War as Subject for Cinema /

Author(s): Abdo Waxen, , Ferial J. Ghazoul and

Source: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 15, Arab Cinematics: Toward the New
and the Alternative / : & lrm; (1995), pp. 229-234
Published by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in
Cairo and American University in Cairo Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/521688
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 War as Subject for Cinema

Abdo Wazen *

Translated by Ferial J. Ghazoul

In one of the opening shots in the film Small Wars (Hurub

saghira), the women-gathered at a wake- pass around a picture of a
War martyr, that of Maroun Bagdadi. Soon enough the picture was
hung on the wall constituting part of the backdrop of a scene in the
film. One wonders if Maroun Bagdadi intuitively foretold his tragic
death as a victim of the darkness left over by the War, or whether he
considered himself from then on a living martyr for having crossed
the hallways, tunnels and muddy fields of the War?
It was not surprising for Maroun Bagdadi to be obsessed by the
War and to turn it-with all its contradictions and interrogations-into
a frame of cinematic reference. The War never ceased to occupy the
memory and imagination of Maroun Bagdadi even after it ended in a
"peace" no less absurd than the War. And now Bagdadi has departed
before starting to shoot a film which he intended to call Angles or
Memory for Oblivion (Zawaya aw dhakira lil-nisyan). He was planning
to use it to open up the question of the War, and to cast yet another
accusing gaze at its events and absurdities. He also wanted to put on
trial his past and his own memory, as well as the past and memory of
his comrades who participated in the making of the War, in order to

* This article, written by the Lebanese poet Abdo Wazen, was first
published in the London-based Arab daily, al-Hayat, on December 15,
1993, following the tragic death of the innovative Lebanese filmmaker
Maroun Bagdadi (1951-1993) whose work has been marked by the
Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). His death was the result of a false
step in one of Beirut's black-outs, so common during the War and its
aftermath; he slipped and rolled down several flights of stairs, never to
get up again. [Translator's note]
* Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics thanks the publisher, al-Hayat,
and the author, Abdo Wazen, for permission to translate the text.

Alif 15 (1995) 229

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underline that he and his comrades were the victims of a game bigger
than them, and overwhelming in its viciousness and spite.
The war remained an ever-pressing concern and preoccupation
of Maroun Bagdadi, both before and during his migration to
France-which he refused to call "exile" as so many emigre
intellectuals have done. Bagdadi felt he had not spelled out all he
wanted to say about the War which was carried on as a succession of
small and big wars, all of which were absurd and criminal. In fact, he
aspired to re-interpret the War, film after film, from multiple points of
view and from varied angles.
If we were to turn to his first feature film, Beirut 0 Beirut
(Bayrut ya Bayrut), which was shot on the eve of the War, we would
learn how he sensed intuitively the tragedy of descending doom. But
the War did not provide an opportunity to show the film, for one of its
rare prints caught fire in Studio Baalbek. Bagdadi refused to reprint it
ever since, for reasons of a highly personal nature-the film being
something of a political autobiography in which Bagdadi denounces
"his past" and presents a portrait of the person he would like to be. In
this film, Bagdadi divided his past and his aspirations between two
character-types: Emile and Kamal. Emile embodies the first Bagdadi
whom he hoped to transcend and assassinate "metaphorically," while
Kamal bears the characteristics of the revolutionary intellectual,
rebelling against feudalism and calling for justice, democracy and
freedom. As for Emile, he was a typical Francophone professor,
trained by foreign monks, who became a professor in their school-in
the very school where he was educated. The film takes a pessimistic
view of the city through the unfolding of a love story that fails. Hala,
an intellectual woman, lost between Emile and Kamal, moves from

one to the other without realizing any of her dreams. Bagdad

forget the Southern character either: the cook who serves in the
kitchen of the monks, leaves for the South [of Lebanon] where he

meets martyrdom, having suffered the most extreme condition of

alienation in the city. The actors who played in the film were Mireille
Ma'louf, 'Izat al-'Alayli and Joseph Bounassar.
The first film of Bagdadi was marked by his relation to the city,
the relation which would deepen more and more during the War. The
young director (who was then twenty-three years old) presented the
city in a quasi-documentary way-as if he felt that what he was
portraying would be set on fire and ruined by the War.
Beirut O Beirut was a decisive point in both the cinematic and

230 Alif 15 (1995)

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political trajectory of Maroun Bagdadi. It was the beginning of a new
experience and the end of a past-the past of a family, of a religious
affiliation, and of a memory. When the War broke out, Bagdadi
moved from East Beirut to West Beirut, to what was known then as

the "Patriotic Street." There he set out making his committed

documentary films-most notable among them were his films on the
South: The South is Well, Assure Us (Al-Janub bi-khayr taminuna),
The Steadfast Majority (Al-Akthariyya al-samida), Kefarkala
(Kefarkala) [the title is the name of a village in occupied Southern
Lebanon] and We are All for the Homeland (Kulluna lil-watan). In t
Patriotic Street, Bagdadi was committed in his special way-as an
aspiring and dreamy intellectual of bourgeois roots, influenced by the
[student] revolt of 1968 in Paris, allied with the victims, and
dissatisfied with his past and present. It was not surprising for him,
then, to admire Kamal Joumblat, the militant politician, and prepare a
film devoted to him. Nor did Bagdadi forget the martyrs and their
mothers: he shot two films related directly to this issue, as obvious
from their titles, The Martyr (Al-Shahid) and The Most Beautiful
Mothers (Ajmal al-ummahat). He turned the camera in the early years
of the War into an instrument of confrontation-confrontation, not

provocation-and of testimony on reality, in the hope of changing it.

He also used it as a weapon of struggle and means of handling the
present and history. Maroun Bagdadi worked hard and shot a great
deal; his short films had a distinctive character-a fast rhythm and a
fantastic eye, mixing the real with the poetic in truly delicate images.
These films established the language of Bagdadi, his distinctive style
and universe.

However, Maroun Bagdadi, who was committed and allied in

the first place to the victim, not to the butcher, began to sense the
absurd and the futile. He found himself victimized by the War -lost
in its many mazes and dark tunnels, like so many murderers and
murdered, comprising both fighters and civilians. Bagdadi was in fact
ahead in his awareness of the absurdity of the War, its contradictions
and crimes. His film Small Wars bore witness to such futility,
criminality and profound contradictions.
Bagdadi turned the War into illustrative material and a means
for depicting the waste in an aestheticist way, somewhat exaggerating
its aesthetics. He opted for the character of a photographer in order to
throw-through his eyes and camera-a panoramic glance at, and in
fact encompass a panoramic overview of, the ruin that has descended

Alif 15 (1995) 231

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on the city and its people. The photographer was the character that
triggered the transformation of a city besieged by War into a series of
images. The picture of the martyr Maroun Bagdadi at a wake
constituted the opening shot of the film Small Wars, in which Bagdadi
tried to lay the scandal of the War bare by attributing it to the
whimsicality of fate. The War is portrayed as a curse descending on
the city, turning it into a crazy battleground, destroying its
neighborhoods and rendering its nights and days desolate. Bagdadi
chose straightforward examples of the infernal reality threatening to
break loose: Thurayya, the bourgeois Christian girl is the last remnant
in the memory of the city; Talal, who had feudal roots, deserts the
warring city and returns to his distant village; Nabil, the
journalist-photographer, ends up witnessing the murders, crimes and
madness that were taking place. The finale of Small Wars is
memorable: it ends in a chase scene in the ruined market-place. Some
found the ending too long, and others saw it as motivated, since
Bagdadi wanted to turn the market into a murderous maze where no
one knows who is chasing whom and who is murdering whom.
Bagdadi's film caused a stir in the political and intellectual milieus of
Lebanon. Some accused the director of capitulation and of retreating
from his cause and position, as well as superficiality in the treatment
of War. Others saw in it a condemnation of the War, a demystification
of its discourse and mechanisms, and a foregrounding of its
nonsensicality, with the director taking the side of the victims who
were swept up unawares by the game. The film was, in fact, a prelude
to a turning point in the social and political events that took place
locally. Since then we have begun to see the reactionary turning
progressive, the indifferent becoming patriotic, and the leftist
participating in right-wing politics. We were to see then the inversion
of roles and positions, and to witness concretely the fall of
contradictions and ideas. Even Maroun Bagdadi himself moved to a
position close to authority when he worked for a while as an
information consultant to President Amin Gemayel. This move
angered a number of his old comrades, and because of that Bagdadi
had to face a campaign which probably led him to leave for Paris.
Hopeless and pessimistic, he left Beirut; but before he did, he shot a
TV film which was banned by censorship, or more precisely, by the
official Information Agency. The film was called War on War (Harb
'ala harb) and was characterized by a gloomy overview of Beirut,
foregrounding the scenes of ruin and waste in its vicinities.

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 In his Parisian "exile," Bagdadi never stopped his cinematic
work. In fact, he benefited from his stay there and shot films produced
by a large Franco-Lebanese company. The first of these films was The
Invisible Man (L'Homme invisible/ Al-Rajul al-mustatir) in which the
director demonstrated how much Beirut haunts his memory and his
entire being. He also wanted the film to be a testimony on the War,
but from a different point of view. It depicts Pierre, the French doctor,
who returns to Paris from Beirut, after having joined for a period the
medical relief effort extended to victims of all religious affiliations.
When he arrives in Paris, he realizes that he cannot rid himself of the

War. In Paris, there was no way out of confronting his daughter

Claire, with her interrogations and doubts. The director cast his hero
as a leftist intellectual-someone who belonged to a group of dreamy
intellectuals, who had a humanist orientation and valued human

beings no matter where they came from, be it the First World or the
Third World. Pierre's departure for Lebanon was nothing more than a
venture to get him out of the state of restlessness which he suffered
from in Paris, only to discover, while in Beirut, that the world lives a
single tragedy but with myriad faces. The violence he encountered in
Beirut is likely to exist in Paris as well. Such were the Lebanese
Parisians carrying their contradictions with them. The Invisible Man
was not devoid of complexity, whether on the level of characters,
events or positions. The film is in fact Franco-Lebanese in more than
one sense: the role of the Lebanese Qassar, who resides in Paris, is

played by Michel Piccoli, and the role of Kamal-another Leban

who ensnares the daughter of the doctor-is played by Michel
Albertini. Probably the most important character is that of the doctor,
with his profundity and credibility (played by Bernard Giraudeau),
and this character would surface again in the universe of Maroun
Bagdadi.

If Pierre, the doctor, returns from Beirut to Paris in The

Invisible Man, by contrast, in Outside Life (Kharij al-hayat) the
French journalist-photographer Patrick will go from Paris to Beirut,
only to become a hostage in the hands of Lebanese kidnappers-who
in their turn, and in all their affiliations and parties, are hostages
abducted by violence and madness. In this film, which won a prize in
Cannes, Bagdadi was not content to simply represent one side but not
the other. Thus, he pushes his journalist-photographer to cross the
"two Beiruts" in order to bear witness to its oneness in the acts of

murder, bombing and fear. The fighters here and there are alike in

Alif 15 (1995) 233

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their destructiveness, in their concrete situations and in their folly;
they are alike in the fact that they are both murderers and murdered.
Bagdadi was inspired in this film, by the kidnapping of the French
journalist Roger Auque, to penetrate the inner ambiance of the world
of hostages-a world which exists "outside life." Bagdadi foregrounds
the agony of the hostage, his daily anxiety, loneliness, apprehensions,
and his varied relationships with the people surrounding him. The film
(as usual) provoked a discussion in Lebanon and France, especially
because it was not quite welcomed by some Arab critics. And if
photographer is here a hostage thrown into a prison (in contrast to the
photographer in Small Wars), Bagdadi, in return, provides the camera
with a chance to roam about and to shoot scenes in the setting of the
War. Hippolyte Girardot, Nidal al-Ashqar, Rafiq 'Ali Ahmad, and
Fadi Abu Khalil, among others, acted in the film.
The War then was an obsession of Maroun Bagdadi, which he
approached with a cinematic eye and visual rhythm. More often than
not, his films seemed close to photographed tableaux shot as a series
of scenes. Even when he made his film Lebanon, the Land of Incense

and Honey (Lubnan balad al-bukhur wal-'asal) in the series of "World

Doctors," Bagdadi got his doctor (Richard Bohringer) in the midst of
the War in order to indulge himself in capturing the city, with its two
parts, visually.

Maroun Bagdadi died before completing his discourse on the

War and without saying everything he wanted to say concerning it.
How one wishes for him to have made his last film or his last

testimony before he was swallowed up by the darkness of Beirut!

It is difficult to summarize Maroun Bagdadi, the avant-garde
director and intellectual, who in his turn summarizes an entire

generation-the young generation which has founded the new and

authentic Lebanese cinema. He was an attentive director who had an

insight into cinematic production and into the technical di

the image. His films will remain the best testimony of his distinctive
language and universe, which were denied the time they needed to
take root.

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