Dr. Laura U. Marks is a scholar and curator of independent and experimental media arts. Her current research interests are independent media in the Arab world, and Islamic genealogies of new media art. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002), and many essays. She has curated programs for numerous venues including the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany), the Images Festival (Toronto), LA Freewaves (Los Angeles) Subtle Technologies (Toronto). Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
The Lebanese postwar documentary is a cinema of virtuality. The most creative works of this movement do not seek to, or seek only to, identify historical events and fix blame. They confront the history of the Lebanese civil war like a plane of immanence, where facts that are known and demonstrable are less politically salient than the teeming sea of virtuals, events that have been bulldozed over, witnessed only by the dead and disappeared, forgotten in the official history that seeks to reinsert Lebanon into the global economy.
Mohamad Soueid's Civil War trilogy tickles the actual in order to make the field of virtuals from which it appeared briefly perceptible. This rich trilogy invites many kinds of reflection and emotion. In this talk I suggest that it is fruitful to think about this work in terms of a model of immanence drawn not only from Western philosophy but also from Islamic atomism, a now-dissipated philosophical tendency that nonetheless leaves traces in Islamic thought.