ABSTRACT
Readers often imagine countries and cities as mythical dreamscapes—cornucopias of prosperity and abundant pleasures. For much of the twentieth century, Lebanon and Beirut evoked such a dreamscape: a glorious past of cosmopolitan Phoenician traders transformed into modern French-Arabic fusion; cool mountain homes overlooking the warm Mediterranean sea; and a capital city, Beirut, that showcased intellectual, cultural and economic surprises. South Lebanon, at the time of my visit, had two large memorials to the Israeli occupation, one an emptied detention/interrogation center in Khiam, and the other a memorial to a massacre in a former UN shelter in Qana. The Qana museum is the twisted wreckage of a massacre in museum form. As such, it is older, better financed, and more elaborate than the memorial of Khiam. The sequence of the film screening, from end back to beginning, replicates the latency inherent in trauma—that the original scene is unrecoverable and recognition possible only in reverse, after the fact.
