An Evening with Akram Zaatari

Akram Zaatari was an adolescent, a teenager, a bored observer of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Or so he tells us on March 17th as we gather at a theater of the Museum of Modern Art for the US premiere of his latest documentary.

Excavating his journals, audio recordings (on audio cassettes), photos and knickknacks of that time, Zaatari (born in 1966 in Saida, Lebanon) desires to see with the eyes of other men, his peers in age and nationality, who experienced the occupation differently. On this night, we were treated to excerpts of four of the more than thirty films in Zaatari's oeuvre: All Is Well on the Border (1997), This Day (2003), In This House (2005) and Nature Morte (2008).

An anthropologist of sorts, Zaatari literally unearths the story of one of his peers, Ali Hashishu, now a foreign correspondent with Agence France Presse, who served in the resistance army; his communist ties and experience on the front continue to serve him in his role as journalist. "Following the Israeli withdrawal from Ain el Mir in 1985, the village became the frontline. The Dagher family was displaced from their home, which was occupied by a radical resistant group for seven years. When the war ended in 1991, Ali Hashisho, a member of the Lebanese resistance stationed in the Dagher family house, wrote a letter to the Dagher's family justifying his occupation of their house, and welcoming them back home. He placed the letter inside an empty case of a B-10, 82 mm mortar, and buried it in the garden." In November 2002, Akram Zaatari headed to Ain el Mir to excavate Ali's letter and outsprang the film, In This House.

In another film, Neruda (a nickname given to him by another soldier because of his romantic and poetic sensibility) learned how to dismantle an AK47 at the age of ten. Once he could successfully make his target in seven of ten shots, he was promoted to RPGs at the age of 13. By 16, Neruda was caught during a bombing mission and held in detention-pseudo-jail by the Israeli army until he could legally be tried and imprisoned at 18. Neruda spent ten years in captivity. His story, shared primarily through the letters he exchanged with his devoted mother, and through interviews Zaatari held with other Lebanese prisoners in Israel, provide the context of the film, All is Well on the Border, completed in 1997.

In the artist's desire to relate his peers' experience of the invasion, Zaatari, the founder of the Arab Image Foundation, comes to understand that, "the story of resistances is really tied to mediation." In the attempt to tell a story of in-betweens, of ambiguity, of individuality, forces weigh against the storyteller leaving binaries of victim and victimizer, soldier and civilian, good and bad. Zaatari strives to get beyond these dualities, but feels hampered at every turn, with the characters in his stories, the audience, the government, all pushing toward black and white understandings and oversimplifications.

In the fourth film excerpted at MOMA, Nature Morte is a self-described, "poetic document that is not a fiction, but not documentary either." Commissioned by the Centre Georges Pomipidou in France, the film excerpt we see at MOMA is bare bones: no dialogue, one room, two characters who interact by mostly not interacting.

An older man wears a black nit cap, his dark eyebrows offset by a graying beard and few days' beard growth. Working under a kerosene lamp he hunches over a table low to the ground, where he is sitting and methodically assembling an explosive device. Behind him a younger man dresses in winter outer clothing, also seated, silent and methodical. He concentrates on sewing - mending a torn clothing article. He wears muted colors of army green with dark mustache and beard against a white-washed wall. After a number of minutes of this silent preparation, the older man loads a gun, the two stand facing each other, silent, inches apart. Who will go? Both? I assume the younger...isn't it always the young that we send to fight our wars? We break to the outside, flash from one man to the other, still unsure who will leave. And one finally does begin to climb up the hillside bordered by a low rock wall as birds chirp in the wintry low light heralding the almost-dawn of spring.

Zaatari's exploration of war, of objects, of experience over the decades appears to herald the dawn of spring, as well - both for him and for the world in the grip of wars worldwide.

From the MOMA catalogue:
An Evening with Akram Zaatari
Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari interweaves documentary and personal narrative to examine the complicated social, political, and cultural issues of a country shaped by extended territorial conflict. His videos and installations speak of the contradictions of everyday life within regions of conflict further fragmented by media. Al Yaoum (This Day) chronicles thirty years of Lebanon, and in How I Love You, five Lebanese men speak about their passions and relationships. Presented in conjunction with Asian Contemporary Art Week. 90min. Monday, March 17, 7:00pm.