A quick scan across the recent books written on Arab cinema reveals the primacy of auteur studies in the field, attesting to the persistent relevance of the cinematic in the age of the posts, despite some claims that cinema lies in the dustbins of history. Indeed, all the available electronic media forms of this new age, the age of the archive, actually affirm the social significance of cinema, at the very least in enabling greater opportunities for the works of Arab auteurs to be known, read about, in some cases watched, and researched in the English and European languages (mainly French and German). My talk will focus on two understudied and deceased auteurs, the Lebanese Randa Chahal Sabbagh and the Syrian Omar Amirallay, both of whom died as exiles in France. I argue that they can each be considered respectively as leading voices of antagonistic discourse in two under-mined areas of Arab auteur research: Arab women filmmakers and Arab documentary film. From Our Heedless Wars to The Kite, Sabbagh was a maker of both fiction and non-fiction films during the 1980s and 1990s, each of which reflected on the intrusion of violent geo-national politics and sectarianism in Lebanese society. From Everyday Life in a Syrian Village to Flood in Baath Country Amirallay used the cinematic language of verite as testimony, portrait and statement countering official narratives of the Syrian state apparatus. My talk will examine their contributions and legacies to these respective areas - Arab women filmmakers and Arab documentary film – areas that are now burgeoning with filmmakers due to the availability afforded by digital technologies and the distribution capabilities of the internet. Armes, Roy. New Voices in Arab Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015 Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. New York: Routledge, 2006 Durovicova, Natasa & Newman, Kathleen, ed. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2010 Marks, Laura. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Camebridge: MIT Press, 2015 Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rastegar, Kamran. Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015

Kamal Aljafari’s Recollection (Germany 2015) is a poetic visual rumination, a cinematic language textured with other filmic images originally taken from Israeli feature films that have as their backdrop the city of Jaffa. The film then centers on this city that was emptied of its people and relegated to a scenic background in these previous films; It wrestles the city and its past from erasure, focusing visually on the space of the city, a space layered with different temporalities. Countering the erasure of Jaffa's history, he introduces sound and figures from Jaffa and from elsewhere as well as from the present. Aljafari creates a filmic language that lingers, that is both restless and arrested as it hauntingly returns to details of the city and its past. Its fixation on seemingly random details signals irresolution and an open interrogation. The film poses interesting questions about auteur cinema, about subjectivity, cinematic language, and the status of film as "archive." The task of recollection of the filmmaker passes through the imaginary of "others", through a certain politics of effacement. How is the filmmaker able to create his own artistic vision in a landscape of artistic and historic erasure that precedes his work? If his cinematic language is "cathartic" as has been proposed, how is he able to chart a new language that does not repeat a certain traumatic gaze that casts trauma only in the past? Aljafari himself has proposed that the film is a "dream." And like a dream the film creates a new grammar from a violently fragmented history reality to inscribe a memory and a vision, reminding us also of the exigency of auteur filmmaking, for cinema, for history. Bibliography Fourest, L. "La Palestine comme écran, ou 'comment passer de l'autre côté du miroir': Le cinéma de Kamal Aljafari." Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée 134 (2013): 85-98. Limbrick, Peter. "Contested spaces: Kamal Aljafari's transnational Palestinian films." In A Companion to German Cinema, Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch, eds. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yaqub, Nadia. "Refracted Filmmaking in Muhammad Malas's The Dream and Kamal aljafari's The Roof." Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2014): 152-168.

Film theorist Tom Gunning suggests that, influenced by poststructuralist ideas of textuality, film studies abandoned the concept of authorship before its possible critical applications had been thoroughly investigated or exhausted. Gunning’s book on Fritz Lang’s films uses authorship to think about modernity, textuality, and technology in cinema in ways that had not been sufficiently resolved. If his statement could be true for a canonical European director, it is most certainly true for the work of Arab filmmakers, whose own relationships to modernity have often been left opaque. This paper uses the examples of Moroccan artists Moumen Smihi (b. 1945) and Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011) to address the paradoxical situation of film authorship in Arab cinema scholarship. While auteur studies (along with national cinemas approaches) have driven many chapters in English-language collections on Arab cinema, there are nevertheless few extensive treatments of Arab filmmakers’ work in critical and theoretical frames that exceed the biographical. Yet there are compelling ways in which author-based studies might yield insight into Arab cinematic and intellectual traditions of modernism and their relation to projects of modernity in the Arab world. Smihi’s films, mostly produced outside the predominant national production context of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM), are part of an artistic oeuvre that also includes essays and translations of international film theory; in his case, authorship is closely connected to the development of an artistic avant-garde that refuses dominant nationalisms. Bouanani’s work, which spans feature films, documentary and short films, poetry, novels, film historical writing, and drawing, is receiving belated recognition after his death. The critical deployment of an auteur focus allows an historically nuanced study of Bouanani’s development of a “vernacular modernism” that combined Moroccan popular traditions with international modernist principles. In a production environment where co-funding is the norm, much contemporary Arab cinema depends for its very existence on financial incentives that reward the individual over the collective. Yet the examples of these filmmakers demonstrate that not all such work need be theorized as a capitulation to overseas norms. Balancing theoretical and historical arguments, the paper theorizes how some aspects of Arab film history might benefit from a critical auteurist approach. Gunning, Thomas. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London:BFI, 2000. Saghie, Hakim. The Predicament of the Individual in the Middle East. Saqi, 2000. Smihi, Moumen. Ecrire sur le cinema. Paris: Slaïki Frères, 2006.

“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