In Ghassan Salhab's Workshop

Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab belongs to a world where chaos and destruction have been alternating for decades. While the Israeli army was bombing Gaza, Southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights and at a time that Palestine was once again experiencing a real human disaster, we asked him: how are you? I’m defeated but not resigned. With him, we will explore the question of doing, with the very Godard-like idea in mind that doing means simultaneously admitting our disappointment at Art’s ineffectiveness, yet trying to bring some answers by adopting a political approach through texts, ideas, gestures and images. Because, for all that, surely everything can be born again from the ruins?

Catherine Bizern

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OUR EYES

by Ghassan Salhab

Minds have been forced to lie
We speak through images, and we know
That what we say is not what is

     Al-Ma’arrï, poem CIV

What is this movement of images that continues to haunt the world?
What is this gesture?

Close your eyes, I told myself. Just close them. For as long as possible. Don’t try to hear, let alone listen. Don’t anticipate anything. Don’t force anything. Breathe as calmly as you can, out and then in, out and then in again. Eventually you’ll open your eyes again, I told myself. Eventually you’ll turn the screen of your phone towards you and watch the videos you filmed through the windscreen of a friend’s car, along different roads that run through more than one shelled municipality, roads that come to an abrupt halt. The Israeli army still occupies the border zone, its guns and air force a looming threat, striking as it sees fit. Eventually you’ll open the black notebook you deliberately leave lying around on what is supposed to be your work table, and you’ll scribble something down. What surfaces, what’s willing to surface, even if there’s not much left to surface, even if every sentence, every word, the slightest action, the slightest articulation, is more and more wrenching. Noticing, logging, noting down, recording, filming, in spite of it all? Revealing, revealing oneself? In the words of Louis-René Des Forêts: “Saying it once and saying it again, repeating it as many times as is necessary. This is our duty: a duty that consumes the best part of our strength, and will only expire with it. Step by step, to the last.” Our everyday duty? With my hands, my right hand to be precise, my lips in vain, and this ink pen, this industrial nib, this black on white, these lines that criss-cross skilfully, so many little squares, in columns and rows. I find myself counting them, an old habit, trying to convince myself that any undertaking is worthwhile.

As soon as I’ve written these words, the temptation to cross them out arises, the temptation to put an end to these endless ramblings, to get it over with once and for all, once again. But temptation is a double-edged sword. I examined this right hand, both sides of it, this skin, these pores, these hairs, these raised veins, blue, green, these protruding bones, this ancient scar, barely visible now, and I had no choice but to indulge in this lingering song. Layla Murad, I think. My mother’s timid voice as she cooked. Maybe, I don’t know. My memory’s working itself out. If only, if only, your heart could, would, if only, my love, the hours go by, the days go by, your shadow is no more, the streets are empty of you, if only, if only, your soul would, could, our feet would no longer touch the ground, look my love, my heart, my life, look, my shadow is no more either, it insists on looking for us, our fronts are now grey, our wings folded back. Night no longer falls, it no longer needs to, it’s already here.

Burning out fingers, our tongues, every nuance exhausted, this word exhausted, what’s left of it, desperately so. This dark glow. Not that everything is about nuance, although we’ve always lacked it, comrade, within ourselves, between ourselves, towards each other, towards everyone. Since we are always on the ropes, since we are nothing but beaks, guts and nails, since we are always having to tear ourselves away, exhausting ourselves by drawing on who knows what resources, time and time again, from one reign to another, from one supremacy to another, from one border to another, from one fabrication to another, from duplicity to duplicity, from one form of bargaining to another, from occupation to occupation, from expansion to expansion, from profit to profit, from siege to siege, from massacre to massacre, from mass grave to mass grave, from devastation to devastation, from cleansing to cleansing, from deportation to deportation, from trivialisation to denial of infamy.

Our enemies see us coming from afar. Even we see ourselves coming. And yet we continue to misunderstand our own abilities, our traditional practices, others, the other, ourselves, various exercises of authority, our own impulses. We‘re always one step behind their formidable propaganda machine. But I swore I’d stop rambling, because words always end up drowning in words, and images of the real cry out in the desert of fiction.

Beirut, 13 February 2025, as consent for genocide continues to be manufactured