A Suspended Life : A Cinematic Fall

Abstract

Nous tombons, writes René Char, We Fall. This is exactly the feeling we get as readers of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll. Falling constantly, gliding, slipping from one scene to another, from one realm to another and getting more and more confused about who we are. Alice’s adventures leave her nameless: she becomes a series of events. She is not an actor, a narrative shifter or what we might call in grammar a “subject”. Alice is always becoming tall, small, huge, unproportioned little girl in an irrational world. In Jocelyne Saab’s film A Suspended Life (1985) Samar is a similar character, going through doors that no one seems to see or know about. She’s a young, fierce and childish woman, being both and neither woman and girl at the same time. The film is focused on one character and takes place in a ruined Beirut: a wonderland filled with mad people evolving in a queer social construct. In order to reveal in detail those aspects of the 1985 Saab’s film, I conduct a comparative study with the major work of Lewis Caroll and underline the “modern” movement of identity loss.