The Daily Star (Lebanon)
December 10, 2011 Saturday
An aesthetic of dereliction and slaughter
by Jim Quilty
Ever since filmmakers began to make documentaries that work more like
art house fictions (and less like in-depth reportage), a sort of
identity crisis has confronted the form, if not the filmmakers
themselves.
DUBAI: Ever since filmmakers began to make documentaries that work
more like art house fictions (and less like in-depth reportage), a
sort of identity crisis has confronted the form, if not the filmmakers
themselves.
Like artists who take their inspiration from their local realities,
filmmakers who work in “creative documentary” – as this
non-journalistic form is called – aspire to the “allusive” and
“universal,” rather than “literal” and “parochial.”
“Sector Zero,” the ambitious debut feature-length documentary by Nadim
Mishlawi seeks to navigate these difficult waters. This cerebral, yet
stylish, examination of the Beirut neighborhood of Karantina had its
world premier Thursday evening at the Dubai International Film
Festival, where it is screening as part of the Arab documentary film
competition.
For those of a certain disposition, Karantina is one of the most
interesting parts of Beirut. The sector was born before Lebanese
independence, after the city was made the capital of its own Ottoman
province and its population blossomed, making it necessary to move its
quarantine facility (“karantina” in Ottoman Turkish) further from the
city center. Because the quarantine was concerned with the traffic of
human illness, a hospital was built on site.
The quarantine itself has not functioned for ages, but the name stuck.
Since then the quarter has come to acquire several overlapping
meanings.
Mishlawi’s film recounts how Karantina became a region where waves of
refugees – Armenian, Palestinian, and Kurdish – settled, so the region
acquired the reputation of a slum.
When Lebanon’s Civil War broke out, the high concentration of
Palestinians in this part of “Christian East Beirut” – made it the
target of a siege (and massacre) by Phalangist militiamen and their
Syrian army allies, who wanted to isolate the nearby Tel al-Zaatar
Palestinian refugee camp.
The region thus came to be associated with slaughter and (ironically,
or appropriately, enough) it also became to site of a slaughterhouse
for cattle and sheep, which operates still. Other light-industrial
enterprises set up shop in Karantina – a tannery, a metal factory –
and during the post-Civil War reconstruction, Sukleen, a private
waste-management company, took possession of the area’s municipal
dump.
Later still the area played host to the nightclub B018. Designed by
famed Beirut architect Bernard Khoury (who is one of Mishlawi’s
informants), the interior design of this subterranean crypt was
originally not unlike that of a local graveyard. The most-recent layer
of urban densification is that of the art galleries – which, like the
pollen of globalization, tend to aggregate in disused regions of
cities worldwide.
“Sector Zero” is a self-consciously elaborate audio-visual creation.
Visually, it combines silent images from Karantina’s now-derelict
structures – the only living presence in which are a spider and a few
sheep and cattle en route to the butchers. In the hands of
cinematographer Talal Khoury, these take the form of panning shots –
reminiscent of Meyar Roumi’s work in Omar Amiralay’s 2005 doc “A Flood
in Baath Country” or Diego Mart?nez Vignatti’s contribution to Kamal
Aljafari’s 2006 “The Roof” – and still life-like studies of found
objects that pass in and out of focus like a fading memories.
Complementing these contemporary images is archival footage.
Black-and-white films of Armenian and Palestinian refugees who found
refuge in Karantina are superimposed over the interior walls of
Karantina structures. There is also some the striking footage of the
Phalange’s 1976 siege.
The film also has a slideshow motif – most effective when it presents
a range of historical maps of the region from the 1950s until today.
Less-effective slideshows are concerned with post-Civil War Downtown
Beirut and Lebanon’s sectarian political leadership.
“Sector Zero” is Mishlawi’s directorial debut but he has been a figure
on the Lebanese art scene for some years as a composer – having worked
on the soundtracks of a number of films in the region – and as a sound
installation artist. Consequently the audio and visual aspects of this
film are as complex.
The soundtrack veers back and forth from Mishlawi’s work for chamber
orchestra to a dissonant soundscape of electronic growls and scrapes –
an aural equivalent of the pockmarked and derelict interior and
exterior shots of Karantina that Khoury captures.
A range of interviews provide the film’s documentary “content.” The
voices take the form of audio interviews with people that have some
personal (contemporary or historical) connection with the region – a
slaughterhouse employee, a writer who lives in the region, a former
militiaman who committed atrocities there – and the filmed monologues
of three prominent Lebanese intellectuals – Khoury, psychiatrist and
clinical psychologist Choukri Azouri and writer and political
commentator Hazem Saghiyeh.
The film’s aesthetic sensibility – by no means the first film to find
beauty in derelict spaces – mingled with philosophical discussion and
reminiscence will move viewers of a certain temperament. Obviously
“Sector Zero” speaks with greatest clarity to residents of Lebanon,
and those non-Lebanese who lost family there. That said the film’s
themes are not particularly parochial.
Refugee movements and tribal-sectarian conflicts aren’t unique to the
Lebanese experience and, historically, every port city in the world
has had a quarantine facility. These days, when communicable disease
is second only to climate change among contemporary plagues – and with
free population movement more likely to be impeded for political than
health reasons – the idea of “quarantine” is a totem from an era of
regulation that’s as quaint as the social welfare state.
Bernard Khoury’s sketch of Solidere’s neoliberal land-expropriation
practices – pioneered in Downtown Beirut before going global – is
interesting enough, as are his views on how his design of B018 was
received by “the Western press.” The extent to which this is useful in
scrutinizing Karantina is debatable.
Though human tragedy is deeply gouged into Karantina’s urban fabric,
for the most part “Sector Zero” enters through the head rather than
the heart. Indeed, some may find the intellectual ballast provided by
the film’s informants doesn’t match the film’s aesthetics.
That said, when the camera falls upon the cattle and sheep awaiting
slaughter at the Karantina slaughterhouse, the soundtrack’s string
accompaniment veers fatally (and uncharacteristically) close to
sentimentality.
In the post-premiere Q&A, Mishlawi remarked that he and
cinematographer Talal Khoury aspire to recast their Karantina project
in other media – whether as a book of photography or a video
installation. Certainly the visual and sound design aspects of “Sector
Zero” are equal to this. Given the artistic strengths of Mishlawi’s
profile of Karantina, it’s curious that the neighborhood’s swelling,
and visually incongruous, art gallery scene is missing from the film.
These complaints do little to diminish “Sector Zero” being an
impressive first film.
The complex variety of its soundtrack is a fine sonic equivalent to
the bleak locations. Derelict and pockmarked with a violent history,
these interior and exterior landscapes are ideal for Khoury’s laconic,
lateral camera movement.
Ephemeral still-lifes – picturesque spider webs (translucent spider
included), mysterious objects sunken in a flooded floor, a diagonal
shaft of light shooting through mysteriously rising steam – are as
informative in their mute transience as an entire roomful of political
philosophy.
The Dubai International Film Festival continues until Dec. 14.