Studies focusing on the cinemas of the Middle East and North Africa sideline the structural histories of this region's film industries. This panel contributes to the growing conversation around film industries and industrial influences within the Middle East/North Africa. By highlighting institutional and industrial histories through distribution, reception, and representational elements of the low- and middle-brow cinema cultures of mid-twentieth-century Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and the Maghreb, the panel poses questions about the value of popular cinema and transnational film theory that challenge assumptions of western imitation. Instead, the panelists tease out the tensions between high and low cultural forms, address colonized and marginalized voices, and contextualize film industries within the broader de-colonizing or postcolonial political, economic, and social backdrop of the region.
The first paper explores the distribution and exhibition of Egyptian films within the French-controlled Maghreb. In opposition to French productions, Egyptian imports provided representational value to Arabic speakers but challenged the creation of individual Maghrebi national cinemas. The second presentation ties the development of film trailers in the Iranian film industry to attempts to elevate the lowbrow reputation of Iranian commercial films. This paper contends that ethnic minorities within the film industry sought to compete with, rather than mimic, western films to advertise and provide Iranian films to a wide range of social classes. The third paper applies feminist film theory to the voice-dubbing practices within mid-century Turkish popular cinema. These industrial practices dislocate the female body from the female voice and serve as a means of presenting a homogeneous Turkish national identity, akin to other national movements. The fourth paper addresses the origin of the Egyptian public sector as it oversaw the domestic film industry. This presentation reconsiders the effects on the film industry resulting from the public sector's responses to political and economic events between 1957-1971. The last presenter investigates the transnational connections between the origins of realism and modernism in Egyptian commercial cinema and other Arab national cinemas. The paper positions the prominence of realist and modernist schools of Egyptian cinema, not as imitation of other global cinema industries, but as in conversation with them. By examining the technological, industrial, and ideological structures of this region's national cinemas, the panelists interrogate constructions of the national and transnational discourses within these film histories, their origins, influences, and social structures.
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Dr. Morgan Corriou
While the development of an ambitious film industry in Egypt is now well known, its international expansion has drawn less attention. However, Egyptian films long were the only Arabic-language films proposed to Arab populations under the colonial yoke. Even though they made their first appearance on Maghrebi screens by the early 1930s, their rarity turned the screenings into huge events, drawing a new spectatorship (notably, families) to cinema theatres.
Over the past few years, scholars have begun to investigate the political aspects of these screenings in the French Empire, highlighting the fear, close to paranoia, that these films raised in the colonial administration, and the heavy censorship that ensued. My aim is to present a more comprehensive study of the circulation of Egyptian cinema in colonial Maghreb, by considering not only the political, but also the social and economic dimensions of this trade. I will focus on distributors and cinema owners who are too often forgotten or disregarded in the cinema history, and on the actual expertise they developed for films commonly scorned by French and Maghrebi elites. My research relies on administrative archives, press, interviews and memoirs, but I make also use of new sources such as printed song lyrics and the private archives of the distributor Films Régence.
The trade of Egyptian films developed in an already precarious environment, which characterized the whole film industry in colonial North Africa. Alongside a few ambitious firms like Films Régence (which extended its trade to Sub-Saharan Africa and did not hesitate to invest in production in Egypt), regularly on the verge of bankruptcy, many distributors only ran small-scale businesses. I will deal with the various obstacles erected by French authorities to impede the distribution of Egyptian films and demonstrate that the colonial administration’s main concern was to obstruct direct commercial relations between Egypt and the Maghreb. Precarity also characterized the business of film exhibition. I will give an overview of cinema owners in North Africa and examine the part that Maghrebi Jews, and an increasing number of Muslims, played in the success of Egyptian films. The major issue here lied within the specialization of a few cinemas in Egyptian films, which the French authorities regarded as an act of political dissidence. Whether on a political, economic or cultural level, Egyptian cinema presented an opportunity for cinematographic independence in French North Africa, in a context that hindered the birth of national cinemas.
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Ms. Laura Fish
Prior to 1954, the growing domestic film industry in Iran did not use film trailers to advertise their productions prior to theatrical release. Despite dissent from his producer, Armenian-Iranian filmmaker Samuel Khachikian crafted his own trailer for the release of the first film he both wrote and directed A Girl from Shiraz (1954). With the film far exceeding the popularity of his previous project, Khachikian continued to expand his marketing methods to newspapers, trade publications, and marquee posters, relying on images rather than text alone to entice audiences, and seeking out international platforms to display his films. This paper examines the history of film marketing in Iranian popular cinema, particularly through the implementation of film trailers and publicity campaigns. I argue that through the pioneering marketing strategies of film industry figures within ethnic minority communities, domestic Iranian commercial films were able to compete against American and European features and win over audiences across multiple social classes.
Historians of Iranian cinema have focused on the commercial cinema of the 1940s-1970s as a form of entertainment primarily driven by working class tastes and amateur and shoddy production values. This period’s commercial films were exhibited, they state, in lower-tier theaters for lower class audiences and portrayed themes and narratives in line with working class ideals. The resulting reputation of Iranian commercial cinema as a low culture phenomenon obscures the varied marketing techniques filmmakers and studio owners were employing to distribute and exhibit their films to a diverse audience that cut across all social classes in all theater tiers and could effectively compete against foreign features. This project draws on historical case studies of filmmakers and studio executives, including Khachikian, to emphasize the parallel advertising and lobbying efforts of expanding the Iranian commercial film market, both in Iran and within neighboring countries. The work of minority figures to focus additional attention on marketing through ads and greater involvement of minority actors both marked a new step towards industrialization that was not based solely on film production and ensured the popularity of this cinema throughout Iran and abroad, the upper and lower classes, and multiple ethnic communities. This project situates the production of the film trailer as a pivotal moment of the expansion of industry methods through which filmmaking in Iran could professionalize and diversify.
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Muge Turan
The cinema of Turkey between World War II and the mid-1990s, termed “Ye?ilçam,” was marked by dubbing or post-synchronization, often performed by professional dubbing artists. My project is to investigate the gendered relationship between the post-synchronized cinematic voice and bodies. I contextualize this relationship within psychoanalytic discourse to understand how it exemplifies Turkey’s repeatedly charged and discharged national identity. I further engage with post-synchronized Ye?ilçam cinema in relation to the question of embodiment, absence, synchronicity and the hollow resonances of Turkish nationalism. I argue that post-synchronized “Ye?ilçam” films with their poor mise-en-scène, jarring editing, technical deficiencies and lower production values are more “audible.”
In film theory, the psychoanalytical paradigm that shifts its attention from the look and gaze to the sound, focused specifically on the female voice. Feminist film theorist Kaja Silverman argues that the film “soundtrack is engendered through a complex system of displacements which locate the male voice at the point of apparent textual origin, while establishing the diegetic containment of the female voice.” It is this very sort of diegetic containment that women characters in Turkish cinema, as a badly synced audio/visual phantom, seem to confound. In most post-sync Turkish films, sound almost seems to be transmitted through women’s bodies as if they were a receiver, like an antenna or passive mirror of sound. I address the example of Türkan ?oray, the so-called “Sultan of Turkish Cinema.” She is the most recognizable film star in Turkey for nearly 50 years, yet she has been voiced by four different actors. I connect this case to Turkish cinema scholar Umut Tümay Arslan’s note that women characters of Ye?ilçam represent either a threatening West or a virgin East waiting to be cultivated. This representation of corrupted morality through women defines the women and the Turkish national identity. Voice acts as a national blanket to cover up those different women bodies, to tame them, and give them a definition no matter how different their characters and actions are. Dubbing within post-synchronized Ye?ilçam flattens and homogenizes onscreen female bodies, concealing female physicality.
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Miss. Tamara Maatouk
Since its inception in the early twentieth century, the Egyptian film industry depended solely upon private capital to finance its development and expansion. This private character of film production began to falter when the Egyptian government established the Cinema Support Institution in 1957, officially marking the birth of the public sector in Egyptian cinema—a state body charged to support, financially or technically, manage, and aid the film industry. In 1960, the same institution acquired the appropriate means to propel its venture into film production, signaling the emergence of public-sector film production—the state’s direct involvement in the film industry as a producer, distributor, and theater owner—, only to end eleven years later in 1971. By presenting a comprehensive, chronological and nuanced assessment of the public sector in Egyptian cinema, this paper seeks to shed some light on the multilayered circumstances under which the said sector emerged, expanded, and eventually brought to an end.
Between an impending birth and a predestined death, deterministic analyses prevail in the study of the public sector in Egyptian cinema, the outcome of which is none other than general confusion. To many historians and film critics, the establishment of this sector was inexorable in a society experiencing an overall drift to socialism, attributing its emergence mostly to a premeditated set of ideological elements. The collapse of this sector, however, is strongly assumed by some scholars to have been predetermined by birth defects, namely, the absence of a clear ideological agenda. From this frequently repeated narrative of the rise and fall of the public sector in Egyptian cinema, the socio-political and economic implications of unforeseen events, such as the Tripartite Aggression in 1956, the political tension between Egypt and some Arab countries from the late 1950s onwards, the defeat of 1967, Nasser’s death in 1970, and al-Sadat’s Corrective Revolution, are typically ignored. By incorporating these seemingly unrelated influences into the story of the public film sector, this paper argues that many state decisions concerning cinema affairs were not part of a preplanned, purely ideologically-driven strategy, but rather pragmatic, somewhat experimental, responses to the many ramifications of the ever-changing realities that Egypt was witnessing at the time.
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Dr. Peter Limbrick
This paper traces the genealogies of realism and modernism in Arab cinema from the 1950s onwards, working comparatively across the region and outside it to displace two persistent critical binaries: the opposition between Egyptian and other Arab cinemas, characterized by the former’s historical dominance and melodramatic form; and the opposition between Arab and European cinemas, by which Arab modernisms are often positioned negatively as derivative of European models. In the 1950s, some Egyptian filmmakers began to explore poverty and social problems using a style of realism hitherto unseen in Egypt. While Italian neorealism was undoubtedly one influence, these films did not resemble Rossellini or De Sica’s. Nor was their realism yoked to an anti-bourgeois or anti-imperialist cinematic voice, as was later the case with the neorealisms taken up by some cinema novo and Third Cinema proponents. While existing in tension with the conventions of Egyptian commercial cinema, which remained largely melodramatic, the realism of filmmakers like Salah Abu Seif, Tewfik Saleh, or Youssef Chahine was also a means to engage a global cultural modernity, similar to what Biswas has claimed in theorizing Indian cinema’s embrace of neorealism and literary modernism.
In this sense, then, realism and modernism often emerged not as personal style but rather as part of larger cultural movements, and even became part of institutional arrangements. Salah Abu Seif's work, for example, was bound up with that of Naguib Mahfouz, the modernist novelist who also authored over twenty screenplays for Seif and others between 1947-59. Beyond Egypt, some North African filmmakers drew on these films as part of an Arab cinematic legacy while incorporating other influences, too. Moumen Smihi’s El Chergui (1975), for example, conjoins Satyajit Ray with Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” in which “modernism [is] shot through with realism” and vice versa (Rhodes 55).
Retracing Arab realisms as restless engagements with global modernity rather than shallow derivation or generic play, this paper uses Egyptian and Arab films to rethink questions of modernism, realism, and genre in cinema.
Bibliography:
Biswas, Moinak. "In the Mirror of an Alternative Globalism: The Neorealist Encounter in India." In Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, edited by Laura E. Roberto and Kristi M. Wilson, 72-90. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007
Rhodes, John David. Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
