Filmmaker Jocelyne Saab | Overthrow has happened, but liberation has not

Jocelyne Saab in »Beyrouth, ma ville« (1982) Photo: Association Jocelyne Saab Reading the newspaper every day means finding out what hasn't been censored today. A young woman comes to this conclusion in Jocelyne Saab's hour-long report "Lettre de Beyrouth" from 1978. At this point in time, the Lebanese capital had been the scene of a civil war for a good three years, which had reached its climax with the Karantina massacre and the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp Tel al-Zaatar. Saab drives in the bus through a destroyed city, whose streets are riddled with checkpoints, and asks about what is going on far away from the reports. Children rummage through rubble and find something to play with; A chair with three legs, lying next to discarded prostheses, becomes the survivors' new furniture. Such images have little to do with hegemonic war reporting.

From the outset, filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, who was born into a Christian Maronite family in Beirut in 1948, did not set out to showcase her heroism with every subsequent live explosion. After studying at the Sorbonne, her friend Etel Adnan brought her to French television, for which she has reported from the Middle East since 1973. The tone with which she does this is unusual, sometimes even prosaic. Her comments do not demand topicality; instead, they are about the past, which is inserted in slow motion between the images of the present. Films like these don't just show what happened; they show how what is becomes present.

Saab is always close to the action, showing the later PLO chairman Yasser Arafat surrounded by Fatah members on board a ship as well as Palestinian Intifada fighters dancing again before their deployment. One of them not only wears a cartridge belt around his hips, but also a keffiyeh that swings to the rhythm of his movements. Jocelyne Saab's reports challenge viewers to rethink their position based on their location. She listens where others think they know. And it places background information where the evidence of the moment seems deceptive.

Saab's interest was in the displaced and marginalized - and all those who were not allowed to claim a place for themselves in the official image. Their films, which are about them, increasingly moved away from the format of television reports and developed into essays - with idiosyncratic comments, drawn-out shots and memory images in the narrated present. The Beirut of her childhood, often referred to by Western reporters as the “Paris of the Middle East,” does not appear as a nostalgic postcard, but rather as a lost possibility of a shared life between Christians, Muslims, Palestinians, Armenians and Kurds. With each other, not against each other.

“Lettre de Beyrouth” forms a trilogy with “Beyrouth, jamais plus” (1976) and “Beyrouth, ma ville” (1982) about the continued destruction of the city in which Saab grew up. In the third part, the director herself moves through rubble. She stands with a microphone in front of her burned-out childhood home, which was destroyed during the Israeli siege. She walks through spaces that no longer exist. She laconically tells the viewer that it was only walls, not people, who were hit.

Saab's interest was in the displaced and marginalized - and all those who were not allowed to claim a place for themselves in the official image.

In addition to Saab's Beirut trilogy, the program "No Past, No Future" was also shown at the Viennale in Vienna's Metro Cinema. The hour-long feature “Iran, l’utopia en marche” (1980), filmed after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, stands out as a contemporary document. For Saab, the situation presented itself as a utopia in the present tense, the outcome of which was still open. She was fascinated by the fact that neither Nasserism nor Castroism was the inspiration for this revolution; The initial spark was not the movement from head to feet that Marx had prescribed for idealist philosophy; Instead, something seemed to be going backwards in Iran in 1978 and 1979, with opium becoming a staple food: prophets instead of philosophers, religious salvation instead of social emancipation.

But what does liberation mean when the future appears in the form of the past? The flame of a production tower burns above an Iranian oil field. The raw material, once exploited by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and exported to the West under the Shah's pro-Western rule, is now intended to secure Iran's national independence.

Saab wants to know more about it and asks women about the chador, which some of them wore before the revolution. The alcohol ban imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini is not followed by a drug-free society; instead, heroin and opium circulate secretly. In Tehran's prostitution district of Shahr-e No, which was evacuated after the revolution, a sex worker seeks shelter in a garbage container. A student tells how he discovered mysticism in exile in England. Pictures of Arafat and Khomeini hang side by side on the wall of his room. Ali Shariati, the “Marx of Iran,” linked Islam and social revolution. Shortly afterwards, a madrasa can be seen in which the patriarchs of the theocratic republic form their offspring. The overthrow has happened, but the liberation has not: Towards the end of the film, Saab travels to the Kurds in the west and northwest of Iran. There the Peshmerga – “those who face death” – experience the continuation of the old subordination.

Different setting, different form of survival: “Égypte, la cité des morts” (1977) leads through the inhabited city of the dead. People cook, talk, laugh and live between the tombs and mausoleums at the Cairo cemetery. A girl dances in front of a 7-Up can, another explains that life is much better here than among the living - there are no cars at the cemetery, but there is plenty of space to play. This is also the case with the children in "Les Enfants de la guerre" from 1976. They don't play cowboys and Indians, but Phalangists against Palestinians. They build rifles and grenade launchers out of wood, interspersed with pictures of past war events. Saab takes away their sound and slows down their movements.

The conclusion of the Viennale special was the film essay “Revolutionaries Never Die” by the Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi from 2026. Saab invited him to collaborate in October 2018, but she had already died in January 2019. His film is a belated response to a message that no longer arrived - as a tribute to an unforgettable revolutionary of cinematic reportage.

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