How 1980s cinema captured Lebanon

The 1980s opened with Lebanon already seven years into civil war and would proceed to deliver, in rapid succession, the Israeli invasion of 1978, the siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and years of compounding destruction that would not end until 1990. There was no longer any distance between the filmmaker and the subject. The subject had arrived at the front door, had burned the house down. What remained was the question of how to point a camera at something so total, and why.

The city, divided

Borhane Alaouié's Beirut, the Encounter (1981) arrived at the threshold of the decade with an image that would come to define it. The film plots a quiet story of attempted reunification across the bombed and bullet-marked backdrops of the city, a Muslim man and a Christian woman, former classmates, separated by the war for two years. When telephone communication between the city's eastern and western halves is tentatively restored, they attempt to reach each other. The film does not reward this attempt with easy resolution. It was selected for the Venice Film Festival in 1981 and competed for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 1982, evidence that the international film world was paying attention to Beirut, even as Beirut was becoming increasingly difficult to watch. 

The year everything changed

1982 is the hinge of the decade. The Israeli siege of Beirut that summer concentrated levels of violence that the preceding years had distributed more gradually. It also produced some of the decade's most urgent filmmaking.

Jocelyne Saab completed the third panel of her Beirut trilogy that year. Beirut My City returns Saab and her collaborator, the playwright Roger Assaf, to the shell of her former home following the invasion, finding small glimmers of hope in the chaos of refugee camps and the rubble of decimated neighborhoods. The film begins with Saab standing in front of her bombed-out family house, 150 years of history gone up in flames. Where her earlier films had observed the city from a reporter's remove, Beirut My City had no remove left. The film no longer hesitates to show the dead and critically injured. It is the moment her trilogy became something closer to testimony. 

Jean Chamoun and the Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri were also shooting in Beirut that summer. They captured footage under dangerous conditions which they would later use in their 1983 documentary Under the Rubble, a harrowing account of the siege's toll on the city's civilian population. The film abandons the sensitive fragments that ordinarily defined their approach, unable to soften what the 1982 siege of Beirut actually looked like. 

Baghdadi and the weight of narrative

Maroun Baghdadi had announced himself with Beirut Oh Beirut in 1975. The 1980s were when he became the central figure of his generation. Little Wars (1982) was presented in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, introducing him to international audiences. It established the terms of a cinema that would occupy him for the rest of his life: Lebanon's violence rendered from the inside, through characters who were neither heroes nor villains but people caught in something larger than their capacity to understand it. 

Later in the decade, L'Homme voilé (1987) transposed the reality of war in Lebanon to exile life in Paris, a film about a Lebanese man present in one city while his consciousness remains trapped in another. Baghdadi knew the subject from the inside, having taken French citizenship himself, and the film carries that particular intimacy. His best work was about what sustained violence does to the self, to the ability to make meaning, to imagine a future.

Heiny Srour and the rewriting of memory

When Leila and the Wolves appeared in 1984, it represented something genuinely without precedent in Arab cinema. The film weaves together re-enactments, archive footage, and fairy-tale sequences to create a counter-history of women's struggle in Palestine and Lebanon across the twentieth century. Its protagonist is a Lebanese woman in London who begins to question what has been erased from the official record, by the colonial archive and by the patriarchal memory of the resistance movements alike. The shadow of Sabra and Shatila falls across its final sequences. Srour shows Leila walking through destroyed Beirut streets, the cityscape cratered into an urban necropolis, while the soundtrack refuses to obey, offering cheerful patter and clinking glasses in total counterpoint to the collapsed world on screen. The disconnect names the inconceivability of what had happened to the city. 

The cinemas that went dark

While this work was being made, the infrastructure that had once sustained Lebanese film culture was quietly dying. One by one, cinemas saw their audiences decline, the regular attendants replaced by bored militiamen, until most could bear it no more and closed down. A series of commercial films, mostly mimicking Hollywood action B-movies, were made in the early 1980s by directors like Youssef Charafeddine and Samir El-Ghoussaini, films popular precisely because they depicted a society where law and order actually existed. The fantasy of normality had its own audience. But that era of commercial production largely ended with the Israeli invasion, and by the mid-decade, it was no longer possible to pretend. 

By the late 1980s, most of the decade's significant filmmakers were working from exile in France. The diaspora, involuntary or semi-voluntary, had become the condition of production. What they left behind, the films themselves, constitutes an archive of a city in the process of destroying itself. These were not films made for posterity, though posterity is what they now serve. They were made in the midst of events, under conditions of genuine danger, by filmmakers who had concluded that bearing witness was not optional. The 1980s are the hardest years in Lebanese cinema to watch. They are also the most necessary.