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LEBANESE CINEMA
DAVID LIVINGSTON EXPLORES HOW RELIGIOUS AND SECTARIAN
IDENTITIES ARE EXPRESSED IN GENRE FILMS FROM LEBANON
It wasnt for long, and it was long ago, but for a handful of
years the little Middle Eastern country of Lebanon, located
on the long, almost at curve of the eastern Mediterranean,
was on track to replace Egypt as the heart of Arab lmmaking.
Egypt was the most populous country in the Arab world, and
for three decades beginning in the 1930s it was the giant of
lmmaking in the vast region stretching from the Pillars of
Hercules in the west to the Garden of Eden on the banks of
the Euphrates in the eastnot because its competitors were
Lilliputians, but because there was no competition. But in
1963 a self-inicted wound delivered by Abdel Nasser in the
form of nationalization undermined the mature yet thriving
lm industry: directors, technicians, actors, and, the lifeblood,
nancing, headed north, leaving Cairo to the port city of
Alexandria and from there by boat to Beiruta city on the
sea where laissez-faire capitalism was the sterling opposite of
the Arab socialism preached and practiced by Nasser and
other Arab states that had gone, revoltingly, from monarchies
to military rule.
From the mid-1920s when Egypt begantentatively
making Bedouin lms, through the 30s with sound propelling the popular song-and-dance genre into the golden era
through the 40s and 50s, Egypt was sole member of the Arab
lmmaking club. In 1919, just as other countries in the
Middle East, especially the Levant, were coming under colonial rule, Egypt rebelled against the British and had achieved
substantial autonomyincluding artistic autonomy. The rest
of the Middle East was either under French and British mandates, and stied there, or too underdeveloped to sustain
lmmaking. It wasnt until the late 50s that Egypt had to deal
with the reality of competition, no matter how thin. That rst
whiff of resistance came from Lebanon.
The Egyptian lm industry responded immediately. Boycott, or, more precisely, threats of boycott, kept the Lebanese
Film Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 2, pps 3443, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. 2008 by the Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss
Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2008.62.2.34
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The Rivoli theater, downtown Beirut, pre-1975. Action star Fouad Charaf El Dine .
Photos in this article were obtained through the courtest of Zafer Henri Azar, Lebanese National Film Cnter.
35
Michel Haroun was another pioneer who faced probbeing surpassed in yearly production by a country that had
lems of his own. His trade was repairing car electrical sysless than a decade of lmmaking history and less than a dozen
tems, but with World War II there were no imports from
lms.
Europe, so he built and sold car batteries for a good sum.
There were other numbers that were important. While
Like Ka, he got his start in theater, and while the lm houses
Egyptian lms were popular in Lebanon and the Arab world,
were under curfew during the British occupation of Lebanon,
it was Hollywood and western lmsItaly, France, the
special passes could be gotten for the theater. He, too, was
U.K.that played at Lebanese theaters around eighty perfascinated by lm, but he was an early pioneer and had to
cent of the time. Egyptian lms represented around fteen
create his own studio before he could begin. He sold his
percent of viewership, and there were a substantial number
wifes twisted gold bracelets, bought a Debrie camera from
of Soviet lms as well as the odd Indian one playing. In 1962,
the French in 1945, and proceeded to
for instance, a year before the invasion,
slowly build a lm-processing studio.
there were 586 lms imported into
This power-sharing, known as
He built half-a-dozen waist-high tanks
Lebanon: 327 were American; ftythe
National
Pact,
is
unique
out of concrete for the chemical bath
seven Italian; forty-nine British; thirtyneeded for the lm, but lm quality
six Soviet; thirty-one French; seven
in the world, and because the
would degrade after around ten rolls beIndian; and seventy-seven Egyptian.
religions are so hostile to one
Lebanon was a small market yet
cause of the reaction of the chemicals
another,
Lebanon
has
long
linhugely important for Egypt. In 1964,
with the sand and cement. It took a year
yearly Lebanese lm attendance was
of experimenting to resolve the probgered in turmoil, a country but
37.2 millionwith individual attenlem. With the challenge of the negative
not a nation.
solved, he then built a printing machine
dance at 22.5 lms, the second highest
for a positive copy. To create spotlights,
in the world, and only slightly behind
he cut corrugated pipes, welded them to a tripod base, and
Hong Kong. Attendance in Egypt was seventy million, with
then welded to the top 5000-watt lights. He lacked the equipindividual attendance at three. Tickets were cheaper in Egypt
because of the lower standard of living, so Egyptian lms
ment to simultaneously shoot and to match to sound, so dubshown in Lebanon were crucial to the Egyptian lm industry
bing was done in the studio on an editing machine the size of
and the Egyptian economy. Hard currency was needed in
a small television. Every technical aspect of lm production
had to be addressed by Haroun before he made, in 1957, Red
the socialist country, and Egypt could not afford to have any
Flowers.
Arab country compete with its total dominance of Arab lmAn artisanal spirit existed, not just because these were the
making.
early days of Lebanese lm, but because the means were
But, in 1963, Lebanon became the new hope of the
limited. The actors, when they were not on screen, served as
expatriate Egyptian lm colony, and the Egyptians were in
the lm crew. The lm was ultimately a product of Harouns
a bind: they could not simultaneously crush opposition in
workshop, and the studio was the result of his desire to make
Lebanon while boosting lm production there. It would
lms. So it went for a half a decade.
be rude.
In 1963, with the Egyptian invasion, there was a sea
What changed in Lebanon was not just the number of
change. From one or two lms a year in the late 1950s and
lms being shot, but the genres used. And with genre change,
early 60s, nine lms were made in Lebanon in 1963; eleven
the religious faultline of Lebanon was exposed. The early
in 1964; sixteen in 1965 and twenty-ve in 1966. In Egypt,
lms of the 1950sdirected by Ka, Nasser, and Haroun
the numbers were reversed, and only a dozen lms separated
were melodramas that took place in the mountains of
the giant from its tiny Arab competitor. Most studios were
Lebanon, the ancestral home of the Maronites. The Maronnationalized, the emphasis had shifted from creating lms to
ites, Catholics of the east and a product of the Christological
suit stars and cater to popular tastes, to creating what became
Controversies of early Christianity, saw Lebanon as theirs. It
known as lms with a purposeor, more precisely, propawas created by the French, with strong lobbying by the Maronite Patriarch, to serve as a homeland for Christians in the
ganda lms. Egypt had a population of 27.3 million in 1962,
Muslim Middle East. Or, at least, that was the way the Marand trailed only Hollywood and India in lm production, but
onites saw Lebanon. That the Muslims who happened to live
it was on course to be supplanted by Lebanon, population 1.7
in the areas the French attached to Mount Lebanon were unmillion. Egypt, with 1000 lms behind it, was in danger of
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37
Clockwise from top left: Lebanons rst lm, The Adventures of Elias Mabrouk (1929). Heartthrob Ihsan Sadek in Georges Kas Two Hearts and
One Body (1957). Two brothers in To Where? (George Nasser, 1957). Kas Memories (1958). Director Mohammed Selmane (center) on the set
of Appointment with Hope (1958). Red Flowers (Michel Haroun, 1957).
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MI6 hard on his heels, and the image of Beirut as a spys nest
in his Bedouin lms which usually featured the songbird
took hold. There were so many western lms that featured
Samira Tawk, mirrored the dislocation the Shiites were
Beirut as a spy haven that the government protested, claiming
going through beginning in the 1950s due to modernization
that their country was being besmirched as a home for interand mechanization: hundreds of thousands left their villages
and farmsand their traditional familiar ways of lifeto eke
national gangs and spies, and in 1966 insisted that all foreign
a living in Beirut as unskilled workers.
lm scripts be vetted for approval before shooting could
By the 1960s, Selmanes nanciers made him switch to
begin.
Egyptian Arabicbetter for export to the Arab world which
Lebanese directors made their own spy lms. Selmane
knew the Egyptian dialect through lm and radioand the
and his followers liberally borrowed the James Bond theme
battle lines between what was considered a Lebanese lm
music, and their stars, again to the consternation of critics
and what was considered just a lm
and those who wanted legitimate
made in Lebanon had been drawn.
Lebanese film, spoke in Egyptian
While the sun-and-fun lms conTrue Lebanese lmssuch as those by
Arabic.
the Maronite directorswere lms in
By now, the early Maronite directinued to be made, as well as
Lebanese Arabic and they represented
tors
had
pretty much given up. Haroun
Bedouin lms, and spy/police
the nation. Those films made in
felt he had been cheated by his partlms, the new mood gave birth
Lebanon with Egyptian actors and the
ners, so used his studio, along with the
to
a
new
genre,
that
of
the
Egyptian dialect were something else
help of his sons, to develop other peobastardized, inauthentic, mere mimicry
ples lms. Ka made lms throughout
fedayeen, the freedom ghters.
of a foreign culture.
the 1950s and into the early 60s. His
As lm criticism developed in the
nal lm, however, done in conjunc1960s in Lebanon, at cine-clubs and lm magazines, critics
tion with Mohammed Selmane in 1963, O, Love, was in
clearly demarcated one from the other. Selmane became the
Egyptian Arabic and was a song-and-dance comedy/romance
exemplar of inauthentic cinema. It did not help that Selmane
a clear sign that the Egyptian invasion had won out. He
was a horrible technician, and that strange shadows, or even
returned to theater. George Nasserseen by Sadoul as the
the arm of a stagehand, would appear in his lms. In The
true originator of Lebanese lmmade a second lm in
Black Jaguar (1965), made almost a decade after Selmane
1961 and a third in 1974, but he concentrated on making adbegan directing, the cameramans shadow is reected on the
vertisements for television, or state-sponsored documentaries
sandand very laughingly visibleduring a ght scene.
extolling Lebanonwhether it was water skiing, traditional
Selmane seemed to be ignorant of montage, and his camera
handicrafts, or the army. He, too, gave up.
would, in imitation of the early years of lm, remain stationThere was still a hunger in Lebanon in the 1960s for
something other than the Egyptian genres, or the western
ary as the characters acted out their parts as if on a stage.
spy/police genre in which the actors spoke Egyptian. One
Close-ups, too, were a nuisance, and since it was song-andnotable lm that was both in and out of genre was the noir
dance, they could come anywhere in the lm, sometimes
Garo (1965), directed by Gary Garabidian, a Lebanese Armenback-to-back.
ian. He shot, directed, edited, produced, and wrote the screenYet Selmane prospered, and served as the epigone for a
play to Garo, the story of an Armenian bandit. It was made on
generation of directors who made song-and-dance, sun-anda pittance. Garabidian worked at a Lebanese television stafun, love-and-romance lms as well as Bedouin lmsall in
imitation, poorly at that, of the Egyptian models.
tion, and nanced the lm from paycheck to paycheck.
Simultaneous with the Egyptian invasion and the shift in
Selmane, known for taking long shots, would often not use
genres, James Bond exploded into the world, and a slew of
the end of a reel for fear of running out of lm, so cinematogItalian knock-offs hit Lebanon. This spy genre, coupled alrapher friends would pass them over at a discount to
Garabidianextra bits of East German Agfa and Orwo. It
most immediately to the police genre, became the third of
took eight months to shoot Garo. The actor who played Garo
the four genres to inuence Lebanese lms in the 1960s.
was Mounir Maasri, freshly back from the Actors Studio.
Lebanon had become an ideal staging ground for western
Maasri, years before, thought the Greek-Turkish director Elia
directors wanting to add the exotic to their spy capers. The
Kazan, who had a very Lebanese-sounding name, was Lebamost famous spy of them all, Kim Philby, had set sail for the
nese, and wrote to him, seeking a mentorone Lebanese
Soviet Union in 1963 from the port of Beirut, with MI5 and
FI L M Q UARTERLY
39
Clockwise from top left: singer Samira Tawk in Bedouin Girl in Rome (1965). Mounir Maasri as the gangster Garo, 1965. We Are All Fedayeen
(1969). Civil war damage to the projection room, Ministry of Information, 1975. Woman of the Black Moons (Samir Khoury, 1971). Tawk and
Syrian singer Fahd Ballan in The Conquerors (Farouk Ajrama, 1966).
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