According to Lebanese filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, present-day Lebanese citizens are often incredulous of the fact that their country developed its own space program during the space fever of the 1960s. Their latest film, The Lebanese Rocket Society, which screened as part of the Special Presentations category of the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival, explores archival and personal records of the eponymous space program in order to rediscover its historical significance and counteract this collective amnesia. For contemporary Lebanese audiences, this ìlost history,î as the filmmakers call it, can serve as a compelling reminder of an era when diverse members of the community could unite under a common heading amid regional, political, and religious strife.

The Haigazian College Rocket Society (HCRS), which would later evolve into the Lebanese Rocket Society, was formed in 1960 at Haigazian University in Beirut. Hadjithomas and Joreige tracked down and interviewed its founder, Manoug Manougian, a young Lebanese professor who had returned to Lebanon to teach after receiving a bachelorís degree from the University of Texas. His passion for science led him to create and fund the club with his own salary. Once he attracted several students, they began working together to engineer and test rockets, attempting to push the limits of their projectilesí reach.

When students and faculty from the University started showing up to watch the HCRSís test launches in increasing numbers, it became clear that the project had a contagious potential for fascination. The film displays photographs of these launches, dug up in Lebanese archives and provided by Manougian himself, who explains that his clubís humble beginnings were opened up, but also conflicted, by the interest the HCRS attracted. As Manougian and his students continued to innovate and test their designs, and reach new heights, the college administration recognized their ability to generate publicity and began funding them. With local youth developing an especially keen enthusiasm in the HCRS, rocket programs started up at other colleges in Beirut and began contributing to the atmosphere of innovation in their own rights. Later on, the Lebanese government finally decided to fund the venture, recognizing its technological success and potential to become a national enterprise, under the condition that it be renamed the Lebanese Rocket Society (LRS).

As Manougian asserts in an interview, although the military was able to provide a set of important resources to the LRS, its interests ultimately conflicted with the programís initial orientation toward science and education. Early in the HCRSís development, the military offered the expertise of a young ballistics officer who could source materials from France and the U.S., and provide a factory setting for more complex engineerings. Manougian reveals that the military later offered him large sums of money to join a secret research project, which he turned down after realizing that its objectives were violent in nature.

As The Lebanese Rocket Society demonstrates, the militaryís engagements both set the stage for a space program and ultimately cut its trajectory short, thereby hermetically sealing it from Lebanese consciousness. A necessity for a collective enterprise developed in the wake of the unstable reconciliation of the 1958 Lebanon Crisis. The civil conflict intensified the religious and political demarcations between Pro-Western Christians and Arab-Nationalist Muslims within the country. Though the film does not analyze the symbolic contours of the space program, it appears that the LRS provided an ideal means to bridge the divide in the population, since it signified both an autonomous, national enterprise, and a step in line with the Westís modernization projects. The era of the LRS was divisively ended with the overwhelming preoccupation of the Six-Day War in 1967, during which much of the archival evidence of the space program was destroyed and denied to posterity.

The LRSís most socially conducive aspect, however, was its emphasis on education and scientific discovery. As the filmís archival images show, the combination of research creation and public exhibition provided a platform for social interactions outside the paradigm of conflict. The film shows footage of the launch of the Cedar IV ñ the fourth in a series of rockets named after the emblem on the Lebanese flag ñ on Independence Day, November 21, 1963. This catalyzed a large public celebration and the commemoration of the launch on a postage stamp. The rocket, which flew 145 kilometres, nearly reached the height of Russiaís first satellite. Although this launch happened six years later, it demonstrates a technological sophistication worth being recognized in relation to the superpowersí achievements.

The Lebanese Rocket Society concludes with the creation of a monument devoted to the historical and national significance of the LRS. The filmmakers coordinate with public officials and engineers to construct a replica of one of the Cedar rockets and erect it on the Haigazian campus. The film depicts how the transportation of the sculpture becomes a politicized task itself, as Hadjithomas, Joreige, and their producers consider the range of implications of driving an ostensible weapon through downtown Beirut. This final act speaks cogently to the inherently militaristic nature of space programs and the conflicts of interests they inevitably stir up, as well as their ability to bring people together.

The post The lost era of Lebanese rocketry appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The impetus for Interior. Leather Bar. is a lesser-known movie from 1980 starring Al Pacino called Cruising, about a detective who covertly enters the throbbing underworld of gay S&M culture in New York in order to track down a serial killer. The film represents a decisive moment in the history of queer subject matter in cinema, as it portrays a particularly ignorant and homophobic vision of the urban male homosexual community. Intended for a wide release, Cruising was censored and the director, William Friedkin, was forced to remove 40 minutes of homoerotic footage deemed too explicit, resulting in a highly schizophrenic narrative. The aim of Interior. Leather Bar. is to imagine and recreate these lost scenes.

The project ends up being less a finished reconstruction of this footage than an investigative ‘making of’ the production itself. Coincidentally, Interior. Leather Bar. co-director Travis Mathews takes a more ostensibly traditional role, easing the equally gay and straight cast into their roles, while Franco provides inspirational support for his long time friend Val, who plays the Pacino stand-in. Val’s persistent inability to grasp Franco’s motivations for doing a gay-themed project and his negotiations with the sexual situations taking place on set provide the film’s main narrative arc. As the viewer watches Val closely in his interactions with extras and listens to the phone conversations between him and his wife, they see a narrative in which discomfort and homophobia are not displaced onto a fictionalized screen but grappled with in their raw, everyday manifestations. While Val theorizes that the project is about having the artistic freedom to push boundaries and explore taboo subjects on-screen, Franco speaks of wanting to reorient his perspective entirely – engaging specifically with the taboo of gay sex in order to dismantle its cultural and psychological weight. (A particular high point of the film is listening to Franco rant passionately about being “sick of heteronormativity.”)

At the heart of Interior. Leather Bar. is a frankness in depicting gay sex and relationships, and a challenge to the liberal facade and secret aversion of contemporary straight audiences. Mathews’ sensibility as a director gives his characters a refreshing shape and depth, even if they are only playing themselves, portraying a diversity of queer subjectivities inadequately met in modern cinema. Moreover, Mathews’ films often involve explicit sex scenes, tastefully shot, encompassing the spectrum of gay sexual behaviour, and often resulting from a genuine, unique attraction between characters. For instance, Interior. Leather Bar. contains a scene in which a real-life couple engages in intimate love-making, and in an interview afterward, they provide a compelling real-world view of gay romance. Their sex scene is made cinematic through editing, sound, and lighting, but is quickly disrupted as the camera pulls out to face the production team and the reality of the studio, framing the ongoing reactions of the people as they continue to look on. The scene asks the viewer to consider representational differences between gay sex, on- and off-screen.

Interior. Leather Bar.’s tactic of forefronting the realities of gay sex are echoed in another, equally intriguing, Festival du nouveau  cinéma selection, L’Inconnu du Lac (Stranger by the Lake), which actually succeeds in staging a fictional cruising ground. Directed by French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, the film takes place exclusively on the beach and in the surrounding woods of a lake in southern France, a popular gay hookup spot. The natural setting and slow ambience are the antithesis of Cruising’s cavernous underbelly, allowing for a more illuminated, yet nonetheless marginalized, microcosm of gay sexuality. The story follows a downtrodden middle-aged man named Franck as he navigates the erotically charged landscape in order to fulfill a deep-seated desire for companionship. After witnessing his new lover Michel murder another man, Franck must simultaneously deal with his emotional and physical attachments and the inscrutable danger Michel presents.

L’Inconnu du Lac pictures the perpetuation of exclusively gay space on the fringes of society. The beach is dotted with mostly older men, naked and sunbathing, or wading into the shallow water, and occasionally going into the woods in search of a hookup. The languid atmosphere this creates contests the conventionally provocative construction of gay sex, rending the tropes of films like Friedkin’s Cruising threadbare and obsolete. And yet the film does not shy away from a full visualization of gay sex either. Multiple sex scenes chart the relationship between Franck and Michel, and participate in the same persistent viewing as Interior. Leather Bar.. The most significant part of the movie is, however, the powerful argument it makes concerning the role of sex in the mediation of more intimate emotional connections. Franck’s lovelorn pursuit is mobilized by the behavioural intricacies of the cruising area – for him, these kinds of spaces provide a last resort in a dominant culture that is structured around heterosexual relations. In a way continuing the claims made in Interior. Leather Bar., it asserts that the stigmatization of gay intimacy relegates opportunities for homosexual romance to the very edges of society.

The post Cruising the contemporary appeared first on The McGill Daily.