by Michael Pattison
As one of its early, unassumingly poetic intertitles suggests, Ghassan Salhab’s Contretemps (2024) is a logbook: a chronological videographic document of events unfurling on the streets of Beirut over a four-year period. It begins in October 2019, as a series of protests takes hold of the city in response to the Lebanese government’s announcement of harsh austerity measures. Salhab began to film, and film, and film – sharing his takes on social media long before their broader meaning could be known. In the film, civil unrest gives way to the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. The disastrous Beirut port explosion happens. Israel resumes and intensifies its genocide in Gaza.
At first, the filmmaker’s camera observes an endless stream of protestors walking through the frame’s x-axis: an external witness to events unfolding independent of it. In the next shot, however, Salhab is in and amongst it, his camera moving forward through the scene’s z-axis as part of a long corridor of protestors. The sea of ubiquitous, forward-facing cameras held aloft by other people situates Salhab’s own image-making in a collective act. At 5 hours 45 minutes, the film is an epic by virtue of its length. While durational extremes are by no means novel, the persistent linearity of Salhab’s observations is a staggering achievement. Here, on a world-historic canvas, artistic drive, personal survival and collective conscience all intersect.
Receiving its UK premiere at Alchemy, Contretemps is also screening for the first time alongside its director’s more recent film, the much shorter No Title (2025), a car-bound survey of utterly devastated sites in South Lebanon following the 2024 Israeli airstrikes. In many respects this film can be viewed as an extension of the earlier work, an afterword necessitated by ongoing escalations beyond the cinema screen. It is not to reveal too much about No Title to cite its closing statement, a gnomic endnote that hints at the unfathomably endless horrors of Israel’s war: ‘still today’.
In its presentation here, though, as a looped work that repeats itself over the course of Contretemps’s six-hour run, No Title is less postscript than counterpoint. Viewed and heard together – literally, in the same space – the works simultaneously gravitate toward and depart from one another as the meaning of each and therefore both endlessly shifts. In this sense, Contretemps and No Title are not merely vital frontline documents: taken together, they exemplify an archive of the present where the relationship between each scene, each artefact, is less causal than compounding.
These images are interdependent: you must look and look again. Just as the visible dashboard of Salhab’s car imbues viewers of No Title with a constant knowledge of their spectatorship, the film’s simultaneous presentation alongside Contretemps induces in exhibition visitors an acute awareness of a deepening violence, an ever-worsening scale of destruction, a dialectics of despair.
