Jocelyne Saab was a Franco-Lebanese filmmaker and artist. Born in Beirut in 1948, the year of the Nakba, the catastrophe for Palestinians of the creation of the State of Israel, she grew up with the pan-Arab ideology that inspired her father. As a student, she became involved with the Palestinians, whose difficult daily life she discovered in the camps south of Beirut. She went on to study economics in Paris – a course of study imposed on her by her father, she would have preferred to go into the cinema: but she recognized that her four years of study had forged her analytical mind. After her first jobs with the national radio station and the Lebanese press, Jocelyne Saab was hired as a war reporter and sent to cover the October War, Iraqi Kurdistan and Libya. It was here that she made her first films, forged a network with the Arab left, notably in Egypt, and established herself as a gifted and audacious journalist. She became independent in 1975, after her film Palestinian Women was rejected for television broadcast, and the first clashes broke out in her country, Lebanon, condemned to 15 years of civil war. She filmed the war that ravaged her country until 1982, when the Palestinians left Beirut. The reporter’s image fades into a poetic cinema, which summons up life amid the rubble as a tool of resistance to the erasure of history.
In her films, Jocelyne Saab tries to show the life that remains despite the clashes. Through nine films, this program provides an insight into Jocelyne Saab’s various commitments: Firstly, to denounce the logic of war ; secondly, to show solidarity with the Palestinian and Lebanese people of the South in their struggle against Israel ; thirdly, to bear witness to a world that is falling apart.
Faced with the ruined walls of her city, Jocelyne Saab found herself faced with an ethical dilemma that was perceptible in the evolution of her work as the war progressed: support for the Palestinian cause conflicted with a pacifist stance, which she naturally adopted in the face of her own and her people’s distress.
This is clear from the first program, which combines Children of War (1976) and Lebanon in Turmoil (1975), and in which Jocelyne Saab’s concern about the outbreak of a long war is very explicit. Lebanon in Turmoil is considered the first film ever made about the Lebanese civil war. Altered by the events of April 13, 1975 (now considered the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war), Jocelyne Saab prepared a film, which she shot in September 1975. In it, she interviewed politicians, militia leaders and civilians, all from different communities, to explain the political, economic and social state of Lebanon, where everyone was arming themselves to gain or retain power. Rather than a war between communities, Jocelyne Saab explained this war in terms of class struggle: it was the war of the ruling class to maintain its ascendancy. This perspective runs throughout the film, Saab’s first feature-length documentary, released in France in 1975, at a time when only the “events in Lebanon” were being talked about, and the war seemed far away. Children of War was made a few months later, in the aftermath of the first massacre of the civil war. Perpetrated in February 1976 by far-right Christian Phalangist militias in an East Beirut shantytown populated mainly by Lebanese Muslims, Palestinians and Kurds, the film follows the surviving children of the massacre, unable to play at anything other than war. These children, who reproduce the actions they witnessed, become recruits for the militias. The kids Jocelyne interviews are Palestinians, and the militias are undoubtedly those of the resistance: but to see them become fedayin at the age of 10, it is clear that the war would disrupt the lives of several generations.
The second film program brings together a series of films directed by Jocelyne Saab in support of the Palestinian struggle, particularly in southern Lebanon. Few Western reporters would document southern Lebanon: Saab was an essential mediator between the terrain of the struggle and that of the Western media. Her first film on the Palestinian struggle, Palestinian Women (1974), was censored at the time by the management of the French TV station she worked for: the film was released in 2019 thanks to restoration work. It prompted Jocelyne Saab to start working independently, and it was on her own that she made The Rejection Front (1975) about a radical branch of the Palestinian resistance, the first to train fighters in suicide commandos. After the outbreak of war, Lebanon became a central preoccupation for the filmmaker, who returned to the south of the country to turn her microphone to the villagers on the border who were being bombed by Israel, despite the Zionist state’s denials. South-Lebanon, History of a Besieged Village (1976) testifies to the complicity of Christian militias with Israel and the injustice being inflicted on civilians. Two years later, the Israeli army invaded South Lebanon, and it was on the edge of the occupied zone that Jocelyne Saab met Arafat and the Palestinian resistance in Letter From Beirut (1978). This is the return of images of armed resistance in the films of Jocelyne Saab, who chose to focus on the lives of civilians after the outbreak of war, documenting the city’s destruction.
Because Jocelyne Saab witnessed the end of a world, and she was clearly aware of it. This is the subject of the latest program, featuring two of the three films in the “Beirut Trilogy” – the second of the three being Letter From Beirut. The collapse of Saab’s world begins with the first months of the Lebanese war, when the filmmaker went down every morning to film the city, its walls, what remained of life in the ruins of the fighting. A poetic film that defies the rules of traditional editing, with commentary by the poet Etel Adnan, Beirut Never Again (1976) is a chronicle of daily life in Beirut despite the war, nostalgic for a world that has already disappeared. The invasion of West Beirut by the Israeli army in 1982 was a further blow. It led to the departure of the Palestinians from Beirut and a new configuration of the war. The siege and extradition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Beirut is recounted, with shattering political poetry, in Beirut My City (1982), which opens with Saab herself, standing in front of her burnt house, and recounts the daily lives of those who refused to leave West Beirut during the siege. In fact, it was her commitment to the cause that prompted PLO leader Arafat to ask her to be the TV journalist who would accompany him on the boat that would take him out of Lebanon. The Ship of Exile documents the Palestinians’ departure: defeated, but dignified. After this event, Jocelyne Saab stopped shooting documentaries in Lebanon.
Mathilde Rouxel
