The short animation filmย This is Only Getting Worse is available to watch at the top of the page.
The film This is Only Getting Worse, by creators Eran Luzon and Michael Negari, unfolds the story of various characters in Jerusalem, a city on the brink of catastrophe, as an ever-expanding chasm threatens to obliterate its future along with its residents. The narrative revolves around a pregnant woman, a taxi driver, and a soldier contemplating suicide, each battling to survive in the midst of an apocalyptic reality. However, the chaos is not the only defining characteristic of their world; it is also magnetic, both literally and metaphorically. An unseen force draws the pregnant woman, the taxi, and the soldier’s military booth towards the chasm, threatening to engulf them via a mechanism of metallic attraction. The woman’s body, the car’s structure, and the soldier’s weapon serve as potent symbols of a world steeped in metal and charred by the devastation. Jerusalem is depicted as a place where life and death exist intertwined, as if life were paradoxically dying, and death was, in turn, coming alive. As Jerusalem-based poet Yehuda Amichai writes in his 1986 poem The Place Where We Are Right goes:
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
In the distinct cinematic universe crafted in the film, the chasm stands out as a linguistic and visual symbol, ceaselessly growing and expanding. The characters are meticulously crafted through a rich tapestry of video and animation, each layer contributing to the whole. The aesthetics of chaos and apocalypse are reimagined by Luzon and Negari into a striking tableau of cut-out characters. Each collage designed for the characters adeptly depicts the complex interplay between place and individual in Jerusalem – a city with a gaping chasm at its heart. Underneath the strata of video and animation, composed of paper cuts, wool, and cloth of stop-motion puppets, realistic eyes shimmer with life.
The use of paper cuts is familiar from religious ceremonies in ancient China and from burial customs of that time, as the Chinese used to burn paper cutouts of human figures with their dead. This art was linked to the belief that it had the power to duplicate the deceased and animate them as a living body also in the afterlife. Similarly, the design concept of the film is that life’s copy to another dimension in the magnetic world of death and destruction: the cinematic world of This is Only Getting Worse is the next world replicated from the existing reality.
All the characters in the film aren’t the originators of hatred and death but rather the results of these conditions. Hatred burns with such intensity that the world, in all its materiality – whether metallic or organic – is inflamed, scorched, and melted down. Stacked pieces of paper and various materials come together to form entities that are half-alive, embodying an echo of the humanity that once was the legacy of this world. Thus, the concept of ‘cut-out’ acquires an additional layer of meaning here: the characters are cut away and distanced from the apocalypse that threatens to consume them.
The film carries an ironic dimension, a result of a clever narrative strategy that uses systems such as the military, public transportation, and by comparison, pregnancyโprocesses with a generally predictable timelineโto represent the old and orderly world. In the valley of Jerusalem, these systems become time-bound ticking bombs, with the uncertainty of what entity will ultimately emerge from the pregnant woman’s body.
The intertwined layers of animation and video underscore the Israeli persona, superimposed on its geographic and human landscape. It’s depicted as an immature, unformed expression, akin to paper cutouts and broken dolls found in a child’s roomโwho has either abandoned them or violently disassembled and reassembled them. The characterizations and aesthetics of the frames successfully convey not just the decay, rudeness, and destruction of the public space, but also invoke a memory of Israeli solidarity and a lost sense of humanity that once belonged to this crumbling world, in the not so distant past.
In contrast to many Israeli films, full length or short, This is Only Getting Worse does not focus on a biological family. Instead, it introduces an alternative familial structure where the only commonality among its members is fundamental solidarity, enabling them to survive and potentially even conquer the valley – ostensibly. In this film, the future isn’t a happy ending, but merely a suggestion or a fleeting moment of tranquility and solace within a world in ruin. Here, in a place where the earth swallows metals and dreams of a better future, flowers may not bloom, but perhaps people may thrive.
And in the words of Yehuda Amichai:
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
This is Only Getting Worse was produced as part of Talโs studies for a bachelorโs degree at the Screen-Based Arts Department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.
The short animation filmย This is Only Getting Worse is available to watch at the top of the page.
