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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Telling the war
By Hani MustafaCairo International Film Festival fringe screenings lack organisation. Those located in the downtown film theatre complexes (Miami, Odeon, Cosmos etc.) do not adhere to the festival's published schedule -- and this is to put it as lightly as possible. Instead, the proprietors of these theatres choose to present their own vision of the festival programme, screening the wrong films at the wrong times. The lurid appeal and consequent profitability of films containing (uncensored) sex notwithstanding, locating less popular fare (no adult content is expected of Lebanese, Iranian and African films, for example) proves nigh on impossible. In the extraordinary event of actually seeing a Lebanese film, the viewer can safely assume that it will be set in the civil war period (1975-91).
Maron Baghdadi's Little Wars, which made an impression in the 1982 round of the Cannes Film Festival, is but one, admittedly famous, example of how the civil war has continued to loom over virtually all of Lebanon's contemporary cinema. The war offers a fertile arena for visually and dramatically exposing the complexity of human affairs and delving deeply into the mental makeup of characters. It makes the scripting easier, too, in the sense that it broadens the scope of coincidence and chance, enabling the filmmaker to string together any number of otherwise blatantly incredible plot developments. A war-torn landscape imposes creative limitations, standardising a lot of the basic techniques and thus enabling the filmmaker to concentrate on the most telling details, making his individual mark but subtly. And this is not to mention that as a historical moment, the war is pressingly relevant, at least to those eager to analyse its broader ideological implications.
One cheering thought is that, despite the omnipresence of war, there is some degree of diversity in both approach and content. This is evidenced by the two Lebanese films shown in the course of the Cairo Festival: Jean Chamoun's Tayf Al-Madina, which was honoured by the jury at the end of the Carthage Film Festival last month (in the Festival of Festivals programme) and Ziad Douieri's by now widely appreciated West Beirut (in the Francophone Cinema programme). Both are recent, if hardly new.
Chamoun charts the eruption of the crisis in southern Lebanon from 1970, prior to the outbreak of the war in Beirut. However documentary in style Chamoun's rendition of the crisis in the south might be, he approaches the outbreak of war symbolically. It is a simple indoor scene at the café where Rami, the protagonist, now waits tables, having emigrated from the south, that introduces the war theme. One client's insulting exercise of power prompts another to set up an armed militia, ostensibly to face up to the insults: the two contending commanders, Al-Dab' and Abu-Samir, respectively, come to represent the whole of militia warfare. And in this way Chamoun unobtrusively suggests that the long-drawn out civil war scenario was characterised by banditry from the very beginning. Rami is an artist, uninterested in fighting. Yet he ends up joining Abu-Samir's militia following his father's abduction by Al-Dab'. Such is Chamoun's war.
Through the eyes of his teenage protagonist, Tareq (who, after behaving rebelliously, is sent out of class by his French teacher to witness the historic scene), Douieri captures the 1975 Palestinian school bus massacre in Beirut (13 April), with the implication that it was, perhaps, the civil war's ultimate catalyst. And although harsh documentary abounds -- depicting, among other things, the division of Beirut into West (Muslim/Left-wing) Beirut and its nemesis, East (Maronite/Right-wing) Beirut -- it is Douieri's concern with what the newly encountered life under war is like for Tareq and his friends that makes up the bulk of the film's content. Douieri takes note of some important events but, unlike Chamoun, almost completely leaves out the political and ideological aspects of the war. The film ends with the subtlest gesture towards the rise of Palestinian resistance and the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982: unexplained footage of Yasser Arafat and Moshe Dayan going silently about their respective businesses of future-making.
Both filmmakers partially employ documentary footage, which adds a sense of authenticity even as it reflects the immense difficulties involved in filming a war-torn city in the context of ongoing projects of reconstruction.
Related stories:
Above and beyond
Princes and knights 9 -15 November 2000
A different dynamic 9 -15 November 2000
See Cairo Film Festival Programme
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