Screening memory: violence and trauma in De Gaulle Eid's Chou Sar?

Abstract

Chou Sar? (What happened?) is a documentary film by De Gaulle Eid, made in 2010 in Lebanon. The film consists of a number of interviews Eid undertook with his close and extended family about a massacre that took place one evening in December, 1980. Among the dead were Eid’s parents. Thirty years later, as he visits his relatives and records their stories, the question what happened? comes to be directed more towards the personal, social, and political circumstances in which the survivors have coped. In the following discussion I focus on how Eid's film addresses this event by concentrating on its aftermath. I am interested in how Chou Sar? engages the capacity of public and political cultures in Lebanon to approach memory of violence and enduring trauma as pressing concerns in and for the present. In doing so, I suggest that the film works to screen and situate violence and trauma as both actual and potential modes of address and response.