A rating / Festival review of The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)
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@THEAGENTAPSLEY Crikey, that is intense. I just thought the space race bit was overblown but I will leave the intellectual argument to you.
— neil white (@everyfilmdteled) November 3, 2013
54 = N : 10 / M : 8 / C1 : 11 / C2 : 7 / E : 11 / F : 7
A rating / Festival review of The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)
N = narration / script
M = material / use of material
C1 = cinematography
C2 = cohesiveness
E = effects / music
F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)
The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012) is a curious film : as if it were not enough to have the achievements of that society commemorated in the film by a scale-model erected at Haigazian University (formerly College), it goes on to end (Disjunction 4) with an animation, which imagines (counterfactually) that the society went on, and continued where the Voyager mission left off, with gold discs sent into space. (Reasons are given why the society became part of the military, and was later closed down : an international incident concerning Cyprus; an accident when propellant was being mixed; and pressure from the French government, amongst others.)
Maybe this animation did not originally belong with the film (I can easily conceive of it as a quite separate celebratory screening on Lebanese t.v.), or maybe it would have been better as a fantasy beginning to the film, rather than the voice of the film-makers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, saying, in a puzzled voice, that they were born in the months either side of the Apollo Moon landings, so how did they never hear about this rocket society ?
In fact, I am told, they said to Professor Manoug Marougian (who led the society until he went back to Texas in 1968, not wishing, he said, to be drawn in by other interested powers) that they had first seen the commemorative postage-stamps (only mentioned later, and not, as I recall, shown), and had wanted to find out more. At the outset, then, these seemed something dressed up about visits to archives that had empty film-cans, and very little footage, and about the whole notion of just tracking down Professor Manougian (in Tampa, Florida) and forthwith going to see him (Disjunction 1).
If you can bear that they would have been in contact after Google and before going, and so would have known already what he had kept and handed over to them, then so good, but it seems a bit too much like a telling a story to an uninqusitive child. On the other hand, showing that what Google Images came up for 'Lebanese rocket' were not space rockets did make the point that no one was remembering rockets in those terms. What Manougian did not appear to have to hand over was all the footage that had been absent so far, and the film simply abandoned the idea of looking for the materials for simply presenting and explaining them as if it were self evident how Joreige and Hadjithomas had come by them (Disjunction 2).
At the time when the chronological story has been more or less told (Disjunction 3), we learn of the scale-model, and that the owner of the factory making it is nervous, in case permissions were needed to create something that looks like a rocket. In terms of us watching the film, we have no notion of how it has not been thought to obtain these permissions (not least if others had been funding it), and again, feeling a little false, we are shown top government officials (before the government falls) agreeing on screen to grant them (or that they are not needed).
Then the very impressive installation of the model rocket, which was supposed to be carried to the former launch-site on the coast and from there to the university (but of which, with no explanation, we only see the latter), and the final disjunction (already mentioned). The film did not need all these stages, but it seemed unwilling to tell any part of the story slowly and in full, and concentrated too much information - too much intense reading of subtitles - in the short period after the film-makers have met Professor Manougian.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
