Film Watch

Untitled for Several Reasons

Mortal Tissue: Beirut’s Cinema of the Vulnerable Body

These works on mortality, of the body and the image, happen to all come from Lebanon, where people are intimately familiar with the fragility of bodies and the impermanence of things.

In Untitled for Several Reasons (2003, 8 mins, Text in English, Video), Roy Samaha asks which is more real: what we see, or what our eyes feel? Received mass media images layer and thicken into pixelline matter. Sound, edited from the image feed, pushes this haptic image into the body.

Performed, shot, and edited with exquisite sensitivity, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joriege's Ashes (Ramad) (2004, 26 mins, In Arabic with English subtitles, 35mm) embodies the process of mourning. A young man returns from abroad to bury his father. The choreographed formality of a wake contrasts with the gestural life of the bereaved, as though mourning were an occasion to celebrate the fact that we still have bodies.

Mohamad Soueid's experimental documentary Civil War (2002, 85 mins, In Arabic with English subtitles, Video) investigates the mysterious death of cinematographer Mohamad Douiabes in 1999. The body of the deceased, found too late for a proper burial, haunts the memories of his friends. Soueid's irreverent tenderness connects this mortal fact to the schizophrenic life of postwar Lebanon, where the trauma of an unfinished war shows up even in people's dental hygiene.