Hisham Bizri
Encyclopedia
Hisham Bizri is a Lebanese-American filmmaker. He has worked in the US and Hungary with filmmakers Raoul Ruiz
and Miklós Jancsó
and has made short films in the US, Lebanon, Ireland, Korea, Italy, and France. As of 2004, Bizri was an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
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).
Cairo Psalm (35mm Film, 2010)
Song for the Deaf Ear (HD/35mm/16mm/Super-8 Film, 18min, 2008)
Asmahan (35mm, 21 min, 2005)
Vertices (polyvision DV, 32 min, 2005)
Chabrol à Biarrtiz (portrait DV, 22”. 2002)
La Rencontre (fiction DV, 28”, 2002)
City of Brass (fiction, Beta SP, 24”, 2002)
Mitologies (stereoscopic cinema,1998)http://www.evl.uic.edu/mitologies/index.html
Few Lines, Bars (stereoscopic cinema, 1998)
Las Meninas (stereoscopic cinema, 1998)http://www.evl.uic.edu/chris/meninas/
The Book of R (stereoscopic cinema, 1998)
Playing with Picasso (interactive sculpture, 1997)
Message from a Dead Man (fiction 16mm, 1994)
The Leaves of a Cypress (fiction Beta, 20”, 1991)
Vertov’s Valentine (portrait Beta, 12”, 1991)
The Ridiculous Man (fiction 16mm, 12”, 1991)
The Third of May (fiction 16mm, 9”, 1991)
The Sun (Fiction Super-8, 5”, 1991)
Phantasmagoric Conception (fiction Super-8, 6”, 1988)
The Shadow of Exile (Fiction Super-8, 4”, 1991)
Raoul Ruiz
Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino was a Chilean filmmaker.Ruiz spent some years at the Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina's cinema school. Back in Chile, he directed his first feature film Tres tristes tigres in the late 1960s, winning the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival...
and Miklós Jancsó
Miklós Jancsó
Miklós Jancsó is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter.Jancsó achieved international prominence from the mid-1960s onwards, with works including The Round Up , The Red and the White and Red Psalm .Jancsó's films are characterized by visual stylization,...
and has made short films in the US, Lebanon, Ireland, Korea, Italy, and France. As of 2004, Bizri was an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
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
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....
, 1981), Au Hasard, Balthazar (Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson
-Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
, 1966), Gertrud (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1964),
Genroku Chushingura (Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
, 1942), The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls
Max Ophüls
Maximillian Oppenheimer — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany , France , the United States , and France again...
, 1953) and Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
, 1965).
Selected Filmography and Stereoscopic Films
Awards
- Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for 2008–2009
- 2008 McKnight Filmmaking Fellowship from the Independent Feature Project
- 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (New York)
- Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at University of MinnesotaInstitute for Advanced Study at University of MinnesotaThe Institute for Advanced Study, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is one of six University-wide centers at the University of Minnesota. The Institute for Advanced Study supports and encourages interdisciplinary and collaborative research and creative work across the University and fosters...
- Media Arts Award, Jerome Foundation (Minnesota / New York)
- Resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy)
- International Media Support (DenmarkDenmarkDenmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
) and the Ford Foundation (NY) funded his proposal for the creation of the first Arab Institute of Film (JordanJordanJordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...
) - LEF Foundation Grant (San Francisco); Institute for the Higher Cinema (Egypt)
- Artist Grant from University of California at Davis
- Commission from Festival Int’l de Programmes Audiovisuels (France) Resident
- Artist Grant from MIT Council for the Arts (Cambridge)
- Commission from the Louvre Museum
- Excellence in Film from the Louvre Museum
- Filmmaking Fellowship from Harvard, Boston, and New York Universities
External links
- Official Website
- An interview from the University of Minnesota
- Bizri's Las Meninas work available for viewing on this site
- Mitologies work available for viewing on this site
- website on Mitilogies
- Arab Institute of Film
- Minnesota Public Radio Interview, March 23, 2006
- International Symposium on Electronic Art 2008