Goya, painting the Disasters of War that he had witnessed, gave us the notorious “I saw it”. It is all about testimony. Here, following the painter’s lead, this involves exploring a bloody episode of the civil war that ravaged Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, the so-called Mountain War in 1983. The violence of civil war, but considered afterwards. How does one relate a massacre? Who remains to relate it? How does one depict the event? Who can do it? This is the ambitious course on which Toni Geitani embarks his generation, born after the events. In the aftermath, everything revolves around the perspective, the staging, the setting of the scene and the laying bare. From the event without images of it, Geitani moves via painting and photography to cinema, the cinema of Godard’s Passion, painting again. And on the horizon, Goya’s agenda and his famous El Tres de mayo in which, by the powers of succinct analysis and imagination, he denounces the Napoleonic repression in Spain. Both scenes serve an accurate but invented image. In order to do this, Geitani listens to accounts, travelling up and down the country and examining the landscape, confronting corpses and images in, for example, the disturbing scene where fantasy meets horror. And listening to today inhabited by the voices of yesterday, striving to contest the masks, like this representation of an ageing Jumblatt that haunts the film. This is the agenda of someone who did not live through the war but who is affected by its secrets, repressions and fractures. (NF)
Toni Geitani
