Divided epochs

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Ahlam Al-Madina

Sonali Pahwa examines an as yet incomplete trilogy of films charting personal and political histories in modern Syria

Mohamed Malas is intrigued by memory. It is fitting that his (as yet incomplete) trilogy of feature films travels back from the 1950s to the '30s and '40s, retrieving impressions of the formative years of his childhood and of Syria's modern history. Though his oeuvre includes documentaries the two features screened at the American University in Cairo provided a substantial meditation on how reality is made, tempting the audience to forgo ostensibly more realistic genres.

The opening note of the retrospective is bleak. The first film begins at the weathered, dripping walls of a building by the Barrada canal. A family of three gets down from the bus that has brought them to Damascus. The mother is touchingly young, and the feeling that she has been driven here despite herself is confirmed when she knocks on a door and is met with abuse. The man cursing the widowed woman and her sons is her father. Somewhere during this grim prelude the film's title Ahlam Al-Madina (Dreams of the City) is stamped out. Ironically, the time is the early '50s and dreams of revolution and Arab nationalism are in the air in Syria. Mohamed Malas has distilled moments of this period into scenes from a working-class urban quarter. The 11-year- old protagonist, Dib, is thrust into adulthood by his father's death and works to support his mother and brother. His wary innocence provides a foil for elders made impetuous by the nationalism of the time.

Many riddles of his new life remain unsolved for Dib. First, why does his grandfather despise his own daughter? He lashes out sadistically at the boys too. There are also rapid changes in the political wind. One moment the schoolteacher is taking his class out on a march in support of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, and the next Dib is beaten for parroting a slogan against deposed Colonel Shishakli like a playground ditty. The genial store owners near the ironing shop where Dib works become altogether different when politics are involved. Then, a faintly slutty acquaintance of his mother tries to marry her off to an unknown man. So desperate is the young widow to leave her father's home that she eventually agrees to a secret wedding. But she returns the very next day. Only as the film nears its end, and Dib has grown just the beginnings of a mustache, are there recognisable coming-of-age uncertainties about girls. In every other way his path to adulthood has no predictable points of transition.

Dreams of the City is a backward glance from 1984 at the years of director Malas' childhood as well as an epoch of Syrian nationalism, all of which suggests that the notions of innocence contained will be complex. The popular quarter in which Malas has chosen to set the film seems so settled as to be unaltered by history. Its men provide a range of father figures for young Dib, some kindly and others proud and short-tempered. Defining historical moments are made concrete through this stock cast of characters and their enduring rivalries. Dib sees a side of revolutionary politics which is not at all high-minded. Childhood is not an adequate defence against contradictory political forces when they seep into schools and streets and the texture of everyday life. Resounding in the film's background the strident ideologies of revolutionaries and their visions of a brave new world contrast with the melancholy childhood at the core of the narrative. The difference is like that between the idea of childhood and a concrete return to it through memory.

Malas' virtuoso use of light and languid camerawork make this piece of realism incisive without being hard-edged. The actor who plays the protagonist, a convincingly normal boy at an in- between age rather than an appealing infant, is well chosen. The film's sentimental restraint is probably because it is semi-autobiographical, as Malas acknowledges. The children in it are now, like Malas, part of a generation that looks to personal histories to provide counterpoints to an unsatisfying national history. Unravelling the sentimentalised simplicity of childhood is one way of achieving this aim.

Malas' 1992 feature Al-Leil (The Night) is set in the late 1930s and '40s, a step back historically from the reflection on his childhood in Dreams of the City. Again there is a child who serves as his alter ego, and again the question of memory is central. But the vista of memory now expands to address national events more directly. Malas experimentally divides the narrative into a dream-like space of stories his mother tells the child about his father, and the historical narrative that he consequently builds out of his stock of public and personal memories. With his native Golan Heights the site of French and British colonialism and affected by the troubles in Palestine, Malas' historical narrative of these years is inevitably one of loss. And with a father who abandoned the family more than once to fight in Palestine, Malas' alter ego narrates a loss that is personal as well.

He relies on a collection of vaguely remembered images in piecing together the landscape of what was lost. A frustratingly static collage emerges from this combination of mythical fragments. The scenes of the rural milieu in which his parents met, and which was later torn by political upheaval, are like carefully composed photographs. All too often the life presented in these scenes is bound within a limited frame: women in the kitchen, children hustled off on errands. Even somewhat more complex characters, like the tyrannical grandfather and the hot-headed idealist father, barely develop.

Because the histories narrated in the film end abruptly, with the loss of the Palestinian cause and the father's subsequent death, their recreation in memory lacks momentum. Malas aims for another kind of lyricism through the series of intimate conversations between mother and son. But the aesthetics of national history intrude more often than they should. Rural colour and appearances by iconic historical figures sometimes give the film the feel of a costume drama. An alternative narrative, which the family scenes seem to attempt, is also strongly coloured by the definability demanded of history before the apocalypse. The urge to flesh out the history of resistance to the Palestinian exodus edges the narrator's complicated father, for one, into the realm of heroism. The film never quite finds a compromise between the everyday humanity of its characters and their place in national mythology.

Perhaps one cannot map personal and political history, or memories of the father and fatherland, too closely, and this is why The Night is a less compelling piece of cinema than Dreams of the City. Although it satisfies in showing under- represented aspects of the Palestinian experience in the 1940s, it fails to draw the kind of resonant ambivalences that give Malas' debut feature its narrative energy. His journeys through the depths of memory still fascinate and confound, however, and pull innovative possibilities out of cinema's bag of tricks.