Laura Marks

To answer one of Rob's questions, when I think of Beirut I think of a group of people that are trying to live their lives the best they can. Lebanon's economy was on the rebound until the summer of 06, but scars of the eighties still remain. Do they think of themselves as a cursed people? Or just trapped between the pincers of land-grabbing hawks in Israel and the moslem extremists who fight them? Of course, everything is more complicated than that. The films Laura Marks played in class gave voice to the agony concerning a history and a nation whose fortunes shift abruptly in a volatile area of the world.

Especially representative of this entrapment and powerlessness that the people of Lebanon rebounded from and are currently re experiencing was the film Dead Time, by Ghassan Salhab. A short, easily shared quicktime film, Dead Time gives us snapshots of the wreckage left after Israel's bombs bombarded southern Lebanon, a place too dangerous for journalists to detail too closely. Even if journalists wanted to get in, however, they would have had to get there before the Israeli military demolished all roadways and bridges out of central population areas; the red cross was even stuck.

Again, all the enterprise of the Christian and Moslems and everyone else living in Lebanon was reduced to a battleground. Self-determination proves fleeting. This is why Salhab wears a superman t-shirt--he is expressing his angst for all those who cannot, people who are just like him, except for the fact that they are without a camera or other means to deliver their stories and pictures.

Self determination turns into a struggle in Lebanon for the main character of the animated film, Sad Man, who must be determined just to walk out the door in the morning. He has been robbed of his emotions; it is all he can do just to get out of bed. He saves happy faces like relics in his restroom, just to remind himself that he's human, and that even if he feels like a prisoner right now, he should persevere.

The short film never tells us why though. That is the fleeting aspect of the normality of life and the constancy of things in America one takes for granted--an operational government, a functioning military to depend on for protection (even though it is grossly misused) instead of militias to whom they owe debt for their guerilla residency and defense of their neighborhoods. The length of these films was an aesthetic and conscious decision, designed to report on conditions of life in Lebanon. Personal looks at a geopolitical struggle in which the residents can never claim victory.