cg video release

[JSalloum at aol.com]

A new videotape by Jayce Salloum,

everything and nothing 
40:40, France/Canada, 2001
English and French subtitled versions available.

An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a 
figure (of resistance) and subject, with Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National 
Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room after release from captivity in 
El-Khiam torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been 
detained for 10 years, 6 years in isolation.


For distribution information please contact:
salloum at rrrr.net

--

Full videotape description:
                                                
    

everything and nothing  (part 1 from the continuous tape, ‘untitled’)
© Jayce Salloum, 40:40, orig format MiniDV, France/Canada, 2001
English and French subtitled versions available.


An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a 
figure (of resistance) and subject with, *Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National 
Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room taped (during the last year of the 
Israeli occupation) one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam 
torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been detained for 
10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and 
will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image 
and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera 
juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the 
distance between the subject and the loss, of what is left behind and what 
remains.

*Soha Bechara is a heroine in Lebanon, pictures of her are seen in many 
houses in the South and posters of her were seen all around downtown Beirut 
when I was working there in the early 90’s. She was captured in 1988  for 
trying to assassinate the general of the SLA, Antoine Lahad (the South 
Lebanese Army was a proxy militia set up & controlled by the Israeli forces 
to give a Lebanese façade to the occupation of South Lebanon). I didn't ask 
her anything specifically about the torture she underwent or the trauma of 
detention, she was being interviewed to death by the European and Arab press 
over the details of her captivity and the minutiae of her surviving it and 
the conditions in El-Khiam and the detainees and the resistance. I went to 
her small dorm room, not much bigger than her cell (she is presently studying 
international law at the Sorbonne), she sat on her bed and I asked her about 
the distance lived between Khiam and Paris, and Beirut and Paris, and what 
she left in Khiam and what she brought with her, a story about flowers and 
how she never puts them in water, how it felt for her now to be under such 
demand, and who she was, and what the title of the tape should be, and a few 
other things. This video material that I recorded of the time spent with her 
is not precious, just time and a conversation, and intense intimacy at a 
close and unbreachable distance.


Screenings to date of "everything and nothing" include; MoneyNations2, 
Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Ayam Bayrout al Cinemaiya, Beirut; Santa 
Monica Museum of Art; Arab Screen Independent Film Festival, Doha, Qatar; 
Artists Television Access/Arab Film Festival, San Francisco; Arab & Iranian 
Film Festival, NYC; Argos Film & Video Festival, Brussels; The World Wide 
Video Festival, Amsterdam; The Museum of Civilization, Hull, Québec; Biennale 
de l’image en Mouvement (Biennial of Moving Images), Geneva; Signal & Noise 
Festival, Vancouver; Pacific Film Archives - University Art Museum, Berkeley; 
Sarah Lawrence College, New York; and upcoming at the Centre for the 
Contemporary Image, Geneva and YYZ, Toronto.


----  
other related works:

This is Not Beirut/ There was and there was not
Jayce Salloum, 49 min., Lebanon/USA/Canada, © 1994
This Is Not Beirut is a personal essay on the popular misrepresentations of 
Lebanon and Beirut which documents the filmmaker's own experiences while 
working in Lebanon.  Aware of its own conceptual baggage, the tape situates 
itself between genres in order to better expose commonplace assumptions.  The 
examination is thus liberated to realize the actual complexities of the 
identities of artist and subject.  The result is a critical engagement of the 
disparities and disjunctions arising on site.


---
Talaeen a Junuub/Up to the South   
Jayce Salloum + Walid Ra’ad, 60 min., Lebanon/USA/Canada, 1993
An oblique, albeit powerful documentary which examines the current 
conditions, politics and economics of South Lebanon.  The tape focuses on the 
social, intellectual and popular resistance to the Israeli occupation, as 
well as conceptions of 'the land' and culture, and the imperiled identities 
of the Lebanese people.  Simultaneously the tape self-consciously engages in 
a parallel critique of the documentary genre and its traditions.


---
Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal  (Introduction to the End of an Argument) 
Speaking for oneself .../Speaking for others....
Jayce Salloum & Elia Suleiman, 45 min., 1990, USA/Palestine
With a combination of Hollywood, European and Israeli film, documentary, news 
coverage and excerpts of 'live' footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, 
Introduction to the End of an Argument critiques representations of the 
Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West.  




---
For more information please contact:
rrrr at rrrr.net