City Limits: Filming Belfast, Beirut and Berlin in Troubled Times 9781501380457, 9781501380419, 9781501380433

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Historical and cultural background
Belfast, Beirut and Berlin: Three histories of division
Peace lines, murals, kerbstone paintings: Belfast’s internal boundaries and borders
Divided Beirut: Between Muslims and Christians
Antifascist rampart or wall of shame? Berlin and the Wall
Three histories of filmmaking
The development of Northern Irish cinema
Lebanese cinema before and after the Civil War
German cinema between east and west
2 Urban space and territoriality
‘A maze to get lost in’: Belfast’s fragmented cityscape in Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man
Belfast’s streets – an ideal spot for a thriller
‘Mental maps’ and the Belfast flâneur
Paramilitary control over Belfast
On both sides of the green line: The Lebanese capital in Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire
Failed encounters in segregated Beirut
The growing impact of war
Mental and physical boundaries
Crossing Berlin’s borders in One, Two, Three; The Man on the Wall; and Wings of Desire
Selling Coca Cola behind the Iron Curtain: Berlin between the United States and the Soviet Union
Walking the line between east and the west
Undivided sky over a divided city
3 Tropes of violence
Coping with sectarian violence: Belfast in Titanic Town, The Boxer and Good Vibrations
A-levels, shootings and paramilitary boyfriends: Belfast from the perspective of a young girl
Belfast prisoners’ wives: Victims or superwomen?
Seeing the light: Punk music as an alternative to the Troubles
Fright and terror in war-torn Beirut: Lebanon, the Land of Honey and Incense, The Tornado and In the Battlefields
Abductions, bombings and a French doctor
From Russia to Lebanon – from peace to war
Beirut – a ground for multiple battles
State supervision and escape routes: Berlin in The Promise, The Tunnel and The Lives of Others
Escaping through the underground
Digging into the West
Omnipresent Stasi terror
4 Representing division through humour
A humorous perspective on Belfast: Divorcing Jack, An Everlasting Piece and Mad about Mambo
Guinness, guns and a fake nun: Deconstructing Belfast’s power structures
Peace and hairpieces: Two barbers dealing with the paramilitaries
The spirit of Brazil in Republican West Belfast
Between humour and drama: Beirut in West Beirut and Zozo
Mother Halloween, bombs and an old Super-8-camera
The effects of trauma, a toothless grandfather and a chick
The comic subversion of Berlin in Meier, Beloved Wall, Sun Alley and Mr. Lehmann
Wallpaper smuggling and love affairs between east and west
The border crossing: A place of suspicion, mistrust and charade
Outwitting the Stasi and the border police
Terra incognita: ‘The other side’ as a blank spot
5 Between present, past and future
Revisting Belfast’s recent history in ’71, A Belfast Story and Mickybo and Me
A fatal trap: Hostile territory and friendly ground
Revenge leads to revenge: The challenge of burying the past
Juvenile cowboy phantasies and sectarianism
Coming to terms with Beirut’s past in Beirut Phantoms, Around the Pink House and A Perfect Day
Fighting the demons of the past
Struggling for a future
Burying the past and the present
Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall in Heroes Like Us, Berlin Is in Germany and Good Bye, Lenin!
From apparatchik to revolutionist
Leaving the GDR past behind
Reviving the past in the present
Conclusion
Bibliography
Websites
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

City Limits

ii

City Limits Filming Belfast, Beirut and Berlin in Troubled Times Stephanie Schwerter

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Stephanie Schwerter, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image © Stephanie Schwerter All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945097 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-8045-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-8043-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-8044-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

7

2

Historical and cultural background Belfast, Beirut and Berlin: Three histories of division Peace lines, murals, kerbstone paintings: Belfast’s internal boundaries and borders Divided Beirut: Between Muslims and Christians Antifascist rampart or wall of shame? Berlin and the Wall Three histories of filmmaking The development of Northern Irish cinema Lebanese cinema before and after the Civil War German cinema between east and west Urban space and territoriality ‘A maze to get lost in’: Belfast’s fragmented cityscape in Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man Belfast’s streets – an ideal spot for a thriller ‘Mental maps’ and the Belfast flâneur Paramilitary control over Belfast On both sides of the green line: The Lebanese capital in Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire Failed encounters in segregated Beirut The growing impact of war Mental and physical boundaries Crossing Berlin’s borders in One, Two, Three; The Man on the Wall; and Wings of Desire Selling Coca Cola behind the Iron Curtain: Berlin between the United States and the Soviet Union Walking the line between east and the west Undivided sky over a divided city

7 8 16 24 30 30 34 38 47 48 50 55 59 65 67 70 74 80 82 87 91

vi 3

4

5

Contents Tropes of violence Coping with sectarian violence: Belfast in Titanic Town, The Boxer and Good Vibrations A-levels, shootings and paramilitary boyfriends: Belfast from the perspective of a young girl Belfast prisoners’ wives: Victims or superwomen? Seeing the light: Punk music as an alternative to the Troubles Fright and terror in war-torn Beirut: Lebanon, the Land of Honey and Incense, The Tornado and In the Battlefields Abductions, bombings and a French doctor From Russia to Lebanon – from peace to war Beirut – a ground for multiple battles State supervision and escape routes: Berlin in The Promise, The Tunnel and The Lives of Others Escaping through the underground Digging into the West Omnipresent Stasi terror Representing division through humour A humorous perspective on Belfast: Divorcing Jack, An Everlasting Piece and Mad about Mambo Guinness, guns and a fake nun: Deconstructing Belfast’s power structures Peace and hairpieces: Two barbers dealing with the paramilitaries The spirit of Brazil in Republican West Belfast Between humour and drama: Beirut in West Beirut and Zozo Mother Halloween, bombs and an old Super-8-camera The effects of trauma, a toothless grandfather and a chick The comic subversion of Berlin in Meier, Beloved Wall, Sun Alley and Mr. Lehmann Wallpaper smuggling and love affairs between east and west The border crossing: A place of suspicion, mistrust and charade Outwitting the Stasi and the border police Terra incognita: ‘The other side’ as a blank spot

97 98 99 105 112 118 120 124 129 133 134 141 146 151 152 154 160 165 173 175 180 185 187 194 199 207

Between present, past and future 213 Revisting Belfast’s recent history in ’71, A Belfast Story and Mickybo and Me 214 A fatal trap: Hostile territory and friendly ground 215

Contents Revenge leads to revenge: The challenge of burying the past Juvenile cowboy phantasies and sectarianism Coming to terms with Beirut’s past in Beirut Phantoms, Around the Pink House and A Perfect Day Fighting the demons of the past Struggling for a future Burying the past and the present Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall in Heroes Like Us, Berlin Is in Germany and Good Bye, Lenin! From apparatchik to revolutionist Leaving the GDR past behind Reviving the past in the present

vii 220 225 230 231 237 243 247 249 254 260

Conclusion

267

Bibliography Websites Filmography Index

278 288 294 295

Acknowledgements I am very grateful for the generous help I received from Peter Kuch, who has been consistently encouraging and supportive, giving me precious advice, inviting me to present my work at the University of Otago and – last but not least – having a brilliant idea in the Silent Bar in Budapest! I’m greatly indebted to Damien Grant for interesting discussions and eagle-eyed proofreading, preventing blessing shrapnel and other silly things from entering the manuscript. Many thanks go to Henry Awaiss for inviting me to the University St. Joseph in Beirut, helping me to find inaccessible films and giving me valuable explanations about the functioning of Lebanese society. I would like to thank Munira Mutran for having given me the opportunity to share my passion for divided cities with the students of the University of Saõ Paulo and for inspiring conversations about Northern Irish film and literature in her garden under the avocado trees. Many thanks go to Farah Bustame for helping me to track down valuable material, to Franck Mermier for drawing my attention to the subtleties of Lebanese legislation, to Clíona Ní Ríordáin for constant friendship and advice, to Jean-Charles Meunier for technical support, to the German Honorary Consul in Northern Ireland for her availability and to the organizer of the world’s only St Patrick’s Day parade in 2020, which took place in Salvador de Bahia. I’m deeply obliged to the research centre Descripto at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, which funded a number of trips to conferences allowing me to discuss my work on Belfast, Beirut and Berlin. Finally, I would like to thank Jean-Pierre Malpot for sharp criticism, clever ideas and much more.

Introduction

Belfast, Beirut and Berlin, three cities notorious for their internal boundaries and borders, have served as an inspiration for scriptwriters and directors from different cultural backgrounds. As symbols for political disunion with an underlying potential for violence, the three metropolises have provided the backdrop to the action of numerous films. Despite their different histories, they share a wide range of features central to divided cities. The cities’ contrasting socio-political environments have generated specific territorialities, which determine their respective urban layouts. Whereas in Belfast, peace lines, murals and kerbstone paintings have separated working-class Catholic and Protestant residents since the outbreak of the Northern Irish conflict in 1968, in Beirut, seventeen years of civil war created a volatile demarcation line, turning the city into a sectarian labyrinth. In Berlin, on the contrary, the Wall divided the urban landscape into east and west for twenty-eight years and served to keep two clashing ideological systems apart. Regardless of their political and historical differences, Belfast, Beirut and Berlin have been equally maimed by physical segregation, which became etched into the fabric of their respective urban spaces. In each place, particular territories take on specific symbolic and psychological meanings. The connecting link between the three cities under study is the fact that their urban division was generated by different kinds of political conflicts. While Berlin’s separation between east and west was generated by the Cold War, the segmentation of Belfast’s urban space is the result of a violent ethno-religious conflict between the Northern Irish Protestant and Catholic communities. Beirut, on the contrary, bore the traces of the Lebanese Civil War, involving not only Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim communities, but also Israel and Palestine. Scholarship on the cinematographic representation of politically segregated cities is, so far, relatively scarce. Only a few articles in edited books and journals, or single chapters in monographs discuss the illustration of urban borders through the lens of film. In most cases, writings merely focus on one city without establishing a connection to other divided metropolises. Until today, no comparative study on films concentrating on Belfast, Beirut and Berlin has yet appeared. Nevertheless, in the discipline of sociology, a growing number of books treat with different kinds of urban polarizations. Jon Calame and Esther Charleswood, for example, explore in Divided Cities Belfast’s and Beirut’s fragmented urban space, comparing it to Jerusalem, Mostar

2

City Limits

and Nicosia.1 In Murs, the French sociologist Claude Quétel mentions the Berlin Wall, and Belfast’s peace lines among a number of notorious walls, such as the Chinese Wall and the eighteenth-century wall against the plague in the south of France.2 In his seminal book Segregation. A Global History of Divided Cities,3 Carl H. Nightingale only passingly refers to Beirut and Belfast next to other socially, ethnically or politically split cities. In the field of Film Studies, the cinematographic representation of urban division is tackled only marginally. In Irish National Cinema, Ruth Barton dedicates one of the book’s ten chapters to films focussing on Northern Ireland, referring to a small number of feature films set in Belfast.4 Sabine Hake in German National Cinema5 provides an overview of German productions, which also includes some films set in Berlin. However, the German capital is not in the centre of the author’s attention. In German Cinema Since Unification,6 edited by David Clarke, merely a single essay refers to Berlin films after 1990. Lina Khatib in Lebanese Cinema7 and Eli Yazbek in his concise volume Regards sur le cinéma libanais8 dedicate a part of their analysis to the study of films whose action is set in Beirut. The only book on film establishing a link between Belfast, Beirut and Berlin is Barbara Mennel’s book Cities and Cinema, in which the fifth chapter compares a small number of films set in the three cities.9 More general volumes concentrating on the cinematographic illustration of modern cities are From Moscow to Madrid by Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli,10 Lara Frahm’s Jenseits des Raums,11 Charles Perraton and Francois Jost’s Un nouvel art de voir la ville et faire du cinéma,12 Stephen Barber’s Projected Cities,13 Nezar AlSayyad’s Cinematic Urbanism14 and Richard Koeck’s Cinescapes.15 However, the quoted works do not specifically engage with the filming of urban division.

Calame, John; Charlesworth, Esther: Divided Cities. Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 2 Cf. Quétel, Claude: Murs. Une autre histoire des hommes, Paris: Perrin, 2012, for the discussion of the Berlin Wall cf. pp. 135–85; for the discussion of Belfast’s peace lines, cf. pp. 272–7. 3 Cf. Nightingale, Carl H.: Seggregation. A Global History of Divided Cities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. References to Beirut cf. p. 403 and references to Belfast, cf. p. 4, 31, 385, 412, 317, 318, 385. 4 Barton, Ruth: Irish National Cinema, London: Routledge, 2004. 5 Hake, Sabine: German National Cinema, Oxon: Routledge, 2002. 6 Clarke, David: German Cinema since Unification, London: Continuum, 2006. 7 Khatib, Lina: Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond, London: I.B. Tauris, 2008. 8 Yazbek, Elie: Regards sur le cinéma libanais (1990-2010), Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012. 9 Mennel, Barbara: Cities and Cinema, London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 104–29. 10 Mazierska, Ewa; Rascaroli, Laura: From Moscow to Madrid, Postmodern Cities. European Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2002, pp. 115–36. 11 Frahm, Laura: Jenseits des Raums. Zur filmischen Topologie des Urbanen, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. 12 Perraton, Charles, François, Jost: Un nouvel art de voir la ville et de faire du cinéma. Du cinéma et des restes urbains, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. 13 Barber, Stephen: Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space, London: Reaction Books, 2002. 14 AlSayyard, Nezar: Cinematic Urbanism. A History of the Modern from Reel to Real, London: Routledge, 2006. 15 Koeck, Richard: Cinescapes. Cinematic Space in Architecture and Cities, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. 1

Introduction

3

In the present study, the connection between the physical structure of a given city and the urban population plays a decisive role. In sociological research, the city is considered as a binary phenomenon, which on the one hand is composed of streets, buildings, parks etc. and on the other of its population. Sociologists disagree about the question whether a city is primarily shaped by its inhabitants or whether the urban society is formed by its environment.16 Despite the contention about cause and effect, scholars agree about the interaction of, speaking in Henry Lefebvre’s words, a city’s ‘social reality’ and its ‘practico-material and architectural fact’.17 Given the binary nature of an urban complex, its physical structure and its society will be equally explored in our analysis. In this context, we shall study the cinematographic methods and strategies employed by different directors in order to render a specific image of their respective cities. In Fragmented Urban Images, Gerd Hurm points out that ‘fictional city images are crucially shaped by the particular issues chosen for treatment’.18 This means that through the conscious exclusion or inclusion of certain urban elements, directors attribute to ‘their’ city an individual perspective. According to James Donald, a city cannot be seen as a concrete phenomenon but rather as an ‘imagined environment’, which bears a different meaning for each of its inhabitants.19 As Belfast, Beirut and Berlin call up contrasting associations, directors build their own imaginary urban complex through a particular choice of images, places, sounds and characters. In order to generate an imaginary city, the directors locate the action of their film in the factually existing Belfast, Beirut and Berlin, while simultaneously adding fictional elements to their city. In so doing, they draw on maps, street names, famous buildings or landmarks to let their characters act in a realistic setting. The audience within a particular culture is thus able to attribute ‘a whole repertoire of meaning’20 to particular urban elements. In the same way as the Wall is closely associated with Berlin, the green line on Damascus Street is linked to Beirut. Murals, peace lines and kerbstone paintings, on the other hand, make us think of Belfast’s fragmented urban space. Due to their ‘polysemous’ or ‘multicoded nature’,21 cities give rise to a wide range of interpretations, which enables directors to make their city ‘speak’ with many voices.22 This holds particularly true for divided cities,

For a discussion in the topic, cf.: Lefebvre, Henri. ‘The Right to the City’. In: Kofman, Elenore; Lebas, Elizabeth (eds. / trans.): Writings on Cities. Hoboken: Blackwell, 1996, p. 103, Park, Robert: ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urba Environment’. In: Park, Robert; Burgess, Ernest (eds.): The City, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968, p. 1, Donald, James: ‘Metropolis: the City as Text’. In: Bocock, Robert; Thompson, Kenneth (eds.): Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 422. 17 Lefebvre, ‘The Right to the City’, p. 103. 18 Hurm, Gerd: Fragmented Urban Images. The American City in Modern Fiction from Stephen Crane to Thomas Pynchon, Frankfurt on the Main: Peter Lang, 1991, p. 9. 19 Donald, ‘Metropolis: the City as Text’, p. 422. 20 Wirth-Nesher, Hana: City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 136. 21 Pike, Burton: The Image of the City in Modern Literature, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. IX. 22 Ibid. 16

4

City Limits

as their ‘voices’ differ according to the community from whose perspective a certain story is told. In The Image of the City in Modern Literature, Burton Pike establishes an opposition between the two notions Real City and Word City. While the term Real City refers to a factually existing urban complex, Word City denotes the fictional representation of a Real City.23 Pike’s opposition of Real City and Word City is not only a valuable concept in order to analyse the representation of cities in literature, it also lends itself to the study of imaginary cities in film. Thus, the notion Word City has to be considered in a broader sense, that is, the depiction of urban complexes through words and images. In film, a combination of verbal and visual illustration is achieved on the basis of the images chosen by the director, and through the dialogues of the characters, or the offscreen voice of an external narrator. The quantitative integration of Belfast, Beirut and Berlin into the action of a film has to be given special attention. In the films discussed in the present book, the city does not only serve as a background to the action but determines the plot to a considerable extent. The story of most of the films could not happen elsewhere as it relies on specific urban features. A convenient strategy to study the fictional urban space in a film is the analysis of what Gerhard Hoffman calls the ‘micro-’ and ‘macrostructure’ of ‘narrative space’.24 If for example, directors decide to focus exclusively on a particular area, while disregarding the rest of the city, they concentrate on the urban ‘micro-structure’ and thus highlight specific urban details. Leander Haußmann, the director of Sun Alley, for example, sets the action of his film entirely in East Berlin and does not pay attention to the west of the city with its entirely different life style. In this way, the divided capital becomes illustrated from a restricted perspective, focussing only on the situation in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). However, if directors decide to represent the city’s ‘macrostructure’, they draw attention to a variety of contrasting areas and urban features in order to create a multifaceted image. In this case, the characters generally move freely through the entire urban scene so that the audience is confronted with different aspects of the cityscape. Choosing to integrate specific elements of the city’s physical structure into their Word City, directors create a particular vision of the respective metropolises. As to Belfast, they might, for example, present peace lines, kerbstone paintings and murals as crucial urban elements, and in this way, generate a threatening atmosphere. Nevertheless, if they decide to shoot scenes in the leafy part of middle-class Belfast situated between Lisburn and Malone Road, they render an entirely different picture of the place, portraying the city as green and peaceful. Directors also make important decisions concerning the ‘social reality’ of their Word City. Richard Lehan argues that ‘each crowd offers a way of reading a city’.25 In this sense, the choice of characters plays a decisive role in the fictional representation Ibid. Hoffman, Gerhard: Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit. Poetologische und historische Studien zum englischen und amerikanischen Roman, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978, p. 418. 25 Lehan, Richard: The City in Literature. An Intellectual and Cultural History, Berkley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 9. 23 24

Introduction

5

of an urban complex. In our analysis, we have to consider whether the characters belong to different parts of the urban society, and thus render a complex picture of the population, or whether they function as stereotypical representatives of a certain political, social or religious milieu. The latter is often the case in Northern Irish thrillers, where characters predominantly hail from Belfast’s criminal underworld and belong to one of the warring factions. If a director concentrates on one particular part of the urban society, the audience might gain insight into the specific functioning and ways of thinking of a group. Richard Lehan claims that ‘a city expresses a society and also the world of this society’.26 Thus, a Word City becomes constructed through the interaction of its inhabitants with their urban environment. This holds particularly true for Belfast, Beirut and Berlin, places in which the daily reality of the citizens is shaped by a variety of boundary markers, such as walls, green lines, murals and flags, which they have to be able to interpret in order to survive in a conflicted environment. The different ways in which characters navigate the territoriality of their city are a frequent topic in the films analysed in this book. The cinematographic representations of Belfast, Beirut and Berlin discussed here are films in which urban division plays a key role. Limitations of space make it necessary to restrict the material to feature film productions, thus excluding experimental and documentary filmmaking as well as TV series. The films explored in this book are major films dealing with Belfast, Beirut and Berlin, which have achieved national and international acclaim. They have received academic attention mostly within their own cinematographic tradition without being compared to films shot in other cultural spheres. The films chosen cover a variety of film genres, ranging from thrillers to comedies. My study does not aim at giving a complete account of all the films focussing on Belfast, Beirut and Berlin from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present day; my selection is intended as representative rather than comprehensive. The films singled out for analysis are either set during the Northern Irish conflict, the Lebanese Civil War, the Cold War, or else take place during the postconflict period, which remains significantly marked by the traces of political violence. The German films under scrutiny are set after the building of the Wall in 1961, apart from Billy Wilders’ One, Two, Three, which began shooting shortly before Germany’s division and was literally interrupted by the construction of the Wall. The films on Berlin analysed in our study were shot by German filmmakers with the exception of Billy Wilders, an Austrian director, who spent a considerable time of his life in Berlin, before moving to the United States. Works by foreign directors are excluded because they would need to be explored outside the German cinema tradition. Films shot in the GDR do not occur in the present study, as they do not sufficiently engage with the division of Berlin. In line with the official party discourse, the Wall did not present an undesirable barrier and therefore, it was not a topic to be commented on in films funded by the East German cinema foundation DEFA. In the very few Ledrut, Raymond: ‘Speech and the Silence of the City’. In: Gottdiener, Mark; Lagopoulos, Alexandors (eds.): The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 120.

26

6

City Limits

GDR films in which the Wall is actually alluded to it is rather presented as an abstract allegory for the country’s division than as a concrete boundary marker of the capital’s urban space. The Lebanese films included in this book are set after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1975. They were produced by Lebanese filmmakers, who either live in their native country or belong to the Lebanese diaspora abroad. The films on Belfast take place after the outbreak of the Troubles in 1968. Most of them were made by Irish producers, directors and scriptwriters. In the few cases in which films were shot by directors from outside Ireland, they are based on novels or scripts provided by Irish authors. The only exception is ’71, a film which was made by a French-Algerian director living in the UK. The underlying concern of my book will be the themes and the cinematographic means chosen by the directors and scriptwriters to engage with urban division generated by a political conflict. Filmic practices will be explored in relation to larger social and political developments in the respective cities. In my analysis, I shall draw on Belfast’s, Beirut’s and Berlin’s history and their functioning as divided cities. Following a comparative approach, I hope to contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on divided cities. As the framework of this study does not allow me to engage with other politically divided cities, I hope to encourage further research on the cinematographic representation of more examples, such as Jerusalem and Nicosia, which are currently at the centre of the world’s attention.

1

Historical and cultural background

Belfast, Beirut and Berlin: Three histories of division Richard Sennett claims that the encounter of entirely different individuals in a city intensifies ‘the complexity of social life’.1 This holds specifically true in the case of divided cities in which the structure of the urban population is particularly complex. To understand the issues raised in the films under scrutiny, an introduction to Belfast’s, Beirut’s and Berlin’s functioning during the respective conflicts seems to be necessary. Scott A. Bollens observes that ‘city division can be physical, psychological, and/or social in character’.2 This also applies to the three cities central to this book, as all of them are characterized by what Bollens calls ‘physical markers’ and ‘invisible lines’, which in different ways are ‘behaviour-shaping and limiting’.3 While physical barriers occur in the form of walls and other territorial indicators, ‘invisible lines’ manifest themselves in the shape of psychological boundaries which prevent individuals from freely moving through a given urban space. In the case of Belfast, Beirut and Berlin, political division is the prominent theme, even if this division may also contribute to a growing social gap. Bollens further notes that polarized cities are commonly platforms for the playing out of broader epic struggles tied to religion, historic political claims, ideology and culture.4 This statement is accurate in the case of Belfast’s and Beirut’s segregation in which the interrelation between religion, culture and historical political claims plays a salient role. As to Berlin, the city’s division was generated due to the clashing of two ideological systems which were disconnected from religious belief and cultural issues. Only after Berlin’s partition did two contrasting cultures develop in the two parts of the city. The conflicts having taken place in the three cities are of very different nature. Whereas Beirut was the scene of a civil war with warring militias confronting each other on the streets, the violent confrontations in Belfast are not to be seen as a

Sennett, Richard: Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilisation, New York: Norton, 1994, p. 25. 2 Bollens, Scott A.: City and Soul in Divided Societies, New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 16. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 11. 1

8

City Limits

war but as ‘an armed conflict without trenches and uniforms’,5 in which belligerent paramilitary organizations, the British army and the local police force were involved in intense political fighting. In Northern Ireland, unofficial armed groups are called ‘paramilitaries’, whereas their Lebanese counterparts are referred to as ‘militia’. Even if the aim of the groups was similar, that is the defence of a certain territory and a certain community, different terms are used to refer to them according to the geographical zone in which they occur. Berlin, on the contrary, was the centre of the Cold War, that is a conflict falling short of military action but characterized by continual political pressure and threats.

Peace lines, murals, kerbstone paintings: Belfast’s internal boundaries and borders In the nineteenth century, Belfast became Ireland’s industrial centre with a thriving tobacco and linen industry. At this time, the city’s shipyard Harland and Wolff – the place in which the Titanic was built – was considered as the biggest in the world.6 Thanks to its flowering industry, Belfast attracted numerous Catholic and Protestant workers from all parts of the island. The influx of members of both ethno-religious communities generated a mixed population in the city.7 At the end of the 1960s, Belfast’s industry suffered a severe crisis, which affected mostly working-class Catholics as well-paid jobs were frequently monopolized by the Protestant community. Due to the tense situation, many people left the city and those who stayed on began to live in almost exclusively Catholic or Protestant areas.8 Residential segregation intensified after the outbreak of the Northern Irish conflict in 1968, which claimed almost 4,000 lives.9 The main belligerent groups represented the Irish nationalists and republicans, wishing to end the partition of Ireland, and the unionists, desiring to maintain constitutional and cultural links with the rest of the UK. Today, the city has about 300,000 inhabitants and two main ethno-religious communities, which are split almost evenly. The Protestant community is slightly bigger than its Catholic counterpart10

Armstrong, Charles: ‘Violent Measures. Representation, Regulation and the Shankill Butchers’. In: Hülk, Walburga; Schwerter, Stephanie (eds.): Mauern, Grenzen, Zonen. Geteilte Städte in Literatur und Film, Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2018, p. 72. 6 Cf. Craig, Patricia: The Belfast Anthology, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1999, p. viii. 7 Darby, John: Intimidation and the Control of Conflict in Northern Ireland, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986, p. 9. 8 Gaffkin, Frank; Morrisey, Mike: ‘The Urban Economy and Social Exclusion: The Case of Belfast’. In: Gaffikin, Frank; Morrisey, Mike (eds.): City Visions. Imagining Place, Enfranchising People, London: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 44. 9 Hanna, Brian: ‘Belfast: “A Partnership Approach to Local Governance”’. In: Gaffkin, Frank; Morrisey, Mike (eds.): City Visions. Imagining Place, Enfranchising People, London: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 197. 10 Cf. McCullough, Andrew: An Analytical Look at Religious Background and Residential Segregation in Belfast. In: Significance, (9 January 2012). https://www.statslife.org.uk/social-sciences/1630-ananalytical-look-at-religious-background-and-residential-segregation-in-belfast, accessed 9 May 2021. 5

Historical and Cultural Background

9

with 48 per cent of the overall population being Protestant and 45 per cent Catholic.11 The roots of the Northern Irish conflict lie in the Plantation of Ulster, which started in the sixteenth century. Protestant colonizers came from Great Britain to Ireland in order to take over the land of the local Catholic population. Initially settling in the north of the island, the settlers gradually travelled south.12 Thus, two populations from a different ethnic, religious and cultural background confronted each other. Ireland became a part of the UK in 1801. Only after the foundation of the Republic of Ireland in 1948, the south of the island became an independent county. Mostly Protestant, the north remained a part of the UK.13 After 1948, the relationship of the two ethno-religious communities deteriorated in Northern Ireland due to the discrimination of the Catholic population concerning employment, housing and the right to vote.14 Violent confrontations between the two groups broke out in 1968, marking the beginning of the Northern Irish conflict, which in the Anglophone world is commonly, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as ‘the Troubles’. As both warring factions did not feel sufficiently protected by the British army and the local police force – the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – a number of paramilitary organizations formed on both sides. Among the Catholic organizations counted the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) and Direct Actions Against Drugs (DAAD). To the Protestant organizations belonged, among others, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), the Red Hand Commando (RHC), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).15 Even if most of them officially disbanded and have been at peace since 2005, their splinter groups are still involved in occasional sectarian crimes.16 The acronyms of the paramilitary organizations remain visible on the walls of Belfast’s working-class areas, functioning as boundary markers, which designate the territory of the respective communities. The historian Claire Mitchell explains that the Troubles are not to be seen as ‘a holy war’, but a conflict generated by multiple factors such as ethnicity and inequality, with religion remaining one of the central dimensions of social difference.17 In the same vein, the sociologist Colin Coulter Devenport, Mark: ‘Census Figures: NI Protestant Population Continue to Decline’. In: BBC News. 11 December 2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-20673534, accessed 9 May 2021, cf. as well: https://www.ninis2.nisra.gov.uk/public/Home.aspx, accessed 9 May 2021. The census of the Northern Irish population is carried out every ten years with the last one having taken place in 2011. At the time of writing, the results of the 2021 census were not yet published. 12 Cf. Ross, David: Ireland. History of a Nation, Belfast: Lagan books, 2005, pp. 138–63. 13 Ibid., p. 46. 14 McKittrick, David; McVea, David: Making Sense of the Troubles, London: Penguin, 2001, pp. 11–12. 15 Cf. Melaugh, Martin; Lynn, Brendan: ‘A Glossary of Terms Related to the conflict’. In: CAIN. Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland. April 2019. https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/othelem/glossary.htm, accessed 9 May 2021. 16 Cf. ibid. 17 Cf. Mitchel, Claire: Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland. Boundaries of Belonging and Belief, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006, p. 1. 11

10

City Limits

argues that even if the Northern Irish conflict is not about the Bible, religious belief and practice have ‘served to promote those secular identities and disputes that form the basis of the “Northern Ireland problem”’.18 Scholars disagree about the date of the end of the Troubles. While some see the Good Friday Agreement concluded in 1998 as the event ending the tensions, others argue that the Troubles were over only in 2007 with the instauration of a joint government in which Catholic and Protestant were equally present.19 During the Northern Irish conflict, Belfast became the epicentre of political violence. Forty-one per cent of the violent clashes between the two communities happened in and around Belfast. Among the bombings, 70 per cent were aimed at housing in the Belfast urban area. Attacks on shops, offices, industrial and commercial premises as well as clubs and pubs were also disproportionately concentrated in Belfast.20 Today, the city still remains divided into numerous Catholic and Protestant sectors. However, ethno-religiously segregated areas are mostly inhabited by the working class.21 Middleclass areas, on the contrary, are more intermixed. Nevertheless, even if territorial segregation is mostly absent in wealthier neighbourhoods, the prevalence of separate schooling systems, separate churches, separate cultural institutions as well as political parties maintains the communal divide.22 Out of fifty-one wards of the city, thirty-five are almost exclusively Protestant or Catholic.23 Including areas such as Ballymacarret, Sydenham, Ballynafeigh and Castlereagh, East Belfast is inhabited up to 88 per cent by the Protestant community. The presence of the Protestant community in the east of the city is historically due to the shipyard Harland and Wolff, which employed mainly Protestant workers.24 Wishing to remain close to their work place, many employees settled in the east of the city. East Belfast comprises a single Catholic enclave, named Short Strand.25 Coulter, Colin: Contemporary Northern Irish Society. An Introduction, London: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 58. 19 Cf. Welch, Robert: Concise Companion to Irish Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 364; Melaugh, Martin: ‘Some Frequent Asked Questions. The Northern Irish Conflict’. In: CAIN. Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland. https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/faq/faq2.htm, accessed 9 May 2021. 20 Bollens, City and Soul in Divided Societies, p. 58. 21 Murtagh, Brendan: ‘Territoriality, Research and Policy Making in Northern Ireland’. In: Dickson, David; Hargie, Owen (eds.): Researching the Troubles. Social Science Perspectives on the Northern Ireland Conflict, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2003, p. 209; ‘Visualising the Conflict’. In: CAIN. Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland. https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/victims/gis/maps/l-jpg/ CAIN-Map_Belfast_Religion_Peacelines.jpg, accessed 20 April 2021. 22 Cleary, Joe: Literature, Partition and the Nation State. Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 100. 23 NicCraith, Máiréad: Plural Identities – Singular Narratives. The Case of Northern Ireland, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002, p. 13; ‘Visualising the Conflict’, accessed 20 April 2021. 24 Cf. Johnston, Kevin: In the Shadows of Giants, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2008, p. 99. 25 Cf. Gaffkin, Frank; Morrisey, Mike: ‘The Role of Culture in the Regeneration of a Divided City: The Case of Belfast’. In: Gaffikin, Frank; Morrisey, Mike (eds.): City Visions. Imagining Place, Enfranchising People, London: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 166; Hickey, Rosaline: ‘Reflected Lives’. 2018. https://www.belfast interfaceproject.org/sites/default/files/publications/ReflectedLives-Publicationfor-web_25april2018.pdf, p. 1-11, accessed April 20, 2021. 18

Historical and Cultural Background

11

The west of the city is largely Catholic territory, including areas such as The Falls, Ballymurphy, Andersonstown, Divis, Clonard, Ardoyne, Turf Lodge and Springfield. West Belfast embraces the comparatively large Protestant enclave The Shankill. The north of Belfast, on the contrary, forms a patchwork composed of numerous relatively small Catholic and Protestant sectors.26 The segregated working-class territories of the north, west and east of the city, stand out against the mixed middle-class area situated between Malone and Lisburn Road in the south. Close to the city centre, South Belfast comprises a single small Protestant enclave around Sandy Row.27 The different parts of the city inhabited by the working class are separated from each other by a variety of boundary markers, hinting at Belfast’s ‘geopolitical faultlines’.28 Among the territorial indicators count flags, murals, peace lines, as well as kerbstone paintings. According to Neil Jarman, the observer becomes literally flooded with a vast array of ‘visual statements’,29 which demonstrate the belonging of territories to one of the two communities.

Figure 1  Peace line in East Belfast. Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, pp. 61–5. Elliott, Sydney; Flackes, W. D.: Northern Ireland. A Political Directory. 1968-1999, Belfast: Black Staff Press, 1999, p. 433. 28 Dawe, Gerald: ‘The Revenges of the Heart: Belfast and the Poetics of Space’. In: Kelly, Aaron; Allen, Nicolas (eds.): The Cities of Belfast, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003, p. 199. 29 Jarman, Neil: ‘Painting Landscapes: The Place of Murals in the Symbolic Construction of Urban Space’. In: Buckley, Anthony (ed.): Symbols in Northern Ireland, Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1998, p. 81. 26 27

12

City Limits

Figure 2  Peace line in West Belfast.

Peace lines are one of Belfast’s most prominent signs of urban division. Scholars involved in Belfast’s Interface Project counted ninety-seven peace lines in 2017. These barriers may take the form of metal fencing, walls, gates or even a combination of walls and fences.30 Some of the structures reach a height of twelve meters.31 Forty of the barriers are situated in North Belfast, thirty are located in West Belfast, eleven barriers can be found in the east of the city, fifteen in the Central area and only a single one in South Belfast.32 The different peace lines are owned by the Department of Justice, the Northern Ireland Office, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive and the Department for Regional Development. Some of them are owned privately.33 The various barriers have been constructed steadily since 1969. The figures of the Interface Project reveal that most of the peace lines have been built during the conflict and before the ceasefire in 1994. However, after the ceasefire, at least thirty-two barriers have been Peacelines can take different shapes and forms. According to the findings of Belfast’s Interface Project the following barriers dividing Catholic from Protestant areas can be found: 20 mesh fences, 16 steel fences, 4 palisade fences, 13 walls, 14 walls with a fence above, 5 walls with a gate adn 23 buffer fences. Cf. https://www.belfastinterfaceproject.org/sites/default/files/publications/Interfaces%20 PDF.pdf, p. 5, accessed 20 April 2021. 31 Feeney, Brian: The Troubles, Dublin: O’Brian, 2004, p. 25. 32 Belfast Interface Project. https://www.belfastinterfaceproject.org/sites/default/files/publications/ Interfaces% 20PDF.pdf, p. 7, accessed 20 April 2021. 33 Ibid., p. 9. 30

Historical and Cultural Background

13

added and a number of old peace lines have been rebuilt.34 The continued presence of these structures tends to be largely supported by people who live beside them. On a daily basis, individuals have to traverse different kinds of barriers and cross various boundaries in order to carry out activities such as going to work and shopping.35 The Northern Ireland Executive intends to remove the peace walls by 2023.36 Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if this aim will be reached, as by people who live near them these barriers are felt to be necessary for protection. Belfast City Council recognizes the remaining division of the city as follows: In Northern Ireland, the traditional divisions between Catholics and Protestants persist. Many of our citizens continue to live parallel lives, with some communities still separated by physical barriers. It is no coincidence that the poorest neighbourhoods in Belfast continue to be those located in and around interfaces and flashpoint areas. Building relationships across communities is central to good relations, with work continuing to create a better future for people within these neighbourhoods.37

Apart from peace lines, approximately 300 murals, as well as several kilometres of kerbstone paintings in the colours of the Union Jack or the Irish Tricolour can be found in Belfast’s urban space.38 Lee A. Smithey claims that murals serve to express communal identity and ideology, while at the same time marking territory and delivering statements.39 The first murals were painted at the beginning of the twentieth century and functioned as decorations for the annual celebrations of King William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne over James II in 1690. Featuring images of King William, they were created to demonstrate the domination of the island by the Protestant community. The mural painting tradition continued throughout the century, flourishing particularly at the time of the marching season of the Northern Irish Orange Order. During the Troubles, a shift in the imagery used became obvious, as more and more murals appeared with pictures explicit in their support for paramilitary groups.40

Ibid., p. 7. Cf. Jarman, Neil; Bell, John: ‘Routine Divisions: Segregation and Daily Life in Northern Ireland’. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, pp. 48–50. 36 Executive Office (Northern Ireland): Together: Building a United Community (2013), https://www. executiveoffice-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/publications/ofmdfm_dev/together-building-a-unitedcommunity-strategy.pdf, accessed 20 April 2021. 37 Belfast City Council: Good Relations. http://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/community/goodrelations/ goodre lations-about.aspx, accessed 20 April 2021. 38 Cf. Shirlow, Peter; Murtagh, Brendan: Belfast. Segregation, Violence and the City, Dublin: Pluto Press, 2006, pp. 61–81; cf. Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, pp. 57–100. 39 Smithey, Lee A.: ‘Conflict Transformation, Cultural Innovation, and Loyalist Identity in Northern Ireland’. In: Ross, Marc (ed.): Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies. Contestation and Symbolic Landscapes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 85–106. 40 Brothwick, Stuart: The Writing on the Wall. A Visual History of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 2015, p. 6. 34 35

14

City Limits

Figure 3  Mural in East Belfast.

Only in 1981, the first murals could be spotted in republican areas. They were initially intended to express support for the hunger strikes of republican detainees in Belfast’s maze prison. Murals of both communities venerate their respective paramilitary heroes.41 However, it can be observed that the imagery of republican murals covers a larger range of topics. Using Celtic revival art, they often refer to historical events such as the Easter Rising or the Great Famine. Others try to establish solidarity with ‘oppressed’ people and revolutionary movements internationally.42 Among others, they boast pictures of Galicia, the Basque country or Catalonia. Some of them are also dedicated to revolutionaries such as Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara. In recent years, a tendency towards an inclusion of the First World War into the imagery of murals on Protestant ground can be determined. A number of paintings celebrate the Ulster Regiment, which fought at the Battle of the Somme and turned into a symbol of Protestant bravery.43 As ‘hallmarks’ of the Northern Irish conflict, in recent years the wall paintings have turned into ‘the subject of a growing tourism industry’44 in Belfast. Rolston, Bill: Drawing Support 2. Murals of War and Peace, Belfast: BTP Publications, 1998, p. i. Santino, Jack: Signs of War and Peace, New York: Palgrave, 2004, p. 41. 43 Cf. Bryan, Dominic; Stevenson, Clifford: ‘Struggles over Symbolic Landscape in the New Northern Ireland’. In: Ross, Marc Howard (ed.): Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies. Contestation and Symbolic Landscapes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, p. 68. 44 Cf. Smithey, ‘Conflict Transformation’, pp. 85–106; Hickey, ‘Reflected Lives’, p. 7. 41 42

Historical and Cultural Background

15

Figure 4  Mural in West Belfast.

Apart from murals, numerous walls in Belfast’s working-class areas are adorned with graffiti, featuring sectarian slogans or acronyms of paramilitary organizations. Theses inscriptions also indicate to the observer on which territory he or she is setting foot on. Furthermore, various flags can be found in Belfast’s streets, which function as

16

City Limits

‘makers of physical ethno-political boundaries’.45 This includes flags of paramilitary organizations, the British Union Jack, the Irish Tricolour as well the flags of Northern Ireland and Scotland. As symbols of solidarity, Israeli and Palestinian flags are found respectively in Protestant and Catholic areas. As a result of these visual signs, a substantial part of the city’s population can be categorized along religious lines. In this context, Hugh Jordan claims that Belfast is unique in that it is ‘quite possible to guess a person’s religion based on nothing more than the side of the street on which they choose to walk’.46 This might be particularly true of segregated working-class areas at tense periods of the conflict. The city’s sectarian geography, highlighted by the above-mentioned boundary markers, plays a central role in the cinematographic depiction of the Troubles. Particularly in thrillers, the maze of Belfast’s territoriality is used to create an action based on persecution in order to generate tension and exhilaration. Peace lines, murals and flags help the audience to decode the belonging of a certain area to one of the two communities.

Divided Beirut: Between Muslims and Christians Situated almost in the middle of the Lebanese coastline, Beirut has approximately 800,000 inhabitants with 1.5 million in the metropolitan area.47 Half of the Lebanese population lives in the capital.48 According to Scott A. Bollens, Beirut is the most religiously diverse city in the Middle East. Lebanon’s nine major religious communities are represented in the capital, among those count Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Druzes, Maronites, Christians, Greek Orthodoxs, Greek Catholics, Armenian Apostolics, Armenian Catholics and Protestants.49 Since the eighteenth century, Christians mostly settled on the eastern side of the city, while Muslim sects went to live in its southern and western parts. Beirut has traditionally functioned as a pluralistic but at the same time ethnically segregated city. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was a small fishing town with a fortification, separating urban residents from nonurban dwellers.50 The eastern wall of the citadel served as an urban threshold that established the city’s north-south axis.51 At the time, Beirut’s population was dominated by Sunni Muslims and included a small Greek Orthodox community, which amounted to about 25 per cent of the city’s inhabitants and lived in well-defined areas.52 Since 1870, Maronite peasants from mountainous areas came to Beirut in order

Cf. Orr, Philipp: ‘For God and Ulster. No surrender’. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/ for-god-and-ulster-no-surrender-1.1950967, accessed 20 April 2021. 46 Jordan, Hugh: Milestones in Murder: Defining Moments in Ulster’s Terror War, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2002, p. 188. 47 Cf. Bollens, City and Soul in Divided Societies, p. 145. 48 Cf. Mermier, Franck: Récits de villes: d’Aden à Beyrouth, Paris: Actes Sud, 2015, p. 48. 49 Cf. Bollens, City and Soul in Divided Societies, p. 145. 50 Cf. Asmar, Fady et al.: Atlas du Liban, Beirut: Presses de l’université Saint-Joseph, 2006, p. 74. 51 Cf. Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, p. 41. 52 Cf. Davie, Michael: ‘Demarcation Lines in contemporary Beirut’. In: Schofield, Clive H.; Schofield, Richard N. (eds.): The Middle East and North Africa, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 36. 45

Historical and Cultural Background

17

to find work. The Maronites – a Christian Arab group claiming Phoenician heritage – mostly settled outside the city, which gave rise to a relatively homogeneous Christian enclave in the eastern suburbs. In 1888, during the Ottoman Empire, Beirut became the capital of its regional administrative district.53 By the 1920s, the Maronites had gradually moved closer to the city centre and went to live in the eastern areas. The Maronite population grew rapidly: while at the beginning of the nineteenth century between 1,200 and 1,600 Maronites lived in Beirut, at the end of the same century, 30,000 Beirutis out of 120,000 belonged to the Maronite community.54 In the early twentieth century, a further group of immigrants arrived in Beirut: Armenians fleeing from violence in Turkey took up residence with fellow Christians and moved to the east side of the city. Shiite and Sunni Lebanese from the countryside continued to settle on the western flanks of Beirut. The heart of the city around the Martyr’s place remained a mixed and undivided area.55 However, it was not only religious affiliation that played an important role in the Beirut’s society. Charleswood and Calame observe that distinctions between clans, classes, and native or non-native Beirutis were important criteria within the larger ethnic categories determining the city’s population.56 During the period of the French Mandate (1920–43), French language and culture considerably influenced the lives of mostly socially upward moving Christians, which contributed to the further growth of ‘confessional and class differences’.57 At the same time, French architects started to shape Beirut’s urban space not only by recreating a replica of the Parisian Place de l’Étoile but also by erecting various Haussmann-style buildings. As local souk owners and religious institutions protested against French construction politics, the mandate government was forced to carry out their plans on a lower scale.58 In 1943, Lebanon gained independence from France with a political system known as confessionalism. This means that the Lebanese parliament is based on religious differences, with the post of the President reserved for Maronites, the Prime Minister for Sunnis, and the House Speaker for Shiites. During the 1950s and 1960s, the socalled Golden Age of Lebanon, Beirut turned into the political and economic hub of the country. While the capital was called the ‘Paris of the Middle East’, Lebanon as a whole was referred to as the ‘Switzerland of the Orient’. This image was partially due to the country’s liberal banking system as well as its open-mindedness and tolerance of religious diversity.59 Apart from becoming the prime location for commercial transactions, Beirut turned into an important nucleus for academics, journalists and editors. As a vibrant place, the city attracted people from all over the county to go shopping, see a theatre play or spend the night out. Thanks to its pulsating cultural

Cf. Asmar, Atlas du Liban, p. 70. Cf. Mermier, Récits de villes, p. 50. 55 Cf. Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, p. 41. 56 Ibid. 57 Naeff, Judith: Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut, Basingstoke: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018, p. 20. 58 Ibid. 59 Cf. Yazbek, Regards sur le cinema libanais, p. 23. 53 54

18

City Limits

scene, the capital became the prime destination for the intelligentsia of the Arab world.60 With the influx of Palestinian refugees fleeing violence in Israel, Lebanon’s demography shifted towards a Muslim majority. The Palestinians were offered refuge but did not receive full citizenship. Most of them settled in camps on the southern flanks of Beirut. Palestinian refugees contributed to the on-going political polarization along ethnic lines in Lebanese society due to the fact that they were tolerated but not supported by the government.61 Driven by despair and insecurity, the members of the Palestinian diaspora living in the refugee camps were easily recruited by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).62 At the beginning of the 1970s, two major events contributed to the deterioration of the political situation in Lebanon. The Jordanian government carried out harsh reprisals against PLO activists inside its borders, which made Lebanon the last remaining haven for the organization. Consequently, PLO presence in the country massively increased, particularly in the refugee camps on the periphery of Beirut. This evolution started to exercise pressure on the national government from two different sides: Whereas the Western allies and Israel demanded that it should take drastic measures against radical Palestinian paramilitaries, the Shiite Muslim community pressurized the government to support the Palestinian cause. In the hope of gaining time, the Lebanese government failed to react.63 The second event took place on the 10th of April 1973, when a group of Israeli soldiers landed on the beaches of Beirut early in the morning. Before the Lebanese army became aware of their arrival, the attackers had already killed four of their PLO targets and were on their way back to Israel. For many, this development was not only an indication of the vulnerability of the Lebanese army, it also showed that Palestinians could not rely on the Lebanese government for protection. The Israeli raid significantly contributed to the worsening of the political situation.64 However, the incident which is officially recognized as having sparked off the Civil War happened two years later on the 13th of April 1975. On this day, Pierre Gemayel, the leader of the Phalange Party – considered as the Voice of the Maronites – attended the opening of a new church in East Beirut. Intending to assassinate Gemayel, paramilitary gunmen shot one of his bodyguards and three other men. The Phalangists assumed that the paramilitaries were radical Palestinians and therefore sought revenge by attacking a bus with Palestinians in the Christian neighbourhood of Ayn al-Rummana. The passengers of the bus were on their way home to the refugee camp in the Christian district of Degwaneh in the eastern part of the Beirut. The attack left twenty-seven people dead and more than twenty wounded. After this event, general violence broke out in the city.65 Tim Llewllyn observes: ‘As the news spread of

62 63 64 65 60 61

Cf. Kassir, Samir: Histoire de Beyrouth, Paris: Perrin, 2003, pp. 16–17. Cf. Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, p. 44. Cf. ibid. Cf. ibid. Cf. ibid. Cf. Llewllyn, Tim: Spirit of the Phoenix: Beirut and the Story of Lebanon, London: Tauris: 2010, p. 60.

Historical and Cultural Background

19

the incident, roadblocks and barrages went up along what were soon to become the familiar “fronts” between Christian and Muslim areas, and the process of city-wide ethnic cleansing was launched.’66 After the assault on Palestinian passengers, Beirut became the scene of violence with the city centre, the harbour and the areas containing most of the capital’s hotels destroyed and looted. Christian and Palestinian paramilitary organizations were violently confronting each other and economic activities came to a halt.67 The souks representing the heart of Beirut were also ruined.68 The spheres of destruction went beyond the city centre so that the whole capital was maimed by the war. Khatib notes that ‘the scars were both physical and social as both the city’s buildings and people shared the suffering’.69 The tense situation gave rise to a fortified 10-mile-long demarcation line, the so-called green line, which roughly corresponded to Beirut’s main northsound traffic corridor, cutting off major roads and public spaces.70 The demarcation line started at the historic harbour, continued through the Martyr’s square and followed Damascus street southward into the suburbs. Thus, the city was divided into a Christian sector in the east and a Muslim sector in the west. Mohamad Hafeda draws attention to the fact that Christians and Muslims, including Sunni Palestinians, moved across the ‘line of religious and political division’ from both sides of the city. Apart from that, Druze and Christians from the Chouf district were displaced to villages and cities, which aggravated the country’s division. Hafeda further underlines that during the Civil War, the displacement process was led by militias ‘who used brutal and organized “cleansing” operations that forced the minorities who had stayed on each side to leave at a later stage’.71 Judith Naeff notes that during the war, East Beirut was predominantly liberal right wing and anti-Palestinian, while the political attitudes of people living in the west of the city were largely leftist and pro-Palestinian.72 One of the consequences of the Civil War was that Beirut lost a number of its landmarks, so that the urban population could no longer rely on their knowledge of the city. One of the capital’s most significant identity points was the Martyrs’ square, the heart of the city and its main transport link.73 Before the onset of political violence, it attracted the entire spectrum of Beirut’s citizens and visitors, in terms of class, income, religious affiliation, ethnicity and political convictions. After the outbreak of the war, it was cut in half by the green line and turned into an uninhabited wasteland. The statute situated in the middle of the

Ibid. Cf. Asmar, Atlas du Liban, p. 60. 68 Cf. Mermier, Récits de villes, p. 79. 69 Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, pp. 57–8. 70 Cf. Sawalha, Aseel: ‘Healing the Wounds of the War: Placing the War-Displaced in Postwar Beirut’. In: Schneider, Jane; Susser, Ida (eds.): Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, Oxford: Berg, 2003, p. 271. 71 Cf. Hafeda, Mohamad: Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon. Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut, London: I.B. Tauris, 2019, p. 235. 72 Naeff, Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut, p. 23. 73 Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 62. 66 67

20

City Limits

square, which had been erected to celebrate Lebanon’s independence, was punctured with bullet holes.74 During the war, the square gradually disappeared as a landmark from the cognitive geography of most Lebanese.75 In addition to the demarcation line, numerous minor boundaries fragmented the eastern and western part of Beirut’s urban space according to the territorial acquisitions of the different paramilitary groups. The green line was a fortified path about 9 km long and 18–90 m wide. It was protected on either side by solid barricades taking on different forms and shapes. Throughout the city, various enclaves were protected by semi-permanent walls, which were about 3 m high and 1.5 m wide.76 The demarcation line was created using sandbags, barbed wire, burned-out vehicles, cement blocks, debris and containers stolen from the harbour. The ground floors of abandoned buildings along the green line were transformed into bunkers with the upper floors being occupied by snipers. Called by Maha Yaha ‘the stoneless “Berlin Wall” of Beirut’,77 it turned into a no-go zone, which over the years was taken over by vegetation.78 Samir Kassir draws attention to the wide range of violent acts committed during the Civil War, among which he lists arbitrary shelling of residential areas, political assassinations, abductions and the evictions of citizens from their homes. Roadblocks, snipers and booby-trapped cars were also everyday occurrences.79 Kassir adds that during the period of political tensions, the city did not exist anymore as ‘Beirut’ but as ‘East and West Beirut’, two different ‘hemispheres turning their backs on each other’.80 While before the Civil War the area of Hamra, for example, was marked by a religiously mixed population, after the outbreak of political violence, most of the Christian population left West Beirut, and more and more Muslim Sunnites and Druses came to live in Hamra.81 Until the end of the Civil War, militias represented the different religious sects, splitting the city into their respective zones of influence. Consequently, municipal politics were carried out by militia leaders. East and West Beirut turned into two administratively autonomous entities, in which taxes were collected and services provided by the militias. In order to obtain money, they collected protection money as well as custom duties through illegal ports.82 For Beirut’s citizens, it was not without danger to move from one side of the city to the other. The following three official crossings existed throughout the war: the Port Crossing near the old harbour, the Museum Crossing next to the Hippodrome

Ibid., p. 62. Naeff, Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut, p. 23. 76 Cf. Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, p. 38. 77 Yaha, Maha: ‘Reconstructing Space: the Abberation of the Urban in Beirut’. In: Khalaf, Samir; Khoury Philip (eds.): Recovering Beirut: Urban Deseign and Post-War Deconstruction, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993, p. 132. 78 Cf. Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth, pp. 33–4. 79 Cf. ibid., p. 34. 80 Cf. ibid., p. 35. 81 Cf. Mermier, Récits de villes, p. 66. 82 Cf. Bollens, City and Soul in Divided Societies, p. 148. 74 75

Historical and Cultural Background

21

and the Gallery Crossing close to the Beirut River and the airport. At checkpoints, harassment on the basis of ethno-religious belonging was not rare. Consequently, the official crossings were mainly used by paramilitary commanders, diplomats and foreigners.83 For most of the city’s inhabitants, movement was restricted to destinations on the territory of their own ethnic enclave. Franck Mermier observes that Beirut’s fragmented urban space generated a mental geography of ‘fright’ and ‘avoidance’, whose effects kept persisting even after the end of the Civil War in 1990. Mermier explains that in the imagination of a whole generation growing up during the war, the other side of the green line was literary non-existent.84 During the Civil War, thousands of people left the city either to join their relatives in the countryside or – in the case of the social elite with international connections – emigrated to France, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Australia and Canada. Foreigners also fled the country, as they were prone to be taken hostage.85 The last months of the year 1989 marked the beginning of the end of fighting with the signature of the Charta of National Reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. The Lebanese National Assembly convened in the city of Taif in Saudi Arabia to formulate solutions to the conflict. The Charta was intended to create a balance between the powers of the two communities. As mentioned earlier, since the end of the French mandate in 1943, Lebanon has adopted a ‘confessional system’ aiming at allocating political and administrative functions to the major sects.86 The Taif agreement transferred significant executive power to the Muslim community, while minimizing the influence of the Maronite president. In 1991, the agreement was followed by an amnesty law, pardoning all political crimes prior to its enactment.87 Until the present day, the ‘confessional system’ distributes the governing authority with ‘parity’ between Christians and Muslims. Hafeda, however, notes that this ‘parity’ is based on ‘political distribution’ and not on actual numbers of each religious community. Furthermore, it comprises a structural system, stipulating that the president must always be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the house a Shiite Muslim.88 According to Hassan Krayem, the persisting ‘confessional’ system is part of the country’s continuing political instability.89 The Civil War killed between 120,000 and 150,000 civilians, displaced more than 30 per cent of Lebanese population, destroyed about 177,000 buildings (among those 53 per cent in the capital and its suburbs) and devastated the central district of Beirut.90 It is, however, misleading to assume that the Lebanese war was merely Cf. Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, p. 38. Cf. Mermier, Récits de villes, pp. 75–6. 85 Cf. Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth, p. 37. 86 Cf. Hafeda, Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon, p. 57. 87 Cf. Asmar, Atlas du Liban, p. 62. 88 Cf. Hafeda, Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon, p. 57. 89 Krayem, Hassan: ‘The Lebanese Civil War and the Taif Agreement’. In: Mirrored at al-Mashriq in Collaboration with AUB. https://almashriq.hiof.no/ddc/projects/pspa/conflict-resolution.html, accessed 9 May 2021. 90 Cf. Bollens, City and Soul in Divided Societies, p. 148. 83 84

22

City Limits

based on Muslim-Christian hostilities. The conflict has to be considered in the wider frame of Lebanon’s officially recognized eighteen sects.91 The Civil War did not only result from quarrels between the different religious camps, it was also characterized by disagreements among members of each religion and even of each sect. Kathib observes that by the end of the war, Shiites were fighting each other in the same way as were Maronites.92 Elie Yazbek explains that the exact causes of the Civil War are difficult to determine due to the diversity of the various confrontations: inter- and intra-religious fighting went along with fights against the Syrian and Israeli army, and sometimes enemies suddenly turned into allies.93 Lebanon saw a further resurgence of violence in 2005 after the attack on the former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. The assassination led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops after a presence of thirty years, which worsened the country’s division. Civil unrest resurfaced again in 2006, when the country was attacked by Israel, after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers at the Lebanese-Israeli border. For thirty-three days, the Israeli army bombarded the south of Lebanon, the Bekaa region, as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut. The human costs of theses attacks were 1,300 deaths and 3,600 wounded Lebanese civilians.94 Apart from that, 125,000 housing units were destroyed in the attacks and 3.6 billion dollar damage was caused to civilian infrastructure and industries.95 The incident led to further internal divisions of the Lebanese political scene, which reached their peak in May 2008. Anti-government protestors had demanded the government to step down. With the government remaining in power, the opposition called for a general strike on Wednesday the 7th of March, which turned into sectarian strife, lasting for ten days and seeing more than eighty individuals killed and 200 wounded.96 In contemporary Beirut, the green line does not exist any more and all barricades have been dismantled along with structures associated with militia activity and military occupation. Before the devastating explosion in Beirut’s harbour on the 4th of August in 2020,97 the city centre was fully rehabilitated and functional. However, large sections of urban fabric still showed traces of war and many buildings maimed by bullets holes were still severely damaged and awaited repair, while a great number of houses which had been emptied in the 1990s have remained deserted.98

Cf. Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 6. Cf. ibid., p. 6. Cf. Yazbek, Regards sur le cinema libanais, p. 15. Cf. Corm, Georges: Histoire du Moyen Orient. De l’Antiquité à nos jours, Paris: La Decouverte, 2007, p. 122. 95 Cf. Bollens, City and Soul in Divided Societies, p. 173. 96 Cf. Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 13. 97 Cf. Azhari, Timour: ‘After Devastating Beirut Explosion, Trauma Sinks in’. In: Aljazeera. 15 August 2020 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/devastating-beirut-explosion-traumasinks-200815152753890.html, accessed 9 May 2021; Guglielmi, Giorgia: ‘Why Beirut’s ammonium nitrate blast was so devastating?’ In: Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02361-x, accessed 9 May 2021. 98 Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, p. 39. 93 94 91 92

Historical and Cultural Background

23

Figure 5  Maimed building in the city centre of Beirut.

The situation in the city has been exacerbated due to the consequences of the explosion, which has destroyed large parts of the urban space. Even today, tanks of the Lebanese army as well as soldiers can be seen on Beirut’s streets.

24

City Limits

Figure 6  Tanks on Damascus Street in East Beirut.

Antifascist rampart or wall of shame? Berlin and the Wall After the Second World War, Berlin became a divided city as a consequence of the partition of Germany into West Germany, occupied by the Western allies – that is France, the UK and the United States – and East Germany, under the control of the Soviet Union. On the 26th of May 1952, the government of the GDR decided to close the border between West and East Germany. This decision was a reaction to the signature of the German treaty in which the Western allies accorded more sovereignty to the Federal Republic. The demarcation line between East and West Germany, which until 1952 was merely an unprotected green line, suddenly became a 140-km long fortified state border cutting the country into two. Berlin was hit by the measures taken by the GDR regime: numerous streets which until the end of May 1952 lead from West to East Berlin were cut off and a fortified border separating West Berlin from the surrounding countryside was erected. Even if Berlin’s inhabitants had to face frequent controls, they were still able to move between the two parts of the city.99 Until 1961, about 50,000 citizens of East Berlin worked in the west of the city and 12,000 citizens of West Berlin went to work in the eastern part of the capital. All together 500,000 people daily navigated between the two parts of the metropolis.100 Cf. Viergutz, Volker: Die Berliner Mauer 1961-1989, Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag, 2008, p. 6. Cf. Quétel, Murs, p. 151.

99

100

Historical and Cultural Background

25

Between 1949 and 1961, the GDR lost 3.5 million inhabitants despite the criminalization of Republikflucht [‘flight from the republic’, meaning ‘flight from the GDR’]. In order to prevent inhabitants of the Soviet-controlled zone fleeing to West Berlin, Walter Ulbricht, the head of the GDR, backed up by Nikita Khrushchev, ordered to cut off East Germany from West Germany in the night of the 13th of August 1961 at about 2 o’clock. The organizer of the mission was Erich Honecker, the GDR state and party leader, who until the end of his life remained proud of his achievement. Protected by the Soviet army, police and soldiers managed to construct a 45-km border running through Berlin’s city centre. Apart from that, they erected a border of 160 km around the city. Thirteen underground stations on the territory of East Berlin were closed down, sixty-nine out of eighty-one border crossings between the different sectors were cut off and trains coming from West Germany were stopped in East Berlin. In the following years, both parts of the city had to be entirely reorganized, not only in regard of its water, gas and electricity system, but also in terms of administration, companies and cultural institutions.101 The historian James Hoberman draws attention to the fact that the Wall erased Berlin’s Third Reich identity by transecting or destroying many buildings symbolizing Nazi rule, such as the Chancellery, the Gestapo headquarters, the Ministry of Aviation, the remains of Hitler’s bunker and the Reichstag.102 During the twenty-eight years, two months and twenty-seven days of its existence, the Wall took different forms and shapes. The first generation of the Wall was a 1.60-m high brick wall, which was 30 cm thick and topped with barbed wire. It was protected by more than 11,000 heavily armed soldiers and 300 watchtowers.103 In 1965, a second generation emerged: the brick wall was turned into a concrete wall, and bunkers were added to the fortification. The third Wall-generation surfaced after 1975, consisting of concrete panels, each of them being 3.60 m high, 1.20 m wide, 15 cm thick and weighing 2.6 t. A total of 45,000 of these segments were used to build the Wall. This generation of the Wall actually consisted of two ramparts, the west wall and the east wall. The west wall could be approached from West Berlin and was worldwide seen as the Wall. East and west wall were separated from each other by 100–150 m of no man’s land, which was heavily guarded by GDR soldiers, who since 1961 had orders to shoot every trespasser. Different kinds of alarms, traps, detectors and floodlights were installed to prevent people from reaching the west of the city. The territory between the two walls was commonly referred to as the ‘death strip’. The east wall was the socalled hinterland wall and was situated on the other side of the death strip and could be approached from East Berlin. The fourth generation of the Wall lasted until 1989 and was an ‘improved version’ of the last one.104 Leo Schmidt claims that the investment in technology and materials enabled the new construction elements ‘to downplay, as much as possible, the unnaturalness and absurdity of the border cutting through the Cf. Wolfrum, Edgar: Die Mauer. Geschichte einer Teilung, Munich: Beck, 2009, pp. 11–13. Hoberman, James: The Red Atlantis. Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, Phidadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998, p. 7. 103 Cf. Quétel, Murs, p. 155. 104 Cf. Wolfrum, Die Mauer, pp. 19–21. 101 102

26

City Limits

city of Berlin’.105 Whereas by the GDR establishment the Wall was called ‘anti-fascist protective wall’ [Antifaschistischer Schutzwall], in the West it was seen as the ‘the wall of shame’ [Schandmauer].106 Hoberman refers to the Wall as ‘a magical Mobius strip allowing Berliners on both sides to feel themselves on the outside looking in’.107 He further describes ‘Cold War Berlin’ as ‘half fortress, half prison, surrounded by rubble and lit up like a Christmas tree’.108 Even in early 1989, Honecker was still convinced of the durability of the Wall and proclaimed that it would still stand in ‘50 and even 100 years’.109 Until today, the exact cost of the Wall remains unknown. Internal records show that the total annual expenditure for GDR border troops increased from 600 million marks in 1970 to almost 1 billion marks in 1983. In the spring of 1989, economists came up with a farcical calculation: they divided the cost for the border by the number or arrests and concluded that each of them costs 2.1 million marks. Therefore, they decided that the border costs had to be lowered.110 For the year 2000, the GDR had planned to build the ‘High-Tech-Wall 2000’ equipped with infrared beamers triggering off alarms, hypersensitive sensors which could register vibrations in a radius of 500 m as well as barriers made out of extra-thin wire in which potential refugees would get caught up. The conception of the high-tech wall followed a double aim: on the one hand, it was intended to render the border more impenetrable; on the other, the use of arms should be avoided thanks to new technology as the order to shoot was harming the image of the GDR on an international level.111 According to Hoberman, the Wall ‘embodied the Cold War’ while saturating ‘the landscape with ideology and reif[ying] the yearning for freedom’.112 While between 1961 and 1980 about 475,000 individuals managed to flee from East to West Germany, 1,200 died on their way to the West.113 Among the victims, 138 people were killed at the Wall.114 More than 75,000 people trying to leave East Germany were arrested for ‘flight from the Republic’. The ways people attempted to overcome the inner German borders were manifold. They escaped through the sewage system, through self-dug tunnels or self-made planes and helicopters.115 Two families even managed to leave East Germany in a hot-air-balloon, which they had constructed themselves.116 Schmidt, Leo: ‘The Architecture and Message of the “Wall”, 1961–1989’. In: German Politics and Society, vol. 29, no. 2, 2011, p. 72. 106 Cf. Bahr, Christian: Divided City. The Berlin Wall, Berlin: Jargon Verlag, 2018, p. 14. 107 Hoberman, The Red Atlantis, p. 7. 108 Ibid. 109 Cf. Bahr, Divided City. The Berlin Wall, p. 14. 110 Cf. Hertle, Hans-Herrman: The Berlin Wall Story. Biography of a Monument, Berlin: Links Verlag, 2016, p. 116. 111 Quétel, Murs, p. 157. 112 Cf. Hoberman, The Red Atlantis, p. 7. 113 Cf. Viergutz, Die Berliner Mauer, p. 7. 114 Cf. Hertle, Hans-Herrman: The Berlin Wall Story, p. 23. 115 Cf. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha: Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen. DDR, Munich: Beck, 2009. p. 55. 116 Cf. Wolfrum, Die Mauer, pp. 73–4. 105

Historical and Cultural Background

27

After 1961, the Wall came to stand for Berlin, and turned into the city’s greatest tourist attraction. As Alexandra Richie observes: ‘When visitors came they did not search out the monuments or the museums or the shops. To Berliners’ chagrin they came to see one thing: the Wall.’117 Soon after the 13th of August 1961, Berlin advertised the Wall as one of its central sights. Almost every state guest of the Federal Republic was taken to pay a visit to the Wall, which in Western eyes symbolized communist oppression. After the erecting of the Wall, the Potsdam Place, Berlin’s main transport hub, had turned into a hug death strip, which could be seen from an observation platform. The place became an almost obligatory stop for visitors coming to West Berlin.118 In the east of the city, a similar Wall-tourism developed, as the GDR regime proudly invited communist state guests to pay a visit to the ‘anti-fascists protective wall’. According to GDR ideology, fascism represented the combination of imperialism and capitalism in its extremes.119 Among the GDR’s guests counted politicians, cosmonauts, sportsmen as well as ‘revolutionaries’, such as Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and Fidel Castro, the Cuban head of state.120 As Hertle puts it, the West was eager to show its state guests the communist ‘wall of shame’ that locked in the people of the GDR, while the East took pride in showing its visitors the ‘anti-fascist protective wall’ that locked out the imperialists.121 On both sides, the Wall became a tool in intense publicity battles. According to the West German government, the Wall had caused ‘indescribable human distress’ and at the same time reflected the ‘brutal inhuman’ underlying system. The GDR government, however, explained the building of the Wall as a defensive measure against persistent Western aggressions.122 Hartman and Kistner draw attention to the different names given to the city by the respective governments. The Western allies baptized East Berlin ‘the soviet zone’ or ‘the east zone’ before finally calling it merely ‘the zone’. In official GDR speech, East Berlin was initially called ‘democratic sector’, then ‘democratic Berlin’, later ‘Berlin (GDR)’ and eventually ‘Berlin capital of the GDR’. The Western allies insisted on referring to the west of the city as ‘Berlin (West)’. Engaging in a propaganda war, each regime attempted to present its part of Berlin as the ‘real Berlin’ and tried to disparage the other half of the city.123 On maps of the city produced in the GDR, the western part of Berlin was merely a white spot. In this way, the GDR regime communicated to its citizens that Berlin ended at the Wall and that the west was literally non-existent. In the 1980s, the domestic political situation in the GDR exacerbated and a growing oppositional movement emerged. People increasingly tried to leave the GDR. While in 1977, 3,500 fled from East Germany, in the first six months of 1989 the number Cf.Richie, Alexandra: Faust’s Metropolis, London: Harper Collins, 1998, p. 802. Cf. Viergutz, Die Berliner Mauer, p. 16. 119 Cf. Kowalczuk, Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen, p. 31. 120 Cf. Wolfrum, Die Mauer, p. 91. 121 Cf. Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story, p. 98. 122 Cf. Ahonen, Pertti: The Berlin Wall and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany. In: German Politics and Society, vol. 29, no. 22, 2011, p. 44. 123 Cf. Hartmann, Rainer; Kistern, Frank Paul: Berlin. Ein Rundgang vor und nach dem Mauerfall, Berlin: Wachterverlag, 2008, p. 32. 117 118

28

City Limits

increased to 34,600, who legally and illegally went to live in West Germany.124 In August 1989, numerous GDR citizens occupied the embassies of the Federal Republic in Prague and Warsaw. Furthermore, the Hungarian government lifted the iron curtain between Hungary and Austria by opening the border, which allowed thousands of GDR citizens to escape to the west of the city. Simultaneously, a peaceful revolution took place in the GDR, which contributed to the opening of the Wall on the 9th of November 1989.125 After its fall, 95 per cent of the Wall was destroyed. More than 40,000 segments of the barrier were crushed and used as granules in road building.126 A few hundred Wall segments survived and have been exported all over the globe. The majority of them can be found in the form of museum exhibits or as open-air memorials in different cities in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, London, Poland, Denmark, Latonia and the United States. In Berlin, no extended original section of the Wall has been preserved as a memorial. Only a few single segments can be found in different parts of the city.127

Figure 7  The Mortal Kiss by Dimitry Vrubel, Eastside Gallery. Eberle, Henrik: “Beamtenmief vom Feinsten. DDR-Politbürokraten in den Sibzigern.” In: Haußmann, Leander (ed.): Sonnenallee. Das Buch zum Farbfilm, Berlin: Ullstein, 1999, p. 44. 125 Cf. Viergutz, Die Berliner Mauer, p. 8. 126 Cf. Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story, p. 225. 127 Cf. Wolfrum, Die Mauer, p. 144. 124

Historical and Cultural Background

29

Figure 8  Test the Rest by Birgit Kinder, Eastside Gallery.

With a length of 1.3 km, the longest surviving part of the Wall was turned by artists into the so-called Eastside Gallery, which has been placed under historic preservation.128 This part of the Wall, belonging to the ‘hinterland wall’, contains 118 paintings from artists coming from twenty-one countries. The Eastside Gallery is praised by Berlin’s tourist office as the biggest open-air gallery of the world.129 Most of the paintings refer to freedom and human rights. The best-known works include The Mortal Kiss by Dmitry Vrubel, a painting of Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev’s mouth-to-mouth embrace, and Birgit Kinder’s Trabi crashing through the Wall. Thomas Jung observes that despite the fact that the Eastside Gallery has turned into a popular tourist attraction, it does not reflect the social and mental significance of the Wall as a border between two states, two ideological systems and the symbol of the Cold War.130

Cf. Bahr, Divided City, p. 112. Cf. ‘Berlin.de. Das offizielle Hauptstadtportal’, https://www.berlin.de/sehenswuerdigkeiten/35597563558930-east-side-gallery.html, accessed 20 April 2021. 130 Jung, Thomas: ‘Topographie einer Wendeerfahrung’. In: Harder, Matthias; Hille, Almut (eds.): Weltfabrik Berlin. Eine Metropole als Sujet der Literatur, Würzburg: Königshaus, Neumann, 2006, p. 275. 128 129

30

City Limits

Three histories of filmmaking In order to comprehend the singularity of the films exploring Belfast, Beirut and Berlin in the present study, I shall begin with a brief introduction to the development of cinematographic productions dealing with the Troubles, the Lebanese Civil War and the Cold War. The films are better understood when they are considered in the general context of filmmaking in their respective cultural environment. The German cinematographic tradition is considerably more complex than filmmaking in Northern Ireland and Lebanon, as after the building of the Wall, the industry went in two different directions, which only met each other again after the country’s reunification. It does not come as a surprise that most of the films dealing with the Northern Irish conflict, the Lebanese Civil War and the Cold War take place in an urban environment. Consequently, Belfast, Beirut and Berlin turn into the main film locations. They often function as microcosms of their respective countries, or region, in which the consequences of political violence manifest themselves in their most extreme form. It is striking that there exist comparatively more films concentrating on Berlin’s division than on the two other cities’ segregation. The reason is most likely the fact that specifically after the Second World War, the German capital played a more important role in world politics than Belfast and Beirut. Whereas Belfast was the scene of a local conflict between Ireland and the UK, Beirut became the centre of the Lebanese Civil War, a regional battle carried out between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. Berlin, however, turned into a metonym for the Cold War, a conflict carried out on a much broader scale, with two opposing value systems and two world powers confronting each other. Thus, Berlin served as an arena in which communism and capitalism met, with the United States and the Soviet Union defending their ideologies. In this way, the Wall divided the superpowers’ sphere of influence in Europe. Particularly in the Western world, the barrier turned into the principle iconic symbol of the Cold War and its divisive consequences. While not wishing to downplay the violent clashes in Beirut or Belfast, it can be said that on a global level, Berlin has attracted more international attention. A further reason for the filmmakers’ prevalent interest in Berlin might be the fact that after the Second World War, Germany has developed into Europe’s economic driving force.

The development of Northern Irish cinema John Hill maintains that today it is ‘difficult to set a film in Northern Ireland that does not deal with the impact of the conflict in some way or other without appearing either naive or wilfully evasive’.131 He further argues that due to the region’s ‘peculiar status’ as ‘geographically a part of the island of Ireland but politically a part of the UK’, filmmaking in Northern Ireland has been restricted to ‘the margins of both the British

Hill, John: Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics, London: BFI Publishing, 2006, p. 242.

131

Historical and Cultural Background

31

and Irish film industries’.132 After an initial burst of filmmaking activity in the 1930s, with the Northern Irish singer and actor Richard Hayward starring in a number of low-budget musical comedies, Northern Irish film production almost ground to an entire halt. The industry never managed to build on these successes and the plan to set up a film studio in the region was never put into practice.133 Consequently, virtually no feature filmmaking could be observed in Northern Ireland until the 1980s, when the then new television Channel 4 supported film workshops and thus rekindled the film industry. However, from the 1990s onwards, Northern Irish filmmaking gained considerable importance, as in a few years more films were produced than in the preceding seventies.134 A great number of cinematographic works focussing on Northern Ireland depict the consequences of political violence. Popular feature films such as Angle (1982) and The Crying Game (1992) by Neil Jordan, Cal (1984) by Pat O’Connor, Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1993) or Philipp Noyce’s Patriot Games (1992) spring to mind among many others. As the epicentre of political violence, Belfast has become a recurrent setting for a variety of films. Most of the films produced in the 1980s, and even at the beginning of the 1990s, render a rather grim picture of Northern Ireland, concentrating on paramilitary fighting, the British Army, imprisonments or the hunger strikes. Belfast is frequently illustrated as a place in which the peaceful co-existence of the two ethno-religious communities is seen as impossible. The city’s fragmented urban space, as well as its internal ethno-religious boundaries,135 has inspired numerous action films featuring shootings, bombings, raids and abductions. The plots of those productions are commonly marked by speed, excitement and tension. According to Brian McIlroy, the ‘standard genres’ of Northern Irish cinema are the ‘thriller’ and the ‘revenge tragedy’.136 In this context, films such as Mark Evans’ Resurrection Man (1988), Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Nothing Personal (1995) and Nathan Todd’s A Belfast Story (2013) could be mentioned. However, in the years following the first ceasefire declaration made by the IRA in 1994, a search for new forms of cinematographic expression manifests itself.137 The improvement of the political climate in the region gave rise to gradual growth of mental and emotional distance from the conflict.138 As a result, a young generation of scriptwriters and producers started to represent the consequences of the Troubles from

Hill, John: ‘Divorcing Jack’. In: McFarlane, Brian (ed.): The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press, 2003, p. 227. 133 Hill, ‘Divorcing Jack’, p. 227. 134 Ibid. 135 Cf. Shirlow; Murtagh, Belfast, pp. 57–100, Calame; Charleworth, Divided Cities, pp. 61–81. 136 Cf. McIlroy, Brian: Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1998, p. 1. 137 Cf. McLoone, Martin: Irish Film. The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema, London: British Film Institute, 2000, p. 64. 138 Cf. Morrissey, Mike; Smyth, Marie: Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. Victims, Grievance and Blame, London: Pluto Press, 2002, p. 3; cf. Paul Dixon: Northern Ireland. The Politics of War and Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, pp. 224–80. 132

32

City Limits

an unconventional angle in order to express the ‘new mood of optimism’139 generated by the more peaceful atmosphere in Northern Ireland. In addition, the emergence of alternative forms of funding encouraged innovative filmmaking activities: the newly founded Northern Irish Film Council (NIFC) provided a production fund in support of locally made films.140 The development of Northern Irish cinema was further encouraged through the introduction of UK lottery funds, increased Arts Council funding and the BBC Extending Choice Policy, a policy aiming at greater regional autonomy.141 As mentioned above, a Northern Irish cinematographic tradition was literally absent before the 1990s. Most of the films on the Troubles had been shot in the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain or the United States. Brian McIlroy points out that thanks to the increase of local productions, the emergence of alternative visual representations of Northern Ireland can be observed: From mainstream film to independent film and video workshops in Belfast and Derry, to specific filmmakers and videographers, Irish people, together with some English, have played a major role in reconfiguring “simplistic” representations of Northern Ireland by English and North American news media.142

McIlroy sees this development as a move away from ‘mainland Britain’s’ ‘imperial perception’ of violence.143 These locally made films also stand out against North American depictions of the Troubles, in which Northern Ireland is frequently used as ‘a convenient metaphor for unmotivated violence’.144 Despite the trend towards a local film production, British and American film industries maintained their interest in Ireland. This might be due to the tax incentives, which had been put in place from 1980s onwards and made filming in Ireland financially attractive.145 According to Martin McLoone, a reason for American interest in the Troubles might be the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. In order to sustain the American genre cinema, new ‘villains’ had to be found to feed the popular thriller narrative. This has commonly been achieved by presenting the IRA as a danger for America’s national security.146 Ruth Barton draws attention to the fact that the IRA man has enjoyed ‘an extended life in mainstream American cinema’.147 However, his position had to be carefully negotiated, as once the IRA man enters America, he symbolizes a potential threat to democracy. American studios were also aware of the fact that overt sympathy for the IRA would alienate Britain, one of America’s main European allies. On the other hand, support for Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer: (De-)constructing the North: Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003, p. 189. 140 Cf. Hill, ‘Divorcing Jack’, p. 228. 141 Cf. Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 162. 142 McIlroy, Shooting to Kill, p. 2. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., p. 4. 145 McLoone, Irish Film, p. 64. 146 Cf. ibid. 147 Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 161. 139

Historical and Cultural Background

33

‘the cause’ would appeal to an Irish American audience, which is traditionally defined as Catholic and republican.148 In the early 1990s, the calmer political atmosphere made it possible to shoot films directly in Northern Ireland. During the most turbulent years of the Troubles, filming on location had not been possible because of security risks and the connected high insurance costs. In those days, Dublin, London or Manchester had habitually served as substitutes for Belfast.149 John Hill claims that due to the shooting in stand-in locations, Belfast appears in many films as ‘an abstract place of the imagination’.150 Frequently, the key landmarks of the city are absent in those productions and therefore, the place lacks in ‘specific geographical and physical markers’.151 The only Belfast-specific features which can be spotted are murals and kerb-stone paintings, which had been artificially added to walls and pavements of the stand-in location in order to recreate the Northern Irish décor. For this reason, Hill argues that Belfast-films shot in other places communicate only little sense of the city as ‘an actual lived-in-space’.152 As noted previously, the city’s changed post-ceasefire situation, spawned alternative perspectives on the Troubles, and films produced after 1994 are widely considered as ‘Ceasefire cinema’.153 The term suggests not only that these films were enabled by the ceasefire, thanks to alternative financial resources, and the possibility of shooting on location, but also due to a new psychological distance towards the Troubles.154 In this context, Martin McLoone maintains that with the political situation growing more hopeful and the ceasefires continuing to hold, ‘culture in general and film in particular’ was able to start dealing with the ‘suppressed horror of the recent past’.155 McLoone rightly argues that commercial cinema and state-funded partnerships managed to ‘open up a space where the legacy of thirty years of violence in Northern Ireland’ could be presented.156 Due to the improved political situation, the region’s history could be revisited and the future imagined with more optimism. Whereas a number of ‘Ceasefire films’ concentrate on the new situation in Northern Ireland generated by the Peace process, others return to tense periods of the conflict, illustrating them from an alienating angle. Among films taking on an innovative perspective one may count Roger Michell’s Titanic Town (1998), in which the Troubles are depicted from the point of view of an adolescent girl, Terry Loan’s Mickeybo and Me (2003), where Northern Irish sectarianism is perceived from the view of children, and Yann Demange’s ’71, where the action is rendered through the eyes of a British solider (2014). Further films are Jim Sheridan’s The Boxer (1998), which focuses on the life of Republican

Cf. ibid. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 213. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 153 Hill, ‘Divorcing Jack’, p. 229. 154 Cf. Ibid. 155 Cf. McLoone, Irish Film, p. 84. 156 Cf. Ibid. 148 149

34

City Limits

prisoners’ wives, and Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Good Vibrations where the consequences of the Northern Irish tensions are depicted against the background of the upcoming Punk movement in the Belfast of the 1970s. In a number of films, defamiliarizing visions of the Northern Irish conflict are reached through a carnivalesque plot shaped by comic characters, slapstick as well as subversive word-play. In line with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnavalization, they aim at the derision of established authorities and undermine received versions of the Troubles.157 John Hill claims that only after the ceasefire did it become imaginable to turn the conflict into ‘a comic matter’ on screen.158 Productions with a humorous take on the political situation include, among others, David Caffery’s films Divorcing Jack (1998) and Cycle of Violence (1998), John Forte’s Mad about Mambo (1999), Barry Levinson’s An Everlasting Piece (2000), Dudi Appleton’s The Most Fertile Man in Ireland (2003), Adrian Shergold’s Eureka Street (1998) – a BBC television series in four episodes – Steven Butcher’s television film Two Ceasefires and a Funeral (1995), as well as Give My Head Peace, a popular TV series running on BBC Northern Ireland from 1995 until 2005. The latter was produced by Tim McGarry, Damon Quinn and Michel McDowell, a group of filmmakers, calling itself the Hole in the Wall Gang. A recent example of a humorous engagement with the Northern Ireland in the 1990s is the TV series Derry Girls created by Lisa McGee in 2018. In films on the Northern Irish conflict, directors seem to follow a common policy in their choice of actors. In most of the productions, the protagonists are played by actors with an international reputation – most likely to attract a broad audience – whereas the minor characters are impersonated by local actors. This has the effect that in many cases the heroes struggle to imitate the Belfast accent, while the secondary characters perfectly express themselves in the local variation of the English language. Ruth Barton claims that in recent years, the production of the TV series Game of Thrones has fundamentally altered the Northern Irish film industry. Due to this large budget production, the local filmmaking infrastructure has significantly improved so that the volume of services required for filming and training has considerably augmented. The popularity of the series also increased the profile of the actors, who are now frequently associated with their roles in Games of Thrones. Barton, however, fears that Brexit might affect filmmaking in Northern Ireland, as the industry will lose access to funding provided by Creative Europe, an EU programme with an annual budget of almost 1.5 billion euros.159

Lebanese cinema before and after the Civil War From the outbreak of the Civil War until today, Lebanese filmmakers have been preoccupied with the consequences of political violence. Common themes are the Bakhtin, Mikhail: Rabelais and His World. Iswolsky, Hélène (ed.), Bloomington: Indiana, 1984, p. 1. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 210. 159 Barton, Ruth: Irish Cinema in the Twenty-first Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, p. 141. 157 158

Historical and Cultural Background

35

destruction of lives and families, the devastation of the country, social division, as well as sectarian segregation. As the centre of the violent conflict, Beirut has become a frequent setting for feature films. Lebanese cinema is a comparatively small cinema, which consists of a collection of films by disparate filmmakers living both in Lebanon and in exile. Scriptwriters, producers and directors come from various religious and ethnic backgrounds, including Lebanese Armenians.160 Most of them are members of a bi- or tri-lingual elite and are often educated at prestigious Western universities and trained in high-profile film schools in Europe, the United States and in Russia. Roy Armes points out that filmmakers belonging to the Lebanese diaspora are forced to approach the situation in their home country at least to some extent as ‘outsiders’. However, this particular situation allows them to ‘be in the forefront of efforts for change’.161 As most of Lebanese filmmakers work independently, it is impossible to speak of a Lebanese filmmaking industry in the conventional sense of the term.162 While Lebanon can pride itself of an academically well-established literary tradition, Lebanese cinema has played a rather minor role on the country’s cultural scene. Concerning Lebanese literature, Syrine Hout claims that ‘whole generations of writers’ responded imaginatively to the Civil War. She further underlines that in particular post-war Lebanese fiction is seen as ‘monumental’ by literary critics, sociologists and political scientists.163 Lina Khatib, however, argues that in contrast to this deep-rooted literary production, Lebanese cinema did not enjoy a central role ‘in public memory’164 until recently. While novels were easily accessible, a great number of Lebanese films remained unseen by the public due to their lack of distribution. Consequently, most Lebanese producers were not screened widely, neither in Lebanon nor abroad. Frequently, they made only a short appearance in international film festivals and were not released in cinemas or on videos. And while Lebanese film suffered from a lack of financial support from the government, the war gave rise to a considerable brain drain. A large number of young people left the country to study aboard, which did not help to spark local film production.165 Even if the bulk of Lebanese films have been shot from the 1990s on, attempts to set up a cinematographic tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century can be observed. The 1930s saw the emergence of a small number of locally made silent films, which were followed by the first Lebanese film in Arabic entitled Amongst the Temples of Baalbek [Bayn Hayakel Baalbak] (1934) released by the Lumnar Film Company.166 In the 1940s, the first professional Lebanese director, Ali al-Ariss, produced The Rose Seller [Bayya’at al-Ward] (1940) and The Planet of the Desert Princess [Kawkab Amirat Cf. Shafik, Viola: Arab Cinema. History and Cultural Identity, Cairo: The American University of Cairo Press, 2007, p. 44. 161 Cf. Armes, Roy: New Voices in Arab Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, p. 8. 162 Cf. Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 21. 163 Hout, Syrine: Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction. Home Matters in the Diaspora, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 2. 164 Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 21. 165 Cf. ibid. 166 Cf. ibid., p. 22. 160

36

City Limits

al-Sahraa’] (1946), two films inspired by the musical genre and Bedouin stories. Under the French mandate, the Lebanese cinema scene was dominated by American, French and Egyptian films with almost no local films being shot.167 After the Second World War, private entrepreneurs became interested in cinema, establishing studios and sharing film productions.168 In the 1950s, a development of the film industry can be observed. Films were usually shot in Egyptian Arabic to achieve a wide distribution.169 Only at the end of the 1950s, filmmakers started to use the Lebanese dialect instead of the habitual Egyptian one. Nevertheless, these films were commercial failures as the target audience – Lebanese village dwellers or expatriates – either lacked in access to cinemas or were not interested in unsophisticated representations of their country.170 Khatib sees the reason for Lebanese cinema’s meagre success until the beginning of the Civil War in the ‘Egyptianization’ of local films. In this context, Viola Shafik draws attention to the influence of ‘Hollywood on the Nile’ on Lebanese cinema. Not only did Lebanon export some of its most famous stars to Egypt – such as Asmahan, Farid al-Atrash and Sabah – but it also functioned as the most important trade centre for commercial Egypt cinema.171 Nevertheless, the Arab market was not receptive to Lebanese films due to heavy censorship and the dominance of Egyptian cinema. However, the city of Beirut frequently featured in Egyptian films serving as an exotic location.172 In order to be successful, films had to follow the Egyptian model and use the Egyptian dialect for dialogue.173 It was only with the beginning of the Civil War and the partial privatization of the Egyptian film industry that Lebanese cinema emerged ‘from under the shadow of its Egyptian mentor’.174 The Civil War had a devastating influence on Lebanese cinematographic production as most of the infrastructure was destroyed.175 An example is the closing of the Arab Cinema Liaison Centre in Beirut in 1975, a centre which concentrated on connecting and coordinating cinematic activities across the Arab world. Khatib explains that the war also had a negative influence on the quality of the films. Lebanese filmmakers relied on old-fashioned cameras and equipment provided by Haroun and Baalbek, the only two studios which managed to survive in the early 1980s. As the cameras were of poor quality, they were not able to capture on-set dialogue and films therefore had to be dubbed.176 As a result of Lebanon’s growing sectarian division, the distribution of films in different parts of the country became literally impossible. Furthermore, the Hamra Cf. Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth, p. 422. Cf. Shafik, Arab Cinema, p. 28. 169 Salhab, Sabine: ‘Esthétique de la « Ligne verte » dans le cinéma libanais de la guerre civile à nos jours’. In: Les Cahiers de l’Orient, no. 106, 2012, pp. 75. 170 Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 22. 171 Cf. Shafik, Arab Cinema, p. 28. 172 Cf. Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth, p. 79. 173 Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 23. 174 Shafik, Arab Cinema, p. 28. 175 Cf. Yazbek, Regards sur le cinema libanais, p. 9. 176 Cf. Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 25. 167 168

Historical and Cultural Background

37

area situated in the west of the city lost its key role as Lebanon’s centre of cinema diffusion, as spectators from the east were no longer able to access West Beirut after the beginning of urban division. Apart from that, cinemas in the city centre were closed down, which led to an additional decline of viewers.177 Similar to Northern Ireland, after the onset of political violence, the shooting of films in certain areas of the country became increasingly difficult due to security reasons.178 By the 1990s, most of the Lebanese film studios had closed down. Due to the absence of funding, young filmmakers worked with video whereas well-known directors turned towards European co-production in order to finance their work.179 From this period emerged a series of films dealing with the Civil War, such as Samir Habchi’s The Tornado [Al-I’sar] (1992) and Jean-Claude Codsi’s A Time Has Come [An al-Awan] (1994). Khatib sees Ziad Doueiri’s film West Beyrouth [Beirut al-Gharbiyah] (1998) as the event that sparked off the ‘renaissance period’ of Lebanese cinema. This hugely popular film attracted a considerable audience, not only in Lebanon but also worldwide.180 Since then, an ever-increasing number of Lebanese films have been produced. These films are not only shown in Lebanon but keep appearing on screens throughout the world. However, Arms maintains that in regard to Lebanese cinema, the term ‘national cinema’ would not be appropriate as filmmakers largely depend on foreign funding. To obtain European funding, for example, a film generally requires a fully worked-out script in French or another European language, even if it is intended to be shot with Arabic dialogue. Lebanese filmmakers commonly depend on funding opportunities linked to film festivals. While Nadine Labaki benefited from a Cannes Festival Project, which allowed her to write the screenplay of Caramel (2007) in Paris, Danielle Arbid received a scholarship from the Montpellier festival to fund her scripting of In the Battlefields (2004).181 The city of Beirut is central to Lebanese cinema. Since the 1960s, a considerable number of films contain ‘Beirut’ even in their title: Beirut, oh Beirut [Beirut ya Beirut] (1975), Beirut, the Encounter [Beirut al-Liqa’] (1981), Once Upon a Time, Beirut [Kan ya ma Kan, Beirut] (1994), Beirut Phantoms [Ashbah Beirut] (1998), West Beyrouth (1998) as well as Beirut Hotel [Beirut bel Layl] (2010). Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Beirut functioned as the cultural and economic centre of the Middle East. Consequently, Beirut was frequently depicted as the home of the rich and famous in films produced before 1975. Moreover, the city commonly served as a setting for commercial action films and romantic comedies.182 However, after the beginning of the Civil War, the cinematographic representation of Beirut changed from a growing glamorous place to a city disfigured by bombs, barriers and residential segregation. Yazbek observes that despite Beirut’s omnipresence in a great number of films, the city

Cf. ibid., p. 25. Cf. Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, pp. 27–8. 179 Cf. ibid. 180 Cf. Ibid., p. xv. 181 Cf. Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema, p. 20. 182 Cf. Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 57. 177 178

38

City Limits

never shows a stable and unchanging identity, as from film to film, the representation of the city is completely different.183 This illustration of the capital stands out against the depiction of Beirut in American films. In her study Filming the Modern Middle East, Lina Khatib points out that in American cinema, Beirut is frequently shown as a ‘concrete jungle’ with ‘shabby veiled women, sandbags, bombed buildings, checkpoints and exploded cars’.184 She criticizes Beirut’s ‘overrepresentation’ as ‘a site of ruin, terror and chaos’, a place, where ‘normal life’ is inexistent and whose inhabitants are merely fighters and paramilitaries. Khatib further argues that American films deny Beirut its ‘lived’ existence.185

German cinema between east and west The history of German cinema can be subdivided into seven periods characterized by specific themes, cinematographic strategies and approaches.186 The first three periods lie before Germany’s division and begin with the Wilhelmine Empire (1895–1919), which is followed by the era of the Weimar Republic (1919–33) and the Third Reich (1933–45). While the post-war cinema (1945–61) can still be considered as a unified cinema despite the beginning division of the country, after 1961 an evolution of two different cinematographic traditions in East and West Germany can be observed. The time after 1990 is characterized by the so-called post-Wall cinema. Since its beginnings, the German film industry has been closely connected to the city of Berlin. After the period of travelling cinema, which lasted until about 1906, more and more storefronts, pubs and coffee houses were converted into stationary cinemas, which made Berlin the German capital of cinema. Simultaneously, Berlin became Germany’s film production centre with most of the studios located in Tempelhof, Weissensee and Babelsberg.187 The film industry grew so quickly that in the 1920s and 1930s, 90 per cent of German films were made in the capital. Apart from that, Berlin became the trade centre for foreign films with glamorous premieres and influential journalists to write about them. At the same time, the city turned into a popular setting for German feature films with its millions of citizens providing a mine of stories.188 Sabine Hake states that films produced during the Wilhelmine era were characterized by tensions between nationalist ideology and social activism on the one hand, and the modernizing forces of technology and the oppressive effect of a

Cf. Yazbek, Regards sur le cinema libanais, p. 23. Khatib, Lina: Filming the Modern Middle East. Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World, London: Tauris, 2006, pp. 24–5. 185 Cf. ibid. 186 Cf. Hake, German National Cinema, p. 7. 187 Cf. Hanisch, Michael: Auf den Spuren der deutschen Filmgeschichte: Berliner Schauplätze, Berlin: Henschel, 1991. 188 Cf. Stucke, Frank: ‘Bewegte Bilder in einer bewegten Zeit. Aufstieg und Fall der Metropole Berlin im Film’. In: Harder, Matthias; Hille, Almut (eds.): Weltfabrik Berlin. Eine Metropole als Sujet der Literatur, Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 2006, p. 172. 183 184

Historical and Cultural Background

39

rigid class system on the other.189 During the same period, the so-called author’s film [Autorenfilm] emerged as a new art form, earning cinema ‘middle-class respectability and cultural legitimacy’.190 The German ‘author’s film’ is inspired by the French film d’art and consists of adaptations of canonical literary text. Until today, ‘author’s films’ have remained a popular genre. Throughout the First World War, cinema played a decisive role in the militarization of culture, with films being either used for propaganda or serving as escapist entertainment. During the Weimar period, German cinema was influenced by different historical events. Between 1919 and 1924, the industry witnessed the rise of expressionist cinema, resulting from the trauma of the lost war and hyperinflation. Due to a greater economic stability, the years from 1924 to 1929 saw the emergence of films following a more realistic approach in the style of New Objectivity. The years between 1929 and 1933, on the contrary, were marked by the rebuilding of the cinema industry and the introduction of sound. The Weimar period terminated with the politicization of cinema before the takeover of the Nazis.191 Anton Kaes states that by the 1920s, Berlin had become ‘the imaginary centre of urban culture, drawing artists, intellectuals, tourist, migrants and immigrants into its orbit like a magnet’.192 He sees the reason for this development in the city’s rapid growth from 1 million inhabitants in 1877, to 2 million in 1905, to nearly 4 million in 1920. Therefore, the city became ‘the primordial site of modernity to which painters, poets and filmmakers returned obsessively’.193 Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli note that after the arrival of Expressionism in the 1920s, filmmakers attempted to achieve a deeper insight into the life of the capital, depicting Berlin in the Weimar period as ‘a model of a rational, perfectly organized modern city’.194 For technical reasons, many films set during this period in Berlin were actually shot in studios as it was easier to construct the desired synthetic or exaggerated vision of the city in an artificial environment rather than on location. As examples could be quoted Karl Grune’s The Street [Die Straße] (1923), in which a full-scale avenue was built in the studio, as well as Friedrich Murnau’s The Last Man [Der letzte Mann] (1924),195 in which artificial skyscrapers create the impression of Berlin as a ‘fast-paced, heartless place’.196 In Walter Rutman’s Berlin, Symphony of a Big City [Berlin, Sinfonie einer Großstadt] (1927), the capital becomes the protagonist of one of the first ‘city symphonies’. The main purpose of this genre was to render an urban complex as a whole, instead of merely depicting some disconnected fragments of its cityscape or specific subgroups of Cf. Hake, German National Cinema, p. 8. Ibid. p. 23. 191 Cf. ibid., p. 28. 192 Kaes, Anton: ‘Sites of Desire: The Weimar Street Film’. In: Neumann, Dietrich (ed.): Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, Munich: Prestel, 1996, p. 27. 193 Ibid. 194 Mazierska; Rascaroli, From Moscow to Madrid, Postmodern Cities, p. 116. 195 Ibid. 196 Neumann, Dietrich: ‘Before and after Metropolis: Film and Architecture in Search of the Modern City’. In: Neumann, Dietrich (ed.): Film, Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, Munich: Prestel, 1996, p. 33. 189 190

40

City Limits

its population. Wanting to depict Berlin as a modern European metropolis, Rutmann chose the structure of the symphony as an analogy for the structure of modern urban life. Thus, the city is illustrated as an imposing metropolis full of life and movement. At the end of the ‘golden twenties’, however, the emergence of less glorious portrayals of Berlin can be observed in which crime, violence and poverty are frequent topics. The dark sides of Berlin become illustrated in films such as Asphalte [Asphalt] (1929) by Joe May and M. A City Searches for a Murderer [M. Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder] (1931) by Fritz Lang. From 1933 to 1945, the German film industry produced more than 1,000 featurelength films, countless short films, newsreels and documentaries. In the Third Reich, cinematographic productions were used to generate narratives of identity and community and to promote National Socialist ideals, which provided distraction in line with the ideology of the regime. The Nazi takeover of the film industry started in 1933 with the creation of the Reich Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda [Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda]. Joseph Goebbels, the minister in charge, assumed control over all aspects of cultural life, from film, radio, press and literature to visual and performing arts, so that all cultural productions corresponded to the political goals of the government. After 1933, every writer, artist, actor, musician and director had to be organized in the Reich Culture Chamber [Reichskulturkammer]. The corporatist guild model of the organization created the institutional structure for cultural production in a one-party system.197 Initially, the city of Berlin appeared to be a problematic topic for the Third Reich cinema. Before the takeover of the Nazis, the cosmopolitan city represented almost everything which went against Hitler’s ideal of an Arian nation. With migrants from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, Berlin was regarded as a breeding ground for degenerate art, which was poisoning the German population. For that reason, the countryside as a place of peace and purity was preferred as a setting in early films. However, a few years later, Berlin started to feature in films displaying the strength and power of the regime. An example of the veneration of the capital is Leni Riefenstahl’s documentation of the Olympic Games in 1936. In Olympia, Berlin is represented as the glorious centre of Germany with pompous buildings and citizens who either cheer the winners of the competitions or Adolf Hitler himself. Glorifying cinematographic representations of Berlin continued to emerge after the beginning of the Second World War. At the time, it was strictly forbidden to show images of Berlin’s destruction, as these were feared to have a demoralizing effect on the population.198 After Germany’s capitulation, the country was divided into a French, British, American and Russian zone, and the city of Berlin was accordingly cut into four sectors. The Allies were keen on dismantling the hierarchically organized structures of production facilities, distribution companies and cinemas controlled by the Propaganda Ministry. Following the War, all new releases had to be licensed in their

Cf. Hake, German National Cinema, p. 66. Cf. Stucke, ‘Bewegte Bilder’, pp. 174–6.

197 198

Historical and Cultural Background

41

respective zones. The Information Control Division (ICD) of the US Army saw in the rebuilding of the cinema industry an efficient means of re-education. In this context, the screening of the film Death Mills [Die Todesmühlen] (1945), which confronted Germans with the truth of the Holocaust, became mandatory. American newsreels such as World in Film [Welt im Film] (1945) and Soviet-made documentaries such as The Eyewitness [Der Augenzeuge] (1945) reported extensively on Nazi atrocities. Initially, the Allies attempted to reach a compromise regarding the re-education of the German population and thought to be able to promote their political and economic ideals through film imports. However, this approach created competing spheres of interest: while old Hollywood films were shown in the Western sectors, the classics of Stalinist cinema appeared on the screens of the eastern sector.199 Furthermore, Soviets and Western allies started to disagree about the future of the German film industry. The Western allies saw the film industry as an institution promoting art, entertainment and information. Their reorganization of public broadcasting followed the model of the BBC, with greater commitment to local, regional and national culture, and the radio as an important medium for public debate in a liberal democracy. In the Eastern zone, on the contrary, the Soviets endorsed their model of centralized production and state control and founded the DEFA [short for Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, meaning ‘German Film Stock Company’]. In 1947, the DEFA became the first studio to resume film production, gradually turning into a state-owned company with close ties to the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei, that is ‘Socialist Unity Party’]. According to Shandley, the DEFA was created by ‘a committee of Soviet officers, returning German expatriates, and resident German filmmakers as the first active post war German film company’.200 Between 1949 and 1962, the period in which Berlin was divided into four sectors, the ongoing business of film production and the cinema activities in the whole of the city generated many border crossings in a physical and metaphysical sense.201 Barbara Mennel observes that despite the striving of the Allied forces for re-eduction and de-nazification, some of the early DEFA and West German films show aesthetic and technological continuities from the Third Reich, as a number of directors and other film professionals had also worked for the Nazi film industry.202 In the post-war period, Berlin became the setting of the so-called rubble films, showing the destruction of the city. These films were produced directly after the Second World War, beginning with The Murderers Are among Us [Mörder sind unter uns] (1946) and ending with Robert A. Stemmle’s The Ballad of Berlin [Berliner Ballade] (1948), a rubble film satire. Robert Shandley lists seventeen rubble films having been released in the span of two years, most of them being set in Berlin. Among them count

Hake, German National Cinema, p. 66. Shandley, Robert R.: Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadows of the Third Reich, Phidalephia, P.A: Temple University Press, 2000, p. 17. 201 Cf. Hake, German National Cinema, pp. 94–6. 202 Cf. Mennel, Cities and Cinema, p. 110. 199 200

42

City Limits

Gerhard Lamprecht’s Somewhere in Berlin [Irgendwo in Berlin] (1946) and Roberto Rossillini’s Germany Year Zero [Deutschland im Jahre Null] (1948).203 After the building of the Wall in 1961, two different cinema traditions developed, with the West German cinema industry organized according to free market principles and the East German one as a state-owned company following the aim of building a socialist society. In the GDR, DEFA films were specifically addressed to GDR citizens and promoted the ideals of socialism as a form of society superior to capitalism. Controlled by the SED, the GDR’s film industry had to struggle with censorship. Hake observes that ‘censorship took place both through official bans and punitive measures and the more pernicious kind of self-censorship carried out in the name of socialism and the allegiance to the party’.204 In the 1970s and 1980s, a tendency towards the exploration of personal life can be observed in GDR cinema. Two of the most popular films concentrating on individual life stories are The Legend of Paul and Paula [Die Legende von Paul und Paula] (1973) and Solo Sunny (1980). Whereas the first film focuses on a dramatic love story of two neighbours, the second one concentrates on an unsuccessful singer living on the edge of society. Between 1961 and 1990, West German cinema was marked by the so-called New German Cinema, which can be seen as the continuation of the previously mentioned ‘author’s cinema’. This new kind of cinema encouraged individual productions and gave voice to experimental filmmakers and writer activists. The New German Cinema was characterized by a striving of coming to terms with the country’s recent past. The ‘author’s film’ was not only to be seen as a new artistic programme but also as ‘a discursive and institutional model for making the Federal Republic – a modern democracy, a social welfare state and a liberal middle-class society – to its citizens and political allies’.205 One of the most critically acclaimed ‘author’s film’ set in the divided Berlin is Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin] (1987), which was followed after the unification with its sequel Faraway, So Close! [In weiter Ferne, so nah!] (1993). The division of Berlin into socialist and capitalist parts with the Wall as its dividing line became an important theme in films made by both German and foreign film directors. In this context, the Wall turned into a suitable means for Cold War propaganda. In a broader sense, Berlin and the Wall became to stand for the partition of the German nation as well as for the Iron Curtain, splitting Western and Eastern Europe into two. Among films treating with Berlin’s division made by foreign directors count The Man Between (1953) by Carol Reed, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) by Martin Ritt, Funeral in Berlin (1966) by Guy Hamilton and Torn Curtain (1966) by Alfred Hitchcock. It is, however, striking that films concentrating on Berlin’s division are almost exclusively narrated from a Western perspective. Ronald Taylor

Cf. Shandley, Robert R.: Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadows of the Third Reich, Phidalephia, P.A: Temple University Press, 2000, pp. 211–18. 204 Hake, German National Cinema, p. 129. 205 Ibid., p. 165. 203

Historical and Cultural Background

43

observes that East German directors rarely explored the city’s division: ‘The Wall itself gave rise to a handful misconceived films readily forgotten. The physical and psychological tragedies from which it was responsible were not permitted material for the filmmakers of the East.’206 Mazierska and Rascaroli draw attention to a small number of Berlin films by East German producers ‘deviating from the syrupy image of life under socialism’.207 In this context, the two authors mention Wolfgang Kohlhaase and Gerhard Klein’s A Berlin Romance [Berliner Romanze] (1956), Berlin – Corner Schönhauser [Berlin – Ecke Schönhauser] (1957) and Round the Corner in Berlin [Berlin um die Ecke] (1965), which focus on the anti-social behaviour of young West Berliners, and The Divided Sky [Der geteilte Himmel] (1964), directed by Konrad Wolf, a film exploring the topic of illegal border crossings.208 The fall of the Wall on the 9th of November 1989 and the following signing of the Unification Treaty on the third of October 1990 marked the end of the Cold War. The process of unification – commonly referred to as the Wende [change, transition] – generated fundamental transformations in the political landscape in both parts of Germany. The so-called post-Wall or Wende-cinema is characterized by a larger thematic, stylistic and ideological scope than the previous period. Hake draws attention to the fact that the merging of two ideological systems was complicated by anxieties, resentments and projections, including the stereotypes of Wessis [West Germans] and Ossis (East Germans].209 While the first cinematographic responses to the collapse of the GDR relied on realist styles and the conventions of the docudrama, in the second half of the 1990s, German filmmakers were returning to specifically German issues, employing ‘popular idioms to explore crucial issues of identity’.210 This trend expressed itself in the revival of popular cinema, which took two forms: on the one hand, the screening of well-known Hollywood blockbusters including Pretty Women (1990), Basic Instinct (1992) and Jurassic Park (1993), and, on the other, the production of comedies targeting a specifically German audience. Among the latter count MantaManta (1991), Doubting Thomas [Irren ist männlich] (1996) and German Spoken Here [Man spricht deutsch] (1998). Within this wave of ‘new German comedy’, a new subgenre – the ‘unification comedy’ – emerges.211 Séan Allen notes that while some of the unification comedies have been decried for promoting an uncritical view on the GDR’s past, the contribution to the ‘normalization’ of German-German relations in the popular imagination should not be underestimated.212

Taylor, Ronald: Berlin and Its Culture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 349. Mazierska; Rascaroli, From Moscow to Madrid, Postmodern Cities, p. 119. 208 Ibid., p. 116. 209 Cf. Hake, German National Cinema, p. 191. 210 Palfreyman, Rachel: ‘The Fourth Generation’. In: Clarke, David (ed.): German Cinema since Unification, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 41. 211 Cf. Allen, Séan: ‘Ostalgie, Fantasy and the Normalization of East-West Relations in Post-unification Comedy’. In: Clarke, David (ed.): German Cinema since Unification, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 106. 212 Ibid.,106. 206 207

44

City Limits

After the collapse of the GDR, the DEFA was privatized after having enjoyed monopoly status as East Germany’s only film production and distribution company for forty-seven years. The new owners of the company had no intention of preserving the DEFA heritage and most of their employees were made redundant. Many directors and scriptwriters took early retirement or started to work for television. Furthermore, the market for East German films in the old federal states was rather small. Already before the unification, West German audiences showed little enthusiasm for films made in the GDR and the new situation did not give rise to a sudden interest in films made by East German directors. Many of the films shot shortly after the fall of the Wall by East German directors accuse the GDR and its omniscient surveillance by the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheit, that is the State Security Service), painting a grim picture of the old regime.213 The unification of Germany in 1990 generated a new interest in Berlin. The first film produced by an East German director which appealed to spectators from both parts of the country was Leander Haußmann’s comedy Sun Alley [Sonnenallee] (1999). Set in East Berlin, Sun Alley is widely considered having generated a wave of Ostalgie [‘nostalgia for East Germany’ – literally ‘eastalgia’].214 Konrad H. Jarausch defines Ostalgie as magnifying the GDR’s achievements, while at the same time forgetting about the regime’s repressions.215 Ostalgie is also expressed through the revival of East German brands, as well as websites devoted to GDR memorabilia, Honecker, Trabis and the GDR’s national anthem.216 Some East Berlin nightclubs even specialized in GDR hits with staff dressed up as party officials and border guards.217 Furthermore, Ostalgie-shows on television gained immense popularity.218 In the years after the unification, many aspects of the GDR ranging from schooling to culture and mass communication had been demonized and dismissed as corrupt. Many institutions were taken over by the West, and East Germans saw their streets renamed and their welfare system disappear so that many felt treated as second-class citizens.219 In this context, Allen explains the reason for ostalgic tendencies within German popular culture with the need for former GDR citizens ‘to preserve the sense of a cultural identity that is

Berghahn, Daniel: ‘East German Cinema after Unification’. In: Clarke, David (ed.): German Cinema since Unification, London: Continuum, 2006, pp. 79–84. 214 Cf. Zeigengeist, Juliane: ‘DDR-(N)Ostalgie in deutschen Nachwende-Spielfilmen von 1990–2006. Zwischen Kritik und Kult’. In: Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte, vol. 13, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011, pp. 130. 215 Jarausch, Konrad, H.: ‘Reshaping German Identities: Reflections on the Post-Unification Debate’. In: Jarausch, Konrad, H. After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities, Profidnece and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997, p. 19. 216 Berghahn, ‘East German Cinema after Unification’, p. 95. 217 Naughton, Leonie: That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification and the ‘New’ Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, p. 20. 218 Thez, Nicole: ‘Adolescence in the “Ostalgie” Generation. Reading Jakob Hein’s Mein erste T-Shirt against Sonnenallee, Zonenkinder, and Good Bye, Lenin!’ In: Oxford German Studis, vol. 37, no. 1, 2008, p. 109. 219 Rinke, Andrea: ‘Sonnenalle – “Ostalgie” as a Comical Conspiracy’, 2006, http://www.gfl-journal. de/1-2006/rinke.html, accessed 20 April 2021, p. 4. 213

Historical and Cultural Background

45

both distinct from that of their West German counterparts, and which reflects the experiences that are unique to their historical and political past’.220 Haußmann’s Sun Alley was followed by other feel-good movies about the GDR set in Berlin, which among others include Sebastian Peterson’s Heros Like Us [Helden wie wir] (1999) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) by Wolfgang Becker. A great number of films on Berlin shot after the fall of the Wall concentrate on contemporary Berlin. As examples could be quoted Life Is a Building Site [Das Leben ist eine Baustelle] (1997) by Wolfgang Becker, Lola Run! [Lola rennt] (1998) by Tom Tykwer and Night Shapes [Nachtgestalten] (1999) by Andreas Dresen. These films render Berlin’s reality of the 1990s by focussing on change, construction and destruction, which goes in hand with the rebuilding of the city. Mazierska and Rascoli observe not only was the Wall demolished but countless buildings were destroyed and many new ones constructed so that Berlin ‘changed more than any other post-communist city with the exception of Yugoslavian towns’.221 This situation provided the background for numerous films on unified Berlin, which at the time looked like an enormous building site.

Allen, ‘Ostalgie, Fantasy and the Normalization of East-West Relations in Post-Unification Comedy’, p. 126. 221 Mazierska; Rascaroli: From Moscow to Madrid, Postmodern Cities, p. 126. 220

46

2

Urban space and territoriality

In the following selection of films, Belfast’s, Beirut’s and Berlin’s city space plays a salient role. The action of the films is led by the respective urban divisions. Even if the functioning of each place is entirely different, the various internal borders and barriers shape its individual physical structure and exercise an influence on its society. Whereas in Berlin and Beirut the internal urban borders are clearly demarcated into east and west, Belfast’s territoriality is more complex. Even if most of Belfast’s Catholic citizens live in the western part of the city and the members of the Protestant community in the east, the urban space is less clearly divided than in the case of the two capitals, as Belfast’s north represents a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant areas, and the South is largely ethno-religiously mixed.1 In the films occurring in this chapter, the characters’ movements are led by the internal limits of the respective cities. In a number of films, the overcoming of the different urban limits and borders plays an important part. The boundaries restricting the characters’ freedom of movement can be of physical or psychological nature. Whereas walls, barricades or demarcation lines present physical obstacles, the mental representations of the hostile ground in the other part of the city frequently prevent characters from crossing over into the territory of the enemy. Based on the assumption that an urban complex is a binary construct composed of its physical structure and its social reality, both elements will be given equal importance in our analysis. In this context, a certain number of aspects have to be taken into consideration. First and foremost, the question arises to what extent the physical structure of the city and the urban population influence the creation of a certain Word City. Concerning the physical structure of a city, the setting of a film plays a crucial role. Frequently, the area in which the action takes place bears a symbolic, historical or political meaning. Appleyard points out that an environment turns into a symbol when it is ‘perceived as a representation of someone or some social group’.2 This applies in particular to cities marked by political division. If characters live, for example, on the West Belfast Shankill road, the audience familiar with the local sectarian geography will immediately understand that they are most likely to be working class and Protestant. Characters with their dwelling place in West Beirut’s Hamra area, on the contrary, are Cf. ‘Visualising the Conflict’. Appleyard, Donald: ‘The Environment as a Social Symbol’. In: American Planning Association Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 1979, p. 144.

1 2

48

City Limits

in all probability members of the Muslim community. Apart from the socio-political signification of particular parts of a city, certain buildings might generate specific associations. In films and novels focussing on Northern Ireland, for example, Belfast’s Victorian city hall is frequently presented as a symbol of British imperialism.

‘A maze to get lost in’3: Belfast’s fragmented cityscape in Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man In the following, we shall concentrate on the representation of Belfast’s spatiality in Thaddeaus O’Sullivan’s Nothing Personal (1995) and Marc Evans’ Resurrection Man (1998). Both films belong to one of the most popular sub-genres of films dealing with the Northern Irish conflict, the so-called Troubles thriller.4 The screenplay of Nothing Personal was written by Belfast author Daniel Mornin, who took his own novel All Our Fault5 as a basis. Even if Nothing Personal was released in 1995, that is one year after the ceasefire, it follows the scheme of a traditional Troubles thriller, probably because Mornin’s novel was published in 1991. Furthermore, the writing of the script and the production of the thriller had certainly already started before the ceasefire declaration so that the film’s action was not yet inspired by the new optimistic atmosphere reigning in Belfast after 1994. Nothing Personal is a co-production of Channel Four Films, British Screen and the Irish Film Board.6 The screenplay of Resurrection Man was written by the Irish author Eoin McNamee and is based on McNamee’s eponymous novel published in 19947 and inspired by Martin Dillon’s case study The Shankill Butchers.8 In the same way as Nothing Personal, Resurrection Man follows the scheme of a typical Northern Irish thriller, even if it appeared in the cinemas after 1994. The reason for its traditional form is most likely due to the fact that the novel on which the film is based was written before the ceasefire declaration. According to Ruth Barton, Resurrection Man was a ‘critical and commercial failure’.9 The film came under severe criticism due to its almost voyeuristic depiction of loyalist violence and was dismissed as ‘a nauseating exercise’ and ‘an outpouring of anti-Unionist hatred’.10 McNamee, however, defends his cinematographic choices by stating that he did not intend to explore politics:

Petit, Chris: The Psalm Killer, London: Macmillan, 1996, p. 65. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State, p. 11. 5 Mornin, Daniel: All Our Fault, London: Arrow Books, 1996. 6 Mulvenna, Gareth: In the Shadow of the Butchers. Loyalist Paramilitaries on Film. 28 October 2015.https://balaclavastreet.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/in-the-shadow-of-the-butchers-loyalistparamilitaries-on-film/, accessed 20 April 2020. 7 McNamee, Eoin: Resurrection Man, New York: Picador, 1994. 8 Dillon, Martin: The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder, London: Arrow Books, 1990. 9 Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 163. 10 Tookey, Christopher: Daily Mail. 30 January 1998, p. 44. 3 4

Urban Space and Territoriality

49

I want people to engage with the character of Victor Kelly […]. I expect them to be moved and to be able to empathise with the characters. I don’t want them to feel they are going to a worthy movie about a political situation, because that’s not what it is. […] It’s about men and violence.11

Interestingly, Resurrection Man was considered as ‘irresponsible’ by both political camps in Northern Ireland.12 The playwright Gary Mitchell criticizes the ‘ugly’ depiction of the Protestant community.13 While Steve Baker claims that Resurrection Man renders a ‘loyalist self-image of vampirism’,14 Ruth Barton sees the film as ‘shot in the style of a Tarantino-influenced post-modern gangster blood bath’.15 In the same way as Resurrection Man, Nothing Personal takes place in the mid1970s and echoes the violent deeds of the Shankill Butchers, ‘one of the worst chapters in Belfast’s bloody history’.16 In contrast to the majority of the Troubles thrillers, both films do not concentrate on the IRA. Set in the 1970s, they belong to the rare cinematographic representations of Northern Ireland focussing on the milieu of loyalist paramilitaries.17 The Shankill Butchers were an eleven men strong splinter group of the UVF, which terrorized the East Belfast’s Shankill area between 1975 and 1985. Its members were convicted of nineteen killings as well as countless attempts of murder, kidnappings and bombings. The gang was described as showing ‘the subhuman depths some people were prepared to plumb in pursuit of political and religious domination’.18 The driving force of the Shankill Butchers was Hugh Leonard Thompson Murphy, called Lennie Murphy.19 Most of the gang’s victims were innocent Catholic civilians, who were first tortured and then brutally killed. The atrocious torture methods involved stabbing, defacement and decapitation and were intended to cause continued terror in the civilian community of Catholics. The Shankill Butchers received more than forty-two life and prison sentences, amounting to 2,000 years.20 They justified their deeds with the argument that every Northern Irish Catholic supported the IRA and

McNamee, Eoin: Resurrection Man, Production notes. Dublin: Irish Film Institut Library, 1998, p. 14. 12 Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 206. 13 Cf. Mitchell, Gary: ‘Read White and Very Blue’. In: Irish Times, 27 March 1998, p. 13. 14 Baker, Steven: ‘Vampire Troubles. Loyalism and Resurrection Man’. In: Barthon, Ruth; O’Brian, Harvey (eds.): Keeping It Real: Themes and Issues in Irish Film and Television, New York: Wallflower Press, pp. 78–86. 15 Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 163. 16 Jordan, Milestones in Murder, p. 192. 17 Cécile Bazin attracts attention to the fact that among twenty-three films shot and released between 1975 and 2005, only one more film apart from Nothing Personal focus on the Loyalist milieu, which is as well as As the Beast Sleeps (2001) by Harry Bradbeer, cf. Bazin, Cécile. ‘Images of the Protestants in Northern Ireland: A Cinematic Deficit or an Exclusive Image of Psychopaths?’ In: Media. Cinema and Marketing, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 2–12, p. 2. 18 Jordan, Milestones in Murder, p. 188. 19 Ibid. 20 Cf. ibid., p. 192. 11

50

City Limits

therefore the entire Catholic community was seen as a ‘legitimate target’.21 The use of butcher’s knives as weapons earned the gang its name ‘Shankill Butchers’. However, its violence was not exclusively addressed at Catholics. Protestants who in the eyes of the gang were accused of ‘anti-social behaviour’ also turned into victims. Furthermore, a number of Protestants who were mistaken for Catholics were murdered accidentally.22 Nevertheless, the question arises whether the killings orchestrated or carried out by Murphy were motivated by politics. According to Steve Bruce, ‘Murphy was a murderer first and a murderer of Catholics second’.23 Eventually, Murphy was killed by the IRA, which managed to track him down on the ground of information given by the loyalist paramilitaries.24 Martin Dillon notes that loyalist paramilitaries wanted Murphy to be ‘wiped out’, as he became uncontrollable and attracted too much police attention on loyalist areas of West Belfast, fearing that this would jeopardize other ‘operations’ such as racketeering.25

Belfast’s streets – an ideal spot for a thriller The Troubles thriller, that is the thriller set against the Northern Irish conflict, is one of the main subgenres of Northern Irish film. In order to comprehend the representation of Belfast’s territoriality in Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal, a short introduction to the key characteristics of the Northern Irish Troubles thriller is necessary. It is not surprising that the tense political climate has made the region a ‘thriller writer’s dream’.26 The sociologist Raymond Williams states: ‘the opaque complexity of modern city life is represented by crime.’27 This applies in particular to divided cities marked by political violence. Due to its urban space split into numerous Catholic and Protestant areas, Belfast became one of the main thriller settings. Boundary markers such as peace lines, murals, flags and kerbstone paintings literally transformed the city into an ‘adventure playground par excellence for the urban terrorist’.28 Bill Rolston notes that thrillers lend themselves to transposition into different socio-cultural contexts, as long as their distinctive features are maintained: ‘whether the hero chases the villain and gets the girl in Belfast, Beirut or Moscow is irrelevant as long as all the elements of the thriller are present’.29 In this sense, Jerry Palmer claims that the thriller is a convenient

Cf. Feldman, Allen: Formations of Violence. The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 61. 22 Cf. Jordan, Milestones in Murder, p. 188. 23 Bruce, Steve: The Red Hand. Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 176. 24 Dillon, The Shankill Butchers, p. 319. 25 Cf. ibid., p. 319. 26 Pelaschiar, Laura: Writing the North. The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland, Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998, p. 19. 27 Williams, Raymond: The Country and the City, London: Chatto and Windus, 1973, p. 227. 28 Seymour, Gerald: Harry’s Game, London: William Collins, 1975, p. 57. 29 Rolston, Bill: ‘Escaping from Belfast: Class Ideology and Literature in Northern Ireland’. In: Race and Class, vol. 31, no. 1, 1989, p. 41. 21

Urban Space and Territoriality

51

form in order to illustrate political conflict: ‘the basic apparatus of the thriller can accommodate more or less any set of political beliefs, precisely because they constitute only a superficial layer.’30 As its political situation provides the essential ingredients for a thriller action, Belfast is almost naturally chosen by writers and filmmakers as a convenient setting for their works. Hinting at James Bond, Alan Titley argues that the region has even managed to replace the Soviet Union as an important thriller location: ‘since the melting away of the worst icicles of the cold war – Northern Ireland has come as a boon to the thriller writer’.31 Usually based on novels, most of the Troubles thrillers adopt a realistic, almost documentary format. Due to the city’s numerous internal borders, Belfast’s geography favours an action based on tension and excitement. The majority of the Troubles thrillers produced during the 1970s, 1980s and even at the beginning of the1990s paint a pessimistic picture of Belfast, illustrating the city as a gloomy place from which the characters have to escape in order to survive. A peaceful co-existence of Catholics and Protestants is literally impossible. According to Martin Rubin, the most salient features of the thriller genre are ‘suspense’, ‘fright’, ‘mystery’, ‘exhilaration’, ‘excitement’, ‘speed’ and ‘movement’.32 Theses elements are also central to traditional Troubles thrillers, where bomb explosions, shootings and abductions shape the action. Clashes between the paramilitaries of both political camps, the RUC and the British army are generally also part of the plot. Frequent settings are gloomy pubs, dark backstreets, derelict factories or building sites. The different boundary markers guide the audience through Belfast’s ethno-religious territoriality. Thanks to various visual indicators, the spectator is able to understand whether the characters move through ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ territory. Aaron Kelly sees the thriller as ‘a radical form, wherein crime functions as a connective fabric through which an otherwise increasingly meaningless and shadowy society may be not only mapped, but also investigated and judged’.33 This is in particular true in the case of the Troubles thriller, in which criminal actions committed by the paramilitary organizations explore the functioning of Belfast’s underworld. Gerry Smyth and Bill Rolston singled out a number of stereotypical Troubles thriller heroes which can be found in Northern Irish prose. The same stereotypes also feature in Troubles films which take on the form of the thriller. Smyth categorizes the main characters as ‘the terrorist godfather’, ‘the conscientious gunman’, ‘the reluctant agent’, as well as the ‘femme fatale’.34 Bill Rolston extends Smyth’s list by adding a further stereotype. Similar to Smith, he refers to the ‘godfather’ as a main agent of terrorism. He describes him as a ‘well-known cypher of mainstream media accounts of

Palmer, Jerry: Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre, London: Edward Arnold, 1978, p. 67. 31 Titley, Alan: ‘Rough Rug-Headed Kerns: The Irish Gunman in the Popular Novel’. In: Éire-Ireland, vol. 15, no. 4, 1980, p. 25. 32 Rubin, Martin: Thrillers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 5. 33 Kelly, Aaron: The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969. Utterly Resigned Terror, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 90–1. 34 Smith, Gerry: The Novel and the Nation, Belfast: Pluto Press, 1997, p. 114. 30

52

City Limits

the Troubles’.35 As a violent commander, the ‘godfather’ merely orders killings without being directly involved in them. This character is commonly represented as misogynist with repressed homosexual tendencies. Another male character mentioned by Rolston is ‘the villain’, an apolitical individual, seeking power as an end to itself. Rolston portrays the villain as ‘a loner who acts out of personal need or psychological inadequacy’.36 Unable to be a leader himself, he is entirely submitted to the ‘terrorist godfather’. In his extreme form, the villain is represented as an unpredictable psychopath. Different from the godfather’s repressed sexual tendencies, the villain’s sexual urges are violent and hedonistic.37 Among the female stereotypes Rolston names ‘mothers’, ‘seducers’ and ‘villains’. Whereas the mother’s role is to protect her children from violence,38 the ‘seducer’ incites male characters to commit crime.39 The ‘villain’, on the contrary, embraces violence with a greater passion than men. However, female ‘villains’ are often represented as ‘second class terrorist’ as they are prone to self-doubt and tears.40 A rather one-sided depiction of the Northern Irish conflict is also characteristic of typical Troubles thrillers. This means that the action is either entirely located in the framework of the Protestant or Catholic community and does not combine views from both sides. Set in Belfast, Nothing Personal was actually shot in Dublin’s Ringsend area.41 Ruth Barton argues that the fact that the film was made in a stand-in location ‘detracts from its claim to realism’.42 Even if some of the city’s most famous landmarks, such as peace lines and the construction cranes of the Harland and Wolff ship yard, do not appear, a very Belfast-specific atmosphere is created through kerbstone paintings, murals, as well as the small alleyways and backstreets, typical of the city’s working-class areas. The title of the film is a reference to a phrase frequently used by the Shankill Butchers before shooting innocent Catholics. Telling their victims: ‘Nothing personal’, they intended to communicate that the killing was not based on personal animosities but merely on their belonging to the opposite community. The simple fact of being Catholics made them to ‘legitimate targets’ for the butcher gang. Choosing this particular title for his film, O’Sullivan clearly locates Nothing Personal in the milieu of Belfast’s loyalist paramilitaries. The thriller’s protagonists are Liam (John Lynch), a single father of two, and Kenney (James Frain), a loyalist paramilitary boss. Whereas the main roles are played by renowned actors, such as Frain and Lynch, the minor characters are impersonated by local actors without an international reputation. The film begins with a bomb explosion in a Protestant pub orchestrated by the IRA. In the opening scene, Liam walks through the remains, helping soldiers to pull injured people and dead bodies Rolston, Bill: ‘Mothers, Whores and Villains: Images of Women in Novels of the Northern Ireland Conflict’. In: Race & Class, vol. 31, no 1, 1989, p. 42. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 44. 39 Ibid., p. 47. 40 Ibid., p. 51. 41 Cf. McLoone, Irish Film, p. 91. 42 Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 165. 35

Urban Space and Territoriality

53

from beneath the rubble. The plot of the film focuses on the UVF’s retaliation for the attack and the internal developments inside the organization. The opening credits reading ‘Belfast 1975’43 are intended to give Nothing Personal a realistic tone. In this way, the audience is confronted with the image of Belfast as a violent city already at the beginning of the film. As in most traditional Troubles thrillers, violence is explicitly depicted throughout the film and reflects the brutality of the clashes between the two communities. Concerning the physical appearance of the city, a substantial number of stereotypical Troubles thriller elements can be found in Nothing Personal. The most important urban feature appearing in O’Sullivan’s film is Belfast’s ethno-religious segregation. The city is divided into a myriad of Catholic and Protestant areas, whose boundaries are clearly designated by the above-mentioned boundary markers. Furthermore, Belfast’s different territories are controlled by paramilitaries from both sides. The main action takes place at night in gloomy locations such as dark streets of working-class Belfast, backrooms of loyalist pubs, deserted factories and a dilapidated gasometer. The urban space becomes the scene of cruel events, including beatings, riots and abductions. The main plot is set during a night of rioting and fighting. Whereas in All Our Fault, the novel on which Nothing Personal is based, a nocturnal ambiance is generated through frequent allusions to the moon and its gloomy light, in the film, an oppressive dark atmosphere is generated through a low-key lighting in which most of the scenes are shot. Veiled in fog, the cityscape appears lugubrious and uninviting. The few sources of light, which illuminate the nocturnal scenery, are pub windows, searchlights falling from British army helicopters or street fire caused by riots. The urban space is populated with loyalist paramilitaries lurking outside nationalist pubs in order to surprise their innocent victims. Their republican counterparts, on the contrary, are waiting for the right moment to retaliate, while the British army tries to re-establish order. This thrilling urban scenario creates an atmosphere of danger, which attributes a menacing tone to the film. O’Sullivan claims that in Nothing Personal, he intends to depict Belfast as a city shaped by working-class ghettos in which Protestant and Catholic adjoin each other. Following the aim to render the claustrophobic atmosphere of enclosed communities, the director leaves the streets of the city intentionally empty in order to make them ‘perform in a dramatic way’.44 He explains: ‘Everything is cleared off the streets and they’re lit and presented in a way that is really more theatrical than naturalistic.’45 McLoone praises Nothing Personal as ‘atmospheric cinematography’46 due to O’Sullivan’s unconventional play with light. Through his choice of lighting, the city is represented as a dangerous place with no mercy for its inhabitants. In this sense, the depiction of what Lefebvre calls the city’s ‘practico-material reality’47 perfectly conforms to the conventions of the Troubles thriller. Nothing Personal. Thaddeaus O’Sullivan. 1995. (00:00:54-00:00:56). O’Sullivan, Thaddeus: ‘Fanatic Heart’. In: Film West, 7 July 1995, p. 16. 45 Ibid. 46 McLoone, Irish Film, p. 198. 47 Lefebvre, ‘The Right to the City’, p. 103. 43 44

54

City Limits

Resurrection Man is likewise shot in a low lighting style. The director followed the aim of imitating the light of American film noir. Evans notes: ‘We decided to make a black and white film in colour exploiting the tone of 40s and 50s thriller without resorting to pastiche.’48 Pierre Aim, the director of photography, further explains that ‘sharp light’ was used in the film in order to generate contrast and shadow.49 The action of the film unfolds around Victor Kelly (Stuart Townsend), who is modelled on Lennie Murphy, the boss of the Shankill Butchers. Resurrection Man was not filmed in Ireland but in three English cities: Manchester, Liverpool and Warrington.50 While Victor commits increasingly cruel and sadistic killings, he is shadowed by the journalist Ryan (James Nesbitt) for whom getting the story about the Shankill Butchers would represent a career move. The opening credits, which appear on the screen ‘as if shot out of a typewriter’,51 communicate a frightening picture of Belfast. They read as follows: ‘January 1975. The streets are in turmoil. Murder is commonplace in a divided city where gangsters draw boundaries in blood.’52 Throughout the film, the atmosphere of danger is heightened through dark music. As in Nothing Personal, the city is illustrated as a miserable place with most of the action taking place at night. In the scenes shot at daytime, the sky is generally grey and it is raining. The bad weather is one of the salient features of the Belfast represented in Troubles thrillers. Edna Longley notes that when a British production crew came to film an adaptation of Gerald Seymour’s novel Harry’s Game, the shooting had to be suspended because the sun was shining. Only when the rain started to fall after two weeks of interruption, the desired gloomy Belfast atmosphere could be captured.53 In Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man, the sound of army helicopters hovering over the cityscape attributes a threatening tone to the goings-on in the streets. Murals and acronyms feature on the walls and mark out Protestant and Catholic territories. Similar to Nothing Personal, the action in Resurrection Man is set in working-class Belfast. Most of the scenes unfold in the Shankill area, the Protestant enclave in Catholic West Belfast. The dark bars and derelict parking lots, where cruel torture and murder scenes are staged, correspond to typical Troubles thriller settings. However, McNamee adds to his scenario the unusual location of a bathhouse located on Tomb Street in the centre of the city. In this place, a particularly bloody scene happens in which Victor brutally mutilates Darkie Larche (John Hannah), his former boss. In contrast to Nothing Personal, Resurrection Man focuses less on the division of urban space as the action is mostly set on Protestant territory. In this sense, it could be argued that the narrative space of the film depicts a ‘microcosm’54 of the city. Ruth Barton states that in both films, Belfast is represented as a ‘post-industrial space’, in

McNamee, Resurrection Man. Production Notes, p. 14. Cf. ibid., p. 13. 50 Cf. Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 198. 51 Ibid., 163. 52 Resurrection Man. Marc Evans. 1998. (00:00:46-00:00:57). 53 Cf. Longley, Edna: The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism, Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994, p. 88. 54 Hoffman, Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit, p. 418. 48 49

Urban Space and Territoriality

55

which the extortion of protection money has ‘supplanted other industries to produce a new economy’.55 She further points out that the violence in Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal is ‘(il)llegal’ with the State remaining entirely absent.56 In this way, Belfast’s urban space turns into a breeding ground for crime and violence.

‘Mental maps’ and the Belfast flâneur In Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man, the concept of ‘mental maps’ plays an important role. The term was coined by the sociologist Kevin Lynch in his groundbreaking study The Image of the City. Lynch draws attention to the importance of cognitive geography in the interpretation of urban space. He argues that citizens have personal ‘mental images’ of their city, which are ‘soaked in memories and meanings’.57 A ‘mental map’ is created in the observer’s mind through the subconscious selection of various aspects of the city, which for him or her bear personal significations. Lynch underlines the importance of ‘mental maps’ in the process of ‘way fining’ and notes that the ‘environmental image’ held by an individual is ‘used to interpret information and to guide action’.58 Liam Kennedy further explains the concept of ‘mental maps’ as follows: ‘Places are charged with emotional and mythical meanings; localised stories, images and memories associated with place can provide meaningful cultural and historical bearings for urban individuals and communities.’59 This applies in particular to the inhabitants of Belfast, who interpret their personal urban environment according to the existing boundary markers. The sociologist Mark Gottdiener explains that ‘meaning in the city is multicoded’60 as each social group ‘possesses its own conception of urban space’.61 This is specifically the case of Belfast, where territories are categorized along sectarian lines. Richard Burton underlines that every detail of the city has a multitude of connotations: ‘even the most trivial phenomenon is replete with meaning, and if “read” correctly and linked to other perhaps widely disparate phenomena, will disclose a universe of significance.’62 In this context, kerbstone paintings can be quoted as a specific detail of Belfast’s urban space. While the external observer might merely recognize the colours of the Union Jack and the Irish Tricolor, for the inhabitants of the city, the colours of the two flags signify concrete ethno-religious borders. Gottdiener and Lagolopoulos

Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 163. Ibid., p. 163. 57 Lynch, Kevin: The Image of the City, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960, p. 1–2. 58 Ibid., p. 4. 59 Kennedy, Liam: Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003, p. 7. 60 Gottdiener, Mark: ‘Culture, Ideology, and the Sign of the City’. In: Gottdiener, Mark; and Lagopoulos, Alexandros (eds.): The City and the Sign. An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 206. 61 Ibid. 62 Burton, Richard: The Flâneur and His City. Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 1815-1851, Durham: University of Durham, 1994, p. 1. 55 56

56

City Limits

note that the perception of a certain area is based on the socio-cultural background of the observer: ‘The cognitive map is so much a product of a social interaction that even individuals living near each other in the very same neighbourhood will hold different conceptions of their area as a product of separate social networks.’63 In Belfast, this is in particular true for citizens living at the interface where Catholic and Protestant adjoin each other. Even if they live only a few meters apart from each other, their representation of the territory belonging to the opposite community might be entirely different and represent a black spot on their mental geography. ‘Mental maps’ are salient for people living in Northern Ireland. Anthony Stewart highlights the importance of local knowledge, claiming ‘the Ulsterman carries the map of his religious geography in his mind almost from birth’.64 The characters represented in Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man are guided through the city’s urban maze with the help of their individual psychological map. They have to be able to decode the city’s sectarian geography in order to survive. This perfectly corresponds to the Northern Ireland Seamus Heaney has called ‘the land of password, handgrip, wink and nod’,65 that means a place in which verbal and non-verbal interaction relies on implicit signs and signals as nothing is communicated explicitly. In Nothing Personal, the representation of Belfast’s city space is confined to a few obscure backstreets, which turn into dead-ends due to barricades erected by the warring factions. As soon as the characters do not follow their personal sectarian ‘mental map’, they expose themselves to danger. Lost on hostile territory or trapped in dead-ends, they are prone to be picked up by paramilitaries and dragged into pubs to be tortured and killed. The characters are led through Belfast’s ethno-religious territoriality on the basis of their personal knowledge, experience or history. Nevertheless, the protagonist Liam loses the grip of his cognitive geography in the aftermath of a riot. Having gone out to man the barricades on the nationalist side, he accidentally enters a Protestant area, where he is badly beaten up by a loyalist gang. However, he manages to get back to his feet and tries to find his way home. Disorientated by the darkness and the pain of his injuries, he penetrates deeper and deeper into hostile ground. As he is unable to pattern and recognize his surroundings, he loses his habitual frame of reference and fails to interpret the ethno-religious semiotics of his environment. Thus, the city seems to turn into an impenetrable maze for the protagonist. Acoustically, the danger of the situation becomes underlined through thrilling music as well as the constant sound of British army helicopters. Stumbling through Protestant territory, Liam is taken in by Ann (Maria Doyle-Kennedy), Kenny’s former wife, who cleans his wounds. Both characters share their feelings about marriage, children and relationships in a politically troubled environment.

Gottdiener, Mark; Lagolopoulos, Alexandros: ‘Introduction’. In: Gottdiener, Mark; Lagopoulos, Alexandros (eds.): The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 11. 64 Stewart, Anthony; Terrence, Quincey: The Narrow Ground. Aspects of Ulster 1609–1969, Newtownards: The Black Staff Press, 1977, p. 180. 65 Heaney, Seamus: North, London, 1975, p. 55. 63

Urban Space and Territoriality

57

Figure 9  Ann and Liam having a conversation, Nothing Personal.

While Liam is wandering through Belfast’s streets, his children left at home start worrying about him. His daughter Kathleen (Jane Courtney), accompanied by her friend Michael (Gareth O’Hare), looks for him in the city’s pubs. As children, they do not have the same sectarian ‘mental map’ of their urban environment as their parents. Therefore, they do not hesitate to cross Protestant and Catholic territories in the search of Liam. At the same time, the fact of being children protects them from becoming targets of violence for the opposite camp. In Resurrection Man, the concept of cognitive geography plays an equally important role. The protagonist possesses a precise ‘mental map’ of Belfast’s different areas. In a number of scenes, Victor crosses nocturnal Belfast with other gang members as they drive through Belfast looking for potential victims. From the backseat of his car, Victors gives the driver directions, quoting the names of the streets with closed eyes. Surprised by Victor’s knowledge of the city, he exclaims: ‘Did you swallow a map of these places?’66 Victor’s nightly movements through the city remind us of the Baudelairian flâneur67 strolling through Paris. In nineteenth-century literature, the character of the flâneur as an ‘urban wanderer’ and observer functions as the main focalizer. Perceived through the eyes of the flâneur, the city receives an individual perspective. Similar to Baudelaire’s flâneur, Victor watches his urban environment. The fact that he crosses Belfast’s city space in his car and not on foot creates a distance between himself and the inhabitants of the different areas. Thus, he observes his environment from the shelter of his vehicle. Richard Burton defines the flâneur as an observer who ‘stands apart from the city’ but at the same time ‘appears to “fuse” with it’.68 Victor melds with the city once he leaves his car and starts committing crimes. Due to the terror his deeds

Resurrection Man (00:14:56-00.14.57). Benjamin, Walter: Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Zorn, Harry (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1973, p. 41. 68 Burton, The Flâneur and His City, p. 2. 66 67

58

City Limits

generate among the local population, he manages to exercise power over whole parts of the city. According to Burton, the flâneur interprets each of the city’s components in isolation in order to reach an ‘intellectual understanding’ of it in form of ‘a whole complex system of meaning’.69 In this sense, Victor could be seen as ‘a reader of urban life’,70 who associates in his mind a specific meaning with the different areas of the city. On the protagonist’s ‘mental map’, the parts of Belfast are marked out as Catholic and Protestant territories. In this context, Charles Armstrong states that Victor functions as ‘an inverted, criminal Sherlock Holmes’.71 Whereas Holmes’ ‘crime-solving exploits’ are linked with an ‘uncanny knowledge of, and familiarity with, the myriad diversity of London’s Victorian geography’,72 Victor’s hunt for new victims is based on his detailed knowledge of Belfast. Due to their violent connotations, a number of areas become allegories for crime. Thus, certain place names turn into ‘things apart from the places they were intended to define’.73 Another link between the protagonist of Resurrection Man and the Baudelarian flâneur is the observation of crime. Walter Benjamin notes: ‘No matter what trail the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime.’74 This statement echoes the fact that the aim of Victor’s night-time wanderings through Belfast is to commit new murders. The protagonist’s awareness of the city’s functioning mirrors not only his psychological state but also his power over Belfast. While at the beginning of the film Victor is capable of locating himself in Belfast’s urban space with closed eyes, towards the end, he loses grip of the city’s ethno-religious geography. The directions he gives to his friend who is driving the car become more and more unreliable and repeatedly lead into dead ends. Apart from that, they do not help any more to track down potential victims. In this way, the city’s real geography and the protagonist’s psychological map start contradicting each other. Through increasing drug taking, Victor’s mind becomes blurred. The protagonist’s declining control of the city’s geography embodies his fading power over Belfast. Victor’s weakening authority foreshadows the final scene of the film, in which he is shot dead by the IRA. Not only ‘mental maps’ but also physical maps play an important role in Resurrection Man. A Belfast map pinned to the wall in the journalist Ryan’s office occurs several times throughout the film. It is visible in the background when Ryan interviews Miss Kelly – Victor’s mother – as well as Heather – the protagonist’s former girl-friend. On the map, places in which crimes have been committed are marked by red pins. The latter are connected with a thread to newspaper cuttings reporting on the different Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. 71 Armstrong, Charles: ‘Violent Measures. Representation, Regulation and the Shankill Butchers’. In: Hülk, Walburga; Schwerter, Stephanie (eds.): Mauern, Grenzen, Zonen. Geteilte Städte in Literatur und Film, Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2018, p. 70. 72 Ibid. 73 Certeau De, Michel: ‘Walking in the City’. In: Ward, Graham (ed.): The Certeau Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000, p. 15. 74 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 41. 69 70

Urban Space and Territoriality

59

Figure 10  Map in Ryan’s office, Resurrection Man.

crimes. This map can be seen as the expression of the ‘polysemous fabric’75 of Belfast’s urban space through criminal deeds, as particular places receive specific connotations, which go beyond their geographical meaning. According to Baudrillard, visual signs such as pictures and maps finally replace reality: ‘The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. […] it is the map that engenders the territory.’76 In this sense, it could be argued that the crimes committed do not only shape Victor’s ‘mental map’ of Belfast, but also determine the physical map of the city. In a central scene, Ryan contemplates the map on his office wall, while the camera zooms into it. After a few seconds, the image of the map blends into an establishing shot of Belfast at dawn. While the camera focuses on different parts of the city in twilight, a mysterious sounding off-screen voice enumerates the following Catholic areas: ‘Ballymurphy, Andytown, the Falls, Ardoyne, Short Strand’.77 The background noise of gunshots underlines that the quoted areas have been the scenes of crimes. Thus, the map in Ryan’s office becomes linked to Victor’s ‘mental map’ of the city and on both maps – on the physical and the psychological one – places become to represent sectarian killings.

Paramilitary control over Belfast Against the background of nocturnal Belfast, the action of Nothing Personal unfolds in a complex set of plots und subplots, which demonstrates the impact of political Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature, p. IX. Baudrillard, Jean: ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. In: Poster, Mark (ed.): Jean Baudrillard. Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988, p. 166. 77 Resurrection Man (00:26:29-00:26:45). 75 76

60

City Limits

violence across three generations of interrelated characters. In the illustration of the city’s population, the film focuses on loyalist paramilitaries. Brian McIlroy points out that O’Sullivan’s thriller works on the following four different levels of discourse: a) the interactions of the IRA and the UVF leadership b) the internal quarrels of UVF members c) the view of non-combatants, who unwillingly become drawn into the conflict d) the impact of sectarian violence of children78 Paramilitary infighting and clashes between the opposite camps are the conventional ingredients for the Troubles thriller. The depiction of the impact of political violence on civilians is also a recurrent theme in thrillers concentrating on the Northern Irish conflict. A focus on the life of children, however, is rather an exception. Among the stereotypical male heroes featuring in Nothing Personal count violent commanders, gunmen and psychopaths – who kill for the sake of fun – as well as members of the British Army. Traditional female individuals occurring in the film are women in the role of mothers or seducers. In Nothing Personal, the character of the young Protestant woman Ann particularly conforms to the stereotype of the ‘caring mother’. In their article ‘Images of Women in Northern Ireland’, Marie-Thérèse McGivern and Margaret Ward criticize the common conception and representation of Northern Irish women as ‘passive victims of the Troubles, viragoes of the barricades’ and ‘advocates of messianic peace’.79 This very image frequently occurs in Troubles film. In Nothing Personal, Ann is not only a single mother of two small children, but has also worked as a nurse in the local hospital. In this way, her profession enhances the stereotype of women acting as mothers and caretakers, who are at the same time innocent victims of violence. In the scene taking place in Ann’s house, the protagonist and the young woman – two individuals from opposite sides of the city – are visibly attracted to each other. However, they are aware of the fact that they belong to antagonistic ethno-religious camps. The encounter of the two characters suggests the beginning of a love story crossing the sectarian divide. The so-called love-across-the-barricades theme80 is a typical feature of Troubles film and fiction. Conventionally, a Catholic and a Protestant character try to overcome ethnoreligious boundaries in order to get together. Theses boundaries can be materialized in form of barricades, closing Catholic and Protestant areas off from each other, or in form of mental barriers, meaning a strong allegiance to one of the two communities.81 In Northern Irish film and fiction, such a relationship usually fails not only due to McIlroy, Shooting to Kill, p. 147. McGivern, Marie-Thérèse; Ward, Margaret: ‘Images of Women in Northern Ireland’. In: Crane Bag, vol. 4, no.1, 1980, p. 67. 80 The term ‘love-across-the-barricades story’ derives from Joan Lingard’s novel Across the Barricades (London: Puffin, 1973), which is addressed to young people in order to explain the impact on political violence on people’s private life in Belfast during the Troubles. In the novel, the two young protagonists are separated from each other through multiple physical and psychological boundaries. 81 Cf. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State, pp. 110–19. 78 79

Urban Space and Territoriality

61

physical intimidation by members of both communities but also because of the psychological pressure exercised by the two sides on the lovers. Even if in Nothing Personal a ‘love-across-the barricades story’ is suggested, it finally does not happen. Liam leaves Ann’s house to continue his way home, knowing that a love affair with a Protestant woman would be too dangerous for himself and his family. The scene implies the impossibility of relationships crossing the ethno-religious divide, which bring characters from antagonistic parts of the city together. This pessimistic message goes hand in hand with the overall gloomy atmosphere of the film. Ann and Liam’s encounter illustrates the influence of political violence on the life of civilians who are not involved in sectarian fighting and whose private sphere becomes invaded by the conflict against their will. In Resurrection Man, Belfast’s social reality is also illustrated through a number of stereotypical thriller characters. The stereotype of the mother can be found in the character of Dorcas Kelly (Brenda Fricker). Ruth Barton describes Victor’s mother as ‘the archetype doting mother who can see no wrong in her son’.82 Even if Victor’s crimes are known about in the whole of Belfast, she keeps protecting her son. In an interview with the journalist Ryan, she states: Although I have little tolerance of the Roman persuasion, Victor never learnt bigotry at this knee. It’s my firm belief that all he really wanted was to be a mature and responsible member of society, loyal to the Crown and devoted to his mother. He suffered from incomprehension. He was in pain because of life. His father James was no help in this regard. He was backward and shy.83

Her allusion to the weakness of her husband suggests a dysfunctional family. Referring to Victor’s violent behaviour, Martin McLoone claims that ‘the only explanation offered for his almost vampiric love of Fenian blood is his “mammy’s boy” oedipal problem with his ineffectual Catholic father’.84 The strong personality of the mother becomes visible in the way she treats Victor’s girlfriend Heather. When Victor is in jail, Heather pays a visit to Mrs Kelly in order to ask her to let her use some of the weekly visiting hours. However, Dorcas Kelly, conscious of her status as a mother, rejects Heather’s query, pointing out that she has the exclusive right to visit her son. In contrast to Ann, the young mother depicted in Nothing Personal, Dorcas does not conform to the stereotype of a selfless caregiver; she is rather depicted as a possessive and egoistic type of mother. Victor himself can be seen as a combination of different stereotypes: the gunman, the paramilitary godfather and the psychopath. The protagonist is played by the English actor Stuart Townsend, generally considered to be good looking. The choice of actor has raised a certain amount of criticism among scholars and journalists. Armstrong states that ‘the leather jacket-clad gang leader looks more like a sexy rock Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 163. Resurrection Man (00:01:52-00:02:32). 84 McLoone, Irish Film, p. 82. 82 83

62

City Limits

Figure 11  Victor walking through his front garden, Resurrection Man.

star than a violent thug, and women are portrayed as being instinctively attracted to him’.85 Gareth Mulvenna even goes further arguing: ‘Stuart Townsend is too pretty to portray a man who was reputedly nicknamed “Planet of the Apes” for his resemblance to Roddy McDowell in the film of the same name.’86 The film begins with a scene in which Victor walks through his front garden in slow motion, dressed in a black coat and calmly smoking a cigarette.87 The protagonist is filmed from a low shot angle to make him appear tall and impressive. Victor’s superiority is further underlined through music expressing fright and tension. In this way, the main character is portrayed as a powerful self-assured hero. At the beginning of the action, Victor operates as a simple gunman, carrying out the orders given by the paramilitary boss Darkie. Having spotted Victor’s capacity for torture, he decides to give him more power inside the organization. For this purpose, Darkie provides Victor with a car, which he calls ‘a Bond mobile’.88 However, Victor’s influence increases when the action goes on so that he becomes more powerful than his boss and finally takes over his position as a commander. Victor does not only dethrone Darkie inside the paramilitary organization, he also seduces his girlfriend. The protagonist’s domination over his boss reaches its climax in a scene taking place in the Tomb Street bathhouse, in which he cruelly mutilates Darkie with his butcher’s knife. The film suggests that Victor’s ruthless behaviour is actually inspired by German expressionist films he watched during his childhood. At the beginning of Resurrection Man, the young Victor and his father can be observed in a cinema enjoying a violent Armstrong, ‘Violent Measures’, p. 70. Mulvenna, In the Shadow of the Butchers. 87 Resurrection Man (00:01:10-00.01.57). 88 Resurrection Man (00:13:52-00:13.54). 85 86

Urban Space and Territoriality

63

scene in which a character is mutilated. In the light of the protagonist’s juvenile passion for dark expressionist cinema, the murders he carries out as an adult seem to be staged as if they were copied from film sequences. A further stereotypical character is Heather, Victor’s girlfriend, who corresponds to the stereotype of the whore, getting involved with various paramilitary fighters. Bombshell blond with tacky outfits, she seduces a number of men throughout the film. The fact that she claims to be in love with Victor does not prevent her from having sex with Darkie and Ryan, while Victor is in jail. The journalist Ryan, however, represents an unusual character in a Northern Irish thriller. He takes on the role of a detective and thus replaces the habitual police officer, who in a conventional thriller tries to track down the criminals. As a wife-beating alcoholic and an overambitious journalist, Ryan hopes to make a career writing about the gang’s crimes. Ironically, his articles serve Victor and his men to achieve the publicity which they were striving for with their deeds. One of the key scenes of Nothing Personal depicts a meeting of the IRA and the UVF in a derelict factory situated in a non-descript part of the city. The encounter of the two paramilitary organization takes place in a kind of no-man’s-land, a territory which is claimed by neither of the two organizations and therefore presents a neutral ground for negotiations. Leonard, the leader of the UVF (Michael Gambar), meets the IRA boss Cecil (Gerard McSorley) in order to negotiate a ceasefire. Both leaders are followed and supported by the members of their respective organizations. According to Smyth’s and Rolston’s conceptions of stereotypical Troubles thriller characters, both paramilitary bosses can be classified as ‘terrorist godfathers’.89 The categorization of Kenny is, however, more complex. Depending on the orders given by Leonard, he is at the same time the head of a sub-group of paramilitaries. As Kenny participates actively in violence, he could be seen as a combination of ‘gunman’ and ‘commander’. The other characters in the scene represent simple gunmen as they only carry out the orders given by their respective ‘godfathers’. They are in charge of shootings, killings and bombings, whereas their bosses do not dirty their hands. The internal structures of the paramilitary organizations become illustrated when several gunmen are disciplined by their superiors for their actions, which are considered as not in line with the organization. The character of Ginger (Ian Hart) is the stereotypical ‘psychopath’.90 Although he is a member of the UVF, Ginger does not follow any political aims but kills for the sake of fun, while brutally mutilating his victims. As Ginger’s random murders shed a bad light on the organization, Kenny tries to reason with his man. Due to internal disputes inside the IRA and the UVF, on top of the disagreements among the two paramilitary bosses, a ceasefire fails to be negotiated. At the end of the film, Liam is again violently attacked after having left Ann’s house in a Protestant area. This time, the assailants are Kenny and his men. After having beaten up Liam, Kenny recognizes that the latter is a childhood friend with whom he

Cf. Smith, The Novel and the Nation, p. 114; Rolston, ‘Mothers, Whores and Villains’, p. 42. Ibid., 43.

89 90

64

City Limits

used to play with before the beginning of the Troubles. For that reason, he decides not to kill Liam but to set him free in a Catholic area. This scene happens in front of Liam’s family home and is observed by his children and their friend Michael. When young Michael aims with a stolen gun at one of the loyalists, Kathleen tries to prevent him from shooting and gets accidently killed. The scene underlines the impact of political violence on the life of children and young people. It ends with Kenny shooting Ginger for his uncontrollable behaviour with the intention to re-establish order among his subalterns. Similar kinds of punishment scenes can be observed in other Troubles thrillers. In these scenes, paramilitary bosses orchestrate punishment kneecappings or killings in order to maintain control over their own community. Retaliation scenes in which paramilitaries from different camps attack each other or scenes in which the British army interferes to establish what they believe to be law and order are also recurrent features of Troubles thrillers. In Nothing Personal, Kenney is shot by the British army after a car chase scene, which is a further typical Troubles thriller element. According to Aaron Kelly, the thriller genre has the function to ‘investigate and judge’91 contemporary society. This applies in particular to Nothing Personal, as the ultimate message of the film is that violence generates more violence. The final scene takes place on the neutral ground of a graveyard. Having just buried his daughter, Liam meets Ann, who returns from the funeral of her former husband Kenny. While both characters express their sympathy, they look at each other in a way, which suggests that they might meet each other again. Leaving the possibility of a future relationship open, O’Sullivan rises hope of a better future for Belfast’s society. Different from Nothing Personal, Resurrection Man concentrates exclusively on the actions of loyalist paramilitaries. Whereas in O’Sullivan’s film paramilitary organizations from both sides interact, in Resurrection Man, the focus lies on the internal structures and functioning of the loyalist gang. As members of the IRA are not part of the cast, Belfast’s urban space is not depicted as contested space over which the two political factions keep on fighting. The city is represented as entirely dominated by loyalist terror. However, the scenes in which innocent Catholics are maimed and killed echo the cruel torture scenes in Nothing Personal. Furthermore, Resurrection Man contains several scenes in which Protestant paramilitaries are punished by their own bosses. Theses scenes remind the spectator of the punishment shooting and beating shown in O’Sullivan’s film. Through the punishment scenes, the director underlines that Belfast represents a dangerous ground where people are not even safe on the territory of their own community. In one particularly violent scene, Victor recruits Hacksaw to carry out a punishment shooting on men whose action did not conform to the behaviour expected by the paramilitaries. Later on, Victor accuses a young gang member of treason and shoots him to set an example. When it turns out that the latter was innocent, Heather asked Victor why he killed the young man. The latter cold

Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland, pp. 90–1.

91

Urban Space and Territoriality

65

bloodedly answers: ‘Somebody needed to get it.’92 The victim was killed in a loyalist pub, a place on Protestant territory, which is supposed to represent safe ground for members of the Protestant community. This scene communicates once again that any area of Belfast has the potential of becoming a dangerous territory for any inhabitant of the city. Another character embodying the loyalist milieu is Sammy McClure (Sean McGinley), a ‘street preacher-cum-terrorist leader’.93 At the start of the film, McClure functions as a kind of tutor for Victor, who encourages him to commit murders. In the course of the action, however, McClure loses control over his disciple. For this reason, he commands Victor’s killing and informs Ryan that Victor will be dealt with. At the end of the film, the protagonist is shot in front of his family home. The place of his death suggests that his own territory turns out to be fatal ground. Victor’s death is the final indication for the fact that he has entirely lost control over the parts of the city he previously dominated through his violent acts.

On both sides of the green line: The Lebanese capital in Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire Beirut, the Encounter [Beirut al-Liqa’] (1981) by Borhan Alawiyeh, In the Shadows of the City [Tayf al-Madina] (2000) by Jean Chamoun and Bahij Hojeij’s The Belt of Fire [Zinnar al-Nar] (2003) are films in which Beirut’s territoriality plays a salient role. Contrary to Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal, they are not indebted to the thriller genre. Different from Belfast in O’Sullivan’s and Evans’ film, Beirut is less illustrated as a maze in which the characters get lost, but rather as a city clearly divided into east and west. In Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal, Belfast is mainly portrayed as a place marked by violent sectarian murders, paramilitary control and retaliation. However, in the three above-mentioned Lebanese films, sectarian violence is not the only central theme. Even if Beirut is presented as dominated by the militia, other issues such as abductions, exile, social class and displacement play an equally important role. In contrast to Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal, the accent of the films lies above all on the way in which the Civil War influences the characters’ everyday life and enters their private sphere. As the three films focus less on violent action than on the impact of violence on the city’s inhabitants, Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire convey a more personal tone. Like most Lebanese films, they obtained funding from aboard. The production of Beirut, the Encounter was supported financially by Tunisia as well as Belgium, and The Belt of Fire received funding from the Agence de francophonie and the French Foreign Ministry. In the Shadows of the City, on the contrary, was subsidized by the French and

Resurrection Man (01:09:59-01:01:06). Mulvenna, In the Shadow of the Butchers.

92 93

66

City Limits

Lebanese Ministry of culture. Whereas The Belt of Fire and In the Shadows of the City were produced after the Civil War, Beirut, the Encounter was shot during the violent confrontations. The Lebanese scholar Lina Kathib explains that during the Civil War, filming became extremely difficult due to the spreading violence. Not rarely, films were shot in the middle of shelling. Moreover, poor funding in combination with the physical limitations imposed by the omnipresent war impacted on the quality of the films.94 Due to the violent situation in the city, Borhan Alawiyeh, for example, was only able to shoot one take of most of the scenes of Beirut, the Encounter, which resulted in ‘an often mistake-ridden delivery of lines by the actors’.95 The circumstances in which a number of Lebanese films were made are fairly similar to the condition in which films on the Northern Irish Troubles were produced. Frequently attacked by the paramilitaries from both sides, film crews were often unable to shoot on-site in Belfast and were forced to record scenes in stand-in locations in England and the Republic of Ireland. The directors of Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire are important personalities in the milieu of Lebanese cinema. The script of Beirut, the Encounter was written by the Lebanese author Ahmad Baydoun. According to the filmmaker Alia Arasoughly, the monologues Baydoun wrote for the protagonists have achieved ‘classical status in Lebanese cinema’.96 Borhan Alawiyeh, the director of the film, was born in 1941 in Arwoun in Lebanon. Apart from his feature films, he is known for his documentaries on the Civil War treating in particular with the theme of exile.97 Beirut, the Encounter was part of the Official Selection at the festival of Berlin in 1982, and in 1984 won a Caesar nomination for the best Francophone film at the Strasbourg festival.98 Jean Chamoun, the director and scriptwriter of In the Shadows of the City, was born in Lebanon in the Bekaa region in 1944 and died in 2017. After having obtained a degree in drama at the University of Lebanon in Beirut, he left his native country in the early 1970s to study filmmaking in Paris. He returned to Lebanon six months before the outbreak of the Civil War.99 His first documentaries on his experiences of war-torn Lebanon were aired on the BBC.100 With Maroun Baghdadi and Borhan Alawiyeh, he is one of the ‘pioneers of Lebanese cinema’.101 Born in Zahle, Bahij Hojeij, the director of The Belt of Fire, studied cinema and history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.102 He became a professor at the Lebanese University Institute for Fine Cf. Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 27. Ibid. 96 Cf. IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132762/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl, accessed 20 April 2021. 97 Cf. Yazbek, Regards sur le cinema libanais, p. 35. 98 ‘Beyrouth, la rencontre’. Beyrouth International Film Festival. https://beirutfilmfestival.org/portfolio/ beyrouth-la-rencontre/, accessed 20 April 2021. 99 Cf. Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema, p. 209. 100 Cf. Zaccak, Le cinema libanais, p. 135. 101 Quilty, Jim: ‘Jean Chamoun, Pioneer of Lebanese Cinema dies at 73’. In: The Daily Star. 11 August 2017. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Arts-and-Ent/Culture/2017/Aug-11/415654-jean-chamounpioneer-of-lebanese-cinema-dies-at-73.ashx, accessed 9 May 2021. 102 Cf. “Bahij Hodij. Arficultures. africultures.com/personnes/?no=5161&utm_source=newsletter&utm_ medium=email&utm_campaign=440, accessed 20 October 2019. 94 95

Urban Space and Territoriality

67

Art in 1990, and established himself as a documentary filmmaker for both Lebanese and French television.103 Before shooting The Belt of Fire, he worked as an assistant director on the production of Alawiyeh’s Beirut, the Encounter.104

Failed encounters in segregated Beirut The action of Beirut, the Encounter is set in 1976 at the beginning of the Civil War. Shot in Arabic with French subtitles, the film concentrates on the Muslim man Haydar (Haitem El Amine) and the Christian woman Zeina (Nadine Acoury). In contrast to Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal – two thrillers which are driven by action and suspense – Beirut, the Encounter is a slow-moving film. A great number of sequences feature images of Beirut’s damaged urban space and contain the lengthy monologues of the two protagonists. It is noticeable that the film had to be made in a short time with very simple means: frequently cuts come rather abruptly and sometimes subtitles are not legible due to the bright colour of the letters which appear against a bright background. However, the merit of the film is that it was shot on location during the war and authentically renders the atmosphere of the city at the beginning of the conflict. Different from many Lebanese films on the Civil War, Beirut, the Encounter does not primarily focus on violent attacks and shelling but on the impact of political violence on the lives of the characters and the traces warfare leaves in Beirut’s urban space. The central themes of Beirut, the Encounter are the city’s division, social class and displacement. The film revolves around Haydar’s and Zeina’s attempts to meet each other in Beirut at the beginning of the Civil War. The city has become a divided space difficult to navigate. Before the outbreak of the war, the two protagonists were fellow students at university, having been in love platonically. After their studies, Haydar returned to his village next to the Israeli border and the two characters lost sight of each other. Two years later, due to Israeli attacks, Haydar flees from the South and returns to Beirut with his brother Mustafa, his sister in-law and his baby nephew. The four of them occupy an empty flat in West Beirut where they sleep on mattresses and eat on the floor. As deprived refugees from the south of the country, Haydar and his family belong to the most disadvantaged group of people in the city. The action of Beirut, the Encounter begins with an establishing shot of the capital taken from Haydar’s perspective. Standing on the balcony of their flat, the protagonist observes the city, looking down on destroyed buildings, rubble and rubbish dumps. Throughout the film, the director uses visual and aural impressions to illustrate Beirut as a devastated and, at the same time, extremely noisy place. Furthermore, in Beirut, the Encounter, the absence of music is striking. The omnipresent sound in the film is the loud and persistent noise of the traffic in the streets, which creates a disturbing atmosphere. In the rare scenes in which music can be heard, the tunes come from far away and are overlaid by the clamour of engines and honking cars. With the sounds the director chooses for his film, he confers a realistic dimension to the images of the city. Cf. Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema, p. 209. Cf. Zaccak, Le cinema libanais, p. 156.

103 104

68

City Limits

Referring to Beirut during the Civil War, Hashim Sarkis notes: ‘Destruction, like violence, homogenises its victims. The rubble of West Beirut cannot be distinguished from the rubble of East Beirut.’105 However, Kathib points out that during the conflict, West Beirut bore most of the symptoms of destruction. She further argues that Beirut, the Encounter is the only film which refers to East and West Beirut’s different degree of devastation.106 The dissimilarities between the two parts of the city are illustrated not only through the area in which the two protagonists live but also by means of their mutual dwelling place. Haydar lives in a bare flat without running water and electricity in West Beirut. The missing glass windows in his flat are merely replaced by curtains. Apart from that, he and his family depend on food which is distributed by the state to refugees. His friend Zeina, however, resides in a spacious, nicely furnished middle-class house decorated with plants. Zeina’s home is located in leafy Achrafieh in the east of the city. East Beirut’s streets are represented as calm and wealthy with souvenir shops and bakeries selling Lebanese sweets. West Beirut, on the contrary, is characterized by ruins, noise and black markets where stolen goods are sold. The division of the city is further underlined by the two characters’ difficulties to meet each other. When the protagonist arrives in the capital, he is unable to contact his friend as the telephone line between East and West Beirut had been cut off. The day

Figure 12  Haydar ringing Zeina, Beirut, the Encounter. Quoted in: Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 78. Cf. ibid.

105 106

Urban Space and Territoriality

69

when Haydar reads in the newspaper that the communication between the two parts of the city has been re-established, he rings Zeina. To his concern, the protagonist learns that she is about to leave Beirut for the United States. With Zeina’s departure, the director evokes again the themes of exile and migration during the Civil War. However, the young woman’s chosen ‘exile’ considerably differs from Haydar’s flight from the south of Lebanon: Zeina is not leaving Beirut in order to survive but in search of a better life and better career opportunities. Both characters agree to meet in a coffee shop in Hamra next to the American University to which they used to go as students before the outbreak of the war. Due to traffic jam in West Beirut, Haydar arrives half an hour late. In the meantime, Zeina has already left the place as she felt threatened by the presence of militiamen making obscene comments. The scene shows that the protagonists’ cognitive geography of Beirut does not function anymore. Haydar and Zeina are unaware of the fact that the peaceful coffee shop in which they used to spend time as students has turned into a meeting point of the militia. Similar to the protagonists in Resurrection Men and Nothing Personal, both characters lose the grip on their ‘mental maps’ of the city. Whereas Liam in Nothing Personal is unable to separate Catholic from Protestant areas, and Victor in Resurrection Man does not manage to determine the limits of Protestant territory, Zeina and Haydar are not anymore capable to distinguish between safe areas and dangerous ground in the capital. In the three films, violence has shifted the internal borders of the respective cities so that the protagonists become destabilized by the evolving territoriality of their environment. They have to realize that their ‘mental maps’ do not provide guidance any more. In the three films, the characters lose control over the urban space surrounding them. In this sense, it could be argued that Evans, O’Sullivan and Alawiyeh employ a similar cinematographic strategy to illustrate the impact of the political violence on Belfast’s or Beirut’s urban population. Another common point between Beirut, the Encounter and Resurrection Men is the flâneur theme. In a number of scenes, Haydar walks through the devastated streets of West Beirut observing the destruction of the city. Different from Victor in Resurrection Man, the protagonist of Alawiyeh’s film does not come across places which stand for specific crimes; he is rather overwhelmed by the overall damage the war has done to the city. With Haydar’s wanderings through West Beirut, the director manages to focus on details of destruction such as walls perforated by bullet holes and entirely ruined buildings. In this way, Alawiyeh paints a gloomy picture of the city through the eyes of his main character. As the protagonists of Beirut, the Encounter are unable to meet before Zeina’s departure to the United States, they decide to record their thoughts on cassette tapes, which they intend to exchange the next morning at the airport. The prolonged monologues of the two characters, which last about thirty minutes, take up a considerable part of the film. Beirut, the Encounter ends in a dramatic way: Haydar is waiting for Zeina at the airport in order to hand over his tapes. Zeina, however, is held up due to barricades erected by the militia. By the time she arrives at the airport, Haydar has already left. While the young man disappointedly throws his tapes out of the window of the taxi, Zeina cries at the airport. The second missed encounter functions as a kind of reversal of the scene in the coffee shop in which Zeina leaves

70

City Limits

before Haydar’s arrival. In both cases, the situation in the city is presented as the reason for the failed rendezvous. Considering the content of the film, the title Beirut, the Encounter is entirely misleading. With his choice of title, the director suggests that Beirut is a place in which encounters are possible. However, as the film goes on, the spectators gradually learn that in war-torn Beirut, people living in different parts of the city are not able to get together any more. Yazbek notes that Beirut in Alawiyeh’s film is illustrated as a loveless city in which people do not ‘live’ but merely ‘survive’.107 Haydar’s and Nadine’s unachieved encounters do not only stand for the failure of a potential love story but also symbolize the division of the city. Hady Zaccak claims that the slow pace of Beirut, the Encounter, which even increases towards the end of the film, symbolizes the creeping ‘death’ of the two communities’ co-existence.108 It is striking that in Beirut, the Encounter the two protagonists are prevented from meeting each other merely by physical obstacles and not due to sectarian or class differences. Even if Zeina’s and Haydar’s different religious and socio-economic background plays a role in the film, it is not presented as the reason for their failed encounters. In this sense, the two characters’ unsuccessful love affair differs considerably from the potential relationship between Liam and Ann in Nothing Personal, which does not develop. In O’Sullivan’s film, the two characters are physically able to meet but are prevented from getting involved with each other through psychological boundaries caused by the pressures of their respective communities. The failed love story in Beirut, the Encounter could be seen as a variant of the ‘love-across-the-barricades’ theme, as the two characters are literally kept away from each other due to physically boundaries existing in Beirut’s urban space. Thus, Haydar’s poor background is not employed to illustrate the social gap between the two protagonists but to portray the fate of refugees from the south who have left everything behind in the hope of finding a better and safer life in Beirut. Nevertheless, when Haydar and his family arrive in the capital, they are not only appalled by the city’s destruction, they also come to understand that they are forced to live on the margins of society. The theme of sectarianism, which is central to Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal, is only briefly referred to in Beirut, the Encounter. When Haydar comes to the capital, his brother tries to convince him to join the militia. However, due to his pacifist attitude, Haydar refuses to perpetrate violence. Nadine is equally critical of her brother’s activities in the militia as she is convinced that the attacks on the Muslim community will merely generate retaliation and increase violence. In this sense, it could be said that with his film, Alawiyeh pleads for a peaceful solution of the conflict.

The growing impact of war In the Shadows of the City is set in 1974, almost at the same time as Beirut, the Encounter. A number of resemblances between the two films can be determined, one

Cf. Yazbek, Regards sur le cinema libanais, p. 41. Cf. Zaccak, Le cinema, p. 121.

107 108

Urban Space and Territoriality

71

of the common themes being displacement. Similar to Haydar in Beirut, the Encounter, the protagonist of In the Shadows of the City leaves the south of Lebanon for Beirut due to the increasing violence. Chamoun’s film is constructed as a tale in which Rami, an adult Muslim man, retrospectively narrates his life story. The voice of the adult Rami accompanying the images of the film confers on the action a lyric tone. Arms describes In the Shadows of the City as ‘a slow-paced, thoughtful film’.109 The slow rhythm of Chamoun’s film is a further parallel to Beirut, the Encounter. The moderate pace at which the story of both films develops stands in sharp contrast to the speed-driven action in Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man. Thanks to their slow pace, the two Lebanese films contain more space for contemplation and reflection. In order to create an authentic atmosphere, Chamoun regularly integrates into his film black-and-white footage of the war, which he has shot himself while working as a journalist. At the same time, the director uses archive material to structure his film: In the Shadows of the City falls into three episodes, each of them beginning with authentic images taken during the Civil War. The first episode focuses on the twelve-year-old Rami (Rami Bayram) arriving in Beirut with his family before the outbreak of political violence in the city. The second episode, on the contrary, is set in 1982 and shows the protagonist as an adult man during the war. The last one takes place in post-war Beirut. Different from Beirut, the Encounter, in which the capital is represented as a divided city from the beginning, in Chamoun’s film, the audience witnesses the increasing division of Beirut’s urban space. When the young Rami arrives in Beirut, his family occupies an empty flat in the west of the city. This reminds us of the bare dwelling in which Haydar and his brother find shelter in Beirut, the Encounter. As refugees from the South, Rami as well as Hayar belongs to the most disadvantaged inhabitants of the city. In Chamoun’s film, the themes of exile and displacement are illustrated through the problematic situation of Rami’s family. As the father (Mounir Keserwani) is unable to find a job, the boy has to earn a living for his parents and siblings. Searching for work, Rami’s father is condescendingly told by his friend Abu Samir to go back to his village. This haughty attitude hints at the low status of refugees in Beirut’s society during the war. In the first episode of the film, Rami becomes friends with the local children and falls in love with Yasmine (Sarah Mrad), a girl of his age. The innocent mutual affection of the two children echoes Haydar’s and Zeina’s platonic love in Beirut, the Encounter. In both films, a male Muslim character develops feelings for a Christian girl. A further parallel between In the Shadows of the City and Beirut, the Encounter is the middle-class background of the female protagonists. In Chamoun’s film, Yasmine’s privileged social status is visualized through the pleasant family home, which echoes Zeina’s beautiful house in the east of the city in Beirut, the Encounter. However, contrary to Alawiyeh’s film, the two protagonists do not live in different parts of the city but in the same neighbourhood. Despite their contrasting religious and socio-economic background,

Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema, p. 209.

109

72

City Limits

Yasmine’s and Rami’s family become friends. With this friendship, Chamoun underlines that before the beginning of the Civil War, Beirut was not divided by social and religious boundaries. Another symbol of the city’s pre-war unity is Salwa’s café, a place in which Rami finds work as a waiter. Described by the narrator as ‘the heart of Beirut’, it unites customers from different religions. The regulars share a number of activities such as eating, singing, playing board games or getting shaved by the local barber. The souls of the café are the owner, the beautiful widow Salwa, and the musician Nabil. The increasing violence in the city is reflected in the invasion of the café by the militia. Militiamen enter the peaceful place, start doing dark business in its backrooms and eventually shoot the innocent Nabil. These events stand for the destruction of a neutral place and symbolize the beginning of the war between different political factions and religious communities. Simultaneously to the invasion of the café, Rami witnesses the militarization of his area. To his great distress, Yasmine and his family move to the Christian East Beirut as the west of the city has become too dangerous for them. Similar to Beirut, the Encounter, the two protagonists are torn from each other by the war. Their separation is due to physical borders, which become erected in the city as the consequence of the ever-growing violence. Even if the two characters lose contact, Rami does not forget Yasmine and hopes to see her again. In the first episode of his film, Chamoun evokes the theme of sectarianism through Yasmine’s brother Nasseem, who joins the militia and suddenly takes on a hostile attitude towards Rami and his family. In the second episode, Rami (Maidi Machmouchi) features as a grown man working as an ambulance driver. Despite his friends’ attempts to convince him to join the militia, he refuses to get involved in violence. In the meantime, Beirut has been transformed into an entirely divided place with barricades between the different parts of the city. People who Rami has known from childhood are now fighting on different sides. Even if In the Shadows of the City does not abound with violent torture scenes, as it is the case in Resurrection Man and Nothing Personal, violence is more explicitly illustrated than in Beirut, the Encounter. Bombings and shooting become increasingly part of the action. In addition to the themes brought up in Beirut, the Encounter, Chamoun adds the issue of abduction to his film, an issue, which Deborah Young calls ‘the seldommentioned tragedy of Lebanon’s thousands of desaparecidos, who vanished without a trace during the war’.110 Like the directors of Resurrection Man and Beirut, the Encounter, Chamoun uses the protagonist as a reflector figure in the form of a flâneur to portray Beirut’s physical transformation. Whereas in Beirut, the Encounter Haydar watches his environment by walking through the city, in Chamoun’s film, the protagonist observes Beirut from the window of his ambulance. Moving through the capital with wounded passengers in his van, Rami contemplates the city’s destruction: houses are in ruins and streets are blocked off by the militia. Young describes the capital as shown in the second episode Young, Deborah: ‘In the Shadows of the City’. In: Variety. 26 November 2000. https://variety. com/2000/film/reviews/in-the-shadows-of-the-city-1200465213/, accessed 20 October 2019.

110

Urban Space and Territoriality

73

Figure 13  Rami driving his ambulance, In the Shadows of the City.

of the film as a ‘lethal ghost town’ which ‘feels as chilling as science fiction’.111 While the protagonist drives along the empty streets lined with damaged houses, the off-screen voice of the adult protagonist tells the audience: ‘In ‘82, I saved many lives, my life was full of danger.’112 This scene echoes a scene taking place at the beginning of the film, in which the young Rami arrives with his parents and siblings in Beirut. Sitting in an open van next to the family’s belongings, the boy stares wide-eyed at the city. The buildings and streets are still intact and do not yet bear traces of destruction. The images of prewar Beirut are commented on by Rami’s voice-over as follows: ‘Beirut impressed me and shocked me at the same time. It was welcoming but heartless. In time, I began to see that something was seething.’113 The comment made by Rami while driving through Beirut in his ambulance in the second episode functions as an answer to the observations made by the young protagonist. In this way, the director underlines that the fears expressed by the twelve-year-old young boy at the beginning of the film have finally come true. Despite his pacifist attitude, Rami eventually enters the militia when his father is abducted. In so doing, he hopes to be able to find him. In the meantime, Salwa’s café, which before the war stood for peace and tolerance, has turned into a meeting point for the militia, a place in which weapons are hidden. With the transformation of the building, Chamoun underlines that the ‘heart of the city’ is not any more a Ibid. In the Shadows of the City. Jean Chamoun. 2000. (00:50:10-00:50:18). 113 In the Shadows of the City (00:04:42-00:04:57). 111 112

74

City Limits

neutral space but has been entirely taken over by the war. The theme of abduction becomes enforced when Rami meets a woman and her little girl whose husband has been kidnapped two years ago. Sharing a common fate, the two characters have to realize that it is impossible to get their loved ones back and learn about the truth of their disappearance. Through the theme of abduction, the influence the Civil War on the city’s inhabitants becomes highlighted again. Eventually, Rami understands that the militia are unwilling to help him to find his father and that the whole organization is entirely corrupt. The militiamen benefit from the war by stealing goods from dead people or by bribing the families of hostages. With Rami’s observations about the functioning of the militia, Chamoun evokes a theme, which Khatib calls the ‘new economy of war’.114 With this term, Khatib refers to individuals who benefit from the situation in order to make money. The theme is equally alluded to in Beirut, the Encounter, when a taxi driver tells his customers where they can make a bargain by buying stolen carpets or when militiamen steal food aid, which is intended for the refugees. At the end of the second episode of In the Shadows of the City, Beirut’s urban space is entirely divided between the different militia and for the inhabitants of the city it is physically impossible to get from one part of the capital to the other without risking their life. The film terminates with a relatively short third episode in which Beirut is depicted after the end of the war. Houses are still in ruins but businesses swarm into the city in order to make money in the rebuilding industry. Former militia leaders have become rich and benefit from the new economic possibilities of the city. The tragic end of the film is marked by a scene in which Rami sees the adult Yasmine, who is happily married and has a small daughter. Like in Beirut, the Encounter, the war is presented as an obstacle to love. The title of the film could be interpreted as a reference to the protagonist’s life, which takes place ‘in the shadow of Beirut’. Rami’s life is dominated by the goings-on in the city, which do not leave him any choice. He is not only unable to live with the woman he loves, but he also becomes corrupted by the war as his personal situation forces him to join the militia. Similar to Beirut, the Encounter, Rami’s story could be seen as a variation of the ‘love-across-the-barricades’ theme as both characters are separated from each other due to the physical division of the city.

Mental and physical boundaries The Belt of Fire (2003), inspired by Rashid El-Daif ’s novel The Tyrant (1983), is Bahij Hojeij’s first feature film.115 In an interview, the director underlines that the film is based on his own experience of the Lebanese Civil War. He argues that he was unable to grieve over the war before having made the film.116 Set in 1985, The Belt of Fire Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 85. Cf. ‘Cloture du festival du cinema européen’. www.rdl.com.lb/2003/q4/3927/nemanquezpas6.html, accessed 20 October 2019. 116 Cf. Bahij Hojeij quoted in Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. xxii. 114 115

Urban Space and Territoriality

75

was entirely shot in Beirut. Hojeij explains that he intentionally chose parts of the city as a setting in which the impact of war was still visible in 2003.117 Like Beirut, the Encounter and In the Shadows of the City, Hojeij’s film concentrates on the influence of war on human relations. Even if the film was shot in Beirut, the audience is unable to determine whether the story is set in the east or the west of the city. For this reason, the capital’s territoriality is less central to the action than in Beirut, the Encounter and In the Shadows of the City. However, as we will see later on, the concept of ‘mental maps’ also plays an important role in Hojeij’s film as the protagonist relies on his cognitive geography in order to interpret his urban environment. The main character is Chafic (Abdallah Homsi), an introvert man teaching French at university, who cannot be identified as Muslim or Christian. The fact that the protagonist is not clearly associated with one of the religious communities echoes a common feature of Lebanese TV films shot during the Civil War. Hafeda notes that TV Liban produced a number of local series that were characterized by ‘sectless characters’, whose names did not bear indications of their religious affiliations. He explains: ‘No males were named Mohamad or George, for example, and no females were Fatimah or Marie. Instead the characters were given modern and more neutral names such as Samar or Sameer.’118 According to Hafeda, the removal of religious references from the programmes was intended to create films addressing different religious communities, without provoking sensitivities.119 Hojeij explains that in his film, he intended to avoid the pitfalls of sectarianism: I wanted to make a film set in Beirut – it doesn’t matter if it’s East or West; about a person’s experiences – it doesn’t matter if he is a Muslim or a Christian or Druze. I did not want the main character to have a defined identity like that. I wanted him to remain a bit abstract.120

Chafic, the protagonist of The Belt of Fire, comes back to Beirut after a longer stay abroad. However, he is unable to recognize the capital due to its transformations caused by the war. The film starts with a scene in which the protagonist returns in his car to his flat and observes the traces bomb explosions and shootings have left in the city’s physical structure. The capital is presented as heavily maimed by the Civil War with most of the buildings damaged and deserted. The impressions of the city rendered through the eyes of the protagonist remind us of the images of Beirut’s destruction shown in Beirut, the Encounter and In the Shadows of the City. The Civil War increasingly enters Chafic’s professional and private life. Hojeij notes that in his film, he intended to emphasize the environment in which the protagonist lives in, an environment which during the war ‘stifled human beings, oppressed the

Cf. ‘Cloture du festival du cinema européen’. Hafeda, Mohamad: Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon. Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut. London: I.B. Tauris, 2019, p. 93. 119 Ibid. 120 Bahij Hojeij quoted in Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 173. 117 118

76

City Limits

expression of love, oppressed freedom, prevented progress’.121 The first part of the protagonist’s life which becomes invaded by the war is Chafic’s private sphere, more precisely his flat. Asbo (Hassan Farath), the guardian of the apartment block, becomes more and more intrusive, pretending to teach the protagonist how to behave during the war. Without Chafic’s knowledge, Asbo moves a pregnant woman and her child into his spare room. He justifies his action suggesting that Chafic is morally obliged to help deprived refugees from the South. Hojeij’s allusion to displacement is a parallel to Beirut, the Encounter and In the Shadows of the City, where the theme plays a salient role. Like in the two other films, exiles from the south are presented as living on the edge of Beirut’s society, depending on the help of others. Asbo gradually fills Chafic’s flat with contraband goods until the protagonist is almost unable to move in his own space. The climax of the guardian’s intrusion into Chafic’s private sphere is when he installs a new steel door to the building for supposed security reasons. In reality, however, Asbo is more concerned about protecting his own smuggled merchandise than shielding the tenants from the surrounding violence. Chafic ends up having to pay a considerable amount of money for a door he never agreed to buy. With Asbo’s behaviour, Hojeij alludes to ‘the new economy of war’122 which is also evoked in Beirut, the Encounter and In the Shadows of the City. In The Belt of Fire, Asbo stands for those who benefited from the war by making money out of other people’s misery. Chafic does not react to Asbo’s intrusion, which goes along with his general passive attitude. On a more abstract level, Chafic’s flat represents a microcosm of Beirut, a place which becomes more and more invaded by the consequences of the war.

Figure 14  Chafic lecturing at university, The Belt of Fire. Ibid. Ibid., p. 85.

121 122

Urban Space and Territoriality

77

Violence enters not only the protagonist’s private sphere but also his professional life. His classes at university are constantly disturbed by bombings, and his students, who become increasingly politicized, prefer demonstrating in the streets to attending lectures. Consequently, Chafic frequently has to face an empty classroom. The key scene of the film takes place in a cellar of the university in which Chafic and his students find shelter during intense bombings. In the darkness, one of his terrified female students throws herself at Chafic and lets him kiss and touch her. Despite the intensity of the encounter, Chafic never sees her face. Throughout the film, the protagonist unsuccessfully tries to identify the girl among his students until he becomes entirely obsessed with the young woman, who starts haunting his dreams. In the The Belt of Fire, the boundaries between dream and reality become blurred: scenes belonging to Chafic’s imagination and scenes representing factual events are filmed in the same way so that the audience is often unable to decide whether they are confronted with the protagonist’s fantasy world or with his actual life. By means of this cinematographic strategy, the director hints as Chafic’s mental instability, which keeps increasing throughout the film. The protagonist’s reveries about the girl fuse with his perceptions of Beirut’s urban space. This becomes particularly visible in a sequences taking place at night. Dreaming about the girl, the protagonist drives in his car through the nocturnal Beirut, observing buildings in ruins, which resemble skeletons. Chafic’s whispering off-screen voice overlays the images: Had the streets been safe, I would have walked all night long. Had I been a poet, I would have written the most beautiful poems. Where would she be now? What is she wearing? Which skirt is hiding her legs? Which blouse is tied around her breast? Which belt surrounds her waist? What is keeping her from coming? Which barricade? Which cause? Which sky? Might she be a dream that vanished?123

The protagonist’s fantasy about the girl appears as an attempt to evade the harsh reality of the bomb-damaged capital. While Chafic dreams about the student, he perceives the horrors of war inscribed in Beirut’s cityscape. The poetic lines pronounced by the protagonist stand in sharp contrast to the images of destruction which are shown simultaneously. Similar to Victor in Resurrection Man, Haydar in Beirut, the Encounter and Rami in In the Shadows of the City, the hero takes on the form of a flâneur, who watches and interprets his war-ravaged environment. Like Alawiyeh and Chamoun, Hojeij employs his protagonist as a reflector figure in order to focus on specific aspects of Beirut. In the three films, the main characters’ wanderings through the city are used to render the war-torn atmosphere. Through the eyes of the protagonists, the audience sees Beirut as a grim place with no hope for peace. Referring to Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s film I Want to See [Je veux voir] (2007), Hafeda argues that thanks to the observations of reflector figures, the viewer begins to see and understand the results

The Belt of Fire (00:26:16-00:26:49).

123

78

City Limits

of war. He considers ‘seeing “seeing”’ as a ‘reflexive act’, as ‘seeing someone else seeing’ will lead the audience to comprehend the violent destruction in the city.124 In The Belt of Fire, the protagonist’s observations as well as his cognitive geography play an important. This can be seen as a parallel to Resurrection Man, Nothing Personal and even Beirut, the Encounter. Whereas Victor in Resurrection Man links the landmarks of the Belfast inscribed on his ‘mental map’ with places of crime, Chafic connects his urban environment with imagined romantic encounters. Beirut’s ruins are commented on by Chafic’s melancholic off-screen voice: ‘Had the streets been safe, I would have walked all night long.’125 The protagonist’s statement demonstrates that thanks to his cognitive geography, he is aware of the dangers of the city. Chafic’s interpretation of Beirut’s urban space guides his behaviour and prevents him from going out. On a more abstract level, Hojeij implies that as much as a stroll through the city is impossible, romance seems to be out of reach. In contrast to Alawiyeh and Chamoun, Hojeij refers to the general danger of the city and less to the risk of crossing from one part of the capital to the other. In this way, Beirut is even more illustrated as a perilous place, as the whole of city is presented as a threat to the characters and not only the territory inhabited by the other community. In contrast to Beirut, the Encounter and In the Shadows of the City, the entire city space signifies dangerous ground without any safe havens. In Chafic’s voice-over comment, urban vocabulary becomes linked to vocabulary of war as streets are mentioned in the same breath as barricades. Thinking of the girl, Chafic asks himself ‘What is keeping her from coming?’ ‘Which barricade?’.126 In The Belt of Fire, the term ‘barricade’ takes on different layers of connotations. In the first place, it refers to a barrier cutting off streets from each other, which in the context of Beirut most likely refers to the green line separating the east of the city from the west. On a more abstract level, ‘barricade’ also refers to mental barriers, such as religious boundaries between Christians and Muslims. This suggests that Chafic fears that the girl refuses to show herself, as she does not belong to the same ethno-religious community. A further ‘barricade’ might be the fact that both characters are separated from each other through their social and professional status with one of them being a student and the other a professor. In this sense, Beirut is presented as a city of multiple physical and mental barriers in which the protagonist is trapped. Similar to Nothing Personal, Beirut, the Encounter and In the Shadows of the City, Hojeij’s film plays with the ‘love-across-the-barricades’ theme. Like in the three other films, a potential love story does not develop. As suggested by the protagonist’s comment, this might be due to a combination of religious, societal and geographical reasons. The scene in which Chafic drives through nocturnal Beirut is an example of how imagination and reality become blurred in the film. All of a sudden, the girl appears in his car out of nowhere. The only hint that suggests that she is just a product of

Hafeda, Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon, p. 122. The Belt of Fire (00:26:16-00:26:17). 126 The Belt of Fire (00:26:46-00:26:48). 124 125

Urban Space and Territoriality

79

the protagonist’s imagination are images showing Chafic smoking on his balcony, which are cut into the sequence and appear only for a few seconds. Suddenly, the two characters are stopped by militiamen at a barricade. Looking for a reason to keep Chafic at the checkpoint, they accuse him of driving a stolen car. The girl is violently sent home in a taxi while the protagonist spends the night at the checkpoint as a hostage of the paramilitaries before they set him free in the morning. In this sequence, the audience becomes entirely disorientated and wonders whether Chafic and the student were really assaulted by the militiamen or whether the incident is the fruit of the protagonist’s imagination. A few days later, the protagonist gets back to the place where he had supposedly been held during a whole the night. However, the checkpoint does not exist anymore. Desperately looking for the barricades, Chafic is unable to distinguish between imagination and reality. A long shot taken from high above shows the protagonist screaming that he will not move his car until his documents are checked. The character’s mental instability seems to have reached its climax as he appears to be losing his mind. Chafic’s unwillingness to accept the absence of the checkpoint takes on a symbolic meaning. On the first narrative level, it signifies that the protagonist does not understand the functioning of the city any more. He is upset by the fact that his cognitive geography is failing and that he is unable to keep up with Beirut’s evolution and the constantly shifting boundaries. On a second narrative level, however, the missing checkpoint suggests that Chafic was never kept hostage by the militia and the whole sequence in which he is shown in the company of the girl was mere fantasy. By denying the absence of the checkpoint, he refuses to accept that the encounter with the young woman was just a dream. In the same way as Victor Kelly in Resurrection Man, Chafic becomes more and more destabilized by the evolving situation. He has to realize that neither his romance nor a peaceful Beirut is within reach. In both films, the concept of ‘mental maps’ is used to draw attention to the increasing disorientation of the protagonists and their deteriorating mental stability. In this sense, the protagonists’ declining grip of the city reflects their mental state. Chafic’s fragile psychological condition mirrors the influence of war on Beirut’s inhabitants. In an interview, Hojeij explains that the war has caused the ‘psychological death’ of the Lebanese population, generating ‘profound wounds’.127 A further allusion to mental illness and instability occurs in The Belt of Fire in the form of Chafic’s colleague Amale. By merely shaking hands with a friend, she got infected by shingles, a disease which gave her great pain and threatened her eyesight. The experience of the illness left her entirely paranoid and afraid of human contact. In Arabic, the disease is popularly known as zennar el-nar, literally ‘belt of fire’.128 Using the name of the disease as a title of his film, Hojeij plays with the term’s different layers of meaning. In the first place, ‘fire’ evokes bomb explosions and shooting and thus

‘Cloture du festival du cinema européen’. Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema, p. 211.

127 128

80

City Limits

becomes associated with war. Apart from that, the link between the war and the illness implies that like a disease, the war is infecting the city’s population. The image of war as a disease further appears in a scene in which Chafic gives a translation class to his students. As a text to be translated from French into Arabic, he has chosen an extract from The Plague by Albert Camus. Chafic reads out the beginning of the novel in which the Doctor Rieux comes across a rat agonizing on his doorstep. In Camus’ novel, the dying rats are infected by the plague, which they bring into the city of Oran. Gradually, the entire place becomes dangerously infested but its inhabitants underestimate the extent of the catastrophe. In his film, Hojeij implies that in the same way as Oran gradually becomes invaded by the plague, Beirut is increasingly ‘infected’ by the war, with the local population being very slow to comprehend the situation.

Crossing Berlin’s borders in One, Two, Three; The Man on the Wall; and Wings of Desire Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961), Reinhard Hauff ’s The Man on the Wall [Der Mann auf der Mauer] (1982) and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin] (1987) engage with Berlin’s territoriality in very different ways. In each of the films, the separation of the city into east and west plays a central role. Berlin’s division reminds us of Beirut’s partition into east and west, as both cities are split in half through clearly marked physical boundaries. Even if the nature of the division is entirely different – Muslims and Christians in Beirut vs. capitalists and communists in Berlin – the borders between the two parts of the respective cities are clear-cut. As mentioned previously, Belfast’s territoriality is, however, less straightforward as the internal borders of the city are more complex. One, Two, Three stands out against The Man on the Wall and Wings of Desire due to its humorous tone. Whereas Wilder’s film takes on the form of a fast-paced comedy, Hauff ’s and Wender’s films echo the slow-moving rhythm and the thoughtful tone of the three previously discussed Lebanese films. Furthermore, the action of One, Two, Three is not set after, but before the construction of the Wall. The story takes place at a time when Berlin was not yet divided into two parts but split into four zones: the American, the British, the French and the Soviet zone. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Berliners crossed the sector boundaries everyday in order to get to their work place, go shopping or see friends.129 In One, Two, Three, the city’s division is visualized through the characters’ movements from the capitalist west to the communist east with the Brandenburg gate playing an important role as a point of passage. The critic James Hoberman claims that Wilder makes better use of Berlin’s famous ‘dead zone around derelict Potsdamer Platz’ than any director before Wim Wenders in his film Wings of Desire.130

Cf. Flemming, Thomas: The Berlin Wall. Division of a City, Berlin: Bebraverlag, 2018, p. 22. Hoberman, James Lewis: ‘Coke Classic’. In: Village Voice. 3 January 2006. https://www.villagevoice. com/2006/01/03/coke-classic, accessed 20 October 2019.

129 130

Urban Space and Territoriality

81

The Man on the Wall is based on Peter Schneider’s novel The Wall Jumper [Der Mauerspringer] which was published in 1982. In Cold War Berlin, so-called Wall jumpers, that is individuals from the west attempting to cross the border into the east, actually existed. For these people, the Wall was ‘a personal irritation’ or even ‘a physical challenge’.131 One of the most famous ‘Wall violators’ was the American John Runnings, who between 1986 and 1987 attempted to overcome the Wall from west to east as an act of protest on a number of occasions. He climbed on the Wall with the help of a ladder and balanced himself for 500 m on top of the barrier. Runnings was arrested and sent back to the west before climbing on the wall again a few days later.132 In The Man on the Wall, we are confronted with an unusual ‘Wall jumper’ character in form of Arnold Kabe, the protagonist of the film. Different from the ‘usual’ Wall jumpers, Kabe does not live in the west but in the east of the city. After having managed to get to West Berlin, he jumps back over the Wall into the east of the city. Hauff confronts the audience with a variation of the ‘Wall jumper’ theme in order to highlight the absurdity of the barrier’s existence. In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), the Wall plays an equally important role as in The Man on the Wall. Having received enormous critical acclaim in Germany and abroad, Wenders’ film is one of the last ‘Wall films’ made before Germany’s reunification. By some critics, Wings of Desire is regarded as the best film on Berlin,133 by others as the most successful film on Germany’s division.134 Coco Fusco praises the film for ‘combining allegory and document, striking cinematography and multilayered sound’.135 The script was co-written by Wenders and the author Peter Handke. Its original German title Himmel über Berlin [literally ‘The Sky over Berlin’] is more closely connected to the story of the film than its English translation. Adam Bingham states that the title suggests ‘human as well as celestial significance’.136 It actually refers to the two protagonists, Damiel and Cassiel, two angels who live in the sky above the city and observe Berlin’s population from above. Even if Wenders states that Wings of Desire takes place ‘in and above Berlin’, the film was only made in West Berlin as the GDR authorities did not allow shooting in the east of the city.137 Different from One, Two, Three and The Man on the Wall, in Wings of Desire there are no human characters crossing from one part of the city to the other. The division of the city is expressed by the fact that only the two angelic protagonists are able to move freely in and above Berlin.

Flemming, The Berlin Wall, p. 56. Cf. Bahr, Divided City, p. 51. 133 Cf. Zander, Peter: ‘Ein Klassiker, völlig neu gesehen: Der Himmel über Berlin’. In: Berliner Morgenpost. 8 April 2018, https://www.morgenpost.de/kultur/article213942181/Ein-Klassiker-voellig-neugesehen-Der-Himmel-ueber-Berlin.html, accessed 20 October 2019. 134 Cf. Clarke, David: ‘In Search of Home: Filming Post-unification Berlin’. In: Clarke, David (ed.): German Cinema since Unification, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 154. 135 Fusco, Coco: ‘Angels, History and Poetic Fantasy. An Interview with Wim Wenders’. In: Cinéaste, vol. 16, no. 4, 1988, p. 14. 136 Bingham, Adam: ‘DVD Reviews. Wings of Desire’. In: Cinéaste, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, p. 68. 137 Cf. Magofsky, Benjamin: Berliner Mauer und Deutsche Frage im bundesrepublikanischen Spielfilm 1982-2007, Hamburg: Diplomica, 2009, p. 66. 131 132

82

City Limits

Selling Coca Cola behind the Iron Curtain: Berlin between the United States and the Soviet Union One, Two, Three is based on Egy, kettö, három, a Hungarian one-act by Ference Molnár, which Wilder had seen on stage in Berlin in 1928.138 The film is also inspired by Ninotchka (1939), a film co-written by Wilder.139 The director was born in Sucha in the Austrian province of Galicia,140 a town which at the time belonged to the AustroHungarian Empire and is now a part of Poland. He worked for a number of years in Berlin before fleeing from the Nazis to the United States in 1934.141 In the States, Wilder became one of the most influential film comedy directors of his time.142 For many contemporary scholars and critics, One, Two, Three is one of the best humorous depictions of the Cold War.143 The film is characterized by a quick pace and echoes the slapstick comedies of the silent film era.144 When Wilder gave the screenplay to James Cagney, who plays the leading role of the film, he told the actor: ‘This piece must be played multo furioso – at a rapid fire, breakneck speed: 100 miles an hour on the curves, 140 miles on the straightway.’145 The shooting of the film began in Berlin on location but was abruptly stopped on the 13th of August 1961 when the construction of the Wall started overnight.146 The legend goes that Wilder’s team was literally ‘interrupted’ by the Wall when filming one of the key scenes in which air balloons with the inscription ‘Russki Go Home’ were released into the sky at the Brandenburg gate.147 The rest of the film had to be produced in Hollywood and in the Bavaria studio in Munich, where a cardboard version of the Brandenburg gate was built148 at a cost of 200,000 dollars.149 The blackand-white film was shot in English with the German characters occasionally speaking

Cf. Philipps, Gene: Some Like It Wilder. The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010, p. 247. 139 Cf. Croliss, Richard: ‘Top Ten Berlin Wall Movies’. In: Time. 11 August 2011. http://entertainment. time.com/2011/08/11/top-10-berlin-wall-movies, accessed 20 April 2021. 140 Cf. Philipps, Some Like It Wilder, p. 2. 141 Cf. Bickermann, Daniel: ‘Sitzen machen! Anschauen!’ In: Schnitt. 9 July 2008. http://www.schnitt. de/236,3541,01.html, accessed 20 October 2019. 142 Wolf, Martin: ‘Billy Wilder und der Kalte Krieg. Cola gegen Kommunismus’. In: Spiegel Online. 10 August 2008, https://www.spiegel.de/einestages/billy-wilder-und-der-kalte-krieg-a-947503. html, accessed 20 October 2019. 143 Cf. for example: Nicodemus, Katja: ‘Nobody’s Perfect’. www.taz.de/!1244430/, accessed 20 October 2019, Dpa: ‘Vor 50 Jahren: Eins, zwei, drei im Kino’. In: West Deutsche Zeitung. 16 December 2011, https://m.wn.de/Welt/Kultur/2011/12/Vor-50-Jahren-Eins-zwei-drei-im-Kino, accessed 20 October 2019. 144 Cf. Füllgrabe, Jörg: ‘“Echter” Trümmerfilm oder lediglich furios-absurde Propaganda-Komödie? Billy Wilders Eins, zwei, drei und die Fronten des Kalten Krieges’. In: GFL. German As a Foreign Language, no.3, 2014, p. 67. 145 Philipps, Some Like It Wilder, p. 248. 146 Cf. Sudendorf, Werner: Verführer und Rebell. Horst Buchholz, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2013, pp. 192–3. 147 Cf. Bickermann, ‘Sitzen machen! Anschauen!’ 148 Cf. Wolf, ‘Billy Wilder und der Kalte Krieg’. 149 Cf. Schulze, Hartmut: ‘Komische Kola’. In: Der Spiegel, no. 27, 1985, pp. 142–3. 138

Urban Space and Territoriality

83

in their native tongue. A German dub version was produced in Munich’s Aventin studio a few months later. When One, Two, Three was released on the 15th of December in the United States, and three days later in Germany,150 it was an entire flop and recorded a loss of 1.6 million US dollars.151 A comedy on the Cold War seemed to have appeared too early, particularly for German spectators, who had just seen their capital cut into two. In the German press, Wilder’s film was heavily criticized. The Berliner Zeitung called One, Two, Three the ‘ugliest film about the city’, while at the same time accusing its director of making fun of ‘what was breaking the Berliners’ hearts’.152 Others considered the film as superficial anti-communist comedy with flat jokes.153 Criticism did not only come from Germany but also from the States: the screenwriter Abby Man considered Wilder’s film as tasteless to such an extent that he apologized for it at the Moscow film festival.154 Moreover, the controversial film was banned in Finland between 1962 and 1986 as it was feared to harm diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.155 However, in 1986, One, Two, Three was rediscovered and rereleased in German and French cinemas156 and became an instant hit, especially in West Berlin.157 After Germany’s reunification, One, Two, Three experienced a second wave of success.158 Even if the action of the film takes place at a time when Berlin was cut into four sectors, the focus lies on the capital’s division into a capitalist west and a communist east. Due to its divided urban space, Wilder mockingly dubbed Berlin ‘Splitsville’.159 The protagonist of One, Two Three is C. R. MacNamara (James Cagney), a highranking executive of the Coca Cola company based in West Berlin. The ambitious MacNamara aims at becoming the head of the Western European Coca Cola headquarters located in London. To enhance his chances of promotion, he negotiates with Russian businessmen in order to expand the export of Coca Cola behind the Iron Curtain. However, his boss W. P. Hazeltine (Howard St. John) is less interested in MacNamara striking a deal with the Russians, but rather keen on making him chaperone his seventeen-year-old daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), who is on a trip through Europe. Instead of remaining for two weeks with the MacNamaras, Scarlett Dpa: ‘Vor 50 Jahren: Eins, zwei, drei im Kino’. In: West Deutsche Zeitung, 16 December 2011, https://m. wn.de/Welt/Kultur/2011/12/Vor-50-Jahren-Eins-zwei-drei-im-Kino, accessed 20 October 2019. 151 Cf. Balio, Tino: United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, p. 170. 152 Corliss, Richard: ‘Top Ten Berlin Wall Movies’. In: Time. 11 August 2011. http://entertainment.time. com/2011/08/11/top-10-berlin-wall-movies, accessed 20 October 2019. 153 Cf. Dpa, ‘Vor 50 Jahren: Eins, zwei, drei im Kino’. 154 Cf. Corliss, Richard: ‘Top Ten Berlin Wall Movies’. 155 Sundholm, John et al.: Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema, New York: Scarecrow: 2012, p. 98. 156 Cf. Staguhn, Gerhard: ‘Billy Wilders Berlin-Komödie Eins, zwei, drei. Linker Hit von rechts’. In: Zeit Online. 13 May 1985, no. 23/1985, https://www.zeit.de/1985/23/linker-hit-von-rechts/seite-2, accessed 20 October 2019. 157 Cf. Wolf, ‘Billy Wilder und der Kalte Krieg’. 158 Cf. Hermsdorf, David: Billy Wilder. Filme – Bilder – Kontroverses, Bochum: Paragon Verlag, 2006, p. 139. 159 Philipps, Some Like It Wilder, p. 52. 150

City Limits

84

stays for two months during which time she frequently goes to East Berlin. In the east of the city, she secretly marries the convinced communist Otto (Horst Buchholz) and on top of that gets pregnant by him. To set the historical time frame of the action, the film starts with MacNamara’s offscreen voice explaining that the story takes place at the moment which was leading up to the erection of the Wall: On Saturday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation’s capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs 44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communist sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we’re dealing with – real shifty.160

The division of the city is illustrated through the presence of two completely different ideologies, which visibly shape Berlin’s urban space. Communist East Berlin is shown as entirely in ruins with air balloons with the slogan ‘Yankee Go Home’ dotting the sky. Instead of rebuilding the city, the East Berliners are too busy parading through the rubble. They carry banners with anti-American propaganda, display pictures of Fidel Castro and fly the Soviet flag. The east of the city is depicted as fully in the hands of the communists. The west, on the contrary, is represented as a place where the traces of war have disappeared a long time ago. The camera focuses on a neatly reconstructed business centre on the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s main shopping boulevard. The images are commented by the protagonist’s off-screen voice telling the audience that: ‘the western sector under the allied protection was peaceful, prosperous and enjoyed all the blessing of democracy’.161 The camera ironically zooms into an advertisement of the Coca Cola company and thus establishes a direct link between democracy and capitalism.

Figure 15  Coca Cola advertisement in West Berlin, One, Two, Three. One, Two, Three (00:01:40-00:02:03). Ibid. (00:03:32-00:03:38).

160 161

Urban Space and Territoriality

85

Throughout the film, Coca Cola becomes to stand for American cultural imperialism with MacNamara being eager to commercially ‘invade’ not only the eastern part of the city but the entire Eastern Block. Like certain characters in Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire, the protagonist of One, Two, Three attempts to use the situation in the city for his personal aims. Whereas the characters in the three Lebanese films benefit from ‘the new economy of war’,162 MacNamara tries to make money out of the Cold War. Hoberman sees the character of MacNamara as a ‘comic version of the Ugly American’, a variation of ‘the great gangster’ of the early ’30s in the form of a ‘megalomaniacal boss’.163 The scenes taking place in MacNamara’s office are filmed in the factually existing building of the Coca Cola company, which let Wilder use its name and agreed to shooting sessions in its Berlin headquarters.164 Through the focus on Coca Cola, West Berlin is shown as being exclusively under American influence, even if at the time, the west of the city also belonged to the French and British allies. The individuals occurring in the film are either Russians, Germans or Americans, while French or British characters are entirely absent. The characters in One, Two, Three are reduced to caricatures: the submissive, heel-clicking Germans working for MacNamara have not yet recovered from the dictatorship of the Third Reich, the sly Russian businessmen are more interested in the MacNamara’s blond secretary than in serious negotiations, and MacNamara, his wife, and his boss are entirely convinced of their cultural superiority. The characters’ crossings between the east and the west of the city play an important part in the film. It is very likely that One, Two, Three did not appeal to a German audience in the 1960s as after the construction of the Wall it was no longer possible to move easily between the east and the west of the city. As after the release of the film, Berlin’s reality had completely changed, the story seemed to be outdated and of little interest. Four key scenes of the film take place at the Brandenburg gate, when characters move between both parts of the city. Before the construction of the Wall, the Brandenburg gate was one of the central control points, which people had to pass to go from west to east and vice versa. The first character to cross over to East Berlin in the film is Otto, the communist Scarlett fell in love with. When MacNamara finds out that the daughter of his boss got secretly married, he wants to get rid of the undesired husband by trying to have him arrested in the east of the city. With this aim, he attaches an air balloon with the inscription ‘Russki Go Home’ to the exhaust pipe of Otto’s motorcycle, hoping that the East German border police will take offence. MacNamara’s plan works: the young man is arrested and accused of being an American spy. The scene is particularly interesting as it demonstrates the physical differences of the two parts of Berlin. When Otto drives through the Brandenburg gate to the east, the images

Khatib, Lebanese Cinema, p. 85. Hoberman, ‘Coke Classic’. 164 Cf. Knezevic, Borsilaw: ‘American Capitalism Abroad: Culture and Cash in Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three’. In: Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia, vol. 54, 2009, p. 192. 162 163

86

City Limits

of the city change abruptly. Instead of clean streets and modern business buildings – such as the headquarters of the Coca Cola company – the audience perceives houses in ruins and Communist propaganda posters decorating the streets. The second border crossing in the film is undertaken by MacNamara in the company of his driver, his secretary and his personal assistant. In MacNamara’s car, they aim for East Berlin in order to get help from the Russian businessmen to free Otto. This change of strategy is due to the fact that, in the meantime, MacNamara has learned that Scarlett is pregnant and his boss is due to arrive the next day from the States in order to see his daughter. Therefore, MacNamara has decided he had better present Otto to Mr Haseltine than no husband at all. The border crossing receives a specifically humorous note when MacNamara bribes the East German border guards with a pack of Coca Cola bottles to get to East Berlin. After having successfully passed the Brandenburg gate, MacNamara and his subordinates meet their Russian business partners in the rundown Grand Hotel Potemkin. In the half-empty place, a few couples in East German military uniforms dance to the music of an ancient band, playing the German version of the song Yes We Have No Bananas. Other elderly comrades play chess, get drunk or sleep drunkenly at their table. A picture of Khrushchev pinned to the wall falls out off its frame and reveals a photograph of Stalin. Through the dilapidated Grand Hotel Potemkin, Wilder illustrates the east of the city as old-fashioned and stuck in time. Moreover, the place functions to highlight the communist domination over East Berlin. Yet again, Wilder subversively establishes an ironic contrast between Western progress and eastern backwardness. The third and last border crossing happens in a car chase scene, which abruptly ends at the Brandenburg gate. The Russian businessmen manage to free Otto and hand him over to MacNamara. Previously, they have agreed with MacNamara to obtain his blond secretary in exchange. However, when the Russians realize that they did not get the secretary but MacNamara’s personal assistant disguised as a woman, they start chasing the American industrialist. The hunt leads through East Berlin’s derelict squares and rubble. Trying to catch up with MacNamara’s car, the Russian vehicle gradually falls apart and finally crashes into the Brandenburg gate. Yet again, Wilder derides the communist east of the city, where bad-quality cars leg behind Western technology. The climax of the comic scene takes place when the East German border policeman returns the empty Coca Cola bottles to MacNamara, the bottles which they previously have received as a bribe. The film’s fast pace is enhanced through Wilder’s choice of music: Aram Khachaturian’s rapid Sabre Dance and Richard Wagner’s energetic Ride of the Valkyries add tension and speed to the action. The rapidly advancing One, Two, Three stands in sharp contrast to the slow-paced Lebanese films Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire. Contrary to Alawiyeh, Chamoun and Hojeij, Wilder does not integrate into his plot a flâneur-character functioning as a focalizer. While in the three Lebanese films, characters are able to slowly wander through Beirut and absorbed its overall destruction, One, Two, Three does not leave any time for unhurried contemplation.

Urban Space and Territoriality

87

Walking the line between east and the west The Man on the Wall is set at the beginning of the 1980s. Different from One, Two, Three, the characters are unable to move easily between the east and the west of the city. In contrast to Wilder’s fast paced comedy, Hauff ’s film is particularly slow moving and melancholic, which reminds us of the three Lebanese films discussed in the previous chapter. The individuals featuring in The Man on the Wall are not like in One, Two, Three comic characters, but alienated beings at odds with their lives. The central element in Hauff ’s film is the Wall, which is shown fourteen times during the action. Benjamin Magofsky notes that in no other film of the 1980s, is the Wall as dominant as in The Man on the Wall.165 The strong presence of the barrier in a film shot in 1982 is not surprising as at the end of the 1970s, the world entered the socalled ‘Second Cold War’.166 The changed atmosphere reigning in Europe due to the tensions between the two superpowers did not encourage humorous cinematographic representations of Berlin. Different from One, Two, Three, Hauff ’s film was not rejected by the audience when it first appeared in German cinemas. This might be due to the fact that the situation in the city had not changed in the meantime and thus the film fully captured the ambiance of the time. The director of the film, Reinhard Hauff, is one of Germany’s leading directors and scriptwriters, who apart from his feature films is famous for his documentaries.167 Set in the east and the west of the city, The Man on the Wall is dominated by an oppressive atmosphere which is enhanced through the gloomy music accompanying the action. At the beginning of the film, the protagonist, Arnulf Kabe (Marius MüllerWesternhagen), lives with his wife Andrea (Patricia von Miserony) in East Berlin and is obsessed with the Wall. His mania is driven by his urge to overcome the barrier from both sides. Hauff ’s hero is an eccentric free spirit whose actions are a mystery to the other characters. With his seemingly absurd behaviour, he confuses not only the GDR border police and the Stasi but also the Federal intelligence service. For Kabe, the Wall seems to be a ‘personal irritation’ and overcoming it a ‘person challenge’.168 The protagonist is arrested by the GDR border police during an attempt to cross a checkpoint illegally. After having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and a number of GDR prisons, he is bought out by the West German government. However, he misses his wife who has remained in East Berlin and therefore jumps over the Wall to the east. Landed in the death strip, he is immediately caught by the GDR soldiers. In order to obtain the ‘privilege’ to re-enter East Berlin, the protagonist is bribed into collaborating with the Stasi. In West Berlin, Kabe meets the marginalized journalist Schacht, who tries to write a book on the GDR. Both characters become friends and Kabe moves into Schacht’s flat. Despite still being in love with his wife, Kabe starts an Cf. Magofsky, Berliner Mauer und Deutsche Frage, p. 42. Hobsbawn, Eric John: Das Zeitalter der Extreme. Weltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: DTV, 2002, pp. 306–17. 167 Cf. Heidelbach, Oliver: ‘Reinhard Hauff. Bibliography’. In: IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0369240/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm, accessed 20 October 2019. 168 Flemming, The Berlin Wall, p. 56. 165 166

88

City Limits

affair with the West German woman Victoria (Julie Carmen). Consequently, Kabe is not only torn between the east and the west of the city but also between two women. In The Man on the Wall, the Wall is shown from multiple angles. The action starts with a close-up shot of the protagonist looking with binoculars over the barrier. His gaze is met by the eyeglasses of GDR soldiers in a watchtower. The observation of ‘the other side’ is a recurrent theme in the film. After Kabe’s arrival in the west, the only way of seeing his wife is by looking at her flat through his binoculars. Sitting on a scaffolding, the protagonist stares over the Wall. Nevertheless, the contact with his wife is merely one-sided as she cannot see him. However, the GDR border guards are watching Kabe in the same way as he is looking at them. Through the regards which cross each other, Hauff evokes the theme of GDR state supervision, suggesting that it reaches even beyond the East German border. When Kabe observes his wife, the camera repeatedly zooms into the death strip, showing watchtowers, traps and soldiers. Thus, the director underlines the impenetrability of the construction A number of scenes contain establishing shots of the Wall with Kabe walking along it. This particular camera angle has a double function: on the one hand, it provides a view from above on the Wall, which lets the barrier appear gigantic and threatening. On the other hand, Kabe looks exceedingly small and vulnerable in front of the massive construction. Letting the protagonist appear tiny next to the massive construction, Hauff underlines the inhuman nature of the border between the east and west of the city. At the same time, he illustrates Berlin as a place in which its inhabitants are dominated by a colossal edifice. In other scenes, establishing shots are taken from the window of Schacht’s flat, which is situated on the western side of the Spree embankment, providing a view on Wall and death strip. Yet again, the audience perceives Kabe looking melancholically through his binoculars to the east. Filmed from a bird’s eye perspective, the border between east and west appears out of proportion as not only the Wall but also the river function as a dividing line between the two parts of Berlin. Similar to Resurrection Man, Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and Belt of Fire, the protagonist in The Man on the Wall functions as a reflector figure in the shape of an urban flâneur. Disconnected from the crowd, Kabe observes the western part of the divided capital by wandering through it at a slow pace. On his walks through the city, the audience perceives West Berlin through the protagonist’s eyes. It is striking that West Berlin seems as gloomy as its eastern counterpart, which is shown at the beginning of the film. Presenting East and West Berlin’s urban space as similarly sad, the director refrains from elevating one political system over the other. This equal representation of the two parts of the city differs from Wilders’ illustration of East and West Berlin. In One, Two, Three, the east of the city is depicted as visibly run-down and backwards, whereas the west embodies modern progress. In The Man on the Wall, Kabe’s repeated use of binoculars enforces the protagonists’ role as a detached observer. The fact that Kabe constantly looks over the Wall to the east of the city attributes to the film a Western perspective, suggesting that people living on the other side of the border are locked out. In this context, a further connection between Resurrection Man and The Man on the Wall can be made. Similar  to a

Urban Space and Territoriality

89

Baudelairian flâneur, both protagonists discover crimes on their walks through their respective cities. However, the nature of the crimes is different. Whereas Victor, the protagonist of Evan’s film, searches for places of cold-blooded murders on his walks through Belfast, Kabe’s eyes remain on the Wall, which for him is the incarnation of political crime. In The Man on the Wall, a number of characters cross the border between the two parts of the city. However, these border crossings happen in very different ways according to the individual’s East or West German citizenship. The first time the East German protagonist gets from East to West Berlin is in a bus in the company of other GDR citizens who are bought out by the German government. Shortly after his arrival, he climbs over the Wall and jumps back to the east, where he is arrested by the GDR border police. After having agreed to collaborate with the Stasi, Kabe is allowed to pass through the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail, a secret Stasi tunnel, connecting east and west of the city. With this tunnel, Hauff alludes to a secret underground passage built for the members of the Stasi which was said factually to have existed.169 His collaboration with the state security forces eventually enables Kabe to navigate freely between the two parts of the city as an agent. With the protagonist, Hauff illustrates the situation of people living in the east of the city: as a GDR citizen, Kabe is unable to move freely between East and West Berlin and consequently is reduced to either jumping illegally over the Wall or getting around the obstacle by cunningly benefitting from official and unofficial institutional help, which means the West German government on the one side, and the Stasi on the other. Contrary to Kabe, Schacht, thanks to his West German passport, crosses over to East Berlin without any problems. His mission is to deliver a message to Kabe’s wife, who has remained in the east. In the same way as Schacht, Victoria, Kabe’s lover, passes the border crossing without difficulty. Through the different characters, Hauff alludes to the restricted freedom of movement in the GDR and underlines that legal border crossings are only possible one-way: whereas citizens of West Berlin can easily reach the other part of the city, the inhabitants of East Berlin have to trick the system, not rarely at the expense of their lives. The climax of inventive border crossing strategies is reached at the end of the film. Kabe’s wife and Victoria exchange passports and identities for a day. While Andrea spends a night with her husband in West Berlin, Victoria stays in Andrea’s flat in the east of the city. In this way, the two women undermine the eastern and the western control system. Another rather comic, but unwanted, border crossing takes place during the inauguration of a Wall memorial in West Berlin. A refugee from East Berlin is invited to show the crowd how he managed to get to the West, using a hang glider. Nevertheless, during his demonstration he gets confused and flies back over the Wall to the east. Kabe, however, is amused by the change of directions, assuming that the pilot wanted to show the spectators that he actually intended to go back.

Entrances to this tunnel allegedly existed at the train stations of Friedrich Strasse and Wolackstrasse. Cf. Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story, p. 128.

169

90

City Limits

In his film, Hauff alludes to the political use East and West Germany made of attempted border crossings. Kabe’s return to the GDR by jumping over the Wall into East German territory is instrumentalized by eastern and Western media for their own propaganda. The Western TV channel reports that ‘a drunken man’ has jumped over the Wall into the east where he was ‘immediately arrested by the border guards’.170 The fact that the individual is assumed to be drunk implies that for the inhabitants of the Federal Republic, only a person without a clear mind would go to the east out of free will. Furthermore, the news report emphasizes the uncompromising behaviour on the part of the guards as Kabe is allegedly arrested straight away. The East German TV chain, however, follows an entirely different discourse. The news speaker declares that ‘a young unemployed’ man jumped over the Wall and ‘rendered himself to the police’.171 This discourse is in line with the GDR propaganda of the time: East German media regularly reported on the growing unemployment rate in the Federal Republic and on the ever-increasing number of drug addicts. The TV report suggests that due to superior living conditions in the GDR, the man was eager to get to East Berlin for a better life. Apart from that, the report underlines that the border police did not have to intervene, as the individual has surrendered himself. With the diverging discourses shown on TV, Hauff mocks East and West German competing political narratives. In The Man on the Wall, Kabe is repeatedly held for an insane or drunk individual by the East and West German authorities. When he tries to cross the border at the beginning of the film, he tells the border police at the checkpoint: ‘Arrest me, I’m thinking of escape.’172 The officer initially orders him to go home and sober up. When Kabe tries to walk through the barrier, the policeman calls him a ‘fool’ and puts him into a psychiatric hospital. When Kabe jumps back into the east, he begs the border guard in the death strip to let him in because he is homesick. Like his colleagues at the checkpoint, the solider considers Kabe to be insane. With the soldier’s reaction, the director ironically implies that for people living in the GDR, the idea to cross over into the East is entirely absurd. In this way, Hauff implies that even those who seemed to be faithful to the state regard the east as inferior to the west. Not only the border guards but also the Stasi are unable to make sense out of the protagonist’s erratic behaviour. After his jump back into the east, Kabe is crossexamined by a member of the Stasi, who enumerates his attempts to cross the border from east to west over the last few years. The interrogator points out that in the past, the protagonist had already ‘violated’ the border four times. Kabe answers stoically that this was by going ‘into the other direction’. The increasingly annoyed Stasi member states: ‘You constantly want to cross the border. Sometimes from this side, sometimes from the other. Where do you actually want to go?’ Kabe’s absurd answer is merely: ‘To the other side’.173 At a later point in the film, the protagonist even states that wherever he is, he does not want to stay. Kabe’s seemingly nonsensical utterances illustrate the The Man on the Wall (00:53:46-00:53:56). Ibid. (00:54:06-00:54:18). 172 Ibid. (00:04:14-00:04:16). 173 The Man on the Wall (00:53:28-00:53:32). 170 171

Urban Space and Territoriality

91

protagonist’s apolitical attitude. The hero’s unpredictable border crossings show that he does not choose one political system over the other. The only political statement the protagonist wants to make is that the Wall has to be taken down. Kabe’s desire to tear down the Wall is also expressed through the Moses-motive which occurs throughout the film. Kabe has recurrent visions of the biblical figure and imagines himself as a liberator and saviour. He even sees himself in his dreams as Moses who has the power to open the Wall and to lead the German people through it. The film ends with a scene in which Kabe is balancing himself on top of the Wall, literally walking between East and West Berlin. In the east, he is watched by the GDR border police, whereas in the west, American soldiers are staring at him. Different from Wilder, who in One, Two, Three attempts to mock the Russian and American allies, Hauff seems to follow a more political agenda in his film by protesting against the presence of the barrier.

Undivided sky over a divided city Wim Wenders, the director of Wings of Desire, is one of Germany’s internationally most acclaimed filmmakers.174 In an interview he gave in 1988, Wenders states: ‘Berlin is very extreme – even its location on the map is very extreme. It exists between different lines of interests and energies.’175 With ‘lines of interest and energies’, the director refers to the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States as well as the conflicting ideologies of capitalism and communism, which found their expression in their most intense form in Berlin. The city is thus represented as the epicentre of the Cold War. Wenders explains that Wings of Desire was conceived as a ‘B-movie’ which was shot very quickly in order to prevent his production company Road Movies from going bankrupt.176 Therefore, he did not expect his thirteenth feature film to become a big hit. Besides his film Paris Texas (1984), Wings of Desire was one of the director’s commercially most successful films. Apart from his numerous feature films, Wenders is famous for his documentary Buena Vista Social Club, which contributed to a revival of Cuban music. In the centre of Wings of Desire are the two angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sanders), who wander through Berlin and hover over the city. They listen in on human thoughts and feelings and cogitate about the earthly existence. Invisible for adults, the two characters can only be seen by children. Damiel eventually falls in love with the trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin) and decides to become a human being. The film is shot in black and white with a few flashbacks to Berlin during the Second World War which are in colour. When Damiel metamorphoses into a human being, the images take on colour until the end of the film. Cf. ‘The Twenty Best German Film Directors’. In: IMBd. https://www.imdb.com/list/ls009365348/, accessed 20 October 2019. 175 Fusco, ‘Angels, History and Poetic Fantasy’, p. 14. 176 Cf. Menzel, Conrad: ‘Die ganze Stadt’. In: Der Freitag. Das Meinungsmedium. 23 September 2012. https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/die-ganze-Stadt, accessed 20 October 2019. 174

92

City Limits

Similar to The Man on the Wall, Wings of Desire is a very slow-moving, melancholic film. Roger Ebert notes that Wenders’ film does not ‘rush headlong into plot, but has the patience of its angels’.177 Peter Zander even goes so far as to call Wings of Desire ‘a film almost without action but full of poetry’.178 Wings of Desire does not contain a central line of action but consists of a number of sequences of different scenes in which Damiel and Cassiel listen to the city’s inhabitants’ feelings, longings and desires. The critic Coco Fusco states that Wenders offers ‘a lyrical reflection on German history and culture that transforms Berlin into a rich symbolic landscape’.179 Not only do the two angels belong to the various symbols occurring in the film but also the places in which they appear have symbolic meanings. The sky is one of the most important symbols, as it is the only space in Berlin which connects the two parts of the city. At the same time, the undivided sky suggests that freedom can exclusively be enjoyed by birds and angels who are the only creatures allowed to move freely in and over they city. Whereas Damiel and Cassiel are able to overcome the Wall in the sky, the human beings on the ground are separated from each other by the enormous barrier. Wings of Desire contains numerous shots taken from a helicopter which apart from showing the city’s sky look down on Berlin’s urban space. Christian Rogowski observes that the film offers a ‘quasi-documentary view of urban melancholy’, presenting Berlin as ‘a landscape of human despair and isolation’.180 At the time of the production of Wings of Desire, helicopter shots, which today are common practice, were an entire novelty. Flying over the city, the helicopter pilot had to make sure not to infringe the GDR air sovereignty in order to avoid an international conflict.181 Apart from the sky, a further symbolic place is the Victory Column [Siegessäule], that is the statue of the goddess of victory, which is one of the resting places of the two angels. The 67-m high memorial is one of the most important sights in Berlin and commemorates the wars which lead to the inauguration of the German empire in 1871. The statue is an enormous golden angel, called by the Berliners ‘Golden Else’ [Goldelse].182 Sitting on the statue’s shoulder, the two protagonists contemplate Berlin, which from above appears like a united city. Choosing this particular place as a lookout for his protagonists, Wenders expresses a desire for the city’s and – in a larger sense – Germany’s reunification. Another viewpoint chosen by Damiel is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the symbolic centre of Berlin. After severe bombing during the Second World War, the church was destroyed apart from its west tower. The ruin of the tower was preserved

Ebert, Roger: ‘Wings of Desire Movie Review and Film Summary (1998)’. In: Great Movie, https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movies-wings-of-desire-1998, accessed 20 October 2019. 178 Cf. Zander, ‘Ein Klassiker, völlig neu gesehen’. 179 Fusco, ‘Angels, History and Poetic Fantasy’, p. 14. 180 Rogowski, Christian: ‘“To Be Continued.” History in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and Thomas Brasch’s Domino.’ In: German Studies Review, vol. 15, no. 3, 1992, p. 554. 181 Cf. Zander, ‘Ein Klassiker, völlig neu gesehen’. 182 Cf. Hartman; Kistner, Berlin, p. 86. 177

Urban Space and Territoriality

93

Figure 16  Damiel sitting on the Golden Else, Wings of Desire.

as an anti-war memorial for peace and reconciliation.183 Through the church, Wenders establishes a link between the Second World War and the Cold War, which both have given rise to the city’s division. At the same time, the director communicates a striving for the end of the animosities of the two Superpowers. As the Victory Column and the Memorial Church are situated in West Berlin, the film receives a Western perspective. Only in a few scenes, East German streets can be seen from a distance when the camera looks down on the city from a bird’s eye perspective. The film begins with a series of aerial views of Berlin and its inhabitants with camera movements that ‘mime the flight of angels’.184 Rogowski notes that through this particular shot angle, ‘the film achieves the feeling of a documentary on life in the city, made by an omniscient observer’.185 Even if the camera does not focus on the Wall, the audience is confronted with a number of borders and barriers seen from above. Streets, motorways, train rails, walls and blocks of buildings cut Berlin’s urban space into small sections. Later on in the film, Damiel’s off-screen voice comments on the capital’s various internal borders which are more than ever present. Describing the city’s boundaries, the protagonist employs a vocabulary which evokes the Wall and the death strip. In a Berlin accent, Damiel explains that each street has its on ‘border barrier’ and that properties in the city are separated from each other by ‘a no man’s land strip’ which is ‘disguised as a hedge or a water moat’. Those who happen to get into this no man’s land ‘fall over chevaux-de-frize or are hit by a lazer beam’.186 Even if Cf. ibid., p. 84. Mariniello, Silvestra: ‘Experience and Memory in the Films of Wim Wenders’. In: Substance, vol. 34, no. 1, 2005, p. 172. 185 Rogowski ‘To be Continued’, p. 554. 186 Wings of Desire. (00:42:59-00:43:15). 183 184

94

City Limits

in Damiel’s description of Berlin’s city space the Wall is not explicitly mentioned, it is omnipresent due to the military vocabulary used by the protagonist. Thus, Berlin is not only illustrated as a city cut into two by a state border but is depicted as a place which is shaped by countless inner limits and barriers. In this context, David Clark refers to the ‘fragmentation of the city into a series of disconnected spaces’.187 The illustration of Berlin as a segmented capital differs from the Berlin illustrated in One, Two, Three and The Man on the Wall, where the city is merely divided into east and west. In contrast to Wilder’s and Hauff ’s film, border crossings are entirely absent in Wings of Desire. The fact that human beings do not move from one part of the city to the other enhances the feeling of seclusion communicated in the film. Hoberman observes that Wings of Desire manages to capture the spirit of Berlin with ‘its stoic melancholy, its somnolence, its self-absorption’.188 He further praises Wenders for expressing ‘the deep sense of loneliness and desertion that was sometimes called Mauerkrankheit (wall sickness) or Insul Gefühl’.189 With these comments, Hobermann underlines Berlin’s division and illustrates the capital as a city which is not only divided into half but also – seen from a Western perspective – cut off from the rest of the country. Marion, the trapeze artist in Wings of Desire, also takes on a Western perspective by observing that it is impossible to get lost in Berlin as you always end up at the Wall. This commentary underlines the division of the city into east and west, suggesting that the eastern part of the city is entirely absent on the ‘mental maps’ of the inhabitants of West Berlin. One of the key scenes of the film takes place at the Potsdam Place. Before the building of the Wall, the Potsdam Place was an international business district with a busy traffic junction. After Germany’s division, the heart of the city turned into a huge wasteland divided by the Wall.190 The main character featuring in the scene is Homer (Curt Bois), ‘the eternal narrator’191 as Wenders calls him. Homer materializes in the form of an old man who is desperately looking for the Potsdam Place he used to known before the war. Accompanied by the invisible Cassiel, he crosses the immense empty space and walks along the western side of the Wall adorned with graffiti. The lengthy scene focuses on Homer’s thoughts and does not contain any significant action. Stumbling through the muddy wasteland, Homer’s off-screen voice tells the audience that in those days, the Potsdam Place was a lively place with cafés, department stores, tramways and horse drawn omnibuses. A series of long shots shows Homer and Cassiel wandering through the derelict space. The black-and-white images create a particularly gloomy atmosphere and communicate a feeling of desolation. In the background, the TV tower situated on East Berlin’s Alexander Place can be spotted. However, it is cut off from the west of the city by the Wall, and thus the division of the capital becomes emphasized once more. Clarke, ‘In search of Home’, p. 154. Hoberman, The Red Atlantis, p. 7. 189 Ibid. 190 Cf. Bahr, Divided City, p. 113. 191 Cf. Graf, Alexander: The Cinema of Wim Wenders. A Celluloid Highway, London, 2002, p. 128. 187 188

Urban Space and Territoriality

95

Silvestra Mariniello observes that the long shot, the sequence’s duration and the sound-image relation render the absence of the liveliness of the past.192 The scene ends with Homer sitting down in an ancient armchair, which has been left on the wasteland. Claiming that he will not abandon his search for the Potsdam Place until he has found it, Homer refuses to accept the present. The character’s ‘mental map’ of the Potsdam Place is different from the city’s actual reality to such an extent that he cannot believe that the place on which he is sitting had undergone profound modification and was entirely disfigured by history. Homer’s incapacity to locate the wasteland of the former Potsdam Place on his cognitive geography reminds us of Chafic, the protagonist of Belt of Fire, who refuses to accept the absence of a previously dismantled the checkpoint. In both cases, the evolution of the respective cities went too fast for the characters to be grasped. In Wings of Desire, Homer’s vain search of the past communicates that the capital’s earlier shape, its life and pre-war society have been irretrievably lost. As in Resurrection Man, Beirut, the Encounter, In the Shadows of the City and The Man on the Wall, the two protagonists in Wings of Desire take on the form of urban flâneurs. The flâneur theme is even more prominent in Wenders’ film than in the others as the two angels do not only wander through the city but also dominate the sky above it. Similar to the Baudelairian flâneur, Damiel and Cassiel are detached from the crowd as they are invisible for adult human beings. As in the above-mentioned films, the protagonists function as focalizers who guide the audience in their perception of the city. Through the angels’ off- and on-screen observations, Berlin and its in habitants are constantly described and analysed. As omniscient commentators, Damiel and Cassiel establish a connection between the city’s past and present. In a scene taking place in the middle of the film, Cassiel drives through Berlin in the back of an old-timer-style taxi. The fact that the protagonist registers the images of the city out of a car reminds us of scenes in Resurrection Man, In the Shadows of the City and The Belt of Fire. While Victor contemplates the nocturnal Belfast from his ‘Bond mobile’, Rami observes Beirut’s derelict buildings from his ambulance window, and Chafic stares at the ruins of the Lebanese capital from his car. On Cassiel’s drive through contemporary Berlin, however, images of the past and present fuse. Wenders includes a series of archive images showing the destruction of the city during the Second World War. The streets are entirely in ruins and the city’s inhabitants try to clean up the rubble. In this way, historical images of devastation become linked to the contemporary damage which the aftermath of the war has done to the city. In the context of this particular scene, Mariniello notes that ‘history is not linear, the past persists in the present, and reality exits alongside fiction’.193 The film terminates with Cassiel’s metamorphosis into a human being. Wandering with Damiel through the death strip, he expresses his desire to experience human sensations such as happiness, fear and grief. Significantly, Damiel’s last conversation as an angel happens on the death strip, a place which would mean death for any human

Mariniello, ‘Experience and Memory in the Films of Wim Wenders’, p. 173. Ibid., p. 174.

192 193

96

City Limits

being trying to penetrate it. When Damiel transforms into a human being, his friend carries him over to the western side of the Wall and in this way, saves him from being shot by the border guards. This scene suggests that all of a sudden, Damiel, as a man of flesh and blood, becomes confronted with borders. In this way, Wenders underlines the limited freedom of movement to which the inhabitants of the city are exposed. However, the film does not end on a pessimistic note. After Damiel has found Marion, his soul mate, Wings of Desire ends with a view of the undivided sky over Berlin with the caption ‘Fortsetzung folgt’ [literally: sequel to follow], asserting that history is indeed ‘to be continued.’ In this way, Wenders implies that the story of the characters, as well as the story of the city is not yet over and it will go on. Thus, the director expresses hope for the reunification of the capital. When he produced Wings of Desire, Wenders did not intend shooting a sequel. In 1993, however, he made Faraway, So Close! [In weiter, Ferne so nah!], a film which takes up the story of Wings of Desire. Set in post-reunification Berlin, the film does not engage with the capital’s former division; it rather focuses on the evil sides of globalized capitalism and its consequences for the city’s population.

3

Tropes of violence

In the following films, tropes of violence play an important part. In this context, ‘tropes’ are defined as ‘images’1 or ‘significant recurrent themes’,2 which dominate the action of the films. In their different cinematographic representations, Belfast, Beirut and Berlin are literally shaped by various kinds of violence. The violence experienced by the cities’ inhabitants is often not only of physical but also of a psychological nature. As each conflict has different origins and is carried out in a specific environment, the violent events happening in Belfast, Beirut and Berlin take on various configurations. Nevertheless, in whatever form it is perpetrated, violence contributes considerably to the respective urban divisions. In the films discussed in the present chapter, physical violence may be acted out by the Northern Irish paramilitaries, the Lebanese militia or the East German secret police and repeatedly finds its expression in the form of shootings, bomb explosions, abductions or imprisonments. Characters might experience psychological violence through pressure exercised on them by their own community or family, the opposite camp or, as it is often the case in German films, by the secret police. A further link between the films is the unusual perspective from which their action is told. For this reason, Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization springs to mind as a useful mode of analysis.3 Shklovsky claims that in order to raise awareness, art has to make the ‘habitual’ appear to be ‘strange’. He explains that ‘the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’.4 In this way, art functions to make ‘objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception’.5 This means that only if things are presented in an unusual way, will they call attention to themselves and force the observer to contemplate them not only anew but also in detail. The estranging perspectives on Belfast, Beirut and Berlin adopted in the following films generate an alienating vision on the respective cities and encourage the audience to perceive the Northern Irish Troubles, the Lebanese conflict and the Cold War from a fresh angle. Attributing to

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/trope, accessed 20 October 2019. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/trope, accessed 20 October 2019. 3 Shklovsky, Viktor: ‘Art as Technique’. In: Lemon, Lee; Reiss, Marion (eds.): Russian Formalist Criticism. Four Essay, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 3–24. 4 Ibid., p. 12. 5 Ibid. 1 2

98

City Limits

their films a defamiliarizing perspective, the different directors attempt to engage with the violence acted out in theses cities from an innovative point of view.

Coping with sectarian violence: Belfast in Titanic Town, The Boxer and Good Vibrations According to Eamonn Hughes, Belfast is too complex to be easily comprehended: ‘There is always more happening than can be apprehended by sight alone, and therefore to understand the city, one has to stand outside it.’6 In the light of Belfast’s complicated socio-political structures, exploring the urban complex from the margins seems to be a suitable way to achieve a detached vision of the city. The following chapter shall thus focus on Titanic Town (1998) by Rodger Michell, The Boxer (1998) by Jim Sheridan and Good Vibrations (2013) by Lisa Barros D’SA and Glenn Leyburn. The three films provide an unusual perspective on Belfast through the eyes of characters who could be seen as marginalized individuals. In the following, the term ‘marginalized individual’ is employed to describe liminal characters, who are on the edges of the mainstream and who are not primarily interested in the perpetuation of political violence or in the Northern Irish political discourse. Titanic Town, The Boxer and Good Vibrations illustrate Belfast’s reality in the 1970s and 1980s by recreating the atmosphere of political terror and alluding to existing personalities and organizations. Referring to events taken from Northern Irish recent history, the films address the situation in Belfast through a focus on the lives of unconventional protagonists who offer quirky, unconventional views. Different tropes of violence are used in order to depict the characters’ lives in a deeply divided city. In Titanic Town, the Troubles are perceived from the point of view of the teenager Annie McPhelimy (Nuala O’Neill). She and the other young people portrayed in Titanic Town are regarded as marginalized individuals because they are neither targets nor proponents of any political ideology nor are they agents of violence. In contrast to adults, who are the main political actors and therefore at the centre of the Troubles, children and young people are caught in the crossfire without being actively involved in acts of political violence. Consequently, they tend to occupy positions that are peripheral rather than central. Not belonging to the adults’ world, they become collateral victims of the Troubles. Annie, the protagonist of Titanic Town, attempts to lead a ‘normal’ life in republican West-Belfast, torn between her A-level exams and her first boyfriend. Her youthful perspective on the world around her stands out against more common perceptions of the Troubles as seen through the eyes of adult and mostly male characters in film. In cinematographic representations of Northern Ireland, the depiction of the experience of political violence from the perspective of adolescents has been largely neglected.7 Hughes, Eamonn: ‘Belfastards and Derrieres’. In: The Irish Review, no. 20, 1997, p. 44. Cf. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 210.

6 7

Tropes of Violence

99

In the Boxer, the female protagonist is Maggie (Emma Watson), a young woman who is married to an imprisoned IRA man. As a prisoner’s wife in republican West Belfast, she is living on the margins of society. The film differs from traditional Troubles thrillers, as it illustrates the pressure which the republican community exercises on women whose husbands are in jail. The Boxer’s focus on the lives of women diverges from the habitual male discourse followed in Troubles thrillers. Due to their stereotypical protagonists, such as spies, soldiers, paramilitaries, policemen and secret agents, Northern Irish thrillers habitually focus on male heroes and largely ignore the female experience of conflict. In this context, Christine St. Peter calls attention to the difficulty met by Northern Irish women to insert their ‘voice’ into the ‘extravagantly militarized “masculine discourse”’8 dominating the Troubles. She rightly states that ‘women’s experiences, political voices, movements, and history have traditionally been occluded or subordinated to the demands of the conflict’.9 In this sense, it could be argued that prisoners’ wives are doubly marginalized in Northern Irish society, not only as women in a male dominated environment but also as wives of imprisoned paramilitary fighters. They have to bear the burden of supporting a family on their own without any possibility of starting a new life with another man. The main character of Good Vibrations, on the contrary, is the DJ Terri Hooley, a music enthusiast, idealist and rebel, played by Belfast actor Richard Dormer. Fascinated by the emerging underground punk movement, Terri opens a record shop in the centre of Belfast in the midst of the Troubles. His unconditional passion for music in a city dominated by sectarian fighting is not always comprehended by his family and friends. As a result, he comes to feel like a ‘spiritual’ outsider. By choosing the world of music, he sets himself apart from the people surrounding him. Living at a remove from the political tensions that underline the divide between the two communities, Terri is doubly ostracized: he is set apart by his consuming involvement in the world of music in general, and more precisely by his absorption in the vibrant but marginal world of punk. Through the alienating perspectives of the three marginalized characters – Annie, Maggie and Terri – the three films communicate a somewhat unusual vision of Belfast.

A-levels, shootings and paramilitary boyfriends: Belfast from the perspective of a young girl The screenplay of Titanic Town was written by Anne Devlin and is based on Mary Costello’s eponymous semi-autobiographical novel10 inspired by her adolescence in West-Belfast’s Andersonstown in the early 1970s.11 Funded by the local lottery,12 the

St. Peter, Christine: Changing Ireland. Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000, p. 3. 9 Ibid., p. 95. 10 Costello, Mary: Titanic Town, London: Methuen, 1992. 11 Cf. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 176. 12 Cf. Hill, ‘Divorcing Jack’, p. 235. 8

100

City Limits

film is set in the republican west of the city at a tense period of the Troubles. The action takes place against the background of the Women’s Peace Movement, in which Bernie McPhelimy (Julie Walters) – the protagonist’s mother – becomes one of the leading figures. This imaginary movement is modelled on the Peace People, a peace initiative founded by Betty Williams and Mairead Maguire in the mid-seventies.13 The organization was started up by a local group of people protesting against the ongoing violence in their area. Eventually, it turned into an internationally supported peace movement for which Williams and Maguire received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.14 Costello’s interest in the Peace People most likely springs from the fact that her own mother was involved in the organization. Titanic Town shows the different ways in which the city as the centre of violence enters the life of children and adolescents, in particular the life of Annie McPhelimy and her younger siblings Sinead, Thomas and Brenda. As they do not play a central role in the clashes of the two communities, these characters observe political violence from the margins. In Michell’s film, one of the main tropes of violence is paramilitary action. The story begins with a sequence taking place in a housing estate in Andersonstown, the dwelling place of the McPhelimy family in West Belfast. One night, Annie observes a violent scene from her bedroom window: she sees a shooting being carried out by an IRA man who is firing at a British army helicopter. The front garden turns into a battlefield used by both, the army and the IRA. In this way, the urban space is seen as a threatening zone, which cannot be protected from acts of violence. However, this fierce outbreak of fighting on her own doorstep does not terrify Annie. Instead of panicking, she quietly continues to observe the IRA sniper with emotional detachment as if the event taking place in such close proximity was not part of reality but merely something happening on TV. The protagonist’s unmoved reaction shows the extent to which armed confrontation has become an everyday occurrence to her. The gunfire in the garden makes Bernie, Annie’s mother, storm outside to chase the sniper. In Titanic Town, the character of Bernie can be seen as the stereotypical mother, who is protective of her family. However, taking her duty as a mother in troubled Belfast very seriously, Bernie leaves the confinement of the domestic sphere and turns into a political activist. In confronting the sniper in her garden, she follows the central aim of the Women’s Peace Movement, which is to stop the shooting in the area. However, rising up against the paramilitaries is a dangerous enterprise in West Belfast, where the republicans are seen as fighting to protect the members of the Catholic community. Aidan (Ciarán Hinds), the father of the family, is aware of the implications of getting caught in the crossfire between the IRA and the British army, and so he tries to prevent his wife from endangering herself. Ignoring her husband’s objections, Bernie runs into the garden followed by her three children. In this scene, the adolescent protagonist is not only confronted with the violence generated by the

Cf. Goodby, John (ed.): The Essential Glossary. Irish Studies, London: Arnold, 2003, p. 29; Elliott, Sydney; Flackes, W.D.: A Political Directory 1968–1999, Belfast: Blackstaff, 1999, p. 392. 14 Cf. Feeney, The Troubles, p. 57. 13

Tropes of Violence

101

complex interactions of governmental forces and counterhegemonic structures, but also with her parents’ disagreement about how to respond to the situation. While the father pleads for keeping quiet and staying out of trouble, the mother insists on getting involved. Consequently, Annie has to make up her own mind about how to act in order to cope with the local tensions, which have invaded her family’s space. The functioning of the McPhelimy family plays a central part in the film. While the father is represented as a weak person, who is repeatedly taken to hospital because of his bursting stomach ulcer, Bernie is illustrated as a strong character, who leads the family and follows a determined political line as a peace activist. Thus, Annie does not only have to come to terms with the danger of sectarian fighting; she also has to handle complex family structures formed by the omnipresence of this same violence. Despite the violent actions graphically depicted in the film, the scene also takes on a humorous tone. When the shooting wakes up the family, Bernie is as much concerned about the IRA in the garden as about the fact that Annie might see her father in his underwear. Rushing downstairs she shouts at her daughter: ‘Annie close your eyes, your father has no trousers on!’15 In a scene which responds to Bakhtinian ideas of carnivalization, the gravity of the situation is humorously subverted through Bernie’s nonsensical utterance. According to Bakhtin, the established divisions between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ are dissolved by mockery and irony.16 By giving equal importance to the presence of a violent gunman and the risk that Annie might see her father half dressed, Bernie inadvertently reduces the threatening presence of the IRA to something almost trivial. This juxtaposition and the laughter it provokes make the audience aware of the different ways in which violence has become the norm in Belfast during the 1970s. The character of Bernie receives a further comic dimension due to the clothes she is wearing when she tries to stop the shooting. Neither intimidated by the IRA, nor by the searchlights of the army helicopter, she storms outside dressed in her nightgown with curlers in her hair. Different from the helicopters in Nothing Personal and Resurrection Man which generate a thrilling atmosphere of danger, in Titanic Town, the British army helicopter is used to produce a comic effect, illuminating Bernie from above as if she was a comedian acting on a theatre stage. In his discussion about how humour functions, Noël Carroll claims that the key to comic amusement is a deviation from a presupposed norm.17 Consequently, the incongruity created through a digression from an assumed standard serves to generate laughter.18 In the context of the given scene, Bernie’s reaction departs from the behaviour expected from a Republican working-class mother, who is supposed to respect the IRA and to respond to the code of virtuous conduct prescribed by the Catholic Church. Challenging the paramilitaries in her nightdress would not only be seen as scandalous by the religious institution; it Titanic Town. Roger Mitchel. 1998. (00:07:28-00:07:29). Bakhtin, Mikhail: ‘Epic in the Novel’. In: Holquits Michael (ed./trans.): The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988, p. 23. 17 Cf. Carroll, Noël: Humour, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 17. 18 Cf. ibid. 15 16

102

City Limits

also amounts to a violation of Bernie’s own rules of female respectability. While she is eager to prevent Annie from seeing her father in his underwear, she gives little or no thought to exposing herself in her nightwear to the British army and the IRA. The young protagonist has to make sense of her mother’s contradictory behaviour in order to find her individual way of surviving in the midst of violence. In contrast to Bernie, who is stirred into action by the gunfire, Aidan passively observes the shooting from the safe distance of his bedroom. Due to her parents’ diverging reactions, Annie is confronted with two contrasting role models. In order to create her own position, she has to decide with whom to identify and whose approach to adopt. The protagonist’s dilemma of allegiance attracts the audience’s attention to the choices to which young people are exposed in a situation shaped by political unrest. In line with Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization,19 it could be argued that through the alienating perspective of an adolescent girl, the spectators are encouraged to enter into the mind of young people, trying to cope with the Troubles. In this way, the audience is led to reflect on the impact of political violence from a different angle. A further trope of violence, which can be observed in Titanic Town, is the intervention of the British army, which by the republican population of West Belfast is seen as a hostile action. British soldiers do not only try to track down IRA-snipers, they also raid republican working-class areas, seemingly randomly arresting members of the Catholic community. The different interventions are observed by the adolescent protagonist. Throughout the film, high-angled shots are used as a cinematographic device in order to illustrate the protagonist as a distant observer. Shooting several scenes from above allows the director to illustrate Annie’s detached attitude towards the events happening in her direct environment. On a number of occasions, Annie watches the goings-on in the street while hidden behind a curtain from her first floor bedroom window. Echoing the opening scene of the film, these repeated scenarios underline the omnipresence of political tension in Annie’s life. The bedroom window allows the protagonist to follow the violent confrontations between the IRA and the British army from a physical and mental distance. In a sequence depicting an army raid, a high-angled shot is once again employed to present the young girl as an uninvolved spectator. From her bedroom window, Annie witnesses how the British army invades republican West Belfast with the intention of randomly arresting male members of the Catholic community. In this scene, she is not only exposed to the violence carried out by the forces of the establishment, but once again also confronted with the contrasting reactions of her parents to such an event. The subversive humour discussed in the above-mentioned scene is also present in the depiction of the army raid. When the army violently enters the area, Bernie’s main concern is that her husband is still undressed. She shouts at him: ‘Put your trousers on! They will come and get you in your bare arse!’20 Thus, she tries to prevent Aidan from being seen by neighbours and soldiers in his

Cf. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, pp. 3–24. Titanic Town. (00:13:25-00:13:28).

19 20

Tropes of Violence

103

underwear in case he gets arrested. According to Vivian Mercier, humour springs from the absurd, which is laughable because it is ‘untrue or irrational or, at the very least, exaggerated’.21 In this light, we might say that in the present scene, humour is generated through the exaggerated importance Bernie attributes to outward appearances in this tense situation. As the arrest of her husband does not seem unlikely to her, she wants at least to make sure that he is taken away in a dignified way. In the existing circumstances, Bernie’s words seem rather surreal, considering the consequences the incarceration of the father would have for the family. The humorous scene demonstrates the absurdities of everyday life in Belfast to which the adolescent protagonist is exposed. Bakhtin claims that laughter does not ‘deny seriousness but purifies and completes it’.22 Furthermore, laughter liberates from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified as well as from ‘the single meaning23’. In this sense, the humour produced in the scene does not aim at ridiculing a certain behaviour generated by violent circumstances but intends to sharpen the audience’s view for the impact of the Troubles on the city’s inhabitants. In a further scene, Bernie’s behaviour gives rise to what Carroll calls ‘comic amusement’.24 During the raid of the area, the British army violently enters the family’s house in order to look for hidden weapons. Searching the children’s bedrooms, a soldier inspects the floor under the beds. Less irritated by the violation of the family’s private sphere than by the unkempt state of Annie’s room, Bernie snaps at her daughter: ‘Look at the dust under your bed!’25 Scolding her daughter for not having cleaned the floor, Bernie suggests that domestic issues and political violence are matters of comparable importance. However, the soldier is more interested in tracking down hidden weapons than in the dirt under Annie’s bed. An alienating view of the Northern Irish conflict is created through Bernie’s preoccupation with cleanliness, which in a peaceful environment would not be surprising from the mouth of a mother. In the present context, however, it seems entirely out of place. According to Bakhtin, laughter caused by absurd situations amounts to ‘the world’s second truth’.26 Thus, we could say that through the subversive humour employed in the scene, the film manages to draw attention to Belfast’s status as a battlefield and to the erosion of normal daily life. A further trope of violence occurring in Northern Irish film is the normality violent events, such as shootings and bombings, take on in Belfast in the 1970s. For the young protagonist, the omnipresent tension turns into an everyday occurrence, which penetrates deeply into her private life. This becomes visible in a conversation happening at night between Annie and her younger sister Sinead. While Annie is reading a book in her bed, Sinead eyes her sister’s dolls on the shelf, naively asking: ‘If ever you get shot, will you leave me those dolls in your will?’ Annie’s annoyed reply is merely: ‘No, Mercier, Vivian: The Irish Comic Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 1. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 122. 23 Ibid. 24 Carroll, Humour, p. 17. 25 Titanic Town (00:16:41-00:16:42). 26 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 84. 21 22

104

City Limits

I want them buried with me.’27 In the given circumstances, the two girls’ dialogue does not appear out of the ordinary. Annie seems to be less irritated by the fact that her sister is anticipating her death than by Sinead’s desire for her dolls. Through Annie’s younger sister, the audience is presented with an even more alienating perception of the current situation. By means of Sinead’s simplistic perception of her environment, the spectators are confronted with a small girl’s ways of thinking. Sinead’s pragmatic attitude mirrors the normality of death and violence in republican West-Belfast during the 1970s. The innocent comment from the mouth of the child serves to shed fresh light on the omnipresence of danger and death. The depiction of Sinead’s striving to benefit from the situation generates a specific kind of dark humour. According to Michael Storey, black humour contains ‘macabre and grotesque elements’, and requires ‘a sense of distance’.28 It could be argued that the humour created in the scene shows the mental and emotional distance towards the conflict taken on by the director of the film. The scene continues with the two sisters observing a British soldier who is waiting for IRA snipers in the rain. As in earlier scenes, the urban space is depicted in dark and unpleasant colours. When Sinead asks her sister what the soldier is doing in their garden, Annie answers in an ironic tone: ‘He is getting very wet […]. He is wasting his time, the boys don’t come out when it’s raining.’29 By using the almost endearing term ‘the boys’ to refer to the IRA, Annie is adopting a Republican point of view. Her reply shows that already as an adolescent, she is not only tuned into the discourse of her community, but is also ready to transmit the latter to her younger sister. At the same time, Annie’s utterance illustrates her awareness of Belfast’s sectarian geography. On her personal ‘mental map’, the area in which she lives with her family is clearly marked out as Catholic territory protected by the IRA. Therefore, she perceives the presence of the British soldier as an invasion. According to the historian Anthony Stewart, people in Northern Ireland carry ‘maps of religious geography’ in their mind almost from birth, knowing ‘which villages, which roads and streets are Catholic, or Protestant, or “mixed”’.30 This also applies to the protagonist, who has no trouble in correctly interpreting the kind of political fighting happening in front of her window. Annie’s attempt to stay at a remove from the conflict and her subsequent behaviour are shaped by her immediate environment and this implies that even if young people take on a marginalized position in the conflict, they are well able to comprehend how it functions. Annie’s experience of political violence is not only illustrated through her interaction with her parents and her younger siblings, but also by means of her awakening interest in boys. The scene in which she encounters her first boyfriend is taken out of Belfast’s reality in the 1970s. Riding on a bus, Annie is addressed by the medical student Dino, before the bus gets attacked and burned out. The two adolescents manage to escape Titanic Town (00:16:41-00:16:42). Storey, Michael: Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction, Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2004, p. 91. 29 Titanic Town (00:21:37-00:21:44). 30 Stewart, The Narrow Ground, p. 180. 27 28

Tropes of Violence

105

and take shelter in a pub, where Annie cleans Dino’s wounds. The urban space in which the scene takes place is depicted as derelict and maimed by the clashes of the two communities. After the incident, the carcase of the burning bus can be perceived in the background. During the 1970s, the period in which the action of the film is set, buses were frequently highjacked, burned and then used as barricades against the British army in Belfast’s working-class areas. In Northern Irish film, they often occur as signs of political unrest and territorial segregation. The pub in which Annie and Dino have a drink after the attack is a further common setting occurring in Troubles films. Different from the gloomy bars in Resurrection Man or Nothing Personal, the pub featuring in Titanic Town is not represented as a dark place in which innocent victims are tortured, but as a safe haven in which the two young people manage to protect themselves from the violence acted out in the street. The pub even becomes the scene of a developing love story, as the two characters have their first conversation in this place. The film illustrates the young protagonist’s striving for a ‘normal’ life, with ‘normal’ teenage preoccupations, such as going out with boys. Nevertheless, the love story between Annie and Dino finishes in a sad way, as he gets arrested for his involvement in the IRA. Being confronted with her boyfriend’s detention, Annie has to decide whether to wait for him or not. In this way, Belfast is represented as a place in which peaceful encounters are impossible as the complex political situation enters the very private space of the characters’ life.

Belfast prisoners’ wives: Victims or superwomen? The Boxer belongs to a trilogy of films written or co-written by Terry George, which also includes In the Name of the Father (1993) and Some Mother’s Son (1996). Whereas the first two films were accused of showing a pro-republican bias, The Boxer did not receive a similar criticism.31 This might be due to the conciliatory tone the film strikes, pleading for an end of political violence and at the same time focussing on the situation of women. In contrast to Titanic Town, Sheridan’s film refers to Northern Irish reality through the anticipation of the IRA’s first ceasefire declaration made in 1994. Throughout the film, two factions of the IRA – a progressive branch and a hardline republican one – cannot agree among each other whether to deal with the British government to achieve a peace agreement or not. Whereas Joe Hamil (Brian Cox) – the father of the female protagonist – tries to negotiate with the British government in order to obtain a peace agreement, Harry (Gerard McSorley), a radical IRA man, sees peace negotiations as treason and a sell out of the republican cause. The two factions appearing in the film are modelled on the Real IRA and the Provisional IRA. The most important link to Belfast’s reality in the 1980s is, however, the illustration of the fate of prisoners’ wives. Shown from a specifically female point of view, the action in The Boxer is rendered from a defamiliarizing angle, which stands out against the predominately male point of view from which most Troubles films are narrated.

Cf. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 200.

31

106

City Limits

Sheridan’s film is set in republican West Belfast and illustrates the inner battle of a young woman, who has to decide whether to accept the code of conduct imposed on her by her environment or whether to rebel against it. Maggie is married to an imprisoned IRA man, with whom she fell out of love a long time ago. However, the community watches closely over her to ensure that she remains faithful to her husband. When Maggie’s former boyfriend Danny (Daniel Day-Lewis) returns to Belfast after a fourteen-year prison sentence, both characters fall in love again. Their story illustrates the pressures exercised on women during the Northern Irish conflict by the maledominated social order. The main tropes of violence are the psychological and physical violence prisoner’s wives were exposed to during the conflict. This includes mental and physical confinement as well as physical aggression. During the Troubles, the female experience of political violence differed considerably from the experience made by male members of Northern Irish society. Even if women were not killed or injured in equivalent numbers to men, they did not suffer less from the political situation. Jennifer Hamilton and Marie Smyth underline that women’s experience of the Northern Irish conflict was composed of ‘absorbing and coping’ with their consequences in other ways, which is in ‘visiting prisons, standing at gravesides or rearing children alone’.32 Margret Ward and Marie-Therese McGivern point out the psychological and emotional burden women had to bear. In this context, they underline that the worry about husband and children was an enormous source of anxiety to many of them.33 Avila Kilmurray describes the everyday life of women in Belfast in the ’70s and ’80s in very dark colours, explaining that they were frequently confronted with very different problems such as ‘a son knee-capped, a brother imprisoned or a father in the Ulster Defence Regiment, alongside a toddler with teething problems or a child playing truant from school’.34 Nevertheless, it has to be underlined that this situation was merely part of the reality of women living in Belfast’s socially disadvantaged and religiously deeply divided working-class areas. Women in wealthy mixed-middle-class areas were far from being exposed to the same problems. Ronan Bennett argues that the greatest inconvenience these women were likely to experience was ‘to be caught in traffic jams caused by army and police checkpoints or office chaos after bombs and bomb alerts’.35 In her illuminating study Shattering Silence, Women, Nationalism and Political Subjectivity,36 Begoña Aretxaga explores the fate of Republican prisoners’ wives during the 1970s. Her book is based on a series of interviews she made with a number of

Cf. Hamilton, Jennifer; Smyth, Marie: ‘The Human Costs of the Troubles’. In: Dickson, David; Hargie, Owen (eds.): Researching the Troubles. Social Science Perspectives on the Northern Ireland Conflict, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2003, p. 19. 33 Cf. McGivern; Ward, ‘Images of Women in Northern Ireland’, p. 67. 34 Kilmurray, Avila: ‘Women in the Community in Northern Ireland: Struggling for Their Half of the Sky’. In: Studies, Vol. 76, no. 302, 1987, p. 182. 35 Bennett, Ronan: ‘Don’t Mention the War’. In: Miller, David (ed.): Rethinking Northern Ireland, London: Longman, 1998, p. 199. 36 Aretxaga, Begoña: Shattering Silence. Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 32

Tropes of Violence

107

young Northern Irish women. Aretxaga explains that women whose husbands were in jail were expected to give unrestricted support without being allowed to have a life of their own. This sacrifice was, however, not recognized by their community as such but was merely taken for granted: Prisoners’ wives are required to be superwomen with the fit rarely being acknowledged. Despite the serious emotional and material hardship faced by women whose husbands become imprisoned, the ideology of unconditional love was, and still is, projected onto the wives, who were required to provide their husbands with unfailing emotional protection.37

Aretxaga explains that women were either seen as ‘mothers’ or as ‘wives’. Unlike the mother, the wife was frequently suspected of sexual deception, that is the deception of her husband, and by extension of deception of the nationalist cause. As prisoners’ wives, they were socially perceived as a potential betrayer, and therefore closely watched by other members of the community. The following extract from an interview carried out by Aretxaga with a woman called Anne demonstrates the condition of the young wives: Life is hell when your husband is in jail […] It’s hell because you haven’t cut your tie with your husband yet you don’t have him either […] Women with their husbands in jail cannot go out with other men. It is not only the pressure of social reprobation, but also friends of the husband would tell the man who approaches his wife to leave. Nobody would do the same if the case was the opposite and the wife was in prison.38

The situation described by Aretxaga provides the background of Sheridan’s film. The Boxer is dominated by an ‘all-prevailing atmosphere of enclosure and imprisonment’,39 which is expressed through peace lines, murals and checkpoints, which frequently appear in the film and draw attention to the divided nature of the city. Moreover, Belfast’s urban space is marked by loyalist and republican slogans, expressing the hostility of the respective communities. However, this division does not only seem to apply to the ethno-religious segregation of Belfast’s society, but also to the complex power structures inside the community, that is the progressive members of the community who are for a peaceful solution of the conflict and those who favour violence. The omnipresence of the British army and the repeated sounds of helicopters enforce the threatening atmosphere of the film. Barbara Mennel states that The Boxer manipulates cinematic space in order to articulate the claustrophobic social relations between the characters.40 This applies in particular to the characters of Maggie and Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 70. 39 Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 202. 40 Mennel, Cities and Cinema, p. 120. 37 38

108

City Limits

Danny, who are prevented by their environment from starting a love affair despite their growing passion for each other. A general sense of confinement is rendered in the film through helicopter and crane shots, which according to Martin McLoone give the impression that ‘in the constricted space of the city the only freedom is upwards’.41 This communicates the feeling that the characters are imprisoned in the city – and in a larger sense in their situation – which appears to be without any hope for escape. McLoone refers to Belfast’s urban space in The Boxer as a ‘geography of imagination’, which is cinematically ‘impressive’ and ‘enjoyable’, but at the same time does not correspond to the city’s reality,42 as the whole of Belfast ‘seems to consist of one block of flats in which everybody lives and fights and conspires and one square in which all the action takes place’.43 Thus, a number of urban aspects are left out, such as the peaceful middle-class parts of the city. Consequently, Belfast becomes illustrated as a place in which political violence dominates the everyday life of the entire population. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the film is particularly highlighted by its visual style. Filmed by Chris Mengers, The Boxer is shot in low levels of lighting and gloomy shades of blue that confer to the film a melancholic tone.44 This lighting technique reminds us of the dark colours in Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s thriller Nothing Personal, which are also used to create a menacing atmosphere. In The Boxer, the urban environment chosen for the action appears equally bleak and is described by Jennifer Cornell as a cityscape marked by ‘grim concrete housing estates’.45 The film opens with a friend of Maggie’s, who is getting married to an imprisoned man. As her husband is unable to leave jail for the party, she celebrates her wedding on her own with her family and friends. At a reception dedicated to the newly wed young woman, Joe, Maggie’s father, who is the local IRA commander, pronounces a speech glorifying republican prisoners’ wives. Quoting the young woman’s courage as an example, he refers to his own fate and explains that when he was in jail himself, his late wife stood to him and thus remained faithful ‘to the cause’, meaning the united Ireland aspired at by the IRA. At the same time, he praises his daughter, who ‘keeps the house together’ until her husband will return from jail. Thus, Maggie is pushed into the role of the mother and housewife. Her father finishes the speech confidently by confirming that all the prisoners will come home.46

McLoone, Irish Film, p. 77. Ibid., 78. 43 Ibid., p. 77. 44 Cf. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 202. 45 Cornell, Jennifer: ‘Different Countries, Different Worlds: The Representation of Northern Ireland in Stewart Parker’s Lost Belongings’. In: MacKillop, James (ed.): Contemporary Irish Cinema: From the Quiet Man to Dancing a Lughnasa, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, p. 83. 46 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford argues that the kind of control of prisoners’ wives as illustrated in The Boxer reflects the reality of an earlier period of the Troubles that is the 1970s. Therefore, she criticizes the film claiming that its director tries to align ‘women’s issues’ with pro-ceasefire politics. Cf. ‘The Prisoner’s Wife and the Soldier’s Whore: Female Punishment in Irish History and culture’. In: Barton, Ruth; O’Brian Harvey (eds.): Keeping It Real: Irish Film and Television, London: Wallflower Press, 2004, pp. 8–24. 41 42

Tropes of Violence

109

Joe’s discourse echoes Arextaga’s findings, as it defines the role of prisoners’ wives in Republican West Belfast: the young women are expected to remain faithful to their husbands and to look after their family, following Maggie’s and her mother’s example. At the same time, the glorification of the status of being a ‘prisoner’s wife’ puts the women under considerable pressure, forcing them to meet the requirements of the republican community. Joe’s speech implies that if they do not support their husbands, who are imprisoned because of having fought for the ‘cause’, they would go against republican ideals. Merely seen as instruments in order to support political aims, the women are not perceived as independent individuals. Maggie’s father Joe, in his function as an IRA boss, is a stereotypical protagonist occurring in Northern Irish Troubles films. With the prisoner’s wife, however, Sheridan adds are a new character to Northern Irish film. In The Boxer, the way in which certain Northern Irish women were caught in their situation during the Troubles becomes illustrated through Maggie’s dilemma when her former boyfriend Danny is released from prison. She has to decide whether to remain faithful to her imprisoned husband or not, when Danny returns to the housing estate in West Belfast, a republican stronghold, in which Maggie’s family lives as well. Still in love with each other, Maggie and Danny know that in the current situation, a relationship would be fatal for both of them. Hill draws attention to the fact that as a prisoners’ wife Maggie is not only ‘spoken for’ but also ‘watched over by a vigilant republican community’.47 Maggie’s and Danny’s love story can be seen as a variation of the ‘love-across-the-barricades’ theme typical of Northern Irish film and fiction. As mentioned earlier, in traditional ‘love-across-the-barricades’ stories, the two lovers are kept away from each other through ethno-religious boundaries, which manifest themselves in form of mental or physical barriers, the latter expressing themselves in Belfast’s urban space through barricades and peace lines. In The Boxer, however, the two characters with the same ethno-religious background are prevented from coming together by internal boundaries in shape of a specific ethical code of conduct imposed by the republican community, which does not allow them to act as independent beings. The pressure put on the two lovers by their environment is illustrated through the difficulties they have in talking to each without being watched. In order to have a conversation, they are forced to leave the territory controlled by the IRA. Maggie and Danny meet on the neutral ground of a coffee shop in Belfast’s train station, or secretly escape to the seaside where they can communicate during a walk on the beach. In a further scene, they cross the army checkpoint at the peace line, in order to get into the loyalist east of the city, where they hope to remain unrecognized. Nevertheless, they are almost immediately discovered by an acquaintance of Danny’s and asked to return to their own territory. Danny and Maggie’s attempts to speak to each other demonstrate that even outside prison, the characters are unable to live as free human beings in politically troubled Belfast. As a former boxer, Danny sets up a boxing ring in the community centre with the intention of giving the local youth a reasonable occupation during their spare time

Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, p. 201.

47

110

City Limits

Figure 17  Maggy and Danny meeting up in East Belfast, The Boxer.

and to reunite Catholics and Protestant through a common passion. Thus, he tries to create a space for reconciliation. When Maggie’s son Liam sees his mother together with Danny, he becomes afraid of his mother leaving him for Danny. In an act of revenge, he sets fire to the boxing ring. His deed, however, does not worsen his own situation, but his mother’s. The psychological violence exercised on Maggie becomes expressed in a conversation between herself and her father after Liam’s act of crime. Joe refuses to punish the boy for burning down the gym, claiming that ‘he has suffered enough’, meaning that Liam has suffered from the absence of his father and so bravely contributed to the ‘republican cause’. In the light of the boy’s criminal behaviour, Joe’s statement seems almost ironic. It is, however, striking that Maggie’s father does not pay any attention to the suffering of his own daughter. He indirectly makes Maggie even responsible for Liam’s deed, suggesting that her son has committed the arson due to her relationship with Danny. Joe, who has understood that his daughter is still in love with Danny, advises her to ‘get rid of him’, as he himself is unable to protect her if both of them go against the expectations of the republican community. When Maggie underlines that she and Danny did nothing wrong, her father insists that the community thinks that they did, and therefore they have to keep away from each other. This shows that society’s beliefs are more important than the actual reality. For Maggie’s father, her daughter’s leaving the community is entirely inconceivable. In this way, the film echoes the stereotype pointed out by Arextaga, according to which the ‘prisoner’s wives’ are merely seen as betrayers and not individuals with their own rights. In a tense conversation with her father, Maggie claims that the actual prisoner in the situation is herself. Her statement ‘I’m the prisoner here’48 brings the situation The Boxer. Jim Sheridan. 1997. (01:19:32-01:19:33).

48

Tropes of Violence

111

to the point, illustrating the male-dominated social structures in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, where politics were more important than people’s private lives, and women’s lives in particular. Furthermore, Maggie can be seen as a prisoner in a double sense. Not only politics prevent her from leaving Belfast with Danny but also her son, for whom she is responsible. Apart from that, Liam is the child of a man whom Maggie does not love and whom she had married by default after Danny’s imprisonment. With her boyfriend in jail, she had no choice than marrying another man to be socially acceptable. Therefore, it could be argued that even the situation before the imprisonment of her husband was not of Maggie’s choice, as she was pushed into an unwanted marriage by her community. The illustration of female oppression reaches its climax at the end of the film. The psychological violence, to which the protagonist is exposed throughout the film, turns into physical aggression as the action goes on. When Danny, Maggie and Liam drive home after a funeral, they are attacked by a violent group of paramilitaries led by the radical Harry. Danny is violently dragged out of the car by Harry, who shouts at him that he has no right to ‘drive around with a prisoners’ wife’. At the same time, he insults Maggie with the following words: ‘Did you forget your wedding ring? You’re a fucking whore, you are a prisoner’s wife, you know what it means.’49 When Harry and his men start beating up Danny, Maggie tries to intervene and becomes physically aggressed by the men who try to keep her away. The fact that Maggie is called ‘a whore’ reminds us of Arexaga’s book, in which the author explains that in Northern Irish society, men and women are not equally judged for the transgression of social norms. If a man would go out with another woman while his wife is in prison, nobody would take any offence, whereas the woman is considered to be a whore.50 In the final scene of the film, which takes place after a car chase scene typical of Troubles thriller, Harry orders one of his men to shoot Danny. However, instead of killing Danny, the IRA man kills Harry to eliminate a troublemaker, who causes havoc inside the IRA by opposing peace negotiations. The film terminates with a shot of Danny, Maggie and Liam, holding each other in their arms. Even if the three characters seem to be reunited, the ending suggests that a peaceful life together might only be possible outside Belfast. In conclusion it could be said that The Boxer renders an innovative vision of the Northern Irish conflict, due to the unusual perspective from which the tropes of violence are rendered. The film provides a multifaceted vision of the different elements contributing to the oppression of women during the Troubles. Through the illustration of the female experience of political violence, The Boxer draws attention to a very specific kind of suffering, which has been widely neglected in Northern Irish film. Sheridan’s thematic choice demonstrates the striving of contemporary producers and scriptwriters to innovate the discourse of the Troubles and to give rise to new manners of thinking and perspectives. Different from Titanic Town, the violence exercised on the protagonist does not come from the opposite community or the

Ibid. (01:42.23-01:42:30). Cf. Aretxaga, Shattering Silence, p. 70.

49 50

112

City Limits

British army, but springs from inside her own republican community. In this sense, the tropes of violence present in The Boxer differ considerably from the violent events taking place in Michell’s film.

Seeing the light: Punk music as an alternative to the Troubles Different from Titanic Town and The Boxer, Good Vibrations does not engage with Belfast’s reality through historical events but through a local celebrity of the 1970s. The film is a biopic based on the life of Terry Hooley, the founder of the Good Vibration label and record shop. The shop opened in 1976 in Winetavern Street in the centre of Belfast and traded for six years before going bankrupt in 1982. Barton argues that in the film, the Good Vibration shop is represented as ‘an utopian space within in the sectarian city’.51 Hooley is regarded as a cultural icon and Belfast’s ‘godfather of punk’, having supported bands such as The Undertones and Rudi and The Outcasts.52 Stuart Baillie claims that Hooley ‘saw the bigger picture’ and could ‘empower young people and save souls’.53 According to Baillie, the music enthusiast wisely recognized that ‘an alternative Ulster’ existed apart from the clashes of the two communities.54 The site of the original Good Vibrations store was honoured with a commemorative plaque and a tree, an award which the local authorities had previously only attributed to Elton John and the Dalai Lama.55 The screenplay of the film was written by Belfast author Glenn Patterson. Good Vibrations illustrates Hooley’s unabated passion for music despite the political violence being acted out on the streets. However, the punk aficionado states that the film does not embellish reality: ‘We never wanted a glossed-over story because I never was an angel.’56 Good Vibrations has a realistic tone as numerous extracts from original footage of the Troubles are integrated into the action. In the film, tropes of violence feature in the form of sectarianism and paramilitary fighting. Like in Titanic Town, the violent actions spring from the opposite community. The violence occurring in the film stands in sharp contrast to Terri’s apolitical attitude. Thus, an alienating light is shed on the city of Belfast through the protagonist’s distorted perspective: he is a marginalized dreamer and music lover and becomes involved in the arising punk movement. He sees himself as a pacifist refusing to support the political aspirations of either community. His apolitical attitude in a place shaped by clashing

Barton, Ruth: Irish Cinema in the Twenty-first Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, p. 158. 52 Cf. Baillie, Stuart: ‘Musical Trailblazer: Belfast’s Terri Hooley’, 2014, 1–4, web, 1 March 2016. http/:www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/music/new-s/musical-trailblazer-belfast-terrihooley- 30863803.html, accessed 20 October 2019. 53 Cf. ibid. 54 Cf. ibid. 55 Cf. Mathieson, Craig: ‘Terri Hooley, the People’s Punk, Still Feeling Those Good Vibrations’, 2015, web, 1 March 2016, http//:www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/terri-hool, accessed 20 October 2019. 56 Quoted in: ibid. 51

Tropes of Violence

113

political allegiances makes him stand out among his fellow citizens. Different from most of his friends, his life is not dominated by politics but by a passion for music. The protagonist is portrayed as a self-marginalized individual due to his different outlook on life and his dedication to a largely ostracized underground music movement. Initially, the punk movement found itself marginalized due to its refusal to follow mainstream music traditions and to adopt conventional societal values. Characterized by loud and fast paced songs, hard-edged melodies and singing style, punk music was often seen as offensive. In addition, frequent anti-establishment lyrics gave the movement a rebellious character.57 Terri’s growing enthusiasm for the new music trend reflects his own non-conformist attitude towards the development of Northern Irish society in the 1970s. The non-sectarian and non-racist nature of punk music echoes Terri’s rejections of the increasing ethno-religious divide in the region. Good Vibrations alternates between the representation of the actual violent reality of the city and the illustration of Terri’s imaginary Belfast. The protagonist’s ‘mental map’ of the city does not contain a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant areas but is inscribed with bars and pubs, where he has listened to popular bands. According to Liam Kennedy, parts of cities are charged with ‘emotional and mythical meanings’, as well as ‘localized stories, images and memories’.58 This applies in particular to the Belfast portrayed in Good Vibrations. Whereas in the minds of most characters featuring in the film, the city’s urban space is inevitably connected to violent acts – such as bomb explosions and riots – for Terry, it is linked to musical events. This difference of perspective is expressed through the juxtaposition of footage of local violence taken from the region’s recent history and scenes in which Terry happily listens to music in bars, sometimes being the only customer. In this context, Ralph Willet’s statement about the cognitive perceptions of urban complexes springs to mind. Willet argues that a city is always an ‘observed and imagined environment’.59 In Good Vibrations, the reality of troubled Belfast – the ‘observed environment’ – becomes contrasted with the city dreamed of by Terri, which according to Willet would be the ‘imagined environment’.60 Due to the film’s binary structure, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘dialogism’ appears to be a convenient tool for analysis. Developed in order to explore polyvocal novels, this theory is perfectly transferrable to films such as Good Vibrations, where different perspectives meet or – in Bakhtin’s words – where different ‘languages’ speak to each other. In this context, ‘language’ is not seen as ‘a system of abstract grammatical categories’ but as ‘a world view’ or ‘concrete opinion’.61 In a polyphonic work, contrasting ‘languages’ in terms of world views enter a dialogue. According to ‘The Art of Punk Movement’, 1 March 2016,