New Voices in Arab Cinema

Roy Armes

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253015280
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

New Voices in Arab Cinema focuses on contemporary filmmaking since the 1980s, but also considers the longer history of Arab cinema. Taking into consideration film from the Middle East and North Africa and giving a special nod to films produced since the Arab Spring and the Syrian crisis, Roy Armes explores themes such as modes of production, national cinemas, the role of the state and private industry on film, international developments in film, key filmmakers, and the validity of current notions like globalization, migration and immigration, and exile. This landmark book offers both a coherent, historical overview and an in-depth critical analysis of Arab filmmaking.

1Characteristics of the New Cinema

EGYPT CONTINUES to dominate Arab cinema in the 2000s, as it has always done, with the vast majority of its filmmakers based at home, and many of its most talented directors trained at the Cairo Higher Cinema Institute and expected to spend a year or two working in an assistant role before beginning a first feature. Cinema in Egypt has an impressive history, with well over 3,000 feature films made since the mid-1920s by around 400 directors.¹ Its films get by far the widest release throughout the Arab world, on both cinema and television screens. In the 2000s, some 330 feature films have been made by over 120 directors. But production elsewhere in the Arab world can match this in terms of output, if not in terms of audience figures. During the same period of the 2000s, over 200 feature films were made in the Maghreb and the Middle East by new filmmakers alone. There are, overall, just as many Arab feature filmmakers outside Egypt who have directed at least one feature film. These are divided fairly equally between the Maghreb and the Middle East, but they have made far fewer films, with only a tiny handful of filmmakers having had to opportunity to direct, say, three films in a decade. Yet the figures in the 2000s are impressive. For example, Egyptian filmmakers released just 35 fictional features in 2007, whereas some 22 were produced in the Maghreb and a further 10 in the Middle East.

Like their predecessors, the new filmmakers of the 2000s in both the Maghreb and the Mashreq keep their distance from Egyptian mainstream cinema, though it continues to dominate television screens throughout the Arab world. In one sense they have no choice, given the lack of any industrial infrastructure outside Egypt, which is the only Arab country to have a national cinema in the traditional sense in which the term is used in the West. Nowhere outside Egypt is there sufficient popular support for locally produced films to make them commercially viable without state aid, foreign co-production, or external funding.

What is perhaps more surprising, since the two areas have such very different histories (in terms of colonialization and the path to independence, for example) and such diverse systems of government (though virtually all are repressive in some way), is that filmmakers in both areas have chosen to adopt much the same approach to filmmaking. The basic characteristics of Maghrebian cinema, which Denise Brahimi picks out in the introduction to her book Cinquante ans de cinéma maghrébin are common as well to the cinemas of the Middle East.

In both areas, cinemas “essentially develop not through heroic gestures, but with a critical intent, unequivocally expressing a disillusionment, indeed a dissatisfaction”²—what Hélé Béji has called “national disenchantment.”³ The 2000s have seen the emergence of a generation with no firsthand experience of colonization or the governmental structures bequeathed by colonialism. For these filmmakers, the faults of contemporary society do not lie in a colonial past but in a maladministration occurring in the present. In so far as they use the past, it is frequently as a means of offering a critique of the present, which censorship restrictions prevent them from confronting directly. We find cinemas which may be socially critical but where political confrontation is never permitted. Comparatively few films are banned (though some have very restricted home distribution), but that is because filmmakers cannot fail to be aware of the constraints within which they must work.

Rather than being shaped by post-colonialism, the views of the 2000s generation are defined by the pressures and possibilities of globalization. The crucial role played by the United States—rather than by France, the former colonizer—for contemporary Arab filmmakers is well captured by Dalia Fathallah in her statement of intent concerning her documentary Beirut Cowboy:

Even if I do not wish to admit it to myself, like so many Arabs, I still dream of America, this new world where I would be able to reinvent and recreate myself. . . . How is our dream of America confronted today with the US policy towards the Arab World? In Beirut, the capital which has always incarnated both the American dream of capitalism and modernity and that of Arab unity, I go searching for these two dreams.⁴

The filmmakers’ approach is as much a product of their own social position as it is of their age. Although their films so often deal with the poor, with downtrodden women, outcast children, and exploited would-be migrants, their own personal situations are very different. They are typically members of a bi- or tri-lingual elite, often educated at some of the most prestigious universities in the West and trained at the foremost film schools in Europe, the United States, and Russia. Many of them live, by choice or necessity, in exile. Although they frequently are totally involved with the issues confronting the modern Arab world—particularly the role and status of women—they must of necessity approach these issues, to some extent at least, as outsiders. Their particular situation, however, allows them to be in the forefront of efforts for change. Indeed, some of the younger women directors, from both the Maghreb and the Middle East, who have lived and studied abroad for many years and are not held in check by local censorship or financing, often express in their films attitudes which would have been inconceivable to their mothers’ generation.

Brahimi’s comment that Maghrebian filmmakers ignore not only the model of the Egyptian commercial film but also the possibilities offered by Western genres is also a characteristic of Middle Eastern cinemas. The opportunities for social critique offered by the thriller are underexploited, and though comedies have proved themselves to be the most popular type of film with audiences at home and abroad, this genre too has been largely ignored—to the extent that Kevin Dwyer was able write an article about Moroccan cinema titled “One Country, One Decade, Two Comedies.”⁵ Has there been a single Arab horror film—in either the Maghreb or the Mashreq—since Hafsa Zinaï-Koudil’s Algerian Woman as the Devil in 1993? Is there any real Arab forerunner for Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s film noir–style thriller, Ajami?

A further area of popular cinema totally ignored is, as Brahimi observes, the pornographic film. As she notes, although “everyone knows that pornographic DVDs circulate widely in the Maghreb, as in other Muslim countries,”⁶ Arab films show an extreme reticence in the depiction of any aspect of overt sexuality, the only exception to this being a handful of mostly Western-trained and European-based women directors. Representations of sexual frustration, on the other hand, are to be found in abundance. This cannot be explained simply in terms of constraints imposed by Islam. As Brahimi again observes, with reference to the fifty films she is analyzing, “Islam is present in a certain number of films, negatively or positively,” but “it is only exceptionally that the Muslim religion plays a fundamental role.”⁷ There is a constant critique of Islamic fundamentalism, but this is from a standpoint analogous to that adopted in the West, not from any position rooted in alternative traditional Muslim values.

At the same time, in neither the Maghreb nor the Middle East has there been any parallel to the situation in the Egyptian film industry, where “a growing number of filmmakers, actors, and actresses, veiled and unveiled, refuse to visually portray sexually explicit scenes, appear in immodest clothing, or depict immoral characters.”⁸ Outside Egypt, there has been no sign of this “new regime of morally disciplined representations in the ‘clean cinema’ trend,” as Egyptian critics have dubbed it. Equally, there is no sign of “a shift in the Islamic Revival towards regarding the entertainment industry as an arena for refashioning religio-ethical norms, particularly ones surrounding the female body and sexuality.”⁹ On the contrary, there has been a tendency for younger filmmakers, and women directors in particular, to take a more open approach to female sexuality (though this step generally remains modest by Western standards).

To the extent that the contemporary cinemas of the Maghreb and the Middle East are “art house” cinemas, in conventional critical parlance, the film directors are by definition film authors (or auteurs). But equally if not more significant in terms of actual production financing is the fact that France has adopted for its funding of films from the South the very same criteria which were developed for the funding of its own domestic cinema. These criteria are followed by virtually all other European funding bodies which deal with Arab filmmaking. In the French system, as Martin Dale points out, funds are allocated not to producers but formally to the director (legally recognized as the film’s author), and subsidies are granted to those projects with the greatest “cultural merit.”

This gives the auteur, whether in France or from abroad, “a significant bargaining tool in negotiating with producers and distributors.”¹⁰ The combination of foreign funding and the lack of a local production infrastructure also adds to the Arab filmmaker’s responsibility. He or she must usually, of necessity, combine the roles of scriptwriter, producer, and director. If the film does achieve international festival screening, it will be the filmmaker who has to take on the tasks of promotion and publicity. Despite these constraints, contemporary Arab filmmakers remain, typically, independent and thoughtful critics of their own societies, with their values rooted in the more liberal traditions of both East and West. Their films, whether documentaries or features, give us a fascinating insight into how they wish to present, to as wide an audience as possible, the issues which they see as crucial to their societies in a constantly changing world.

2The Filmmakers

NOURI BOUZID has pointed out the significance of the June 1967 Arab defeat for his own generation of filmmakers, who were born in the 1940s and made their breakthrough in the 1980s.¹ The generation born since 1960 and making its breakthrough in the 2000s is very differently placed. These filmmakers were either small children or not yet born in 1967. The shared political experiences shaping their lives have been the Yom Kippur War in 1973; the outbreak of the fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon in 1975; the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which began in 1980; the successive assaults by Israeli forces on both Palestine and Lebanon; and the two Palestinian intifadas. As a result of the upheavals caused by these wars, many of the filmmakers have shared the experience of voluntary or enforced exile, often beginning in childhood or adolescence.

Their individual national experiences differ greatly, however. In the Maghreb, the new filmmakers constitute the first generation born after independence, but they have also experienced the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and life under often brutal dictatorships. In Lebanon, they grew up in the midst of seemingly interminable civil conflict and constant repetitions of foreign invasion and occupation, extending up to the 33-Day War of 2007. In Palestine, they experienced the continual tightening of Israeli rule, the Palestinian response to this (the two intifadas), and more recently, the blockade of Gaza and its bombardment in 2008. In Syria and Iraq, those whose parents had not been driven into exile grew up under Baath party rule and experienced at first hand the constraints imposed by the tyrannies of Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein.

There are also cultural distinctions separating this new generation from the previous one. The world has changed since the mid-1980s. Talking of her sense of the difference between her own work and that of Nouri Bouzid and Ferid Boughedir (fourteen and fifteen years older than she is, respectively), the Tunisian filmmaker Nadia El Fani has said: “This difference is based on the fact that I belong to a generation that listened to rock and roll; we experienced the 1970s. There is a small gap between their generation and mine; there was no smooth transition between the two.”²

There is work of real distinction to be found in the films of the 2000s newcomers, but much of the output is, in stylistic terms, fairly conservative. Only a few of the filmmakers have adopted styles that compare with the narrative innovation to be found, for example, in the work of their Francophone West African contemporaries, such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, or Abderrahmane Sissako. At the same time, though a number of the younger directors have made telefilms for broadcast transmission, there has been no breakthrough to truly popular forms of the kind exemplified by the “Nollywood” home video dramas of Nigeria. Equally, none of the younger filmmakers outside of Egypt has followed the example of Jocelyne Saab and made a mainstream Egyptian movie. The French notion of the individual filmmaker, seen legally as the author (auteur) of the film, seeking acclaim and establishing a reputation at international film festivals, remains the norm, as do foreign funding and co-production.

The New Importance of Women Filmmakers

Until the mid-1990s women made up little more than 6 percent of the total number of feature filmmakers in the Maghreb, and there were even fewer women feature directors active in the Middle East. After the very real contributions of Arab women to the (expatriate dominated) beginnings of Egyptian filmmaking,³ very few women were given the opportunity to direct a feature film. Sometimes the exclusions are staggering. No woman was given employment as a director within any of the successive Algerian state film production organizations. The two Algerian women pioneers, the prize-winning novelist Assia Djebar (elected to the Académie Française in 2004) and her fellow writer Hafsa Zinaï-Koudil each made just a single feature, in 1978 and 1993, respectively. But both Djebar’s La nouba and Zinaï-Koudil’s Woman as the Devil were 16mm works produced by Algerian television (RTA). Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida in 2002 was therefore the first 35mm feature film for cinema release to be directed by an Algerian woman, and though the filmmaker herself is resident in Algeria, all the production financing for this work came from France. The three other Algerian-born women to make a breakthrough in the 2000s, Yamina Benguigui, Djamila Sahraoui, and Nadia Cherabi-Labidi, are all French based and French funded. A similar pioneering role has been filled in Syrian documentary production by another Paris-based woman filmmaker, Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub.

But in Morocco, Tunisia, and Lebanon, conditions in the 2000s have been more favorable, and women make up about a quarter of all new directors. Several of these have already shown striking originality of tone and subject matter. Most focus largely on aspects of women’s lives in the Arab world, and they often bring to this subject matter a quite novel perspective. But they by no means form a unified group, and indeed, their principal characteristic is perhaps their very diversity.

Virtually all the women born in the 1960s and 1970s who have made a fictional feature have lived, worked, and/or trained abroad. There is no single pattern of entry to filmmaking, but it is notable that none of them has had the conventional, sheltered upbringing reserved for so many women in the Arab world. Among those from the Middle East, for example, the Palestinians Annemarie Jacir, Najwa Najjar, and Cherien Dabis and the Lebanese Dahna Abourahme, all learned their filmmaking in the United States,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Characteristics of the New Cinema
• 2. The Filmmakers
• 3. Documentary
• 4. Feature Filmmaking
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index