In the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War, the Lebanese left understood the unfolding violence as a necessary step for ending the structural inequalities of the state and bringing about a just society. The revolutionary euphoria did not last as interventions by Syria and Israel against the left and its allies made the war seem interminable. As the Lebanese Civil War dragged on, much of the left rejected the revolutionary capacities of violence and embraced a defeatist position towards what the war was and what its aftermaths would be. Even though some prominent figures such as leftist philosopher Madhi ‘Amil pushed back against this pessimism, despondency towards revolution predominated. The destructiveness of the war and the restoration of the old order appeared to foreclose the possibility of a revolutionary present and future. Lebanon, following the conflict, did not undergo a period of self-examination, reflection, and contextualization of the war. Instead, the state evaded examining the socioeconomic contingencies undergirding the war and pushed towards a neoliberal future. Cinema became a means to explore the war’s aftermaths and despair brought about by destructive violence and the failed revolutionary project. My paper explores how two films grapple with the aftermaths of the war and attempt to contextualize the violence that destroyed the sense of futurity and revolutionary politics. French-trained Maroun Baghdadi’s 1991 Kharaj al-Hayat [Out of Life] presents a fictionalized account of a French kidnapping victim. The narrative from the Frenchman’s point of view refracts the war’s inanity into fragments that show how violence pushes Lebanese individuals into desperate circumstances. Throughout this film, the Frenchman encounters individuals ravaged by the war and people grappling with their lost hopes. Soviet-trained Samir Habchi’s 1992 al-Is‘ar [The Tornado] tells the story of a young man returning from a study abroad who was subsumed by the war’s banal violence. The expatriate’s pessimistic view of the war lay in the manner in which war destroyed the potentiality of a better future. Both films examine the role of militias and the cyclic violence that renders the war pointless. Both films take place during the war and present the disjointed time experienced in postwar Lebanese society and civil society’s ongoing attempts to recapture a sense of progressive time.