In “Tripoliscope: In Search of Tripoli’s Cinema Culture and Practices,” researcher Nathalie Rosa Bucher traces the activities of thirty-six of the forty-one cinemas active from the 1950s through the ’80s in Tripoli, Lebanon. To do so, she draws on the archive of the Société Commerciale Cinémathographique Tripoli Liban (SCCTL), a now-defunct company established in to oversee the Roxy, Rivoli, Odeon, and Dunia cinemas, among others with names likewise borrowed from distant places. Bucher stumbled upon this collection of documents, photographs, and film reels in an abandoned cinema and placed them under the care of UMAM Documentation & Research, which, in the absence of accessible public records, has served as a significant repository of Lebanese cultural and political archives.

With the rise of Islamic militants in Tripoli during the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), moviegoing was effectively banned; before that, however, cinema had been a favorite local pastime. Conventional Hollywood films in every genre, Nouvelle Vague classics, and risqué features such as Last Tango in Paris (1972) were all screened with the Lebanese General Security’s stamp of approval. But soon B-grade action movies and pornography came to replace the abundant and audacious programming of the long ’60s. To fool the censors, amateur projectionists cut and spliced porno films with Westerns using razor blades. This seemingly innocuous act evokes the necessity of rupture in the construction of new meaning. More pointedly, it exposes the cut as the condition of the spectator’s complicitous desire, not simply in wartime but in ordinary, everyday life.

— Natasha Gasparian