The Militiaman Icon: Cinema, Memory, and the Lebanese Civil Wars

Much has been made of the existence of amnesia amongst the Lebanese regarding the 1975–1990 civil wars, and the threat this forgetting poses to the reconstitution of the nation in the post-war era (Khalaf 2006; Young 2000; Hogbaulle 2005). Yet as Barak (2007), notes, the amnesia thesis, which holds that the Lebanese people hold a deep desire to forget “the scars and scares of almost two decades of cruel and senseless violence” (Khalaf 2006, 34), stands in marked contrast to a reality in which debates about the war implicitly or explicitly inform political struggles over the post-conflict social order. In fields as diverse as education and economic policy, the war is an entity, an event to be known if its reoccurrence is to be resisted and the unity and health of the nation restored.

Nowhere has the conflict been a more central concern than in the arts. Architects and urbanists have debated the role of architecture, urban design, and heritage preservation in healing the wounds of war (Khalaf 1991, 2006; Tabet 1996). Performance art, too, such as WalidRaad’s “Missing Lebanese Wars” (1999), has interrogated the limits of violence as political project and those of conventional history as a means by which to understand such undertakings. Lebanese cinema, too, has been a domain within which the trauma of war has received attention. How have Lebanese filmmakers dealt with the wars? How have their works narrated the conflict and, through such narration, contoured the post-war nation?

In what follows I hope to answer these questions through an examination of three films that have dealt explicitly with the war and have, through either their notoriety or acclaim, helped contour the wars’ remembrance. Together, the docudramas—Samir Habchi’s The Tornado (1992), Jean Chamoun’s In the Shadows of the City (2000), and Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut (1998)—constitute a fictive archive of the wars through which we might read memories of war as they coexist, compete, or play off one another. Indeed, memory is not produced on a level playing field, and which memories dominate has important material effects (Drexler 2008; Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007).

In what follows, I argue that the generation of narrative memories is more than a process of working through or providing closure to a difficult and traumatic past (Sturkin 1997), though they are indeed that. They are about the narrative constitution of a nation. More specifically, they are part of a larger set of processes that Mitchell (2002, 183) calls the “performative making of the nation.” In this process, the nation is not to be taken as the author of narrative memory. Rather, it is the unstable product of multiple and sometimes contradictory narratives that cohere through a process of “making-other”—defining which groups, behaviors, and beliefs belong to the nation and which are excluded, marginalized, or to be guarded against. It is only by establishing otherness—a constitutive outside—that the modern nation comes into being. What can be learned about the nation through reading docudramas about the war?

Protagonist as National Potential

Regardless of genre, filmic representations of historical events are more or less self-conscious, analytic engagements with the past. They put forward social diagrams, divide peoples into typologies, suggest correlations, wed social processes to causal factors, and it should be noted, hide others from view. In producing and reproducing images and narratives of the civil war, filmic treatments not only interact with more conventional histories—often rooted in western theoretical constructs—put forward by journalists and academics but draw their truth value from them, as well (White 1988). Thus filmic narrations of the civil war are always already hybrid documents, or to borrow Schwenkel’s phrase, “recombinant histories” that weave together “diverse transnational memories, knowledge formations, and logics of representation” (2006, 5). Reading these films through the lens of and beside conventional histories throws into relief resonances that help us trace the consolidation of an increasingly dominant narrative of the civil wars.

The films considered here can be read as reflections on what Lebanon could have...