Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Film: An aesthetic of dereliction and slaughter

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Film: An aesthetic of dereliction and slaughter

    The Daily Star (Lebanon)
    December 10, 2011 Saturday


    An aesthetic of dereliction and slaughter

    by Jim Quilty


    Ever since filmmakers began to make documentaries that work more like
    art house fictions (and less like in-depth reportage), a sort of
    identity crisis has confronted the form, if not the filmmakers
    themselves.

    DUBAI: Ever since filmmakers began to make documentaries that work
    more like art house fictions (and less like in-depth reportage), a
    sort of identity crisis has confronted the form, if not the filmmakers
    themselves.

    Like artists who take their inspiration from their local realities,
    filmmakers who work in "creative documentary" - as this
    non-journalistic form is called - aspire to the "allusive" and
    "universal," rather than "literal" and "parochial."

    "Sector Zero," the ambitious debut feature-length documentary by Nadim
    Mishlawi seeks to navigate these difficult waters. This cerebral, yet
    stylish, examination of the Beirut neighborhood of Karantina had its
    world premier Thursday evening at the Dubai International Film
    Festival, where it is screening as part of the Arab documentary film
    competition.

    For those of a certain disposition, Karantina is one of the most
    interesting parts of Beirut. The sector was born before Lebanese
    independence, after the city was made the capital of its own Ottoman
    province and its population blossomed, making it necessary to move its
    quarantine facility ("karantina" in Ottoman Turkish) further from the
    city center. Because the quarantine was concerned with the traffic of
    human illness, a hospital was built on site.

    The quarantine itself has not functioned for ages, but the name stuck.
    Since then the quarter has come to acquire several overlapping
    meanings.

    Mishlawi's film recounts how Karantina became a region where waves of
    refugees - Armenian, Palestinian, and Kurdish - settled, so the region
    acquired the reputation of a slum.

    When Lebanon's Civil War broke out, the high concentration of
    Palestinians in this part of "Christian East Beirut" - made it the
    target of a siege (and massacre) by Phalangist militiamen and their
    Syrian army allies, who wanted to isolate the nearby Tel al-Zaatar
    Palestinian refugee camp.

    The region thus came to be associated with slaughter and (ironically,
    or appropriately, enough) it also became to site of a slaughterhouse
    for cattle and sheep, which operates still. Other light-industrial
    enterprises set up shop in Karantina - a tannery, a metal factory -
    and during the post-Civil War reconstruction, Sukleen, a private
    waste-management company, took possession of the area's municipal
    dump.

    Later still the area played host to the nightclub B018. Designed by
    famed Beirut architect Bernard Khoury (who is one of Mishlawi's
    informants), the interior design of this subterranean crypt was
    originally not unlike that of a local graveyard. The most-recent layer
    of urban densification is that of the art galleries - which, like the
    pollen of globalization, tend to aggregate in disused regions of
    cities worldwide.

    "Sector Zero" is a self-consciously elaborate audio-visual creation.

    Visually, it combines silent images from Karantina's now-derelict
    structures - the only living presence in which are a spider and a few
    sheep and cattle en route to the butchers. In the hands of
    cinematographer Talal Khoury, these take the form of panning shots -
    reminiscent of Meyar Roumi's work in Omar Amiralay's 2005 doc "A Flood
    in Baath Country" or Diego Mart?nez Vignatti's contribution to Kamal
    Aljafari's 2006 "The Roof" - and still life-like studies of found
    objects that pass in and out of focus like a fading memories.

    Complementing these contemporary images is archival footage.
    Black-and-white films of Armenian and Palestinian refugees who found
    refuge in Karantina are superimposed over the interior walls of
    Karantina structures. There is also some the striking footage of the
    Phalange's 1976 siege.

    The film also has a slideshow motif - most effective when it presents
    a range of historical maps of the region from the 1950s until today.
    Less-effective slideshows are concerned with post-Civil War Downtown
    Beirut and Lebanon's sectarian political leadership.

    "Sector Zero" is Mishlawi's directorial debut but he has been a figure
    on the Lebanese art scene for some years as a composer - having worked
    on the soundtracks of a number of films in the region - and as a sound
    installation artist. Consequently the audio and visual aspects of this
    film are as complex.

    The soundtrack veers back and forth from Mishlawi's work for chamber
    orchestra to a dissonant soundscape of electronic growls and scrapes -
    an aural equivalent of the pockmarked and derelict interior and
    exterior shots of Karantina that Khoury captures.

    A range of interviews provide the film's documentary "content." The
    voices take the form of audio interviews with people that have some
    personal (contemporary or historical) connection with the region - a
    slaughterhouse employee, a writer who lives in the region, a former
    militiaman who committed atrocities there - and the filmed monologues
    of three prominent Lebanese intellectuals - Khoury, psychiatrist and
    clinical psychologist Choukri Azouri and writer and political
    commentator Hazem Saghiyeh.

    The film's aesthetic sensibility - by no means the first film to find
    beauty in derelict spaces - mingled with philosophical discussion and
    reminiscence will move viewers of a certain temperament. Obviously
    "Sector Zero" speaks with greatest clarity to residents of Lebanon,
    and those non-Lebanese who lost family there. That said the film's
    themes are not particularly parochial.

    Refugee movements and tribal-sectarian conflicts aren't unique to the
    Lebanese experience and, historically, every port city in the world
    has had a quarantine facility. These days, when communicable disease
    is second only to climate change among contemporary plagues - and with
    free population movement more likely to be impeded for political than
    health reasons - the idea of "quarantine" is a totem from an era of
    regulation that's as quaint as the social welfare state.

    Bernard Khoury's sketch of Solidere's neoliberal land-expropriation
    practices - pioneered in Downtown Beirut before going global - is
    interesting enough, as are his views on how his design of B018 was
    received by "the Western press." The extent to which this is useful in
    scrutinizing Karantina is debatable.

    Though human tragedy is deeply gouged into Karantina's urban fabric,
    for the most part "Sector Zero" enters through the head rather than
    the heart. Indeed, some may find the intellectual ballast provided by
    the film's informants doesn't match the film's aesthetics.

    That said, when the camera falls upon the cattle and sheep awaiting
    slaughter at the Karantina slaughterhouse, the soundtrack's string
    accompaniment veers fatally (and uncharacteristically) close to
    sentimentality.

    In the post-premiere Q&A, Mishlawi remarked that he and
    cinematographer Talal Khoury aspire to recast their Karantina project
    in other media - whether as a book of photography or a video
    installation. Certainly the visual and sound design aspects of "Sector
    Zero" are equal to this. Given the artistic strengths of Mishlawi's
    profile of Karantina, it's curious that the neighborhood's swelling,
    and visually incongruous, art gallery scene is missing from the film.

    These complaints do little to diminish "Sector Zero" being an
    impressive first film.

    The complex variety of its soundtrack is a fine sonic equivalent to
    the bleak locations. Derelict and pockmarked with a violent history,
    these interior and exterior landscapes are ideal for Khoury's laconic,
    lateral camera movement.

    Ephemeral still-lifes - picturesque spider webs (translucent spider
    included), mysterious objects sunken in a flooded floor, a diagonal
    shaft of light shooting through mysteriously rising steam - are as
    informative in their mute transience as an entire roomful of political
    philosophy.

    The Dubai International Film Festival continues until Dec. 14.

Working...
X