Political Aesthetics of Modernity in the Contemporary Arab Cinemascape
Panel III-14, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, October 6 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
The theory and practice of Arab cinema is founded in the politics of modernity. Arguably more so than other moving-image cultures, that of Arab cinema and its study emerge in the context of a history over-determined within (neo)colonial conditions of oil extraction and a political-economy of inter/transnationally funded (mal)development that entails geological and infrastructural ruination, social displacement and ethnic cleansing, and environmental degradation, as well as--for the few--social benefit and growth. Such destructive and inequitable conditions challenge Arab cinema and its theorization while at the same time informing and defining it.
Resistance to these conditions may articulate as aesthetic experimentation with "found" and/or "home-movie" footage, for example in films by Mustafa Abu Ali and by Abdessalam Shehata, made in response to the crisis in Gaza and necessitating a rethink of the salvage paradigm and its "ethnographic temporality" in relation to modernity: they surpass typical, reflexive allegorizations of excess and surplus extraction by re-emphasizing the temporalities of historical time and the everyday in the context of occupation, exile, and return. By contrast, the postmodern transformation of the cinematic gaze in contemporary Egypt from conventional cinematic looking to new forms of spectatorial passivity fostered by the neoliberal spatialization of seeing--into shopping mall consumerism, on one hand, and as suburban living and highway driving, on the other--works both to exemplify and exacerbate neocolonial capitalism's deleterious effects.
A preliminary genealogy of Arab film theory can help draw ideological connections between the study of Arab cinema and the proliferation of rampant, petro-funded neonationalisms throughout the Arab region. Such an approach will frame the panel theoretically as a collective inquiry into the evident need within Arab cinema/studies for a sustained, epistemologically based recognition and materialist critique of ways in which moving-image culture in and of the Arab region has been deployed as a means of advancing as well as countering (neo)colonial violence, technocracy, and the ostensible pleasures of "militainment." As such, the panel proffers a deep-structural explanation of Arab moving-image culture as a site of struggle against such purposes, as it works to envisage a decolonized gaze and, in turn, an intellectual re-situation of its interpellated subjectivities. A discussant will summarize and offer a critique of these claims and analyses in the interests of strengthening the discourse presented by, between, and amongst the panel's three component papers.
During the “neo-liberalizing” years of the 1980s-1990s, when film scholars turned their attention to (multi)cultural studies, focus on Arab cinema remained within the well-worn confines of auteur, genre, and theme studies. The aim of this paper is to problematize that limitation by discussing Arab cinema studies’ contemporary emergence as a modality of post-Cold War area studies. In this context, the paper will propose and explore the extenuating hypothesis that Arab cinema studies is an intellectually riven phenomenon of the postmodern petrodollar economy, and that interpretations and analyses offered by and within this new, more sophisticated sub-field subsist in contestation within a crisis-ridden arena characteristic of the history of area studies. It will argue that, on the one hand, Arab cinema studies may support and benefit from petrodollar economy by advancing social, cultural, and philosophical discourses that serve to rationalize its location at the core of contemporary capitalism--and the international cinemascape; and that, on the other hand, it may challenge such ideological positions by drawing attention to their implications and critiquing their contradictions, in turn shedding anticipatory light on anti-colonial/imperialist avenues of possible inquiry. The paper will focus its gaze on the particular role of Zionism in fostering and enabling contemporary Arab cinema studies as such. This will entail not only a critique of Zionist discourse per se as it circulates within the discipline, but, furthermore, of the practices by publishing venues and higher educational institutions, located primarily in the Arab region and funded largely by Western governments and private interests, that serve to facilitate Israeli hegemony by promoting the production of Zionist discourse in new and innovative, often increasingly insidious forms. In turn the paper will foreground and discuss ways in which filmmakers and film scholars in Arab-world settings have called Zionism, its discursive and institutional practices, to task and have as such helped carve spaces within the Arab cinemascape that redirect interest away from traditional area studies agendas toward questioning the viability and ethicality of carbon-based education, culture, and society.
Recollection by Kamal Aljafari (2015) and Infiltrators by Khaled Jarrar (2014) illustrate the dual aesthetics of ruin and recovery that Catherine Russell identified in her studies of found footage films of the 1990s: Recollection is an essay film composed of extracts from Israeli and American films, “reversing” the invisibility of largely Palestinian residents in the portrayals of Aljafari’s home neighborhood by removing the Ashkenazi characters; and Infiltrators is an observational documentary composed of clandestine shooting that captures the diverse and often perilous ways in which Palestinians in the West Bank attempt to overcome the separation wall to reach their desired destinations. This aesthetic of ruin and recovery--informed by the geo-political effects of land usurpation, ethnic cleansing, and military occupation--intersects with the two kinds of temporality observed by Gertz and Khleifi operating in Palestinian cinema: that of historic (traumatic) time and that of the everyday, ongoing time.
Examining Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza by Mustafa Abu Ali (1973) and To My Father by Gazawi filmmaker Abdessalem Shehata (2008), we see that the abject and the uncanny re-surface through this intersection. If, according to Catherine Russell, the found footage film is the salvage paradigm that produces an imaginary ethnography or “ethnographic temporality” inextricably linked to modernity, such an ethnography of Gaza highlights a political temporality that is at the same time spatial, where space and time inhabit each other and where modernity is anchored to its post-colonial history. What emerges are questions unique to Arab modernity and its "aftermath" in the context of Palestine that can never be unchained from the political arena.
Gertz, Nurith and Khelifi, George. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. (Indiana University Press, 2008)
Rahman, Najat. In the Wake of the Poetic. (Syracuse University Press, 2015)
Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. (Duke University Press, 1999)
Sabry, Tarik. “Revolutions in the age of ‘globalization’: between the trans-temporal and the trans-subjective” in Media, Culture & Society: 35(1), 2013
Yaqub, Nadia. Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution. (University of Texas Press, 2018)
In this paper, I begin by revisiting the arguments made with respect to cinema, the railroad and the shopping mall to think more specifically about contemporary Cairo. Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern examines the ways in which particular forms of nineteenth century entertainment fed into the “pleasures” of cinema, the shopping mall and video games. In a similar vein, Kirby’s Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema suggests that at the turn of the twentieth century the railroad and the cinema were developing as “mechanical doubles.” The postmodern and colonial gaze has since been modified to reflect an increasingly mediated and militarized technological context. I ask, what are the cultural, social and urban particularities that shape the spectator/consumer experience in Cairo today?
I then explore the specific cultural components pertaining to spectatorship that have been reproduced in these new settings, by examining how the cinema and screen culture more broadly might in turn help us to understand other monuments as they exist in the visual landscape and in relation to a moving spectator – the billboard and construction site. I doing so, I connect cinematic spectatorship with what John Urry refers to as the “‘system’ of automobility” in the context of contemporary Cairo.
The presentation will focus on the construction of new transportation routes and networks in New Cairo, which I argue have resulted in the modification of specific cultural and consumption practices. The moving images displayed – having evolved from static billboards to light boxes and screens – have created new sites of cultural exchange between the advertiser and the driver/passenger. Set against the mechanics of automobility and the construction industry, I suggest that the cinematic spectator has evolved in the context of the technologies and apparatus that have been made part of (as well as crucial to the construction of) the American/Arab Gulf style mall and multiplex cinema. The unfolding of these spaces in real time can be used to understand the corporate/colonial/military logic that has made such mega projects possible.
Featherstone, Mike, Nigel Thrift and John Urry. Automobilities. Sage, 2005.
Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. University of California Press, 1994.
Kirby, Lynn. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent CInema. Duke University Press, 1997.
Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in A Global Context. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
