After the Catastrophe?
Reflections on “Taste of Cement” by Ziad Kalthoum
Ewa Fiuk
ewa.fiuk@ispan.plInstitute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9908-8510
Abstract
In 2017 Ziad Kalthoum, a Syrian filmmaker, living in exile in Germany for several years, made Taste of Cement, a documentary in which he refers to his own experience as a refugee. Ewa Fiuk considers the structure of the document with particular focus on the aesthetics of the image, while the essential context of her reflections is wartime catastrophe (civil war in Lebanon in 1975–1990 and in Syria since 2011). In the course of the analysis, tension between the film’s topic (the war-enforced migration of Syrians to Lebanon) and imagery (visually sophisticated frames) becomes clear. Another issue considers how far and in what direction does Kalthoum’s film diverge from television and internet footage depicting the war in Syria. While presenting the aforementioned questions, the author refers to cinematic history by drawing parallels between Taste of Cement and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as well as Werner Herzog’s concept of ecstatic truth in documentary films, contained in his Lessons of Darkness, also known as The Minnesota Declaration (1999).
Keywords:
Ziad Kalthoum, war in Syria, exile, flood of images, aesthetics of the imageReferences
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Authors
Ewa Fiukewa.fiuk@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9908-8510
Ewa Fiuk – film scholar, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw); film writer and contributor to many magazines, periodicals and books; translator and interpreter working in Polish and German; editor of Kwartalnik Filmowy. Author of the books Inicjacje, tożsamość, pamięć. Kino niemieckie na przełomie wieków [Initiations, Identity, Memory: German Cinema at the Turn of Centuries] (2012), Obrazo-światy, dźwięko-przestrzenie. Kino Toma Tykwera [Worlds of Images, Dimensions of Sounds: Cinematic Work of Tom Tykwer] (2016) and Film jako przestrzeń transkulturowa. Współczesny przypadek niemiecki [Film as Transcultural Space: The Contemporary German Case] (2024).
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