A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, May 9, 2025

Leila and the Wolves (Heiny Srour, 1984)


Cast: Nabila Zeitouni, Rafik Ali Ahmad, Raja Nehme, Sabah Obeid, Samar Samy. Emilia Fowad, Ferial Abillamah. Screenplay: Heiny Srour. Cinematography: Curtis Clark, Charlet Recors. Film editing: Eva Houdova. Music: Bachir Mounir, Laki Nassif. 

Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour's Leila and the Wolves is a fascinating journey into the 20th century history of the conflict in Lebanon and Palestine. Nabila Zeitouni plays Leila, who is mounting an exhibition in London on the role of women in the heavily male-dominated struggle. She imagines herself, wearing the same white dress she wears to the opening of the exhibition, wandering through time and space as events in the conflict unfold through the eyes of women contributing however they can to the liberation of the Palestinians. In one scene, the women throw flowerpots and pour boiling water onto the enemy troops as their run beneath their balconies. In another, they take an active role by staging a mock wedding that allows them to smuggle weapons and ammunition to the men doing the fighting. Finally, young women emerge as actual combatants. Srour's film is a collage of newsreel footage and reenacted scenes, with symbolic touches such as a crowd of women shrouded and veiled and seated on a beach as a kind of silent chorus on the action.  

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