Etel Adnan

Michael Shamberg's P.S. Beirut, Chapter One is a personal journey to Beirut and the first chapter of a series bent on «discovering» the lost briefcase of Walter Benjamin which went missing when Benjamin's body was found

Letter from Beirut documents the filmmaker's return to Beirut during one of the lulls, three years after the outbreak of the civil war, animated by the urge to return. She is confronted by the physical, emotional and psychological ravages of the war, terrified and sorrowful, she cannot find her place in the city. In that quest, she communicates with everyday people, friends, neighbors, people riding the bus across the city's eastern and western flanks. To pace her journeying and dramatic unraveling of the film, Saab borrows the guise of a letter read in a voice-over, written by world-renowned poet Etel Adnan. A rare document from the civil war, Letter from Beirut lays bare and spontaneously how people make sense of their everyday in the midst of chaos, violence, terror and sorrow.

A few months after the incident of April 13, 1975, during which Palestinian civilians were machine-gunned by Phalangist militiamen, the toll is most tragic: six thousand dead, twenty thousand wounded, incessant kidnappings, a semi-destroyed capital. This film traces the origins of the Lebanese conflict, the perception of a society that goes to war while singing. A unique document on the Lebanese civil war. Beyond the religious war, the painting of a social and political reality that has not changed much, more than four decades later.

Poetry is everywhere, even in the refugee camps where absolute misery reigns. In front of old plastic advertising posters on which are drawn in giant format the big icons of luxury and consumerism that make up their shelters, refugee children stand like kings. Symbols of life at the heart of war, fragility, and death, these children are shown by Jocelyne Saab as precious notes of hope in the heart of a dehumanized world. One Dollar a Day was filmed in the Syrian refugee camps of the Bekaa plain, Lebanon in 2015, with text by Etel Adnan.

1976 marks the beginning of Beirut’s calvary. With a child’s eyes the filmmaker follows for six months the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting.

Etel Adnan’s last words recorded by her close friend, the Lebanese historian and writer Fawwaz Traboulsi, on colours, Nietzsche and poetry. Twenty years after her film Etel Adnan: Words in Exile (2007), the filmaker returns to find Etel Adnan’s lost voice in a Lebanon marked by ongoing historical fractures.

Michael Shamberg's P.S. Beirut, Chapter One is a personal journey to Beirut and the first chapter of a series bent on «discovering» the lost briefcase of Walter Benjamin which went missing when Benjamin's body was found

Letter from Beirut documents the filmmaker's return to Beirut during one of the lulls, three years after the outbreak of the civil war, animated by the urge to return. She is confronted by the physical, emotional and psychological ravages of the war, terrified and sorrowful, she cannot find her place in the city. In that quest, she communicates with everyday people, friends, neighbors, people riding the bus across the city's eastern and western flanks. To pace her journeying and dramatic unraveling of the film, Saab borrows the guise of a letter read in a voice-over, written by world-renowned poet Etel Adnan. A rare document from the civil war, Letter from Beirut lays bare and spontaneously how people make sense of their everyday in the midst of chaos, violence, terror and sorrow.

Poetry is everywhere, even in the refugee camps where absolute misery reigns. In front of old plastic advertising posters on which are drawn in giant format the big icons of luxury and consumerism that make up their shelters, refugee children stand like kings. Symbols of life at the heart of war, fragility, and death, these children are shown by Jocelyne Saab as precious notes of hope in the heart of a dehumanized world. One Dollar a Day was filmed in the Syrian refugee camps of the Bekaa plain, Lebanon in 2015, with text by Etel Adnan.

1976 marks the beginning of Beirut’s calvary. With a child’s eyes the filmmaker follows for six months the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting.

The film reconstructs through an array of visual fragments, a multiplicity of languages, of peoples and their identities, the unique portrait of the poet and painter Etel Adnan.

In the 1980s, Adnan regularly traveled with a Super-8mm camera in hand. She visited New York frequently, staying at a friend’s apartment in a high-rise overlooking the East River. While there, she would repeatedly attempt to capture the sun touching skyscrapers’ windows, the geometry of bridges, the marriage of light and water, the movement of barges on the river, the shapes of factory smoke – the oddly meditative poetry of inexorable motion at the immediate edge of city life. The footage was retrieved and digitized three decades later, and edited into a feature-length film, MOTION, which premiered at Documenta 13 in 2012. — BIDOUN