In recent years, emerging media forms have participated in documenting not only state violence, occupation, and war, but also the ordinary and the mundane. The accessibility of new audiovisual modes of documentation has engendered an unprecedented fusion of witnessing, archiving, and narrating. Documentation and witnessing have become ubiquitous themes in Middle Eastern cinema and have brought to the fore perennial questions about contradictions inherent in notions of truth and authenticity in documentaries and docufictions. Addressing these issues from an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses history, literature, and cinema studies, this panel raises the following questions: How can we conceptualize the act of documenting both the ordinary and the unspeakable in the context of political and social upheaval? How do we understand the interaction between aesthetics and ethics of witnessing and documenting? How does the process of cinematic documentation reiterate or subvert reductive or essentialist articulations of life experiences, whether traumatic or ordinary?
As they engage these questions, the panelists explore the intricacies of audiovisual documentation from its earliest forms to its contemporary manifestations in animations, docufictions, and fiction films that cover peripheral geographies and ideological spaces in the Middle East. The first panelist revisits the problematic notion of authenticity in representing the Armenian genocide in the 1917 American documentary “Ravished Armenia.” The notion of self-reflexivity is the focus of the second paper that examines the ways in which the fictional film “West Beirut” (1998) depicts two teenagers as they struggle to represent themselves in a homemade video. The theme of self-representation appears again in the third paper that compares the portrayal of victimhood in the documentaries “Waltz with Bashir” (2008) and “Five Broken Cameras” (2011) and traces the ethical and esthetic traces of trauma that stems from guilt. The fourth paper explores Simone Bitton’s documentary “Wall” (2004), which deploys parody and mimicry of the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank as a profound critique of the didactic and naive undertones of pervasive forms of documenting the occupation. The debunking of notions of collective remembering is central to the fifth panelists’ discussion of “Ok, Enough, Goodbye” (2010), a fictional film that depicts through a parody of the documentary genre ordinary Lebanese characters and peripheral spaces and thereby contributes to the deconstruction of the postwar Lebanese film consumed with the themes of civil war and collective memory.
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Prof. Kelsey Rice
In 1919 the newly completed film "Ravished Armenia" was screened before an audience of New York philanthropists as part of a fund-raising campaign by the American Committee for Armenian and Assyrian Relief (ACASR.) The film was based on teenaged Armenian genocide survivor Aurora Mardiganian’s 1918 memoir of the same name, and was taken on a twenty-one city tour featuring a rotating cast of hired Aurora look-alikes as part of the ACASR’s fundraising campaign. In its depictions of ethnic violence and role in American philanthropic efforts, "Ravished Armenia" presents a compelling case study of early documentary film, representations of ethnicity, and depictions of trauma.
The events depicted in "Ravished Armenia" are largely ahistorical and exploitative, filled with scandalous scenes of Armenian women tortured at the hands of orientalized Turks in manners unsubstantiated by historical record. Despite this, the film makes claims to authenticity through the use of an actual genocide survivor reenacting her own experiences and through an introductory title claiming verification of each scene by two noted diplomats. But who had authority in the representation of truth in Ravished Armenia? In this paper I argue that "Ravished Armenia" is representative of the many contesting claims of authenticity and truth surrounding the Armenian genocide immediately following the end of World War I, and that American philanthropic and diplomatic interests asserted a great deal of authority over how this event was represented and perceived throughout the world. As a young refugee Mardiganian’s narrative was easily manipulated by her American guardians, but when compared to literary accounts of ethnic violence in the Caucasus and Anatolia during this time period from both Armenian and Turkic sources, it becomes clear that the explicit depictions of violence and the othering of the aggressor present in the film were part of a broader trend in Caucasian discourse on ethnicity. This paper displays the clear link between the American production "Ravished Armenia" and Caucasian narratives on violence produced during the same time period, showing how in the period following World War I western diplomatic interests and emerging nationalist discourses throughout the colonized world influenced and informed each other.
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Ziad Doueiri’s debut feature film, “West Beirut” (1998), is powerfully bookended by black-and-white footage supposedly shot by the main characters’ Super-8 camera. Elsewhere, similar scenes, blown-up 8mm footage shot by the handheld camera, punctuate the film. These scenes, which increasingly distract the viewer as they become less and less integrated into the film’s editing, raise an important question about life narratives and changing visual technologies. What is achieved by forcing the viewer to watch the footage that the two main characters, Tarek and Omar, desperately try, but never successfully, to develop? Scholars have suggested that Doueiri’s use of Super-8 technology is a self-reflexive strategy which captures the lack of agency that Lebanese citizens had in representing their own war.
But this reading of Doueiri’s use of Super-8 technology overlooks the role that the 8mm scenes play within the film’s text, and it does not recognize the genealogy of the film medium that is called forth by the integration of older technologies. I argue that the four scenes in “West Beirut” shot with a Super 8 camera do more than call into question the film’s realist mode. They explode out of the film’s fictional narrative with gray-tones and silence. Drawing on theories of amateur film articulated by Heather Norris Nicholson and Patricia R. Zimmerman, I position these grainy black-and-white moving images, which have no soundtrack other than sound of the Super-8 camera itself, as constitutive of an entirely separate film, a home movie shot by the two main characters, representing their own perspectives, and charting the developments in their own lives. And yet this is a movie that its directors never see. Tarek and Omar cannot access their footage, because its outdated technology means that there is only one store in Beirut that can develop the film, and the growing Civil War makes it impossible navigate the divided city. So when Tarek, determined in his mission to develop the film, cries “I have the technology,” we as viewers understand that his technology has already become obsolete. In this way, Doueiri’s “West Beirut” captures anxieties about the course of Lebanese cinema, which was disrupted by two decades of war, and its ability to adapt at this crucial moment in the mid-1990s when digital technology was changing the shape of cinema.
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Dr. Nisrine Mansour
Susan Sontag considers visual representation of victims of atrocities as unethical because it is both ineffective and harmful to the individual’s traumatic experience and the moralities of peace.
This claim becomes less obvious when actors involved at both ends of the conflict document their own version of atrocities and victimhood. The new trend of autobiographical war documentaries requires a reassessment of the ethics of visual representation at two levels. First, the ideological positioning of the filmmaker plays a crucial role in historicising the conflict. Second, the filmmaker redefines ‘victimhood’ in relation to the recognition and worthiness of warring parties and civilian populations. Two award-winning autobiographical documentary films directed by filmmakers involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict illustrate the argument. They are Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2008) and Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s “Five Broken Cameras” (2011).
The argument starts with a discussion of Sontag’s claim in relation to the media of photography and documentary film. While documentary film is more inclusive than photography, it revolves around the ‘creative treatment of actuality’, and is inherently subjective. At the heart of this creative process lies the filmmakers’ ideological positioning within the different autobiographical ‘worlds’ of the two films. Folman’s film is part of a growing revisionist trend, narrating his experience as a former IDF soldier exclusively within the world of military subjects. Conversely, Burnat adopts a more conventional approach as he narrates his own experience of enduring Israeli occupation within the civilians’ world.
This ideological positioning of the filmmakers also reconfigures the definition of victimhood of the subjects involved. As the film evolves, Folman’s character is redrawn from the typical image of a perpetrator to an amnesic, tormented victim who is oblivious to the brutality of the military institution he belongs to. On the other hand, Burnat’s character is reconstructed from a passive victim to an active witness subverting the perpetrators’ actions through the camera. The authors’ contrasting ideological positioning and their reversal of victimhood offers multidirectional channels for voicing and excluding the claims of populations involved in atrocities beyond Sontag’s critique.
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Dr. Drew Paul
The closing scene of Simone Bitton’s film “Mur” (“Wall,” 2004) depicts a series of people who, on their way to school or work, are seen climbing over the Israeli-built West Bank barrier near Jerusalem. The film, devoted to the effect of the wall’s construction on those who live beneath its shadow, manages at once to portray the hardships caused by the wall’s presence, the absurdities of its justification, and its failure to achieve its stated goal of blocking the movement of people between Israel and the West Bank. “Wall” is part of a growing trend of documentaries that shine a critical light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many of which have gained prominence on the international stage.
“Wall,” however, sets itself apart by avoiding the traps of didacticism and naivete into which so many of these documentaries fall, and by doing so it serves as an effective articulation of a powerful critique. It accomplishes this critique largely, I argue, by mimicking formally its object of interest, the wall. I draw on theoretical discussions of documentary and voice by Bill Nichols to show how the film uses the wall as a structuring device. Bitton makes little use of voiceovers and other common means of bringing structure to documentary footage and instead uses the progressive encroachment of concrete slabs on subjects’ lands and lives to show the destructive effects of the wall. “Wall” frequently juxtaposes the fantasy of official rhetoric against the reality of the wall captured on film and, as in the final shot, makes use of long periods of silence. The film portrays the wall’s piecemeal construction in order to dismantle the logic of separation and control used to justify its existence. The title, “Wall,” then, is more than the documentary’s subject but also describes the structure of the film itself. By ending with a series of shots of men and women crossing over the border meant to block them, the film reveals both the impotence of the concrete wall and the potency of the celluloid “wall” it constructs for itself.
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Dr. Zeina G. Halabi
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.
