Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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in southwest Asia, or the Mashreq). In addition, it includes the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, as well as the Jewish state of Israel. Although we include an entry on Afghanistan, this is largely in view of its interrelationship with Iran. Entries on the stateless peoples of the Western Sahara and Kurdistan are provided and contextualized in their interrelationships with Morocco and with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, respectively, while the first stirrings of a revival of cinema in Sudan have prompted an entry on that country, partly in light of its relationship with Egypt. The history and current position of cinema in each of these countries and regions is different, and the cinema of the Middle East covers a remarkably diverse range of topics and aesthetic approaches. With minor exceptions, however, Middle Eastern films are some of the least known to audiences and scholars outside the region, their global distribution and exhibition being limited largely to international film festivals in major urban centers. In some instances—for example, Syria, where rarely more than three films per year are produced—they have hardly been seen. This is a pity, because the quality and breadth of much Middle Eastern cinema is undeniable.
We cannot expect a volume such as this to address fully all the implications raised by the geographical and political constraints of the above, but we do firmly believe that the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema will provide a useful resource to support inquiry and analysis of the ways Middle Easterners have depicted themselves, their societies, and their histories on film. Although the volume does lend minor attention to North American and European depictions of the region and its peoples, which have often repeated the long tradition of orientalism that variously discredits or demeans its subject, this is not our emphasis: we assume that a majority of our readers will have encountered that “Middle East” in popular Hollywood films about the region, and perhaps in the Western media more broadly speaking. In fact, the Middle East is a part of the world that remains poorly understood, and we believe that examining the aesthetic quality and intellectual breadth of its cinema can supply a powerful means toward helping change that. We have tried to emphasize, in the difficult process of deciding what to include, material that may be available to our readers; nevertheless, much Middle Eastern cinema is regrettably inaccessible, and we can only hope that publicizing such films will contribute to improving the likelihood of their future dissemination. Comprehensiveness is an impossible and, perhaps, undesirable goal, so we have endeavored to choose significant films, directors, performers, production agencies, exhibition venues, cinematic organizations, and pertinent historical and political figures, events, and sociocultural practices that, together, provide a representative image of Middle Eastern cinema.
Very broadly, two distinct, but frequently overlapping, categories of filmmaking are traceable throughout the entries: industrial and auteurist. In the former, the dominant determinant of style and subject is the system of relations and conditions of production, both local and international; in the latter, it is the individual—or independent collective—working within or against that system and its transnational parameters. In most Middle Eastern countries, both categories of filmmaking have, at least periodically, existed simultaneously. Perhaps paradoxically, the films most widely available and seen in some of these countries—Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Israel, for instance—are those least likely to be distributed to foreign audiences—and probably the least geared to their tastes. It has been argued, on one hand, that such industry genre films, meant to attract large domestic audiences in their countries of origin and typically screened less frequently outside them, are more “true” to their particular national cultures than are films distributed largely internationally (auteur or festival cinema). For Middle East cultural critic Walter Armbrust, for example, art cinema funding and the pull of Western(ized) film festival exhibition venues serve to disguise the cultural richness of the popular Egyptian cinema. Roy Armes, on the other hand, argues that the rejection or transformative revision of genre cinema provides the best evidence of national-cultural “authenticity.” This debate reflects the important work of Cuban theorist and filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, whose writings address the nature and character of the films that might be made in Cuba following the revolution. García Espinosa establishes a distinction between a popular cinema that emanates from and articulates the people’s concerns and a mass cinema that is a commodified product drawing on stereotypes and aiming at a presumed lowest common denominator ultimately remote from those concerns. Armbrust is inclined to see the potential for studio-based genre cinema to push away from the latter toward the former; Armes less so.
With these debates in mind, we have developed a historical dictionary that includes a larger proportion of entries regarding the popular industry cinemas of Egypt and Turkey (Yeşilçam) than regarding those countries’ independent cinemas; such commercial, if occasionally “quality” or auteur, products constitute these countries’ more significant cinematic contributions nationally and regionally, and while therefore canonically central, have received limited exposure beyond the Middle East. However, the volume also includes a larger proportion of entries regarding the independent cinemas of Iran, Lebanon, and Israel than regarding the industry cinemas in those countries; these auteur and independent works also constitute, we postulate, their countries’ more significant cinematic contributions, but they have frequently received more attention internationally than at home—due both to exilic and diasporic filmmaking conditions and to political restrictions involving censorship. In this second edition, nevertheless, we have included additional entries on the commercial cinemas of Lebanon and Iran, on state-funded cinema in Israel, and on independent cinema in Egypt, both in an effort to redress historical gaps in the earlier volume and to reflect, in hindsight, the reemergence of earlier directions and practices under new circumstances. The relative importance of Palestinian cinema to its national liberation struggle is duly represented, as is the predominance of art cinema production in the Maghreb, notwithstanding, indeed in light of, the continued necessity of European funding—although we also acknowledge the recent trend toward locally funded productions, often genre films, in Tunisia and Morocco. The quite different structural constraints of the Syrian and Iraqi cinemas, and the difficult, transnational mixture of industry and auteur production, albeit some of it emergent and some of it derailed, in Iraq, Jordan, and the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Yemen, are represented, as is the phenomenon of exilic-diasporic, minority, and women’s filmmaking connected to each and every Middle Eastern country. We also cover the range of cinematic modes, from documentary to fiction, representational to animation, generic to experimental, mainstream to avant-garde, and entertainment to propaganda, and the variety of exhibition practices, including the demise of many traditional cinemas, the growth of shopping mall screens, and the rise—and in some cases fall—of film festivals in the Middle East and Middle East–themed film festivals internationally. These entries are supplemented by those on general concepts (colonialism, pan-Arabism, transnationalism), historical events (the Arab Uprisings, Iranian Revolution, Lebanese Civil Wars, Nakba), political figures (Arafat, Khomeini, Nasser), and, of course, the pertinent countries and regions themselves.
It is always difficult to know what the future holds in cinema: at the end of the Cold War, there were many predictions for its worldwide demise; they have proven unwarranted. As certain national cinemas flourish and others struggle (for example, the current tendencies in Morocco and Algeria, respectively), centers of interest, innovation, and development in the cinemas of the Middle East will undoubtedly change. If national cinemas are able to resist Hollywood penetration and to attract substantial domestic audiences, as is currently happening, for example, in Turkey, then local and national concerns may be explored in greater depth and breadth; on the other hand, today’s interlinked global world, now epitomized in the Middle East by the Gulf states, surely conditions the likelihood that all new cinema produced in the region will be consequent upon and reflective of transnational issues and concerns, whether such cinema be commercial or independent in origin. Cultural analysis of these cinemas, meanwhile, starting from sociological and anthropological bases (the work of Armbrust on Egypt and Kevin Dwyer on the Maghreb), as well as those trained primarily in film (Viola Shafik, Hamid Naficy, Ella Shohat, and many others), should grow under the influence of younger and lesser-known scholars, including those who have participated in the production of this volume. The latter are Samirah Alkassim (Palestine, Syria), Farshad Aminian (Iran), Savaş Arslan (Turkey), Patricia Caillé (Maghreb), Sandra G. Carter (Maghreb), Anne Ciecko (Jordan, Gulf states, Yemen), Gayatri Devi (Iran, Palestine), Iman Hamam (Egypt),