The aftereffects of political violence, financial ruin, and other disasters (both natural and manmade) have been the subject of French artist Eric Baudelaire’s films, videos, and photographs for more than a decade. Yet none of his work is strictly, or even superficially, documentary, and all of it seems to be in dialogue with the high formalism of several major and minor figures in the history of art, literature, and cinema. Baudelaire consistently flirts with the aestheticization of conflict. He risks turning the wreckage of war into images that are beautiful, melancholic, or sublime. But there is something unself-consciously searching about his evocations of Franz Kafka and Andrei Tarkovsky in “Imagined States,” 2004–2005, a series of large-scale photographs capturing cycles of destruction and reconstruction in the contested Caucasian territory of Abkhazia. The same can be said for “Site Displacement,” 2007, for which he hired photographer Anay Mann to “re-make” in India a series of pictures he had originally shot in France; or for his imaginative engagement with Michelangelo Antonioni, in the video The Makes, 2010, which finds film critic Philippe Azoury narrating his way through the Italian director’s supposed “Japan period” while describing a rich collection of films that were imagined (in Antonioni’s notes) but never made (and never meant to be set in Japan). In these and other works, Baudelaire seems to be looking, ever more intently, amid the strewn rubble and failed revolutions of the world, for the possibility of artistic and intellectual friendship, and for collaborations that could last, both through and beyond the work.

Two such collaborations that did not last but rather famously fell apart—one between the French filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, the other between the Japanese filmmakers Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi—were among the many spectral subjects of Baudelaire’s solo show in Beirut, “Now Here Then Elsewhere.” The exhibition’s title was a nod to Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere)—a film as generous toward as it is critical of the Palestinian resistance movement that initially commissioned it—which Godard started with Gorin in 1971 and (after the dissolution of the Dziga Vertov Group, to which they both belonged) finished with Anne-Marie Miéville in 1976. In The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images, 2011, a masterful sixty-six-minute collage of video, Super 8, and archival film fragments, Baudelaire twins Godard and Miéville’s film with Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, which Wakamatsu and Adachi made together in Lebanon in 1971. Though mesmerizing as an example of the film-essay form, Red Army/ PFLP is utterly lacking in political nuance from the opening line: “The best form of propaganda is armed struggle.” Adachi returned to Beirut four years later to film a sequel but ended up joining that armed struggle instead. He lost all of his footage in an explosion and stopped making films for thirty years, despite Wakamatsu’s sometimes daily pleas for him to return to work and resume their partnership.

Where Wakamatsu, who died last year, failed, Baudelaire has so far succeeded in engaging Adachi as an active partner, the two of them trading footage for visual material, interview time, and a screenplay for a feature film (a follow-up to The Anabasis titled The Ugly One, which, as an installation of uncut scripts and rushes, was shown at the Beirut Art Center as a work in progress). Through a fine range of composed, quoted, and incomplete films, Baudelaire’s exhibition delved into Adachi’s theory that the hidden power structures of a given society can be made visible by filming its landscapes, and it wrestled with the legacy of the radical left, which became disturbingly fascinated with devastating violence in the wake of 1968. The supporting works—black-on-black silkscreens, found photographs, newspapers inadvertently encoded with poems, and a slide projection of Adachi’s prison drawings—were less convincing, but the collaboration between Baudelaire and Adachi, pensive and playful, is something one hopes will be sustained.

—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie