Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano: A Hinge Film between Catastrophes

Abstract

Dancing on the Edge of a Vulcano (Cyril Aris, 2023) is first and foremost a testimony to the various crises that ravaged Beirut in 2020 and 2021, beginning with a warehouse containing remnants of war and fertilizer exploded, killing 218 people, injuring 7,500 and devastated an area that left 300,000 without homes. It is also the “making-of” for Costa Brava, Lebanon (Mounia Akl, 2021), a fiction film inspired by the 2015 rubbish crisis. Moreover, Aris’s film includes excerpts from Whispers (Hamasat, Maroun Bagdadi, 1980) with the aim of bringing the ruins resulting from the explosion into dialogue with the decimation caused by the country’s civil war (1975-1990), while also exploring the impact of both events on Lebanese political affairs and everyday life. To analyse the visual motifs in Aris’s documentary, it is essential to consider the other two films named above, as it establishes an explicit dialogue with both of them. Considered together, the view they offer of both past and future evokes Walter Benjamin’s criticism of progress, expressed in the allegory of Angelus Novus. In addition, this analysis establishes a relationship between real historical landscapes and the dystopian settings foreshadowed in science fiction and disaster films.