This paper is part of a larger project that seeks to rethink a complicated relationship between cinema and the Reformist Movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Scholars have thus far reduced interactions between these institutions to modes of mutual support, noting Mohammad Khatami’s backing of the film industry during his tenure as Minster of Islamic Culture and Guidance (1982-1992) and his liberal cultural policies as president (1997-2005). However, my research indicates that Iranian cinema and the Reformist Movement crucially informed one another, and the dynamics of their exchange functioned on an ideological level. More than just benefiting from the Reformist Movement, Iranian cinema helped to shape and articulate its emerging political discourse. The Reformist Movement, therefore, marked a change on the political landscape at the same time that it signaled a new phase in the country’s cinematic history. The exchanges between Khatami’s Reformist Movement and Iranian cinema have generated a unique set of aesthetic qualities that includes a revival of mystic love, the use of Tehran as a metaphoric site of social and structural reformation, and reconfigurations of perceptions of time. In this paper, I examine Massoud Bakhshi’s "Tehran anar nadarad" [Tehran Has No More Pomegranates] (2007), a self-described “musical, historical, comedy, docu-drama, love story, experimental film,” and the music video “‘Eshq-e sor’at” [Love of Speed] (2007), performed by the underground band Kiosk, directed by Ahmad Kiarostami, and released on YouTube. I use this comparison to prove that reform as an aesthetic movement functions outside of the temporal limits of its political antecedent. Although both works were released two years after Khatami’s presidency ended, and did not benefit directly from his cultural liberalism, they still participate in central reformist debates. Specifically, they interrogate the legacy of Khatami’s political platform, which included concepts like “civil society” and “religious democracy.” Their experimentation with form further suggests that the reformist aesthetic possesses a momentum that permits it to develop and transform without explicit contact with the political movement that inspired it. By considering a film alongside a music video, I hope to use reform to connect innovations in cinema to trends in new media and youth culture and, thereby, establish a new model for the study of cultural productivity in contemporary Iran.

Lately the Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt have become the subject of commercial Egyptian cinema with movies like ‘Hasan and Morqos’ (2008), ‘Baheb el Cima’ (2004), of TV serials like ‘Season of Roses’ (2000), and of a documentary at Al-Jazeera about Copts in Egypt (2006). Also, the Coptic-Orthodox Church stands behind a media production within the Church with a professional production of films about the historical saints and martyrs of the Church and with an amateur production of local videos. Thus, pluralism in representations seems to flourish in the new millennium with the purpose on one hand to promote inclusion and tolerance and on the other to promote a Coptic counter public. However, very often these mediated representations have resulted in public or legal protests or restrictions, constructing the Egyptian field of representation as a field of struggle or what Samia Mehrez (2010) defines as a culture war. In order to explore this field of representation this paper suggests as an analytical starting point the concept of ‘situated representations’ referring to different levels of situatedness: Firstly, the representation is spatial defined (locally by the Church, nationally by the Egyptian cinema, and globally by the satellite channel) and thus situated in as well as defining different publics. Secondly, “[…] representation cannot exist outside the contexts of its reception”, as phrased by Eugenia Siapera (2010), situating the mediated representation in the context(s) of reception and consumption to be able to understand its meanings. As far as representations have the potential to produce sameness as well as difference, it is these differential representations that feed the struggle. By comparing different levels of situatedness in different kinds of media representations of Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt, the paper will demonstrate how the constructions of difference and receptions hereof are deeply embedded in the specific situatedness of the representation.

This paper addresses the work of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi and its part in a long history of exchange between the Maghreb, Europe, and the Americas. Smihi (b. 1945) is a foundational figure in the “New Arab Cinema” of the 1970s. Born in Tangier, he moved to Paris in 1965; attending film school there, he was deeply influenced by seminars with Roland Barthes and other intellectuals. Since his return to Morocco in the early 70s, Smihi has continued to make groundbreaking films and has published three volumes of writing on cinema. None of his films is available in the US and, of his published writing, only a single interview is available in English. Despite this, Smihi’s work has been highly esteemed by Francophone critics and historians of Maghrebian cinema and has recently garnered belated interest within Morocco. Since his first feature (EL CHERGUI, 1975), Smihi experimented with a narrative and visual style that relinquished popular Egyptian models; consequently, his early films were praised overseas but not screened in Morocco. While Smihi’s films may be formally challenging, their failure to circulate extensively within Morocco, he argues, is ultimately due not to their textual complexity but to the gradual devaluation within Arab societies of a discourse of critique, experimentation, and self-transformation. I will argue that Smihi’s intellectual project—critical and creative—constitutes a re-invigoration of discourses of modernity within the Arab world and a re-valuation of the cultural traffic between the Maghreb and non-Arab sites. Turning equally to Arab intellectuals like Taha Hussein, writers like Barthes, and filmmakers like Woody Allen, Smihi is also in dialogue with artists like Chadi Abdel Salam or Tawfik Saleh who also opposed the orthodoxies of the dominant Egyptian film industry. Rejecting explanations of either a hegemonic globalization or a “clash of civilizations” by which Arab and Western cultures are in fundamental opposition, my paper will expose a much more complex traffic between East and West in which Smihi’s work takes shape. Bibliography Armes, Roy. POSTCOLONIAL IMAGES: STUDIES IN NORTH AFRICAN FILM. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Berrah, Mouny et al. “Cinémas du Maghreb.” Special issue. CINEMACTION 14 (1981). Dwyer, Kevin. BEYOND CASABLANCA: M.A. TAZI AND THE ADVENTURE OF MOROCCAN CINEMA. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. Edwards, Brian T. MOROCCO BOUND: DISORIENTING AMERICA’S MAGHREB, FROM CASABLANCA TO THE MARRAKECH EXPRESS. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Smihi, Moumen. ECRIRE SUR LE CINEMA. Paris: Slaïki Frères, 2006.