Beirut Outtakes (2007), by Peggy Ahwesh

This beautiful film is cut from pieces of film found in an abandoned movie theater in Beirut. The film clips appear to show segments of newsreels, advertisements and trailers for films that one might have seen a Beirut theater in the 1950s, 60′s and 70′s.

What is eerie about Ahwesh’s video is not only the glimpse we get at life in Beirut before years of constant war, but also the strange combination of violence (American westerns), Orientalist sexuality (gyrating belly dancers), and feminine domesticity (women shopping for home appliances). This cocktail of violence, sexuality and domesticity seems so painfully modern, so appropriate for a forward-looking city, ‘the Paris of the Middle East.’ Ahwesh’s film is a cloudy mirror, a surface which shows us the reversed, distorted, but absolutely accurate image of what we are (not) now.

This is “NOW” (1965) a short film by Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez. The song in the film is called NOW, and is sung by civil rights activist, Lena Horne, (who also performs in the video clip below, with another civil rights activist, Kermit the Frog). A classic archive of the civil rights struggle in the cities of the United States of America.

What I find interesting about the film, is how it is composed almost entirely of still images, mostly photos that one might find in the newspapers of the period. Simple materials, but the rhythmic editing, matched to the intensity of the music, produces a remarkably moving effect. Alvarez was a master of using found materials. As he once said: “Give me two photographs, a moviola and some music and I’ll make you a film.”

Now, Now, Now, Now, Now, Now, NOW IS THE TIME. THE TIME IS…NOW!

Martin Luther King Day, New York City, 2010

…and now i am an alien in my own land

One day, a couple of weeks ago, anxious, shut-in and tired of reading, I went to the movies in the middle of the day. Film forum was my theater of choice. It was the opening day for “Of time and the city,” Terence Davies’ new film.

It was a dreamy experience, not least of all because I was in a movie theater at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and discovered a whole other world of daytime art-film-goers: people who hacked and coughed constantly, and hissed “Quiet!” at the least sound of popcorn crackling; people who wheezed and snored softly; people who grimaced at the thought that someone might try to share their row.

The movie was composed almost entirely of archival footage of Davies’ hometown, Liverpool, in the years of his childhood and young adulthood. Elements of the film are simply the archival footage, the sound of the director’s voice, and the music. Sound like documentary? It’s not. It’s better.

To listen to Terence Davies talk about his archival practice,

I said, when we were cutting it, ‘cut it like fiction.’ And then it has a subtext, that’s an emotional subtext, which people either get or they don’t, they like it or they don’t, but cut it as fiction. And then, then, it becomes ellipses, and that is really exciting because it’s not: ‘this happened, that happened, this happened.’ It doesn’t become that. It becomes an emotional journey, and real– The difference between film and television is, in film you go on a journey; in television they tell you where you’re going.