Theater of Smoke
The Wikipedia article about the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, killing approximately 120,000 people and repelling nearly a million from the country, features a table listing the belligerents. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the United States and Israel were involved. Others included France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Syria, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Libya, South Yemen, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iran, and several Lebanese military and paramilitary organizations, with Christian and Muslim tensions added.
It was a clusterfuck in a complex ancient country about 7/10s the size of Connecticut.
The World War Two American battleship U.S.S. New Jersey in 1983 and 1984 fired its sixteen inch guns at Lebanon, causing me even then to recall Marlowe's amazement in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness when he remarks that the ship he's on, firing its guns at the African coast, was "shooting at a continent!"
The tangled madness of the Lebanese Civil War is the subject of Volker Schlöndorff's Die Fälschung (The Fake), but released in English as Circle of Deceit. From 1981, the film was made on location in Beirut, the crumbling war-ravaged city at places on fire, rubble scattered everywhere, armed men in trucks, at checkpoints, explosions near and distant, civilians killed by snipers, masked fighters retaliating against civilians of the other side, that is, practitioners of other religious faiths.
Into this human-made storm comes a West German journalist (Bruno Ganz) and his photographer (Jerzy Skolimowski). There to find a story to document and write about, the pair go from place to place, meeting with representatives of both sides, hoping for an interview (which never happens) with the PLO's Yasser Arafat, witnessing extreme violence committed by both sides.
Georg (Ganz, who's best known to American audiences for his role as an angel in Wings of Desire and as Hitler in Downfall) gets involved with a woman who's been living in Beirut for many years. Played by Hanna Schygulla (star of many great Fassbinder films), she has a fatalistic sense of life in the battered city. For her there's nothing to think about in terms of the future. Her existentialist viewpoint influences Georg to the extent that he ends up staying in Beirut beyond the planned departure. Unlike his fellow journalists, and his photographer, the chaos of the war has put him into it. After spending many days trying to figure out how to write about the city's situation, he finally quits his observer role and participates in the population's pain, even committing an act of violence
that seems to erupt from his time of frustration there.
For everybody else in the West German journalistic contingent, Beirut is an assignment that seems to them like an exotic and dangerous vacation, but the horrible situation of the city's people doesn't touch their consciences as they live it up in a nice neutral zone-situated hotel. They gladly whisk themselves away from the war even as Georg stays on, drawn to his fatalistic and brief love affair, willing to let events guide him from witnessing constant suffering to spending a lot of his time dodging out of the way of fighting and death, all of it increasingly incomprehensible except for the undeniable fact of the harm caused by a mixture of religion and geopolitics, for the Lebanese Civil War was a World War in miniature. We can see this phenomenon (so-called proxy wars) carried out in more recent times in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and places to come.
Whether some of the film's action scenes were staged or not, I don't know. Everything in the film looks real. The Holiday Inn, a tall structure, often has black smoke either gushing from its window spaces or coming out in wisps. A brownish-black haze often hangs over the concrete-strewn streets. Yelling, men gesturing with automatic weapons, civilians dropping suddenly to the pavement and not moving again--it's all very realistic, and I have a feeling the director managed to use an actual city in an actual war as a film set, which, if true, adds a strange analog to Georg's exploration.
The movie doesn't take sides. All is in a whirl of chaos and strangeness and much of the violence seems to stem from the practice of righting wrongs, which leads, as we know from the War on Terror, to a circular process without end, with only those profiting from war smiling at its reality.
Vic Neptune
The Wikipedia article about the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, killing approximately 120,000 people and repelling nearly a million from the country, features a table listing the belligerents. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the United States and Israel were involved. Others included France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Syria, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Libya, South Yemen, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iran, and several Lebanese military and paramilitary organizations, with Christian and Muslim tensions added.
It was a clusterfuck in a complex ancient country about 7/10s the size of Connecticut.
The World War Two American battleship U.S.S. New Jersey in 1983 and 1984 fired its sixteen inch guns at Lebanon, causing me even then to recall Marlowe's amazement in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness when he remarks that the ship he's on, firing its guns at the African coast, was "shooting at a continent!"
The tangled madness of the Lebanese Civil War is the subject of Volker Schlöndorff's Die Fälschung (The Fake), but released in English as Circle of Deceit. From 1981, the film was made on location in Beirut, the crumbling war-ravaged city at places on fire, rubble scattered everywhere, armed men in trucks, at checkpoints, explosions near and distant, civilians killed by snipers, masked fighters retaliating against civilians of the other side, that is, practitioners of other religious faiths.
Into this human-made storm comes a West German journalist (Bruno Ganz) and his photographer (Jerzy Skolimowski). There to find a story to document and write about, the pair go from place to place, meeting with representatives of both sides, hoping for an interview (which never happens) with the PLO's Yasser Arafat, witnessing extreme violence committed by both sides.
Georg (Ganz, who's best known to American audiences for his role as an angel in Wings of Desire and as Hitler in Downfall) gets involved with a woman who's been living in Beirut for many years. Played by Hanna Schygulla (star of many great Fassbinder films), she has a fatalistic sense of life in the battered city. For her there's nothing to think about in terms of the future. Her existentialist viewpoint influences Georg to the extent that he ends up staying in Beirut beyond the planned departure. Unlike his fellow journalists, and his photographer, the chaos of the war has put him into it. After spending many days trying to figure out how to write about the city's situation, he finally quits his observer role and participates in the population's pain, even committing an act of violence
that seems to erupt from his time of frustration there.
For everybody else in the West German journalistic contingent, Beirut is an assignment that seems to them like an exotic and dangerous vacation, but the horrible situation of the city's people doesn't touch their consciences as they live it up in a nice neutral zone-situated hotel. They gladly whisk themselves away from the war even as Georg stays on, drawn to his fatalistic and brief love affair, willing to let events guide him from witnessing constant suffering to spending a lot of his time dodging out of the way of fighting and death, all of it increasingly incomprehensible except for the undeniable fact of the harm caused by a mixture of religion and geopolitics, for the Lebanese Civil War was a World War in miniature. We can see this phenomenon (so-called proxy wars) carried out in more recent times in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and places to come.
Whether some of the film's action scenes were staged or not, I don't know. Everything in the film looks real. The Holiday Inn, a tall structure, often has black smoke either gushing from its window spaces or coming out in wisps. A brownish-black haze often hangs over the concrete-strewn streets. Yelling, men gesturing with automatic weapons, civilians dropping suddenly to the pavement and not moving again--it's all very realistic, and I have a feeling the director managed to use an actual city in an actual war as a film set, which, if true, adds a strange analog to Georg's exploration.
The movie doesn't take sides. All is in a whirl of chaos and strangeness and much of the violence seems to stem from the practice of righting wrongs, which leads, as we know from the War on Terror, to a circular process without end, with only those profiting from war smiling at its reality.
Vic Neptune
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