14 March 2006

BEIRUT: One of the quiet eccentricities of Lebanese pop culture is the picture postcard. Beirut gift shops and bookshops stock them like any other tourist destination. The odd thing here is that many of the locations no longer exist. Shots of the former Martyrs' Square (when it actually was a square), the seaside Corniche in the late 1960s and of course the pre-Solidere city center are far more common than their contemporary counterparts. Commercially derelict, these old postcards become screens upon which initiated tourists, foreign and Lebanese, can project their nostalgia.

Wael Noureddine's half hour long short film "Ca sera Beau From Beirut with Love" (2005) addresses a Beirut that is. It's quite different from the one depicted in postcard convention.

One of several films that got their first Beirut exposure during the recent International Festival of Creative Film and Video, "From Beirut with Love" was among the new works presented at Cinema Sofil by the organizers of the Ne a Beyrouth festival. It has a patina of controversy about it.

Ne a Beyrouth, which produced the film, had planned to screen "From Beirut with Love" in August during their own festival. They didn't. Knowing that the film's subject matter was too fraught to pass the censor untouched, they were nervous to screen it without approval.

The film begins provocatively. With the blades of surveillance helicopters whumping in the background, the camera gazes up at a bullet pocked building skeleton and the uniformed men standing on its roof. The image shifts abruptly, the camera jarred to one side. A low explosion rumbles in the background.

The screen fills then with the carnage in front of the Hotel St. Georges on February 14, 2005 one year and one month ago today when former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in a massive explosion. Like so many others, Noureddine's camera had free access to that less-than-secure crime scene, and the lens swivels in the to and fro of shock and confusion, moving from internal security personnel to smoldering bodies still strapped in their seats. Smoke and fire are followed by shots of several neglected graves revealed to be a Jewish cemetery, a reminder of Beirut's once-vital Mizrahi community. Images of quiet independence era residential streets blend into a moving shot of a space overgrown with bushes and signs warning of landmines.

There are flying shots of the front of the old Holiday Inn, from the ground up and from the commercial hot-air balloon moored nearby. Downtown Beirut's most prominent un-restored/un-destroyed landmark, it was (along with the nearby Murr Tower, which also draws the attention of Noureddine's camera) a favorite sniper location during the country's Civil War. There is a surfeit of shots of Lebanese Army soldiers lounging on the Fouad Chehab ring road, during one of the protest days of March 2005. They're remarkable because uniformed men usually don't like being filmed. Noureddine was fortunate to be shooting during this transitional period when the state was especially courteous to cameras.

There is a wordless interlude with a militiaman named "Abu Lamba" ("Father of the Lamp"), fiddling with his pistol. We meet his mom and dad, too.

There are shots from inside the flat of a fellow called "Ahmad," a tag that seems intended to designate religion as much as identity. The camera looks on matter of factly as the young man cooks a hit of heroin ($10 a gram) and shoots it.

More disturbing somehow is a second squat where the camera watches a group of young men shooting up. One fellow evidently loses focus part way through the operation. The half shot needle is left dangling from his vein. Such frank images of this city's youth subculture are usually absent from public screenings.

Between the two heroin vignettes, the camera shoots young men in South Lebanon enacting the Ashoura ritual. They march en masse among village buildings stenciled with the name "Haidar" ("Lion") a name of the Imam Ali in Latin characters. They shout "Haidar! Haidar! Haidar!" as bloodied hands energetically slap razor bladed foreheads.

The kaleidoscope of images is occasionally accompanied by Noureddine's text in the form of French-language subtitles. Text and image are assembled against a soundtrack that moves from natural soundscape to contemporary music, the dominant influence being the work of Soap Kills' Zeid Hamdan.

This shot by shot description is enough to make the eyes of seasoned Beirut residents roll back in their sockets.

The bullet gouged concrete skeletons of the city skyline are surely the single most popular subject among Beirut's adventure tourists those voyeurs who collect photo memorabilia of other peoples' horrors.

The blood rituals of Ashoura, too, have inspired cameramen to gorge themselves on spectacle for spectacle's sake. A similar critique might be leveled against the filmmaker's turning his camera on Beirut's hard drug demimonde. Arguably it has no aesthetic merit other than raw shock value.

Worse, Noureddine might be painted a self-indulgent film student emulating the heroin culture excursions of Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream" (2000) or Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting" (1996) all the more likely when you realize this is only his third short.

Some might argue, along with one Beirut filmmaker attending the premier, that Noureddine's gloomy vision is just as much a cliche as the touristic one of cedar trees and red tiled roofs.

What raises "From Beirut with Love" above mere mimesis, and redeems it from cliche, is the technical skill with which Noureddine and his team director of photography Robert Fenz and editor Francine Lemaitre assemble the collage.

The "Haidar! Haidar! Haidar!" of the Ashoura episode, for instance, plays out against a Soap Kills' track repeating the phrase "Shou ma sar" ("Whatever happens").

The filmmaker might simply be juxtaposing cool image with cool music. The effect, though, is to reinforce the film's running theme of incongruity. The image itself is elevated above cliche - or at least aestheticized because the lens is pitched just above the marchers' heads. We see little more than the rise and fall of bloodied hands.

Noureddine's film can be seen as a strong example of a sub-genre of documentary short the "repatriate film." It is a hybrid form reflecting the liminal peculiarities of boomerang expatriates who, feeling both inside and outside, make identity labels like "Lebanese" or "foreigner" problematic.

Noureddine matches the profile well enough. The Paris based filmmaker lived in Beirut until 2002, and he's returned regularly ever since. He says he was in Lebanon in February 2005 to shoot a film about old Beirut when the Hariri assassination compelled him to make one about Beirut today.

But it's the work that makes the genre. True, the lens has an aversion to the lovely kitsch of tourist footage and the filmmaker is informed by insights and an access to a bleak side of life here that's usually beyond the reach of Western visitors.

There is insight but no discernible argument. Though there is text, it makes no pretence to "explain" anything being more an imagistic travelogue, punctuated by a snippet or two of conversation.

In form, the film mimics a tourist documentary's impressionistic concern with the look of things, and particularly the visual incongruities of the city.

Its worship of the image is the strength of the film, all the more because it is shared by some of the filmmaker's subjects.

During one scene a young man discusses his plans to commit suicide. He describes what kind of pistol he'll use and how he'll put his back to a window when he does the deed.

"You got the gun. You shoot. The bullet enters your mouth ... It has to come out somewhere ... It'll be beautiful ... There'll be blood on the window."

For more information on Wael Noureddine's "From Beirut with Love," check out the filmmaker's blog, www.wael-noureddine.blog.ca