His film was about his family and his sister and their history though he hadn’t really intended it to be. He hadn’t intended it to be well-received either: to secure, as it did six months ago, a berth in the short experimental section of the Festival du Film Libanais known as “Né à Beyrouth”—born in Beirut.
Cut loose from his degree, from Fors, life had gone quite silent. Leon had stayed home in the bedroom of his house of mourning and collaged: magazine photos and old TIME/LIFE photo hardbacks cut up and pasted on card over which he scrawled song lyrics (“those midwives to history put on their bloody robes”) and taped or glued or sewed stones, cement, and tree branches. But the results weren’t satisfying; he was blank in doing it and bored after and only later, finding the sheets of card beneath his bed, realized that he had been making sketchbooks for his film. He borrowed the camera from Pascal; from Pascal too he’d inherited the third-hand Compaq laptop (ca. five years old) and he learned to gently massage it into abnormally extended life: to use only ever one app at a time, to on a weekly basis faithfully defrag the disk and decant raw video to leave large tracts of the hard drive spare, like it was a sick old cow from which he’d get his milk or starve.
And what to do with a completed but hopelessly experimental short film? With a kind of contempt he submitted it to the Heritage section of the sixth film festival, which had been postponed from the year prior and its July War. The Empire Sofil Theater, the usual venue, had instead been used during the day for the children of southern refugees to make their own collages on trestle tables in the foyer, and Cannes Critics’ Week films were screened for their pale insomniac parents at night.
He was informed by email that In the anti Lebanon was selected from only 190 submissions, and bumped from the Heritage slate. This was a selection premised on nostalgia and lament—it was dedicated to edited selections of dozens of old pre– and civil-war era 8mm family films rescued from the Sunday markets, implying to those who might have the imagination the varied scenarios of forced emigration and abrupt flight and washing of hands of Lebanon. In the anti Lebanon was bumped to a bushel of twenty-five short experimental works to be shown over three days in the graveyard morning slots of the festival. So, being now un auteur, Leon was awarded an AAA pass to all of the small festival’s films and talks and seminars and lectures. After the screenings, serious, kindly Goethe-Institut and NGO staff and fest-associated friends and well-wishers—mostly, it seemed, impossibly chic and passionate women—congratulated the filmmakers and distributed information packs on film labs and script workshops, master classes and fellowships and readerships and all kinds of other ships to ports here and there: London, Amsterdam, New York. All the cultural sympathy votes and NGO goodwill hopelessly, steadfastly ranged against airburst, cluster bomb, flechette.
“There are, I think,” the president of the festival had said in his speech, “very few films that capture a sense of Lebanon when there was no other war or catastrophe.” When something happens, we all pick up a camera, he was saying. Leon felt his chances out there in this new world, where Lebanon meant only war and baffling religious complexity, were more or less nonexistent. Who would want a Lebanese filmmaker whose film tried to refuse coherence, let alone cognizance of what it was really about? He filled out the fellowship forms anyhow. He avoided most of the Heritage screenings and walked out of three short narrative films—at least in the experimentals he could tune out and be blank and think and be alone.
But atavistically, he wanted to hear something true. Reduced and desperate, he wanted to hear someone say something sensible, something frank, sane, and clear; to give him information. Really, he wanted to know how to live, to learn. In grief, believing no one and nothing and given this strange new opportunity he went looking—his guts boiling, chain-smoking and shy, blank-faced and angry, staring people down—for something to believe. In the stack of literature, the talks and titles were listed:
I Have No Scar, I Remember No Wound.
Towards a Foreign Likeness Bent.
Real Bombs in Imaginary Ruins.
He chose to go to a lecture in the west, held at the West Hall at AUB in Ras Beirut, and he chose it for two reasons. The first was the winning name: Witness Whores Collective presents Amr Saffari: Since I Died Before Dying in the Interim Between this Death and the Last, and the second was because he’d not been back to AUB since that awful day he quit, and as he would realize when Saffari said it, in his talk, aloud, the criminal and the victim alike return to the scene of the crime.
It turned out that the Saffari lecture at AUB had been a sort of analogical semifictional thing about vampires and violence, and he’d dreamed his way through it in a kind of agony (the criminal and the victim alike return to the scene of the crime) and he had left that early too, tripping on the stairs, to sit out under the trees on that selfsame bench, to feel the weightlessness, the shame, maybe to cry, to remember.
His film then, had originally been intended as anti-Lebanon; a twist on the antiwar: anti-recovery, anti-lament. The films of which he’d read and that he’d watched made by other young directors, especially do-gooding foreigners and second-generation émigrés, and the Lebanon they created—reproducing the failure of war-art; the volcano dormant or erupting; cycles of de- and reconstruction; ruined olive orchards reprised against; talking heads telling horror stories; tiny but “telling” details of trauma, judgment, and limping deliverance—he’d wanted none of it. If your Lebanese work was not about the war it was ignored outside Lebanon.
He’d made a film that wanted to be ignored, was defiant, that turned its head away. He’d sat above Rafic Hariri International Airport, with the West Beirut cape and the oil-fringed sea beyond filling the frame with mauve haze, and shot planes landing and taking off for hours. He’d shot flowers for hours and shot a photo of his sister. He’d composed a meandering story about the Japanese in Lebanon, told in voice-over from photo captions in his father’s Times Atlas of World History, and from U.S. news reports from CBS and ABC in the ’70s and ’80s with their whitewashes, skews, and vicious Israeli torque. When asked what his film was about, he replied in an unanswerable non sequitur: “beauty in italics.” He’d wanted it to be anti-everything obvious in grief, but somewhere, inevitably, it had slipped from his control and entered meaning. He had thought he wanted to be ignored; he got noticed. He had recorded his friends’ and family’s conversations and stole aphorisms he cut into his monologue:
“With Christians, reach always exceeds grasp,” someone says breathlessly at one point.
Abu Keiko intones, an attempt at humor at their dinner table, with some faux-drama, “We traded in shrouds; people stopped dying.” An awful silence follows.
With venom Lauren mutters, about Aoun, “Tell him to wake up from his dream so we can wake up from our nightmare.”
The large opening sequence of the twenty-minute film cut between the airport, the flowers, and the photo of Keiko Elias at twenty-eight. No uniform was shown, just her high, proud eyes hazel-brown, her fine eyebrows finely cut, expressionless, her dark hair shaved close and military. Neither beautiful nor unbeautiful—she was only a presence, completely calm; she was forceful; she seemed to see the photographer and his reasons, not his camera. Defiance would imply or connote some form of defense, some defensiveness. But she was an icon; impossible to imagine in motion.
Over her photograph, over planes rising and descending, Leon narrated selections from the books and TV shows, on the Japanese influence in the Lebanon. On the arrival of militant Japanese Red Army cadres in the early ’70s, back when they were still sexy and exotic, before their utter fall from the small grace they’d gained, before the riots went bad, the murders and purgings in Japan. On the escapist middle-class beatnik hipness of the Palestinian cause to Japanese youth, and then the so-called “Second Wave,” when hundreds of young Japanese descended on the Lebanon. Who were unlike those first pioneers who sought out the PLO and PFLP and trained and fought and organized and killed and died, however absurdly and futilely—as in the Lod Airport Massacre in 1972, the last successful terrorist act at Ben Gurion. Improbably, committed by Japanese—their victims: More than half of the twenty-six dead were a group of Puerto Rican Christians on pilgrimage.