Chroniques d’un assasinat

Amos Gitai / Yitzhak Rabin

28 October 2023 – 18 March 2024 / Sabatini Building, Floor 3

The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 shocked the world and caused the peace process to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to come to a sudden standstill. The event had a profound impact on film-maker Amos Gitai and would become a leitmotif in his body of work.

Gitai documented the process of the Oslo Accords through a four-episode film for television entitled Give Peace a Chance (1994). Subsequently, three weeks after the assassination of Rabin he began investigating the events surrounding it, making the film The Arena of Murder (1996). This research ultimately stretched across a twenty-year period, leading to the creation of a rich and complex documentary archive and giving rise to the feature-length film Rabin, the Last Day (2015), in addition to a series of works in different formats — publications, performances and installations — under the general title of Chroniques d’un assasinat.

The installation Chroniques d’un assasinat (2021), donated to the Museo Reina Sofía after being presented in the National Library of France in 2021, sets forth a spatial journey around pertinent scenes from Rabin, the Last Day by way of fourteen panels and seven sound documents. Using collage, akin to a film montage, Gitai combines archive documents, press images and stills which intervene to dissect the context of the tragic moment that changed the history of the Middle East and offers a complex and critical narration of events.

For Gitai, the hybridisation of genres and the crossover of disciplines are part of his approach to film, and he views documentary as an archaeology of the human and fiction as an architecture of memory. Thus, his work moves between these two concepts and is traversed by a critical gaze of his own biography and the permanently warring world in which he has lived.

Project carried out in collaboration with 
BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Laurence Engel
Joël Huthwohl

Graphics
Émilie Paillot

Production
Laurent Truchot

Texts
Marie José Sanselme

Research
Rivka Markovizky Gitai