Beirut, My City (Jocelyne Saab, 1983).
Beirut is not dead, but simply disfigured. If it weren't for the sea, Beirut wouldn't have survived its devastation. But there is salt on the ground, in our mouths, on our clothes, in our hands; something that resists putrefaction.… It was quickly apparent that in this city everything can melt into a transfigured memory. There's something overheated in Lebanon: life’s splendour always ends up in an abyss. Energies always evaporate.
—Etel Adnan
Last week’s retrospective of the Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab coincided with yet another onslaught of armed violence and devastation visited upon Lebanon by the Israeli army. Saab’s films serve as timely reminders that neocolonial aggression has never been a defensive maneuver; their politics defy any expectation of simplistic partisanship. Saab lived through the wars she documented, and her lyrical missives are marked both by fearlessness and vulnerability. Images of genocide now pile up in smartphone newsfeeds far faster than we can process them or investigate their implications. Saab’s cinema engenders a mode of viewership that is perhaps the very opposite of doomscrolling. Every image and every word are thoughtfully measured, carefully paired; her visual language is economical and penetrating. Her films simultaneously testify to and question what is in front of her camera. “Truth” is nowhere to be found in her cinema, which is instead propelled by the perpetual critique of any accepted knowledge.
“When I was little I always wanted to work with images,” Saab once recalled, but she was discouraged from doing so by her family and teachers, who told her that filmmaking wasn’t “a job for girls.”1 Instead, she studied political economy, and she would later acknowledge that a “certain rigor” in her education had informed her art.2 After working for Lebanese radio and television, she moved to Paris to continue her career as a broadcast journalist. During this period, she filmed in and reported from Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; her work aired internationally, on news channels in Algeria, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan, among other countries. Though she scrutinized many societies and conflicts with her camera, none implicated her on such an intimate level as would the civil and regional wars in Lebanon beginning in 1975.
Top: Lebanon in a Whirlwind (Jocelyne Saab, 1975). Bottom: The Rejection Front (Jocelyne Saab, 1975).
To picture a conflict that violently reconfigured the very fabric of Lebanese society, most visibly in Beirut, Saab broke with established modes of reportage to forge a documentary form that we could describe today as essayistic, which made room for a layered apprehension of the war, its root causes and repercussions. Two of Saab’s films from 1975, Lebanon in a Whirlwind and The Rejection Front, illuminate her work’s passage from journalism to art. Filmed on the volatile cusp of civil strife, Lebanon in a Whirlwind pieces together with remarkable lucidity the complex factors behind the conflict. Though the film—in which she travels the country to speak with civilians from various social groups—is still journalistic in form, Saab’s analytical rigor is complemented by a subjective sensitivity and a desire to understand different political stances. Whether she is interviewing a member of the Maronite upper class in an exclusive tennis club or a Shia farmer from the south, Saab is deeply engaged in the complex question of why Lebanese civilians took up arms.
In The Rejection Front, Saab documents one of many factors in the conflict, the presence of Palestinian guerilla fighters in Lebanon, which polarized public opinion, though it was legally permitted by the Cairo Agreement of 1969. The Rejection Front critically illustrates that the Palestinian resistance has never been a monolith; rather, it was and is shaped by various political currents and strategic considerations. Saab was the first journalist to film at the training grounds of the titular faction, a splinter group unwilling to recognize the state of Israel and preparing to deploy adolescent suicide commandos to liberate occupied Palestine. An earlier reported piece of Saab’s, Palestinian Women (1974), is a counterpoint to the archetype of the male Palestinian fighter. Here, Saab explores the everyday lives of Palestinian women living as stateless refugees in Lebanon, to whom she offers her microphone. Though the film was commissioned by the French television channel Antenne 2, the network decided to shelve it during postproduction.
Top: Beirut, Never Again (Jocelyne Saab, 1976). Bottom: A Letter from Beirut (Jocelyne Saab, 1978).
If Saab’s work in the years leading up to the war investigated the cause of the looming conflagration, Beirut, Never Again (1976) registers the dislocation that followed. “Every civil war has something absurd about it; it’s crueler and more saddening than other wars,” the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan observes in voice-over, reading a text she wrote for the film. The film is an audio-visual poem, undertaking a morphological reconnaissance of a city dismembered by war. Saab’s camera observes, as if caught by an ugly surprise, streets filled with debris, deserted shopping districts, ravaged and ruined buildings; it dwells on the metaphysical improbability of a new landscape carved out by the brutality of warfare. Looking at the blocks of cement strewn along the road as barricades, Saab laments how they “choke the streets the same way the political horizon is also choked.”
Whether due to the passage of time, or only because of its epistolary nature, A Letter from Beirut (1978), made three years into the conflict, possesses a more pensive quality. The title’s reference to a piece of correspondence implies reflection, as shock gives way to its circumspect elaboration. There is a palpable attempt to make sense out of senselessness, to record the many ineluctable ways in which life continues in spite of the devastation, which restricts freedom of movement between East and West Beirut, sentencing the local population to perpetual instability. While riding the bus, a woman complains about having been unable to sleep since the war began, and another passenger sarcastically replies, “That’s good for the sales of sleeping pills.… Businessmen have to make money; that’s what political parties want.” Like many on the Lebanese left, Saab refused to limit her gaze to the surface of the conflict, which was often reduced to a dispute between Christians and Muslims, and tried instead to unearth the material interests obfuscated by the fog of war and the rhetoric of factionalism.
Top: Beirut, My City (Jocelyne Saab, 1982). Bottom: The Ship of Exile (Jocelyne Saab, 1982).
Beirut, My City (1982), one of the pinnacles of Saab’s cinema, begins with the director in front of the camera surveying the wreckage of her own family home, destroyed by Israeli bombs. “Time has taken its time,” the Lebanese playwright Roger Assaf’s voice-over notes, “or rather, war has taken our time.” An expressionist ethnography of Beirut under siege, the film is scorched by a febrile immediacy. The surreal desolation of the western sector of the city is illuminated by its resolute dignity. When West Beirutis bid farewell to the Palestinian fedayeen, forced out of Lebanon by the Israeli siege, Saab’s images radiate a kind of agonizing transcendence. She does not only capture things as they took place but, crucially, hints at the way they could have been. Assaf’s rapturous words sound like a eulogy:
We’d say, “I’m from West Beirut,” and for once we spoke and behaved in a way that ignored the petty differences between communities. You can be Shia or Christians, Jewish or Sunni, Lebanese or Palestinians, really and truly be who you were, while at the same time and place be someone from West Beirut, where a certain kind of society was possible. A society that was an Arab dream. Unfulfilled dreams of a condemned people. Dying Beirut looked like a utopia. To be Arab and Lebanese was possible. Jewish and Palestinian, that existed. Muslim and progressive, no problem. Woman and leader, we had those. Anarchist and organizer, there were many. But utopia is comes at a heavy price, and we didn’t know how horrifically the bill would be increased.
A strangely hopeful coda to Saab’s “Beirut” trilogy, The Ship of Exile (1982) sees the director boarding the titular ship that evacuated the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon. On this languid, melancholic journey, Yasser Arafat and his guerrillas amiably talk to journalists and assess the uncertain horizon ahead of them, caught in a surreal atmosphere that can seem closer to a pleasure cruise than a military retreat. Though it is unclear where the struggle is going, the boat’s passengers are aware that they have lost the battle, but not the war. The civil and regional wars would, in fact, drag on until 1990. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut had marked a turning point, after which the conflict became increasingly internecine, with factions within each camp often fighting each other, muddying the political divides. If the first part of the conflict (from 1975 to 1982) had been defined by two clearly distinct camps—with a coalition of Arab nationalist and leftist parties fighting to reform the Lebanese state and liberate Palestine on one side, and right-wing Christian militias defending the status quo on the other—the second part (from 1982 to 1990) saw the proliferation of infighting within each camp and the increasing influence of external actors, both regional and international.3
This state of war for war’s sake is the backdrop of Saab’s first foray into fiction. A Suspended Life (1985) is a coming-of-age story shaped by the precarity of a city itself transfigured by a decade of warfare. Hala (Hala Bassam), a teenage girl who has never known peacetime, meets and befriends Karim (Jacques Weber), an artist clinging to his daily routines even as they’re punctuated by a seemingly endless conflict. Coming-of-age films usually follow a protagonist from childhood to early adulthood, but Hala has been deprived of a true adolescence by the circumstances of her upbringing, and she finds herself unable to dream of a different future. Her young life, like that of the spectral city in which she lives, is confined to the temporality of the “suspended now.”4 War has put life on pause, and yet time inevitably proceeds, frustrating any attempt to move forward with intentionality. A Suspended Life is a film of simultaneous beauty and agonizing sadness, showing how war can drain the life even from its survivors.
Top: Egypt, City of the Dead (Jocelyne Saab, 1977). Bottom: Fertilization in Video (Jocelyne Saab, 1991).
Saab’s ongoing work as a reporter afforded her the possibility to travel and learn about other places and conflicts. Her eye, drawn to key details without losing sight of the bigger picture, brought out the heterogeneity of regions too often flattened by Orientalist narratives. In Egypt, City of the Dead (1977), Saab carries out a polyphonic survey of Cairo at a time of transition, when Arab nationalism and socialism were overtaken, and then replaced, by Infitah neoliberalism. The film begins in the Cairo Necropolis, a network of cemeteries where many people are forced to reside due to rapid urbanization coinciding with a housing shortage. Saab examines the emerging social reality in the Egyptian capital, alternating between observational footage and interviews. The director returned to Egypt nine years later to make a postscript of sorts, Ghosts of Alexandria (1986), in which she looks at the vestigial traces of a once “cosmopolitan” city, finding that economic and political disenfranchisement has bolstered a socio-religious conservatism on the margins. Across her work, Saab does something rare in fast-paced TV news: she listens to the people in front of her camera so that their condition is articulated in their words, not hers, and on their own political terms. Sahara Is Not for Sale (1977) focuses on the Sahrawis’ ongoing struggle for self-determination in Western Sahara, where they live under Spanish and Moroccan occupation. It is a testament to Saab’s genuine internationalism that her attention and solidarity were not reserved only for her own countrymen, but for all peoples fighting against oppression and exploitation.
Saab was extremely active in the Beirut arts community, continuing to organize festivals, exhibitions, and screenings until her death in 2019. She also continued to make films that illustrated her unwavering commitment to the fight for a less miserable world—even when they focused on unexpected subjects. Fertilization in Video (1991) is ostensibly a pretty straightforward scientific film about artificial insemination, but rather than simply describing the procedure, Saab ponders the social implications of a scientific breakthrough that allows women to bypass men in the act of procreation. The short exemplifies the inseparable bond that links every life to its political dimension, much like Saab’s entire oeuvre. While journalism is always at risk of dehumanizing politics, Saab consistently politicized life.
- Mathilde Rouxel, Jocelyne Saab: La mémoire indomptée (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar Editions, 2016), 13. ↩
- Rouxel, Jocelyne Saab, 36. ↩
- For more, see Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2012). ↩
- Judith Naeff, Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City’s Suspended Now (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). ↩