Winter 2006

Notes from the Underground: The Art & Physics of Film

by Eugenia Smith

As bombs exploded and broken bodies littered the streets above, a teenage boy, Hisham Bizri, sat quietly in the basement of the building across from his house in West Beirut, Lebanon, sent there for safety by his mother. There he watched movies—Rear Window, Vertigo, Wild Strawberries, and Stagecoach among them. He soon learned that he could find refuge and solace in art—even in shoot-'em-up American Western movies.

Today a reflective, soft-spoken University professor, Bizri talks with surprising serenity about his boyhood travails and his search for equilibrium amid competing cultural and political forces.

Bizri was raised in a Lebanese Francophone family with four sisters, "a strong mother," and a businessman father who was also a poet. A Muslim in a world divided by the Cold War and post-colonial hostilities, he was weaned on Western (mostly U.S.) films in the Soviet Cultural Center and educated in Jesuit schools.

"I wasn't sure which religion I belonged to," he says. "I would go to the mosque and would pray to Jesus. I didn't really know I was a Muslim until Black Saturday, when Christians in East Beirut started massacring Muslims."

As a college student in Lebanon, Bizri studied math and physics; later, in the United States, he studied film. Today a self-described exile who has lived in the United States for some 20 years and in Minnesota since 2003, he is an assistant professor of cinema and media culture in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and an internationally acclaimed filmmaker.

With his spouse of eight years, Michelle Mason (assistant professor of philosophy), Bizri has settled comfortably into his life in the Twin Cities, yet he remains resolutely Lebanese, with a "Mediterranean sensibility." ("I love snow," he says, "but I miss the sea.") Both in his life and in his art, he continues to explore and embrace the cultural contradictions of his early years. The language of his films is pure Bizri—Arab, American, Anglo-European, universal.

The universal language of film

"I came to cinema because of the war," says Bizri. "When my friends and family were dying, films gave me a way to live in the world, gave me a sense of well-being. Of possibility. My salvation is in art."

It wasn't the words that captivated the young Bizri—he "never followed what they were saying," he says. It was the cinematic worlds created by the play of light and shadow, the gestural language of two-dimensional figures moving across celluloid landscapes.

"I was in love with [Swedish film director Ingmar] Bergman," Bizri recalls. "I didn't understand any of the philosophical, religious symbolism, but I was mesmerized by the light, by the Scandinavian landscape, and I thought, 'It could be wonderful to just watch films.'"

By the age of 15, Bizri recalls, "I had seen all the masterpieces of world cinema." Some films he watched again and again, with an ardor and attention to cinematic detail that grew out of a budding scientist's fascination with the physics of film and an artist's attention to visual language.

For a while, because "you couldn't study cinema in Lebanon and you couldn't make a living as a filmmaker," Bizri studied physics at the American University of Beirut. But when a close family friend, Rafik Hariri (later Lebanese prime minister, killed in a bomb blast in 2004), offered to send him to America for college, Bizri grabbed the opportunity to move beyond watching films to studying and making them. As a filmmaker, he would be able to integrate his disparate selves—scientist and artist, humanist and cultural critic, observer and chronicler of the human experience.

The art and science of filmmaking

Bizri's films—whether multi-screen interactive installations or more traditional cinematic narratives—unfold as life unfolds, or as atomic particles behave when observed, with uncertainty and unpredictability. Both physics and film are ways of knowing, says Bizri. "And film is even better than physics, better than science, because it expands consciousness.

"I used to think I should have continued in physics because it was more worthwhile, and I could make a living at it. Then I started to think, 'Art is another tool to know the world. It's just as valid.'"

Perhaps even more so. Attentiveness to film and to other art forms is transformative, says Bizri. It connects us to "the eternal aspects of life and death," to our "common humanity." At the intersection of physics, art, and spirituality—the site of filmmaking and the cinematic experience—something Bizri calls "magical" is created.

For a filmmaker, as for a physicist, the very act of observing alters the course of events. As soon as you train a microscope on a particle of matter or a camera on a scene, the reality has changed; the moment is past. In Bizri's work, that principle translates into moody, evocative films whose grainy, flickering images, off-kilter time sequences, and fluid, non-linear narrative arcs capture themes of loss and melancholy, of alienation and exile, of people existing in the liminal and timeless space between worlds and between moments.

In his haunting 2004 film Vertices, Bizri constructs a complex narrative out of a series of 50-second scenes, or "visual meditations," that he filmed with a stationary camera to capture a "day in the life" of three very different post-colonial cities—Dublin, Beirut, and Seoul. Each scene is projected as a triptych, in three side-by-side frames.

Across frames, the scenes play at varying speeds, creating a montage of unsynchronized moments—a "new kind of cinematic space." The effect is a kind of information overload and sense of dislocation: The viewer's eyes must either focus on one image at a time while the other scenes flicker on the periphery, or dart from image to image. Either way, it's impossible to take in the whole.

The triptychs are interrupted by full-screen scenes of wartime—archival footage of battles and their aftermath. From images of bombed-out buildings, tanks, and soldiers in camouflage to scenes of people at prayer or at a fish market and a blind man on the subway, the film powerfully evokes life's discontinuities and the loneliness of crowds. Anonymous people randomly glance off each other and move about in isolation and seemingly without purpose through their crowded and indifferent worlds.

In one street scene, as a woman waits for a cab on a busy street corner, cars and pedestrians pass by at random intervals across the three frames in an endless loop, utterly heedless of her existence. The effect is unsettling. And yet the artistry of the film transforms these recursive vignettes of the "daily rituals and practices of city life" into what Bizri calls a "cinematic symphony of image and sound," creating a "harmony of feeling that takes us beyond 'us and them,' to a kind of resolution." That, says Bizri, is the redemptive power of art.

Filmmaker as anti-theorist

It's hard not to take away from Vertices a powerful political message about the ravages of war and imperialism. But Bizri insists that he is "not a political filmmaker," not out to deliver a message or make a point. It's enough that we are moved by his films, he says. What matters is what he calls the "wonder and mystery."

Bizri's films have more to do with painting and poetics than with theory or politics, he explains. When he was filming Vertices, Bizri says, "I opened my eyes and closed my eyes and started making the film. I felt that I was just listening to life—how people feel, what they are engaged in. The alienation I saw made me sad. But exposing that wasn't my purpose. The film didn't happen the way it did because I had an idea about it. Life happened and I filmed it. I portrayed what I saw."

If filmmaking transcends ideology, it also transcends technique, says Bizri. "Art is organic. It unfolds. I tell students, if you want to be a filmmaker, study literature and philosophy. Don't take film classes. You need to become a humanist, not a mechanic or a politician.

"If we want a world where people get along with each other and understand their relationship to life and to each other, we need more art, not more politics or better technique. Only art gives us a sense of peace—politics can't do it, and science can't.

"It seems to me that everything now is becoming a science. I want to think, so I take physics, or do experiments, or do problem sets, or read theoretical texts—everything is think, think, think. That's all fine, but art should do something different. Art is a very different way of knowing the world. If my film only makes you think, then I failed."

That said, it must also be said that Bizri's singular take on art and culture translates easily into the language of the academy. In all of the U.S. cities where Bizri has taught, made, and shown films—including Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis and St Paul—he has lived "on the cultural margins." This marginal location, he says, has given him a privileged view of the American culture that still in many ways eludes him, despite his early steady diet of American movies—the classic war movies and "cowboy movies" of John Ford and John Huston among his favorites.

"It's a physical exile, of course, but it's also intellectual. I tried to go back to my country in '95, and I taught at the American University, but it was difficult. I'm a new person now. We live in an abstract space. You're here, but intellectually and artistically, you are somewhere else.

"I have a perspective on knowledge that I never would have had if I'd stayed in Lebanon. Exile is another way to live in the world. It allows in me a kind of dialogue between different parts of myself and different parts of the world. I think that shows in my films."

Although Bizri declines to critique American consumer culture, he does decry the emphasis on the self. "I try to show my students an enormous landscape in which they can't recognize themselves. Today in film and in art, the sense of history is lost. We think we are supposed to see ourselves in that painting or in that film. But I think it is important in a way to disappear in a work, and for a work to be completely mysterious and opaque—so you have to work very hard at getting to it. That's what makes art transformative."

The birth of a film

To hear Bizri tell it, the creation of a film is a process of gestation, from the moment of its conception to its coming-to-life on screen, something like the unraveling of filmic DNA. The writing, the focusing, the shooting, the editing are "all part of the artistic process," he says. "But it's only when it's a two-dimensional image on screen that the film is born."

His reverence for the artistic process is something that Bizri hopes to instill in his students—not as a mastery of technique but as the unfolding of a vision. "I really want to make my students make films like Mozart made music. Its form is beautiful and organic, and it comes to life when it's played.

"Films should leave us with a sense of mystery, and that's art. If you live in the world with a sense of mystery, then your life is richer. Even if I cannot hope to make the world better, I can hope to make better films. And as a teacher, I can hope to make better filmmakers."

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