Haunting and the neoliberal encounter in <i>Terra Incognita</i> and <i>A Perfect Day</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses two post–civil war Lebanese films, Ghassan Salhab’s Terra Incognita and Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas’ A Perfect Day, to examine how the conditions and valences of a particular sociocultural moment register affectively and mobilize the investments that inform memory making in the Lebanese context. In particular, I study these works as embodiments of an emerging structure of feeling specific to post–civil war Beirut, in which the haunting remnants of an unresolved violent past intersect with the neoliberal imperatives to propel Lebanon into a global market. In this sense, I build upon an exclusive concern with ‘pastness’, which often dominates discussions about post-conflict and post-colonial societies, in order to consider how an unfinished traumatic past intersects with more contemporary oppressions and the affective dimension of these intersections. Through a series of visual motifs and audio techniques, Terra Incognita and A Perfect Day track the ways that forces from the past encounter a wholesale embrace of neoliberalism and commercialism to create a kind of affective impasse that plays out either in depressed apathy or in excessive indulgence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".