re:assemblage collective

r e : a s s e m b l a g e c o l l e c t i v e

We are itinerant and intentional-- "reassembling" assumptions about artist film/video practices: who is shown and the forms of works championed.

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― DIFFUSION 4: Jocelyne Saab + Basma Al-Sharif, 113' ―
Guest curated by: Kaleem Hawa

Jocelyne Saab’s challenging and complicated late film Once Upon a Time in Beirut (1995), attempts to make sense of Arab image-making after the formal conclusion of the Lebanese civil war. In the film, Yasmine (Michèle Tyan) and Leila (Myrna Makaron) ride in a taxicab to visit the mysterious Monsieur Farouk (Emile Accar), an aging projectionist inspired as a child by silent films and Westerns to run several cinemas across Beirut. He welcomes them and leaves them to explore his archive, seemingly of every film ever made of Lebanon: “They told us you were Beirut’s living memory,” the girls say among the celluloid.

What ensues is a montage of scenes from more than thirty films spanning a century of cinema, culled from about four hundred collected for the project, with Yasmine and Leila occasionally inserted in asides to offer homilies on love or history. The scenes Saab selected flood the eye: the corniche, the aerodrome, wake surfers dragged by motorboats; leather merchants and colonial soldiers with orders; forbidden loves with Bedouin beys or gangsters; seductions, trysts, funerals, and marriages across musicals, melodramas, and spy thrillers; the 1930s and 1950s and 1960s draped in Fairuz, Farid al-Atrash, and Serge Gainsbourg.

The screening will be preceded by the Basma al-Sharif short
O, Persecuted (2014), which is a recovery and adaptation of Kassem Hawal’s Our Small Houses (1974), a resistance film that had been presumed to be lost. A discussion will follow, focused on both the strengths and limitations of Saab’s film, critiques of its politics, and an assessment of its intervention into questions of spectacle and the image in Lebanon. -Kaleem Hawa

This event is supported and co-presented by York University's Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies with funding support through a SSHRC Connection Grant.

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Indoor Screening
10 August 2024 · 6:00pm screening
Bechir/Yerex Presentation Space · 452-401 Richmond St. West, Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

کان یا مکان، بیروت ( Il était une fois Beyrouth, histoire d’une star) (Once Upon A Time: Beirut, the History of a Star)·
Jocelyne Saab O, Persecuted · Basma al-Sharif

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کان یا مکان، بیروت ( Il était une fois Beyrouth, histoire d’une star) (Once Upon A Time: Beirut, the History of a Star)

Directed by Jocelyne Saab
Lebanon · 1994 · 101'00