The Tractor
On a windy winter week, a group of 12 villagers, to a desolate hill in the Jordan Valley of Israel. For several days, we uncovered by hand, an old tractor that was pre-buried underneath the rocky surface. This tractor served for years in the farm fields of Kibbutz Afikim until it was not efficient and replaced. We made an icon out of the 'dinosaur', recallin the idealist spirit of Duvzhenko's tractor in his 1930 film 'Earth'.
Preliminary sketch
Stoyboard page
Stoyboard page
On set
On set
On set
On set
On set
On set
On set
Video still
Video still
On set
Video still
Excerpt from catalog text by Curator Tali Tamir:
In his current film, which takes place in an unidentified mountainous site, Hirsch orders a group of elderly peasants to dig in the ground with simple tools they brought with them. Shot in black and white, the film’s expressive style corresponds with Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1930 film Earth, unfolding the first encounter of peasants in the kolkhoz ,with agrarian technology in the form of a tractor. In Hirsch’s version the old tractor is a type of fossil buried in the ground, and retrieved as a cultural icon. Despite the absence of geographic and national identification marks in the film, this confined drama and its protagonists allude to the declining mythology of Zionist agriculture and the era of .l