SOCIAL STUDIES features works by Maher Abi Samra, Marwa Arsanios, Christian Ghazi & Jumana Manna.
This program presents Christian Ghazi’s 1969 film A Hundred Faces for a Single Day in conversation with three films from Lebanon and Palestine made between 2008 and 2016.
Ghazi’s avant-garde cinematic manifesto captures a society at the cusp between Lebanon’s so-called Golden Age and the protracted civil war that would erupt soon after in 1975. Depicting the early days of a revolutionary moment—in which the filmmaker was a participant—that brought Palestinian and Lebanese liberation struggles together with workers’ movements, the film is a scathing critique of Lebanon’s political and cultural bourgeoisie, as well as a warning against neglecting one’s own internal pitfalls.
Decades after Ghazi’s Hundred Faces, the films of Maher Abi Samra, Marwa Arsanios, and Jumana Manna can be said to turn our gaze inwards once again to grapple with a social oblivion conveniently masked by more pressing political concerns. Their films ask how the task of building a shared social consciousness becomes constantly consumed by sectarian divisions, military occupation, and corruption, whereby any kind of social reckoning or emancipation remains a mostly private undertaking. When will such efforts gain entry into politics?
- Amal Issa, Curator
Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010)
Arabic with English subtitles
Blessed Blessed Oblivion weaves together a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, manifested in gyms, auto body shops, and hairdressing parlors. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the video uses visual collage and music as ironic commentary. Anger’s subjects—leather-clad bikers—serve as a counterpoint to the culture Manna attempts to portray, that of male “thug” culture in East Jerusalem. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry or unabashed self-praise.
About the Filmmaker
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
- Year2010
- Runtime21 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountryPalestine
- DirectorJumana Manna
SOCIAL STUDIES features works by Maher Abi Samra, Marwa Arsanios, Christian Ghazi & Jumana Manna.
This program presents Christian Ghazi’s 1969 film A Hundred Faces for a Single Day in conversation with three films from Lebanon and Palestine made between 2008 and 2016.
Ghazi’s avant-garde cinematic manifesto captures a society at the cusp between Lebanon’s so-called Golden Age and the protracted civil war that would erupt soon after in 1975. Depicting the early days of a revolutionary moment—in which the filmmaker was a participant—that brought Palestinian and Lebanese liberation struggles together with workers’ movements, the film is a scathing critique of Lebanon’s political and cultural bourgeoisie, as well as a warning against neglecting one’s own internal pitfalls.
Decades after Ghazi’s Hundred Faces, the films of Maher Abi Samra, Marwa Arsanios, and Jumana Manna can be said to turn our gaze inwards once again to grapple with a social oblivion conveniently masked by more pressing political concerns. Their films ask how the task of building a shared social consciousness becomes constantly consumed by sectarian divisions, military occupation, and corruption, whereby any kind of social reckoning or emancipation remains a mostly private undertaking. When will such efforts gain entry into politics?
- Amal Issa, Curator
Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010)
Arabic with English subtitles
Blessed Blessed Oblivion weaves together a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, manifested in gyms, auto body shops, and hairdressing parlors. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the video uses visual collage and music as ironic commentary. Anger’s subjects—leather-clad bikers—serve as a counterpoint to the culture Manna attempts to portray, that of male “thug” culture in East Jerusalem. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry or unabashed self-praise.
About the Filmmaker
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
- Year2010
- Runtime21 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountryPalestine
- DirectorJumana Manna