The Defeats of the Victors Cinema Between Creative Freedom and Market Logic

We rarely find among writers and poets the love of cinema that drives them to write (cinematic) criticism. Rarely do we find anyone who prefers a film to a novel, or a play to an original novel or play, because most of them believe that cinema is completely incapable of filmmaking literature and theater. However, cinema, which has been influenced by literature and has drawn from the treasures of its novels, rarely does it become a film that isn’t adapted from a novel. In his book “The Defeats of the Victors,” poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah doesn’t stop at his love of cinema; he goes further, adding to his literary output an engaging literary book about films, which took him five years to write. According to the author, cinema is not the seventh art, “but rather the seven arts, from which we, as writers, are obligated to learn, just as its early directors learned from theater, novels, music, and visual art. Just as cinema needs other arts, artists, writers, and poets need cinema as well.” This book explores the ambiguous meaning of heroes who ultimately achieve a special victory, yet conceal a sad defeat. It reveals the story of this intellectual meaning, with its dramatic and artistic variations, in a number of well-known films.