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“Avakian presents a remapping of the war-torn and divided city of Beirut, using, as his guide, Lebanese action cinema, a film genre whose decade long heyday fell squarely within the civil war period. [...]Avakian acknowledges [the] link between violence and geography in The Revenge of Geography: wars “redeploy” spatial identities as much as they do political and sectarian affiliations. [...] Avakian bases his novel topographic map of Beirut on where in the city these action films were shot and the amount of screen time each of these locations take up. Often the sites of action in the film would correspond to sites of action in the actual conflict. But in Avakian’s map the blank spaces, the sites which are left out, are just as telling as those translated into the quantified reliefs. Were these areas relative safe zones in the war-torn city or were they too dangerous or complicated to film in? Or were they just not that interesting cinematically? Here the scenography of war and cinema uncannily overlap, proposing an alternative cartography of territory and urban experience, both on and off-screen. Through the proxy of popular culture, Avakian tackles the complex, and as yet unresolved, history of civil strife. His map not only layers scene upon scene of Lebanese film history, and its relationship to specific urban loci, but on a different symbolic level, visualises the numerous gaps and missing narratives yet to be acknowledged in Lebanon’s political history. ”