Film

February 26, 2008

Starting Again

This blog is changing from one focused on my year in Beirut to one that will still be about photography, but will revolve around my life in Baltimore. It will continue to feature my photography and my writings about photography (with occasional diversions).

So, rather than starting a whole new blog, I am going to continue posting in this particular bit of cyberspace, but the blog's name will change (once I think up a new one). You'll always be able to find it at this web address, regardless of its name.

Thanks for visiting!

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I saw the movie "4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days" the other night. It's by a Romanian director, Cristian Mungiu, and depicts a few days in the life of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in 1987. It is unrelentingly bleak, but mostly well-crafted and compelling. [Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania's ruler from 1965 until his overthrow in 1989, had outlawed birth-control and abortion in 1966 in an attempt to increase the population.]

Although I enjoyed the storyline, I also found the little details of life under that authoritarian regime very interesting and familiar. In 1990 I took a trip to Turkey and Bulgaria with some friends from Cairo, where we were living. Bulgaria's communist leader had only very recently been removed by opposition forces and later in 1990 the Communist Party gave up the reins of power and free elections were held for the first time since 1931.

But when we were visiting there was still a shortage of food in shops, we could get very little at the few restaurants, pro-democracy protests were still being held and the general look and feel of most places we visited was institutional and bare. It wasn't all desolate, though. In Sophia we randomly met a man who spoke English and we went to visit his mother and sister's young daughter at their flat in an area of colorless high-rise apartment buildings. Inside the flat was a whole different world. It was warm and vibrant, they offered us what must have been precious fresh oranges, chocolates and some homemade fruit liqueur. For a glimpse at what we saw, here are a few photos from that trip.

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August 29, 2007

Lebanese films

Sunday night I went to see some films in the 6th edition of the "..né.à Beyrouth" festival of Lebanese film. The three I really enjoyed were Wassat Beirut (Central Beirut, 1993) by Akram Zaatari and Rachad el Jisr, L'armee des Fourmis (The Army of Ants, 2007) by Wissam Charaf, and Sheherazade's Tale (2006) by Rami Kodeih.

My favorite was Wassat Beirut, shot on black and white Super-8 film without sound. This type of film stock was introduced in the mid-'60s and its grainy look made Wassat Beirut look like it could have been the early '70s, not '93. But what makes it obviously not from an earlier era are the camera angles and visual language that to me seem photographic, at times framing views as if they were still images. Accompanying the film was an ambient sound environment produced by Charbel Haber of the band Scrambled Eggs, live in the theater. The music/noise along with the grainy poetic images made the whole experience mesmerizing.

It begins close-up on the war damaged hand of one of the figures in the Martyr's statue which at first glance appeared like a living hand to me, pulling out to reveal an abandoned Martyr's Square. Roads and sidewalks are now mostly expanses of dirt. The film explores the battle-scarred and overgrown terrain of downtown Beirut only a few years after the civil war officially ended. At that time there were people (many displaced from other parts of Lebanon) living there amongst the ruins. Even though the downtown has been remade since then into an upscale shopping area, nowadays it's a virtual ghost town. The political impasse has led the opposition to remain camped out in the area since last December alongside the massive rolls of razor wire, concrete barricades, tanks, checkpoints and army men.

Back to 1993, Wassat Beirut follows a group of boys as they play at being militia men with toy guns. But for me the subject of the film was the space itself. The camera lingers on the damaged structures, the empty interiors full of holes, views from windows and along the arched porticos of the old colonial-era architecture. The people who inhabit these spaces seem lost or forgotten, living in a strange limbo zone. Watching them now is poignant because we know what happened to them and because downtown in it's new form doesn't welcome those who can't luxury shop. Most were evicted to become displaced people elsewhere, but a few were killed in the redevelopment process during the demolition of old buildings. In the film some men sell postcard images of Beirut before the war, when the trees were planted deliberately in rows around Martyr's Square and not growing haphazardly out of the rubble of what was once apartments, shops, vibrant urban life.

This film reminded me of the French photographer/artist Sophie Ristelhueber's Beirut photographs from 1982. In black and white she focused on the scars and wounds that had already accumulated in the civil war landscape of downtown. Without drama and with a straight forward, unembellished style she documented the incredible wreckage. In one shot she takes the viewer up close to look at the corner and two sides of a building that is so badly pockmarked by bullets and shells that it appears corroded, as if by acid. In others she stands back to look at whole streets of buildings in rubble.

Unfortunately I can't find any of her Beirut photos on the web except for this one, which isn't representative of what I remember from her book.

Ristelhueber_mobil
[Sophie Ristelhueber, Beirut, 1982]

Fouad Elkoury is another great photographer who took pictures downtown. His are from 1991. Here's an example, but I recommend a visit to his website, which has many examples of his work.

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[Fouad Elkoury, Rue de Damas, Beirut, 1991]

Rather than seem dated, these representations of the Lebanese civil war through its physical damage and psychological impacts are still relevant today. Although a younger generation of filmmakers and photographers are reflecting on, even directly recorded, a more recent war--that of last summer's war between Hizballah and Israel--violence, destruction and political/social paralysis are again common and meaningful  motifs in Lebanese art.

July 03, 2007

Allan Sekula's film "The Lottery of the Sea"

The Global Photographies conference was attended by a good mix of scholars, photographers, artists, curators and students from Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, the US, Turkey, the Netherlands, Canada, Finland, and more.

The first night we loaded into buses and went to the Mermaid Arts Center in Bray to see a screening of the photographer and writer Allan Sekula’s film “The Lottery of the Sea.” Here is how he describes it:

The Lottery of the Sea takes its title from Adam Smith, who in his famous Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776) compared the life of the seafarer to gambling. Thus notions of risk were introduced by Smith through an allegory of the sea's dangers especially for those who did the hard work, and also for those who invested in ships and goods.

The film asks: is there a relationship between the most frightening and terrifying concept in economics, that of risk, and the category of the sublime in aesthetics?

It is an offbeat diary extending from the presumably "innocent" summer of 2001 through to the current "war on terror" by way of a meandering, essayistic voyage from seaport to seaport, waterfront to waterfront, and coast to coast.

What does it mean to be a maritime nation? To rule the waves? Or to harvest the sea?

An American submarine collides with a Japanese fisheries training ship. What does this suggest about the division of labor in the Pacific?

Panama decides whether to expand the width of its canal, over which it now exercises a certain qualified measure of sovereignty. How is it that a scuba diver would be most prepared to question this great flushing of the jungle watershed?

Galicia is presented with an unwanted gift of oil, with important questions following about the monomania of governments able only to conceptualize danger in one dimension.

Barcelona turns anew to its seafront, producing a pseudo-public sphere and new real estate value to the north and even greater maritime logistical efficiency to the south.

In between, we visit blizzards and demonstrations in New York, drifting prehistoric mastodons in Los Angeles, militant drummers and bemused African construction workers in Lisbon, millionaires or millionaire-impersonators in Amsterdam, and the stray dogs of Athens, all by way of thinking through seeing the sea, the market, and democracy.

—Allan Sekula, 2004

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[Images from the film, lifted from the web. Oil collected from the spill in Galicia, containers on a ship, slicing a fish for scientific research, I think.]

Although there were some bits that I thought could be edited down, I enjoyed it very much. For me it built up over time so that by the last third or so I was mesmerized by the multiple interactions with seas and ports Sekula presents. Some large questions that emerged from these are: Who is able or allowed to benefit from marine resources? Who does the actual maritime work and with what tools? How do we find ourselves connected or divided by the sea? And of course, what is globalization doing to our world?

I learned about the practice of merchant ships flying a “flag of convenience,” which means the country where the ship is registered (such as Panama or Liberia), is not the one where the shipping company or cargo is from. The company registers wherever the fees and laws are most advantageous to the ship owner (including labor laws that govern how workers are treated and paid).

The sequence in the film that has remained most vividly in my mind is about the oil that coated the coast of Galicia, Spain, after the tanker Prestige sunk in 2002. The ship was Greek-operated, single-hulled oil tanker, officially registered in the Bahamas, but with a Liberian owner. (The flag of convenience system made it difficult to figure out who was responsible for the disaster.) The Spanish government mobilized volunteers to clean it up, all by hand. (Crazy that the government didn’t get equipment and professionals to do at least part of it.)

The scenes are extraordinary, like a depiction of the myth of Sisyphus rolling the boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down where he has to start the difficult task all over again. The oil clumps and slicks seem to have no end, rolling in with the waves, sticking to the rocks and the volunteers' white protective jumpsuits. I thought about Lebanon and the oil spill from the Israeli bombing of the Jiyyeh power plant last summer. But in Lebanon besides doing it by hand, pulling or shoveling up the carpet of oil from the seabed, they used suction equipment to clean rocks.

I also was struck by the film’s depiction of port workers moving the massive containers that are now the norm in transporting goods across the world. Instead of the old-time stevedores who loaded and unloaded cargo by hand or small machines, now they are mostly operators of those tall cranes that lift and move the containers. Though even with those it appeared there are workers who stay below in the ship and prepare the way. It all reminded me of the second season of the excellent TV show “The Wire” that was about port workers, labor struggles and smuggling at the port in Baltimore.

There was so much of interest in the stories the images told that I found it hard to concentrate on Sekula’s words, especially when he was more philosophical or abstract in his commentary. The film definitely inspired me to think more about the cargo ships and ports I love to watch whether I’m in Oakland, Baltimore, or Beirut.

Oaklandport
[Oakland, CA port and city, from the port's official website.]

Sekula attended the conference and I saw him around often. I liked his serious and quiet demeanor and his hat (a fedora maybe). He also gave the last keynote talk, a very interesting description of trying out various modes of presenting an exhibit of his photographs at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany called "Shipwreck and workers (version 3)." At first he tried to find a way to install massive prints in a working factory, but eventually they were mounted on metal frames and set outdoors in Schlosspark Wilhelmshöhe underneath the Herkules statue alongside the monumental baroque water cascades.

   

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