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
One Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1969)
Arabic with English subtitles
Made in 1969 and released in 1972, Christian Ghazi’s incendiary, avant-garde masterpiece is one of the filmmaker’s only two surviving early works. Through this fiction documentary hybrid film, Ghazi forged a stinging critique of bourgeois society in Beirut during Lebanon’s Golden Age (which would end in 1975 with a grueling and protracted civil war). An essay on labor, class, social relations, and resistance, Ghazi considered the film his “manifesto on cinema,” a powerful and polemical work that reaches back to the early decades of film experimentation while pioneering radical techniques in multivalent sound, disjunctive montage, and an embedded perspective on direct action.
About the Filmmaker
Born in 1934 in Antakya, Turkey to a Lebanese father and a French mother, Christian Ghazi grew up in Syria and then settled with his family in Lebanon in 1939 where he studied, worked, and lived. He made dozens of films in Lebanon, mostly centered on the struggles of resistance fighters, refugee camp dwellers, tobacco farmers, and factory workers. His first twelve documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Tourism in 1964 were all banned and burned for being subversive. In1988, his entire body of work was destroyed when militia fighters broke into his home and burned all his film negatives. Disgusted, he quit making movies. Christian realized the documentary Coffin of the Memory (2001) when a copy of A Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1972) was recovered in Syria and returned to him. In addition to making films, Ghazi also worked as a journalist, taught philosophy, wrote poems, directed plays, and composed music. He died in 2013. A copy of another of his early works, Resistance, Why (1971) was recently recovered and re-released earlier this year.
- Year1969
- Runtime63 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- PremiereAlternative Film Festival - Damascus - 1972
- DirectorChristian Ghazi
- ScreenwriterChristian Ghazi and Rafiq Hajjar
- ProducerSmakya Film and Partners
- Executive ProducerNadim Suleiman
- CastHoda Rami - Remon Geabara - Salaheddine Mokhallalati - Michelin Daou - Nadim Suleiman - Mona Wassef
- CinematographerYoussef Antar , Ahmad Mohsen
- EditorKais Al Zubaydi
- AnimatorNaji Obeid
- Production DesignBahjat Haydar
- ComposerStockhausen
- Sound DesignZuheir Fehmi
- MusicStockhausen Hamnen and Concerto Rodrigo Larn Khaus
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
One Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1969)
Arabic with English subtitles
Made in 1969 and released in 1972, Christian Ghazi’s incendiary, avant-garde masterpiece is one of the filmmaker’s only two surviving early works. Through this fiction documentary hybrid film, Ghazi forged a stinging critique of bourgeois society in Beirut during Lebanon’s Golden Age (which would end in 1975 with a grueling and protracted civil war). An essay on labor, class, social relations, and resistance, Ghazi considered the film his “manifesto on cinema,” a powerful and polemical work that reaches back to the early decades of film experimentation while pioneering radical techniques in multivalent sound, disjunctive montage, and an embedded perspective on direct action.
About the Filmmaker
Born in 1934 in Antakya, Turkey to a Lebanese father and a French mother, Christian Ghazi grew up in Syria and then settled with his family in Lebanon in 1939 where he studied, worked, and lived. He made dozens of films in Lebanon, mostly centered on the struggles of resistance fighters, refugee camp dwellers, tobacco farmers, and factory workers. His first twelve documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Tourism in 1964 were all banned and burned for being subversive. In1988, his entire body of work was destroyed when militia fighters broke into his home and burned all his film negatives. Disgusted, he quit making movies. Christian realized the documentary Coffin of the Memory (2001) when a copy of A Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1972) was recovered in Syria and returned to him. In addition to making films, Ghazi also worked as a journalist, taught philosophy, wrote poems, directed plays, and composed music. He died in 2013. A copy of another of his early works, Resistance, Why (1971) was recently recovered and re-released earlier this year.
- Year1969
- Runtime63 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- PremiereAlternative Film Festival - Damascus - 1972
- DirectorChristian Ghazi
- ScreenwriterChristian Ghazi and Rafiq Hajjar
- ProducerSmakya Film and Partners
- Executive ProducerNadim Suleiman
- CastHoda Rami - Remon Geabara - Salaheddine Mokhallalati - Michelin Daou - Nadim Suleiman - Mona Wassef
- CinematographerYoussef Antar , Ahmad Mohsen
- EditorKais Al Zubaydi
- AnimatorNaji Obeid
- Production DesignBahjat Haydar
- ComposerStockhausen
- Sound DesignZuheir Fehmi
- MusicStockhausen Hamnen and Concerto Rodrigo Larn Khaus