In 1897, a Lumière Brothers’ camera operator shot a fifty-second film at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. Of the many scenes the Lumière Brothers collected from North Africa and the Middle East, this particular film is considered to be the first instance of a close-up--with a pedestrian approaching the camera from deep space. Over the course of the fifty seconds, a man strolls forward through a crowd, appears briefly in close-up, and then vanishes suddenly in the street scene. Recent scholarship in film and media studies has much to say about the close-up as the most affect-laden shot of filmic discourse, but how might we understand that one of its earliest instances occurs in Palestine? Can the formal analysis of a filmic concept be divorced from the location at which it is made thinkable? My paper is attentive to the challenges this Lumière Brothers’ film poses to national cinema and film theory--on the one hand, the site of the film’s production, and on the other, the relationship staged between film form (here the close-up on a Palestinian face) and film history (the Lumière Brothers at the Jaffa Gate). Returning to the close-up in this early film allows us ultimately to consider the place of Palestine in a history of film form and the possibilities of facing the camera differently.

Around the fringes of a cadre of seldom-seen and under-theorized films like Wechma (Hamid Benani, 1970), Le Chergui (Moumen Smihi, 1975), or Mirage (Ahmed Bouanani, 1979), there exists an even more marginal archive of Moroccan cinema: the documentary films that were made with the support of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM). Included in this archive are films by directors who later went on to direct feature-length work, like Bouanani's Mémoire 14 (1971) and 6 1/2 (1968), the collective work by M.A. Tazi and Bouanani, Tarfaya, ou la marche d'une poète (1966) or the remarkable Le forêt, by Rechiche Majid (1970). These works could easily be regarded as the products of a training ground for those who would later move on to feature filmmaking; as evidence of the structure of possibility available to filmmakers under the umbrella of the CCM in the years following independence; or even as an ethnography of Moroccan life in the post-protectorate years. Indeed, they are all those things. But this paper will argue for the need to also take these films seriously as part of a culture of both aesthetic experimentation and political practice in a post-independence Maghreb. Such experimentation rejected the prevailing international documentary aesthetics of that period (which, in the US, had begun to yield the "direct cinema" of non-intervention while in the Mashriq a cinema more polemically political in its ties to Palestinian resistance movements). Rather, these films can be situated as attempts to map the landscape of Morocco in the postcolonial period through a radical interweaving of ethnographic, documentary, and fictional aesthetics (the latter filtered through Italian neorealism as well as Soviet filmmaking). This strategy of experimentation--continued in the feature films mentioned here--constituted a response to the contradictions of a contemporary Morocco marked by colonial violence, analphabetism, and conflicting discourses of modernity and tradition. By treating these works in an intertextual method rather than within a teleology of short-to-feature development or documentary-to-fiction, this paper will propose a way of reading politics and aesthetic form within Moroccan cinema of the post-independence period. Cinema 3 nos. 1,2 (1970). Casablanca, Morocco. Renov, Michael. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge, 1993. Rouch, Jean. Ciné-ethnography. Trans. and ed. Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Souiba, Fouad. Un siecle de cinema au Maroc 1907-1995. Rabat: World Design Communication, 1995.

Many filmmakers in the Arab world have dealt with the fact that history in their regions is not well documented. Thus it is characteristic of their artworks to resort to idiosyncratic archives, personal memory, and, when memory fails, to fabulation, or inventing a past when documents and memory fail to testify to it. The intellectual genealogy of fabulation goes back long before Gilles Deleuze to Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn Ibn Sînâ and Sadr al-Dîn Muhammad al-Shirâzî Mullâ Sadrâ, and particularly to the concept of the imaginal realm developed by Mullâ Sadrâ and others (Jambet 2006). I will explore some of the creative strategies that this concept from eastern Islam offers for contemporary cinema. However, filmmakers who use these strategies sometimes encounter a problem, namely that their work is considered irresponsible, or held not to properly represent regional history. They may be charged with Western neo-liberalist individualism (El Shakry 2009), or just with irresponsibility. This talk will examine these dilemmas, in the case of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s 2008 film Je Veux Voir, in which the French star Catherine Deneuve plays herself, visiting Lebanon for the first time in 2006 and “wanting to see” the country as it reels from the Israeli-Hezbollah war. The film was well received outside Lebanon, but Lebanese critics responded with anger and frustration that the film was too pro-Israeli, or too pro-Hizbollah, or in other ways could not be appropriated to a political program. Considering Je Veux Voir as a work of fabulation, however, and one that creates historiography imaginally, allows us to appreciate its creative and political efficacy. References Omnia El Shakry, “Artistic Sovereignty in the Shadow of Post-Socialism: Egypt’s 20th Annual Youth Salon,” e-flux Journal, 7 (June-August 2009). Christan Jambet, The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mullâ Sadrâ (New York: Zone, 2006).

Long before the 2011 uprisings momentarily gave the term a positive valence, ‘the Arab Street’ had invoked the image of angry and unreasonable mobs. This metaphorical space—a product of the relationship between international news reportage and the spaces of Arab cities—has historically worked to stabilize a tension between media coverage and urban unrest. Since its historical predecessor in colonial social management and counter-insurgency strategy, it has rhetorically buttressed anti-democratic policies and violence deployed to contain populist energies of civilian populations deemed incapable of proper public affective comportment or political obedience. This paper traces the genealogy of the discourse of ‘the Arab Street,’ seeking to un-flatten the specific contexts and situations into which it has been imported in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by Arab and Western regimes. Rather than a complete inventory of every instance of the term, I examine how it changes over time in connection with key events, including the Syrian national revolt in the 1920s, the Algerian anticolonial struggle, the first Intifada, and the political movements and protests surrounding the second Iraq War. This paper has two main objectives. The first is to examine the intersection between the key historical shifts in this broader discourse, and the visual modes that inform them. The second is to reflect on the forces which make an object called ‘the Arab Street’ (and in the past decade or so, the corollary ‘Arab/Muslim Media’) appear to be coherent and amenable to expert management and intervention. This visual history will also open up to critique the modes of witnessing that the discourse of ‘the Arab Street’ seeks to close down, arguing that the recurrence of the term is both the justification of the use of force, and part of the reordering of the claim to visibility that the embodied and vocal contestation of space makes. I draw conclusions regarding the political stakes of the study of aesthetic forms of Arab media.