Once You’ve Got the Gun
by Jayce Salloum
Wednesday, September 28, Broadway Theatre, 7 p.m.
Songs of Experience Film Series 2011
This is Not Beirut (There Was and There Was Not)
by Jayce Salloum (48 minutes, 1994)
This video is a personal project. It examines the use of images/representations of Lebanon and Beirut both in the West and Lebanon. It records the interactions and experiences during filming in Lebanon, focusing attention on the representational process as both a Lebanese and a Westernized, foreign-born mediator with associated cultural connections and baggage from both realms. Positioned between the disparities and disjunctions, the project also dances between genres, looking from the inside out at each. The video engages critically at the assumptions imposed and thus broken in this site of complexity, a nexus where identities are defined and articulated.
Up to the South (Taleen a Junuub)
by Jayce Salloum and Walid Ra’ad (20-minute excerpt from 60-minute videotape, 1993)
Up to the South focuses specifically on southern Lebanon, its current conditions, inhabitants, histories, politics and economics, as well as the Israeli occupation and the socio-ideological and popular resistance to this occupation. After filming more than 150 hours in Lebanon, from January to December 1992, the authors collected more than 30 hours of video images and archival film footage. With the help of several producers, researchers, historians and journalists from the region, they focus on the ways certain terms are currently used within Western discourse to describe the situation of another culture: terrorist, terrorism, occupation, colonisation, post-colonialism, resistance, collaboration, truth and fiction.
Salloum and Ra’ad’s meta-witnessing is as powerful and relevant today as when it was made, more than 15 years ago. With uncanny tact and delicacy, they create a dense mosaic of voices, broken architectures, out-of-the-car-window landscapes, all framed and reframed by their dialogues on representation. Here is a model movie, an example of a deeply engaged ethical movie practice unafraid to show both sides of the camera.
- Mike Hoolbloom
