Remembering The Civil War in Today’s Lebanese Cinema

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2025.714

Keywords:

Collective memory, Collective trauma, Past, Lebanese cinema, Lebanese civil war

Abstract

In the aftermath of the civil war, memory and trauma are a prominent thema in Lebanese cinema. This study aims to explore how the civil war is remembered through cinema in contemporary Lebanese cinema, based on an analysis of the films Where Do We Go Now?, Tramontane, The Insult and Memory Box. These films, selected from among the films made in Lebanon after 2010 by Lebanese directors and dealing with the civil war, were analysed through descriptive analysis under the themes of past, identity, trauma and space. The films under scrutiny serve as conduits for the articulation of remembrance, both as a means of confronting past traumas and of reflecting upon the present. The act of remembering the past and confronting traumas is rendered through the medium of personal recollections by the directors, thus creating a narrative of collective memory. When the subject of the civil war is represented in films, it is commonly remembered as “the past in the present”.

Author Biographies

Gökhan Evecen, Akdeniz University

Dr. Gökhan Evecen graduated from Dokuz Eylül University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Cinema-TV, in 2004; Selçuk University, Institute of Social Sciences, Radio, Television, and Cinema MA in 2017; Anadolu University, Institute of Social Sciences, Cinema and Television, PhD in 2023. For his PhD thesis titled “Collective Memory and Middle Eastern Cinema: Reflections of Collective Traumas on Lebanese Cinema", he conducted field research in Lebanon for three months in 2022 with a TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) scholarship. Between 2011 and 2018, he worked as a director at the Anadolu University TV Production Center. He won awards from national and international festivals with his short films and documentaries. Since 2018, he has been working as a lecturer at the Akdeniz University Faculty of Communication and continues his academic studies in the fields of the sociology of cinema, documentary, and Middle Eastern cinema.

Sırrı Serhat Serter, Anadolu University, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Department of Cinema and Television

S. Serhat Serter graduated from Anadolu University, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Department of Cinema-Television in 1996 and completed his master's and doctorate in the same department. Serter, who continues his professional life at the faculty he graduated from, has also been the director of Eskişehir International Film Festival since 1998. Serter has published articles in English and Turkish and has edited two books on Turkish Cinema and Star Wars films. The revised version of his book on Star Wars cinema was re-published in the UK in 2021. Serter, who attaches importance to interdisciplinary cooperation, has made projects and documentary films to benefit disadvantaged groups as a representative of his field of science.

References

Assmann, J. (1992). Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Verlag C.H.Beck.

Audebert, P. (2021). Liban, cinéma du miel et du fragment. https://www.lanouvelledimension.fr/cours/liban-cinema-du-miel-et-du-fragment/

Aygün, G., & Tunç Cox, A. (2023). A Narrative of An Ideological Destruction: Where Do We Go Now?. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 11(1), 339–357. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2023.506

Ayhan, V., Tür, Ö., & Benli Altunışık, M. (2009). Lübnan: Savaş, Barış, Direniş ve Türkiye ile İlişkiler. Dora Yayınları.

Ayoub, J. (2017). The Civil War’s Ghosts: Events of Memory Seen Through Lebanese Cinema. In The Social Life of Memory (pp. 55–82). Palgrave Macmillan.

Başaran İnce, G. (2010). Medya ve Toplumsal Hafıza. Kültür ve İletişim, 13(1), 9–29.

Boyer, P., & Wertsch, J. V. (2009). Memory in Mind and Culture. Cambridge University Press.

Cleveland, W. L., & Bunton, M. (2018). A History of the Modern Middle East. Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429495502

Dannreuther, R. (1998). The Lebanese Civil War. In The Soviet Union and PLO (pp. 69–87). Palgrave Macmillan.

der Kolk, B. A., & der Hart, O. (1995). The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In N/A (Ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Duruel Erkılıç, S. (2014). Türk Sinemasında Tarih ve Bellek. Deki Yayınevi.

El Din, R. S. (2024). Cinema in the Levant. In N. Mellor (Ed.), Routledge Handbook on Arab Cinema (pp. 82–93). Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003302025

El-Horr, D. (2016). Melancolie Libanaise: Le cinema apres la guerre civile. L’Harmattan.

Eyerman, R. (2004). Cultural Trauma: Slavery and Formation of African American Identity. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 60–111). University of California Press.

Fluck, W. (2003). Memory and Film. In U. J. Hebel (Ed.), Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures (pp. 213–229). Universitatsverlag.

Groh, F. (2023). “Experiencing Trauma”: Aesthetical, Sensational and Narratological Issues of Traumatic Representations in Slasher Horror Cinema. Arts, 12(132), 1–9.

Hagerdal, N. (2021). Friend or Foe: Militia Intelligence and Ethnic Violence in the Lebanese Civil War. Columbia University Press.

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory (L. A. Coser, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press.

Haugbolle, S. (2012). The (Little) Militia Man: Memory and Militarized Masculanity in Lebanon. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 8(1), 115–139.

Hirsch, J. (2004). Film, Trauma and the Holocaust. Temple University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt1dc

Kaplan, A., & Wang, B. (2004). Introduction. In Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (pp. 1–22). Hong Kong University Press.

Khatib, L. (2008). Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond. I.B. Tauris.

Khatib, L. (2024). The Contested City: Beirut in Lebanese War Cinema. In A. Marcus & D. Neumann (Eds.), Visualing The City (pp. 97–110). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003572466

Kraemer, J. A. (2015). Waltz with Bashir (2008): Trauma and Representation in the Animated Documentary. Journal of Film and Video, 67(3–4), 57–68. https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.67.3-4.0057

Launchbury, C., Tamraz, N., Celestin, R., & DalMolin, E. (2014). War, Memory, Amnesia: Postwar Lebanon. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 18(5), 457–461.

Le Breton, D. (1995). Anthropologie de la douleur. Métailié.

Mellor, N. (2024). The value chain of the film sector. In N. Mellor (Ed.), Routledge Handbook on Arab Cinema (pp. 125–134). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003302025-11

Mikdashi, M. (2023). Ethnography, cacophony, and Lebanon as a zone of prestige in the anthropology of the Middle East. The Journal of the American Ethnological Society, 50(2), 206–207.

Moliner, P., & Bovina, I. (2019). Architectural Forms of Collective Memory. International Review of Social Psychology, 32(1), 1–11.

Naor, D. (2014). The Path to Syrian Intervention in Lebanon on the Eve of Civil War, 1970–1975. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 41, 183–199.

Olick, J. K. (1999). Collective memory: The two cultures. Sociological Theory, 3(17), 333–348.

Pinchevski, A. (2011). Archive, Media, Trauma. In N/A (Ed.), On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (pp. 253–264). Palgrave Macmillan.

Rastegar, K. (2015). Surviving Images: Cinema, War, and Cultural Memory in the Middle East. Oxford University Press.

Rosa, H. (2010). Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Aarhus University Press.

Salibi, K. (1976). Crossroads to Civil War, Lebanon 1958-1976. Caravan Books.

Sarlo, B. (2012). Geçmiş Zaman: Bellek Kültürü ve Özneye Dönüş Üzerine Bir Tartışma. Metis Yayıncılık.

Sawalha, A. (2014). After Amnesia: Memory and War in Two Lebanese Films. Visual Anthropology, 27, 105–116.

Silverman, M. (2021). Latency in Lebanon, or bringing things (back) to life: A Perfect Day (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2005). Memory Studies, 16(4), 694–708.

Sönmez, S. (2015). Filmlerle Hatırlamak Toplumsal Travmaların Sinemada Temsil Edilişi. Metis Yayınları.

Susam, A. (2015). Toplumsal Bellek ve Belgesel Sinema. Ayrıntı Yayınları.

Tarraf, Z. (2017). Haunting and the neoliberal encounter in Terra Incognita and A Perfect Day. Cultural Dynamics, 29, 39–62.

Toplin, R. B. (2002). Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood. University Press of Kansas.

Vimercati, G. F. (2021). Port of Entry: Towards a Political Economy of Cinema in Lebanon (1919-1975) [Master].

Walker, J. (2005). Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. University of California Press.

Woods, E. T. (2019). Cultural trauma: Ron Eyerman and the founding of a new research paradigm. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 7, 260–274.

Yazbek, E. (2012). Regards sur le cinema libanais (1990-2010). L’Harmattan.

Zisser, E. (2011). Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). In N/A (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of War. John Wiley and Sons.

Downloads

Published

2025-05-27

How to Cite

Evecen, G., & Serter, S. S. (2025). Remembering The Civil War in Today’s Lebanese Cinema. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 13(1), 335–371. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2025.714

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2025): Winter

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Gökhan Evecen, Sırrı Serhat Serter

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.