“In June 1967 the defeat was like a bell which roused the consciousness of the Arabs who were sleeping in their long slumber; it awakened the Arabs from their dreams, shook their faith in all nationalistic slogans and made the military regimes doubt the ability of the military to fulfill the tasks it had assumed and which it had loudly and widely proclaimed.”
This was the presentation of Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid in his post-1967 Arab cinema .‘The New Reality in Arab Cinema: Defeat-Conscious Cinema’. The loss of Arab forces against Israel that year, and the subsequent disillusionment with Pan-Arab unity, resulted in filmmakers of this time and place finding new ways to capture a culturally decaying world. This is very evident in the text .“New Lebanese Cinema” of 1970s and 1980s, where filmmakers like Heiny Srour and Jocelyne Saab mixed documentary and fiction, as well as personal and political, to create films where human life endures amidst the rubble.
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If the loss of the Six-Day War woke the Arabs from a dream, the following decades brought nightmares. The Lebanese Civil War broke out 1975 – a 15-a year-long dispute that led to a compromise 150,000 people killed. Saab, a journalist based in Paris at the time, returned to Beirut, and would go on to make a number of documentaries documenting the destruction of the city in which he was born. In just a few years, his fictional work evolved to take on a more personal and poetic style of photography. The Beirut Trilogy – incl Beirut, Never Again (1976), A letter from Beirut (1978), and Beirut, My City (1983) – portrays the divisions within Lebanon and the involvement of Israeli, Arab, and United Nations forces as a curse that has befallen Lebanon. Residents are trying the normal things of daily life while the refugees are in their homes.
Beirut, Never Again opens with a discordant scream and the sound of gunfire, tracking the sound of destroyed buildings and congested streets. Saab narrates, summoning the Beirut that once held both respect and sadness. He describes the tourists who have visited this city as flies, and the luxurious things that were there .“careless.” He also provides information about the city’s once beautiful buildings.” It’s a bitter, broken poem on display.” All the good and bad of the past are longed for, while everything in the present is a ghost of what it once was.
While the film’s narrative laments a past that will never return, Saab’s camera remains focused on the present conditions of the people of Beirut. Life and death are always in the same situation. Children live in the streets as if they were newly built but ruined playgrounds, playing in dirty water while corpses lie on the shore. People often walk past the camera playing AK-47s and flowers. In a moment, three card-carrying grenades are seen placed on a chair, both ready to be used by a nearby group of young men and boys should they find them. It is almost always true that the people who carry weapons are not more numerous than the guns themselves. .““When the war grows, the fighters become smaller,” said Saab dejectedly.
Two years later, Saab would end A letter from Beirutfurthering this focus on the common efforts of people facing disaster. Long sections of the film show candid conversations between citizens riding public buses, as Saab himself walks across the partitions to capture the various sides of the war. Often people talk about places they can’t go and places they can’t see. One woman talks about how she used to go to college, but now the bus can’t cross military borders; the other lost his home because of the war, and left him with him 12 disabled children; while another explains that her husband and son have been kidnapped. Bombardment from various forces, including Israel and its scorched earth policy, depopulates the countryside. At one point the young boy pointed to different houses and named them, but by the time the film reached the house, it had been demolished.
