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Soda Shots: Vienna and Lebanon

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The Lebanese Rocket Society

The Lebanese Rocket Society

Life is stranger than fiction and with the DVD release of 2012 documentary The Lebanese Rocket society; no statement could sum a film up more precisely. This is not a scientific programme by the USA, Japan, China, Russia, France or Germany but a tiny country sat between Israel and Syria. The very suggestion sounds fictitious to modern ears. Documenting student experiments that took place in the hills surrounding Beirut between 1960 and 1966, directors Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige look at the group of students and why those 6 years of rocket testing have been forgotten.

In tracking down any footage or trace of the Lebanese rocket society and recalling the society itself, the first 58 minutes show a clear passion for the audacious student project. This is a film about the optimistic spirit of adventure and seeing how it was all taken over by military might. As long as science and the military exist, the theme of military application and sabotage will never fail to be relevant. At an hour, this story would fit perfectly into a series of ‘lost history’ documentaries from the More4 or BBC4’s of this world.

Unfortunately, it’s not an hour-long. Hadjithomas & Joreige continue on for another 30 minutes. In which they add a troubles of installing a scale statue of the rocket to the university where it all began, which just about manages to be relevant to the goals of the documentary. After that there is a bizarre but nicely animated 10 minute cartoon about a futuristic Lebanon recognising their Rocket Society. As nice as the animation is, there is absolutely no reason for it to be there.

At an hour it works perfectly at 90 minutes Hadjithomas & Joreige burn themselves and the film out. Sadly, there is a technical compliant with the DVD too, one that would be short-sighted to ignore, light colours under white subtitles make the relatively simple task of reading harder than it ever needs to be.

Museum Hours

Museum Hours

One of the wildcards of many critics ‘best films of 2013’ lists, Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours straddles the line between fiction and documentary. Bobby Sommer is Johann, a man who has had his life in the fast lane; now in the autumn years of his life he enjoys the quiet of his work as a security guard in Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, Vienna. In between his internal monologues about the nature of everything from consumption of art and technology to sex and childhood, Johann has a chance encounter with a Canadian woman whom he provides he aids as she visits her critically ill cousin.

Together Anne (Mary Margaret O’ Hara) and Johann discover and rediscover everything Vienna has to offer. In that unearthing, Johann views the city with a renewed vigour seeing places that he had long since forgotten. With deliberately hesitant photography and editing, Cohen captures the serendipity of natural beauty that are as affecting in the moment as any art, without any of the grandiose and over-zealous fanfare into what it ‘all means’. Seeing two footprints in the snow and the tiny impressions of a family of birds parting it, this is the beauty that Cohen values. As it is, much can be read between the lines of Museum Hours frugal script and measured pacing.

To this point it sounds like a unanimously positive appraisal on Cohen’s film, and perhaps it is. After all, the cinematography is beautiful and packed with meaning and the execution is faultless in evoking time and place. Almost inevitably there has to be something preventing it from greatness and that something is the pacing, if it could be described in one word it would be tedious. While it may capture how time stands still in a museum and the philosophical ponderings of the art world, this is ultimately a film that demands an obscene amount of patience with no significant reward.

Both Museum Hours and The Lebanese Rocket Society are available on DVD from Soda Pictures (UK)


Filed under: Home Releases, Soda Pictures

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