In the Beginning Was Desire
with Avivah Zornberg
Produced and Directed
by David Grubin
Visuals Conceived and Created
by Naomie Kremer
Weaving together the work of multimedia artist Naomie Kremer, interdisciplinary Torah scholar Avivah Zornberg, and Emmy Award–winning filmmaker David Grubin, In the Beginning Was Desire is a surreal audiovisual journey through the archetypal story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The mythopoetic film leads the viewer through a kaleidoscopic landscape that is equal parts sensory, symbolic, and textual, with Zornberg’s deftly probing commentary on humanity’s creation, temptation, and ultimate exile from the Garden of Eden seamlessly threaded into Kremer’s shifting spectrums of light and form. Tapestries of sound, color, and Hebrew script wash over the screen and fade into each other, expanding the experience of this iconic script into new dimensions. Far from an inert or static fable, In the Beginning Was Desire aesthetically transforms this brief passage in the Book of Genesis into a world unto itself, one whose all-too-human problems of desire, consciousness, relationship, and authority feel both timeless and timely.
A Conversation between Naomie Kremer and David Grubin
Naomie: I think the idea of doing a film together came up over lunch one day, before we decided to base it on the story of the Garden of Eden.
I’ve been fascinated with the story since reading the Torah with my father on Shabbat afternoons as a small child growing up in Israel. Going to yeshiva through high school, I studied it in depth, including the extensive commentary. You mentioned that you knew the biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg and recommended that I read her book, The Beginning of Desire. I was blown away by the intricacy of her scholarship and how psychologically rich the story became under her analysis.
What got you interested in telling the story of Adam and Eve?
David: You know, my daughter’s name is Eve. I must have some felt connection to this primordial story. It’s so mysterious: the relationship between men and women, good and evil, what it means to be human. All there. In one story. It was my daughter who introduced me to Avivah Zornberg. I knew that Avivah could share her insights with me in an interview, but I had no idea how to visualize the story or her ideas, and that’s why I turned to you.
Weren’t you daunted by the challenge?
Naomie: I was somewhat daunted, but I can’t think of a more fun challenge than trying to imagine the garden of Eden and the creation of humankind. I like to approach a big project in small bites, one step at a time. Over years of designing video-based sets for opera, theater, and dance, I’ve collected tons of footage of nature, both figurative and abstract. So I started with the garden. We wanted to avoid a “talking heads” approach. Your questions set up a very natural narrative for the story.
Did you prepare them ahead of time? To what extent was the interview spontaneous?
David: There were so many questions to ask, and Avivah had so much to tell us. If I didn’t prepare in advance, we could have gone on forever. My questions were a roadmap for the narrative—so if we got too far off track, we could get back on the main highway. The aim was to tell the story and allow Avivah to intervene with provocative insights about particular moments. I’d send you pieces of the story, and it was like we were feeling our way, experimenting with the visuals, learning what worked as we went.
Naomie: It was a very organic process, working together. I would come up with a visual clip and send it to you, and then I’d tweak it based on your response. We were really on the same wavelength; it was a pleasure. And then you did the massive editing job. Some great early visuals ended up on the cutting-room floor because they didn’t advance the story, which is such a familiar one it’s hard to make it “new.”
David: Everyone knows the story, but Avivah’s ideas make it new. We took the risk of slowing the narrative down, letting the images play longer so that her ideas could sink in. Avivah draws on centuries of rabbinic tradition, psychoanalysis, and literary analysis to open a path to understanding without diminishing the wonder. That’s what we were trying to do. We didn’t want to illustrate the story. We wanted to amplify it—to tell this ancient tale with Avivah’s interpretations in a contemporary medium. We could do a whole series of films like this.
Naomie Kremer is a painter, video artist, and stage designer. Her work is held in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China.
Her video based set designs include Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner Alcina, by GF Handel, the world premiere production of The Secret Garden co-commissioned by San Francisco Opera and Cal performances, Light Moves, a collaboration with Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók. She art-directed a shadow puppet short film based on Marc Chagall’s autobiography, My Life, with Shadowlight Productions.
Kremer has taught Painting and Drawing at California College of the Arts, The San Francisco Art Institute, California State University, Hayward, and the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art, France. She has been a visiting artist and guest lecturer at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Painting, Oxford University; the Syracuse University Painting Program, Florence, Italy; Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota; and Mills College, Oakland.
David Grubin is a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer whose films range across history, art, poetry, and science. He has won major awards in his field, including two Alfred I. Dupont awards, three George Foster Peabody prizes, five Writer’s Guild prizes, and ten Emmys.
His films include The Buddha, The Trials of Robert Oppenheimer, Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided, LBJ, Truman; TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, The Secret Life of the Brain, The Jewish Americans, Kofi Annan: Center of the Storm, Tesla, The Mysterious Human Heart, and Language Matters with Bob Holman: Degenerate Art.
Grubin has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hamilton College. A former chairman of the board of directors of The Film Forum, he is currently a member of the Society of American Historians, and sits on the board at Poets House. Grubin has taught documentary film production in Columbia University’s graduate film program and has lectured on filmmaking across the country.
Avivah Gottleib Zornberg is the author of six books, including The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, and most recently, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus. She lectures on the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic thought at academic, psychoanalytic, and Jewish educational institutions around the world. Raised in Scotland by parents who fled the Nazi takeover of Austria, she lives in Jerusalem.