Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
Читать онлайн книгу.
left to fend for himself and suffer the trials and tribulations of everyday life in a country with which he has difficulty connecting on a social and emotional level. With an estimated 4.7 percent of Egyptians living outside the country, Black Honey along with other mainstream films, such as You Fly (Ahmed El Guindi, 2009), addresses the dilemma of diasporic living and the desire for home.
BOSTA (2005)
Before the international film festival success of Under the Bombs (2007), filmmaker Philippe Aractingi and producer Christian Catafago successfully brought to the screen this first fully Lebanese feature film. Using an entirely Lebanese cast and crew, they acquired financing from Lebanese businessmen to make a postwar road musical centered on the Lebanese national dance, the dabkeh. Bosta attempts to channel postwar anxiety through a story of renaissance and rejuvenation. Kamal, who lost his father during the Lebanese Civil War, reconvenes his now-closed school’s dance troupe in order to compete in the national dabkeh competition; he rebels against the traditional conventions of dabkeh, pushing a new, modern approach. This theme serves as a thinly veiled commentary about the way youth must deal with the baggage of the past in postwar Lebanon. Once accepted for competition, Kamal and his troupe travel around the country in a brightly colored bus, singing and dancing their way to personal resolution—including Kamal’s romantic relationship with Alia (Nadine Labaki)—and national unity. Bosta garnered large audience support and recouped the money invested in its production, thus proving to Lebanese financiers that Lebanese cinema could be profitable.
BOUAMARI, MOHAMED (1941–2006)
Born in Algeria but raised in France, Bouamari returned to Algeria in 1965 to work at the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographiques as an assistant director for Gillo Pontecorvo, Ahmed Rachedi, and Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, while also making his own short films. His first feature, The Charcoal Burner (1972), catapulted Bouamari to attention, as it set a precedent for interrogating rural transformations following the Algerian revolution. His subsequent films—The Heritage (1974), First Steps (1978), and Refusal (1982)—analyze the conditions of women and their social emancipation. Also an actor, Bouamari has appeared in some noteworthy Algerian films, including The Citadel (Mohamed Chouikh, 1988) and Enough! (Djamila Sahraoui, 2006). During the 1990s, however, his work was targeted by Islamists, and he was forced into temporary exile in France. There, at the end of 2006, while in production on his film Le Mouton de Fort-Montluc, which concerns prisoners condemned to death in 1958 for having participated in the Algerian revolution, he died suddenly and unexpectedly; the film has not been completed.
BOUCHAREB, RACHID (1953[1956?]–)
Born in France to Algerian parents, Bouchareb studied cinema at the Centre d’Études et de Recherches de l’Image et du Son, then directed films for French television (SFP, TF1, Antenne 2). Recognized for critically reflecting a “global village” in which different cultures coexist in mutual ignorance, Bouchareb’s films project themes of alienation, marginalization, and exile and narrate stories of immigration, identity crisis, the search for home, and the return to origins. He has filmed in Africa, Vietnam, the United States, and Europe, and many of his films have been short-listed for Academy Awards.
Bouchareb’s first feature, Baton Rouge (1985), tells an ostensibly true story of three Parisian friends who, inspired by the Rolling Stones rock group, decide to emigrate to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The film recounts their adventures until their expulsion by the immigration services. His second film, Cheb (1991), a pointed critique of the French policy of deporting “immigrants” for petty crimes, focuses on Merwan, a 19-year-old beur who has been expelled from France and forced to return to Algeria, where he was born, but where he now finds the language and customs quite alien. The Algerian authorities confiscate his passport and enroll him in mandatory military service—in the desert—where other soldiers constantly remind him of his foreignness. Swapping passports with a Frenchman he encounters, he reenters France but is conscripted once again into army service. In Little Senegal (2000), Alloune, a tour guide in a museum to the notorious slave island Gorée, traces the path of his ancestors, who were sold into North American slavery, to Harlem, United States, where he discovers Ida, a forceful kiosk owner who has no interest in her African roots.
Bouchareb’s interest in the North African experience abroad is continued with his Days of Glory (2006), a suspenseful, action-packed war film in the tradition of the Hollywood genre that exposes the exploitation of North African soldiers who either volunteered for or were conscripted into the Gaullist forces during World War II. With the exception of the less widely distributed Camp de Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembene, 1987), the role of Africans in this primarily European war had been ignored, if not largely forgotten, prior to Bouchareb’s cinematic intervention. In 2010, Bouchareb directed Outside the Law (2010), with the same stars: Djamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila. In this genre film, which he claims was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969), Bouchareb revisits the history of the Algerian war of liberation in France. The film focuses on three Algerian brothers whose lives diverged before the struggle for independence reunites them in Paris at a decisive moment in the conflict. The mise-en-scène uses all the tropes of the thriller and culminates in the evocation of the violent reprisals against the peaceful demonstrations of Algerian families on 17 October 1961.
BOUGHEDIR, FÉRID (1944–)
A self-taught filmmaker, but also a historian, theorist, and film critic for Jeune Afrique magazine, Boughedir was born in Hammam-Lif, Tunisia. He studied in both Paris and Rome, earning a master’s degree in literature and a doctorate in African and Arab cinema, as well as a diploma in cinema studies. During the 1970s and 1980s, he worked as an academic film critic and a documentarian of cinema, writing key commentaries on the history and present state of the medium in Africa, African Cinema from A to Z and The Cinema in Africa and in the World, and directing the documentaries African Camera (1983) and Camera Arabe: The Young Arab Cinema (1987, edited by Moufida Tlatli), thus becoming one of the most important intellectual theorists of Arab cinema. Boughedir’s contribution to film theory includes a schematic classification system that categorizes films based on the relationship ascertainable between their estimable audience effects and the theoretical positions of their directors. This system refers to directors as auteurs and includes categories that describe political, moral, commercial, cultural, self-expressive, and narcissistic-intellectual functions of cinema.
Boughedir’s early work in fictional filmmaking consisted of contributing an episode to the collective feature In the Land of the Tararani (1972), codirecting Murky Death (with Claude d’Anna, 1970), and assistant-directing several foreign productions. In 1990, however, Boughedir made his first film as sole director, the acclaimed Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces, a male rite-of-passage story that was screened widely at international film festivals and which remains the most financially successful of all Tunisian films. Halfaouine was followed by another popular success, A Summer in La Goulette (1995). His Zizou / Spring Perfume (2016) concerns a young migrant from the countryside who moves to Tunis and in 2011 finds a job setting up satellite dishes, which brings him into the homes of a wide range of Tunisians with very different views on the Arab Uprisings.
BOUHMOUCH, NADIR (1990‒)
Born in Casablanca and raised in Rabat, Bouhmouch is a filmmaker and social activist whose documentaries stand as a challenge to the official discourse of Moroccan cinema. Funding for them has mostly been raised from individuals, including through crowd-sourcing, as in the case of Makhzen and Me (2011), which discusses the 20th February movement, named for the protest in February 2011—a part of the Arab Uprisings—in support of political reform, in which Bouhmouch has been active. His 475: When Marriage becomes Punishment (2013) explores the case of 16-year-old rape victim Amina,