6. Queer Imaginaries and the Essay Film: The Cinema of Raed Rafei
Al-Atlal (The Ruins) | directed by Raed Rafei | 16 mins | Arabic & English | Lebanon/US | 2021
A drawing of an ancient bathhouse in a French travel book to the Middle East sparks a visual poem, inspired by the Arab poetry tradition of "standing by the ruins". The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring capitalist and colonial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, archives and ruins, histories of sex, and histories of empire, all commingle in this essay film. What transpires is a web of visible and invisible threads where homosexuality in the Middle East today seems to be enmeshed.
This essay film is a methodological showcase of Rafei's academic filmmaking. It begins with a colonial-era archive—a French travel book's depiction of a Middle Eastern bathhouse—and uses it as a portal to unravel complex histories.
Formal Strategy: The film operates as a visual and historical palimpsest. It overlays the archival image with contemporary reflections, text, and footage to explore how histories of sex and empire are intertwined. The bathhouse (hammam) is presented as an ambivalent space: site of community, homoerotic possibility, social cleansing, and state surveillance.
Key Concept – "Standing by the Ruins": The film is inspired by the classical Arabic poetic tradition of al-wuquf 'ala al-atlal (standing by the ruins), where a poet reflects on a deserted campsite to lament loss and memory. Rafei adapts this to reflect on the ruins of history and the fragmented archive of queer desire, asking what has been recorded, what has been erased, and by whom.
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