Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon

Chapter Two. “Speak, Ruins!” The Work of Nostalgia in Feature Film

ch a p ter t wo “Speak, Ruins!” The Work of Nostalgia in Feature Film Nostalgia and Lebanese film have gone together since 1929, when Jordano Pidutti depicted an emigrant’s homecoming in the first Lebanese film, Mughamarat Ilyas Mabruk (The Adventures of Elias Mabruk).1 Cinema was ideally suited for capturing nostalgic feelings in a country of emigrants. Slow pans, point-of-view shots, and cross-cutting in time formally coded the poignancy of the past. In return, nostalgia offered the new medium meaningful pauses in kinesis as the hero stops to take stock, build psychological capital, and tie the present to the past before returning to action. This symbiosis between film and nostalgia is manifest in the forms and topoi associated with nostalgia. The first Lebanese talkie, the 1934 Bayn Hayakil Baʿlabakk (Among the Temples of Baalbek), elaborated a nasīb-like plot of an Arab prince falling in love with a foreign woman and then being forced to forsake her.2 These early films, each in its way, thematize perennial Lebanese concerns about dealing with the other, with the past, and with the pain of separation. The development of nostalgic fantasy culminated in 1964 with Yusef Maalouf’s film adaptation of Gibran Khalil Gibran’s auto- “Speak, Ruins!” 97 biographical novel al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira (The Broken Wings). Hardly a scene in this melodrama goes unendowed with nostalgia. It begins with a frame narrative of the middle-aged poet/protagonist looking back on his life and literally opening the first pages of the Book of His Life. Within this first level of historical regress, we see the poet at eighteen reminisce with a friend about the halcyon days of their childhood. Gibran then meets a venerable shaykh who immediately falls to musing over the friendship he shared with Gibran’s father in their youth. Nothing can stop the nostalgic regress. Even Gibran’s first meeting with his beloved Salma prompts the poet to declare joyously that he is sure they have already met. Indeed, even before meeting her and without seeing her picture, Gibran sketches Salma’s portrait and throughout the film gazes at it longingly, suggesting that their love is otherworldly and beyond time. The film emplots the contrast between an idealized past and a present debased by class and economic concerns. Salma is the daughter of a wealthy man and therefore cannot wed the comparatively poor poet Gibran but rather must marry a rich scoundrel and womanizer. This ensures a tragic present and an always unattainable bliss over which Salma and Gibran can pine. Salma eventually dies in childbirth, and Gibran’s mourning seeps back into the frame narrative and the closing of the book, reminding the viewer that the whole story was itself an instantiation of nostalgic memory. By the end of this chapter, it will be clear how far contemporary filmic representations of memory have come since this 1964 movie. The 1960s heyday of nostalgia continued in the folk fables of the Rahbani brothers’ musicals featuring the Lebanese diva Fayrouz.3 These films adapted from the stage—Bayyaʿ al-Khawatim (The Ring-Merchant), 1965; Safar Barlik, 1965; and Bint al-Haris (The Guard’s Daughter), 1968—tend to reinforce a fantasized vision of Lebanese heritage at the expense of grappling with the challenges of modernity.4 While it would be churlish to indict these delightful films for purveying the “false consciousness” of nostalgia, it is no less the case that their refracted images of tensions within Lebanese society are thoroughly celebratory.5 Yet if nostalgia “Speak, Ruins!” 98 is mystifying, its absence is of course no guarantee of social relevance . Many 1960s Lebanese films were Hollywood derivatives produced and directed by Egyptians who worked in Lebanon to escape Nasser’s crackdown on the the arts.6 The industry thrived economically at least for a time on fare such as the 1965 James Bond knock-off al-Jaghwar al-Sawda (The Black Jaguar), featuring a Beirut of international intrigue and exoticism, but like their Hollywood models, these films avoided serious treatment of the problems they referenced. If Lebanese cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s was steeped in fantasies of nostalgia and adventure, by the late 1970s, Lebanese filmmakers, like their counterparts working in the novel, effectively reappropriated the aesthetics of yearning in an effort to face the violence and anomie of ethnic-sectarian war. This chapter argues that, wittingly or...