Laura Marks: Recent videos from Beirut

Visiting scholar Laura Marks offered a look into a world of film that goes almost unnoticed to the general public. Islamic art is something i never even considered to appreciate until the recent presentation given by Marks. The collection of videos she screened was enough to see that Islamic and Arab filmmakers have something important to say and a fascinating way of saying it. She stated that the people in Lebanon use experimental film because "their reality is hard to wrap your head around." It is experimental in terms of how to tell the truth or how to represent reality.
Usama Alshaibi's video was a trance like film animation that made great use of sound/image continuity. His video lets us know that geometry has content in the the Arab world. While the image may hold some sort of religous connotation it doesn't seem to be concrete. Akram Zaatari's video In This House was "a story about archiving." The movie is largely a political piece which carries a very anti-climatic ending with it. The story does a good job of painting a portrait of what war-time life was like and providing an interesting insight to the mindest of resistence fighters on the border. Democratic socialist resistence fighters consciously thought to write an apology for the destruction of an olive tree while they occupied a christian home. That kind of subject matter is never the content of a film concerning war and it made this piece unique.