On Representing the War as Rupture: Jocelyne Saab and New Lebanese Cinema (1975–90)

This chapter examines the cinema of Jocelyne Saab during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), while placing it in the context of New Lebanese Cinema, as she was confronted with violence that generated a fracture and crisis of representation. While in the documentary Lebanon in Turmoil (1975), the ‘real’ still seems to be under the regime of finding meaning. Informative interviews and commentary that punctuate the film give way to the poetic text of Etel Adnan in Beirut, Never Again (1976), which grasps the gap between words and objects. This need to look for new forms of representation is at the heart of a practice that attempts to represent a reality and a present, even though during war, the real may no longer be achievable or representable. Such a notion carried Jocelyne Saab’s films towards a proclivity for fiction. With A Suspended Life (1985), the filmmaker interrogates the representation of this strangeness to oneself, an absence of meaning, a gap between people and the world, in places that the characters pass through without being able to inhabit them.