Noir Barakat in Conversation with the Foundation for Art and Psychoanalysis

London — Beirut, 25 November 2020

Foundation for Art and Psychoanalysis: You have spoken of your father’s love for pictures and how he documented your childhood. Being close to photography very early on, I wonder how your relationship to the photographic image developed throughout the years, which changes it went through.

Noir Barakat: Actually, I didn’t start to constantly take pictures until 2014. My father did introduce me to photography through his cameras, his lenses. I used to watch him all the time taking pictures of us, of the family. My father passed away two years ago and he left me a bunch of pictures. I love them. It’s my treasure. Because of my father, too, I was introduced to cinema. When I finished school, I wasn’t sure of what to do, what to major in. And then I majored in Cinema Studies and took two years of photography as well. After I graduated, I started working as a freelancer in advertising, a little bit of TV, a little bit of everything. And I was lost. I was doing something that I wasn’t in love with. Anything that provided me with a living, I wasn’t comfortable with. Then in 2014, I went through a hard time. I had some anxiety attacks. And I knew the cause of them. I had them because of death; I am afraid of death. And I relate photography and cinema to death as well. I believe that everything you watch on screen does not exist. Those are ghosts. And in everything you see in a picture, when you look at a picture, there’s this paradox between what is present in front of you and what is absent. Those people in pictures do not exist anymore. This is why I thought that to overcome my fear I should take more pictures. And this was my cure.

FAP: Your series Album de Famille seems to be both a reflection on your life and on the life of images. How do you see the relationship between one’s life and the images of one’s life?

NB: Those are pictures taken by my dad. There are a lot of feelings involved. It makes me sad yet it makes me happy. It makes me dream. It’s something I cannot grasp anymore, my previous life. My dad, my mum, when they were young, my sisters… It’s all gone. It’s fugitive. It makes me melancholic and yet I am in love with that feeling. I believe that I am someone who lives in the past more than in the present. For me, there’s no such thing as the present. The present coexists with the past. And the future is the accumulation of the past. So the past is the most important thing. It is the definition of oneself. Photography is the most important thing in cinema as well. Cinema is photography, moving photography. This was the subject of my Masters. It was the presentation and the representation of death in cinema. In everything you watch on the screen, cinema is presenting you death.

FAP: Were there specific films that you referenced or that were important to you?

NB: I started with The Searchers By John Ford. Then Persona by Bergman, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Alain Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad. I tackled Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Ordet. David Lynch, also. Mulholland Drive. This is what I recall now.

FAP: It’s interesting that you mentioned L’année dernière à Marienbad. It seems to be really relevant to what you were saying. You have the audio track with its repetitions but also the images of places that no longer…

NB: Exist. Yes. The memory of the place. And the memory of people in that place. It’s when you don’t know what is alive and what is dead. We are living death. We are growing and we are dying, with each passing day.

FAP: In your work, it seems that subjects, when they are present, are always connected to the place where they find themselves. In the same way, the environments you depict, even if devoid of figures, seem to be lived environments. How important is the notion of ‘place’ to you?

NB: I always tell my students to look at places where there is nothing because there is a lot happening there. You just need to observe and be patient. Something that I always say is that if you stay in one place for a long time, you become that place. Or the place becomes you. And this is why, for me, the place—whether it is one’s house, nature, the landscape, anything—is another character. It is a living thing. It is there. Even without a person, even if there is no one in the room, a room can tell a lot about the person who lives in it. This is why for me the place is another character. The light is a character, too. Everything in a picture can play a character. I don’t like clean pictures. I don’t like, you know, the digital picture. I don’t like the perfect… Because perfection does not exist. I don’t believe in perfection just as I don’t believe in happiness. I believe in the pursuit of happiness; I believe in the pursuit of perfection. But once we have what we desire, what we once desired, we do not want it anymore. The same goes for pictures. Looking at a picture that is so clean, so perfect, I look at it and I see no beauty in it. I see it as a fake picture. It does not look like life. When the picture is not “perfect”, it’s much more beautiful. It’s real. I like rawness. Even films, I learned how to like raw films. There are many more feelings in them than in a clean picture.

FAP: Your body of work is quite rich and diverse. You seem to be able to move freely between different types of images, different topics, and different kinds of composition…

NB: It’s because I don’t understand myself. I am lost. When I look at my pictures, I don’t know… There is a saying in Arabic that means that every picture is from somewhere. They don’t have the same topic yet, at some point, there’s me in it. When I think about an identity, I don’t believe that I have one.

FAP: Is it difficult for you to feel like you don’t have an identity?

NB: Yes, very difficult. Especially here, in Lebanon. There is this struggle with identity in our country. We don’t know what we want to be or what we are. Some say we are Arabs, some say we are Phoenicians. We speak French, English, Arabic. We want to be Lebanese and European, but it doesn’t work. I am trying to find an identity. My own. I’m not aiming for spotlights. I’m not aiming for fame. This is the last thing that I want in my life. There’s this saying, you know… you keep a diary hoping that one day it will keep you. And this is why I take pictures and am trying to make films. I might put them in a drawer, or in a closet. And one day, someone might come and open that closet, and when they look at a picture or watch a short film I made, they will say ‘ah! This is Elie. This was Elie.’ And this is all I want.

FAP: It’s interesting that you have just said ‘this is Elie,’ which is your birth name. There is something there, too, between the struggle with the name and the struggle with identity.

NB: There is no straight answer in the documentary I made with my mother, All About My Mother Then Nothing More, but watching it one can see why I changed my name to Noir. And by ‘Noir’ I don’t mean darkness, I mean shadow. Because I believe that, even darkness, shadow… They are the essence of life. Without them, there is no light. I don’t believe one should remove pain or darkness, you should embrace them. And once you embrace them, they will inspire you.

FAP: For you, what are the connections (or disconnections) between photography and storytelling?

NB: When I look at a picture, I want it to talk to me. To tell me a story. There’s always something happening before and after [a picture is taken]. What interests me more is the before and after. Especially the before. This is when my imagination starts working. What happened before the picture was taken? It’s also not always about the subject being photographed, but the photographer photographing. There are always two subjects: the subject being photographed and the person behind the camera. It’s about the photographer, too. ‘This is what I saw and I want you to see that specific moment.’ And this is why a documentary is not real. Because what you document is what you want another person to see.

FAP: Until With Time… you hadn’t considered producing a body of work on the explosion that took place at the port of Beirut on August 4th, 2020. What difficulties did you experience when dealing with collective trauma?

NB: At first, I didn’t want to be part of anything that had to do with the explosion. I felt like I didn’t want to take advantage of anyone. When something big happens, when something bad happens, to start taking pictures of the explosion, the destruction, people crying, people who lost their houses, people who lost relatives… Who am I to go there and take pictures of them and ask them questions? I wanted at least to step back a little. And observe. I try to put myself in everyone else’s shoes. I try to understand everyone’s needs. Then, when I have my own perception of things, I do something about it. For example, when there was the revolution, I wasn’t interested in filming people in the revolution, going on the streets, protesting. I was interested in filming an old man, or a boy, or a kid sitting at the beach while the revolution was on. The people who are disconnected, who are far, but who want the same thing as well. I’m more interested in what is happening behind the screen than in what is happening on the screen.

FAP: How did you choose the subjects who participate in the videos? Did you focus on the residents of specific areas of Beirut?

NB: Karantina - Medawar and Mar Mikhael. Those were the areas that were most affected by the explosion as they are right in front of the Port. Especially Karantina - Medawar. It was never in the spotlight like Mar Mikhael, which is an area that is always crowded with youngsters, with people going to bars, drinking. It’s always busy there. Medawar is more like a small area where people live. It’s the opposite of Mar Mikhael. It’s very calm. When the explosion happened, Mar Mikhael was in the news 24/7. No one, at least in the beginning, talked about Medawar, where major destruction happened. I wanted to go there because I wanted to be part of the people, to ask people there about their experience. And they had beautiful stories.

FAP: It was important to give visibility to people who hadn’t been made visible at the start.

NB: Yes. Today I took a picture of a woman and asked her about memory. She said, ‘it’s better not to remember anything anymore. I’m 85 and I don’t want to remember. I wish life was without memory.’ Then after I took her picture, she looked at me and smiled, and she said, ‘now people will know me.’ Life there is really hard. But people there are genuine. They are perfect the way they are, that’s what I want to say. In With Time…, I’m trying to film the silence between question and answer. I keep the camera recording sometimes. I keep it on people’s faces and they just go. They disappear. You can see eyes with stories. And they go and you feel them. They remain silent for one minute, two minutes without saying a word. They forget they are being filmed. And, intentionally, I don’t ask them any questions. I just film their expression. Their faces and their expressions tell more about them than their actual story. They don’t look straight at the camera. They turn away and they drift away. And what strikes me the most is that most people wish they could go back in time and live the life they were living before, because they say that they think the life they were living before was much better than now. But it wasn’t. We were at war, back then. We were always at war. Life in Lebanon is really hard. And then I ask them, ‘what if something bad happens in ten years from now, would you wish to go back in time to 2020 like you are wishing to go back to the ‘90s or ‘80s or the beginning of war?’ And you see that they don’t know what to say. I also ask them another question: if they would go to an exhibition and in front of them there would be two pictures, the Port before the 4th of August and the Port after the explosion, which one would they look at and which one would they love most. And you know what their answer is? Most of them, they would choose the second option, the picture after. Because there’s a story in it, there’s pain. And because of pain, they’ve learned. And this is beautiful I think. Most of them don’t want the Port to be rebuilt. They want it to be just the way it is, to remind them. Our main problem here in Lebanon is that when something bad happens, the next day we clean it and we forget. We shouldn’t. We should keep things just to remember. We clean the outside but the inside is not clean. This is what I mean. We need to rebuild ourselves before rebuilding the buildings. We are not cured.

FAP: In the videos from With Time…, like in your previous work, we feel a very strong connection between the subjects interviewed and their environment, their domestic surroundings. During filming, how was the process of choosing the ‘setting’ in which people are portrayed?

NB: I chose that. I went to their place. If their room was broken or destroyed, I would film just outside their place. Or inside without any roof, like I did today, for example. I wanted to go to their place because, for me, it is their home. Like I told you before, the place is another character. It’s much better and I think that they are more relaxed when you film them in their place. Some of them, a couple of them, they don’t have homes anymore. I had to go to where they are living now and film them, not in Medawar… I even asked them about colours, if they could describe the colours they saw, if they could remember the colours they saw when the explosion happened. And most of them said there were no colours. It was grey. Some of them said it was black. Most of them said it was like in a movie. Time was so fast. Ten hours felt like one second. And there was this young girl, about thirteen years old, I asked her about the colours, and she said that the colours were crying on that day. Then she burst into tears. That was two days ago. And I couldn’t stop myself from, you know… I couldn’t stop my tears, too.

FAP: Which challenges did you come across in the making of the project?

NB: Holding my tripod and going from place to place. That’s the only challenge, I promise you. Other than that, I am in love with the people there. I love what I am doing. Even though, as I am telling you, it [the footage] is very raw, there are a lot of mistakes, it’s beautiful the way it is. I am going to an area where there is so much destruction, there is so much imperfection, and yet it is perfect. And I wanted that to be the case for the film. Sometimes the light goes off, sometimes the light goes back again, sometimes the voice… there’s something in the background like a dog barking, or a car passing by, horning, I don’t know. I kept everything.

FAP: They are the sound of the place.

NB: At one point, I was interviewing a woman, and all of a sudden a door shut in a violent way. And she jumped from her seat. She was scared. ‘What happened?’ Because, you know, of the trauma.

FAP: Do you think of this project in historical terms? Do you see it as a document? And, if so, in your view, what is it a document of?

NB: It’s keeping a story, saving a story. People who have stories to tell in front of the camera. Because… This is something important. Now I remember. One month after the explosion, I went to MarMikhael. I fell in love with destruction and it scared me. I looked at destruction and I was like, ‘wow, this is beautiful.’ I was sad, don’t get me wrong. I was really sad. But it was like I was watching something that… I mean, there’s beauty in ugliness. Of course, I do relate with people and I’m sad about what happened. But for me, death is death, no matter the form. For example, my friend lost her brother one day before. He was taking a shower and he got electrocuted. For her, her brother’s death was much more important than the explosion. Which is quite normal, I guess. And this amazes me, too, because everything is relative. Because of what I went through since the day I was born in 1974—the war in 1975, the war in the ‘80s, the war in the ‘90s, the war in 2005, and the explosion—I became numb. And I look at it and I feel sad, I feel drained, but, at the same time, I feel nothing. And this is what scares me now. If I’m going to ask people again the same questions in the future, are they going to become numb?

FAP: Has this project provoked any reflections on your work?

NB: I want to understand why I am feeling numb, at some point. Why am I always, you know… I am always far.

FAP: Considering the title of this project, which role do you think time plays, how is time perceived, in the face of tragic events of such a high magnitude?

NB: One of the questions I asked the people whom I interviewed was ‘what is time?’ I believe that we are time. We are time. When we don’t exist, time stops. At least for us, individually. You are time. I am time. I am made of time. You are made of time. The minute we are born, we become time. And the minute we die, time stops.

FAP: Did the event of the explosion change the way people think about time?

NB: One or two of the people whom I interviewed, when I asked them about the explosion, the Port, they said, ‘I am the Port.’ ‘Now, I am the Port.’ As if to say, ‘I am the explosion. The explosion happened to me. This is me. I am destroyed. It’s not just Karantina - Medawar, it’s not just Mar Mikhael, it’s not just my home, I am destroyed. It’s me. On the inside, I am destroyed.’ This is us. Even me, Elie. The explosion happened to me, in a way. Even if I feel numb.Even if I don’t feel numb. Whatever I am feeling, it affects me. I am the Port. I am time.