This paper explores two growing trends in Jordan: Western movies, whether funded through major Hollywood studios or independently, that shoot in Jordan to capture similar terrain as the war-torn, revolutionary, and still unstable locations they wish to depict; and a small but growing market of local film production from and about the country itself. These developments encourage a more theoretical inquiry into the visualization of space on film. What exactly do we see when we watch a particular landscape activated in a movie? What happens when profilmic space, the city, countryside or studio in front of the camera, does not line up with the narrative of the film? In other words, what does it mean for one space to be dressed up as, to be asked to perform another? This critical conversation becomes especially vital in relation to Middle Eastern cinema or films made about or shot in the Middle East. Jordan, as a site of much recent filmic activity, provides a useful case study. The role-playing Jordan’s countryside and city centers perform on screen highlights the country’s complex national identity and as such necessitates an examination beyond the budgetary and safety concerns filmmakers cite for their location choices. If contemporary visual culture considers the ethics of photographing, displaying, and looking at human bodies, and particularly human bodies in pain, I advance in this paper a similar ethics of visualizing space that requires us to describe carefully the kinds of staging practices that produce the images we see on film. This practice departs from the current archive of cinema and space scholarship, which tends to focus on films representing or producing specific cities and places. I engage with and trouble theories of national cinema to argue that in the Middle Eastern context, the production and circulation of film reveals precisely the complex and often arbitrary nature of national borders. Finally, I turn my attention to a close reading of Annemarie Jacir’s recent Lamma Shofak (When I Saw You, 2013) to argue that this model of spatial visualizing allows viewers to recognize the places that haunt a film without ever appearing on screen, broadening our definition of a film’s setting. A sensitivity to this model allows scholars of cinema to address more thoroughly the imagined spaces and nostalgic histories that comprise a character’s relationship to space and the way an audience engages with what they see on screen.

The Israeli military checkpoint, a space that restricts Palestinian movement within and between the West Bank and Gaza, is a setting that appears frequently in contemporary Palestinian cinema. Scholars have argued that the checkpoint functions as a site for the constriction and fragmentation of Palestinian life in films directed by Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, and Rashid Masharawi. They also point to the possibilities, raised by on-screen acts of contestation, of resisting the checkpoint’s restrictions. However, these analyses largely focus on the checkpoint’s role as a metaphor for the hardships of life in Palestine. By contrast, my analysis revolves around the means by which the checkpoint is filmed and the forms of representation this produces. I frame my discussion using notions of surveillance and Panopticism, particularly the work of Eyal Weizman, who theorizes the checkpoint as an architectural space constructed on the basis of visual illusions such as one-way mirrors. I use this framework to focus my discussion not on the checkpoint film but rather on the act of filming the checkpoint. In this presentation, I argue that the checkpoint’s portrayal in Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002) reflexively calls attention to the act of filming the checkpoint. Much like Weizman’s one-way mirror, Suleiman uses the camera in particular ways to reveal the checkpoint’s depiction as a representation constructed through cinematic tricks and illusions. The methods by which the director frames the checkpoint scenes remind viewers of the limits of the camera’s perspective, and by extension that of the viewer. Screens separate the camera from the events at the checkpoint, which calls attention to the screen upon which the film itself is viewed. Finally, I show that the checkpoint functions a stage, site of choreographed set pieces. Through these techniques, the film reveals the constructedness of its depiction of the checkpoint. However, this method also exposes the constructedness of the checkpoint itself. It functions as a site of a scripted drama performed daily in the interactions of soldiers and civilians, a grainy, parodic facsimile of mechanisms of power exercised through visual control. It is from within this filmic act of exposing the artifice of the checkpoint that a new set of possibilities for contesting this disciplinary space emerges.

Across times and cultures, space has always been deeply implicated in ritual. Sacred spaces, profane spaces, spaces proscribed to all but a certain few, spaces of both natural and human construction: all are involved in the creation and performance of rituals. Muslims who circumambulate the Kaaba in Mecca are enacting a ritual that takes place both in a certain space (the Sacred Mosque) and around another, equally specific space (the Kaaba itself). Spaces that serve as the centerpieces for ritual can function as sites of powerful emotional attachment. When the bodies of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Umm Kulthum were carried aloft through the streets of Cairo after their deaths in 1970 and 1975, video footage of these funerals shows their coffins working as the focal points for rituals of mourning with striking visual echoes to the circumambulation of the Kaaba. The coffins themselves become uncanny spaces containing corpses reanimated to a sort of second life by the adoration of the crowds, their association with life stronger than that of the mourners who are trampled to death in the frenzy or commit suicide out of the intensity of their grief. In this presentation, I analyze visual representations of ritualized space in film, in particular space that is involved in rituals of mourning. Focusing primarily on the houseboat in Ḥusayn Kamāl’s 1971 film "Tharthara fawq al-Nīl" ("Chitchat on the Nile"), where a group of Egyptian men and women gather nightly to smoke hash and forget the disappointing realities of post-1967 Egyptian society, I propose that the director’s camerawork and the film’s repetitive staging of certain movements and lines of dialogue inscribe the houseboat within a 20th-century Arabic visual aesthetic of loss shaped around uncanny spaces that function as stages for the ritualized performance of melancholy. Defining melancholy in accordance with Freud and Judith Butler as a state in which true, cathartic mourning is inhibited by a refusal to accept the loss of what is gone, I argue that a careful examination of Kamāl’s film exposes the houseboat as an uncanny, always already liminal space where melancholy is ritually enacted by the houseboat's “gang of stoners” ("shillat al-masāṭīl") and the unbearable loss of the grand promises of Nasserist Egypt is endlessly deferred.

“Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvelous, continuous performance of films and scenarios.” After its introduction to Iran in 1900, and the commencement of its public screenings in 1903, cinema became closely tied to urban and societal transformations, which marked the ethos of modernity in that country. This paper offers a historiographical survey of Tehran of the early twentieth century as a cosmopolitan city, and will explore the ways in which cinema, as a heterotopic site, contributed to urban hybridity and cosmopolitan imaginations. Furthermore, analyzing newsreels, short and feature films from the first three decades of the twentieth century, this presentation will also attend to how the depiction of urban experiences in films portrayed discontent with and criticisms aimed at the rapid and unfamiliar changes brought on by this "new time." By the early twentieth century, Tehran had become a popular diasporic hub for the Armenian, Azerbaijani, Ottoman, Georgian, Russian, French, American, and British communities, who lived and intermingled in various neighborhoods. To meet the demands of these diverse groups, Tehran was further expanded and compartmentalized. In fact, Tehran soon witnessed the rapid multiplication of public spaces such as hotels, restaurants, cafes, cinemas, and theaters designed for the recreation of Tehrani residents. Movie theaters were built in urban areas that were easily accessible by mechanical forms of transportation such as tramways and streetcars; thus further facilitating the circulation of diverse people, ideologies, ethnicities, and religions. Concentrated in the most prestigious streets and owned/operated by the diasporic communities, movie houses became sites of sociability for audiences who inhabited these urban centers. The cinema screen, on the other hand, as a space of illusion for and of the Other, facilitated the refashioning of modern subjectivity; showcasing different lifestyles, cultures, landscapes, and technological innovations, the international films projected onto Iranian screens offered a cinematic horizon of expectation for multiple alternative futures. Drawing on everyday city experiences in films, cinema itself became a public medium through which criticisms were made against urban changes. Thus, while mediating public sentiments associated with the urban, cinema became engaged in a process of urban cosmopolitanism. In examining the understudied relationship of cinema and the city, this paper intends to draw attention to cosmopolitan Tehran as a fundamental tenet to the discussions on cinema and modernity in Iran, and also to establish film as an analytical tool of urban studies.