Jocelyne Saab

ISSUE
07.04.2021
EN

Jocelyne Saab

Out of the Shadows

COMPILED BY Gerard-Jan Claes, Stoffel Debuysere
CONVERSATION
Maryse Léon, Magda Wassef, 1978
“It’s up to women to lift the veil”

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

CONVERSATION
Gaston Haustrate, Corinne McMullin, 1982
“The public needs fiction, and several of us are moving in that direction”

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

CONVERSATION
Sylvie Dallet, 1983
“It’s no longer a matter of taking a position”

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

CONVERSATION
Olivier Hadouchi, 2014
Documenting and Telling the Torments of the World

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

ARTICLE
Etel Adnan, 2014
For Jocelyne
CONVERSATION
Olivier Hadouchi, 2014
Conversations with Etel Adnan and Jocelyne Saab
CORRESPONDENCE
Wassyla Tamzali, 2014
Letter from Algiers to a Friend from Beirut

Once you’re holding a camera, it’s your profession that matters...Maybe, as a definition, and fundamentally I don’t know, you react with a gaze that doesn’t linger on the surface of things, of guns or armies; I have always preferred getting to know people’s sensibilities in great detail, the children, the women, the men, the daily life of human beings... In this field, people are so  surprised to see a woman arrive on set that they make room for her and respect her.

Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was born and raised in Beirut. After completing her studies in economic sciences at the Sorbonne in Paris, Saab worked on a music programme on the national Lebanese radio station before being invited by poet and artist Etel Adnan to work as a journalist. Unlike most war reporters, who must travel to war zones to pursue their profession, war came to Saab’s native Lebanon in 1975, and that same year saw the beginning of Saab’s filmmaking career with Lebanon in a Whirlwind, an account of the various forces and interests behind the incipient conflict. The war would last another 15 years, and Saab’s chronicling of its horrors — particularly in her remarkable “Beirut Trilogy”, comprising Beirut, Never Again (1976), Letter from Beirut (1978), and Beirut, My City (1982) — is unequalled in both its ethical integrity and emotional impact. The same candour and empathy Saab applied to the war in her homeland can be found in her other documentaries. Filming the struggle of the Polisario Front in the desert of Western Sahara, the consequences of the infitah on Sadat’s policy in Egypt, or the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979, a picture of a Middle East removed from reductive simplifications emerged through the polyhedral prism of her camera. “I believe that what makes up the specificity of my trajectory is that I have always wanted to remain coherent; I have always been ready to fight for what I believe in, to show and analyse this changing Middle East that I’m so passionate about. Yet the day came when I grew tired of it, or rather my eyes grew tired. I couldn’t see anything anymore — there had been too many deaths and too much suffering. I then moved on to fiction.” Her entry into fiction filmmaking came in 1981 when she worked as second unit director on Volker Schlöndorff ’s Circle of Deceit. Shortly after that, she directed her first fictional work, A Suspended Life (1985), set in the same war-torn Beirut she had documented ten years prior. After the war reconfigured the whole country, in Once Upon a Time in Beirut (1994), Saab tried to rescue the cinematographic memory of the Lebanese capital in the same year that cinema turned 100 years old. In 2005, she was censured and her life threatened for making Dunia, Kiss Me Not On The Eyes, a film shot in Cairo about desire, pleasure and female sexuality in the context of Islam. Until her death in January 2019, Jocelyne Saab remained devoted to what she called her “two permanent obsessions: liberty and memory”.

Texts

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

Maryse Léon, Magda Wassef, 1978
CONVERSATION
07.04.2021
EN

“Each time I made a film, it was in a given political period; each time I had a political objective, my films couldn’t just be without orientation. That’s not sentimentality. Through a form of sensibility, a political problem emerges. The destruction of Beirut, the children fighting, it means something. I figured this way of showing things could touch people and have a real political impact. People are fed up with the talking. On television, for example, one day they show a representative of the left, the next a representative of the right. Every day, they agree with someone else, and they end up forgetting who’s right or wrong!”

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

Gaston Haustrate, Corinne McMullin, 1982
CONVERSATION
07.04.2021
EN

“This documentary phase wasn’t only linked to my personal history; it was determined by my country’s political situation and Lebanon’s cinema history. My trajectory is a bit like that of other Lebanese filmmakers. If I decided to move to fiction it’s because, after speaking in a “militant” manner, I now want the image to speak as much as possible.”

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

Sylvie Dallet, 1983
CONVERSATION
07.04.2021
EN

“Today, nine years later, I say to myself: “It’s no longer a matter of taking a position.” That’s where my films are headed and that’s what brings me to fiction. I think I’m meeting my time, the wave of complete scepticism, of doubt, which means that in the fiction to come I have completely abandoned any political point of view – even if everything is political. Even if there is no doubt that there has been a political position. The desire I had to be on TV, to reach a lot of people, meant that my work was concerned with the imagery, which was much more powerful than militant film.”

Interview with Jocelyne Saab

Olivier Hadouchi, 2014
CONVERSATION
07.04.2021
EN

“I began by making film reports, documentaries, and I didn’t come to fiction until much later. The boundaries between the two aren’t very clear-cut, however, and there are often documentary elements in fiction films and vice versa. At the time, there was a fabulous reporting tradition, with film crews in conflict zones that didn’t hesitate to take risks and demonstrate a certain situation by bringing us the footage. Resorting to cinema, especially to documentaries, in order to provoke or accompany social change, to denounce or to provide a basis for action, all this was very much present when I started.”

Etel Adnan, 2014
ARTICLE
07.04.2021
EN

I would also like to express my affection for Jocelyne. On the strength of her films and the way she has lived her life to date, I consider her one of the bravest, most intelligent and above all freest spirits I have ever encountered – though her freedom of thought and behaviour has sometimes cost her dearly and even put her life in danger. Few other people have suffered so much to preserve their self-esteem and survive in a meaningful way in a world as hostile and indifferent as ours.

Olivier Hadouchi, 2014
CONVERSATION
07.04.2021
EN

“They no longer allowed us to express ourselves. There was no freedom anymore. At the time, I didn’t fully understand that I was scaring them because I didn’t realize the impact of my work. With my documentaries and my different way of looking at things, I managed to reach European and American television channels. They were afraid my images would shake the public opinion and dismantle their propaganda.”

Wassyla Tamzali, 2014
CORRESPONDENCE
07.04.2021
EN

There are encounters that withstand long separations because they happened at a particular time. That goes for you, who I lost sight of for a long time, and who I met in the liveliest days of our lives. Are there lives outside of lively days? Alas, yes. Many years later, we ran into each other and caught up in the queue for a plane from Paris to Cairo, and then in Alexandria we met again, and... since then, we met again where we had parted, in the intimacy of History, the Tunisian revolution had just broken out and our hearts were cheerful.