Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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of Islam on cinema has also led to a contestation, within film, over what defines that country and its national religion. Many Iranian filmmakers worked on behalf of reformist ex-president Mohammed Khatami, who in his prior position as minister of culture and Islamic guidance was an important facilitator of cinema. The screening of previously banned films under Khatami helped define his vision of the nation, just as their proscription has defined other regimes, and current President Hassan Rouhani has echoed Khatami in some ways while also appointing more conservative figures to key cultural posts. By the same token, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s documentary Our Times (2002) records Khatami’s election victory while also acknowledging the many female candidates who ran against him, thus drawing attention, from a woman-centered perspective, to certain limitations of the nationalist project. Meanwhile, a change in disposition toward the dominant modes of Islam in Iran can be traced across the films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, which first emphasized the central role of religion in defining national identity, then rejected and finally abandoned it, with his The Gardener (2012), which examines the still marginalized Baha’i religious movement, being shot in Haifa, Israel–Palestine.
Turkish cinema has very specifically been a site of struggle over what constitutes Turkish national identity. Debates about the nature of a “true” national cinema have been ongoing, with Islamic values weighed both against national folkloric traditions and Western, secular-rationalist norms. This debate is very much alive in the 21st century, as an Islamic renewal movement has been fostered in order to bolster the increasingly autocratic nationalism of the Tayyep Erdoğan regime, even as earlier in the century the country had applied for admission to the European Union (EU). Indeed one obstacle to that goal has been Turkish resistance to enforced secularization (for example, legal restrictions in France against Muslim women wearing the head scarf [hijab] in public places) and other anti-Muslim/immigrant policies in some EU countries in which Turks and Muslims live as migrant and guest workers. Another point of contention has been Western disapproval of Turkey’s treatment of its substantial Kurdish minority in the east. As in Iran and Iraq, nationalist ideology, sometimes rationalized in the name of pan-Islamism, has precluded acknowledging Kurdish claims to autonomy and led to the violent suppression of struggles for political independence, including a 2019 intervention into Syria that created a buffer zone in the north of that country, along the Turkish border, free of Kurdish influence. Interestingly, one of Turkey’s best-known actors and, later, directors, Yılmaz Güney, was a Kurd, although this went unacknowledged for much of his career. So indeed was the historical Saladin, a fact not recognized in Chahine’s pro-Nasserist celebration of his pan-Islamic values. Iranian Kurd Bahman Qobadi and Iraqi-born Hiner Saleem both emphasize their Kurdishness in recent cinematic works and identify themselves with their non-nation rather than with Iran or Iraq.
The situation of Palestinians has been compared, not without controversy, to that of the Kurds, although with a much stronger film history, reflected in the title of Hamid Dabashi’s edited collection Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. The difficult conditions of exile did not deter Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon from producing a significant, often aesthetically challenging corpus of short films, mostly documentaries—some of which have recently been rediscovered and newly disseminated, as explained in Off Frame (AKA Revolution until Victory) (Mohanad Yaqubi, 2015)—that in retrospect came to be called Palestinian Revolution Cinema. Many of its remaining extant works are stored in the Dreams of a Nation Archive, cocurated by Dabashi and Palestinian diasporic filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, among others. The unremitting nationalist and often revolutionary internationalist character of these films influenced the later Palestinian cinema that emerged in the years following the Camp David Accords, exemplified by Michel Khleifi’s landmark Wedding in Galilee (1986), in which, however, the question of nationalism is rearticulated in terms of gender roles. Palestinian Israeli directors could at this time receive financial support from the Israeli government, although many chose to seek funding abroad, mostly from European sources. Palestinian cinematic output increased, even and especially under deteriorating political-economic conditions, following the First Intifada and ensuing Oslo Accords, and a series of auteurs emerged in addition to Khleifi (who would later collaborate with Jewish Israeli director Eyal Sivan on the critical documentary feature Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine–Israel [2004]). Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002), the second film in a highly self-critical, national-allegorical series, exorcises Palestinian woes with the help of supernatural forces—but also the superior humor and intelligence of its Palestinian protagonists in comparison with their Israeli opponents—while Rashid Masharawi and Hany Abu-Assad, in Ticket to Jerusalem (2002) and Ford Transit (2002), respectively, and Annemarie Jacir in Salt of This Sea (2008) all demonstrate exemplary Palestinian steadfastness—sumud—in the face of the occupation’s social and spatial restrictions, characterized by military checkpoints, the construction of the Apartheid Wall/Fence, and the continued construction of Jewish-only settlements.
The new edition of this historical dictionary likewise draws attention to a third displaced and stateless people, the Sahrawis, whose ancestral lands in the Western Sahara are also divided by a wall constructed by the Moroccan state, which claims the land for itself. Israeli cinema, by contrast, has throughout its history variously invoked and supported Zionism, the ideology of Jewish nationalism. Exemplifying this aim are the aforementioned popular genre films, as well as a small but significant array of Holocaust films that attempt to justify the Zionist project as a means of ensuring Jewish safety.
Transnationalism in the Middle East
Much film scholarship of late has emphasized the transnational character of Middle Eastern cinema not only in recent decades but historically, the earliest films having frequently been made by outsiders in one or another sense of that term. In addition to colonial filmmaking and the use of Middle Eastern countries as backdrops for Western films, such as the Josephine Baker vehicle Princess Tam-Tam (1934) or David Lean’s study of Englishness abroad, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), filmmakers frequently not of Middle Eastern background, or otherwise from elsewhere in the region, were prominent in starting local industries. Thus, in Iran, for example, Avanes Ohanian, who directed the earliest features, was an Armenian and longtime resident of Russia who spoke little Persian. The first Persian-language sound films were made in India by Abdolhossein Sepanta and Ardeshir Irani; nevertheless, they were powerful nationalist documents, serving to legitimize the shah’s rule and to celebrate Iranian cultural traditions. Many of the earliest Egyptian films were made by filmmakers of Italian origin, such as the Egyptian-born Stephane Rosti, who directed Layla in 1927. This film’s position as the first full-length Egyptian feature has been challenged by Shafik, who substitutes another film directed by an Italian, Victor Rositto’s In the Land of Tutankhamen (1923). She points out, too, that the highly successful early Egyptian Jewish director Togo Mizrahi also held Italian citizenship, while other important pioneers were the Lama brothers, Ibrahim and Badr, who were Chilean Lebanese—or possibly Palestinian. The connection of the Egyptian industry to Lebanon has continued to be very strong, with many major stars, especially those with musical connections, such as Farid al-Atrache, having originated there. A striking example of the impact of transnational exchange on the construction of iconic national figures in this cinema is the dancer, singer, and actress Tahiyya Carioca, whose stage name is adopted from the Brazilian dance, the “Karioka,” made famous by Carmen Miranda and at one time immensely popular in Egypt. (To her credit, Carioca was able to sustain a long and distinguished career, which extended in later years to key roles in realist and auteur films, that prevented her descent into the sort of demeaning self-parody characteristic of Miranda’s Brazilian exoticism in Hollywood.)
These conditions of transnational exchange and interdependence have been accelerated since World War II with the implementation of neoliberal trade practices, concomitant tariffs and taxation of films, and multinational funding models. The effects of such developments are especially evident in the growth of Middle Eastern immigrant and diasporic populations beyond the region, and the artistic cultures, including cinema, that they have carved out in sometimes inhospitable environments. Such cinema’s numerous determinants include considerable French influence on the Maghreb, especially during the colonial period, the persisting cultural links of which have compelled many Tunisians, Moroccans, and Algerians seeking work,