Understanding the Narrative of the Lebanese Civil War in Short Films

Ramee Deeb
Aug 24, 2017 · 18 min read

Our lives, our identities, and our histories are composed of several overlapping stories and narratives that are reciprocally defined by those same events. ­­­­­

To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human: from hakawati to audience, newscaster to listener, father to son, teacher to student. The mediums by which we, as humans, share our stories and histories might have changed, but the techniques of storytelling and narrative endure.

Historical evidence indicates that humans are hardwired to think of themselves in terms of narratives. People and civilizations from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form, where they would converge multiple elements that would fit within the socio-political contexts of that culture. This is not to say that a common narrative would convey an ultimate truth or a deceiving lie about a historical happening. A narrative would allow for an abstraction to those events which would guarantee a communality of experience through the ‘simplified’ iteration of sequential events without necessarily compromising the specificity of individual episodes. In Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s memoir Living to Tell the Tale he says that we use memory and stories to make sense of what we’ve done, give meaning to our lives, and to establish connections with other people.

Lebanon. West Beirut. 1982. Playing on a makeshift swing amid the rubble. (Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos)

Cinema is arguably the 20th century’s most dominant arena for storytelling. Filmmakers told stories across geographic distances, in as many languages, genres and credos as one can imagine. It is difficult to conceive a narrative that has yet to be addressed in cinema. During the last few decades, numerous new technologies were integrated into the global media scene and therefore innovating new modes of storytelling, which is now dominated by Hollywood’s blockbuster formula. The regime of truth under which cinema had been operating is prioritizing sensation, not the narrative, as king. Technical access to tell a story has never been greater, though the same cannot be said about the narrative.

Narratives have to be simple enough for everyone to grasp and share, though this would risk that they serve dual and conflicted purposes. On one hand, they would allow for common assimilation of events, while on the other, they create room for alternate understandings that might be diffused or distant from reality. Therefore, it is critical for one to understand the narrative of historical events, and make sense of how they are recreated in various modes of cultural production, within the processes of remembrance, amnesia, and cultural memory.

Our intent from this research paper is to deconstruct the narrative of the civil war in Lebanese post-war short films. We will be asking the following questions as we go forward with our research: How was the Lebanese cinema allowed to speak about the civil war? What is the relationship between these elements? And how do 2 Lebanese short films narrate the civil war and what can they tell us about their discourse? We aim to argue that establishing a narrative on the civil war through cultural production would enable a process of national reconciliation and foster tolerance among society.

Lebanon is a country where the notion of having a ‘common Lebanese identity’ remains highly contested on several political, historical and religious levels. There lacks a feeling of social cohesiveness which brings communities and individuals around a collective affiliation to the nation, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language. The remnants of the war remained stagnant in the imagination of the Lebanese public, even after the acts of violence were declared over by a series of political deliberations, which institutionalized a process of amnesia in public discourse; as if nothing had happened.

Each sect developed its own rhetoric towards the war in a way which validates its political aspirations in the post-war era. Militias who were once warring against each other were embedded into the political system, around which they developed a confessional representational system which allegedly would “sustain national unity and security.” The political system saw economic and political benefit in enforcing a project of amnesia, and therefore did not promote or even support any effort to address it in a manner that would memorialize it, in hope of bridging lanes of communal rejuvenation and national unity. The civil war did not have the opportunity to become a national tragedy in the minds of the Lebanese, in par to other post-conflict contexts such as Germany after WW2.

The country, and particularly Beirut, was demarcated across several political, geographical, social, and sectarian lines. In the public sphere, it was a shameful event that must be erased from history, and instead demanded everyone to either look back at the glories of the pre-1975 era or forward towards the future of reconstructed Beirut under the banner of PM Rafiq Hariri and Solidere. In short, the discourse of the war was to be ascribed to ‘the others’, where the Lebanese had nothing to do with the violence as it was external forces who were manipulating internal actors for bigger geopolitical purposes, namely Israel, Syria, the US and Palestine. The dominant postwar agenda aimed to redirect national cultural memory to an embrace of reconstruction projects, and with it a redefinition of Lebanese national identity, by denying local culpability for any aspect of the war.

Cultural producers, on the other hand, were faced with a dilemma of another kind where they had to overcome a highly charged post-war socio-political formation in their process of addressing the war. I like to consider them as anarchists who have refused to operate in accordance with the ongoing discourse of forgetting. Also, to inscribe a bloody war that was so recent and so impactful had proven itself to be a difficult task facing artists, who have turned to creative modes of storytelling and surreal expressions to overcome such limitations.

Civilians and militants in Beirut gather around a TV powered by a concealed Kataeb tank, 1983.

Moreover, in 1994 a newly formed government had signed a new media law which had put several obstacles in front of cultural producers, specifically when it comes to talking about the civil war in a way that might ‘incite public uproar and national instability.’ Any film, documentary, play, song, or even any form of public denouncement of the war was either faced with censorship, banning, or complete apprehension. Naturally, the subsequent governments that came after, could not even agree to memorialize the day the civil war had started (or ended), while on the other hand, the day Israel was defeated on May 25th 2000 is recognized to be a national holiday. The national amnesia project was going full force; normalized.

How would one attempt to build a narrative of a civil war, knowing the multiplicity of events, the overlapping of accounts, the numerous actors involved in violence, and the unresolved nature of the way the war ended? Where would one even begin? The casualties? The ideological differences? Sectarian divisions?

To be fair, speaking of an overarching common narrative in cultural production would be utopian. Every individual subscribes the war according to their first-hand experience, and would therefore only be able to imagine the war from that specific scope and relate to other people’s experiences relative to his/her initial understanding. Though, that does not mean that one has to conform to the set of generated lies that have been codified and accepted in the public and political sphere. Militia leaders have built simplistic, patently false narratives in the name of national unity and stability.

Along similar lines, the Lebanese theorist and videographer Jalal Toufic (2003, 72) says, “The demolition of many of the ruined buildings…was war by other means; the war on the traces of the war is part of the traces of the war, hence signals that the war is still continuing.”

How was the Lebanese cinema allowed to speak about the civil war?

The answer to this question is rather a simple one, and can be understood in material terms: there is no big money being made in Lebanese cinema. After the Taif accord, which brought the acts of violence to a halt, an immediate reconstruction projection had emerged across the city and a set of neoliberal economic policies was adopted to attract foreign investment and big capital to the re-emerging market. In the same direction, politicians and business men rushed to license their illegally established media outlets (used during the war for propaganda purposes) ahead of the proposed 1994 media law which aimed to restrict the number of media outlets operating on Lebanese soil (Kraidy, 1998). The law provided an urgently needed framework in order to orchestrate the booming industry:

[The law] legalized private broadcasting and revoked Tele-Liban’s monopoly on television in Lebanon, but maintained that channels were the exclusive property of the state and could only be leased. It re-affirmed media freedom within the framework of the constitution and mandated more local production. Broadcasting licenses were to be issued by the Council of Ministers, who set requirements and a two-month application deadline. Finally, the law established the National Council of Audio-Visual Media (NCOAVM) with the task of laying down technical conditions, monitoring broadcasting, and recommending the suspension and closure of the media violating the law (“An Audio,” 1994).

The problem with the law is that it was too market driven, focused on creating profit, protecting private holdings, and therefore did not develop an environment where cultural producers could work toward a national bonding project. The law did not provide a strategy which prioritizes bringing Muslims and Christians together through the media. The main focus was on generating more ad-revenue from television stations and attracting bigger audiences. Especially given the fact that in the immediate period after the war there was immense competition in the advertising industry over the limited Lebanese market consisting of a mere 3 million at the time. The editor of Arab Ad once commented that “greed overcame common sense in … a chaotic media market…in which [media] mushroomed out of all proportion to the country’s real needs” (Azzi, 1994, 3).

In the period between 2004–2015, 168 Lebanese films were made on an average budget of $2.4M, and those same films brought a total sum of $1.5M from the local box office (Fondation Liban Cinema, 2015). Another study which looks at TV advertising revenues in national markets shows that in the period from 2010–2015, the total of revenue was estimated at $329M (Media Industries in the Middle East, 2016). What the Lebanese cinema makes in 10 years, TV ad revenues make it in 2. Money goes where the money is.

Moreover, in 1996 Lebanese satellite broadcasting had taken the industry by a storm. Regardless of the numerous legal and bureaucratic hurdles faced by Lebanese television stations such as Future Television (owned by PM Rafiq Hariri) and LBCI (launched by the Lebanese Forces), money was pouring in from everywhere to invest in Lebanese Television. Ad-revenues were skyrocketing and business was booming.

On the other hand, Lebanese cinema was left in shambles, and no money was being invested in rebuilding it. The war completely decimated the infrastructure of the Lebanese cinema industry, from movie theaters, dubbing studios, cutting rooms, and film development facilities. As the country came to be divided, the distribution of films in different areas became almost impossible (Soueid, 2000). Audiences from East Beirut were unable to access the cinemas in Hamra, as well as the ones in the downtown area and vice versa. Several smaller cinema theaters around the Maten and Keserwan areas were constructed as a result, though were also faced by the decline in attendance and low box office numbers. The war added to the scarcity of film producers and funders, who were mainly concerned with whether the films’ genres would appeal to a mainstream audience, which resulted in the increase in films revolving around action, sexual scenes and comedy (Soueid, 1983).

In 1997, George Ki’di’s revisit to his report on the state of Lebanese cinema, he states: ‘We are continuing with no national cinema, and therefore no memory, no image, no presence’ (Ki’di, 1997). With no infrastructure or support to the industry, filmmakers had the responsibility not only to create a film, but to create a cinema.

This is not to say that the Lebanese post-war cinema had complete freedom to operate, but instead enjoyed a relatively bigger space to narrate the war given the nature of the medium. For example, when Ziad Doueiri’s film West Beyrouth was made in 1998, General Security told him that the film would have to be approved by a Muslim sheikh and a Christian priest before it could be distributed across the country. However, censorship of that kind was not the main obstacle facing filmmakers, but it was funding. The Lebanese government provided little to no financial support to filmmakers, forcing them to resort to either personal funding schemes, or seeking funding from foreign investors mainly based in France and Belgium. The reliance on foreign funding does present its problems. Knowing that European audiences were used to experimental and art house films under the title of ‘world cinema’, French funders demanded the usage of the French language in Lebanese films. They did not care what was being said about Lebanon in these films. The films that were being made about the civil war were made with French money to an international audience.

Why study short films and not long feature films?

It is clear by now that there exists several hurdles in the way of establishing a real cinema industry in Lebanon, especially during the post-war era. Feature filmmakers had failed to coalesce around a common narrative or a structured strategy to approach the topic at hand, so all they ended up with is a number of disparate films and experimental documentaries that subscribe the war depending on their experience and how they visualize it aesthetically. In order to tell a story that may cover months or years, the filmmakers must choose to present certain events and leave others out.

Alternatively, short filmmakers were better posed to experiment with new genres and modes of storytelling. Short films constituted a smaller economic risk and they are screened to a smaller number of people who are composed of local intelligentsia and enthusiasts who are exposed to new ideas. Short filmmakers were capable of telling things they wouldn’t have been able to tell in feature films.

To some extent, studying post-war short films would allow us to see how the narrative and the cinema industry would take shape if it was ridden of all the economic, political, sectarian, and technical obstacles that are currently withholding the growth of an actual cultural cinematic movement.

How did the Lebanese post-war short films narrate the civil war?

Lebanon. Beirut. 1977. A young man, wounded in the civil war, is fitted with an artificial leg. (Photograph: A. Abbas/Magnum Photos)

Wartime Witnessing and Post-War Haunting in Lebanese Cinema:

Kamran Rastergar’s book Surviving Images describes the series of films that came after the war to ‘represent the cultural memory of the war through stories with haunting ghosts, vampires, and characters caught in a liminal space between life and death.’ In post conflict contexts the predominance of ‘undead’ characters is not simply symptomatic, but rather can be ascribed to the process of ‘contestation over the narratives that codify the war experience and its memories.’ The presence of such characters in those films allowed filmmakers to put painful memories and experiences within a mythological or allegorical frame, upon which several interpretations can come up.

In Mark Westmoreland’s (2010) study of postwar Lebanese visual cultures he argues that the interest in the undead in Lebanese cultural works is due to “perhaps the undead thirst for resurrection because they have not been mourned…until the undead can be put to rest they will further compel violence” (Westmoreland, 2010, 201). The undead characters in several post-war films are seeking justice to their end and hold those responsible for the war accountable for their mistakes.

In what follows we aim to analyze two short films by critically assessing their narrative structures and the manner in which they tell the story of the civil war.

The story of Hany Tamba’s Aftershave takes place in Beirut, where an old street barber is hired to shave a rich widower, but the latter’s deceased wife gets in the way. The opening scene starts with a blind lottery seller who guides us into the local coffee shop where men are gathered for hookah and a game of backgammon. Abu Milad (played by Mahmoud Mabsout), the local barber, is trying to shave a customer’s beard as he’s constantly stifling around in his chair. The poor barber does not have a set price and is usually paid an honorarium for every shave he does.

On his way back home, the barber is stopped by the local grocer who tells him to head to Mr. Raymond’s palace where he had lived inside ever since his wife died during the war. Afterwards, we witness a few cut scenes where ‘Sukleen’ workers are dusting off the empty streets of the downtown area as well as the street lights.

Mr. Raymond (played by Rafiq Ali Ahmad) is a rich aristocrat who is also a painter with his deceased wife as his muse. Ever since his wife’s death, Mr. Raymond had spent his days in seclusion, painting nothing but his wife and embracing her obsession with turtles as his own. Throughout the course of the film he is visited by the ghost of his wife, who has a cynical tone to her character. The ghost is constantly reminding Mr. Raymond of the good old times, when she would be dancing with him and he would keep stepping on her feet while doing so. The first disruptive moment in the film is when the cassette tape that Mr. Raymond plays while having a haircut gets destroyed after being played for almost the millionth time. The connection to the past can be seen as partially severed.

Abu Milad was being paid generously for his services, and saw no reason why Mr. Raymond should ever leave the house. One day Mr. Raymond’s pet turtle Isabelle, which used to belong to his wife, is lost. At this point, Mr. Raymond decides to leave the house towards Nejmeh Square where he first met his wife back when they were younger.

On his way out, Mr. Raymond decides to buy a lottery ticket from the same blind seller seen at the beginning of the film. Unfortunately, Mr. Raymond gets hit by a car just as he crosses the street and the lottery ticket he bought flies off his hand and lands into Abu Milad’s, who is interrupted by the return of Isabelle, the turtle. The last scene of the film shows Mr. Raymond reuniting with his wife as they walk toward Nejmeh Square.

In Tamba’s Aftershave, the undead character is that of Mr. Raymond’s. He had been in a sustained state of shell shock after the death of his wife, where it wasn’t until Isabelle (turtles are generally considered a good omen in Lebanese folk culture) had left that he decided to do something about it. Unlike feature films that came after the war, our undead character here was not seeking justice or accountability, but rather to escape living within the liminalities of life and death. Mr. Raymond wanted redemption from the all the memories that have held him hostage in his own house.

This can be seen by looking at the film from a different scope, that of the struggle of letting go of the past and embracing the uncertainty of the future. If Mr. Raymond wanted to completely shut himself out of society, he would not have invited a barber to his palace, but instead he would have shaven himself as he was fully capable of doing so. Abu Milad is Mr. Raymond’s connection to the real world: he brings him groceries to his palace (products to consume) and he is driven by the 50$ per cut price (capital) that Mr. Raymond gives him. Interestingly, Mr. Raymond had invited a barber and not a doctor to his palace. Not to say that Mr. Raymond was sick, but instead that he wanted to remain young and to look good for his dead wife’s ghost, which he constantly conversed with. Another thing to be noticed is that Mr. Raymond had left his wife’s belongings exactly the way they were left on the dresser and the bathroom.

The only time the civil war is mentioned during the film is when the local grocer is telling Abu Milad to go to Mr. Raymond’s palace, and the barber exclaims widely at the idea that Mr. Raymond didn’t leave his house since the war. This brief incident makes it sound like the war is ancient history or this surreal occurrence might have not even happened in the first place. The war is used as a non-diegetic element within the narrative of the film, where it is only implied to by the usage of two cut scenes showing Sukleen cleaners dusting off the streets of the downtown area and the street light even, which shows the diligence in removing every single trace of the war.

Aftershave skims around the topic of the civil war by overstretching the everydayness of daily life and dramatizing the struggles faced by individuals in society, something which had been done in other feature films such as A Perfect Day (Hadjithomas, Joreige) and The Last Man (Salhab). Note that the short film is made with the financial support of Fonds Francophone de Production Audiovisuelle du Sud.

On the other hand, if we look at Lebanon Wins the World Cup, which is a Lebanese funded film, we are confronted with a different method of narrating the civil war, one that is shaped by reconciliation and forgiveness.

Lebanon Wins the World Cup (dir. Tony Elkhoury & Anthony Lappé) — Official Trailer

The short documentary film is driven by two main protagonists who were once fierce enemies: one fought alongside the Lebanese Communist Party driven by an ideology, and another fought alongside the Lebanese Forces who thought he was on a crusade to protect the Christians of his area. Both characters are engulfed by a sense of guilt of what they’ve done and the need to ‘forget everything.’

Matter of fact, the first scene starts with Edward, the ex-Lebanese Forces fighter, saying ‘When I go swimming, I forget everything.’

Their passion about football had brought these two fighters together to reminisce and share their memories of the war. Throughout the course of the film they remind us of the futility of the differences that were exacerbated by the effects of the war. Edward and Hussein comment on how ‘the Lebanese are more royal than the king himself’, and that they can’t come up with an original idea themselves. In a symbolic analogy to the civil war and its chaos, many scenes throughout the film show the Lebanese public as fanatics towards football, whether it was the German team or the Brazilian team: ‘Lebanese are always searching for a hero’ says Hussein Bazzi as he comments on the lack of Lebanese identity and originality.

The two fighters recall how a 1982 Worldcup match between Brazil and Italy had temporarily stopped fighting back then, only to be resumed heavily afterwards. ‘Suddenly football made us forget everything for a while,’ says Edward after meeting Hussein for the first time and watching a game together in 2014. At one point during the film, Hussein Bazzi comments that Nelson Mandela was able to bring 2 races to put their difference aside and commune in a game of rugby.

Though, this is not to say that everything can simply be forgotten through a game of football, but rather it helps in bringing people together and create a space for shared interest and tolerance.

Conclusion

The time surrounding the civil war, cinema emerged as one of the primary arenas for confronting the legacies of the conflict or what some have vaguely called al ahdath (the happenings). Lina Khatib suggests in her book that many “seemed to choose to forget — the memory of the war was deemed too painful and guilt-inducing to be resurrected…. Filmmakers … resisted the sidelining of the memory of the war, and continued to make films about their war experiences.”

At times, the reality of a continuing flow of political and social conflict in society had driven cultural producers away from addressing core issues such as sectarianism and social differences, something which filmmakers were capable of doing. Despite the fact that some filmmakers have seen the war as a heavy weight that is preventing them from exploring other topics and themes, they were capable of articulating a cultural memory of the conflict, what Khatib (2008, 179) terms “a memory project giving voice to a silenced past.”

A consistent narrative would create a new public consensus around memories of the war. Though, for cultural producers to do so, they need to be able to recognize the victims, hold the criminals accountable for their actions, and create room to what Freud ([1917] 1957, 243) terms “the normal affect of mourning,” and allows the audience to find a closure to the myriad tragedies of the war.

Short films, as much as football, have taken the shape they have due to the absence of a true industry that would create limitations and opportunities ahead of them. That is not necessarily a bad thing, especially that they have the potential to overcome the regime of silence, denial, and repression. I am not calling here for a complete loss of memory of the war through redundant rearticulation of past events, but rather to find middle ground between forgetting and forgiving and the right for remembering.


References:

· Azzi, W. (1994, January). ‘Lessons that should be learned’, Arab Ad, 4.

· FLC study of the Film Industry. (2015). Retrieved April 28, 2017, from http://www.fondationlibancinema.org/facts-figures

· Freud, Sigmund. (1917) 1957. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, translated and edited by James Strachey, 237–258. London: Hogarth.

· Khatib, Lina. 2008. Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond. New York: I.B. Tauris.

· Ki’di, George (1997a). ‘An-Nahar opens the file of the disappeared Lebanese cinema and its possible horizons 1’, An-Nahar, January 20 (Arabic).

· Kraidy, M. M. (1998). Broadcasting Regulation and Civil Society in Postwar Lebanon. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 42 (3), 387–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838159809364457

· Mideastmedia.org. Television Industry in the Middle East. Retrieved April 28, 2017, from http://www.mideastmedia.org/industry/2016/tv/#s14

· Soueid, Mohamad (2000). ‘The cinema industry un Lebanon’, Al-Hiwar, April 15 (Arabic).

· Soueid, Mohamad (1983b). ‘Stories from cinematic production in Lebanon’, As-Safir, September 12 (Arabic).

· The audio-visual guillotine blade falls (1996, September). Arab Ad, 40–41.

· Toufic, Jalal. 2003. Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo.

· Westmoreland, Mark. 2010. “Catastrophic Subjectivity: Representing Lebanon’s Undead.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 30: 176–210.

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Ramee Deeb

Written by

Filmmaker, photographer, and an art enthusiast. News Editor @mtvlebanon

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