»I know you! But do you know me?« says the protagonist of the film »My Friend Imad and the Taxi« to an oversized Rambo poster hanging in the entrance to a cinema in an abandoned-looking part of Beirut. Previous to this, the man, equipped with sunglasses and Walkman, strode boldly through the destroyed streets. He goes his way purposefully, as if he were on a mission, which does not end at the above-mentioned poster, however, but leads on to a bombed-out car which he finally gets into, before singing the song »A Streetcar Named Desire«.
The original Super-8 film was made in 1985 by the Lebanese Olga Nakkas and Hassan Zbib, and was recently given a new electronic soundtrack. As a work that shows both the visible signs of war and the subjective practices that seem increasingly absurd in such a context, the film figured centrally in the special programme »Radical Closures« presented at this year’s Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Strictly speaking, this programme was about a programmatic doubling, as reflected even in its title. On the one hand, it was about »radical closure«, that is, the idea of a »radically closed-off space«, as the Beirut author and media artist Jalal Toufic describes theatres of civil war in general.1 On the other – and this was pointed out by Akram Zaatari, who compiled the programme – it was also just as clearly about routes of flight and survival techniques, expressed in the motto-like line of a Sufi poem: »Send me to the seas of love, I’m drowning in my blood.«
But Zaatari was not only interested in the dialectics of closure and breaking open within catastrophic scenarios, but a whole series of reflex-like counter-projections: the West and the Arab world, terror and peacemaking, war and everyday progress, education and indoctrination, and finally documentation and (fictional) art. The programme showed strikingly how all of these aspects allow productive combinations, without leading to an impenetrable discursive chaos or becoming caught in rigid oppositionality. After all, one of the central aims was keeping open the axis of Here and There – which Zaatari placed at the start of the programme in the form of Godard/Miéville’s »Ici et ailleurs« (1974). Open to obvious relativisations (of preconceptions such as »here civilisation, there barbarism«) as well as smaller, micro-political shifts, with regard to which more can been seen in the walk through Beirut described above than the demonstrative inspection of a godforsaken arena of war.
The idea was not to present »films from the Middle East«, and certainly not to provide a visual record of a crisis-stricken territory, but rather to work in contradictory fashion against certain categories, first exposing their discontinuities. In his documentary »Toufan fi balad al baas (A Flood in Baath Country)« (2003), the Syrian director Omar Amiralay revealed several of these discontinuities. As a self-critical response to Amiralay’s own propaganda film about building the Assad dam, made thirty years ago, the film undertakes a kind of revisiting. Although a large number of sites of historical and cultural interest had to make way for this huge modernisation project of the Syrian Baath regime (they were flooded out), the dam now provides the country with energy. But the indoctrination of the school children living there is just as outdated as ever. Appeals to the head of state before and after classes are still on the agenda, as is the eulogising – with its pseudo-basis in nature mythology - of Arab socialism that dominates school textbooks. In an empty room at the school there are three boxes - »the immense gift of the computer«, as the teacher starts to enthuse. But the computer scientist has still to come who gets the universal machine running and connects it to the present day.
Oussama Mouhammad, who also comes from Syria, recorded the course of very everyday matters in the port city of Lattaquié in 1981. In »Al yawm wa kol yawm (Today and Everyday)«, the small drama of awakening everyday life unfolds from multiple perspectives and completely without spectacle – the scenes merge into each other without commentary in this film modelled on Russia cinema; the cogs of institutional life interlock without a totalitarian overall impression arising. Mouhammad, who studied in Moscow in the seventies,2 had another small masterpiece in the programme as well - »Khotwa khotwa (Step by Step)«, his debut film from 1978, which depicts life in the Syrian village Rama. The authoritarian father gives the boy two options: either to work in the fields (which means a hard, ten-hour working day), or to take his studies seriously. The son wants neither and goes to the city, where he finishes as an impoverished construction worker. At the same time, the parallel story of the celebrated soldier begins: yes, he would deliver up his own family and take on every mission, even if it meant death. A military career and the unconditional oath of allegiance to the state seem to be the sole real-socialist options in a country in which children (as at the start of the film) dream of becoming doctors, teachers or engineers. However, this documentary in black-and-white never slides into hopeless gloom; rays of light in the sky and a plane flying to New York suggest there are ways out. The continuous musical soundtrack also gives back dignity to the harsh life on the land, and at the end the film insistently reflects the hope that the village people will someday be better off.
In the programme, this film was followed directly by »Ben askerim (I, Soldier)« (2005) by Köken Ergun, a penetrating study of an annual Turkish military sports festival. I combines a violently overmodulated speech with martial drumming, along with the naïve and forlorn-looking face of a young soldier and demonstrations of power that highlight the unholy alliance of high-performance sport, (Turkish) hip-hop and militarism. The film programme was not always characterised by such contextualisation and mutual commentary between the individual works, and sometimes more detailed explanations of the selection and order were to be desired. This was the case with the juxtaposition of Hatice Güleryüz’s »Intensive Care« (2001), for example, which captures the circumcision that a small boy wants to have – he wants to be a real man - and Vlatko Gilic’s »In Continuo« (1971), the sublime, cryptic (fictional) depiction of a day’s work in an abbatoir.
But the discontinuities were not always as abrupt as this, and in the course of the programme many, often wide-ranging, cross-references began to emerge, for example with regard to (EU external) borders and (Israeli) checkpoints; here, the Spaniard Matei Glass produced a striking document in »Magnetic Identities«. »Radical Closure« finally became interdiscursive and interdisciplinary with the presentation by the American art theorist Stephen Wright of a historic series of photographs by the Iranian photographers Bahman Jalali and Rana Javadi. They had taken photographs at anti-Shah demonstrations in 1978/79, recording a mostly secular, student-based, mixed-gender formation that was only gradually appropriated and hegemonised by the mullahs for their purposes.3
From here, it is easy to draw a line to Tirdad Zolghadr’s highly worthwhile film »Tropical Modernism« (2005), which could be seen in the competition programme. By means of short, purportedly self-staged sequences, the protagonist of the film, Dr Rahati, recapitulates the history and the failure of the Iranian left wing. This docu-fiction throws roving spotlights on the socialism of the fifties, the rival opposition groups und the Shah regime and the oppression and marginalisation of the left wing in the theocracy that was set up in 1979. All of this is addressed directly to us (Western) viewers from perfectly framed settings. As if Dr Rahati or the film wanted to say to us: »I know what you want from me. But do we even know each other?« A question that »Radical Closure« posed most emphatically.

Radical Closure, 52nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 4 to 9 May 2006; http://www.kurzfilmtage.de

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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