While some of what was thought impossible, for example, interaction-free measurement, turned out, thanks to quantum mechanics, not to be so, what one thought possible, human life, is really impossible: “Human life is impossible. ¹ But it is only affliction which makes us feel this” (Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace). The “contemporary” Lebanese, who underwent a protracted civil war and two Israeli invasions in the latter part of the Twentieth Century, should be aware of this better than many other peoples. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, even though the vast majority of the Lebanese discovered in affliction that life is impossible, they then limited this impossibility cheaply, “realistically,” to the period of affliction, considering human life impossible during affliction, rather than coming to the realization that affliction does not make human life impossible but merely reveals that it is impossible, always—do many people make other people’s lives a living hell the better to hide from themselves and others that human life as such is impossible? ²

First Aid, Second Growth, Third Degree, Fourth World, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Sense

During the Israeli army’s 1982 siege of West Beirut, the Palestinians faced a double bind: the siege and their desertion by the rest of the world—orchestrated by Israel’s main ally, the USA, a UN Security Council permanent, thus veto-wielding, member—may have changed their enclave into a radical closure, yet they were being violently pressured to leave that enclosure. The Palestinian combatants’ delay in coming to a decision may not have been caused only by the reluctance to decamp from what had become to many of them a surrogate homeland and to relinquish the elaborate political and administrative apparatus they had established in Lebanon; and by their mistrust of the guarantees they were being offered for the safety of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who would be left behind—a mistrust that proved justified by the subsequent massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. A feeling of radical closure might have contributed to the delay in deciding to leave: “Where should we go after the last frontier? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” (Mahmoud Darwish, “The Earth Is Closing on Us,” Ward Aqal, 1986). Ghosts may appear in a quarantined region, not to complete an unfinished business but to intimate to the quarantined living people that the dead are not party to their desertion by the rest of the world. These posthumous entities may appear in time, before the quarantine turns into a radical closure, where apparitions are experienced as impostors not because of the doubling that is a characteristic of the death realm from which they apparently issue, but because they are ahistorical, unworldly entities that irrupted fully formed in such a closure. They may appear there although the quarantined living people were, and possibly continue to be, despite the quasi-spontaneous Buddhist-like meditations on their bodies hallucinated as chopped, buried under rubble, or burned to ashes, themselves party to the modern world’s desertion and exclusion of the dead. ³ The dead appear there also to maintain the possibility of their continuing remembrance by the living, since were the quarantine to turn into a radical closure, those in it would become disconnected from history. Despite the fact that I had not been in Beirut for the previous four years, the curator Jayce Salloum placed me as residing in Los Angeles and Beirut in his catalogue for the exhibition “East of Here…. (Re) Imagining the ‘Orient,’” which took place at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, in November–December 1996. His reason for doing this was probably to stress the connection of the included artists to the Middle East. I think such a description of my geographical coordinates was then and continues to be quite accurate only from the perspective of radical closure. Haven’t I written: “He left (did he leave?) Beirut—a city where ‘nothing [is] left, not even leaving’—to New York in 1984”? Even if I never go back to Beirut, my coordinates are conjointly the city in which I happen to reside and Beirut. ⁴

Have the desertion of West Beirut by the Arabs and the rest of the world during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the continuing sanctions against Iraq, now [1996] in their sixth year, divested these two communities from the rest of the Arab world, undoing any notion of an Arab community? If so, is it accurate on my part to have written in Over-Sensitivity that the conjunction of catastrophes affecting the Arab world in Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, and earlier Palestine added up to a surpassing disaster? Is the tradition for such communities no longer the one that used to be theirs, but the other communities of the surpassing disaster: Gnostics, Nizārīs, Qarmaṭīs, Sabbatians? Unfortunately, these communities, which have tried to deal with the withdrawal consequent of a surpassing disaster, have been subjected to another kind of unavailability, a material one enforced by their orthodox enemies: most of the works of the Nizārīs, Qarmaṭīs, and of the Sabbatians have been burned or destroyed (the Mongols’ destruction of the library of Alamῡt, etc.). ⁵

Postwar Lebanese Photography: Between the Withdrawal of Tradition and the Irruption of Unworldly Entities

The title of a May 2001 workshop organized by Lebanese video makers Mahmoud Hojeij and Akram Zaatari, for which they invited seven persons from four Middle Eastern countries and from various fields (cinema, video, graphic design, etc.) to come to Lebanon, join two Lebanese, and make, along with these latter, each a one-minute video by the end of the workshop, was Transit Visa. Can one have a transit visa to a radical closure? Doesn’t the very notion of having a transit visa to Lebanon imply that, notwithstanding the siege of West Beirut by Israel during the latter’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it is not a radical closure? ⁶

In addition to so much Lebanese photography that remained at the level of artistic documentation, for instance the work of Samer Mohdad (Les Enfants de la Guerre: Liban 1985-1992 [Musée de l’Elysée; Agence Vu, 1993]; and Mes Arabies [Éditions Dār an-Nahār, 1999]) and Fouad Elkoury, who were treating and continued to treat the civil war and war as a disaster and the closure that affected Lebanon as relative albeit extreme, we encounter two kinds of works that are symptomatic and emblematic of a Lebanon that was during part of the war years a radical closure ⁷ and / or a surpassing disaster. ⁸

Where is the rest of the world? What is the world doing? How is the world allowing such atrocities not only to happen but also to go on being perpetuated for months and years? ⁹

The incredible desertion of the world is the leitmotiv of the indignant exclamations one hears in zones under siege: the Palestinians and the Lebanese in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of that city in 1982; the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since the start of their closures then sieges by the Israelis; the inhabitants of Sarajevo during its siege by Bosnian Serbs; the Tutsi minority during the Rwandan genocide of 1994; the Iraqis since the start in 1990 of the ongoing sanctions. Is it strange that some feel or make artworks that imply that these places became radical closures? Can we detect in such places one of the consequences of radical closures: the irruption of unworldly, fully formed ahistorical entities? As usual, it is most appropriate to look for that in artworks. The “document” attributed by Walid Raad to Kahlil Gibran and projected as a slide for the duration of Raad’s talk “Miraculous Beginnings” at Sursock Museum in Beirut; ¹⁰ and the eight small black-and-white photographs of group portraits of men and women that were published in Raad’s photo-essay “Miraculous Beginnings,” and that—the reader is told—are part of twenty-nine large photographic prints and fifty-two documents (handwritten notebook entries, letters, typed memoranda and minutes) unearthed in 1991 during the demolition of Beirut’s civil war-devastated Central District, processed by laboratories in France and the USA, ¹¹ and handed to the Arab Research Institute, ¹² can be legitimately viewed as unworldly ahistorical entities that irrupted in the radical closure that Beirut may have become at one point. ^13 14

We live in a block universe of spacetime, where nothing physically passes and vanishes, but where occasionally things withdraw due to surpassing disasters. Palestinians, Kurds, and Bosnians have to deal with not only the concerted erasure by their enemies of much of their tradition: the erasure by the Israelis of hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948 and their renaming with Jewish names, ¹⁵ and the erasure of hundreds of Kurdish villages during the Anfāl operation in Iraq, etc.; but also the additional, more insidious withdrawal of what survived the physical destruction. The exhibition Wonder Beirut by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (Janine Rubeiz Gallery, Beirut, July 1998) revolves around a photographer who, along with his father, was commissioned by the Lebanese State in 1969 to do postcards, and who four years into the civil war and while shutting himself off in his studio takes down all these postcards, “which no longer referred to anything” since what they showed—Martyrs’ Square, the souks, policemen on camels, etc.—either was destroyed or no longer existed, and “burns them patiently, aiming at them his proper bombs and his own shells… thus making them conform better to his reality. When all was burned, it was peace.” ¹⁶ Thus the following model sequence: photographs of burned buildings and scorched walls taken by him from the window of his studio a couple of years into the conflict; then, four years into the war, burned photographs that are later exhibited (this indicating that the war was then not yet a surpassing disaster, but just a localizable catastrophe); then, in 1999, undeveloped photographs, a symptom of the withdrawal past the surpassing disaster that Beirut must have become: “Today, this photographer no longer develops his photographs. It is enough for him to take them. At the end of the exhibition [Wonder Beirut] ¹⁷, 6452 rolls of film were laid on the floor: rolls containing photos taken by the photographer but left undeveloped” (from Hadjithomas and Joreige’s text “Ṭayyib raḥḥ farjīk shighlī” [“OK, I’ll Show You My Work”], Al-Ādāb [January – February 2001]). Hadjithomas and Joreige are currently preparing a show titled Latent Images in which they will frame and mount on the gallery’s walls textual descriptions of photographs taken but left unprocessed. Here are six examples from film roll no. PE 136 GPH 160:

 

• Master shot of the dead end from the window of
  the room. It is raining.

 

• Close shot of the seepage under the living room’s
  windows.

 

• The water enters into the kitchen.

 

• Close shot of the floorcloth in front of the living
  room’s windows.

 

• The rain on the room’s pane, with the camera
  focus being on the drops.

 

• Close shot of the spots of humidity on the walland the ceiling.

While their work in Wonder Beirut and their forthcoming Latent Images bring to my mind two parts of Hollis Frampton’s Hapax Legomena, Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice (1972), in the first of which Frampton placed one at a time photographs on a hotplate, the latter’s coil shortly tracing its shape on the photograph before the latter’s full burning; and in the second of which he placed on a table, in between a small cactus and a cup of coffee, a stack of papers with descriptions of two hundred and forty different shots, which descriptions we read one at a time for the span of the film (for instance, “#4. [close-up] A small table below a window. A potted cactus, a coffee cup”), I am aware that the burning of the photographs in Wonder Beirut not only has to do with matters relating to the medium as such, as in Frampton’s Nostalgia (Hadjithomas and Joreige: “We wanted to return to an ontological definition of these images: the inscription of light by burning” [Al-Ādāb (January–February 2001): 37]), but is also a reaction to the incendiary wars that were going on in Lebanon; and that the substitution of textual descriptions for the photographs is related not only to the problematic relation of words to images in audio-visual works, but also to the withdrawal of many images past a surpassing disaster. I had not expected the intermediary step of Latent Images between exhibiting rolls of undeveloped films in Wonder Beirut and a possible future exhibition of developed photographs. This intermediary step can be considered a contribution to the resurrection of what withdrew following the surpassing disaster. The intended effect of the work of the one trying to resurrect tradition past a surpassing disaster is fundamentally not on the audience, except indirectly; it is on the work of art—to resurrect it. Such resurrecting works are thus referential. It is interesting to see when—if at all— Hadjithomas and Joreige will feel the impulse to develop those photographs, this signaling the resurrection of tradition.

Felicitous photographs of Lebanon many years into the war and then many years following it: photographs taken by nobody—unworldly entities that irrupted in a radical closure—but developed (Miraculous Beginnings); and photographs taken by someone but left undeveloped because of the withdrawal due to the surpassing disaster that was Beirut (Wonder Beirut, 1999).

It is one thing for an academic scholar like the Palestinian Walid Khalidi to do archival work (he is the editor of Kay lāānansá: qurá Filasṭīn al-latī dammarathāā Isrā’īl sanat 1948 wa-asmā’ shuhadā’ihāā [All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948]); it is, or at least it should be, another matter were Walid Raad and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige to do so. Walid Raad is already a member of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige would, in my opinion, be fine candidates for membership in the same foundation, which was established in Lebanon in 1996, and whose aim is “to promote photography in the Middle East and North Africa by locating, collecting, and preserving the region’s photographic heritage.… Material in the collections will date from the early nineteenth century to the present.” Raad is also implicated through his artistic practice in both the Arab Research Institute’s archival collection Miraculous Beginnings: The Complete Archive, which as of 1994 comprised, we are told, forty-six hundred documents; and the Atlas Group’s growing collection. While for now the artistic practices and issues at stake in these latter two archives have not affected or interfered with the collection of the AIF, it is quite conceivable that they will, through Raad, do so, problematizing the historical authenticity of its photographs, with the probable consequence that we will learn about new Muḥammad ‘Abdallah, Camille el Kareh, or Alban photographs. I envision, as a first stage, the archival collections of both the Arab Research Institute and the Atlas Group ending up equaling the collection of the AIF, presently around 30,000 photographs; then the AIF archive becoming just an appendage of Raad’s (largely virtual) archive, the latter occasionally referring to the former as holding a small number of photographs that it does not have : “For an additional 23 photographs of the work of Camille el Kareh, as well as for an additional 20 photographs by Muḥammad ‘Abdallāh, we refer you to the Arab Image Foundation’s collection.” What would happen to the AIF’s “long-term goal of… the creation of a center in Beirut for the preservation and exhibition of its photographic collections” were Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige to end up becoming members of the foundation? How would the AIF’s goal of preservation be affected by the presence of two artists who have burnt some of their photographs then exhibited them? How would the Foundation’s goal of exhibition be affected by the presence of two artists who have included in one of their exhibitions myriad rolls of unprocessed photographs, therefore of unexhibited photographs? How would the Foundation’s goal of archiving and therefore also dating be affected by the presence of two artists who assigned two different dates to what seems to be the same postcard of pre-civil-war Beirut’s Central District, and wrote through the mouth of their fictional interviewer, the twentieth-century Pierre Menard of Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”: “I have here two images, one taken by the photographer in 1969, the other a 1998 photograph of this same preexisting postcard.… By simply photographing these images you invent a new path, that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution”?

The “You have seen nothing in Hiroshima” said by the Japanese man to the visiting French woman in Alain Resnais’s (and Marguerite Duras’s) Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959, could at one level mean: You, a French woman, removed from the direct experience of either the atomic explosion or its radioactive aftereffects should not have the presumption to consider that you have seen anything in Hiroshima. At yet another level, it includes her in the community, since she is experiencing the withdrawal due to the surpassing disaster. If she reacts negatively to the Japanese man’s words, insisting that she has seen certain things, it must be because, being an ethical person, she is not sure she is yet of that community. ¹⁸ Those Americans who managed to pressure the Smithsonian to an out-and-out scaling back of the exhibit “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II” it planned to hold in 1995 at the National Air and Space Museum are certainly not ones who “have seen nothing in Hiroshima”; they are merely ones who do not want others to see what they think is perceptible. To very few Westerners would I say: “You have seen nothing in West Beirut” or “You have seen nothing in Iraq.” How little has Herzog, the director of Lessons of Darkness, 1991, seen in Iraq and the Kuwaiti theater of operations in the aftermath of the Gulf War! With rare people would one progress from “You have seen little in Iraq” (most frequently because they have scant historical knowledge and no direct experience and depend for their political outlook on the biased mainstream media of the West) to “You have seen nothing in Iraq,” because they now belong to the community of the surpassing disaster and thus are affected with the withdrawal. The first expression is critical and exclusive; the second is inclusive when in relation to communities that underwent a surpassing disaster. I highly respect Duras for having “seen nothing in Hiroshima”; I feel contempt for her for how little she saw in Palestine and in Iraq. I certainly would not have said to the living Duras: “You have seen nothing in Palestine and Iraq. Nothing”! ¹⁹

 

1. This too is impossible: that we are mortal, i.e., already dead even as we live. Cf.Rilke: “Murderers are easy / to understand. But this: that one can contain / death, the whole of death, even before / life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart / gently, and not refuse to go on living, / is inexpressible” (“The Fourth Elegy,” Duino Elegies, 1923, trans. Stephen Mitchell). Some people attempt to do away with this impossibility through trying to become liberated from samsara, the “cycle of existences,” or by means of suicide—those who attempt the latter are unaware that suicide is the impossible aspiration of equating the two deaths (Blanchot), physical death, and the death that co-exists with life and, (having) labyrinthine (temporality), is not subsumable in chronological time.→
2. *N.E.: Jalal Toufic, Undeserving Lebanon (Forthcoming Books, 2007), 32–33.→
3. “At the very core of the ‘rationality’ of our culture… is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death” (Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, revised edition, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: SAGE Publications, 2017), 147)—I myself would have put quotation marks around inferior races.→
4. *N.E.: Jalal Toufic, Forthcoming, 2nd edition (Berlin: e-flux journal-Sternberg Press, 2014), 104–105.→
5. *N.E.: Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009), 51–52. →
6. N.E.: Jalal Toufic, Distracted, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 2003), 82–92.→
7. Spaces that are radically disconnected from their environs are open to the diagram (for example, the Red Room in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me) or to an unworldly elsewhere or to nothing (the one referred to in the Latin ex nihilo, out of nothing). I term such spaces radical closures (see my book Radical Closure [Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2020; https://jalaltoufic.com/downloads/Jalal_Toufic_Radical_Closure.pdf], which gathers my texts on this concept). →
8. Regarding this concept, see my book The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009; http://www.jalaltoufic.com/downloads/).→
9. *N.E.: Jalal Toufic, Distracted, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 2003), 82–92.→
10. Walid Raad, “Bidāyāt ‘ajā’ibiyya—miswadda (Miraculous Beginnings—A Draft),” trans. Tony Chakar, Al-Ādāb, January–February 2001, Beirut, Lebanon, 64–67. The document in question appears on page 65. →
11. Walid Raad, “Miraculous Beginnings,” Public, no.16 (1998): 44–53.→
12. Is the role of art to reestablish the search for truth in the aftermath of wars, with their many falsifications and distortions? Is it on the contrary to insinuate and extend the suspicion to reality itself? Would the aforementioned Raad works be ones that extend the problematization and suspicion not only to the discourses and behavior of politicians but also to reality? →
13. So can the video Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version), 2000, produced by Walid Raad and whose purported director is the hostage Bachar Souheil notwithstanding that historically there was no hostage by that name. Is it at all strange that the director of the radical closure film The Birds (1963) should conceive the following scene for North by Northwest (1959)? “Hitchcock: ‘Have you ever seen an assembly line?’ Truffaut: ‘No, I never have.’ ‘They’re absolutely fantastic. Anyway, I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the assembly line. The two men look at it and say, “Isn’t it wonderful!” Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!’ ‘That’s a great idea!’ ‘Where has the body come from? Not from the car, obviously, since they’ve seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see! …’ ‘That’s a perfect example of absolute nothingness! Why did you drop the idea?…’ ‘… We couldn’t integrate the idea into the story’” (François Truffaut, Hitchcock, with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, rev. ed. [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984], 256–257). In radical-closure films such as The Birds, the Hitchcokian suspense is abrogated—the first, abrupt attack of a bird breaks with the principle of alerting the spectator to the dangerous element—and we switch to surprise (and then, past the first irruption, to free-floating anxiety). The haunting quality of Toba Khedoori’s Untitled (Doors), 1995, and Untitled (Apartment Building) does not emanate from some possible presence of lurking people behind the rows of closed windows and doors, but from the eventuality of the irruption of unworldly or otherworldly entities. Consequently, despite the resemblance between her Untitled (Apartment Building), 1997, and Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, 1930, there is a fundamental difference between these two paintings, since Hopper’s space is not a radical closure. Sooner or later (better later, when he or she has become adept at impressing on us the difference between a relative closure and a radical one), a radical-closure artist paints or produces prisons or prison-like structures (the prison of Robbe-Grillet’s Topology of a Phantom City, of Magritte’s Universal Gravitation, of Khedoori’s Untitled [Chain Link Fence]), but the radical closure is elsewhere: the blank of Khedoori’s Untitled (Auditorium). It is unsettling to see the museum guard walking in front of a radical-closure painting such as Khedoori’s Untitled (Park Benches), 1997, with its life-size benches, for such a painting gives the impression that the guard himself, supposed to prevent people from touching the painting, could irrupt in the latter (as happens to the museum spectator in the “Crows” section of Kurosawa’s Dreams). Insofar as they guard against strangers, dogs are irrelevant in situations of radical closure: they cannot shield from the irruption of what does not come from the surrounding space and does not enter a house or other enclosure through an opening. If in works by radical-closure filmmakers, “dogs” still appear, they fittingly do so in the manner of the irruption of unworldly barking sounds (Lynch’s Lost Highway). At one point in Duras’s The Man Sitting in the Corridor, the till then extra-diegetic narrator tells the female protagonist, whose eyes are shut, that the man who was standing in the corridor is coming towards her: “We—she and I—hear footsteps.… I see and tell her, tell her he is coming” (Marguerite Duras, The Man Sitting in the Corridor, trans. Barbara Bray [New York: North Star Line, 1991], 19). Notwithstanding André Bazin’s proposition in 1951 that unlike in theater, with its flesh-and-blood actors, there is no presence in cinema, the irruption of the women in the final few minutes of Duras’ film Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta, who can be viewed as the fictional characters Anne Marie-Stretter and one of her party guests, but also as the actresses themselves, introduces a presence in that medium. In Kubrick’s The Shining, before leaving the hotel on his yearly winter leave sometime in the 1970s, the psychic cook told the psychic child of the middle-aged Jack Torrance that he should not worry about the visions he might see in the Overlook Hotel, for they are like pictures in a book: they cannot hurt him. But precisely with radical closures, there is intermixing of world and media, and therefore what is inside a picture can intermingle with what is outside it, and vice versa. Did the child’s father end up becoming one of these, a picture in a book: the photograph with the inscription “Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921” in which he appears as a middle-aged man? →
14. *N.E.: Jalal Toufic, Distracted, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 2003), 82–92. →
15. See Walid Khalidi, Kay lā nansá: qurá Filasṭīn al-latī dammarathā Isrā’īl sanat 1948 wa-asmā’ shuhadā’ihā (All That Remains : The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948), 2nd ed. (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1998).→
16. The quote is from the exhibition’s wall text.→
17. Alongside the irruption of ahistorical fully formed unworldly entities in the radical closure that the 1982 besieged West Beirut may have become (Walid Raad’s Miraculous Beginnings, 1998 and 2001, The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, 1996 –1999, and Hostage: the Bachar Tapes [English Version], 2000) ; the withdrawal of tradition past the surpassing disaster that Lebanon may have become during and even after the 1975–1990 war (my Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995; Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Wonder Beirut, 1999); and the cinematic restoration of movement otherwise blocked by damaged roads and bridges in the wake of war (as a result of the intensive bombing of Beirut’s southern district during the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, debris from collapsed buildings and fallen concrete closed many roads. Eventually the municipality or the government cleared these obstructions, repaired the roads, and traffic resumed. But that was not enough: movement had to be restored cinematically, too. Ghassan Salhab accomplished this in (Posthumous) (2007), superimposing the shot of a motorcyclist halted by rubble over one of cars in motion, so that the transporting sensation is created that he is moving. Thus movement was restored even before the municipality cleared the way, and in this sense Salhab contributed as a filmmaker to the reconstruction of Beirut’s southern suburb); the fourth most important aesthetic issue and strategy in relation to Lebanon is that of the archeological image, a subject already addressed by Gilles Deleuze regarding Straub-Huillet’s work (with the break in the sensory-motor link “the visual image becomes archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic. Not that we are taken back to prehistory [there is an archaeology of the present], but to the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms.… These are … essentially the empty and lacunary stratigraphic landscapes of Straub, where the … earth stands for what is buried in it : the cave in Othon where the resistance fighters had their weapons, the marble quarries and the Italian countryside where civil populations were massacred in Fortini Cani…” [Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 244]); Serge Daney in relation to Palestine (“As for the missing image, it is, still in L’Olivier, when Marius Schattner explains in a very soft voice that beneath the Israeli colony [which we see] there is, buried, covered over, a Palestinian village [which we don’t see]. I also remember this because we are among the few, at Cahiers du cinéma, to have always known that the love of cinema is also to know what to do with images that are really missing” [Serge Daney, “Before and After the Image,” trans. Melissa McMuhan, Discourse 21, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 190]); and myself, mainly in the section “Voice-over-witness” of my book Over-Sensitivity in relation to the Shoah. Clearly, the issue and aesthetic of the archeological image belongs to any of the zones that have suffered massacres and mass graves: Lebanon, Rwanda, Cambodia, Srebrenica, etc. Do we witness an archeology of the image in those sections of Danielle Arbid’s Alone with War (2000) where she goes to the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and to the Christian town Damour, the sites of massacres and mass graves in 1982 and 1976 respectively, asking playing Palestinian children whether they have come across anything arresting while digging in their makeshift playground? Regrettably, the possibility of an archeological image is somewhat botched because what we hear in relation to these images is not a voice-over-witness, but journalist Arbid’s commenting voice-over. It is therefore better to look for this archaeology of the image in Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre’s Al-Manāẓῑr (The landscapes), 2001, where at the corner of some of the photographs of the green landscapes of south Lebanon one can read the inconspicuous terse factual information about Israel’s invasion; and where one can hear the disincarnated voices of the stretcher-bearers ascend from this archeological earth to relate work anecdotes and describe life during the long Israeli occupation. While in this postwar period in Lebanon, those of us who have not become zombies are suspicious of classical cinema’s depth (Deleuze: “You [Serge Daney], in the periodization you propose, define an initial function [of the image] expressed by the question: What is there to see behind the image? … This first period of cinema is characterized … by a depth ascribed to the image.… Now, you’ve pointed out that this form of cinema didn’t die a natural death but was killed in the war.… You yourself remark that ‘the great political mises en scenes, state propaganda turning into tableaux vivants, the first mass human detentions’ realized cinema’s dream, in circumstances where… ‘behind’ the image there was nothing to be seen but concentration camps.… After the [Second World] war, then, a second function of the image was expressed by an altogether new question: What is there to see on the surface of the image? ‘No longer what there is to see behind it, but whether I can bring myself to look at what I can’t help seeing—which unfolds on a single plane.’ … Depth was condemned as ‘deceptive,’ and the image took on the flatness of a ‘surface without depth,’ or a slight depth rather like the oceanographer’s shallows…” [Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)])—which may explain, no doubt along with financial reasons, why a substantial number of the most interesting Lebanese makers of audiovisual productions work in video, with its flat images, rather than cinema—we believe in the depth of the earth where massacres have taken place, and  where so many have been inhumed without proper burial and still await their unearthing, and then proper burial and mourning. →
18. Does the “You have seen nothing in Hiroshima” automatically include the non-Japanese film spectator? No. In principle, most film spectators are not included in such a statement. →
19. *N.E.: Jalal Toufic,The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009), 67–68. →