Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
Ashes (Ramad) with introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Friday, February 19, 2016.
John Quackenbush 0:01
February 19, [2016] the Harvard Film Archive screened the film Ashes, which was preceded by a live performance by the filmmakers titled Aida, Save Me. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the discussion that followed the event. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
Unknown Speaker 0:23
[BEGINNING AUDIO MISSING] –welcome all of you to a very special evening here at the archive. First of all, if you have any device on your person that makes noise or sheds light, please make sure that it's turned off, especially since the bulk of this evening's presentation is going to be a live lecture performance by the filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, which it’s our great pleasure to welcome here for two evenings, culminating our retrospective of their film work and timed to coincide with their very first museum show in the US at the MIT List Center. The exhibit is called I Must First Apologize, and it opened to the public today and is on display until April 17. And I encourage all of you to go. We have the museum brochures on the outside. And it's a really wonderful experience.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are artists, collaborators, and partners based in Lebanon, based in Beirut and in Paris, who've been working together for almost twenty years now. They're one of so many imagemakers in the world today who go back and forth between cinema and the art world. We've shown several of their feature films as well as a couple of their shorter works—they made five features in all—and tomorrow night, we'll end the program with their most recent feature film, the documentary from 2014 called The Lebanese Rocket Society. Tonight, we'll be seeing a short film of theirs from 2003 before the performance. They’ve consistently throughout their filmmaking career, gone back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, including often mixing the two. And we may see some hints of that tonight.
This relationship between fiction—or maybe we could say storytelling—and the real world is very much at the heart of the exhibit at the List Center, which is made up of several different pieces in a variety of media. And seeing the exhibit gave me a profound appreciation of their ability to move back and forth between cinema and the art world with both ease and with rigor, because of the way that they always focus on the specificity of the different media that they use. The installation also sort of focused, for me, a realization of the way that their work foregrounds the interactions of what we might call, affection, empathy, grief, loss, mourning, on the one hand, these innate forms of affect, and contemporary forms of communication that give them voice today. But what ultimately I think what unites the work—all of their work—and what is at the foreground of the two works that we'll be seeing tonight is the power of images from whether from old or new technologies to express the ineffable, to render ghosts visible and render the intangible, tangible.
The two works that we'll be seeing tonight are, as I said, the short film Ashes from 2003, followed by Aida, Save Me, a lecture performance. So after I'm done here speaking momentarily, we'll go right into the short and from the short, we'll go right into the performance. And then after the performance, we will have a conversation with the artists. The works that you're going to see tonight, like a lot of the earlier work is in some ways, profoundly marked by the period of civil war in Lebanon from 1975 to ‘90, so that it's not just forms of communication and technology that shape us but also politics and history, as we'll see.
I'm very grateful to have the chance to have both of them here in person. I'm grateful to Henrietta Huldisch from the MIT List Center for making this possible, as well as her colleagues there. They're very busy. They're busy people. They have another exhibit opening shortly in France. They’re working on a feature film and plans to open a Cinematheque in Beirut. So I'm grateful to have them here. They'll be here after the performance; they’re not going to speak right now. So I'll just welcome all of you and we'll go right into the screening of Ashes. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
John Quackenbush 5:30
And now, David Pendleton.
David Pendleton 5:32
Maybe I'll start by asking a question or two. I think that the performance itself is such a brilliant example of the way in which you turn fiction and reality into each other. But I wanted to ask you a question about cinemas' ability to be both real and unreal. And maybe it's a question—as you say at the end of this—of context. I'm struck by in Ashes, the realism of the film. There's a way in which this family is very minutely detailed and observed, and especially the scene where they're in the salon, there's the close ups of the gestures of the parts of the body. And at the same time, there's in so much of your filmmaking, this idea about the ways in which images can change reality or replace reality. And it seems to me that there's this sort of double-edged sword of the cinematic image both to sort of observe something and keep something but at the same time to replace it or erase it. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about what are the contexts in which the moving image might still have value as something to document, and what are the contexts in which it is better to be suspicious of the ability of the moving image to replace reality?
Khalil Joreige 7:01
Let's say that we are much more interested in the accidents that occur in reality. So even when we are doing a fiction, most of the time, we don't give the script to the actors. It's not meaning that we are trying to improvise—because all the team has the scenario—but we are always expecting what we call an “encounter,” meaning something more than what we are hoping to happen. And it's neither what we are, neither what they are, it's something else, an accident.
David Pendleton 7:40
Something in between, perhaps?
Khalil Joreige 7:42
“In between” is a kind of consensus, but it's not a consensus; it’s something else. It's something that is neither I, is neither them, neither her; it's something else. That is, we consider that this is a place, but it's vivid. It's something in which we believe—meaning that it's not a speech, it's a talk. So you have the impression that it's happening for the first time. You have the feeling that it's something [UNKNOWN], and this is where suddenly there's something that moved us. And it also has to deal with how we consider that in reality, we have to negotiate. So there's a lot of possibility to reconfigure, because, in reality, things are occurring and displacing completely our relation even to a film or to a certain position. So a small adventure is re-articulating and re-editing completely a certain position that we thought that we had.
David Pendleton 8:47
Did you want to add anything to that?
So it seems one of the things that that interests you then is using the cinema then to create a new reality.
Joana Hadjithomas 9:00
In a way, you have to see what kind of stories you can say, what kind of images you can do… And I think, for each time, it's a different setup. Each time it's something that we try to see how, for example, we can believe in this story, because most important is to believe in the images that you produce. Or even if you're questioning them, you have to have this very strong relation with these images because you don't want to add more images, so many images. So there has to be really, really a specific use of the image and of the story and it's true that for years for example, it was very hard to think about narratives in a country where there are so many problems with history-telling and learning history and or sharing it. So we were questioning a lot of narratives at that moment. And but it's true, there's a story of Aida that was really incredible, and it made us think a lot because of the way you use images and you make films.
David Pendleton 10:17
The installation, too, is a lot about narrative, it seems to me. I mean, not to say too much about it, presuming that many of you haven't seen it yet. But there's a way in which, I guess I'm also interested in your fascination with narrative and the use of storytelling to make sense of the world.
Joana Hadjithomas 10:37
I think we try also because we have a practice as filmmakers and as artists. We try to use setups from art in our films, and use narratives and storytelling in art. And we are very interested in how these tools can serve one and the other.
David Pendleton 10:58
Are there questions in the audience right away? Who wants to be the first person to ask a question? Or I can also ask another question, if nobody's ready.
Oh, okay. Raise your hand, and if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you to use a mic so we can all hear you. So Dan will bring you a mic.
You need to turn it on. Alright, just ask your question, and I'll repeat it.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE TALK]
Audience 1 12:19
So the talk explains things really clearly in a way that both poetically... like it demystifies a lot of the mysteries… I’ll be very concrete. The instant in which the man is in the coffin, and he's maybe dead, maybe not; we don't really know. What then happens in parallel in the talk, is a process that both demystifies to gives the audience and myself a certain pleasure of cognition, of understanding how the magic trick works, somehow. So you take on the role of the anthropologist demystifying the actual work or magic that you have yourself created. And I'm sort of wondering how you can set because you clearly think very clearly about these two different positionalities—the one of the artist/maker, and the one of the interpreting performer, in a sense. And I'm curious as to when that second position developed in your practice and why that has developed and whether there's ever tension between these sort of two positionalities. And whether you think of that performance/lecture, as an autonomous work in its own right, in the sense of how artworks circulate, and so on, and so forth. So just the relationship between artists/maker, interpreting performer slash anthropologist...
Joana Hadjithomas 13:59
Usually we just do the talk; we don't show the films before. And so it doesn't have this direct relation to the film. But I think it's very hard to understand even this talk for me, even though I've been doing it for a while. And I think there is a mystery in doing films. That is, you don't know why it works. It's being an invisibility. And as a big mystery for me in this story—even today—with this idea of how recognition works, and why this happened at a moment, and what does it mean? I believe that things happen for a certain reason sometimes and that if you just try to understand… or you do not have to always have to react to them, but take them and transform them into something else. And this is what's interesting for us.
What we do is always very close to something that happened to us, an encounter: we find an image, we find a film, we collect scans, and suddenly we just look at them, and we think that it's interesting material. And this is how it begins. It’s not something very strategic or [thought out]. No, it's not what you're saying, I know. But it's just happening like that. And after a while, we do so much research that we understand a little bit about what we don't want to do and the direction where we want to go. And here in this story with Aida, it was really hard at the beginning, because we had to cut the film. And now we are telling the story like that, but it was really not easy. And I was very anxious. And I felt really bad for Aida. I felt like, we do our films, we don't think about people, you know, all that stuff. And I was really not feeling comfortable at all about it. And then I thought, with Khalil, that it's an incredible story for us that we always worked on fiction and documents and reality, always trying to understand how to show both sides of the same aspects. And so we had this idea that we had to transform something and we have to question—with our audience—these ideas and possibilities, because the coincidences were really... because everything is true, eh? [LAUGHS]
Khalil Joreige 16:41
I would like to add something about this. There are several years between Aida, Save Me and even the launching of the film. And probably we made Aida, Save Me because it was still something we needed to understand. I'm not saying that we found the answers, but at least we had to re-edit several elements that we had. So it's a kind of re-articulation. This is why we are revisiting part of our work. It's one perspective, and it's not probably the other—meaning that even for Ashes, it's reducing certain meanings of Ashes, for me, and of course, it's opening others. And this is what interests us. Between the events, and the moment we started to think about Aida, Save Me, it's months where it was still in our head, and we had to deal with it. It's like when you have a problem, and you are not facing it and at the moment, you cannot escape it. It's coming back. It's haunting all that you do. When we close the door, it comes back from the window, or it's waiting everywhere. And it's really about the fact that we are just people living in a place and this place suddenly is becoming bizarre, really bizarre.
Joana Hadjithomas 18:28
But maybe we write this kind of stuff also because we come from a region that you know very well, where there's not a lot of people writing about art and films. And [made it a] habit to write and to try to understand what we are doing.
David Pendleton 18:54
Are there other questions? Yes, there's one back there.
Audience 2 19:00
Thank you very much. This was really interesting, the shifting boundaries between reality and fiction and the way the same theme comes up in so many different aspects of your work. I'm curious what made you want to do the film Ashes? And another question is in the movie by Junior, did anyone ever recognize themselves in the last pictures?
Khalil Joreige. 19:27
So Remy is my cousin. I remember one day we went to church for a... mass?
David Pendleton 19:46
A mass. For mass, for service.
Khalil Joreige 19:48
–in the absence of the body. It was a–
David Pendleton
Like a funeral.
Khalil Joreige
Yeah, but with the absence of the body. It was a very weird moment. It was a very cathartic moment that day. It haunted us all. I think all the family was traumatized a little bit by all these events. And after, when we mourned our grandmother, a body was reconfiguring itself, especially in that place. These are the two events that led us to start this film: a mourning in the absence of the body, and how another body is being configured and how... Before the condolences of my grandmother, I was usually never going to any condolences, and suddenly something else happened, a kind of relation to a body and something very physical. And it was very weird, having the absence of a body on one side and on the other side, a real physical presence of something that is very important. So you see how a small personal event can take us to something [where] you don't need to know everything.
Joana Hadjithomas 21:19
But it's true that it's moments that are very cinematic, because you are here and in Lebanon, it's three or four days of condolences, and everyone comes and you see people that you haven't seen for twenty years. And it's really a moment where society bonds again. It's a very strange thing, and very strong. And people offer cigarettes. So we were watching those things happening in the house and we thought, “Wow, it's telling so much about all these little things that you say, that you do, and that we are all confronted with that moment and really wanted to ask this and also this idea that in Beirut, it's very difficult to choose what you want to be. A lot of our films are about individuals trying to stay in their community, but choose what they want to be. And Nabil is one of them. It's like, you know, it was his father's decision to be incinerated, and he loves his family, but he feels totally like a stranger with them. Because what is the most difficult is not to rebel and say, “I'm not like you, I want to be this individual,” but to make your choices and keep on loving and staying with a community or a family that you don't really recognize in a way. So it's something that we search for in a lot of our films.
In Beirut, a lot of decisions are [made] by religious laws, and we had a friend, Lena, wife of Rabih, and she was totally afraid of being buried; she wanted to be incinerated. And so it was a discussion going on with Rabih and Hélène and me, like, “You have to promise that you won't let me like that, that you will go against the law and have me incinerated. So it was like, all those kinds of choices that you can make, we thought it would be a good film. [LAUGHS]
David Pendleton 23:45
Are there questions?
I wanted to come back to the quote from Jalal Toufic—one of the quotes that you mentioned—one has the choice to either be haunted by the ghosts or not to see them and become a zombie. And when I heard you say that, that helped me sort of encapsulate a lot of the things that are in your films, which are precisely about being haunted and to accept being haunted. You know, in Ashes, one of the things we haven't talked about—we mentioned a little bit—the ghosts. And there's this idea that that's precisely the repressed as you say, the return of the repressed. And that seems to me, such a very cinematic… or using cinema to illustrate that situation to bring that situation to life seems to me like such a brilliant gesture. And I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about this idea of using cinema to make the unseen visible.
Khalil Joreige 24:46
This is something very related even to the exhibition now at the List. We consider that art and cinema are some of the places where we give a sensation of something that we are not able to perceive, to embody what is imminent or abstract. It's something that is at the heart of our practice. Probably at the beginning, we had to face the latency. So what is the condition of the visibility of those present [with] the cluster bombs in I Want to See, or the ghost in some films or what is not seen, but what you can feel. I think that this is at the heart of [our] cinema practice, because it's never showing things. It's exactly the opposite...
Joana Hadjithomas 25:51
Making them visible.
Khalil Joreige 25:55
Yeah. Even in the exhibition. Also, it's not just showing something, it's showing a complexity. It's layered. And to go back to this idea of the ghosts and not becoming a zombie... we are much more today in a very weird position. Because I don't know if you notice in Aida, Save Me, at the beginning, for years, we were saying that we should live with our ghosts, we should accept them. Maybe today, the ghosts are just people who are trying to escape and be forgotten, to be able to live in something else. This is what Aida led us to start to think.
Joana Hadjithomas 26:43
Maybe it's a relation to the present too, you know. What is very difficult for us, we began doing films and images in the 90s and the 80s in a city that was devastated. And we thought, we have to keep traces of what was happening here. And after a while, we really wanted to move to something else, because we always wanted to do things that are very close to our life, our present. We work together, we live together, we, you know, and always those questions came back all the time. And the perfect day was this moment where we said, “Can we let go of that? Can we just forget those ghosts?” This is the attitude of Malik; we are close to him in a way. We want to live in the present, to live something else, and at the same time, you have this difficulty because: Are we going to turn out as zombies if we do that? As if we live in this historical present and just want to live and, you know, just forget. So it's always a tension that we have. And I think we're not the only ones. I think we all have this tension of how do we move? And what is important to show now? How we can talk about stuff, because, of course, in this situation, and now I think it's a very troubled time. And it's everywhere. So we can't escape sometimes. We just have to confront these questions and see what we can do artistically about it, how we can share those anxieties and this question together in films, in art...
David Pendleton 28:35
Other questions or comments? Yes, here’s one in the middle. Raise your hand so that Dan can see you.
Audience 3 28:47
Thank you. I have a question about how you think about involving the audience and the visitors in the gallery, for example, in your artwork at MIT, at the List gallery, in the video projections. For those who haven't seen it, one has to get very close and almost get into a sort of intimate relationship so you know, there's a certain change in perception that happens in the audience and in your fascinating piece Latent Images, there was an involvement by the audience. The texts were printed in books, so that you had to cut open the books. There was an engagement by the audience to actually reveal something that was hidden even though it was hidden even more in the film rolls and not only in books, so there was this layering but it's always an involvement by the audience and by the viewer.
Joana Hadjithomas 29:46
We always try to skip the space. You know, even in the films usually, the space is not felt. It's not efficient. You have the space as [an unresolved question]. Endings are open usually, and in the artwork too, you're talking about a work that was in Venice where people had to open a book to read it. And from the beginning, we always liked this idea of having participation and this moment of sharing, for example. It's one of the first works we did. It’s called Circle of Confusion. It is a picture of Beirut cut in 3,000 pieces and stuck on a mirror, and people come and take images of it and transform it continuously. And in the work that is here at MIT, The Rumor of the World, for example, it's about shot-counter-shots that we developed here with Revoir and Perfect Day. The idea is that you can stay in the middle of this sound piece, and you will only have the rumor of the world. But if you just choose a character, and you really get close to it to have this face à face, and so you see his face, you hear his voice, and you experimented in a very different way. And so this is something that we are very interested to– We are not giving you the answer, because we don't have them and we are not interested. We just want to share this thing and see what kind of experimentation it can lead us to. This is at the heart of what we're doing, I think.
Khalil Joreige 31:35
Depending even on your mood, depending on, for example, on the ways you can move in The Rumor of the World, you are going to produce different meanings. Being attracted by gender, race, political background, it will generate different meanings, it will create different links. This is exactly what we'd like to do. When you see several layerings and at the same time, you feel that it's a composite world. And you can just enter and find that it's a world standing by itself. It's a very weird relationship. Because even if I trying to build my worlds, I try always to give this world, to share this time. A Perfect Day, for example, is a story about the same event lived by two persons. For the son, his father died fifteen years ago, same event for his mother who is dying today. There's a fifteen-year gap between the two. And it's become a question of rhythm. Barthes was saying that the condition of living together is to share the same rhythm. So it was really at the heart of a lot of experiences: how we can share a same moment, how we can share the same experience, or we can share some issue or concern.
Joana Hadjithomas 33:14
It questions also representation and images, image making, and imaginaries, how we are building imaginaries on the other. And we are very concerned by those imaginaries. (I know the term does not exist in English, but I can't find another one.) And so this representation is at the heart of what we want to really question all the time. Like, what are those images that we do? What are those images? How can we shift the gaze on those images? And we cannot do it without this participation, because we felt that from the beginning, [to use] images is not a simple thing. You have to really think of them, how to produce them, what idea to construct, what to say. So [we must] also think about the power of images and how they can construct realities that we are after, [that] we are trapped in.
Audience 4 34:29
Thank you. I want to ask [about] an image in the last sequence of Ashes. So the film begins with... the first take is at the airport. The last one is at the sea and then in the middle you have this open house and this open coffin which is an open house for mourning. And then you have in the middle the image from that Raouché Rock, the Pigeons’ Rock of a leap which reminds you a little bit of Yves Kline's Leap into the Void. And then in the end, you have the image of the same rock seen from the house, but there is nobody there. So as if the body has disappeared, which is in a way, in my own reading what all of the film tries to deal with. But the first time I saw the image, in a way I was thinking that this was like a cover-up suicide, that the body was not burnt. And then in a way, if you look at this film, and then later your lecture/performance, that is always being posited as this collective transitive relation, rather than this collectivity of spectating a dead body, or a body that was not found dead, that was not there anymore. So if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between the Pigeons’ Rock and the film?
Joana Hadjithomas
You really want to know? [LAUGHS] Do you really want me to say it? I can say why we did it, but it doesn't mean that this is what you have to see in the film. In our minds, this idea was that the father used to jump from this cornice. This film was one film in a triptych that we wanted to do. The second film, Je veux voir, transformed into another film, totally. We wrote those films and the third film was a performance where we wanted Rabih to jump from one of the [rocks]. [LAUGHS] But we never did it, for several reasons. Yeah, we were afraid, he was afraid. It was cold, it was not so possible. It was all those things. And so we thought, like, it's interesting to put this in the film. In our own narrative, the father wanted his ashes to be thrown there. But it's our narrative. It doesn't mean that it is the narrative of the film. And we really liked the way it was done. We did it like an impossible image. Because if you just look at the image, it's impossible to jump like that. Just totally impossible.
Khalil Joreige 37:26
There is something else. The Raouché, the cornice, is really for us a lost public space in Lebanon. So it's haunting all of our films. All of our films have a relation to the Raouché, which is being maybe destroyed soon, transformed into a real estate project. I like it when there's a possibility of imagining what you are imagining. I’m not saying that “I do not master all the possibilities,” and this is what I like. But also, in the ways that we work, we put some elements—like Joana just said—and [afterwards,] we erase them, but there are always traces that are there, that infiltrate the other narrative. This is also a way of working.
Joana Hadjithomas 38:23
We believe that film is not a script that you adapt. It's something totally different. There’s a story but it’s not the story [that is] so important. Now today, even when we are trying to make our film we always have this problem people are saying, “But there's no story! What's happening?” So, in a way cinema [loses] a lot when it has to be produced in a regular way with this idea that there has to be a beginning, an ending, we have to be to resolve all the questions, this character has to [evolve], you know, all that stuff. And so we try to think of films—not only films that you do alone as an artist without money—but in an industry also. Films that try to make you think about elements and sensation and all that makes a film, and it's not, you know, the body of the actor. It's all that and not only the narrative because now we are, in a way, really controlled by this narrative. So we just put some elements and you just have to [make] your own story.
Khalil Joreige 39:41
There’s mystery also. We were chatting yesterday night, I think, about even if you are putting all the elements [in], it is still composite. You don't understand [that you will] create something vivid but it's like a Frankenstein: you take an element, a part of the body, and you wait for a miracle or energy or–
Joana Hadjithomas 40:03
Poetry! Or emotions...
David Pendleton 40:06
A spark to bring it to life.
Khalil Joreige 40:08
And this is something you can never plan. You are always waiting for it. This is why we have this method of working. Because I can plan a beautiful shot, a beautiful music, a beautiful actress, a beautiful actor, and there's nothing at the end, nothing vivid, nothing live. So this is something that is very important. and we are looking [for] images in which we can believe.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]
Joana Hadjithomas 40:43
[LAUGHS] It's more like [making] setups, you know. What we try to do is to [make] the setups and to put all the elements [together] and to see what happens. We really worked a lot like that. In Ashes, for example, The idea was to put all those people in situations they know. They confronted by the situation. But the problem is that when we were shooting the films, they were all acting, you know, like acting, and so we decided to tell them that we were shooting when we were not shooting, and tell them that we were not shooting when we were shooting. And so it created something different. So each time you have to find something. In Je veux voir, for example, Rabih and Catherine never met before. Catherine arrived in Beirut, and we had this dinner with the crew. And after they have to pretend to meet in front of this hotel. So we thought like, why do they have to pretend to meet? They don't know each other. So we asked Rabih not to come, for example, to the dinner. And so we found really the first time they met and they are both very shy. Something very uncomfortable was between them. And so, you know, you just try to find tricks and setups to make it plausible, believable, or not. It depends what you're searching for.
David Pendleton 42:21
Well, one of the things I think that's so beautiful about Je veux voir / I Want to See is the way in which it is precisely about an encounter. As you say, it's not about the story, it's about the encounter between—well, one way to look at it—it’s about the encounter between Mroué and Deneuve, but also the way in which it is at one and the same time both a documentary and a fiction. We see the two of you there, we know some of it’s staged, and yet we can also feel that some of it's not staged. And so we're constantly having to shift these registers or be in between registers in a way that I think makes it a very unique experience.
Joana Hadjithomas 42:58
Well, for Je veux voir we really had to do a very special film, because it was just after the 2006 war. Really, it was so difficult to make images. And we were totally questioning ourselves like, why do we do images? What can cinema do? What are we going to say as a story? We've been filming ruins and photographing ruins [since] the 80s, and now we're back, we have those ruins, and why do we do images because we had such unbearable images on television, but also on the internet and that didn't stop the war. Something else stopped it. But we wanted to do something about it. And so the question was very simple. Like, if we are asking ourselves, what can cinema do?, we can just ask it literally. And bring an icon of cinema to a place where it will be a shock kind of experimentation. And it was very important that the film would be shot in a very, very short time. We always make rules for ourselves. And no one would get paid for the film. And that no one would have the script except the crew and Khalil and me. And yeah, we wrote it of course. [LAUGHS] And the fact also that we would have to stay in a very fragile situation, that we will begin the film, but maybe nothing will happen and maybe the film won't happen, maybe Rabih and Catherine, it won't work between them. So we always had to flirt between this possibility of something just not happening in the film. Because it was a little bit about that. So the most terrible thing about a war and about drones, you just look at them and you don't see anything or you are just so used to seeing them, you don't see them anymore.
Khalil Joreige 45:04
It's also about when there's a war or a rupture, there's suddenly a gap. And how you can reconfigure yourself, be it by invoking the history of cinema, be it by– Here, it was really literal, because after the war, there was a period where everybody was allowed to film, to witness. And after, everything was blocked. We weren't going to shoot a small video, and we were about to generate a new war between Hezbollah and Sahel. And it's at that moment that we said, “Okay, we are forced to leave…”
Joana Hadjithomas 45:45
No, because we wanted to put a tripod on a border. And we didn't know that you cannot do that. So we just had to leave. And it [caused] a lot of problems. So we thought like, “What do we have to do to be able to put the tripod on that border?” And this is how it started a little bit.
Khalil Joreige 46:08
And this is also how we still consider in cinema and art, a possibility of enlarging territories. This is something you can see in the film that we're going to show tomorrow, The Lebanese Rocket Society, where we consider that very shortly, and in The Lebanese Rocket Society, a rocket in the Middle East today is perceived more as a missile, but this was really a space project for space exploration. So how you can fight against this misunderstanding, I would say. For us, it was really important to consider that cinema and art are places where we can fight to re-enlarge the possibility of meanings.
Joana Hadjithomas 47:00
And we can negotiate.
David Pendleton 47:03
That's great. Is there one last question? Here's one up front.
Audience 5 47:23
[INAUDIBLE] there without being saddled with the possibility of being [INAUDIBLE]
Joana Hadjithomas 47:30
What is very strange is that Antoine is present in the DVD, for example, but we haven't put Antoine back in the film. It's geographical. There’s a place next to her house where the film was shown that she didn't want Antoine to be [seen], but in the rest of the country, it was okay. So we didn't cut the whole film.
Audience 5 47:56
But the DVD, presumably you walk into a store in Beirut...
Joana Hadjithomas 48:00
Yeah, you can find it and it's not cut. It's an agreement that we did together. I think it was very important that we acknowledge the fact that we did that to her too, that she was really sitting in this cinema, and she saw Antoine, she saw her husband, and I can imagine that it's really something to live that, to see him in a film. So it was a respect that we owed too, you know...
Khalil Joreige 48:28
Even if it was changing the meaning of the film for me, because in a way for me, in Aida, Save Me, cutting out the father, the image of Antoine, changed completely the meaning of the film.
Joana Hadjithomas 48:45
Yeah. There was no shot-countershot.
Khalil Joreige 48:47
So there was this confrontation. And it was at a moment where whatever the situation, we have to respect the suffering of somebody.
Audience 5 49:03
So even in her reaction, she can still sort of intellectualize the fact that yes, somebody could encounter it accidentally the way she did, but not–
Khalil Joreige 49:13
Now she has no problem to see Antoine in the film, I think. But it's part of the process of mourning, you see. My family, for example, at the beginning, the latent images of my uncle... My aunt, wife of my uncle, didn't want to see it and [later], it was important for her to see it. There's different process. It's part of mourning.
Audience 5 49:46
How long prior to when you got the rights to use this image. How long before that had he been murdered? Was it a distant past at that moment or...?
Joana Hadjithomas 49:59
You are asking when Antoine was killed? The film was released in 2006, and it [had been] less than six years.
Audience 5 50:11
Oh, so much more recent then…
Joana Hadjithomas
Mmm-hmm.
David Pendleton 50:16
Well, I thank all of you for staying. I thank the two of you for your generosity. I encourage you all to come back tomorrow. There's another aspect of their practice that we haven't really talked about tonight, too, which is the relationship to the archive, which will be on evidence in The Lebanese Rocket Society as well as the idea of rethinking history. So come back for that.
Joana Hadjithomas 50:50
Thank you.
Khalil Joreige
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
©Harvard Film Archive
