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“Ok, Enough, Goodbye” to the Lebanese Postwar Film: The Peripheral Narratives of Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia
Abstract
The traumatic legacy of the civil war (1975-1990) has permeated all facets of Lebanese cultural production since 1990. As such, Beirut, mourning, and memory have become the three recurring motifs in postwar Lebanese literature and cinema. Despite the singularity of their cinematic trajectories, established Lebanese directors such as Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (2005; 1999), Ghassan Salhab (1998; 2002), Nadine Labaki (2011), and Ziad Doueiri (1998), have echoed in their works an interest in conceptualizing collective memory and amnesia in the backdrop of the controversial reconstruction process of war-torn Beirut. The codification of collective memory within the urban center has become a distinctive feature of the Lebanese postwar film, which has arguably sidelined peripheral spaces and narratives. The thematic fixation on Beirut has engendered a discursive void that a new generation of directors begins to address. “Ok, Enough, Goodbye” (2010) by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia is a no-budget film about an ordinary man in the northern city of Tripoli as he learns to become autonomous after his mother unexpectedly moves to Beirut. Drawing on a hybrid cinematic genre that incorporates documentary and fictional features, the film begins with a panoramic shot of Tripoli with information about its location, size, weather, and economic contribution. The film, however, challenges its own stipulated goal by zooming-in on closed spaces such as homes, cars, and shops, and proceeds to expose the banality and the ennui that engulf the urban periphery. I aim to show how Attieh and Garcia tap into Elia Suleiman’s self-reflexive, disjointed, and absurdist cinematic style in order to de-territorialize Lebanese cinema by interrogating the postwar fetishization of the capital as the crucible of debates about Lebanese collective memory. I argue that the trials of the awkward, inarticulate, and lonesome northern man, as well as the marginal characters that surround him, constitute a series of disjointed micro-narratives that make no truth claims about the surrounding urban space, the imagined national community, and Lebanese collective memory. By severing its discursive ties with the center and simultaneously trivializing notions of memory and representation, “Ok, Enough, Goodbye” ushers us towards a nascent Lebanese film genre that bids Beirut and the civil war farewell.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Cinema/Film