Shadows of the Past

"In the Shadows of the City," directed by Jean Khalil Chamoun, 100 minutes, France/Lebanon, 2000
Free Screening: Friday, January 21, New York City

By Ginan Rauf

H.G. Wells once said, coming our of a political meeting where they had been discussing social change, that this great towering city was a measure of the obstacle, of how much must be moved if there is to be any change. I have known this feeling, looking up at great buildings that are the centers of power, but I find I do not say ‘There is your city, your great bourgeois monument, your towering structure of this still precarious civilization’ or I do not only say that; I say also "This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is everything then not possible?" Indeed this sense of possibility, of meeting and of movement, is a a permanent element of my sense of cities.
-- Raymond Williams

Twelve-year-old Rami flees his war-torn village in South Lebanon and comes to Beirut with his family. It is a city full of promise and a city fraught with peril. The young protagonist looks upward at the blue sky as he muses on how Beirut impressed and shocked him, proved welcoming and proved heartless. That image of a radiant city seen through the eyes of an ordinary boy looking at the horizon from the ground up recalls the documentary footage of aerial bombardment from which the family had initially fled, the bombardment that wreaks havoc on civilian populations and targets urban centers with callous disregard. Rami experiences this sense of possibility that the literary critic Raymond Williams associates with great pulsating cities even as he retains a painful awareness of the destructive forces seething right beneath the surface of cosmopolitan Beirut.

The young protagonist on the cusp of manhood is poised between the unrealized dreams of childhood and the diminishing possibilities of adulthood; Rami’s feeble attempt to render the cramped apartment in Beirut more habitable, to re-make home in a new urban setting is met with the disapproval of a stern father figure intent on disabusing his son of the quaint notion that ‘’men’’ receive an education or fulfill childhood dreams. For the dispossessed and the displaced Beirut looms large as the locus of lowered expectations. School gives way to the necessity of finding employment and manhood is largely defined in terms of earning power. On the street a shady character named (al-Winch) dupes the neighborhood children and robs them of their money as he asserts his commandeering presence with the aid of a garish car, an icon of excessive machismo and crushing power used to signal who rules urban space at a given moment in time. Everywhere Rami ventures he encounters the haunting specter of big people exploiting small people, crushing them with impunity like so much dispensable human debris.

The larger question thus arises for Rami; namely, will he retain vestiges of a submerged dream and emerge as an artist or succumb to the corrosive cynicism that has already begun to infect his friend Walid for whom making money is infinitely more important than learning how to read. Such corrosive cynicism has as its corollary the disinvestment in the education of the young. And such is the de-schooling that often precedes and paves the way for the emergence of militias and the militant cultures they generate.

Rami’s experience at the café where he eventually finds work proves crucial in this regard. For the café becomes a temporary haven from the prowling hyenas and it is highly evocative of another Beirut, one that welcomes the young boy and encourages the cultivation of a human intelligence steeped in tenderness; it is a civic space where the alienated adolescent can regain a lost sense of at home-ness: if the filial bond has been ruptured at home, then that very separation opens up the possibility of affiliation and the formation of voluntary human associations transcending blood ties. Nabil the musician functions like a surrogate father providing Rami with an alternative vision of manhood, one that privileges the moral courage to stand up to the spirit of the predatory hyena feasting on death. And when the militia leader otherwise known as the hyena barges into the café, Rami alone demands just recompense for the drink he has consumed and for that act of singular courage he gains recognition as somebody in Nabil’s eyes.

The café itself is a meeting space that is of the place and not of the place insofar as the factional strife beginning to divide Beirut is anticipated, debated but also resisted and contested by the individual conscience. Memories of that space hold out tenuous hope for envisioning a different future. Yet no space is immune to the divisiveness orchestrated from above that literally de-civilizes space. Once Rami’s father is disappeared by a competing faction, he can no longer resist the divisiveness and joins a militia. By then, however, it is not simply a matter of transcending the factional strife that divides Beirut. Perhaps more crucially it becomes a matter of resisting the sleek aesthetics of war and the banditry that makes it so tangible a temptation.

So when Rami attempts to appropriate an apartment occupied by the shadows of missing civilians the question thus arises; namely, will the fragments of a former self be forever lost to the grown man or is the café as civic space retrievable. Chamoun’s film revisits the shadows of a traumatic past and his visual memory works against the historical amnesia that allows traces of the disappeared to be repressed with impunity. To remember the war as a racket is not necessarily to re-open the wounds of a civil war that bitterly divided Lebanon along sectarian lines. Rather, it is to achieve a critical understanding of the power structures that have a vested interest in perpetuating war and gorging on the tragic waste of human potential.

Perhaps the larger question for humanity at this critical juncture rests on our collective ability to entertain that possibility.