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Reeling War and Defeat in Middle East Cinema

Panel VI-14, 2024 Annual Meeting

On Wednesday, November 13 at 2:30 pm

Panel Description
N/A
Disciplines
Media Arts
Participants
  • Dareen Hussein -- Presenter
  • Ghida Anouti -- Presenter
  • Soubeika Bahri -- Presenter
  • maia nichols -- Chair
Presentations
  • Dareen Hussein
    In his essay “New Realism in Arab Cinema,” Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid contends that the Arab defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel shattered the illusions of nationalistic slogans and military regimes, “awaken[ing] the Arabs from their dreaming” (242). Against this “backdrop of failure and disintegration,” Arab filmmakers arose to reshape understandings of realism in the wake of political defeat (242). This presentation traces the evolving perceptions of realism in Arab cinema from the 1960s-80s and the central space that the Palestinian “question” occupies within these debates. Defining events like Algerian Independence catalyzed a wave of militant cinema which countered the conventions of bourgeois Egyptian film productions. This genre of political film, exemplified by works like Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), was defined by its engagement with anti-colonialism and social realism. The aftermath of June 1967 reshaped the political imaginary, compelling Arab filmmakers to experiment with a counter-cinema capable of conveying the realities of this postwar moment. “New Realism” emerges as an aesthetic and political tool to confront the disillusionment of political failure. This presentation examines different experiments with “New Realism,” exploring how Arab filmmakers countered tropes that predominated state-sponsored, anti-colonial cinema. The methodological focus of this presentation relies on the analysis of film manifestos and close visual reading of my case studies. Anglophone scholarship on anti-colonial cinema primarily spotlights Latin America, Europe, and the legacies of May ’68 as the focal points of this era, however, this presentation widens the field’s scope to emphasize Arab perspectives on realism, decolonization, and political cinema. Additionally, it advocates for re-centering Palestine in historical engagements with political cinema and the anti-colonial century, particularly as Palestinian life and sovereignty remains under grave threat.
  • Ghida Anouti
    This paper investigates the importance of the archive as a tool for historicizing war, specifically the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that has not been transcribed into accessible historical texts to be taught within institutional frameworks. While educational institutes fail to impart such essential knowledge to their pupils, artistic cultural productions such as films engage with such historical events. By analyzing the 1998 film West Beirut directed by Ziad Doueiri in parallel with Walid Raad’s 1999 short The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, this study explores films as archives that can preserve memories, events and social interactions often lost within traditional archiving processes. In a postwar era of retrospection and social reconstruction – stained by a state-sponsored amnesia of the war – these films recount historical experiences through the employment of fiction and mythology within the subversive space of cinematic narrative-building. This research lies at the juncture between films and archives, the relationship of filmmakers to archives, and the potential pedagogical device of film as a democratic storytelling apparatus. Doueiri’s iconic film can be analyzed as a site of cultural production creating a shift in collective consciousness about the war, or perhaps awakening a more nuanced relationship between the Lebanese populace and postwar material politics. Raad’s film, a fabulation, derives its ‘truthfulness’ from the culmination of imagined events of the war. I argue that the use of storytelling through a filmmaker’s lens is an act of archival recollection and revolt that challenge a repressed history long dominating the Lebanese sociopolitical landscape. Film’s relationship to reality, as well as the sense perceptions of viewers, generate a productive fixation with the work, revealing the potency embedded in fiction, specifically cinematic imaginaries. Analyzing key visual elements, characters and plotlines in these films can reveal the power of the archive as a tool for negotiating between imagined fictions and the ‘real’, whatever that may be in the collective minds of generations of war survivors and the ripples they generate in the present. The formal, aesthetic, and narrative components of these films contribute to the archiving of history and memory, while the filmmakers’ processes of production challenge the limitations of historicizing war. These films as archives of images and collective memory give form to generational trauma through narratives of war that flit between factualized fiction and falsified fact, which filmmakers Raad and Doueiri employ as a significant tool for reconciling historically incongruent accounts of war.
  • Soubeika Bahri
    Amid the COVID-19 global pandemic and just like many film festivals around the world, the New York Forum of Amazigh Film (NYFAF) also had to pivot to an online format that lasted about two years. NYFAF returned with an 8th edition in 2023, yet in a hybrid form that included both in-person and online screenings. The virtualization of the film event meant to a large extent transforming its relationship with the filmmakers and audience and changing the ways its organizers create and communicate over each edition while taking into account that its mission surpasses the mere screening of films to encompass multipurpose and multifaceted undertaking that incorporate an educational, pedagogical, cultural, and transnational aspect. Drawing loosely on the concept of “scrambled to remain the same” proposed by de Valck and Damien (2023) in describing film festivals' conversion to the non-habitual online platform during the pandemic, this study will examine the notion of hybridity as new strategy and opportunity adopted by the NYFAF organizers to transcend in the words of film scholar Brenden kredell (2023) the “spatiotemporal boundaries” and re-imagine a future look of this film forum with this new approach. To that end, the analysis will be based on interviews with members of the programming team and friends of the forum, research about NYFAF, and the hybrid showcase of the eighth edition. The interviews aim to provide an approximate evaluation of the hybrid model's adoptability from an emic perspective. The study also argues for a different understanding of the hybridity approach considering NYFAF’s educational and pedagogical foci and points to the importance of a reflection on the expressions of continuity, disruption, and place particularly in the context of small “genre” film festivals, such as the one in question. The chapter will finish by exploring new perspectives on continuing and updating NYFAF.