Emailing a little with Christine Tomeh about participating in Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices, a festival involving performance, video, installation etc., the next edition of which which takes place in Beirut this April. I loved this description she sent:
The first edition of the Home Works Forum opened in early April 2002, coincided with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in Palestine, the second edition opened in late October of 2003, after a six-months delay due to regional upheavals caused by the US invasion of Iraq, the third edition was due to take place in mid-November 2005, again after a 6-months delay due to the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005. At this point the Home Works Forum has (we think) settled into a regular schedule of regular disruptions. This unpredictable dynamic has become a rhythm, a paradoxical routine. Because the practical and political circumstances around our work are always breaking and shifting relevant questions about dislocation and disruption have imposed themselves repeatedly.
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Two days after No Country For Old Men I’m still in an enjoyable shock about how casually at a certain point it throws away one particular narrative tension, and how much (very cruel) fun it has at the viewer’s expense in denying access to a certain scene. (If you’ve seen the movie you’ll know what I’m talking about – if not, I’m not spoiling the surprise). In a not-unrelated conversation just after the film M. asked “Oh yes. What did happen to the money in the end? Who got it?” Took us most of the ride home to remember/figure it out, and even then we weren’t totally sure. I loved this sense of certain things (characters, plotlines, events) moving slightly in and out of focus as the film went on. Loved also the film’s mini-theme of very badly wounded guys buying clothes off of strangers for disguise, bandage or tourniquet purposes.