Philip Widmann  currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the SNSF-funded research project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich. Across filmmaking, publishing, curatorial and educational work, Widmann follows an interest in film as an object of circulation, whose mutability expands notions of material unity, historical chronology, national origin, division of labour and expertise. In 2023, he initiated Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema, a collaborative project on unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in other media, and films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. A book by the same title was published by Archive Books in 2024.
 

Research project: In and Out of Circulation

Based on the case of Dans les ruines de Baalbeck, the first talking film produced in Lebanon, considered to be lost today, my research project examines the multiple roles that cinema played in efforts to establish national industries, infrastructures, and identities. Resources available to members of the diaspora and to non-nationals, such as the film’s German producer, were potential assets to be exploited for the integration of such national establishments into an international political economy. When Dans les ruines de Baalbeck was released in 1937, several years before Lebanon’s independence from French Mandate rule, the production company’s claim to have made the “first national film” must have resonated ambiguously between desires for national self-determination, their instrumentalisation, and the international commodification of material and immaterial goods branded as ‘national’. Inherent contradictions of making cinema national crystallise along the translocal trajectories of individuals involved in the film’s making and at the intersections between cinema and other, political and economic interests. To what extent did they contribute to the film’s relegation to a prehistory of the Lebanese cinema and its eventual disappearance?

Non-film sources, such as newspapers and illustrated magazines published in Lebanon and Egypt, fragments of business correspondence, US trade surveys, and diplomatic files from Germany, France, and Italy, provide para- and hypotexts to approximate Dans les ruines de Baalbeck as an object of circulation, whose existence as a discrete material entity is but one temporary stage. While some of these sources attest to the film’s valuation in various spheres and amidst conflicting interests, others document how its making responded to ideas and images which already circulated internationally and repurposed them as national recognition values. Their assembly into a feature length narrative talking film addressed local audiences through an established form – which also promised smooth passage in conduits leading beyond national borders. Extending from an analysis of how such an exchange of originality for origin may act as an element of friction in relation to other factors, the methodological approach of my study proposes a way to reassess the irrevocable loss of films in nation-state frameworks.