Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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displaced from their lands and properties since at least 1948, have mostly resettled as refugees in Israel and in refugee camps in the OPTs and neighboring Arab countries, as well as throughout the West, and many Palestinian filmmakers have been educated abroad. A significant Palestinian diasporic cinema has developed under these conditions, with Bethlehem-born Annemarie Jacir and Norma Marcos beginning their filmmaking careers in New York City and Paris, respectively, and U.S.-born Mai Masri basing her filmmaking practice in Lebanon. Similarly, Lebanese directors-in-exile, notably Walid Raad, have made avant-garde and documentary films about that country’s civil war, often—like Palestinian cinema—challenging related notions of nationalism and ethnic and religious chauvinism. (In many ways, indeed the same has been true of nonexilic Lebanese filmmakers such as Jocelyn Saab, Maroun Baghdadi, and Borhane Alaouié, whose works have opened up a discussion of internal exile.)
These films are instances of what Hamid Naficy has termed an “accented” cinema, one that carries specific modes of production, themes, and formal characteristics, such as an interest in movement, entrapment, and epistolary structures. Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless, a prerevolutionary exile whose melancholic works made in Germany express a yearning for a home he seemingly never achieved, are perhaps prototypical; while the formally very different work of Fatih Akın, a German of Turkish background, grapples explicitly with issues of national displacement and transnational existence in the narratives of relatively more widely distributed films, such as Head-On (2004) and Edge of Heaven (2007). As these examples illustrate, the multiple lines of connection constituting “world cinema” are often as enabling as they are constraining, a film’s ideological tenor and aesthetic quality dependent as much on a director’s individual fortune and tenacity as on larger global forces. Tawfik Saleh, for example, unwilling to compromise with the persisting commercialism and abiding censorship of the Egyptian studio system, was able to make films in socialist Syria (The Dupes [1973], itself an allegorical film about the difficulty faced by displaced workers when crossing borders) and Iraq, where he taught at the Cinema Academy, although he struggled to maintain a consistent output worthy of his considerable talents and commitments.
Perhaps the most obvious way Middle Eastern cinema now operates in a transnational world is through the ubiquitous use of coproductions, especially outside the industrial cinemas of Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Israel. This means of funding, typified by the French Fonds du Sud, incorporates Middle Eastern filmmaking with transnational economic systems controlled more or less by agencies outside filmmakers’ home countries or regions. Major auteurs such as Youssef Chahine and, particularly, Iranians Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi, who have been able to secure a measure of independence from the vicissitudes of production in their respective countries by securing European—again often French—funding for their projects, have sometimes been criticized as “festival filmmakers.” While Chahine continued to insist that his primary audience was Egyptian and produced a number of domestic successes, Kiarostami’s films, although in many respects steeped in Persian culture, were not much seen or sought after at home. His slow-paced, self-referential films explore ideas both intellectually and philosophically, revealing self-critical insights into Iranian life and society. Border Café (Kambozia Partovi, 2005) is another Iranian film that emphasizes displacement in a world in which people are forced constantly to cross borders, only here the cafe of the title offers a brief taste of home and a place in which nationalities can mix; its images of trucks, drivers, and their passengers on the move reveals another form of displacement, and specific food items, among other things, help to provide a temporary home.
The cultures of a far-off homeland are replicated in diasporic communities across the globe, whether in the cooking of traditional dishes, often refashioned in accordance with current circumstances, or in the watching of satellite television stations, which can bring a little bit of Cairo or Tehran to those who view. Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain (2007) celebrates North African cultural traditions through mealtime and belly-dancing scenes, while responding to their potential exoticism by placing the nostalgia often experienced by exiled and diasporic communities in the context of host-country prejudices and racism. Similarly, just as many Middle Eastern cities today are populated by television antennae that allow people access to a wide variety of media, some of which may be discouraged by local authorities, films may be made in communities and transported to diasporic and exilic communities outside the region. VHS Kahloucha (Néjib Belkadhi, 2006), for example, a record of the work of amateur filmmaker Moncef Kahloucha, whose films are made with extremely low budgets, begins with the delivery of cassette tapes of his newest production to a group of Tunisian migrant workers in a small town in Italy. Film is again seen to forge connections and to build community across borders. By the same token, the contradictions of transnational digital culture are examined and pried apart in independent and experimental/avant-garde films that, in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, problematize the relationship between technological development—including that of cinema and the televisual—and the political and economic conditions leading to exile and diaspora. Noteworthy, among such works are those of U.K.-based Palestinian filmmaker Larissa Sansour (Nation Estate [2013] and In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain [2015]); Fatenah (Ahmed Habash, 2009), the first Palestinian animation; and Out on the Street (Jasmina Metwaly/Philip Rizk, 2015), an Egyptian experiment with filmed theater of the oppressed.
Indeed, such issues lie at the core—and grappling with them may be part of the mission—of international film festivals, important instances of which have developed in the Middle East, especially in the wealthy Gulf states; although in contrast to well-established festivals in Carthage (Tunisia) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), each with a significant audience base, such transnational “red carpet” festivals have often lasted only a few years. Nevertheless, the displacement of refugees from, through, and around the Middle East continues to be a pressing issue, one that has had major consequences for nationalistic, even chauvinistic, governance within and outside the region, and films, both documentaries and features, about migration itself are a developing genre, as is a proliferating series of films, both commercial and independent, which hold up for critical examination contemporary worker exploitation and the oppression of indigenous populations.
The Form of the Historical Dictionary in Theory
At first glance, the division of information implicit in the historical dictionary format may seem to work against a recognition of the transnational interconnectedness detailed above by ghettoizing the material. (This possibility is, after all, inherent in the encyclopedia form, which developed historically as a mode of dividing and categorizing knowledge, often deployed to abstract and generalize about particular geographical regions under European colonial control.) We do not, however, believe that this is necessarily the case and have striven to ensure that it should not be. Indeed, the nonlinear, cross-referential nature of this work can, we believe, counter this tendency by facilitating multiple entry points into the general topic of Middle Eastern cinema, and thus encourage readers to cross possibly unfamiliar cinematic and philosophical borders. Following certain threads through the volume may also aid readers in adopting alternative approaches to the typical ways this material has been organized, and we hope in this way to enable them to measure the cinemas of the Middle East against each other, as well as in comparison to the Hollywood cinema with which they may be most familiar.
In addition, in selecting material for the historical dictionary, we have tried to balance inclusion of the best-known figures and movements internationally—those most likely to engage the book’s probable readership in the first place—with lesser-known material from an already underserved area of cinematic inquiry, where some of the more innovative and challenging work has consistently taken place. We acknowledge claims made by Shafik, as well as Kiarostami, that the cinema—and its modern conditions—are by no means “alien” to the Middle East, as has sometimes been asserted, and that to presume otherwise oversimplifies the history of the region and its cultures. This discussion evokes questions raised by long-standing scholarly debates over whether concepts of symbolism, metaphor, and allegory are especially appropriate or inherently valid means for interpreting non-Western films, as originally suggested in controversial work by Fredric Jameson and debated in critical responses by, among others, Aijaz Ahmad, Madhava Prasad, and Rey Chow (representative works by all of whom can be