David Stratton speaks with Jessica Khoury, Co-Director of the Lebanese Film Festival
show cinema against the context of what was
happening in the world at the time the films were
being made and shown. So I'm trying to link the films
to international events - not only political events but
what books were being published at the same time,
what plays were being performed, what works of art
were being produced for the first time, what songs
were popular...
I've always been interested in the history of cinema,
but also in the way that cinema reflects the place and
the time that it was made. A French film made in
1920 is going to reflect France in that post World War
I period - no matter what the film is, or what the
subject is. Similarly a Japanese film made in 1940 is
going to reflect the growing militarism of the time no matter what the subject, it's going to be the
background, the subtext of the film. That has always
fascinated me, and I'm trying to demonstrate that, but
I hope in a very entertaining way, because it's not a
heavy course. We're looking at all kinds of films, not
only serious films, we're looking at westerns and
musicals and so on.
What are the key national cinemas that the course
will explore?
We cover as many countries as possible, as many
countries as we in the West know about their cinema.
For example Indian cinema is difficult, because
historically not much of it has been preserved, for one
thing. Going right back into the past, very few Indian
films have survived because there hasn't been a great
culture of film preservation, and consequently we
don't really know all that much about it. With that
caveat I'm trying to show as much as we can.
For example, when I come back from Venice in the
middle of September, we'll be starting at 1954. That's
a time when in Eastern Europe all those countries that
became communist, or had communism imposed
upon them in the post-war period, by about 1954 they
begin to produce films again. Prior to the war all of
them - Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia - all had
film industries. Those films just more or less died for
several years. Then under communism the film
industry was restructured, and by the early 1950s it
started going again. So from 1954 onwards you start
finding extraordinary films being made in Poland, and
Hungary and Czechoslovakia and so on... that's just
one example.