city going mad, and it apparently is super, super relevant right now,” Mr. Dar said, although now the narrative would be less about a city and more about an entire culture. “This is a story about a polarized and corrupt city, where everybody stands for their own point of view with all their might. They are not willing to compromise their own standards.

“In the film, everyone is right. They’re right all the way to hell.”

This is where history repeats itself, or at least it rhymes. “The sages in the story are telling us, through 2,000 years of history — telling us through me, in this film — that we must learn what happened to us because, if we don’t, history is bound to repeat itself. If you don’t listen, if you don’t learn, it will happen.

“It’s starting to happen in Israel, in America, in the rest of the world. So the movie is about ancient history, but we are living this history right now.”

The film begins with all of Israel prostrate on the ground at the Temple, listening to the high priest intone “Blessed be His glorious name forever and ever” and then repeating it themselves, as a red-scarved goat, still unaware of its fate, stands waiting.

“That’s the last time all the people are together,” Mr. Dar said.

The story shows the Romans waiting, rather than going in for the kill, as the Jerusalemites, divided into factions of zealots, betray each other, burning each other’s stores of food inside the besieged city and then starving. “I don’t end it happily,” Mr. Dar said. “I tried to give some hope, but I failed. The movie didn’t let me. I tried to end it somewhere else, but the movie said, ‘No. This is where I end.’

“I tried.

“The movie punches you in the stomach very hard. We are not sweetening the bitter pill at all. It is a call for action.

“We are trying to frighten you, because it relates to you. When you leave the theater, I want you to think, ‘Wow. This is really happening.’ I want you to look around and say, ‘What can I do? Where am I contributing to hate? To division? To polarization? Where am I reaching out to see what I can do to fix it?’

“Two thousand years ago, they would have stopped it if they had known what would happen. There were many crossroads where they could have stopped, but they didn’t. They kept on insisting on their own rightness.”

That doesn’t mean that there is nothing worth holding onto, or that you shouldn’t believe in anything. “The whole idea of democracy is that the sides are able to make compromises,” Mr. Dar said. “The fact that you have an ideology doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t compromise,” it just means that you take care when you do it. “It means that you don’t go all the way with what you believe. The zealots went all the way. We often are told to go all the way.

“The main character in the movie is a zealot, and by the time he understands what he’s done and wants to go back, it’s too late.

“There are many zealots today on all sides, and I identify with them. A zealot is someone who wants to go all the way with what he believes. You want a hero to go all the way — but if he does, he damages more than he helps.”

This is easy to say but hard to live by. How do you know what’s too much? How do you know when and where to compromise, and when and where to hang on to your beliefs? Surely compromising cannot mean doing what you deeply believe to be wrong.

“I don’t have an answer to that,” Mr. Dar said. “It’s a dilemma. And that’s what the movie is about.”

Reality has changed since his work on the project began. “When I started, it didn’t seem at all like an Israeli reality,” Mr. Dar said. “It seemed to be more like Syria or Libya during the Arab Spring. But it took me years to do the film, and the more we progressed with it, the closer it came to Israeli reality.

“In 2021, people viewed the film as prophetic. They saw it as a red light for Israels. But then things got worse and worse, with judicial reform, and then October 7.

“There is a scene in the movie where the Roman generals come to Vespasian and ask him if he knows that there is a civil war in Jerusalem, and if this would be a good time to attack. Vespasian was very cruel, but he also was very smart. He said, ‘You are out of your minds. Let them do the work for us. We are not going to attack now. We will wait.’

“So he waited for a year and a half, he became Caesar, he sent his son Titus to finish off Jerusalem, and by the time he got there Jerusalem was basically finished. There was a famine. They were fighting each other.

“Jerusalem was hard to conquer. There was food for 10 years inside the city. But they preferred to burn their food and kill each other.

“So the question now is where Israeli reality is going. After October 7 we reunited, but now we can see the cracks. The biggest challenge for Israel today, the most strategic question, is whether we can work together.

“If we can’t, we are done. If we can, we can overcome everything.”

Okay. That’s a surface look at the content. What about the form?

The movie is neither live action nor animated. It is instead made up of about 1,500 paintings made by two artists, David Polonsky, who drew the Israeli movie “Waltzing with Bashir,” and Michael Faust.

It is a film about the perils of history repeating itself, but — and — it is also a film about experimenting, about doing things differently. Both animated and live-action movies are a series of still images, but they’re shown so quickly — at about 24 frames per second — that the human eye sees them as one moving image. “Legend of Destruction” lingers on each painting for far longer than that.

“The form really does have to do with the content, because, first of all, history was recorded with paintings, and we are using classical paintings,” Mr. Dar said. “Most of them were under church auspices, and many of them were paintings of this guy who died in this city, 30 years before this event takes place.” To state the obvious, he’s talking about Jesus and Jerusalem. “So about 50 percent of all the world’s paintings were about this same place. And there were gaps between the stories in the paintings. In this respect, there is something in our cinematic style that is like talmudic storytelling. The gaps leave space for interpretation.”

There is a nod to movie history in the film, Mr. Dar said. “There is a scene where a Roman messenger, coming from Vespasian, rides a horse, and the horse begins to move. It’s animated, just for a moment. People who notice it ask me about it.

“At the end of the 19th century, a few rich guys wanted to know if a horse’s four feet all are off the ground when it runs.” The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge was able to film running horses, and the world learned that yes, all four feet do leave the ground, and at least momentarily horses do fly. “That fact was less important than what the film represented,” Mr. Dar said. “It was the birth of cinema. I chose to put it in because I wanted to remind the audience that no matter what, movies are the illusion of movement.” And audience members often tell him that not only do they quickly forget that his film is made up of still images — that despite how slowly they move, their minds still fill in those gaps — but that somehow the violence seems even more graphic, and the whole film somehow seems even more gripping, than it would in either animation or live action.

The collaboration between the two artists as they created images of destruction also in a sense belied the message of their work. “They worked side by side at a round table in a studio in Tel Aviv,” Mr. Dar said. “Their work isn’t exactly the same.

David Polonsky was the art director for “Waltzing with Bashir.” “David is a Renaissance painter,” Mr. Dar said. “He can paint in any style, and his work is very exact. Very precise. Michael is more of a wild guy. His work is much wilder. If you really watch the film, you can see that there are some paintings that have wilder brush strokes, and they’re more aggressive. They’re Michael’s. The most stunning, most precise paintings usually are David’s.

“They’re such good friends that there is no ego between them. It’s the exact opposite of what is in the movie. They would do anything for each other.”

Because of the movie’s connection to Tisha B’Av, “we decided to produce a worldwide event this Tisha B’Av, and we will screen it all over the world,” Mr. Dar said. “In many American states; in Singapore; in China; in India; in two places in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa and in the war zone in Gondar. In Israel, we will show it inside the walls of the Old City, in the courtyard of the Tower of David. It will be a huge event.

“It’s to ignite the awareness that Tisha B’Av is the most important day in Judaism these days. It talks about something that is super relevant to us. It will be a very, very big event. It’s important to know that as you watch it, many other people in the world are watching it too.”