Inside the Pandora's Box
"The reason Israel didn't bomb our television stations this summer was so we could watch our own death," explained performance artist Rabih Mroué, speaking at the Face à Face arts festival which ran from 2 – 5 November in Munich, Germany. The festival was presenting "Views from Lebanon" – all of them linked by a common thread of death, the presence and absence of images, and thus also of facts and moorings.
Sixteen years have passed since the end of the civil war. The devastated buildings have disappeared, but the devastation suffered by the population has not, as Ghassan Salhab's film Terra Incognita, filmed in 2002, illustrates.
A group of young friends wander through Beirut, a city in the process of reconstruction. Their guide, Soraya, shows the tourists every piece of land; each piece is steeped in history. It is a land she herself yearns only to escape, just as she also yearns to escape her body, which she shares with various men she afterwards wants nothing more to do with.
The burdon of memory
Just don't remember – and if you do remember, don't base anything on your memories – this is also the motto of the architect Nadim. He has saved Beirut down to the last detail on his hard drive and divided it up into plots of land, which he creates anew in the austere isolation of his room. Meanwhile, over a drink, Laila mocks the way Lebanese are so in thrall to religious denominationalism, only to rush to the toilet and beg God for forgiveness.
Which God?
"Whatever. Just don't ask a Lebanese what his religion is," explains Ghassan Salhab who was born in Senegal and moved to Beirut when he was twelve. Like most of the artists involved, Salhab attended the Munich festival in person. Just don't ask about the issue that is still grinding the country down, sixteen years after the civil war.
Homo homini lupus
Massacre, a film that documents what happened in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila, is another illustration of the Pandora's box that would be opened if you infringed this taboo.
For three years Monika Borgmann, her Lebanese husband Lokman Slim, and Hermann Theißen worked to track down members of the "Forces Libanaises" and persuaded them to talk. In 1982 these militiamen collaborated with Israel, and under their "protection" (Israeli soldiers surrounded the camp so that no one besides the murderers could enter) they carried out a massacre that went on for two nights and three days.
The total number of victims – the majority of them civilians – was never established. Instead, in 1991, the Lebanese parliament approved an amnesty for all civil war criminals.
More than 20 years after the massacre, six of them speak for the first time about their excesses of violence. Their testimonies make difficult listening, but they could just as well be referring to Rwanda, Srebrenica or East Timor.
Instead of putting these testimonies in their historical and personal context (the latter is also veiled to protect the anonymity of the perpetrators), the film focuses on the beast in man – at least, this is the impression for outsiders. Lebanese people, however, have no need of further exposition to feel deeply personally affected.
"Many of the 900 people who squeezed into the 800-seat cinema at the premiere in Beirut ran out before the film had finished; and in the tumultuous discussion that followed the screening they all accused each other of perpetrating every massacre before and after 1982," reports Verena Frensch, a Munich-based artist who curated the festival. It was Frensch's commitment, supported by Klaus Blank, the principal of the public academy of the Munich adult education centre, that enabled Face à Face to come about.
Nietzsche and the Ashura flagellants
Wael Noureddine's short film Ça sera beau – From Beyrouth with Love also touches people's sensibilities. Like the 48-year-old Salhab, this young director, who has immigrated to France yet thinks only of Lebanon, depicts his country from the point of view of restless youth. Yet whereas the ongoing stagnation is reflected in the tempo of Salhab's 120-minute film, Noureddine's Lebanon races. In a world characterised by violence, despair and drugs, his "video diary" brings sharply into focus both what is, and what might have been.
With his study of the Ashura festival, director Jalal Toufic is seizing the initiative by seeking and building bridges to the Occident. Those who do not understand the poetic laments, passion plays and self-flagellation with which Shiites commemorate the martyrdom of their Imam Hussain in the year 61 after the hijra (680 A.D. in the Christian calendar) might want to look it up in Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals": "One burns something onto one's memory in order that it remain there: only that which does not cease to cause pain remains in the memory."
It is also a reminder of a political message: solidarity and the capacity to endure suffering are the best weapons against oppression. No need to show an image of a confident Hezbollah for this to come to the audience's mind.
A country divided
Meanwhile Mai Masri's Beirut Diaries – Truth, Lies and Videos introduces the two camps of the 14th and the 8th of March that have divided the country for the past year and a half since the "Cedar Revolution". Over a period of several months Masri accompanied youths who demonstrated, in vain as it turns out, for independence in "Martyrs' Square" – independence from the Syrian occupation as well as from the noose of their own denominationalism, placed around their necks by warlords in search of profit.
Has Lebanon really been set back dozens years since the July war? Is it helplessly stuck in a destructive vicious circle, created by both foreign powers and itself?
The images produced by its very lively film scene present only one answer: Here we are, these are our realities; take a look at them instead of blindly following media "documentation". It is an answer that is sometimes angry, but it is not helpless.
Mona Sarkis
© Qantara.de 2006
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
Qantara.de
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