Career
Hisham works in the tradition of film as art. His films are meditations on everyday life, shaped by his personal experience as a Lebanese growing up during the civil war, enduring multiple Israeli invasions, and navigating the Anglo/European culture in which he currently lives. Emerging from this context, his films reflect political and social concerns informed by modernist aesthetics and the poetics of the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish traditions. In his films, he creates a dialectic between the retinal/material impact of the image and its conceptual possibility in order to depict the world around us. In this way, his films may be viewed as the material expression of intuition and emotions, but also as a way to understand how we construct ourselves as people.
It is because of the varied experiences he's had that he has created films that are personal meditations on some of the issues facing us today: our common emotional and intellectual alienation, our decaying landscapes, our cultural loss, and our never-ending wars and exiles. In his films he aims to listen to life and thus he does not advance an exclusive method. Instead, each of his films has a particular method of its own, constructed out of the life material he is working with. In this way the story, characters, and context mold a method. In his films, method is always a function of the needs of the material he is working with.
In his film "City of Brass," for example, he employs optical images with horizontal perspectives and vivid colors to reflect the stability and power the West enjoys, whereas digital landscapes are created in 10th century Arabia with distorted spaces, oblique perspectives, and monotone colors, that allegorically show the tragic reality of Arabs today. In "La Rencontre," his great adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story "Emma Zunz," the story unfolds first through the image and second through the omniscient narrator who often repeats, adds, and sometimes omits what the image tells us. This strategy of Bressonian ellipsis and doubling heightens the psychological drama and emphasizes the idea that what is unsaid is as good a clue as what is said. In "Vertices," Bizri placea the cities of Beirut, Dublin, and Seoul side by side in a triptych to depict and reflect upon civil wars, foreign invasions, and the symptomatic post-colonial reality. In "Asmahan," a film about colonial Egypt seen through the eyes of a historical female singer murdered because of her political loyalty to Egypt, he uses the style of rapid montage, alternating between night and day, people and animals, to form a complex canvas of the singer’s multiple personas as a lover, mother, sister, peasant, actor, informant, and a generator of dreams.
His most recently completed film, "Song for the Deaf Ear" (2008), began as a meditation on the insanity of war and violence in his country Lebanon. It is a film that emphasizes the visionary seers and not what one sees. To accomplish this, he made a film built with intricate patterns of clusters of flashes mixed with asynchronous patterns (in the tradition of Serial music), which anticipate other patterns of frame-to-frame montage (not shot-to-shot montage), with certain structures creating a seemingly endless series of irregular accelerations. The structure reveals a world in Lebanon made up of scattered segments that have lost their center, a world where permanence, depletion, and incessant loneliness characterize the Lebanese.
Bizri is now working on several short films and a feature, all reflecting the ever-melancholic consciousness of people in a visual/auditory poetics of his own where the film image is a real thing, an organism that embodies human action rendered by the real experiences of the filmmaker.
For Bizri, the meaning of human action cannot be understood solely by looking at politics and economics, but as a filmmaker he turns to art to grasp what lies in the inner depths of peoples’ lives: our common humanity. Bizri believes that if film has a universal language it is precisely because of its ability to render human action, and to quote Henry James: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… giving fresh meaning to contemporary life.
On his website, Bizri cites some of his favorite film: Arabic Series (Stan Brakhage, 1981), Au Hasard, Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966), Gertrud (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1964), Genroku Chushingura (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1942), The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, 1953) and Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965).
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