The Night (1992)

The Night is a semi-autobiographical film reflecting director Mohammad Malas's childhood from before the Second World War into the 1950s.  Its main characters are alter egos for Malas and his parents.  The film mostly takes place in flashback.   It's bookended by scenes in which the stand-ins for Malas and his mother speak retrospectively of their memories of the film's events. 

There is a scene in which the child goes to school for the first time.  His father, Allalah, carries him across a shallow river on his back.  The school is on a hill in front of them.  We look at it from below.  We see scores of children walking down the hill, surrounded by swaying plants, with a spinning windmill in the background at the top of the frame.  The sights and sounds evoke life in the open air, the liberating feeling of discovery.

Expressive scenes like this mark the emotional heights that burned themselves into the characters' memories.   Some of the most indelible imagery is much more ambiguous than the school, like a civilian running off into an inky-black night during a military skirmish, or a low shot of a person standing on top of a mirror.  At one point, someone muses that there are certain moments in our lives we experience over and over again.  They become the filters through which we account for everything else that happens to us.

There are a couple scenes in which people pose for photographs, and the film lingers on them as they wait for the photo to be taken.  Their stillness is more pronounced than it would be in a photo because we saw the movement leading up to it.  Remarkable moments, the things we want to capture in photographs, emerge from a living, moving background.  The film illustrates the city of Quneitra in deep focus, with people constantly walking about in the street.  We see people at work.  The camera peers through frames-within-frames.  The characters' memories serve as a window into the past, and the film commits to portraying Quneitra as big and heterogeneous enough that we know something always falls beyond the window's edges.  

But there's another side to what The Night is doing.  Quneitra was almost totally destroyed by Israeli settlers in 1974 after the October War.  While the events depicted are related to the main characters' memories, they're also fragments of something larger that no longer exists.  The mother and child are stuck with only still fragments with definite edges.  This is a film not just about irreparable loss, but how difficult it is to properly communicate the scale of loss to outsiders.