A few weeks ago, the memory of the “Lebanese civil war” (1975-1990) passed, and with it, Arab programs, newspapers and magazines restored the history of the war and its pains, as well as the extent of its impact on the Lebanese. gift. Politics, society, culture and art; The extent of the influence that this war exerted from the seventies to the nineties is still today to release its flame on the Lebanese political reality, and to enter it into a recurring whirlwind and a series of dilemmas and cracks, from which only the ordinary citizen suffers.
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Cinema instead of photography
Despite dozens of photographic exhibitions, which treated the theme of the “Lebanese civil war” with artistic study and aesthetic imagination, by virtue of the ability of photography to be documented and dated, due to its rigidity and his sensitivity to the event and its opportunity; The enormous amount of photographic archives – which documented the war diaries, despite the little interest it shows on the part of Arab researchers and institutions in treating this photographic work with study and analysis – has been a means of knowledge and visual source of contemporary history in Lebanon, and can be relied on for historiography and the formulation of a new history that disavows the authoritarian traditions and ideological vision that have characterized the history of Arab countries in the contemporary period.
Photography, touching the door of the Lebanese civil war, implicitly works to renew the perception of it, not only through archiving, but also to make the war a central and topical issue that deserves an in-depth examination in its stages and in its scope. its impact on the political and cultural structure of Lebanese society.
From documentation to fiction
But cinema and its cognitive background, due to the dynamic nature of its artistic images, he paid more attention to the element of imagination than to documentation, even though dozens of films documentaries, made during the war, were dominated by the framework that monitors Lebanese society and people’s lives, so the camera in Lebanese films is Jean Shimon (1944-2017) is close to individuals and their livelihoods .
However, other narrative visual texts, and even if they worked on the “Lebanese civil war” in its topicality, the element of the narrative and its esthetics within this war constituted an aesthetic sign for these films and a focal point for the transition from the documentation process to the imagination. 1953-2008).
On this basis, cinema remained the most preoccupied visual art of the Lebanese Civil War, as a cinematic work barely ends until a new documentary or fictional film appeared, reading the speech of war and its scourge by monitoring a number of stories from this film. war and its fragmented facts.
Hence the cinema at this stage specifically called “alternative cinema” or “independent”; It produced a strong cinematic discourse with its structure, themes, stories and the uniqueness of the vision of a large number of Lebanese directors who made the camera a visual means of capturing the forsaken, the fleeting and the fleeting. of this war, and what the “dragons” of power hide, reinvent it and make it overlap the biography of the visible.
The films came as a ‘testimonial’ that extrapolated the scene politically and socially with varying degrees of aesthetic treatment, between direct documentary-style reporting and the narrative template based on the elements of the story and the breadth of its intertwining and penetration with the Lebanese.
From content to form
However, the aesthetic leap in quality that the cinema of the Lebanese civil war made was the moment of the transition from documentation to fiction, because this visual “displacement” was not controlled by cognitive motives. or political, but remained essentially dependent on the subjective. and aesthetic dimensions, because the works that appear In the last years of the war, he relies heavily on the aesthetics of stories and tales, and not on concrete realism and the crises that are conducive to it.
Randa al-Shahal’s films were an artistic expression based on the imagination of the narrative text and its setting at the heart of Lebanese tragedy, without leaving the context of war and oppression. This shift from content to form is the secret to the success of Randa al-Shahhal’s films and other experiences that emerged at the start of the new millennium, after Alawiya, Baghdadi and Shamoun devoted their cinematographic works based on Lebanese reality to time of war.
The visual form seemed unimportant compared to the cinematic discourse, faced with a set of transformations and the search for an aesthetic and imaginative horizon, much further in a politically and socially guided scene.
Despite the power of the imagination, which appeared in certain documentaries by Jocelyn Saab, Maroun Baghdadi, Jean Chamoun and Alaouite proof, the cinematographic image crystallized in their work as a “documentation” of a wound that has not healed to date.
After many years have passed since the end of the Lebanese civil war, his terrible memory is still fresh in the hearts of many new Lebanese filmmakers, as is the case with Hussein Ibrahim in his short film ” Disappearances and uncomfortable relations ”(2018), and Walid Munis in his film of 1982. Despite the effort made in these films in terms of breaking with the shadows of the civil war in direct treatment by betting on the documentary dimension sometimes and the imaginary at other times The years after the war changed many people’s beliefs and visions of the country, and this is what these films tell us which, although they are keen to document the scene, are soon find themselves in cinematic worlds in which the real / historical and the imaginary / aesthetic intersect.