Beyrouth fantôme

A Whole Damned City

"Only the dead have seen the end of war" - Plato

Made in 1998, Phantom Beirut is the work of Ghassan Salhab (b.1958), one of a number of artists raised during the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war and grappling, in its aftermath, with its catastrophic consequences. Less a film about the war than one about what the war has done, it is also a cinematic tribute to Salhab's devastated hometown - to those who stayed and those who returned and had to find a way through the wreckage.

The foreground of Salhab's noir psychodrama is made up of the shattered dreams and war-battered streets of the Lebanese capital in the late 1980s, when a thirty-something year old man named Khalil reappears in the city he was pronounced dead in a decade earlier. But Khalil is not the only spectre haunting the town. The film plays out a bitter moment in the history of the Lebanese civil war, when much of Beirut's population had fled, the city had been partitioned from East to West along sectarian lines, and the urban conflict had escalated into a litany of car bombs, sniper attacks, and street battles. The sounds of gunfire and explosions pepper the film's soundtrack throughout, the threat of a new disaster never far away. It seemed the war might never end and the Lebanese, like the film's protagonists, had long ago ceased to hope for it.

Unanswered questions around Khalil's disappearance fester, and his former friends struggle with their feelings of suspicion, betrayal, and anger. Khalil may have returned, but his former friends are living an internal exile of their own, irrevocably dispossessed of the lives and beloved city they knew before the war. As he slowly seeks out the remnants of his old life, a vision materialises of a city and its peoples haunted by the tragedies and traumas of the conflict. "Perhaps our generation, the one that lived through this period in all its intensity, looks like these ruined buildings on the inside" wonders actor Hassan Farhat, in one of the interviews that surface throughout the film like an insuppressible memory, in which the cast play themselves speaking some years later after the war has ended, with painful frankness.

Watching in 2024, it is impossible to ignore another of the film's hauntings –"that Palestine that we dreamt so hard about", as Khalil recalls. Lebanon became home to tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees after the Nakba - "Catastrophe"- of 1948, when the state of Israel was created, and some 850,000 Palestinians were dispossessed; thousands more came in 1967, when Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza. By the time the film is set, the Palestine Liberation Organization had been expelled from Lebanon, and a long shadow had been cast by the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camp neighbourhoods of Sabra and Shatila. In the south of Lebanon, a war was underway against the Israeli occupation forces that is not over to this day. Like so many of the dreams that emerge during the film, Khalil and Hanna's vision of Palestinian freedom remains suspended, caught in the limbo between living and death.

Yet, Salhab's "phantom" Beirut endures and allures despite the disfigurement inflicted on it during the conflict. The film's black humour speaks not only to the absurdities of war, but also to the city's irrepressible and unruly spirit. When Khalil pursues a local crook for the official documents with his old name on them, he is told: "we can't bring back the dead like that, even in Beirut". Yet, Beirut is constantly being recalled to life; this, after all, is the city that lore tells us was rebuilt from the ashes seven times –long before the civil war, and before the 2020 port explosion that mangled it all over again. In the bust and broken ruins that still characterise Beirut, its past lives linger on, like a phantom limb.

Realised less than a decade after the end of the war, when Lebanon's political elite were clambering over the ruins - and each other - for a piece of the reconstruction pie, the sounds under Phantom Beirut's opening credits hint at the frenetic rebuilding that followed it, part of the ultimately unsuccessful attempts to occlude the crimes and scars of the recent past under the veneer of a new cityscape. The whole film seems to ring with the first words spoken by actor Darina Al Joundi: "Maybe this will put an end to this whole damned city once and for all". The deeply intertwining fates of Beirut's architecture and its peoples is a frequently occurring feature in the artistic works of Salhab's generation (e.g. Joana Hadjithomas (b.1969) and Khali Joreige ('69); Tony Chakar ('68); Mohamed Soueid ('59); Lamia Joreige ('72)) - and indeed those who preceded them, such as filmmaker Jocelyn Saab (1948) and poet and artist Etel Adnan (1925). When the war broke out, Adnan wrote of Beirut that, "with every wall which was falling and every man dying, something of a collective life and memory was being obliterated."1 In its aftermath, it is towards a reconstruction of that 'collective life and memory' that Salhab's cinema strives, offering a glimmer of hope from its ruins.