“City Symphonies” is a column in which film critic Victor Morozov aims to travel to several cities of the world via the films that made them famous.

Between 1976 and 1982, after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) shoots a trilogy of medium-length films dedicated to conflict-torn Beirut. Of course, at the time, Saab hadn’t yet earned a reputation as an eager keeper, through the means of image, of the quotidian past that is always threatened with erasure (as a matter of fact, a French monograph dedicated to her is, in fact, called “Untamed Memory”). On the contrary, she is simply a young woman with a movie camera – a camera that renders images. And this is where this first level of the experience that the resulting films reside, an interplay between echoes of vulnerability: the vulnerability of a city once thought to be immortal in its immemorial culture, reduced to a pile of rubble; the vulnerability of a technique (16mm film stock) that fixates time onto physical support, to the same degree that it exposes itself in front of it, allowing itself to be consummated, exhausted by its action; and, finally, the vulnerability of a feminist gaze, for whom the gesture of turning on a camera – this weapon of the weaponless – inevitably entails the risk of situating oneself in the world of nationalistic manhood and, more than one, within in the line of fire.

An expression of courage

This trilogy – composed of Beyrouth, jamais plus (1976), Lettre de Beyrouth (1978) și Beyrouth, ma ville (1982) – is, first and foremost, the expression of courage. Here, Saab operates with a noble and extreme definition of a documentary filmmaker’s job (even mission), for whom testimonies are necessarily obtained by confronting a series of dangers that are as concrete as they can be. Navigating antagonistic factions, Saab thus arrives in the middle segment, talking to soldiers of color working as UN peacekeepers, tentatively stationed – in the film’s words so that the West may sleep soundly, with its conscience intact – in a watch post far from the city.

The image is not just remarkable at the level of “representation”; its very composition – this woman clad in a vaporous white shirt and surrounded by the torrid muscles of military men – imposes Saab as a creator of strong instances. It’s not through the already common “trademark images” – and here resides its entire nuance –, but rather, through intense moments that are constructed effortlessly and without any attention to sure-fire effects, that are forgetful in their sacrifice: of transforming these films, as a whole, into persistent experiences.

Six years part the first and last film of the trilogy. Between them, Saab has time to change her method, radically making away with previous forms, only for her to return to a mix. Beyrouth, jamais plus is the most conventional sample of cinema: an honest gusto of documenting in a manner as neutral as possible, underneath which both the indignation and urgency of a still-new event can be felt, one that, by all appearances, is insufficiently seen. Clear visual information is paramount: we see touching examples – meanwhile turned into full-fledged tropes – with children playing football between ruins and adults that, bordering on the lower limit of poverty, trying to gather their courage for tomorrow. The temporality that is at play here – with its short interviews of people on the street and its summary incursions within the city – bring this film closer to future journalistic reportages made by a television station that truly takes its mission to inform the audience seriously.

In a way, this trilogy lands on an open front, in which information is becoming welcomingly democratic. Then – as a result of a brutally fast evolution – it begins to lead to disorientation and saturation. This mutation, which entrails a transformation of television into an autonomous and viable medium thanks to directness, and the concept of “news” begins to invade every single home, is indirectly portrayed in the delays and struggles that animate these films. 

Once a place for refuge, now a place of refugees

The second segment, Lettre de Beyrouth, is, as its name suggests, a thinly-veiled confession. First of all, Saab invests the image with her own body, her handbag, and her decisive walk. Here, she is a figure that draws a quotidian route to the same degree that she marks herself in its midst. From the heights of the vineyards – a woman returns to her natal area, meanwhile ravished by war, to gather some grapevine leaves – towards the Mediterranean, the film thus describes the trajectory of a confused city, caught in the spasms of an illusory calmness between two battles, on board of a French bus that still has a plaque of its original route: Bastille-Nation.

The bitter irony of this reality, wherein the city remains captive despite all efforts – a landfill for the rejects and waste of the West and, simultaneously, an event horizon that locals have started to fear –, marks this film about the impossibility of optimism: “once a place for refuge, now a place of refugees”, the off-screen voice says.

Lettre de Beyrouth proves to be a much more ambivalent film in contrast to the previous one: not only because it presents itself as an intimate, singular perspective from the very get-go – rather than an “objective” report –, but also because it describes a town that is much more contradictory. If Beyrouth, jamais plus revealed the open wounds of this capital – an ideal backdrop for a film about ruins –, the following shows the still-painful scars that mar a place that is striving for normality.

On the one hand, there are Berlin and Hiroshima, with their cliches – in both senses of the term –, precarious images ossified in the consciousness of a man that is asking for more and more. On the other hand, we have Bucharest and Baghdad, which announce the future arrival of the audiovisual police, and offer an illustrative sample of the enormous challenges – manipulation, lies, ecstasy – that are part of their package. Between them lies Beirut, trapped in the dawn of media’s pulverization, back when cinema could still constitute an irrefutable document, but the image – micro-units related to so many ideals and disappointments – gives its first signals of rebellion.

In this sense, it’s no wonder that the final (and most complex) title in the trilogy digs deep within the audiovisual detritus, to the same degree that it explores the achingly real ruins left behind by a new salvo of bombs. “Today, time seems to grow foggy, the images weigh each other off, face each other…”, says Roger Assaf’s off-screen voice. An extraordinary premonition of a new age of the audiovisual? A pure poetic license? In any case, here, Beirut also gains, beyond the seemingly infinite laceration of conflict, the air of an imagistic war front, in which divergent theories about the role of the image clash with violence. After all, it took six years to pass from the status of an insufficiently seen city to that of a city that isn’t properly seen. Saab constructed herself a veritable artistic credo from appropriating this unjust state of affairs, which is only apparently symbolic.

This dialectic is like a tight rope hanging above the walls of the citadel, which a documentary filmmaker is beckoned to cross while blindfolded, inventing their art along the way. Starting with the wish to express the drama of man dispossessed by history, Saab ends up landing in a thinly-veiled confrontation with mass media. The distance between visibility to obscenity is disconcertingly small, inscribed by a match cut, a lingering image of a face, a detail that turns mise-en-scene into a political creature that is difficult to rein in.

In a 2009 film, activist filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige carried Catherine Deneuve – a star whose glory still shone bright –  amidst ruins that Saab, in her necessary and terrible gesture, had filmed first. Titled Je veux voir, from the get-go, the film shone a light on the contradiction that gathers voyeurism and the legitimate wish to know into a monstrous embrace. Coming in Saab’s wake, the film inherits this humanistic concern, a fragile balance between a valuable testimony to atrocity and a flight from the path of sensationalism.

This informal trilogy of Beirut doesn’t abscond anything of the drama that has thrown its shadow over the people, but it shows them as they’re still living lives that are full, rounded up, unexpected, as if they were a silent protest against those two tried to transform them into a prime matter for newspapers and television stations. It’s clear – and here reside the film’s most precious merits – that Saab was not that much interested in art. Meaning, I’d go out on a limb to say that she wasn’t interested in activism, per se: if it was conjured, that always happened afterward – after these life forms, these steaming stones, these faces have been hidden from forgetfulness. It’s crushing to find out how one of the filmmaker’s friends, who she recorded in the median segment, has died in the meantime, and resurfaces in the latter film only as a memory. The update in a camera’s prowess – Barthes’ all-too-known ça a été, a simultaneous funerary crown and living struggle – was never more literal. 

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.