Lebanon

One of a number of films from the Middle East in this year’s Sydney Film Festival program, Lebanon – which won the Golden Lion award at the 2009 Venice Film Festival – is based on writer/director Samuel Maoz’s experiences as a young IDF conscript during Israel’s 1982 invasion of its northern neighbour.

The film opens as a tank crosses the border into Lebanon, the camera adopting the point of view of the gunsight, complete with crosshairs. The action is set almost entirely inside the tank, which heightens the drama and acts an effective metaphor for the claustrophobia of war itself.

What is seen through the telescopic sights of the terrified tank gunner is a series of horrific vignettes viewed with a sense of distance that is at once illusory and compelling.

Australian audiences may struggle to place the film within its historical context. The 1982 war was the precursor of the 2006 invasion of Southern Lebanon but, unlike that conflict, which was sparked by the abduction of some IDF soldiers, the 1982 war was fought with the intention of destroying the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) infrastructure and paring back the influence of Syria in the region. In 2006, the IDF sought to defeat the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah but comprehensively failed to do so.

The context is important because the film assumes a certain prior knowledge of the reasons for the PLO’s presence in Lebanon and, indeed, the presence of refugee camps that were established there following the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

Not surprisingly, the film has had a controversial reception in Israel.

Lebanon is a powerful evocation of the experience of combat. The human drama in the film is almost entirely played out between Israeli soldiers, with the exception of one scene involving a distraught Lebanese mother, and several involving a captured Syrian fighter. The noise, filth, brutality, chaos and palpable fear combine to create an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension and visceral disgust. The young tank crew is portrayed as frail; psychologically unprepared for the immediacy of bloody battle. (One of the criticisms of the film in Israel was that it would deter Israeli conscripts from their duty.)

As a testament to the indiscriminant horror of modern warfare, Lebanon is blunt in its judgment. As art, the film succeeds technically and aesthetically, the high tensile performances of the acting ensemble aided by some innovative camerawork and a gut-wrenching soundtrack.

Maoz pulls no punches in his assessment of IDF propaganda. In one scene, the unit commander instructs the tank crew to refer to their use of phosphorus shells as “flaming smoke” because phosphorous is banned under international law and “we respect that law”. Maoz very effectively draws our attention to the ‘little picture’ of warfare in which human beings spill real blood, limbs and minds are lost, and dead IDF soldiers become ‘angels’ lifted into the skies by evac choppers. But he also alludes to the ‘big picture’ of military strategy and its pragmatic involvement in dubious alliances and acts of expediency.

Lebanon is not a film for the fainthearted but, as George Orwell once wrote, there are those who wish to ‘see things as they are, to find out the true facts and store them up for posterity’. It cannot be said of any film that it tells the truth of history, and that is indeed the case with Lebanon. But to the telling of one of the world’s most vexed historical stories, Samuel Maoz and his collaborators have made a compelling and sobering contribution. For Australian audiences, Lebanon could be a difficult but timely insight.

Lebanon (dir. Samuel Maoz, Israel, 2009)

Cinematography: Giora Bejach Editing: Arik Leibovitch Cast: Oshri Cohen, Zohar Shtrauss, Michael Moshonov, Itay Tiran, Yoav, Reymond Amsalem, Dudu Tassa Music: Alex Claude & David Liss Running time: 93 minutes

Sydney Film Festival, June 2 – 14

www.sff.org.au