Violence and masculinity in Maroun Baghdadi's Lebanese war films

Abstract

In this article I discuss three of Lebanese filmmaker Maroun Baghdadi's films that were made during the Lebanese Civil War: Little Wars, Land of Honey of Incense and Outside Life. The article shows how the three films use male characters to comment on the non-rational nature of the war, focusing on the representation of violence in the films. Violence is discussed as a condition of masculinity, but also as a performance aiming at the assertion of one's identity. As the war threatens to usurp people's humanity and sense of self, the male characters in the films struggle with their own masculinities. Baghdadi goes beyond dominant representations of masculinity as spectacle, to highlight the fragile side of the masculinities on display in the films. I argue that the films, viewed in chronological order, show how the Civil War results in a gradual descent into dehumanization in general, and increasingly brings masculinities under threat in particular.