An Image of Tolerance Still Manages to Flicker in Old Movie Theaters

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/world/middleeast/old-beirut-cinemas-recall-more-tolerant-days.html

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The red velvet curtains opened and a fantasy of Lebanon emerged, devoid of disputes over sect, politics or nationality.

A Mexican-Lebanese singer belted out a pair of songs in Spanish. Arabo-Cuban performers followed, then a woman thundering through Adele, a longhaired Gypsy guitarist, an Egyptian singing in French and an imposing military man singing patriotic songs about Lebanon. Somewhere in there, the 10-piece band also looped in a little “Stairway to Heaven.”

“It’s like D.J.-ing, but it’s live,” said Michel Elefteriades, the owner of the nightclub, Music Hall. “This is a country where we don’t have a lot of things, where we don’t have parks or a zoo for the kids. What we have are cinemas, restaurants and nightclubs.”

Music Hall is a bit of all three, a restored movie palace whose past can be seen in the sloped floor and high ceilings, where the food is rich and dancing inevitable. It is an example of the Lebanon that many here want to project to the world: open, tolerant and fun, all in the heart of the Muslim Middle East.

But other old movie theaters here complicate the glossy portrait. That includes the Egg, an old movie house on prime property that preservationists want to save, which is slated for demolition to make room for the high-rises that have turned downtown Beirut into a generic Dubai. It also includes the smaller neighborhood cinema where the police arrested 36 men last month and subjected them to anal probes to test if they were gay.

Old movie theaters here, it turns out, are not just aging structures that conjure up an earlier era. They also reflect the conflicting versions of Beirut that are always competing for prominence, like the political parties and militias that fight for power.

Mohammed Soueid, a Lebanese film director and author of a book about cinema history in Lebanon, sees the old movie theaters as an example of what he calls “the big lie” of Lebanon, the idea that diversity itself (the miniskirted woman beside the veiled) signals success.

“You have a multifactional society with something like 17 different religions,” he said. “This model is not functional and we have paid a heavy price for it.”

Theaters once played a more unifying role. Lebanon lived under French control from 1920 to 1943, and the lingering influence of France, along with the magnetism of Hollywood, led Beirut to what many here still consider a golden age of moviegoing.

In the mid-1950s downtown Beirut was filled with glorious movie palaces like the Empire and the Majestic and the Roxy. Lebanese presidents attended premieres, and many still recall the rush of stepping into an air-conditioned theater during Ramadan or its bookend holiday, Id al-Fitr.

“I used to sit on the floor in the front and stare up at the screen,” said Bassam Halabi, 68, a lawyer and amateur cinema historian here. His first movie was “Superman.” “My father died when I was very young and my brother took me,” he said. “Cinemas used to be like soccer fields. They were huge and for everyone.”

Even in the early years, though, movie theaters were entwined with politics. The Communist Party met in a Beirut cinema in the 1920s. In 1974, a new theater in the Holiday Inn aimed to open with “The Tamarind Seed,” featuring Omar Sharif as a Russian agent, but the Russian Embassy protested. “They held it for two months,” Mr. Soueid said.

When Lebanon’s civil war began a year later, there were dozens of movie theaters all over the capital, and it was only a matter of time before they became part of the conflict. In Hamra, an area of west Beirut not far from what was then the city’s front line, gunmen used several basement theaters to store ammunition.

The war also pushed people to suburbs like Jounieh, where new theaters delivered a safer array of options. Movies from the Arab world became less common, as anything that seemed to offend the sensibilities of one group ended up censored or banned.

Now, most movie theaters in Lebanon can be found in malls, and most movies are safe American blockbusters.

Still, many of the old theaters remain, though in different forms. The Virgin Megastore downtown used to be one of the movie palaces. Several clothing stores in Hamra are old movie theaters too, and a handful of nightclubs — following the success of Music Hall, which opened in 2003 — have also found a way to update old theaters while holding on to projectors that hint at the clubs’ origins.

But increasingly Beirut is less interested in renewal than removal. All around the Egg’s gray sarcophagus — a cracked oval revealing the orchestra — there are cranes and glass towers. Many were built for oil barons from the Persian Gulf.

“It’s total greed,” Mr. Elefteriades, the nightclub owner, said, sitting in his personal lounge in Music Hall, decorated with candelabras and antiques. “There is no respect for what makes a country a country.”

But of course, what makes Lebanon a country has always been a subject of debate, if not war. This is largely a stateless state, with sects that run their own wings of government. Intermarriage — a Muslim to a Christian — requires a wedding abroad, because civil marriage does not exist in Lebanon.

In such an environment, many here say, juxtaposition is the rule and avoiding provocation is the ultimate virtue. At the movie theater that was raided on July 28, after a local television station produced a segment identifying it as a gay cruising spot, patrons had no interest in discussing what had happened. A man standing in the lobby made that clear: “You are already fulfilled with information,” he said in English.

Upstairs, in the projection room, however, Lebanon revealed its contradictions. On one wall near an old Italian movie projector hung a painting of the Mecca mosque, and a shrine to the Virgin Mary; on the other side were movie posters from all over the world.

Down below, the theater was completely dark — except for the flicker of an old movie showing two men ogling a belly dancer.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Dalal Mawad contributed reporting.