MOUNT OF OLIVES BY CAMILLE SAUVAGEOT

CAMILLE SAUVAGEOT  (1889-1931)

Mount of Olives or Mount Olivet  (826m - 2, 716ft)

East Jerusalem 

In Vue du Mont des Oliviers depuis le Mont Scopus, Jérusalem, 1925 -Autochrome Lumière.
Musée départemental Albert Kahn 

The photographer

Camille Sauvageot, like other operators of the "Archives of the Planet" by Albert Kahn, is coming from the Cinematographic and photographic section of the French Army created during the First World War. He entered to the service of Albert Kahn in 1919 essentially to cinematograph landscapes but he only brought back autochrome plates from Palestine, taken in April 1925, and from the Vosges in June 1927.  In 1928-1929  he was the only one to test the cinematographic process of restitution of colors called "Keller-Dorian" of the name of  one of its inventors, which associates a film comprising a lenticular array with a trichromatic lens for taking pictures and for projecting. Forty-five minutes of color film, now restored, concretize the dream of Albert Kahn to associate color and movement to restore the reality of the world. After the end of the "Archives of the Planet" and the Second World War, Camille Sauvageot took part n Thomson Company's researches on color cinematography and was the operator in 1947 of the color version the film « Jour de fête » by Jacques Tati  realized  with the Thomson Color Embossed Film System.

Source:
- Musée Départemental Albert Kahn

The mount 

The Mount of Olives or Mount Olivet (826m - 2, 716ft) -  in Hebrew: הַר הַזֵּיתִים‎, Har ha-Zeitim ; in Arabic: جبل الزيتون, الطور‎‎, Jabal al-Zaytun, Al-Tur - is a mountain ridge east of and adjacent to Jerusalem's Old City. It is named for the olive groves that once covered its slopes.
The Mount of Olives is one of three peaks of a mountain ridge which runs for 3.5 kilometres (2.2 miles) just east of the Old City across the Kidron Valley, in this area called the Valley of Josaphat. The peak to its north is Mount Scopus, at 826 metres (2,710 feet), while the peak to its south is the Mount of Corruption, at 747 m (2,451 ft). The highest point on the Mount of Olives is At-Tur, at 818 m (2,684 ft). The ridge acts as a watershed, and its eastern side is the beginning of the Judean Desert.
The ridge is formed of oceanic sedimentary rock from the Late Cretaceous, and contains a soft chalk and a hard flint. While the chalk is easily quarried, it is not a suitable strength for construction, which is why the Mount was never built up and instead features many man-made burial caves. From Biblical times until the present, Jews have been buried on the Mount of Olives. The necropolis on the southern ridge, the location of the modern village of Silwan, was the burial place of Jerusalem's most important citizens in the period of the Biblical kings. The Mount has been used as a Jewish cemetery for over 3,000 years and holds approximately 150,000 graves, making it central in the tradition of Jewish cemeteries. The religious ceremony marking the start of a new month was held on the Mount of Olives in the days of the Second Temple. Roman soldiers from the 10th Legion camped on the Mount during the Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews celebrated the festival of Sukkot on the Mount of Olives. They made pilgrimages to the Mount of Olives because it was 80 meters higher than the Temple Mount and offered a panoramic view of the Temple site. It became a traditional place for lamenting the Temple's destruction, especially on Tisha B'Av. Several key events in the life of Jesus, as related in the Gospels, took place on the Mount of Olives, and in the Acts of the Apostles it is described as the place from which Jesus ascended to heaven. Because of its association with both Jesus and Mary, the Mount has been a site of Christian worship since ancient times and is today a major site of pilgrimage for Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants. In 1481, an Italian Jewish pilgrim, Rabbi Meshullam da Volterra, wrote: "And all the community of Jews, every year, goes up to Mount Zion on the day of Tisha B'Av to fast and mourn, and from there they move down along Yoshafat Valley and up to Mount of Olives. From there they see the whole Temple (the Temple Mount) and there they weep and lament the destruction of this House." In the mid-1850s, the villagers of Silwan were paid £100 annually by the Jews in an effort to prevent the desecration of graves on the mount. Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin asked to be buried on the Mount of Olives near the grave of Etzel member Meir Feinstein, rather than Mount Herzl national cemetery.
 Much of the top of the hill is occupied by At-Tur, a former village and now a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem with a majority-Muslim population.