- 3 I Fashion a Nest Between Spines & Stories
- 4 Sonic Beirut, Displaced
- 5 The Translation Institute
- 6 Air as Commodity, Image as Spectacle
- 7 Auditory Escape
essays
2 Between City and Self
Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Spring 2023
A Reading of Red:
Revealing Textures in Cinema Fouad
Revealing Textures in Cinema Fouad
Independent Paper
Advised by Professor Caroline Jones
Presented at the International Conference on Film Studies organised by London Centre
for Interdisciplinary Research at Birkbeck College, University of London (2024)
Abstract
A melodramatic tune emerges from the elastic weeping of violins and round plucking of the qanun in Abdel Halim Hafez’s song Ana Lak Ala Toul (I Am Always Yours). The mellow love song is an apt preface for the 41-minute-long documentary video Cinema Fouad (1994) directed by Mohamed Soueid, throughout which the motifs of loss and desire resonate. Abdel Halim’s voice is channeled into that of protagonist Khaled El Kurdi, who chronicles her hauntingly poignant experiences as a transgender Syrian woman who flees her home in Aleppo, first working as a belly dancer at a casino in Damascus, then moving to Beirut to dance at a cabaret. Unable to undergo the gender affirming operation she has longed for her whole life, Khaled’s anguish turns into a vengeful hysteria, leading her to execute a suicide operation in the South of Lebanon. As Hafez bestows the poetics of the tune upon El Kurdi, a transitional moment between song and story manifests in a zoomed-in shot of what seems to be two moist tomatoes.1 Sensual in their composition and placement within the frame of the video, the tomatoes glisten, never fully captured in the frame but cropped from all sides. This shot ejects us from the world of Abdel Halim and parachutes us into the world of Khaled, passing through this visual purgatory, a moment of suspension in which the nature of the fruit is yet uncertain. Are they oranges? Apples perhaps? Marking the first scene of the film after the introductory credits and images of the Arab stars, the close-up shot of the fruits invites us into the moist and inescapably red world of Cinema Fouad.
This paper explores the color red as a generative visual tool with the capacity to reveal historical gaps and revitalize cultural practices through filmic representation, particularly through Soueid’s experimental video in the Lebanese post-war context. Shot almost completely indoors at Khaled’s house, the video follows the protagonist as she narrates her life’s story while performing routine domestic activities, like preparing food, applying makeup, and getting dressed. Throughout Soueid’s interview of Khaled intercepted by fleeting shots of kaleidoscopic objects, red appears in various shots, extending beyond the screen, or as media theorist Laura U. Marks refers to it, the cinema’s skin. The video’s haptic visuality connects the viewer to the screen in a production of latently erotic and violent symbols, through which a distance is maintained between the visual material and the viewer.2 In her book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks notes, “haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image.”3 Referencing Bill Nichols and Jane Gaines’ discussion of documentaries, she argues, “haptic, visceral intimacy engenders an ethical relationship between viewer and viewed, by inviting the viewer to mimetically embody the experience of the people viewed.”4 Cinema Fouad does precisely that, provoking a lingering desire to touch the low-resolution images that distance the viewer from their discernability, which is precisely the quality constituted by the video’s low contrast ratio and pixelation.
The video’s grainy texture and its charged capacity to be electronically and digitally manipulated, while also decaying over time, elevates Soueid’s documentary into a haptic and consequently erotic visuality that undulates between what the viewer may receive and, in turn, give back. This research predominantly draws from Marks’ theories on haptic visuality, erotics, and tactility, but also posits experimental video’s capacity to unravel a nation’s contested past through alternative media that weaves fragmented imagery with poignant narratives. I intend to read through red, perhaps as a medium on its own, the lacuna in the representation of both historical events and characters as well as cultural and artistic practices. This close chromophilic reading stresses the potential of experimental video to voice the silenced in the contemporary world of Lebanese and, more broadly, Arab cinema. By isolating the rich red pigments on the screen as generative, extra-visual elements and distilling the color’s allegorical capacities, I examine the embedded sexuality in the red of the tomato and the latent aggression in the red of the shawl, as well as Soueid’s experience of Beirut’s theatres, hotels, and streets, which disclose his own escapism through film and notable relationship with the color.
Notes
1 Cinema Fouad, directed by Mohamed Soueid (Tele Liban, 1994), 1:40.
2 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema Embodiment and the Senses. (Durham / London: Duke University Press, 2000), xi-xii.
3 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3.
4 Ibid, 8.
A melodramatic tune emerges from the elastic weeping of violins and round plucking of the qanun in Abdel Halim Hafez’s song Ana Lak Ala Toul (I Am Always Yours). The mellow love song is an apt preface for the 41-minute-long documentary video Cinema Fouad (1994) directed by Mohamed Soueid, throughout which the motifs of loss and desire resonate. Abdel Halim’s voice is channeled into that of protagonist Khaled El Kurdi, who chronicles her hauntingly poignant experiences as a transgender Syrian woman who flees her home in Aleppo, first working as a belly dancer at a casino in Damascus, then moving to Beirut to dance at a cabaret. Unable to undergo the gender affirming operation she has longed for her whole life, Khaled’s anguish turns into a vengeful hysteria, leading her to execute a suicide operation in the South of Lebanon. As Hafez bestows the poetics of the tune upon El Kurdi, a transitional moment between song and story manifests in a zoomed-in shot of what seems to be two moist tomatoes.1 Sensual in their composition and placement within the frame of the video, the tomatoes glisten, never fully captured in the frame but cropped from all sides. This shot ejects us from the world of Abdel Halim and parachutes us into the world of Khaled, passing through this visual purgatory, a moment of suspension in which the nature of the fruit is yet uncertain. Are they oranges? Apples perhaps? Marking the first scene of the film after the introductory credits and images of the Arab stars, the close-up shot of the fruits invites us into the moist and inescapably red world of Cinema Fouad.
This paper explores the color red as a generative visual tool with the capacity to reveal historical gaps and revitalize cultural practices through filmic representation, particularly through Soueid’s experimental video in the Lebanese post-war context. Shot almost completely indoors at Khaled’s house, the video follows the protagonist as she narrates her life’s story while performing routine domestic activities, like preparing food, applying makeup, and getting dressed. Throughout Soueid’s interview of Khaled intercepted by fleeting shots of kaleidoscopic objects, red appears in various shots, extending beyond the screen, or as media theorist Laura U. Marks refers to it, the cinema’s skin. The video’s haptic visuality connects the viewer to the screen in a production of latently erotic and violent symbols, through which a distance is maintained between the visual material and the viewer.2 In her book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks notes, “haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image.”3 Referencing Bill Nichols and Jane Gaines’ discussion of documentaries, she argues, “haptic, visceral intimacy engenders an ethical relationship between viewer and viewed, by inviting the viewer to mimetically embody the experience of the people viewed.”4 Cinema Fouad does precisely that, provoking a lingering desire to touch the low-resolution images that distance the viewer from their discernability, which is precisely the quality constituted by the video’s low contrast ratio and pixelation.
The video’s grainy texture and its charged capacity to be electronically and digitally manipulated, while also decaying over time, elevates Soueid’s documentary into a haptic and consequently erotic visuality that undulates between what the viewer may receive and, in turn, give back. This research predominantly draws from Marks’ theories on haptic visuality, erotics, and tactility, but also posits experimental video’s capacity to unravel a nation’s contested past through alternative media that weaves fragmented imagery with poignant narratives. I intend to read through red, perhaps as a medium on its own, the lacuna in the representation of both historical events and characters as well as cultural and artistic practices. This close chromophilic reading stresses the potential of experimental video to voice the silenced in the contemporary world of Lebanese and, more broadly, Arab cinema. By isolating the rich red pigments on the screen as generative, extra-visual elements and distilling the color’s allegorical capacities, I examine the embedded sexuality in the red of the tomato and the latent aggression in the red of the shawl, as well as Soueid’s experience of Beirut’s theatres, hotels, and streets, which disclose his own escapism through film and notable relationship with the color.
Notes
1 Cinema Fouad, directed by Mohamed Soueid (Tele Liban, 1994), 1:40.
2 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema Embodiment and the Senses. (Durham / London: Duke University Press, 2000), xi-xii.
3 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3.
4 Ibid, 8.
* Paper available upon request *