SPECIAL FOCUS
WAR AFFORDS CHALLENGES TO ARTISTS. During Israel’s bombing
campaign of July-August 2006, for instance, Lebanon’s experience
was one of appalling, surreal incongruity – relentless destruction in
targeted areas and anxious suspension elsewhere. This combination
compelled many film- and videomakers to work, and some sympathetic
European agencies facilitated matters. On the other hand, the nature
of war itself tested those who would generate art as extraordinary as
the circumstances.
Lebanon’s wars have proved fiendishly difficult to treat artistically
because they are so often inconclusive: rendering the object is dicey if
you don’t know where to stand when addressing it. The Lebanese Civil
War offers a case in point. Conventionally dated 1975–90, that conflict
ended without resolving any of its fundamental issues – undermining
artists’ efforts to take a creative distance from it. Though filmmakers
have made several attempts to take up that war, it’s informative that
the most successful civil war film, Ziad Doueiri’s West Beyrouth (1998),
simply mingles elements of the coming-of-age story and the family
drama – it’s not ‘about’ the war at all.
Lebanon’s video artists began to engage with the 2006 summer
war shortly after it began. Nearly all their work to date has attempted
to subvert the war narrative prevailing in television news. A range of
aesthetic and political positions and intentions has been discernible,
though, demanding that critics employ nuanced criteria in assessing it.
Some artists have struggled to find a language that embraces
and sublimates the guts of war, the smashed buildings and twisted
corpses, without simply replicating television’s fetish with the spectacles
of deadly material and distraught mourners. Others have sought a
means to look past the visceral – an approach employed by both video
artists and a few innovative documentarians whose work has distilled
immediacy into art. from top: Rania Stephan, still from 14 August 2006/Southern Suburb Bridge/Beirut, video short, 4 min 3 sec;
The most eloquent subversion of the television narrative to Rania Stephan, still from 15 August 2006/Ramel El Zarif School/Beirut, video short, 8 min 17 sec. Both from Lebanon/War, 2006, 47 min. © the artist
emerge since last summer’s war is Merely a Smell (2007), by Maher Abi
Samra. The seven-minute film looks at rescue workers at a bombsite
in Dahyeh (Beirut’s southern suburbs). The fixed camera peers upon
gas-masked workers picking through rubble for bodies, but it abjures Local artists cherish the privilege of working at some remove
spectacular images. Shot in sun-bleached black-and-white, Abi Samra from politics. Akram Zaatari, one of Lebanon’s best-known video artists,
wrings the scene dry of the vivid colours that are TV’s stock-in-trade. has not yet unveiled his response to the summer 2006 war. In 1997,
Instead the artist selectively magnifies the sound: the whine of an Israeli though, he released an informative pair of works: Majnounak (Crazy of
surveillance drone, accentuated by the crash and thud of concrete and Yo u ) and All Is Well on the Border. The former is a hilarious treatment
metal heaved out of a crater; a blood-curdling off-camera scream; the of sexual representation among young men from Dahyeh. The latter
hiss of an aerosol against the stink of something rotting in the heat. appears to be a conventional documentary about the resistance
The film’s title could be doubly ironic: it evokes how the medium to Israel’s 1978–2000 occupation of South Lebanon – not that of
cannot represent the full sensory experience of war (the scent of it, Hezbollah but the by-then-extinct communist resistance. He gradually
for instance), while underscoring the silent tragedy of human beings unravels a heroic narrative, revealing, though, that his ‘informants’ are
reduced to a mere smell. really scripted actors.
Equally accomplished is Lebanon/War (2006), a series of eight Yet the video artists’ struggle to develop an aesthetic language
vignettes by Rania Stephan. In one of these, shot on 14 August, the to make art from war reflects the contradiction between the need for
day of the ceasefire, she finds an avid Hezbollah supporter near the creative distance and the summer conflict’s immediacy. Leila Kanaan’s
base of a felled bridge in Dahyeh, celebrating the Hezbollah ‘victory’ After the Storm (2006), which opens with images from an autumn
for the cameramen. He is waving a yellow-and-green Hezbollah flag, lightning storm gathering over the stillness of a war-smashed landscape,
an expression of support that’s frowned upon by the party’s leaders, presents a series of portraits from destroyed South Lebanon. Except
who encourage their constituents to fly only the national flag (a cedar for the drift of clouds overhead, the images approach photographic
tree on a red-and-white background), after a precedent set by parties stillness, denuded of people and movement. The explosions in
opposed to Hezbollah. The Hezbollah fan is taken aside. A moment the soundtrack could be echoes of war or thunder. The hypnosis of
later Stephan’s lens finds him waving a Lebanese flag and bellowing ruin is ended by the sounds of normalcy – birdsong and post-storm
the national anthem while a television camera looks on. The episode is automobile traffic. Kanaan is striving for a language that acknowledges
as comic as it is informative of the relationship between media practice the violence of war while averting her lens from television’s indulgence
and performance. in spectacle.
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