A View to a Massacre
by Sharad Venkat on August 4, 2008 in Blog, Live from Beirut
A film review I did for the movie Massaker, a documentary about the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps 1982, just after the assassination of then newly elected Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel. It was committed by the Christian Phalangists and supported by the Israeli Army. There is no official count of how many were killed though the number is somewhere in the thousands. I hope to screen this film and another one made by an Israeli director about the same events next year at HKS.
Documentaries will always be subject to controversy, the integrity of the story questioned, the balance of the perspectives weighed. There is a fine line to walk whenever a film documents politically sensitive topics, especially in a place like Lebanon, and particularly when the filmmaker turns the lens toward the Lebanese civil war.
Directors Monika Borgmann and Lokman Slim have done just that with the film Massaker. Screened last week at the Medina al-Masra Theater in Hamra, this documentary points the camera squarely at the Lebanese civil war and the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, told through the memories of six Kataeb fighters who took part. With an unflinching eye, Borgmann and Slim documented a gruesome tale in the barebones style of the Blair Witch Project, except in this case, the story is true.
The film begins with a man drawing a circle on a piece of colored paper taped to the wall. He uses a permanent marker with a fat tip, and the thick sound of the sponge tip rubbing against the paper is uncomfortably loud.
A handheld camera follows the marker around the paper as the artist adds dashes around the outside, explaining that it represents a circle of civilians in Sabra and Shatila, the dashes along the outside signifying soldiers who are about to shoot them all down.
On first impression, it seems that this film is a victim of poor camerawork and production, but after 30 minutes, it’s clear the style is intentional.
The lack of bright colors, music and stylistic transitions gives the whole documentary a raw edge. An airy hiss like the reverb from a guitar amp provides the soundtrack, punctuated occasionally with steely drum beats. The sparse sounds create a feeling of emptiness to complement the vacuity of the rooms in which the interviews take place.
The rooms are always dimly lit and a solitary bulb on the back wall often provides the only illumination. The camera and subject move in an intricate dance, keeping the interviewee’s face perpetually obscured in the shadows, ensuring his anonymity.
This man and the other five are killers, killers who are telling their stories in graphic detail without any real remorse. The only voices you hear come from the fighters themselves – there is no background narration, no framing of the issues with commentary from outsiders or experts – the story is told wholly by the people who were there.
The fighters not only admit guilt in the interviews, but tell how they complied with the Israeli army to carry out the massacre, down to the details of how to dispose of the bodies.
To say this film is controversial is an understatement. Its starkness leaves the viewer squirming in his seat the entire time, and one is sometimes even compelling to turn one’s head away in disgust, though what you’re turning away from is nothing more than a man talking. It is littered with lines like, “Young and old, babies in arms, show no mercy.” Or, “You kill the first against your will. The second and third times are a little easier. By the time you get to the fourth, you enjoy it”
Director Borgmann addresses a common critique of the film: that it demonizes only one group’s activities at a time when the country was littered with mass graves from various massacres. She told me, “This film took three years, and I’m not sacrificing another 30 years of my life just to be politically correct. I’m not accusing these guys, and it is not about assigning blame.”
“The massacre at Shabra and Shatila is an example of what can happen when someone is committing collective violence, of what human beings are capable of under certain circumstances,” she added.
Indeed, this film provides a look into the powerful forces that existed within the dense fog of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.
Borgmann provides an example that did not make it into the film,
“There is one guy who couldn’t do it [the killing], so he went home. But the group pressure was so great, that after some hours, he came back by himself and killed an old man in his bed. By himself, he would never have committed this killing, but the collective pressure of the group made him come back, so he could say to the group, I am not a coward,” she said.
Borgmann shows in the film how young the fighters were when they did the killings. They followed their leaders blindly, did lots of drugs and grew to love war for its freedom from responsibility and accountability. They even became so accustomed to the sounds of firing that it eventually became a strange surrogate for a warm cup of milk. One fighter recounts, “Many of us could only fall asleep to the sound of gunshots”
Massaker provides insight into the survival mentality people felt they needed to get through the war. One of the interviewees, who was a group leader at the time, told the camera, “I sent in my boys to fight and kill some people. The most important thing, if you want to survive a war, is to see blood.”
Another spoke of a message from his father after being hit in the leg by a sniper. His father showed up at the hospital he was taken to, and after gifting him a pistol, ordered him back to the violence: “don’t be afraid. When they fix you up, go out and fight again.”
Truthfully, the admissions of guilt by these fighters are astonishing, but I found myself more interested in the way the soldiers thought and lived. I was shocked by their coldness and lack of remorse, but I never once thought that these characteristics were unique to only the fighters on screen, or the group they represented.
Massaker is long, and towards the end painfully so. At an hour long, I could probably have left the theater and gone out for drinks afterwards. But after almost two hours of interviews, Massaker stayed with me for the rest of the evening and for the next few days as well. Perhaps the message could have been conveyed in less time, but I don’t doubt that the directors may have done it on purpose- this film was not meant to be easy to swallow or easily forgotten.
The controversy around this brave endeavor will not end anytime soon, if for no other reason than it opens up old wounds and attempts to shake away the collective amnesia the Lebanese have for events before 1990.
It is a reminder of the indoctrination and pressures that are needed for wars and massacres, and a viewer will be hard pressed to not see parallels in the situation in Lebanon today. It shows that beyond the smiles, handshakes and agreements of political reconciliation today, there are deeper issues that require healing.
On the other hand, it is unclear if the film could have any deterring effect on the new generation of fighters. Director Borgmann herself said, when asked how she thought young fighters today would respond to the movie, that she just didn’t know.
But a key to this movie, as Borgmann also said, is having open and constructive dialogue after watching it. It seems that, if Massaker is to really foster reconciliation and understanding on a deeper level, the two must go hand in hand.
Since its completion in 2004, Massaker has only been screened in Lebanon three times, and today Borgmann and Slim are still fighting to get the film a broad theatrical release.
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