Revolutionary Reenactment: Militant futures past in Rania and Raed Rafei’s 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle)

Abstract

This article analyses how innovative narrative techniques operate in the movie 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) by Rania and Raed Rafei (2012). The film is a reenactment of an historical event: the student occupation of the American University of Beirut one year before the start of the Lebanese civil war. The use of improvised reenactment, testimonials and the voiceover all strengthen the film’s approach to the event as an embodied transformative experience, even as it descends into its defeat. While a cynical spectator might argue that the focus on “revolutionary becoming” reduces collective action to individual experience, the article argues that it is precisely this affective and embodied approach that allows the film to resonate with other times and places and to evoke a speculative state of agitation beyond closed narratives of defeat.