Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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star Sadri Alışık, especially in Tourist Ömer on the Star Trek (Hulki Saner, 1973), in all three films Arif (Cem Yılmaz) is a homegrown and witty Turkish character, much like Turist Ömer, who finds himself in space among aliens and robots. Concurrent with the boom in comedy films in recent decades, all three films topped the box office as the lead comedian/actor capitalized on the success of the formulaic story line.
ARKIN, CÜNEYT (1937–)
Trained as a doctor in Turkey, Arkın began acting after his good looks were noticed by a film director. During the mid-1960s, he played the handsome male lead in melodramas and romantic comedies, but he would accrue fame for his roles in later action and historical adventure films, westerns, karate films, and costume dramas. Like other stars of the high Yeşilçam period, Arkın acted in a very large number of films—in his case, almost 300. These included Turkified science-fiction films, in which he is depicted performing stunts in circus acts, fight sequences, and horseback-riding scenes. After starring in the Malkoçoğlu film series as an early Ottoman warrior hero, he continued to play similarly cartoonish characters, including Battal Gazi and Kara Murat, who fight and kill the enemies of the Turks or Ottomans, in action-adventure films. Arkın gained international attention for his lead role in The Man Who Saved the World (Çetin İnanç, 1982), a low-budget genre piece known as the Turkish Star Wars.
ARNA’S CHILDREN (2003)
Codirected by Juliano Mer and Dutch filmmaker Danniel Danniel, this vérité documentary analyzes the historical changes in conditions and perspectives that have occurred within Jenin refugee camp since Israel’s 2002 reinvasion of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Arna’s Children portrays the director’s mother, Arna, conducting educational theater workshops with the children of Jenin camp from 1989 to 1996. The film alternates between Arna’s educational sessions and interviews conducted several years later by Mer with former workshop participants, now grown and actively engaged in the conflict with Israel.
AROUND THE PINK HOUSE (1999)
Lebanese directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s first feature exemplifies the frustrations that many squatters faced at the end of the Lebanese Civil War, when the political economy shifted to accommodate newly mandated reconstruction projects. While developers stood to profit, squatters were lured into abandoning their homes for only modest compensation. The titular pink house is a large, heavily damaged mansion inhabited by two families. When its new owner announces his intention to remodel the house into a commercial center and gives the families 10 days to vacate the premises, the surrounding neighborhood divides between those who favor reconstruction and those who oppose it. Although technically awkward at times, the film effectively depicts postwar Beirut as a persisting battlefield, declaration of peace notwithstanding.
ARTEEAST
This nonprofit organization was established in 2003 in New York City by Israeli curator and educator Liva Alexander with the specific mission of presenting contemporary Middle Eastern art and artists to a wider audience, both internationally as well as in North America. ArteEast showcases the multicultural connections among the various Middle Eastern cultures and peoples while providing a forum for the Western world to sample the burgeoning diversity of Middle Eastern films, literature, music, and visual arts.
ASLI, MOHAMED (1957–)
Born in Casablanca, Asli studied in Milan, working as an assistant cameraman and assistant director, then a production executive. Returning to Morocco, he established, in 2003, a training facility in Ouzazarte within Kanzaman Studios in partnership with CinéCittà and the Luce Institute. Moroccans had been demanding such a school for decades, and Asli’s was the first. He made a documentary about the school in 2005.
Asli wrote, directed, and produced In Casablanca, Angels Don’t Fly (2004), Morocco’s first feature in Arabic and Berber. The film tackles the harsh lives of three waiters transplanted from their villages to Casablanca to work to try to support their families back home, a subject Asli treats with humor and respect. Rarely are Moroccan features shot in rural areas, and even more rarely are rural problems handled with the realism of Asli’s film. The three men are rendered as complex human beings endowed with desires that poverty makes almost impossible to realize. The film was honored as the first Moroccan movie since 1978 to be selected for the Week of the Critic at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2011, Asli made Rough Hands, about a barber who tries to facilitate work in Spain for his neighbor, but her hands are insufficiently rough to get her the job.
ATATÜRK, MUSTAFA KEMAL (1881–1938)
The founder and the first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (literally, “father of the Turks”) was born in Salonika, at that time part of the Ottoman Empire. After a military education, he served in various ranks in the Ottoman army before becoming a leader of the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923). As the president of Turkey from 1923 until his death, he led the creation of a modern, secular nation-state through a series of rigorous reforms.
The party he founded, the Republican People’s Party, represented the new republic’s six basic principles with an arrow on its logo. These connected and overlapping “Kemalist” principles were as follows: republicanism (the replacement of the monarchy with a constitutional republic); populism (social mobilization of the people to realize reforms); laicism (the French rendering of secularism, which introduces a separation of worldly and religious matters while giving control of religious affairs to the central state apparatuses); reformism (the replacement of old, traditional, and Ottoman elements with those of modern, republican ones and the belief in continual reform as necessary for progress); nationalism (the creation of a nation-state based on an imagined ethnicity); and statism (the creation of economic modernization and industrialization through state measures and institutions). As a blueprint for the Republic of Turkey, Kemalism included the adoption of the Western, positivist understanding of science and education. In time, however, some of these fundamentals lost their power, especially as contemporary Turkey has integrated into global capitalist markets. Current renderings of Kemalist ideology often draw on the secular, democratic character of the nation-state with some nationalist undertones.
Since Atatürk’s death, the filming of his life has been a hotly contested issue in Turkish cinematic circles. In a 1989 book concerning the issue, Metin Erksan claimed that a film on Atatürk could not be made in Turkey because the concept of Atatürk would inevitably be concretized, thus limiting the people’s freedom to imagine him. Erksan instead called for “a big and real American filmmaker, such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, or George Lucas,” to direct such a film, on grounds that Hollywood filmmaking, so well rehearsed in constructing myths and legends, was more suited to projecting an ideal image.
Nonetheless, Turkish filmmakers did indeed make films about Atatürk, although for years not a single feature focused primarily on him. That task was left to a 2008 feature-length docudrama, Mustafa (2008), directed by television journalist Can Dündar. Released on the 70th anniversary of Atatürk’s death and seen by 1.1 million people, Mustafa was criticized for its televisual language and its attention to the late leader’s private life. Other works featuring Atatürk include the film and the television series Tired Warrior (Halit Refiğ, 1979), which narrates the Turkish War of Independence; the film Republic (Ziya Öztan, 1998) and the television series Metamorphosis (Feyzi Tuna, 1992), both of which focus on the foundation and early years of the Turkish Republic; the television documentary The Yellow Zeybek (Can Dündar, 1993), about Atatürk; and the feature The Last Ottoman Yandım Ali (Mustafa Şevki Doğan, 2007), a love story involving a late Ottoman bully who meets with Atatürk.
AVANTI POPOLO (1986)
This independent Israeli feature was innovative as well as controversial