Militant Cinema and the Temporality of Revolutionary Affects in Lebanon

This article analyzes the documentary film A Feeling Greater Than Love by Mary Jirmanus Saba, which explores two forgotten labor strikes from Lebanon's past. By engaging with the content of the film and the filmmaker's own commentary on it, the article thinks through the affective labor this cinematic text is carrying out and its potential effects on viewers in a present moment felt by many to be devoid of revolutionary potential. The article argues that the film, by provoking a haunting, inspires a sense of indebtedness to the abandoned revolutionaries and unfinished revolts of the past, and it thinks through the potential impact of this feeling on social movements in the Lebanese present. The article argues that Saba's film provokes a reckoning with what the dead are owed, both in terms of reembracing elements of their organizing and militancy that have been characterized as impossible or ineffective, and in terms of learning from their mistakes, which society has been unknowingly repeating.