“Cinema memory may simply provide material for solitary reverie or daydream. It may also provide material for stories that we share with others—stories about our lives and the times and places we have inhabited.” (Annette Kuhn, « What to do with Cinema Memory? », 2011, p. 86)
- 1 Interviews with Antoine Ouaiss conducted over the phone in French, 7 and 15 November 2022.
- 2 Several later audience members of the Arab Film Club recall attending similar screenings in the 196 (...)
1The scene unfolds on an ordinary day of striking at the law faculty of the Lebanese University (LU), a few years before the creation of the Beirut Arab Film Club (1973). Upon returning from a march, the students—whose movement was a crucial force of social protest at the time—attended a screening at the University’s film club, moderated by Antoine Ouaiss,1 a teacher at the Champville Marist School who would be among the first members of the future film club (El Rassi 2010: 140). Initially tasked by the Catholic Youth Circle with launching a “youth film club,” Ouaiss and Charles Abou Chacra (a teacher at the Notre-Dame de Jamhour school) each had a 35mm projector at their disposal. This equipment had been provided by the National Centre for Lebanese Cinema to promote film culture in Francophone schools2 and subsequently in universities.
- 3 The Lebanese sociologist Marie-Claude Souaid was nineteen years old when the Arab Film Club was cre (...)
2On that day, Antoine Ouaiss presented Sacco et Vanzetti (Italy/France, 1971), directed by Giuliano Montaldo. The film tells the story of the trial leading up to the political and racist assassination of two anarchists (Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti). Although it is set in the 1920s, like any historical film (Sorlin 1974: 266), Sacco et Vanzetti touched on contemporary themes and denounced the war waged by the reactionary US regime in Vietnam. It features a montage of black-and-white footage depicting the international movement of solidarity towards the two prisoners, set to Joan Baez’s music. This sequence could work as a mise en abyme of the role members of the Arab Film Club attributed to political music and film at the time of the film’s release.3 At the very least, this aspect of Montaldo’s film likely resonated with the concerns and practices of the audience that had gathered at the law faculty. Nearly 400 students stayed after the screening to participate in the debate. This alerted the dean, who summoned Ouaiss for a meeting in his office—he suspected the former moderator of the “Youth Film Club” of screening erotic films at the university! Ouaiss in fact gravitated towards the works of Bergman, Pasolini or Antonioni, and what had attracted interest from so many students in this case was the theme of revolution.
- 4 On this subject, see also Kuhn, Biltereyst & Meers (2017).
- 5 Interviews with Souad Slim (see above) and with Houda Kassar (Ghossoub), conducted in Arabic in Qor (...)
- 6 Souad Slim (see above) walked to screenings with a fellow ESL student. Five other individuals inter (...)
3In her article “What to do with Cinema Memory?” (2011), Annette Kuhn explains that one of the key findings of the oral method applied to the study of British cinephilia in the 1930s is that interviewees’ recollections more often pertain to the social act of going to the theatre (cinemagoing) than to the films per se. According to Kuhn’s distinction (ibid.), that social act takes precedence over the cultural activity in that generation’s memory.4 In the memory of the Sacco et Vanzetti screening at the Lebanese University, social and cultural practice intertwine in that they both contribute to the making of political ideas. As in the case of other memories shared in interviews conducted for this research, the experience of forming a club with other protestors5 is just as central as the title of a film—or the story told by a film, whose title only comes up as a result of the conversation sparked by the interview situation. The “generational memory” (Nora 1996) that is “condensed and expressed” in Beirut’s Arab Film Club appears in the form of a “we” that remembers going to Cinéma Beyrouth from the nearby École supérieure des lettres (ESL),6 attending the club’s screenings with a group of intellectuals who wrote for the journal of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), al-Tarīq (La Voie), and coalesces around memories of films such as Z (Costa-Gavras, France/Algeria, 1969), Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/France, 1969) or al-‘Asfūr (The Sparrow, Youssef Chahine, Egypt, 1972).
- 7 There is a slight inconsistency between the numbers of seats reported by Mohamed Soueid (1996) and (...)
- 8 Interviews with Majed Nehmé (see above) and with Jaber Suleiman, conducted in Arabic in Saida, 24 F (...)
- 9 Interviews with Ibrahim al-Ariss, conducted in Arabic in Beirut, 28 February 2022, and with Adnan M (...)
4Beirut’s Arab Film Club went through three distinct periods. It was launched at the Clemenceau theatre in 1973 (Hamra, 550 seats) and soon moved to Cinéma Beyrouth (Barbir, over 900 seats7). Setting up shop in this working-class neighbourhood of al-Mazra’a was a means to no longer cater only to intellectuals (muthaqqafīn) and the elite (nukhab) and introduce other strata of the population to cinema.8 After organizing a Cuban cinema month in that venue in May and June 1975 (Karim 1975), the club interrupted its activities during the Two-Year War (August 1975-August 1977) and resurfaced at the Clemenceau around 1977-1978. By that time, most of the filmmakers and critics who had participated in the club’s foundation had already left Lebanon. The club was then mainly supervised by Ibrahim al-Ariss (a Lebanese film critic and translator) and Adnan Madanat (a Jordanian film critic and director), both of whom leaned towards communism.9 Lastly, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Arab Film Club experience was prolonged for a few months at the Strand (670 seats). A member of the Film Club since the early days, Jaber Suleiman, who worked at the Planning Centre for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), explains:
- 10 Formerly The Palestinian National Liberation Movement (PNLM), it was the largest resistant organiza (...)
- 11 Interview with Jaber Suleiman (see above).
We had this idea: why should the war stop us from having screenings? So we rented the Strand theatre, which is in the middle of Hamra. There was no electricity, there were engines that we borrowed, I believe, we asked the PLO (Fatah10) for oil and we started screening films during the siege.11
- 12 Editor’s note: all the articles mentioned are listed into the bibliography section, by newspapers a (...)
- 13 Editor’s note: the spelling al-Safīr is used in preference to as-Safir, which is also employed, for (...)
- 14 The archives of the Cinémathèque nationale du Liban (Ministry of Culture) are difficult to access. (...)
- 15 The former president of the Beirut Arab Film Club’s executive board, El Rassi also wrote a set of s (...)
5My research on the history of the Beirut Arab Film Club draws on articles published by the club’s organizers in the press and in specialized publications12. I have, most notably, systematically read issues of al-Akhbār, al-Balāgh, al-Safīr13, al-Tarīq et Film between 1973 and 1978. I have also searched through the archives of the Cinémathèque nationale du Liban14 and those of the poster collector and publisher Abboudi Bou Jaoude. Lastly, this article draws on a series of interviews with thirty-one former management board members and attendees of the Arab Film Club. First conducted intuitively, this still ongoing oral history effort has since been pursued through methodical contacts with film club members whose names appear in the list of members kept by Georges El Rassi in his private archives.15 During interviews conducted after January 2023, I showed interviewees a visual record consisting of a variety of documents (articles, photographs of screening rooms, member cards, film posters, etc.) to share the first results of my research and rekindle their memories.
6The work of Annette Kuhn, the author of An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002), is a major reference for New Cinema History. This approach, which I use in this article, combines oral history and archival research to shed light on the circulation and consumption of films. New Cinema History shifts the focus away from film as an object—traditionally the focus of a highly auteurist historiography—to the process through which films and audiences are connected, looking especially at the range of mediators that make screenings possible and at moviegoing practices (Corriou, Damiens, Leventopoulos & Liontou 2024; Elsaket, Biltereyst & Meers 2023). By retracing the discontinuous history of the Arab Film Club, this article proposes an original intervention in the film studies field, in which research has largely remained Eurocentric and dedicated to national film histories. This research strives to emphasize the importance of moviegoing in the social and intellectual life of a generation of politically active Beirut residents. First, we will look at the trajectories of individuals who entered the film trade in Lebanon at the turn of the 1970s and acted as brokers in their capacities as programmers, moderators and critics within the Arab Film Club. Second, we will consider the ways in which the film club contributed to making and remaking a group and its ideas on politics and film—as a space for gathering and having conversations, as a legal structure providing access to a permit to show films, and as infrastructure requiring access to the gas that made it possible to screen them.
7The majority of the filmmakers and authors who helped put together the first two seasons of Beirut’s Arab Film Club (1973–1975) were born between the early 1940s and the early 1950s. They joined in this undertaking after finishing their studies in Belgium (Borhane Alaouié and Jean-Claude Codsi), in France (Maroun Baghdadi, Jean Chamoun, Elham Kallab, and Georges El Rassi), in Italy (Ibrahim al-Ariss), in Poland (Jaber Suleiman), in Russia (Adnan Madanat) or in East Germany (Kais al-Zubaidi). A transnational approach to the training of these young filmmakers is necessary to understand the alternative Arab cinema they promoted, which sought to depart from the mainstream film industry’s output and tell new stories after the Arab defeat of 1967 (Naksa) (Farine 2019). These trajectories also give us important insights into the group formed by these filmmakers born in Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, and other Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian intellectuals for the purpose of discussing this new cinema in Arabic with a Beirut audience.
- 16 A professor of philosophy at the Lebanese University (1979–2011), literary critic and publisher. At (...)
- 17 A researcher in information science and author of books such as L’Image de la femme dans la presse (...)
- 18 On the political and intellectual trajectory of Waddah Charara, see Bardawil (2020).
- 19 Interviews with Waddah Charara, conducted in French in Beirut, 26 April and 2 October 2023.
- 20 Interview with Elham Kallab, conducted in French in Beirut, 6 December 2022. See also Kallab (2021: (...)
- 21 Interview with Georges El Rassi (see above).
8The short film Alors… (1973), which Jean Chamoun directed as a film student at the University of Paris 8 (Vincennes), was recently recovered by the Palestinian director Mai Masri and digitized by the association Nadi Lekol Nas. Shot at the Cité internationale universitaire of Paris, the film documents the living conditions and struggles of Lebanese students. It paints a critical picture of the higher education system in Lebanon and of structural sexism and racism in France. We see debates involving some up-and-coming figures of Beirut’s intellectual and film circles such as Farès Sassine16 and Yolla Polity Charara.17 The writer and sociologist Waddah Charara18 also took part in the shooting of Alors…, most notably in the scene in which students stage a sit-in and meet prime minister Saeb Salam.19 Founding member of the Arab Film Club Elham Kallab, who had lived at the Maison du Liban of the Cité universitaire a few years before, contributed to the May 1968 movement by helping to make posters.20 Georges El Rassi, for his part, went to France for the first time in 1968. He spent two years in Strasbourg, which was then a “vibrant hub of that revolution.”21 He returned to Beirut to participate in the launch of al-Balāgh, a weekly paper with Arab nationalist leanings. Having issued calls for creating an Arab Film Club (al-Balāgh 1973b: 44) in the paper, he ended up reporting on its activities there.
- 22 Interview with Antoine Ouaiss, conducted in French in Paris, 2 August 2023.
- 23 Produced by the cultural and artistic department of the Palestine Liberation Organization and sung (...)
9In 1971, Jean Chamoun played the part of a laid-off worker in Soyons tout, a film about an uprising in a factory where the General Confederation for Labour (CGT)—one of the main French trade unions—fails to meet the expectations of strikers. The film was directed collectively under the helm of Serge Le Peron. A member of the Vincennes Cinema Group, Le Peron was later assisted by Chamoun when the Group shot L’Olivier, a film made in support to the liberation of Palestine. Jean-Claude Codsi and Borhane Alaouié were both students at INSAS (National Higher Institute for the Performing Arts and Diffusion Techniques) in Brussels until 1972. Alumni from that school took part in the filming of Kafr Kassem (Borhane Alaouié, Lebanon/Syria, 1974), a film Antoine Ouaiss helped fund22 and whose first screening in Lebanon was held by the Arab Film Club. The screening, which made a lasting mark among Beirut cinephiles, was followed by a debate, moderated by George El Rassi, with the director, and Assem al-Joundi, the author of the novel adapted in the film, a member of the Arab Film Club and a Syrian political opponent who had taken refuge in Beirut. The story unfolds in 1956, the year when the Suez Canal was nationalized and Palestinians were slaughtered in Kafr Kassem. For nearly twenty minutes of Kafr Kassem, we hear a radio speech that characters listen to in cafés and in their homes. A tribute to the voices of Arab nationalism in the era of transistor radios (Dakhli 2009), this sequence depicts the conditions of the making of a community whose members, like those of the Film Club, all heeded The Urgent Call of Palestine.23
- 24 Translator’s note: Since 1986, the IDHEC has been known as La Fémis, one of the most prestigious fi (...)
- 25 Interview with Georges El Rassi (see above).
10A graduation project for the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques24 by Maroun Baghdadi, Beirut Oh Beirut includes a scene whose editing is reminiscent of an experiment made in Alors…, stressing the importance of student movements in the expression of revolutionary demands in Lebanon between the late 1960s and early 1970s. An anonymous article published in March 1975 in al-Akhbār, an LCP publication whose contributors organizing members of the Arab Film Club Iskandar al-Deek, Anwar Hamadé, Kassem Hawal, and Kamal Karim, emphasized the unconventional filming of Beirut Oh Beirut. Unlike on a regular film set, where each person is assigned a specific task, work was performed collectively. The credits of Baghdadi’s first film list a number of organizers and members of the Arab Film Club. Oussama al-Arif, a lawyer who acted as the film club’s legal representative vis-à-vis the authorities,25 has a screenplay credit. Another member, Paul Chaoul has a dialogue writing credit alongside Renée Francodis, who was a member of the film club’s board and wrote articles in the newspaper al-Balāgh. The name of Shawki Matta, an actor in Baghdadi’s film, also comes up in Georges El Rassi’s list of Arab Film Club members. Lastly, the Iraqi director Kais al-Zubaidi worked as an editor on Beirut Oh Beirut.
- 26 Interview with Adnan Madanat (see above).
11A fixture at the Arab Film Club, which showed several of his films between 1973 and 1975, Nabil Maleh regularly came to Lebanon without ever relocating there permanently. In 1974, he travelled to Brummana, a village in the Matn District of Lebanon, to shoot a film produced by the National Film Organization (NFO) of Syria, in which film critics and organizing members of the Arab Film Club Walid Chmait and Adnan Madanat are credited as actors. Madanat (1974: 50–52) wrote about the filming in al-Balāgh, claiming that Fellini would refuse to work in such precarious conditions, which made the task of these “young filmmakers” akin to those of Palestinian combatants (Fedayeen). Adnan Madanat (who was from Jordan) and Kais al-Zubaidi (from Iraq) were former colleagues of Maleh who had left Damas to look for work in Beirut. Madanat moved to Beirut in late 1973 on the advice of Iraqi director Kassem Hawal, who introduced him to the communist authors and members of the Arab Film Club Oussama al-Arif and Kamal Karim.26 Nabil Maleh and Kais al-Zubaidi were barred from working by Ahmad Qorneh—a close collaborator of Hafez al-Assad—when Qorneh was appointed as head of the NFO in 1974 after a purge of civil servants performed by the Syrian regime in an effort to regain control over public institutions (Boëx 2011: 113–118). Kais al-Zubaidi continued to work anonymously for a while and ultimately resigned himself to a new exile (Malas 2019: 94). It was impossible for him to return to Iraq due to the hold of the country’s Baath Party (which subjected the Communist Party to violent repression) over the government (ibid.: 27, 36, and 96). He stopped working in Syria altogether in 1976 and like many other militant filmmakers, dissident intellectuals, and exiles who made up a significant part of the audience at the Arab Film Club, he moved to Lebanon.
- 27 Interview with Ibrahim al-Ariss (see above).
- 28 These were ransacked in 1982.
- 29 Interview with Jaber Suleiman (see above). See also Habashneh (2019: 124–125).
12In addition to these collaborations, the activities of the Arab Film Club reportedly encouraged the LCP to support a new film institution supervised by Kamal Karim, a film club board member and director of The Leaves of the Poor Are Golden (Lebanon, 1975) (al-Balāgh 1975: 49).27 Kais al-Zubaidi and Rafik Hajjar, who directed several films produced by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and sat on the board of the Arab Film Club, were respectively credited for editing and photography. By nourishing Jaber Suleiman’s passion for cinema, the Arab Film Club also helped give an impetus to the creation of the Palestinian archives and Cinematheque,28 after Khadija Abu Ali was trained at the PLO’s Planning Centre.29 Beirut’s historical role as a “nodal city” in global social, political, and cultural interactions (Maasri 2020) is exemplified by the choice of Lebanon for the filming of al-Sayyid al-Taqaddumi (The Progressive Gentleman, Nabil Maleh, Syria, 1974) and by the versatility of the roles occupied by members of the Film Club’s core group (programmers, filmmakers, critics, actors). The films directed and shown by the film club’s members influenced the outlooks of that generation’s politically active intellectuals on cinema and prompted them to back the sector financially.
Figure 1
Al-Balāgh, 15 April 1974.
Preserved at UMAM Documentation & Research’s archives.
- 30 Interview with Jaber Suleiman (see above).
13In 1977, armed clashes were temporarily brought to a halt after Syrian troops entered Lebanon, and the Arab Film Club resumed operating at the Clémenceau (Hamra) after a two-year hiatus. The programme for the upcoming months was presented on 27 January. It featured a selection on “New Arab Cinema,” with films including Beirut Oh Beirut, al-Sayyid al-Taqaddumi and al-Yazerli. This was a kind of Beirut extension of the “golden age” of alternative cinema that had originated in Damascus as well as a showcase for the work of the filmmakers who founded the Arab Film Club. It appears, however, that the screenings never actually happened. On the other hand, a screening of Youssef Chahine’s The Sparrow (1972) did take place in October that same year. In 1982, the organizers feared that the audience would not show up. “We were afraid, we were wondering: who’s going to come and watch a movie during the siege?,” said Jaber Suleiman.30 These fears turned out to be unfounded and people came to the Strand to watch films that had been selected specifically in response to the climate of the ongoing war. These included, again, The Sparrow, for its third outing in the Arab Film Club’s history—one per period of operation. Towards the end of this Egyptian film, the character Bahia, upon hearing Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s resignation speech, refuses to accept the defeat of 1967 and urges people to take the streets with her. The film embodies the sense of grief that shaped the generational memory of the Arab Film Club, despite its tumultuous history and the distance between members.
14The return announced in January 1977 in al-Safīr was delayed by several months. At first, the Film Club could not find a venue. Theatres charged 1,000 to 1,200 pounds a month, which was above the means of an organization who could not hope to have more than 500 members at the time (al-Safīr 1977). The board members turned to the National Centre for Lebanese Cinema (CNC), but a meeting with its director was fruitless. Ibrahim al-Ariss then asked the LCP, the DFLP, and Fatah for financial support. Screenings were now held at 6.30 p.m. instead of 9, as the war made it particularly difficult to go out at night. Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961) and Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1971) were among the most memorable films for the members during that second period.
- 31 “The club has demonstrated that it is possible to (successfully) attempt to unite cultural activiti (...)
- 32 Interviews with Souad Slim (see above) and Houda Kassar (see above)
15In 1977–1978, going to the Clémenceau meant seeing films like these alongside the poet Mahmoud Darwish, LCP members Hussein and Karim Mroué, music critic Nizar Mroué, or filmmaker Randa Chahal. Darwish, who had moved to Beirut in 1972 and later went into exile in Paris along with Joseph Samaha and Ibrahim al-Ariss (2020), reportedly said that he was keen to relive this experience, which had opened his eyes to the importance of cinema, according to the Lebanese film critic Ibrahim al-Ariss, who later, like Darwish and other Arab Film Club members (Bilal al-Hassan and Émile Menem), contributed to the pan-Arab magazine al-Yawm al-sābi‘, founded in 1984 in Paris (Khalil 2022). This sentiment was not only an expression of nostalgia; it also reflected concerns about the performative dimension of the Film Club as a “movement in need of continuation” (Latour 2005: 37) to bring together the various strands of the left. Highlighted by Adnan Madanat (1974b),31 the unifying role of the Film Club is a key dimension in the retrospective narrative conveyed by some members, who note that other cultural initiatives, for instance at the University, were marred by more manifest political divergences among leftist factions.32
- 33 Benoît Lamy was later involved in the production of the film Out of Life (France/Italy/Belgium, 199 (...)
- 34 I borrow this phrase from Antoine Bohdziewicz and Catherine Duncan, president and executive secreta (...)
16The Leipzig, Damascus, and Carthage film festivals were important showcases for the films screened by the Arab Film Club from 1973 to 1975. Film schools were also spaces for conversations that continued during shoots. Likewise, movie theatres facilitated the circulation of ideas and encounters at the levels of the city of Beirut, of the Arab region and internationally. On the occasion of an Algerian film festival organized jointly with the Arab Film Club at Cinema Beyrouth in May 1974, George al-Rassi wondered how interactions between Maghreb and Mashriq could be fostered. Until now, the Arab Film Club board member contended, only cinema made such contacts possible, which explained why one of the film club’s main goals for the season was to shine a spotlight on young Algerian cinema (El Rassi 2010: 230-237). Early the following year, in addition to screening Kafr Kassem, the Arab Film Club showed the films of a group of Belgian filmmakers on Corniche al-Mazra’a. Benoît Lamy’s33 Home Sweet Home (Belgium/France, 1973) brought the spirit of 1968 into a nursing home, telling the story of a mutiny among nursing home residents who can no longer abide with the institution’s rules. A few months later, in May and June 1975, the Arab Film Club hosted a Cuban delegation at Cinema Beyrouth, an event organized in partnership with the National Centre for Lebanese Cinema and the Cuban Institute for the Film Arts and Industry (ICAIC). The programme of Cuban films, subtitled in Arabic, also served as an opportunity for a meeting with filmmakers from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) (Yaqub 2018: 133). In an interview for al-Akhbār (1975: 28–29), the film critic and ICAIC’s director for film information noted that over a hundred new releases were shown in Cuba each year, but that very few were Arab films. Strikingly, by way of an explanation for this scarcity, the Cuban delegation member mentions issues that preoccupied Arab Film Club members (citing the overwhelming majority of commercial Egyptian films) and highlights a few favourites in Cuba (Algerian cinema, the films of Youssef Chahine, Shadi Abdel Salam, and Nabil Maleh). These statements suggest the emergence of a burgeoning shared alternative film culture and of new criteria for the making of a common international film culture among film clubs.34 Such encounters were laboratories for the making of distinct—but always political—definitions of the idea of “film culture” and of tools that should be passed on for the collective discussion of films.
- 35 Interview with Paul Achcar, conducted in French in Beirut, 27 April 2023.
- 36 Interview with Elias Chaker, conducted in Arabic in Beirut, 5 March 2023.
- 37 “Cinema is the strongest and most important means of artistic and media expression. It offers a dir (...)
17Cinema Beyrouth, where this programme was shown, was suited to hosting such large-scale gatherings and ideally located between the city’s west and east parts. It became part of a long history of political meetings held in movie theatres (Thompson 1999: 2000),35 which are venues for encounters and activism, and also places from which knowledge on cinema emerges. On the occasion of the Cuban cinema month, the magazine al-Tariq, which had dedicated a special issue to the new Arab alternative cinema in 1972 (Farine 2019), put out an issue on “revolutionary cinema and political film,” featuring contributions from Kamal Karim, Kais al-Zubaidi, and Said Mourad (a Syrian communist film critic and translator). Kais al-Zubaidi (1975: 34–35) wrote a review of the feature fiction film Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1968). The film recounts the aftermath of the revolution from the perspective of a bourgeois man who has decided to stay in Havana. Elias Chaker, a contributor to the Communist publications al-Akhbār, al-Nidā’, and al-Tariq, remembered the plot in detail as he cited that film among his film club memories.36 In a piece entitled “Cuban cinema in Beirut,” Kais al-Zubaidi (1975: 32–33) recalled a 1959 quote by Fidel Castro37 that largely echoed the ideas shared by the Arab Film Club’s organizers when they left the Clémenceau for Cinéma Beyrouth for the first time. That venue served as a testing ground for their ambitions on popular film education and the transformation of society through cinema, offering as it did the opportunity for encounters between critics and moviegoers that did not necessarily attend screenings at the arthouse Clémenceau theatre. In Arab Affairs, Adnan Madanat (1974) emphasized that dimension, explaining that the critics’ work, being limited to publications in newspapers and magazines, used to be cut off from readers and audiences. Film critics had pretty much no idea who they were writing for. By fostering direct meetings, the Film Club made it possible for moviegoers to ask questions to critics, in the process giving critics and filmmakers opportunities to gain a better understanding of their expectations.
Figure 2
Member card, 1973–1974.
From Jaber Suleiman’s private archives.
- 38 Interview with Elham Kallab (see above).
18Like the cafes of Hamra, which at the time of the Film Club’s launch were vibrant hotspots for conversation and creativity,38 the Arab Film Club was a venue for the diffusion of ideas on cinema that primarily reflected the politicization of a cultural and social practice by young left-wing Arab intellectuals. As Agnès Favier (2004) pointed out in her study on forms of engagement and protest in Lebanon between 1958 and 1975, film club memberships largely hinged on party affiliations, as they were “all-encompassing” social venues. This politicization transpired for instance in the Arab Film Club’s relations with the Beirut Film Club, a weekly affair that screened films by directors such as Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Andrej Wajda and Jean-Luc Godard at the Embassy (Achrafieh) at the same time. As I explained in detail in a previous article on the Arab Film Club that focused on post-screening debates (Farine 2023), the rivalry with that association was the reason for its choice of name. Indeed, the Beirut Film Club, which was founded in 1957, was widely considered by Arab Film Club members as apolitical, elitist, and geared towards a Francophone and Francophile bourgeois audience. Staging an exodus from the club managed by Jean-Pierre Goux-Pelletan, who was about twenty years older, the organizers of the Arab Film Club managed to bring together a significant number of members (640 and counting) very quickly. They redefined the film club as a social venue by framing cinema as a space of struggle—no longer merely an aesthetic object.
- 39 Arab Film Club members Georges Chamchoum and Mohammed Reda wrote in the bilingual Lebanese film mag (...)
- 40 Interview with Hayat Chaker, conducted in Arabic in Beirut, 5 March 2023.
- 41 Interview with Souad Slim (see above).
- 42 Interview with Jaber Suleiman (see above).
- 43 Translator’s note: First published in 1951, Les Cahiers du Cinéma is a French film magazine whose f (...)
19The Arab Film Club’s attendees, who read or wrote in film publications39 and in the leftist partisan press, took part in debates that occasionally went on for weeks. This was the case of Mohamed Abdallah in 1974: in al-Akhbār, this member of the Arab Film Club was one of the participants in a long exchange of opposing reviews spurred by Cries and Whispers (Sweden, 1972), an Ingmar Bergman film whose images lingered in the memory of Hayat Chaker, who described a scene from it when we met.40 Now a historian, Souad Slim recalls having discovered and joined the Arab Film Club while attending a training session at the headquarters of the National Centre for Lebanese Cinema in the summer of 1974 (in Hamra)—not through the École supérieure des lettres where she was a student.41 Maroun Baghdadi, Kais al-Zubaidi, and Nabil Maleh were among the speakers in the training session, which the Arab Film Club organized for eighty members. Jaber Suleiman, one of the only board members who was neither a filmmaker nor a critic, was immensely pleased with his experience there.42 Since the vast majority of the Arab Film Club’s attendees was not used to discussing the fine points of filmmaking, the training was intended to introduce volunteer members to the language of film. Jaber Suleiman explains, however, that the films that elicited the most intense debates reflected the existing political culture of club members, citing the Cinema Beyrouth screenings of The Working Class Goes to Heaven (Elio Petri, Italy, 1971) and the screening of The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1966) at the Strand, held during the siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, a classic of political cinema, depicting the Algerian people’s struggle for liberation, and which got audience members to stand up on their seats. Recollections of Elio Petri’s work and of Costa-Gavras’s Z reflect a contrast between the appropriation of these films by Arab Film Club members and by their cinephile counterparts in France. During a “Cahiers week” organized with the Damascus Film Club, the film critic Serge Daney (1978) described the reception of Z as a “militant” film by the Syrian audience as an “error of judgment.” In Lebanon and Syria alike, the Cahiers du cinéma’s43 controversial put-down of Costa-Gavras’s film as a “fairly banal commercial product” that would have deserved a more radical form did not resonate; divides were caused by other kinds of concerns.
- 44 Interview with Ibrahim al-Ariss (see above) and with Kassem Hawal, conducted in Arabic online, 5 Ap (...)
- 45 Interview with Elham Kallab (see above).
- 46 Interview with Antoine and Nicole Ouaiss, conducted in French in Paris, 2 August 2023.
20Although the Arab Film Club’s original manifesto stated a refusal to get involved in any sort of partisan conflict, its screenings quickly became a platform for successive controversies that redefined the group. In March 1974, for instance, the month of Soviet film elicited a war of words that even turned into a physical fight inside the theatre (al-Anwar 1974; al-Nahār 1974; Farine 2023). The controversy, which received ample press coverage, revolved around claims that the programming process was “undemocratic.” Its protagonists were, on the one hand, the Communists and the Arab nationalists on the other, a group of members who each would have liked the film club to follow a different orientation (Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist-Maoist, Proudhonian, Luxemburgist, etc.44). Antoine Ouaiss was part of the latter camp, whose members rallied around Borhane Alaouié, whose films they considered as models.45 Ouaiss quit the Film Club’s organizing team, in which he had always felt marginalized, and in 1975 he moved to France, where he still lives to this day, having become an antique dealer after continuing to work in the film sector as a cultural mediator in Lorraine.46
21As a space where projections into the future were negotiated, the Arab Film Club—through its archives and members’ recollections—allows us to retrace a history of political dissent and unfulfilled possibilities. In late 1974, the club planned to launch a new magazine, Dafatir al-sinima (Notebooks on Cinema), as part of a partnership with the Film Critics’ Union, television, and the Ibn Khaldun publishing house (al-Balāgh 1974b). The latter had been founded two years earlier by Mohammad Kechli, an Arab Film Club member with Arab nationalist leanings who went on to join the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (OCAL).
- 47 The Arab Cultural Club was founded in 1944 and relaunched on the occasion of Beirut’s first Arab Bo (...)
- 48 Respectively in 1971 and 1974-1976. See: Al-nādī wa al-madīna, khamsa wa sab‘ūn ‘āman ‘alā taʾsīs a (...)
22Other evolutions reflect the effects of the overlapping of different circles of actors of intellectual and cultural work and the constant renegotiation of their respective objectives and proximity. These smaller-scale controversies can for instance be retraced by analysing changes in the Film Club’s visual identity and the association’s moves within the city of Beirut. In 1973–1974, the Film Club’s member card featured pieces of film; the logo, then spelled out in Latin letters, was reminiscent of a camera (See Figure 2). The following year, the French language and the film-related symbols disappeared, giving way to a circular motif formed against a blue background by a calligraphed Arabic version of the club’s name. In December 1973, new members signing up at the Clémenceau were asked to show two ID photos and ten Lebanese pounds (roughly four American dollars) (al-Balāgh 1973c). In November 1974, members were asked to sign up or renew their membership at the Arab Cultural Club (al-Balāgh 1974a). The switch reflects the fact that since the early days, the Arab Film Club’s network had overlapped with those of both the National Centre for Lebanese Cinema and the Arab Cultural Club (al-Nādī al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī).47 Before the creation of the Arab Film Club, whose board he joined, Kassem Hawal had for instance presented Ghassan Kanafani—A Word, a Gun (Palestine, 1973) to a Beirut audience thanks to the Cultural Club (al-Balāgh 1973a). Elham Kallab and Majed Nehmé, who were both Film Club members before the beginning of the war, both sat on the board of the Cultural Club.48 Accounts of the relations between the two clubs tend to diverge confusingly: some contend that the Arab Cultural Club supervised the Film Club, whereas others claim that the two entities were entirely independent or even opposed. These contradictions shed light on a project in the making and on the fragile balances allowing the club to operate at various stages in its history.
- 49 Interview with Georges El Rassi (see above).
- 50 Interviews with Nadine Acoury (see above) and with Ghassan Salhab, conducted in French in Beirut, 1 (...)
23Looking at the painstakingly organized archives of the Arab Film Club that he located upon returning to Lebanon in 1992, Georges El Rassi says: “It really was a social movement…49” The former president of the board’s phrase echoes the sentiments of a few other participants, evoking the memory of a social practice (moviegoing) that was a more political than cultural activity. Attendance at the Beirut Arab Film Club was undoubtedly spurred by the pre-existing membership of many members in other groups (Arab Cultural Club, LCP, PLO, DFLP, PFLP) and its history was punctuated by scissions and moves within the city that were driven by partisan motives. Still, the theatres, the films and the language picked to debate them allowed critics and audiences to meet and lent the Arab Film Club a federative momentum, as the desire to access films that were somewhat rare at the time put bodies in motion.50 While film and non-film archives shed light on the programming of the Beirut Arab Film Club and point to its important role in the production of knowledge (on cinema) in Lebanon, here the practice of oral history—inspired by feminist and Palestinian historical research—yields a history of cinema whose contribution to social history is more significant.
24Asked by Jaber Suleiman to expand on her practice of history and on her effort to collect personal accounts of experiences in the camp of Burj al-Barajneh in 1998, Rosemary Sayigh recalled:
- 51 Interview with Rosemary Sayigh in Al-Jana (1998), cited by Mai Taha.
For the interviews, my Palestinian colleague put together a list of informants that made up an exclusively male, older sample. I objected and he said “But these are the only people who know the Palestinian question.” I then realized that, for many, the Palestinian experience was a subject that had to be discussed on the basis of scholarly knowledge rather than personal experience, which I had assumed was the most obvious source.51
25When he and I met, on the other hand, Jaber Suleiman initially downplayed the importance of his thoughts on the field of cinema, telling me that I should speak with the filmmakers and critics with whom he had worked. Yet, his account, which is full of somewhat detailed memories of films, is just as valuable as those of the club members who worked in film. Precisely, within the framework of this research, oral history gives us insights into the cinematographic experience as a wider socio-cultural phenomenon without dismissing the films themselves as ultimately secondary concerns. Remarkably, some bilingual Arab Film Club attendees remember films but not the name of the film club that showed them (the venue being in such cases the only indication of whether this was at the Beirut Film Club or at the Arab Film Club). This shows that language was a key factor for access to the films, which had a direct impact on the making of the community, but that conflicts between organizers found a limited echo among the bulk of the audiences. Taking the memories of moviegoers as a starting point equally means pointing out the significance of certain films in the making of a leftist outlook on the world and partaking in a research practice that has so far seldom been applied to the history of cinema—and in this instance, a research practice that does a better job of honouring the democratization efforts of the founders of the Arab Film Club.