Since her death in 2019, Franco-Lebanese war reporter and film director who died in 2019, has been the subject of a revival in Paris Cinemas.
With some 47 films in her journey, including 35 documentaries shot in war zones and four works of fiction, hers is a rich filmography with much to draw upon.
With documentaries showing Egyptian belly dancers, alongside the fantasized utopia of Iran post-1979 Islamic revolution, and a look at the Alexandrian bourgeoisie -- nostalgic for the greatness of the city, Jocelyne Saab takes viewers on a journey through the history and heritage of the Middle East.
Jocelyne Saab, Unclassifiable
How to classify Saab? Journalist? Film director? She surprises us with her unclassifiable style. “She wanted to make films before journalism and saw herself first and foremost as a filmmaker” says Mathilde Rouxel, a researcher and specialist in the cinema of Jocelyne Saab and author of Jocelyne Saab, La Mémoire Indomptée (edited by Dar An-Nahar, 2015).
Saab’s works illuminate global conflicts and crises from a unique perspective. While she touches many areas, Saab deals primarily with war -- she once cynically quipped: “what interests people is war.”
The freshness of Saab’s work lies in the fact that it is shot largely through the eyes of the forgotten people of the Middle East, via portraits of Palestinian female fighters, child victims of the war in Lebanon, the left behind.
Jocelyne Saab’s approach is halfway between journalism and cinema, juggling documentary and fiction, and her aesthetic manages to break out of the mold of both genres.
In Iran, l’Utopie en marche (Iran, an Ongoing Utopia) a 1980 documentary on the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, Saab measures the impact of that cultural earthquake on Iranian society. With great freedom of tone, she captures the lives of students at Tehran University who are torn between supporters of Shariati and Khomeini, the election campaign of a liberal MP in the bazaar of Isfahan, and does not forget the fringes (misfits, opium addicts, slum dwellers, prostitutes, etc.) and the minorities of this multi-ethnic country (Peshmerga, tribes of Balochistan, etc.). We see the rise of the Revolutionary Guards or “Pasdarans” and of Ahmadinejad, anticipating the post-revolution Iran.
Saab’s fascination with Egypt and her desire to pay tribute to its heritage gave rise to Les Fantômes d’Alexandrie (The Ghosts of Alexandria), a 1986 documentary for which Saab films figures from the Alexandrian bourgeoisie, one of whom is none other than the heiress to the cotton factories that made Egypt’s fortune. The viewer discovers, not without a touch of amusement, the sumptuous past of a bygone Alexandria. These women face the camera and tell of the parties and social events that brought the whole of Alexandria together a few decades earlier. Pointing to her dining room table, the heiress lists the people who have sat there: Abdullah I of Jordan, Faisal II, King of Iraq, Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy and his wife, Queen Elena of Montenegro alongside Prince and Princess of Romania, Antoine Bibesco and his wife, Elena Epureanu. Her eyes reflect the nostalgia of a cosmopolitan Alexandria, where Egyptians and Europeans lived together.
Another tribute to Egypt, the country Saab loved so much, is the 1989 documentary Les Almées, danseuses orientales (Almahs, the belly dancers, عالِم in Arabic), in which she combines archive footage of the great figures of bellydance from the 1940s and 50s (Samia Gamal, Dahia Karioka, Naaima Aakef...) with dancers who have come from all over Egypt to learn their craft. Her close-ups of the vibrations and movements of the dancers' bodies mesmerize the viewer. Bellies have been magnified by Saab’s footage to the point that you almost want to join in the spectacle of their spinning bodies. In these scenes, Jocelyne Saab is paying homage to women. As she said to Mathilde Rouxel: “In dance, women regain possession of their bodies; they also enter into communion with the world, it's also a form of poetry. At the end of the documentary, I film a dancer [ed: Nadia Gamal] who has cancer and will soon die and who dances, between life and death, on a rock in the setting sun: the dance appears here as a long prayer.”
Lebanon: Jocelyne Saab’s preferred artistic playground
Jocelyne Saab was one of Lebanon's most prolific filmmakers, shooting almost thirty films about the civil war in Lebanon over a period of more than fifteen years. The violence of the civil war took her by surprise. Having been on her way to Vietnam when war broke out in her homeland, she changed her plans and began covering the war in Lebanon for the French media.
Saab quickly immersed herself in the heart of Lebanese cultural life. In 1992, she got involved in rebuilding the archive of the Lebanese Cinémathèque, restoring some 35 films about Lebanon. She saw commitment to cinema in her country as a way for her to help restore the link between its people. In 2013, at the very moment when the Syrian civil war marked the resumption of violence in Lebanon, Saab created the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival. Over the course of three editions, the festival has screened films from all over Asia and the Mediterranea in Beirut, Saïda, Zahlé, Tripoli, and Tyre. “Cinema allows us to reconstruct what war destroys, just as it allows us to open our minds. Cinema allows us to reconstruct bits of our memory by encouraging us to reflect on what happened,” she confided to Agenda Culturel in 2013.
An uncertain posterity
Long ignored, rarely celebrated, and sometimes censored, Jocelyne Saab’s work is now enjoying a revival in the Arab world, along with other directors of the 1970s. Mathilde Rouxel believes that the filmmaker suffered greatly from this lack of interest from her peers. “She was always saying that she was ahead of her time,” she told Tamooda.
The censorship that Jocelyne Saab experienced also affected her greatly on a personal level. This was particularly so with regard to her film Dunia, kiss me not on the eyes. Released in 2005, the film questions the feminine desire of a young woman fascinated by Arabic poetry and aspiring to rediscover her body through dance. Set in Cairo, the film also tackles the issue of female genital mutilation. “People said my film was pornographic while I was inspired by the greatest Arab authors! I suffered a lot,” the filmmaker confessed to Bahar Rahmani in 2005.
To preserve and promote Jocelyne Saab’s work, the Association that bears her name, co-founded and presided by Mathilde Rouxel, is working to restore her films and written archive. After a retrospective dedicated to Jocelyne Saab held in Paris, the association will repeat the event in Marseille from 6 to 28 February, 2024. A series of 15 documentaries by Jocelyne Saab, filmed between 1974 and 1982, is also soon to be released thanks to the association's work. Perhaps now at last Jocelyne Saab’s work will begin to receive the recognition it deserves.
