Between City and Self: Reading Beirut in Mohamed Soueid’s Tango of Yearning

Abstract

Set in Beirut in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the pseudo-documentary film Tango of Yearning (1998) follows the lives of several subjects who speak of love, loss, dreams, and cinema as they navigate their fragmented postwar city. Directed by underground Lebanese filmmaker Mohamed Soueid (b. 1959) and shot purely on video, the film is saturated with cinematic references, images of urban sites, sensual and religious symbols, and sociopolitical intimations. Soueid sees Tango of Yearning – the first in a trilogy titled Civil War – as an ‘obituary’ of his life prior to making this film. Hence, for him, the film is rooted in the past, yet I argue that it is a significant augury of Beirut itself as a palimpsest of urban memories sublimated by Soueid. This argument is nestled between Soueid’s assessment of his film as a personal work of cinema, and my own reception of it as symptomatic of Beirut’s history in the periods prior to, during, and after the Civil War. Tango of Yearning is, at its core, a meditation on the city of Beirut as it transformed throughout various periods governed by the traumatic event of the Civil War. Through a close reading of the film, I reveal how an ostensibly private essay is also a medium for archiving memories either forgotten or suppressed by the nation’s contested amnesia of the war, while also investigating how the postwar city’s history intertwines with the filmmaker’s biography. A largely unrecognized yet significant contributor to the Arab world’s video and cinema scene, Soueid – an agent, actor, and narrator of the city – is one of the most sensitive chroniclers of life in Beirut during the 1990s and early 2000s. Weaving historical realism with fabulation to fill or distort representational lacuna, his film offers doubled lenses – one of his life and another of Beirut’s contemporary history. Through a chronological reading of an otherwise nonlinear film, I extract a history of Beirut in three stages: its cosmopolitan yet polarized 1960s with a brimming arts, film, and literature scene; its violent war characterized by sectarianism and fragmented nationalism; and its amnesic postwar era in which the film was created. Accordingly, I ask how Soueid’s private image-making apparatus draws an image of Beirut through his own autobiographical narration.