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words JOSHUA MACK
Hadjithomas
& Joreige
Two filmmakers address the harsh realities
of violence in the Middle East through the
use of fiction and the telling detail
LAST SUMMER, AS ANYONE WITH A PASSING INTEREST IN CURRENT
affairs and access to the media should recall, Israeli forces invaded
South Lebanon in a disastrously miscalculated campaign to dislodge
Hezbollah from the region. As usual the conflict was interpreted
abroad according to longstanding narratives of Israeli aggression; or in
the US, as ‘the War on Terror’. In the Arab world the invasion reinforced
convictions of imperialist victimisation, while in Lebanon it shattered
widely held fictions of hard-earned stability and security.
On 4 May of this year filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas
and Khalil Joreige, who have been married since 1991 and have
collaborated since 1994, began shooting a feature with Rabih Mrouè,
an actor with whom they work frequently, and Catherine Deneuve.
The resulting movie will document the difficult process of securing
permission from Hezbollah, UNIFIL (the UN’s long-term military,
humanitarian and peacekeeping force in Lebanon) and the Israeli and
Lebanese armies to film in the South, and will follow Deneuve and
Mrouè as they travel to his ruined village near the Israeli border.
As implied by the film’s title, Je veux voir [I want to see],
Hadjithomas and Joreige aim to create tensions between the
preexisting ideas through which events in Lebanon are interpreted and
the immediacy of the personal experience Deneuve seeks. In addition
the script involves a parallel fictional story, in which Deneuve functions
as a ‘star’, establishing a dichotomy between her roles as private citizen
and film icon that is intended to mirror the divide between private
experience and public analysis in Lebanon.
As the artists explained in a conversation in New York this
April, the inspiration for their piece was Jean-Luc Godard’s comment
in his 2004 film Notre musique that since 1948 the Palestinians have
been ‘a documentary’, defined by their conflict with Israel and unable
to develop other concepts of individual and national identity. Jews,
by contrast, have been the stuff of fiction, free to create diverse
understandings of self and community. What, Hadjithomas and
Joreige wondered, would be necessary to reintroduce fiction to South
Lebanon after last summer’s war? Or taken more broadly, for Arabs
to interpret their experiences free of defining narratives. “We see big
things in the Arab world,” Hadjithomas explained. “How can one be
an individual separate from this myth of Arab unity and shared fate?”
These are open-ended questions; however, the film’s use of fiction to
explore a region characterised for most by the hard fact of conflict, and
its presentation of Lebanon from the perspective of an outsider like
Deneuve, are attempts to create possible answers.
Hadjithomas and Joreige have mixed fact and fiction with
similar intent before. Their series Latent Images (1998–2007) relies Stills from KHIAM, 2000, 52 min. Courtesy the artists and CRG Gallery, New York
ARTREVIEW eight.linfour.lin
p081-087 Special Focus AR Jul07.84 84 6/6/07 22:37:20
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