Dwarfed by the behemoth of Egyptian cinema, more or less ignored in the rise and subsequent heyday of Beirut as one of the elite intellectual capitals of the Arab world, and, finally, relegated to near oblivion by conflict and its aftermath, the study of Lebanese films made in the 1950s and 1960s can nevertheless contribute in critical ways to the construction of a coherent narrative of the decades between Lebanon's formal independence (1943) and the outbreak of civil war (1975).Footnote 1 As cultural artifacts deeply embedded in modernity and popular culture, films and their reception can play a significant role in elaborating the manner in which specific cultures experienced—and expressed—global modernity during a crucial moment in their postindependence, postcolonial histories.Footnote 2 Indeed, cross-disciplinary research on popular culture in the Middle East by a vast range of scholars, including Walter Armbrust, Ziad Fahmy, Joel Gordon, and Lila Abu-Lughod convincingly argues that ignoring popular media and its cultural reception forecloses an important dimension of understanding culture beyond elite, literary institutions, in particular for the predigital past.Footnote 3
In Lebanon, attempts to understand the lived priorities of the 1950s and 1960s are hobbled by the challenge of finding archival material.Footnote 4 Histories of the period following independence from French Mandate rule have focused on economics and politics, often carefully reconstructed from colonial archives. In recent years, however, historians such as Ziad Abu-Rish have argued that a local social and cultural history of those decades is crucial because it allows us to reframe war-oriented narrative teleologies of Lebanon as a site where not much happens in between episodes of externally triggered internecine violence.Footnote 5 In this article, I contend that close readings of films from the era, coupled with an analysis of their impact on filmgoers and critics alike, can illuminate concerns imperceptible in the historical record. The study of film and parafilmic content such as reviews, posters, or advertisements, can be a crucial component in sensitively reconstructing the popular concerns of a particular historical moment. It enables a glimpse into the topics, subjects, and anxieties that mattered within a national culture during a given era.Footnote 6 In the case of Lebanon, extant films and parafilmic material from the prewar decades suggest a cultural anxiety about emigration—a topic overlooked in most studies of Lebanon during the 1950s to the early 1970s—that threads together multiple decades of the nation's history.
The challenge of using cinema to explore a cultural mood in a country such as Lebanon with a limited visual archive is twofold. Film, which is flammable and degrades rather quickly, has been especially vulnerable to the vicissitudes of neglect and conflict. Moreover, the lack of a national archive or interest in collecting popular cinema and parafilmic material means that many of these films and their paraphernalia are no longer accessible. For example, we must rely on secondary accounts for the filmic romances of Mohammad Salman, Georges Kahi, and Michel Haroun, all released between 1950 and 1957. These accounts dismiss their poor production quality, flimsy plots, and bad acting, but do not provide a lot of detail about the films' contents, complicating critical formal analysis.Footnote 7 Ila Ayn? (Where To?), George Nasser's 1957 film that is the main subject of this article, is an exception in two ways. Firstly, the film has been preserved. Secondly, it was considered worthy of serious critical analysis by the mainstream press.Footnote 8 It inaugurates, as observers note, a moment in Lebanese cinema that is often linked to the rise of a national, “Lebanese,” cinema.Footnote 9 This moment, as I show in the rest of this article, is itself not disconnected from the rise of film as a worthy subject in Lebanese general- and special-interest publications. Thus, one of the stories that Ila Ayn? recounts is the story of the constitution of the objects, main actors, and discourses of a new field of cultural production.Footnote 10
The second challenge is an analytical one. Most scholarship—and it is scant—on prewar Lebanese cinema consists of filmographies and film summaries rather than close readings of the films themselves.Footnote 11 Yet, recent scholarship in cinema and affect studies demonstrates that an interest in the cultural effects of films should not foreclose a commitment and attention to form.Footnote 12 Eugenie Brinkema shows how readings of cinema that make affective claims are heavily informed by the branch of affect theory that pays attention to the emotional affects they have on viewers, but often tend to sideline form, or the details of the films themselves.Footnote 13 However, Brinkema argues that an analysis that attends to both cinematic effects and the ways cinematic affect is produced formally can more sharply elucidate an ongoing conversation between a film and its audience(s). In the case of Lebanon, extant films and the articles that were written about them suggest a cultural anxiety about emigration that is not visible in political discourses of that era. In this article, I combine both approaches to show how Ila Ayn? and, to a lesser extent, Henri Barakat's 1967 Safar Barlik are embedded and participate, in ways overt and tacit, in discussions over the deleterious effects of emigration on Lebanon.
With the aura of international recognition garnered from being the first Lebanese film screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Ila Ayn? was covered extensively in the Lebanese press. Based on a screenplay partly cowritten by noted novelist Yusuf Habshi al-Ashqar, the film tells the story of a family whose father emigrates in the hope of making his fortune in Brazil. His family loses all touch with him. Twenty years later, his youngest son prepares to follow in his footsteps, to his family's consternation. As he does so, a stranger appears in the village, a returned emigrant who is mortally ill. Ila Ayn? highlights emigration as a peril on the individual and collective scale. In doing this, it continues a long history of Lebanese cultural engagement with emigration, in which film was the most recent participant.
Emigration is a recurring keyword in Lebanese culture, including cinema. Indeed, the most striking aspect of prewar Lebanese cinema, and most writing about it, is its deep entanglement since its infancy with the experience and representation of migration. In her 1966 overview of Lebanese cinema, Lucienne Khoury describes emigration as “a Lebanese subject.”Footnote 14 For her part, Kiki Kennedy-Day observes that the first Lebanese film, Mughamarat Ilyas Mabruk (The Adventures of Ilyas Mabruk, 1929), dealt with the subject of emigration and return, and states that “exile and migration … ha[ve] a particular poignancy in Lebanese films.”Footnote 15
Although Mughamarat Ilyas Mabruk is long gone, extant newspaper articles emphasize how cinema emerged as an especially potent medium for communicating the perils of emigration to a moviegoing audience; indeed, film critique became a conduit for expressing anxieties about the deleterious effects of emigration on the nation. For example, in summarizing Mughamarat Ilyas Mabruk upon its release in 1929, the Beirut-based daily newspaper al-Maʿrad (The Exhibition) describes the film as a “miniature image of Lebanese life” (ṣū ra mu ṣaghghara li-l-ḥayāt al-lubnāniyya).Footnote 16 The article goes on to describe how those who participated in making the film, “served their country to the utmost, by exposing the defects [ʿuyūb] of emigrating, and urging people to stop emigrating and to hold on to the little plot of land that they own in their homeland [masqa ṭ raʾsihim].”Footnote 17 Al-Maʿrad's use of such emotive language as ʿuyūb to describe emigration speaks to a structure of feelings, a cultural anxiety about the effects of emigration on Lebanon itself as it was “actively lived and felt,” and a hopeful sense that this new art form could perhaps intervene to effectuate social and cultural change.Footnote 18 The emotive language of such articles in the popular press adds an affective dimension to the topic of Lebanese cinema's depictions of emigration, which connects form—what films are, and how they convey meaning—to affect—what films do to the audiences they address.
The issue of audience raises a crucial point about Lebanese cultural productions during the heyday of Lebanese nationalist, postcolonial culture in the 1950s and 1960s, which is its relationship to formal attempts to engage the vast Lebanese diaspora. Historically, emigration has long been a subject of Lebanese print and popular culture; since the nah ḍa, Lebanese journals that fictionalized and represented cycles of migration circulated between Lebanon and the diaspora.Footnote 19 Having ebbed in the 1930s and 1940s from its peak in the years of Ottoman rule over Lebanon, emigration from Lebanon intensified again in the 1950s.Footnote 20 During that time, the Lebanese government became actively involved in diaspora outreach.Footnote 21 This outreach included sending emissaries to diasporic communities abroad as well as hosting government-sponsored conferences for members of the diaspora in Lebanon.Footnote 22
Cultural productions played a role in the articulation of a shared national Lebanese culture for Lebanese abroad and at home. For example, the Rahbani play Bayyaʿ al-Khawatim (The Ring Seller, 1964) premiered at the first nationally sponsored conference on and for the Lebanese diaspora. In fact, Christopher Stone notes that a “diasporic audience became central to the fame of Fairouz and the Rahbani brothers,” and that the latter often staged events designed “to remind the Lebanese migrant of his Lebaneseness.”Footnote 23 Bayyaʿ al-Khawatim was made into a film the following year, directed by Yusuf Shahin. It is an allegory of the village/nation banding together in order to negotiate and mitigate an outside threat, albeit one that is artificial. Safar Barlik, the brothers' second film, is a musical national romance that pits the plucky and brave inhabitants of a Lebanese mountain village against the Ottomans and their local minions. It, too, was directed by an Egyptian in temporary exile from ʿAbd al-Nasir's Egypt, Henri Barakat.Footnote 24
As Lebaneseness was exported to the diaspora, internally, emigration also colored the cultural and social conversation. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore all the ways in which emigration occupied the Lebanese popular imaginary during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, even the most cursory glance at the literature of that period—including novels by rising stars of the local literary scene such as Emily Nasrallah, Yusuf Habshi al-Ashqar, and Tawfiq Yusuf ʿAwwad—reveals a recurrent engagement with the social effects of internal rural–urban migration and with emigration. Collectively, these cultural artifacts cast doubt on the dominant cultural narratives of the postindependence period in Lebanon as one of hopeful nation-state building in which the idealized village stood for the nation, and instead, throw an anxious shadow over Lebanon's golden age. Ila Ayn? exemplifies the anxieties circling around emigration during that time.Footnote 25 The film and its reception illuminate the discussion around emigration from Lebanon, and the worries over the newly independent, politically frail nation during the 1950s; these worries were certainly exacerbated by growing rates of internal and external migration.Footnote 26
Ila Ayn? and the media accounts that circulated around it reinforce the argument that critical attention should be paid to the ways that anxieties about emigration permeate different genres of Lebanese mainstream culture. These texts need to be taken seriously both for what they explicitly express, and for the affects embedded into, and enabled by, their forms. For example, al-ʿArusa (The Bride), a film magazine that sought to produce a film-literate public, praised Ila Ayn? for being “the first Lebanese film to represent reality, and to tackle the problem that is Lebanon's most significant issue, the problem of emigration that Lebanon suffers from since half of its sons have left, ambitiously seeking their fortune.”Footnote 27 One way to understand the hyperbole of the phrase “half of its sons have left” is as a symptom of the impact that emigration from Lebanon had during the second half of the 1950s. The exaggeration is echoed in an interview with Nasser given at the time he made Ila Ayn?, in which the director declares that he was inspired to make the film because thousands of individuals were leaving Lebanon each month. Film scholar David Livingston corrects Nasser's hyperbole, mentioning that the actual numbers were closer to 6,000 annually.Footnote 28 What Livingston disregards is how much Nasser's hyperbolic utterance underlines the affective impact of this number. To Nasser, and to the Lebanese of the 1950s, who were experiencing a fourfold increase in emigration numbers, mostly to Africa and the Arab Gulf, it felt like thousands of people were leaving the country every month.Footnote 29 The effect was more overwhelming in mountain villages, which were rapidly emptying out to urban migration. Dismissing this anxiety without attending to its cultural urgency and resonance—or to the manner in which it played out in cultural forms like cinema—prematurely forecloses a potentially valuable research avenue. By paying attention to the way that Ila Ayn? uses and adapts formal film techniques such as allegory and neorealist melodrama to express its anxieties about the nation and to the manner in which this allegory was used by the film's critics and Lebanon's cultural elite to, in turn, publicize their own anxieties about the state of the nation in the late 1950s, we broaden our understanding of the issues of the decade. Read alongside the ambivalent ending of a deeply nationalist fantasy such as Safar Barlik, which I turn to in the article's conclusion, such attention to film content and technique sheds light on the manner contemporaneous concerns were produced and disseminated in different filmic genres, and calls into question some of the assumptions often made about Lebanon during the prewar period.
Mapping the Nation through Landscapes of Suffering
Studies of cultural expressions of affect, including this one, owe much to Raymond Williams's pioneering work on structures of feelings, which has been developed into one branch of affect theory that takes seriously the connection between form, affect, and politics. Often, Williams notes, cultural texts like films describe emergent social concerns that contain the first expressions of an ineffable sense of “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.”Footnote 30 Lauren Berlant links such kinds of texts to an intervention in the national sphere, emphasizing the connection between text, affect, and nation.Footnote 31 Cultural texts, Berlant suggests, are responsible for, among other things, producing “a constellation of national signs [in part] to provide for the people a National Symbolic, the common language of common space.”Footnote 32 For Berlant, the national symbolic binds affect to political life through producing “national fantasy,” the “images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness.”Footnote 33 In Lebanon, one such national symbolic, critically described and deconstructed by Christopher Stone, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and others, is the Rahbani aesthetic of the idealized mountain village that, through musical theater, pop songs, and eventually cinema, became more entrenched in the popular imaginary.Footnote 34 Of course, as Christopher Stone's work shows, this idealized village had to be produced on a soundstage for Bayyaʿ al-Khawatim, and cobbled together from different villages for Safar Barlik, which was filmed on location.Footnote 35 Nevertheless, this fantasy of a physical location “with red-tiled, stone-walled and old arch-replete houses,” as well as the village-as-symbol of “the nation … [and] the land as an area incompatible with tyranny,” came to predominate mainstream Lebanese culture.Footnote 36
Even as one strand of the national fantasy propagates its own particular version of social and national cohesion, another circulates through the collective consciousness alongside it. In Lebanon, this was the narrative of emigration and the toll that it took upon the individual, the family, and by extension, the nation.Footnote 37 Less fantasy than nightmare, it was nonetheless an idea that took hold alongside the national fantasies promoted by the state in the Shamʿun era, set against a moment of heightened sectarian tensions, Cold War politics, and the economic, social, and political fragility of the new nation-state.Footnote 38 In fact, this work is at its most affecting—and effective—when it appropriates the symbols of the national fantasy to cast doubt on the viability of the nation. In a film like Ila Ayn?, this entails simultaneously invoking and then calling into question the mythology of the mountain by reinserting the material reality of labor, and the visual realties of previous economic cycles of boom and bust into the visual landscape, and from there, into the collective consciousness.
Like literary culture almost a century earlier, as Arab cinema developed, film took on the role of cognitive mapping, inscribing “an audience's sense of national identity and firmly establish[ing] its emblems on their cognitive map.”Footnote 39 In Lebanese film and in regional films about Lebanon, the mountain and the sea were the most obvious symbols of that kind of cognitive mapping.Footnote 40 But, all too often, terms such as “mountain nationalism” and “mountain romance” are used as self-evident and self-contained analytic categories without probing more deeply into their mechanics, logics, and internal workings.Footnote 41 Like many keywords that resonate in socio-cultural analysis, over time the terms have become a shorthand for a politically and aesthetically conservative, mostly Christian, cultural hegemony that prioritizes the mountain and its values over the city. For example, in her history of the Lebanese cinema, Dima El Horr contends that the reason that prewar Lebanese films failed to compete locally against Egyptian, American, or European films was because Lebanese directors focused too strongly on village living, and failed to engage critically with “the city and its tensions.”Footnote 42 El Horr, like many media critics, cites in particular the Rahbanis for creating the utopian ideal of the mountain village during a time when migration from the villages was rampant.Footnote 43 Critiques of the Rahbani oeuvre are extensive, and mostly valid, but even in the most saccharine, utopian, and triumphalist nationalist works, a barely repressed, residual anxiety surfaces, as I argue in the conclusion of this article. Rather than write these texts off as simplistic, insignificant, or uncomplicated, I suggest, instead, that returning to them with a critical eye reveals much of the cultural anxieties and tensions of that turbulent political period. An engagement with the genres and forms of these texts reveals the way in which they self-awaredly use formal techniques—in cinema, these are most often visual- and sound-scapes—to critique and complicate the very tropes they are meant to be unthinkingly reproducing.
Ila Ayn?, like many neorealist films, lays claim to a kind of authenticity of setting, location, and subject matter. “It would be difficult to find a frame as free of all artifice as the beautiful and austere mountain that is the true face of Lebanon,” gushed one of the film's reviewers.Footnote 44 But of course, this onscreen verisimilitude was meticulously crafted. For example, as the film starts, there is a sequence of establishing shots, so-named because they establish setting and location. These are of different parts of Lebanon, from the mountains to the Mediterranean, cut together in a manner that makes them seem seamless. Yet, there is nothing neutral about landscapes, which have, as W. J. T. Mitchell points out, been used to situate and frame identity for centuries, most effectively when they “naturalize a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable.”Footnote 45 Ila Ayn’s establishing shots of an unspoiled natural landscape seem to uncritically feed into narratives of the Lebanese mountain as a pristine and idyllic site, limited only by the sky and the Mediterranean sea. These shots tap into what was already an established visual narrative in Arab cinema.Footnote 46 Establishing shots illuminate the relationships between characters and place; moreover, in situating their characters, they also situate the audience in a specific place.Footnote 47 In Ila Ayn?, the sequence of establishing shots of the Lebanese mountain landscape positions the characters within the village, and the village within the nation. The establishing shots set up a spatial paradigm of nation-village-family by moving sequentially from the national to the familial. For an audience already primed to see the village as the nation, the film's opening sequence highlights that this is not the story of one family, but rather a broader story about the nation itself.
But, closer examination of the way the mountain is figured in Ila Ayn? reveals a looming anxiety instead of an idyllic revelry. The film's establishing opening shots are of wide vistas, pine tree forests, and the Mediterranean Sea, but as the action gets going, the landscape that comes to the fore is the semiarid, terraced landscape of the Lebanese farming village. In the film, the village is always associated with back-breaking manual labor and the ruined landscape of earlier bust-and-boom economic cycles. This visually reinforces the village's desolateness and paradoxically, despite the film's best efforts, the younger son's argument that he needs to leave it in order to improve his life. Moreover, the village is always rendered as empty, save for the family members and the stranger. In this way, it is far from the socially cohesive, vibrant, and welcoming place that the imaginary of the mountain always strives to make it.
As the film proceeds, it begins to explore visually a landscape that belies its opening scenes in other ways, reinforcing the earlier emphasis on suffering, and in particular the suffering connected to labor. Where the opening shots focus on laden vines and other images of natural plenitude, as the film proceeds, the rural landscape is linked with labor that is too hard for the characters who remained behind to do. While the initial scene (in which the father decides to emigrate) is framed against the backdrop of the sea twinkling below the mountains, and is a portrait of rural idyll, the farming scenes shot after the father's departure use the semiarid rocky landscape as a backdrop. Most of the scenes in which the family discusses their poor health, and their concerns about being able to continue to farm in the absence of both the father and son, are set in the farming terraces, and feature not the harvest, the successful culmination of farm work, but rather the work of weeding, which is all about identifying and attempting to mitigate threat. In all of these scenes, the difficulty of the work is emphasized. By focusing on this arduous labor and the physical toll that it takes on the women who remain to do it in the absence of emigrant men, Nasser's camera subtly critiques the reality behind the stereotypes of mountainous idyll usually associated with visual renditions of Lebanon's mountain villages in Egyptian and earlier Lebanese cinema.
The other striking location choice that the film makes ties the village not only to its present, but also to the past. Many of the pivotal encounters in Ila Ayn? are staged in the ruins of an old stone home that looks out onto the Mediterranean. Farid, the youngest son who is determined to emigrate, often is filmed there, looking out to sea. The site is where he first encounters the stranger. Symbolically, the ruined home is, of course, a metaphor for the ruins of the family that emigration has wrought. But ruins are not neutral objects in a landscape. They visually suggest previous cycles of destruction, such as the 1860 civil war, which triggered waves of migration from Mount Lebanon, or the collapse of the silk-based monoculture economy that led to the second huge wave of migration.Footnote 48 The ruin works to emphasize the poverty of village life, and to situate it visually within a cyclical history of destruction. They also place the film in conversation with the classical trope of the aṭlāl, the ruins of a beloved's abode and a past to which one cannot return. In Ila Ayn?, the ruin adds to the sense of the nation as a ruined home.
In representing the ruin, and the harsh landscape, not only does the film gesture to local and cultural pasts, but it also raises a question relating to futurity that it asks in its title, and that it returns to in its ending. Jacques Derrida writes that to examine the haunting of the present by the past is also to interrogate the future:
Without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?” This question arrives, it questions with regard to what will come in futures-to-come.Footnote 49
Derrida's questions in this quotation invoke verbatim the Arabic title of the film, and the question implied by the title, left open in the film's closing scene. As the stranger leaves the house, the camera films him from inside the room where Farid is convalescing in a tracking shot in which the camera moves from one window to the other in the room. It is true that the camera's perspective is shot from the inside; it, like the family, and unlike the stranger, occupies the domestic sphere, while he has to travel the path into the unknown, his action invoking the rhetorical question of the film's title. But, from the inside looking outside, the view is of barred windows. Even as it highlights the stranger's alienation and outsider status, the framing of the shot through the bars simultaneously suggests a domestic entrapment and enclosure, as if the home is a prison, and not a cozy space. Those inside are trapped by the socio-economic realities of farm labor, limited educational options, and traditional gender roles, while those outside are doomed by leaving, the film suggests, as the rhetorical question asked in the title looms larger, encompassing not only the stranger walking away, but also the family and the country. Without resolving the traumas of the past, or the haunting of the present by those absentees, what question can be asked of the future except where are we all going? This seems a fitting question for a film released a few months before the outbreak of civil conflict in 1958.Footnote 50
Naming and the National Allegory
I have already suggested that the establishing shots of Ila Ayn? emphasize the connection between family and nation by moving sequentially from the national scale to the familial. Its chosen genre, neorealist melodrama, does the same by moving in reverse direction.Footnote 51 Like many filmic melodramas that use family drama to query specific national narratives, Ila Ayn? explores the deleterious effects of emigration by focusing on one family.Footnote 52 At the beginning of the film, a young farmer is trying to decide whether to emigrate from Lebanon. Finally persuaded, he leaves his family—a wife and two sons named Saʿid and Farid—behind and emigrates to Brazil. The film briefly depicts the lives of the family as the children are young, and the boys' friendship with the neighbor's young daughter, Amal. Flash forward to their adulthood, the mother has aged, and both brothers are in love with Amal, who is a hardworking peasant with some family drama of her own, as her brother has also emigrated and left his familial responsibilities behind. Before the ambitious Farid has a chance to ask her to marry him, Saʿid does, and the couple wed in a long scene. During the wedding, the audience learns that Farid is planning to emigrate to Brazil, just as his father has. Following the wedding, he begins to prepare for the journey. Farid's departure is a growing source of tension in the family: his mother does not want to lose him as she did his father. Her health begins to fail under the twinned duress of the hard physical farm labor she has had to do throughout her life in her husband's absence, and Farid's imminent departure.Footnote 53 In the last third of the film, Farid meets a homeless stranger who lives in the ruins of an old village home that the youth often retreats to, and who tries to warn him against the perils of emigrating.
Ben Singer argues persuasively that melodrama is a genre that fully embraces its own affective impulses and, moreover, cultivates them in its audience. Singer furthermore connects melodrama to “the anxieties of a society experiencing unprecedented moral, cultural, and socioeconomic disarray.”Footnote 54 Carla Marcantonio builds on this to argue that global melodramas, including the Italian neorealism that Nasser cites as an influence, used the form to express—and, crucially, generate—anxieties about the nation and national identity in an increasingly globalized world.Footnote 55 Both Singer and Marcantonio consider melodrama to be tied to the nation-state through its use of allegory and in the way it “allows audiences to make sense of the ways in which globalization has reorganized our affective and sociopolitical domains.”Footnote 56 Nasser's film harnesses many of the conventions of neorealist filmmaking, including location shooting, a minimalistic score, and the use of nonprofessional actors to illuminate the effect of generations of migration on village communities through a depiction of a family affected by it across two generations. The film deliberately presents itself as an allegory of Lebanon. Significantly, it was understood as such by contemporaneous critics.
Ila Ayn? explicitly presents itself as a national allegory in the Jamesonian definition of a text in which “the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society.”Footnote 57 The film's characters are archetypes: the honest farmer, the ambitious younger brother, the suffering mother, and the absent father, who significantly, doesn't have a name, and who describes himself as “one of thousands who left the country [sēfaro], and who are in the same condition.” It is this father's absence that looms over the film's first third, when the boys are young, shattering the heteronormative family unit at the heart of the national fantasy and suggesting that this is a communal hardship. Although the national allegory—especially in the postcolonial context—has had a complicated critical trajectory, in a more recent piece, Brian Larkin recuperates the form, arguing that, in fact, sometimes texts—including films—do indeed operate as national allegories. They do so, Larkin says, on two simultaneous levels: in the manner that the text presents itself, and in the manner that people understand it as such. “Allegory is not always a feature immanent to a text,” Larkin points out, “but is something texts have placed upon them through the act of circulation across cultural difference.”Footnote 58 It is clear that Ila Ayn’s characters and plot were deliberately crafted for allegorical resonance. And it is also clear that contemporaneous Lebanese critics of the film saw the film as a national allegory dealing with, as one critic put it at the time, “the eternal problem between the Lebanese land and migration.”Footnote 59
As the 1950s wound on, the disarray wreaked by emigration was an integral part of the cultural conversation. On the one hand, as this article argues, this is a narrative that Ila Ayn? helped disseminate through its form and through Nasser's many press interviews. But the emotional resonance, omnipresence, and impact of this social phenomenon on the culture more broadly is also apparent in the language of the reviews of the film. Together, the film and its reception illuminate the affective impact of emigration as a subject in popular culture. The Arabic language daily al-Nahar (The Day) describes the film as “a tale of the tragedy that the Lebanese have suffered from [maʾsāt ʿānaha al-lubnānī] for over a quarter century, and continue to suffer from to this day. The tragedy is emigration to beyond the seas.”Footnote 60 In the Francophone Le Jour (The Day), the author describes emigration as “an easy mirage that dupes too many Lebanese who, instead of the promised ‘Eldorado’ only find misery and hardship,” and posits the film as a way “to warn them [the Lebanese chasing Eldorado] against this false attraction.”Footnote 61 Its chosen subject matter, Le Jour stated, made Ila Ayn? “an essentially Lebanese film” (un film essentiellement libanais). Footnote 62 The choice of words such as tragedy, misery, and hardship to describe the Lebanese national condition belie narratives of the golden era, and underscore the deep anxiety over emigration in the culture.
While the film's subject matter drew emotional reactions from the mainstream press, its formal components caught the attention of the nascent film magazine al-ʿArusa, which then set out to didactically explain the allegorical resonances of Ila Ayn? to its readership. Seeking to educate its readership in the ways of cinema, the magazine explains that, like all neorealist films, Ila Ayn? is concerned with a specific theme, the true hero of the film, derived “from the life of a people, or the way in which a nation lives” (ḥayāt shaʿb aw ṭarī qat ma ʿīshat umma).Footnote 63 The article goes on to exclaim that “Ila Ayn? is the first Lebanese film to represent reality, and to tackle the problem that is Lebanon's most significant issue, the problem of emigration that Lebanon suffers from since half of its sons have left, ambitiously seeking their fortune.”Footnote 64 In a series of photo captions, the article explains the characters of the film by what they are supposed to represent. For example, “the mother, represents to the utmost faithfulness the life of the village woman who has been left behind by her emigrant husband,” “the happy couple, happy in their beautiful village and their good land,” and “the model of the ambitious Lebanese youth.” The captions move back and forth between the actors' names and their characters, further blurring the distinction between individuals and their allegorical characters. The characters' names also carry an allegorical resonance. Saʿid, the eldest, means “happy,” and such is Saʿid, happy with his lot as a farmer in the village. Amal, Saʿid's beloved wife, is indeed, in her capacity as a young bride who is pregnant with the couple's first child by the end of the film, the repository and symbol of the hope represented in her name. Saʿid and Amal are the happy, hopeful couple who are committed to remaining in Lebanon to work the land and bear children. They form the heteronormative, heteronational fantasy at the heart of the film; indeed, the sequence filming their wedding is over nine minutes long, approximately a tenth of the film's run, and the only time that the camera focuses on happiness and on the village as a holistic community, rather than the family as a unit under siege.
Haunted by ghurba
But of course, in true melodramatic style, Saʿid and Amal's matrimonial happiness—while lengthily observed—is short-lived, due to Farid's decision to emigrate, which happens at the end of the wedding scene and transforms the couple's—and village's—joy towards anxiety. Here, too, the allegorical resonance of the name is important. Farid means “unique” or “one of a kind”; of course, while the irony is that Farid's desire to emigrate is not unique to him, the boy's name nevertheless emphasizes that he is apart from the rest of the community. It is here that a close reading of specific cinematographic choices shows how Ila Ayn? mobilizes some of the traditions of the neorealist melodrama, such as male suffering and estrangement, while departing from others, such as an emphasis on recognition, in order to produce its own cinematic language to depict the ravages of emigration.
From the beginning, the film suggests that the migrant is, in some ways, always already estranged from his community. Emphasizing Farid's uniqueness cinematographically, Ila Ayn? often frames Farid apart from the others. In the opening scene where the boys are children, the mother is milking a cow as Saʿid and Amal are playing on the steps of the home. Meanwhile, at the top of the frame, Farid is beating a bird cage, and frightening the birds. Not only does the action—heavily symbolic in itself, and for which his brother and mother scold him—mark him as different, so does the framing. As the film progresses and the boys age, Farid is often filmed on the edge of the frame, in it, but teetering on the edge of breaking free. This is true whether he is with the family or hanging out with his friends. These shots' unbalanced composition marks him as distant from his family and from his village.Footnote 65 Even before he has left, his desire to leave has set him apart. Thus, the film suggests, even the desire to emigrate is foreshadowed as an estrangement from the family, friends, and village life.
In the global melodramas that arose in the model of Italian neorealism across the world, male suffering is emphasized. This emphasis, Catherine Marcantonio argues, “points to the imagined loss of potency of the nation-state in the context of globalization,” and is often represented cinematically in the depiction of bodies.Footnote 66 Implicit to Marcantonio's observation is that, in nationalist cultural texts, when female bodies suffer, things will be set right by patriarchal norms; male suffering, on the other hand, poses a more open-ended dilemma to the nation. Ila Ayn? is not a film that seeks to complicate essentialist gendered symbols.Footnote 67 Within it, both female and male bodies suffer as a result of emigration. The women in the film suffer from the work that they have to take on despite their physical weakness in the absence of men—intriguingly, this is also the case for Saʿid, who is told that he is too thin and weak to donate blood. In its formal choices, however, the film pays particular attention to male suffering, both physical and emotional. The faces of the two main male protagonists, Farid and the stranger, are mostly shot in medium-close up, allowing their deep emotional anguish to register. As symbols of the nation's sad past and its anxious future, the returned emigrant and Farid represent all of the anxieties over migration that the film musters.
Ila Ayn? renders migration a form of complete and utter estrangement from family and village life. Yet, interestingly, it seems to posit migration as both fate and inevitability, prefiguring this through its portrayal of Farid, who in one crucial scene describes this desire as a compulsion bigger than, and separate from, himself. As the film foreshadows Farid's estrangement, it also depicts migration as a process that renders the familiar strange through the figure of the unknown stranger who arrives in the village. In English, estrangement and stranger share a Latin origin in which to estrange is to treat as a stranger. In Arabic, estrangement is connoted in the word ghurba, which is also alienation, and the word for a place of exile, for not-home. As it does in English, ghurba shares a root with the word for stranger, gharīb. In a pivotal dialogue, Ila Ayn? plays on the Arabic connection between these two words to reinforce its thesis that to emigrate is to render oneself alien, and then to be doubly alienated as a gharīb (a stranger) if or when one returns:
Farid: “Are you a stranger?”(inta ghar īb?)
Stranger: “Yes, I am a stranger. Originally from the village”
Farid: “Don't you have any friends here?”
Stranger: “I thought I did. I didn't find them”
All the while, the man's eyes are hidden by the wide brim of his hat, and his face is half obscured by shadow, as it remains throughout the film. The choice to obscure half of his face creates a chiaroscuro effect that emphasizes the somber and mysterious nature of the man's identity, but also casts him half in the world of the film, and half out of it. Though the characters of the film do not recognize him, the audience has seen the homeless stranger twice before, in the scene immediately preceding this conversation, and also at the very beginning of the film when he was wearing more traditional clothing and making the decision to emigrate, leaving his family behind. In the previous scene, the stranger walks up to the family home, as if to knock on the door, before being interrupted by an argument. Farid and his mother are fighting about his plans to leave the country. The film cuts between the staged drama of the interior domestic scene, and the face outside. The man begins to react to the argument: his lips tremble. Towards the end, when the mother screams at her child that his goal of locating his absent father is ridiculous—“After twenty years? What are you going to say? What if he's dead?”—the man is filmed with his face half in shadow. He pauses, then hangs his head. Slowly, he turns away from the house and begins to walk dejectedly down the path, the camera filming him taking slow, unsteady steps. For the audience, the encounter is further mediated by dramatic irony, which augments the conversation's pathos because the audience recognizes that the gharīb is in fact anything but a stranger. Choices of lighting, framing, and setting position the character in such a way to render him internal to, and external from, the world of the other characters.
As the film renders the stranger's presence-absence in the village and outside it, it begins to move beyond the formal boundaries of neorealism, and into a more symbolic relationship with the real. In her discussion of global neorealist melodrama, Marcantonio lists recognition as one of its pivotal tropes. Indeed, recognition is the hinge that texts since The Odyssey rely on to convey the relationship between the returned and those who have remained, and an enduring trope of melodrama. But, unlike that account of family reconciliation after a twenty-year exile and return, in Ila Ayn?, the dramatic tension is raised by the fact that, within the film, this recognition is foreclosed. While the film depends on the audience recognizing the stranger as the father, within its internal logic, it is significant that the returned father is constantly misrecognized as a stranger, his doubled alienation underscored repetitively. As Farid continues to plan for his departure, he keeps meeting the man, but still does not recognize him. In one scene, Farid has just gotten his passport; his departure is imminent. He spots the homeless stranger on a bus headed towards Beirut. The latter gets off the bus, and they begin to walk, the younger man unable to contain his excitement. As they walk, the stone arches of the village they are walking through fade into a natural mountainous landscape; but the old man continues the conversation as the film flashes back into his memories, and we realize that the film is now depicting the space of the diaspora, in this case Brazil. The voice over begins, with a slow, portentous tone:
What is the best way to start a new life?
The easiest thing is to put the kashsheh [the pack that peddlers wore] on your back
You'll leave the cities
You will cross mountains and valleys
You will find a small village where you can sell a few items. If you sell, you'll sleep in a small room. If not, you'll sleep in open air. Or on a bank in a garden, hungry. If you eat, you'll eat plain bread. You will stay on your own summer and winter. You'll lose your faith. You'll forget your past, and where you came from. You'll continue down the path, unknowing and unknown (jāhil wa-majhūl). The days will pass, and you will grow old before your time. You'll lose your self-confidence, and avoid the difficult things in life. Until one day, your health will force you to see a doctor but it will be too late.
Reinforcing the film's point of the extreme alienation of exile, the scene begins as a conversation between (jāhil, unknowing) son and majhūl (unknown) father, but soon, a voiceover dominates as the diasporic montage begins. The voice, disembodied, adds to the sense of alienation of the flashback sequence that depicts the man on his own in various landscapes: crossing a river, seeking shelter under the shade of a lone tree, huddled sleeping on the street; the only other human that appears in these few minutes is the doctor who delivers the man's poor health prognosis. As the man narrates his past to his (unknowing) son, the uncanny effect of the disembodied voice works with the images of alienation to trigger pathos in the audience, and in its surrogate, Farid.
The film then cuts back to the two men; Farid is visibly upset, as the stranger sums up that “the new life” (al-ḥayāt al-jadīda) is both good and bad. The young man berates him, complaining that he has not mentioned any of the good aspects, and physically recoils from him. He is then hit by a car and critically injured. The violent accident enables the stranger's return to the family home, as he carries Farid's wounded body across the threshold of the home, but again, he remains majhūl, unrecognized even as he offers to donate his blood to save the young man's life. The film emphasizes this again in its framing; for example, in one scene, the entire family, the doctor, and even the young man who ran over Farid rush over to the bed, while the estranged stranger/father remains to the left, edging closer and closer to the doorway. In the film's final scene, after Saʿid has thanked him, calling him by the warm, informal ʿamm, uncle, the man walks away to a death that has already been foreshadowed in the flashback sequence.
Ila Ayn? depicts the man as a literal shadow passing through the house. The boys' mother, now an old woman, looks up at him as if she recognizes him, glimpses his shadow disappearing along the walls of the house, then collapses back into the arms of her daughter-in-law. The image of the father's disappearing shadow is worth exploring in more depth. It visually highlights a point that the film has been suggesting throughout: that migration is such a fundamentally life-altering experience that it erases one's identity. Read in this way, this scene is the last in a series that have rendered the stranger-father as a literal revenant, a ghost presence that haunts his family in his absence, and whose belated presence onscreen and in their lives cannot undo the past. The revenant-father occupies a position of death/nondeath to his family; his physical return to the village does not supersede and cannot resolve his twenty-year absence, a point that the cinematography emphasizes over and over in lighting and framing decisions that mark him apart from the rest of the cast, and always outside the family unit as his memory haunts them.
Thinking about spectrality and haunting, Jacques Derrida remarks, forces us to think of a “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”Footnote 68 More recent Lebanese film scholarship has talked about haunting as a symptom of the melancholia of the postwar period, related to the effects of war, displacement, and traumatic memory. Excavating Ila Ayn? embeds this theme much earlier in Lebanese culture. From the perspective of this current moment, the deployment of the metaphor of spectrality and melancholy emphasizes the manner in which migration was presented and understood to be a cultural trauma as wrenching as war would be a few generations later. Like the war, the social trauma of migration on the landscape of the Lebanese village, and by extension the nation, is one that resonates across generations.Footnote 69
Towards the Unknown
Cultural artifacts such as Ila Ayn? enrich current historiographical understandings of 1950s Lebanon by exposing the repressed anxieties of that era. In this article, I have used my reading of Nasser's film to demonstrate that revisiting the extant Lebanese film archive through close reading of both form and content allows us to see how Lebanese films adapted their chosen genres to explore the pressing social issues of their era. I have also shown how reading these films alongside the parafilmic archive exposes socio-cultural fault lines and renders visible the social anxieties that simmered beneath the surface of mainstream popular culture. In refusing closure and eschewing containment in the ambiguity and open-endedness of its concluding scenes, Ila Ayn? quite literally frames the anxieties around emigration experienced in Lebanon during the 1950s as open-ended doubt that spreads out from the world of the film to the world of its audience.
This methodology can also be brought to bear in productive ways on texts that, at first glance, seem more resistant to readings that seek to expose anxieties. As cultural theorist Paul Saint-Amour points out, unpacking texts that do their best to contain and repress ambiguity can also be a productive means of revealing the anxieties of a given period.Footnote 70 Saint-Amour pays special attention to endings, and it is to the ambiguous ending of Safar Barlik that I turn in the concluding paragraphs of this article.
Despite its culturally dominant and seemingly unabashed nationalism, anxiety over emigration can be detected looming hauntingly over the ending of Safar Barlik, coincidentally released the week of the outbreak of war in June 1967. Formally, of course, the film produced and reproduced a glossy, idyllic Rahbani aesthetic that valorized a particular kind of Lebanese mountain village as a microcosm of the ideal nation. The film was praised for its cinematography by critics on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Lebanese nationalist poet Saʿid ʿAql declared that “no other film portrays Lebanon's nature better than Safar Barlik,” and left-leaning Unsi al-Hajj, al-Nahar’s culture editor at the time, described it as having “beautiful panoramic tableaus” and “brilliant colors.”Footnote 71 In his history of the film's making, David Livingston gestures to the manner in which the film brings together the “Rahbani themes” of “a shared land, identity and history” figured in the picturesque, and idealized, red-roofed Lebanese mountain village.Footnote 72 Like much of the rest of the Rahbani oeuvre, Safar Barlik is often understood as a straightforward national romance with a nationally unifying message that attempts to transcend Lebanon's sectarian divides.Footnote 73 Its adherence to the formal constraints of the musical genre and its reliance on dichotomies of good (villagers/Lebanese, and one Syrian) and evil (Turks) muffle most of its anxieties in Fairouz's reassuring, unfaltering tones and the generic formula of the feel-good musical.
Yet critics of the film who focus on its optimistic, simplistic nationalism elide in their readings the ambivalence of the film's form, and the manner in which its cinematography and aspects of its soundtrack rupture its facile (and, admittedly exclusionary) nationalism.Footnote 74 I have already described how the film's idyllic landscape had to be carefully constructed; indeed, it cost the film's first director his job.Footnote 75 And, although they remain in the background of tracking shots, ruins also dot the landscape of many of Safar Barlik’s scenes, a stark and indelible reminder of cycles of destruction that have left their mark on Mount Lebanon's landscapes.
While this byproduct of location filming may be dismissed as accidental, other aspects of the film belie a more deliberate, if uneasy engagement with emigration as part of the Lebanese condition. The film's first song, sung by Fairouz's character ʿAdla, is “Ya Tayr” (O, Bird). Its lyrics address a bird flying off to the ends of the earth, and laments “if you could only tell my loved ones what ails me.” Sung as ʿAdla wanders through the landscape of the village, the song is incongruous with the rural idyll of the film's beginning. It invokes absent, departed loved ones who are not part of the plot in any way. By casting ʿAdla as always already lamenting absent loved ones, the song foreshadows the film's ending, whose ambivalence connects it to a more uncontainable anxiety over emigration and the nation-state.
In the film's final minutes, ʿAdla is standing on a cliff where she is seeing off her beloved ʿAbdu, fleeing the Turks in a boat with other Lebanese rebels.Footnote 76 In a voiceover narrative spoken in the final minutes of the film, Fairouz is heard saying:
No matter how far they send you, I am waiting, and you will return / No matter how many soldiers they send after you, I am waiting, and you will return / Then the wedding festivities will be doubled, and there will be a blue veil and a flapping flag.Footnote 77
The disembodied assertiveness of the repeated promise of waiting, spoken in Fairouz's familiar tones, takes the monologue out of the internal narrative world of the love story in the film, and into the realm of the national. As Fairouz's voiceover—and many of her songs—imply, the nation, which she is often meant to embody, patiently waits for its young men to return.
Even as the assertive voiceover confidently announces the men's certain return, Safar Barlik’s cinematography complicates it. Over alternating tracking and reverse shots of the young woman, the camera zooms out, away from ʿAdla, so that all that is visible is the outline of a woman and a white kerchief, as the music swells. As in the disembodying move of the voiceover narrative, the woman loses her specificity as the camera watches her watching the boat recede, and then films in reverse shot from behind her shoulder, thereby conveying in its visual field that which she is seeing. In the film's final shot, the camera once again returns to its position behind Fairouz as the boat sails away. Thus, as the film's endtitle appears on the screen, the boat recedes further into the distance, visually highlighting the growing gap between the hopeful promise of ʿAbdu's return, and its possibility. The growing distance between the camera and the character functions as a visual metaphor of the film's increasing ambivalence over the possibility of ʿAbdu's eventual return. In Safar Barlik, the personal romance, always already a national one due to Fairouz's status as a national symbol in addition to the film's plot, remains indefinitely postponed by ʿAbdu's open-ended departure. Intriguingly, the Rahbanis and Barakat did not include an epilogue in which the long-awaited independence of Lebanon and the lovers' reunification could happen. Instead, the film chooses to end with the audience taking on Fairouz's perspective; in positioning its viewers in ʿAdla's place, the audience symbolically becomes Fairouz/Lebanon watching its young men sail away, maybe for good. Like Farid's ambivalent smile as he watches the stranger who is his father leave the family home for the last time, the films leave the audience guessing as to what will happen as their characters leave the home, village, and nation, and head towards the unknown.
