- 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 * Fall 2022
The Filmmaker’s Archive:
Historicity and Memory of the Lebanese Civil War
Historicity and Memory of the Lebanese Civil War
Independent Paper
Advised by Professor Huma Gupta
To be presented at the 58th Middle Eastern Studies Assosciation (MESA) Annual Conference (2024)
Abstract
This paper investigates the importance of the archive as a tool for historicizing war, specifically the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that has not been transcribed into accessible historical texts to be taught within institutional frameworks. While educational institutes fail to impart such essential knowledge to their pupils, artistic cultural productions such as films engage with such historical events. By analyzing the 1998 film West Beirut directed by Ziad Doueiri in parallel with Walid Raad’s 1999 short The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, this study explores films as archives that can preserve memories, events and social interactions often lost within traditional archiving processes. In a postwar era of retrospection and social reconstruction – stained by a state-sponsored amnesia of the war – these films recount historical experiences through the employment of fiction and mythology within the subversive space of cinematic narrative-building.
This research lies at the juncture between films and archives, the relationship of filmmakers to archives, and the potential pedagogical device of film as a democratic storytelling apparatus. Doueiri’s iconic film can be analyzed as a site of cultural production creating a shift in collective consciousness about the war, or perhaps awakening a more nuanced relationship between the Lebanese populace and postwar material politics. Raad’s film, a fabulation, derives its ‘truthfulness’ from the culmination of imagined events of the war. I argue that the use of storytelling through a filmmaker’s lens is an act of archival recollection and revolt that challenge a repressed history long dominating the Lebanese sociopolitical landscape.
Film’s relationship to reality, as well as the sense perceptions of viewers, generate a productive fixation with the work, revealing the potency embedded in fiction, specifically cinematic imaginaries. Analyzing key visual elements, characters and plotlines in these films can reveal the power of the archive as a tool for negotiating between imagined fictions and the ‘real’, whatever that may be in the collective minds of generations of war survivors and the ripples they generate in the present.
The formal, aesthetic, and narrative components of these films contribute to the archiving of history and memory, while the filmmakers’ processes of production challenge the limitations of historicizing war. These films as archives of images and collective memory give form to generational trauma through narratives of war that flit between factualized fiction and falsified fact, which filmmakers Raad and Doueiri employ as a significant tool for reconciling historically incongruent accounts of war.
This paper investigates the importance of the archive as a tool for historicizing war, specifically the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that has not been transcribed into accessible historical texts to be taught within institutional frameworks. While educational institutes fail to impart such essential knowledge to their pupils, artistic cultural productions such as films engage with such historical events. By analyzing the 1998 film West Beirut directed by Ziad Doueiri in parallel with Walid Raad’s 1999 short The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, this study explores films as archives that can preserve memories, events and social interactions often lost within traditional archiving processes. In a postwar era of retrospection and social reconstruction – stained by a state-sponsored amnesia of the war – these films recount historical experiences through the employment of fiction and mythology within the subversive space of cinematic narrative-building.
This research lies at the juncture between films and archives, the relationship of filmmakers to archives, and the potential pedagogical device of film as a democratic storytelling apparatus. Doueiri’s iconic film can be analyzed as a site of cultural production creating a shift in collective consciousness about the war, or perhaps awakening a more nuanced relationship between the Lebanese populace and postwar material politics. Raad’s film, a fabulation, derives its ‘truthfulness’ from the culmination of imagined events of the war. I argue that the use of storytelling through a filmmaker’s lens is an act of archival recollection and revolt that challenge a repressed history long dominating the Lebanese sociopolitical landscape.
Film’s relationship to reality, as well as the sense perceptions of viewers, generate a productive fixation with the work, revealing the potency embedded in fiction, specifically cinematic imaginaries. Analyzing key visual elements, characters and plotlines in these films can reveal the power of the archive as a tool for negotiating between imagined fictions and the ‘real’, whatever that may be in the collective minds of generations of war survivors and the ripples they generate in the present.
The formal, aesthetic, and narrative components of these films contribute to the archiving of history and memory, while the filmmakers’ processes of production challenge the limitations of historicizing war. These films as archives of images and collective memory give form to generational trauma through narratives of war that flit between factualized fiction and falsified fact, which filmmakers Raad and Doueiri employ as a significant tool for reconciling historically incongruent accounts of war.
* Paper available upon request *