Cultural Revival Blooms After Lebanese Revolt

"What use is it for the country to replace some by others?" he asked in his book. "They've only taken advantage of the system, nothing more. It is the system that needs to be transformed and some accountability be brought in."

What Lebanon's artists do in their work every day -- weighing the claims of memory and reconciliation, optimism and cynicism, personal and collective identity -- has emerged with new urgency as the country struggles to chart a more democratic future without Syria's long-dominating presence.

Philippe Aractingi, a producer and director with more 40 documentaries to his credit, is finishing what he said was the first feature film produced and funded in Lebanon since the civil war, which ravaged the country from 1975 to 1990. Tentatively titled "The Autobus" (a reference to the attack on a bus that sparked the country's civil war), the new movie is a musical, with a bright, glossy Bollywood sheen. It follows a group of young dancers who are trying to introduce a contemporary techno version of the classic Lebanese dance, the dabke .

Although he has been working on the film for years, its central themes -- the tension between global and Lebanese culture, and Western influence and Lebanese traditionalism -- are rising to the surface once again, as the Lebanese question whether the country's cultural identity will be dissolved by greater political and economic integration into the Western world.

On a computer editing screen, in a vast 1950s apartment he has turned into a production studio, Aractingi showed a clip of his new film, a dance sequence that ends with fashionably dressed young dancers making a yin-yang pattern with older, traditionalist Lebanese villagers. Aractingi said the yin-yang shape was his metaphor for integrating identities that are usually seen as locked in hopeless conflict.

"It is a complete echo of what is going on," Aractingi said of his film.

It's difficult to gauge the degree to which the work of Lebanese artists, many of them cultural elites drawn from the country's Christian minority, has an influence on the wider political dialogue.

In the cosmopolitan Hamra neighborhood, a window of the Agial Art Gallery featured a painting directly inspired by recent events. Sabhan Adam, a painter based in Syria, has filled a canvass with dark, screaming faces, violent X shapes and the colors of the Lebanese flag. Adam's paintings, which sell for thousands of dollars, don't fly out of the gallery very often.

"They are not cheap," said Carol Chehab, a designer at the gallery.

The distinction between cheap, mass-produced forms of creative expression and "high art," made to last longer and appeal to more discriminating tastes, has even taken on a political dynamic in Lebanon. The Lebanese, critics argue, have become very good at producing "instant" culture -- graphic design, fashion, pop music -- while they let a deeper and potentially more unifying artistic culture languish.

"Beirut has become the capital of kitsch," said Samir Khalaf, a professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, who sees a post-civil war tendency to escapism in Lebanon's taste for "mass consumerism" and "public entertainment." Khalaf argues that the arts can help "neutralize the overwhelming constituent features we see around us, the churches and the mosques."

There is also a deep undercurrent of nostalgia for the halcyon days of Lebanon in the current artistic efflorescence. An exhibition of photographs and texts at the Goethe Institute, titled "Shared Spaces in Times of Crisis," contrasts images of Beirut from the 1950s and 60s with images from the civil war and its aftermath. The texts recall Beirut as an open, intellectually and culturally vibrant city, and suggest its future is to return to that past. But there's risk in that, which artists here are keenly aware of.

"Beirut scares them," read one panel, referring to Arab leaders in the region. "It has always been the source of their terror, for in its journals, clubs and theaters, it used to uncover all the anti-humane practices taking place in this Arab capital or that. Its freedom is their constant worry, its democracy their fear."