The 1970s reinvention of Lebanese cinema

Cinema in Lebanon has long served as a mirror of society, a record of collective memory, and, at times, a form of resistance. Few decades illustrate this more powerfully than the 1970s, a period that began with packed theaters, international recognition, and a thriving commercial film industry, only to be reshaped by the outbreak of civil war. As the country entered one of the most turbulent chapters of its history, Lebanese filmmakers responded by creating some of the most ambitious, politically engaged, and internationally significant works the Arab world had seen. From glamorous box-office productions to groundbreaking documentaries that captured the realities of conflict, the decade marked both the final flourish of Lebanon's commercial cinema and the birth of a new cinematic language that would leave a lasting imprint on film history.

The last flourish of commercial cinema

Cinema attendance in Lebanon in the 1970s was the highest among Arabic-speaking countries, and the market for Lebanese films extended far beyond the country's borders. The infrastructure was in place, the talent was available, and the appetite was real.

Beirut hosted the first international film festival in the Arab world in 1971, a fact worth pausing on. That a city of Beirut's scale should organize and host such an event ahead of Cairo, Damascus, or Baghdad speaks to how seriously the Lebanese capital took its cultural ambitions. 

A generation of filmmakers came to the medium in and around the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, sometimes referred to as the New Lebanese Cinema, who used film as an extension of their political and social activism. What made this cohort remarkable, and without real precedent in Arab filmmaking, was its composition: the new wave fostered, unusually, equal numbers of women and men. Among them were Maroun Baghdadi, Jocelyne Saab, Borhane Alaouié, Heiny Srour, Randa Chahal Sabbag, and Jean Chamoun, names that would define Lebanese cinema for the next two decades.

The woman who walked 800 kilometers

Perhaps the most extraordinary act of filmmaking Lebanon produced in the entire decade came from Heiny Srour, a Beirut-born filmmaker with a background in social anthropology. In the early 1970s, Srour and her crew trekked 800 kilometers on foot from the Yemen border to Dhofar to make a documentary about a battle for independence underway in this remote governorate of Oman. The result, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), documented an anti-colonial uprising with a particular focus on the women fighting within it.

The film was the only documentary about the armed struggle in Dhofar and the advanced democratic experiment it represented, which included, as the film's opening captions informed viewers, affirmative action for women thirty years before the West.

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived was the first film by an Arab woman shown at Cannes. That distinction alone would secure its place in cinema history. But the film's fate at home was a different matter: it was banned in Lebanon for 45 years and remains censored in many Arab countries to this day. A Lebanese woman had made a film radical enough to be selected for Cannes and suppressed everywhere she lived. The contradiction is its own kind of statement about the decade.

Jocelyne Saab and the chronicle of rupture

Jocelyne Saab came to filmmaking through journalism, working as a war correspondent across the Middle East before the war arrived on her own doorstep. When it did, she turned the camera inward. Her first long documentary, released in France in 1975, explained the Lebanese conflict in terms of class struggle, the war of the ruling class to maintain its ascendancy. It was an unflinching analytical framing at a moment when most of the outside world was still speaking only of "events in Lebanon."

Her Beirut Never Again (1976), with commentary written by the poet Etel Adnan, was a chronicle of daily life in Beirut during the war, nostalgic for a world that had already begun to disappear. The film did not aestheticize destruction so much as it refused to look away from it, allowing the city's wounded beauty to coexist with the evidence of what was being done to it.

Maroun Baghdadi and the city that could no longer recognize itself

Maroun Baghdadi released his debut feature, Beirut Oh Beirut, in 1975, the year the war began. The film turned the camera inward toward the city's contradictions, hopes, and unfinished futures. It was a work of premonition as much as observation, made by a young director who had studied the city closely enough to sense what was coming even as it arrived. Baghdadi would go on to become, by wide consensus, the most internationally significant Lebanese filmmaker of his generation, but Beirut Oh Beirut remains the hinge, the moment Lebanese cinema shifted from imagining its country to bearing witness to it.

Baghdadi's documentary Koullouna Lil Watan, produced in 1979, won the Jury Honor Prize at the International Leipzig Festival of Documentary and Animated Film.

What the war did to the archive

The Lebanese documentaries produced in Lebanon during the 1970s caused a surge of documentary production across the Arab world. The decade's filmmakers, working under conditions of increasing danger, had helped define a new mode of politically engaged cinema that reached well beyond Lebanon's borders. And then the infrastructure that had sustained them collapsed.

The 1970s in Lebanese cinema are a decade in which a film culture, sensing its own end, produced the most searching work of its history. The camera became a tool of memory,a form of insistence that what was happening would be seen, would be recorded, would not be allowed to disappear without a witness.

And it is precisely what makes the films of the 1970s, for all the difficulty of watching them, so impossible to dismiss.