Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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Algeria’s struggle for independence from France re-creates the Algerian uprising against the occupying French during the Battle of Algiers of 1954–1957. The film opens in 1957, as Colonel Mathieu, a cold-blooded representative of the French military, has just forced a confession revealing the location of Ali La Pointe, an FLN member and a symbol of Algerian resistance and identity. Paratroopers locate La Pointe and other resistance fighters, including a young woman and 13-year-old boy, hiding inside the Casbah. Their ultimatum: surrender or be blown up. As La Pointe and his comrades consider their options, the film flashes back to 1954, when the FLN launched major military operations in Algiers, and re-creates key stages in the uprising and in La Pointe’s political development. Meanwhile, Mathieu places the Casbah under martial law, with military checkpoints, raids, and mass arrests. The FLN reacts with assassinations, and Mathieu unleashes a program of systematic torture and other forms of collective punishment.
By 1957, the rebellion weakens in the face of intensifying French military efforts and the capture of FLN leaders. However, the film ends with the outbreak of mass demonstrations and a renewed Algerian uprising that eventually forced France to cede power to the FLN. Pontecorvo’s development of a quasi-documentary form of realism, with newsreel-style narration and captions, 16-mm handheld news cameras, and the use of FLN and official French military proclamations, were groundbreaking. An accomplished composer and musician, Pontecorvo provided his film with a complex soundtrack, highlighted by Ennio Morricone’s alternately overwhelming and restrained score. While The Battle of Algiers was immediately successful in Algeria, Italy, and the United States, it was banned in France and Great Britain until 1971. It was also one of a few anticolonial films to be banned under the shah in Iran, but it was exhibited after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It has remained pertinent in more recent times and was supposedly screened for American military leaders at the Pentagon in the early stages of the Iraq War.
BAYOUMI, MOHAMED (1894–1963)
Born in Tata, Egypt, Bayoumi graduated from military school in Cairo in 1915 and served in Sudan and Palestine. Eager to be involved with the cinema, he moved briefly to Berlin in the early 1920s, where he studied film and worked as a minor actor in the German film industry, then in one of its most creative periods. Returning to Egypt, Bayoumi was cinematographer on Italian Victor Rosito’s In the Land of Tutankhamen (1923), and he directed a short film version of a play, The Clerk (1923). He founded Amon Films in Cairo, where he oversaw the production of a series of newsreels and patriotic, anti-British shorts, as well as some short narratives, such as Barsum Looking for a Job (1923). In 1924, Bayoumi filmed the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb. He apparently completed a narrative feature, The Victim, as cinematographer and director in 1928, but it was not released, meaning that his only directorial feature was Fiancé Number 13 (1933), shortly after which he abandoned film production. Bayoumi founded a cinematographic training institute, Egypt’s first, in Alexandria in 1932.
BEHI, RIDHA (1947–)
Born in the Muslim holy city of Kairouan in Tunisia, Behi studied sociology and ethnography at Nanterre, then began his filmmaking career with Hyenas’ Sun (1977), a scathing indictment of Western transnationalism in which the economic and political structure of an entire seaside Berber village is irrevocably transformed when a European tourist resort is built nearby. Behi’s subsequent The Angels (1984), however, was a melodrama in the Egyptian style, as was his Bitter Champagne (1988), starring Julie Christie and Ben Gazzara, concerning a young man who unwittingly has an affair with his father’s mistress. Despite their generic styles and Western stars, these films were subject to censorship for their perceived political undertones.
Behi again selected an international cast for Swallows Never Die in Jerusalem (1994), a melodramatic homage to the Palestinian struggle set on the eve of the Oslo Accords. Richard, a French television journalist, travels to Israel to cover the historic negotiations. There he meets a Palestinian taxi driver, Hammoudi/“Local Radio” (Curfew’s Salim Dau), who he learns has been searching for his long-lost grandmother, and he decides to arrange a television interview between his own Jewish girlfriend Esther’s father, Moshe (Ben Gazzara), a Holocaust survivor, and Hammoudi’s father, a Gazan refugee. Hammoudi’s brother, Riadh, however, formerly an exile in Jordan, has joined an Islamist organization that violently protests the Oslo Accords, thus undermining Richard’s mediating efforts. His idealism is strikingly figured in a noteworthy panning shot of Jerusalem that enframes the major holy sites of all three religions represented by the film’s characters, which prefigures a similar shot in a later Palestinian film, Looking Awry / Hawal (Sobhi al-Zobaidi, 2005). Swallows has been criticized for its displacement of excessive blame on Palestinian militants, especially those adherent to Islam, for the failures of Oslo.
Behi’s provocative, humanist critiques of conflict and political idealism continued with The Magic Box (2002), which examines the complex life of Raouf, a resident of Tunis whose French wife, burdened with ennui, has become an alcoholic. To escape ensuing domestic problems, he decides to write a screenplay about his childhood in Kairouan. The screenplay recounts his early relationship with his uncle, a traveling film projectionist who owns a cinema caravan and whom Raouf accompanies throughout the rural countryside as respite from the harsh treatment he receives from his strict, religious father. Recalling Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1990), with which the film has been compared, Raouf’s uncle introduces him to the wonders of cinema, a gift that comes full circle in the present context of the screenplay. Always Brando (2011), a project originally intended to feature the iconic American actor, both celebrates his skills and recounts the often corrupt nature of the movie business. The Flower of Aleppo (2016), starring Hend Sabri, tells the story of a woman who goes to Syria to retrieve her son who has joined ISIS.
BEIRUT THE ENCOUNTER (1981)
Shot on location during the Lebanese Civil War, Borhane Alaouié’s film depicts a chance meeting between two young friends separated by the war. Their encounter is emblematic of the displacement and uncertainty faced when navigating intersectarian relationships and the obstacles of everyday political violence. Zeina and Haidar agree to meet at the airport to exchange audio letters before Zeina leaves Lebanon for America, where she plans to pursue her studies. Rather than overt violence, the backdrop of war shows a society paralyzed by the material signs of disjuncture (sporadic electricity, water, and phone connections, as well as roadblocks and traffic jams); time is hostage—no one knows how long it will take to cross the city or for the war to end. At film’s end, Zeina is stuck in traffic on the way to the airport, and Haidar gives up and leaves. A powerful symbol of departure and disconnection, the airport serves as a site of impossible good-byes. See also UNDER THE BOMBS (2007).
BELKADHI, NÉJIB (1972–)
Belkadhi is a Tunisian actor, filmmaker, and producer whose reputation has been built on a satirical television program, Chams Alik, which he produced and hosted on Canal Horizons in 2000. The characters in Belkadhi’s films have dreams that take them beyond the tough reality of their lives. VHS-Kahloucha (2006) is an upbeat documentary about the shooting of a film by a former mason turned filmmaker and actor, Kahloucha. This extraordinary character had featured as the protagonist in numerous low-budget genre films that he made and financed himself. These films have circulated widely on VHS in both Tunisia and the diaspora. Adopting a caustic and at times hilarious approach, Belkadhi presents Kahloucha while maintaining a keen awareness of the desperation of communities left behind in the modern race for economic prosperity.
It took years for Belkhadi to make his first narrative feature. Based on a screenplay he wrote in 2007, Bastardo (2013) is an allegory about corruption and the submission of the majority to the will of the most powerful. In an enclosed district where the struggle for power justifies any kind of violence, the film’s protagonist,