“Intertextuality and trauma: Muhammad Malas as the transnational, Syrian, and Arab auteur” The Arab cinema, like any transnational cinema, has auteurs that make their mark as both public intellectual and aesthetic film artist. Studying their work requires a clear understanding of both intellectual and aesthetic ideas across many geographies, languages, and time spans. The Syrian filmmaker Muhammad Malas’s oeuvre invites a careful examination of how he embodies the definition of the auteur, and how he extends this definition. His work as an early film student in Moscow to his latest film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival represents two significant trends among some auteurs in the Arab world and Third world cinema. First, Malas’s uncanny ability to promote a unique intertextuality produces important ideas about his local concerns as it challenges our notions of auteur aesthetics. Second, Malas’s writing, his political positions, and his genealogical approach confront specific political and social traumas that afflict his society and perhaps the rest of the Arab world. Between these two themes - intertextuality and trauma—Malas’s role as auteur is not only an opportunity to examine the concept of auteur, but also provides a new way to confront the protean identity of any transnational grouping. My essay will examine all of his films, but will investigate moments when specific discourses are either constructed or broken down. Rastegar, Kamran. Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 Salti, Rasha, ed. Insights into Syrian Cinema. New York: Rattapallax Press, 2006 Wedeen, Lisa. Ambiguities of Domination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999