A Bottoms-Up Approach: Studying the Lebanese Film Industry Through the Perspectives of its Laborers

Abstract

This thesis explores the Lebanese film industry through the perspectives of its laborers and analyzes these perspectives through Janet Wolff’s neo-Marxist analysis on artistic production which positions laborers and recipients as the content producers themselves as well as social arbitrators. The aim of the thesis is to explore how laborers of the film industry in Lebanon navigate the challenges imposed on them, namely the neoliberalist economy, and the volatile socio-political situation in the country. To this end I conduct interviews with several industry workers to portray how they negotiate and mediate the fragile infrastructure of the industry, their working conditions, absence of government support, lack of adequate funds, pressure from international funding agencies, and other day-to-day realities that shape the production process. I also study interviews with two filmmakers about their particular films to explore how cinema is also defined through discourses that surround the films after their release. My intention here is to counteract studies that refute the existence of a Lebanese industry or that impose singular meanings on Lebanese cinema by focusing instead on how industry insiders negotiate the multiple challenges imposed on them. I argue that these multiple challenges and how they are mediated are in fact what define the industry and lend proof to its existence. To this end, I highlight the agency of industry workers and the multiple ways they shape the film industry and the films themselves. The way that laborers of the film industry in Lebanon may express, transfer, and handle from their end macro factors imposed on them is a form of equal and opposing force to larger socio-political and economic components. It is important that we study, and observe the ideas, inputs, and decisions of those who work in the industry to cover all facets of Lebanese film industry as most of the studies already executed focus on top bottom approaches that do not tackle all roots of influence over the industry but rather argue either that the film industry does not exist or is a result of western influence. By materializing and grounding the interrelationship between daily habits, networking, power, and funding with the general economic, political and social issues that underlie them I make a case of change in the industry tangible. Thus, allowing for future discussions on how to find solutions to these problems in the industry rather than seeing them as abridgments that are not attainable or never to be possibly reversed.