Ten Arab Filmmakers

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Introduction: Auteur Directors, Political Dissent, and Social Critique Josef Gugler
1. Nabil Maleh: Syria's Leopard (Syria) Christa Salamandra
2. Jocelyne Saab: A Lifetime Journey in Search of Freedom and Beauty (Lebanon) Dalia Said Mostafa
3. Michel Khleifi: Filmmaker of Memory (Palestine) Tim Kennedy
4. Elia Suleiman: Narrating Negative Space (Palestine) Refqa Abu-Remaileh
5. Youssef Chahine: Devouring Mimicries or Juggling with Self and Other (Egypt) Viola Shafik
6. Daoud Abd El-Sayed: Parody and Borderline Existence (Egypt) Viola Shafik
7. Yousry Nasrallah: The Pursuit of Autonomy in the Arab and European Film Markets (Egypt) Benjamin Geer
8. Mohamed Chouikh: From Anti-colonial Commemoration to a Cinema of Contestation (Algeria) Guy Austin
9. Merzak Allouache: (Self-)Censorship, Social Critique and the Limits of Political Engagement in Contemporary Algerian Cinema (Algeria) Will Higbee
10. Nabil Ayouch: Transgression, Identity, and Difference (Morocco) Jonathan Smolin

Film Index
Name Index

Sujets

• Middle Est
• Media Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• History of the Middle East
• General officer
• North Africa
• Middle East
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 29 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253016584
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Ten Arab
FILMMAKERS
Ten Arab
FILMMAKERS
Political Dissent and Social Critique
Edited by
Josef Gugler
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ten Arab filmmakers : political dissent and social critique / edited by Josef Gugler.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-253-01644-7 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01652-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01658-4 (ebook) 1. Motion pictures-Arab countries-History and criticism. 2. Motion picture producers and directors-Arab countries. 3. Motion pictures-Political aspects-Arab countries. 4. Motion pictures-Social aspects-Arab countries. I. Gugler, Josef, editor.
PN 1993.5. A 65 T 48 2015
791.430917 4927-dc23
2014044165
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
To directors who confront new challenges as they pursue just causes .
I consider myself a filmmaker who must be engaged . . . I m happy to speak about the situation in my country, but at the same time I would point out that I m not a politician. The responsibilities of someone who makes a film under these conditions are not the same as those of a European or North American director.
-Merzak Allouache
CONTENTS
Preface
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Auteur Directors, Political Dissent, and Cultural Critique
Josef Gugler
1. Nabil Maleh: Syria s Leopard (Syria)
Christa Salamandra
2. Jocelyne Saab: A Lifetime Journey in Search of Freedom and Beauty (Lebanon)
Dalia Said Mostafa
3. Michel Khleifi: Filmmaker of Memory (Palestine)
Tim Kennedy
4. Elia Suleiman: Narrating Negative Space (Palestine)
Refqa Abu-Remaileh
5. Youssef Chahine: Devouring Mimicries or Juggling with Self and Other (Egypt)
Viola Shafik
6. Daoud Abd El-Sayed: Parody and Borderline Existence (Egypt)
Viola Shafik
7. Yousry Nasrallah: The Pursuit of Autonomy in the Arab and European Film Markets (Egypt)
Benjamin Geer
8. Mohamed Chouikh: From Anticolonial Commemoration to a Cinema of Contestation (Algeria)
Guy Austin
9. Merzak Allouache: (Self-)Censorship, Social Critique, and the Limits of Political Engagement in Contemporary Algerian Cinema (Algeria)
Will Higbee
10. Nabil Ayouch: Transgression, Identity, and Difference (Morocco)
Jonathan Smolin
Illustration Credits
Contributors
Index of Films
Index of Names
PREFACE
Ten Arab Filmmakers completes a journey I embarked on a decade ago. As we were inundated by television and cinema presenting Western perspectives on the Middle East after 9/11, I sought to bring to my students voices and images from the region. Eventually I edited Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (2011), which presented the nine principal national cinemas of the region and featured eighteen films. The present volume complements it by focusing on distinguished Arab directors.
I thank the nine contributors from three continents who agreed to join our venture, who responded to my critical comments, endured my unending suggestions, and experienced unfortunate delays in the completion of the manuscript. I appreciate the critical comments and advice I received along the way.
We are indebted to the directors who made themselves available to us, provided us with copies of films not yet in distribution, and furnished illustrations. We benefited from the comments of two anonymous reviewers. Our book was enriched by the individuals and institutions, acknowledged in the credits, who provided illustrations.
My special thanks to Walter Armbrust and Nadia Yaqub for their excellent advice. Lynne Goodstein offered crucial support. Gordon Daigle, Maha Darawsha, and Ingrid Gugler assisted in various ways. But for the expertise and devotion of Alex Bothell, many illustrations would be in worse shape; others would have been abandoned altogether as unsuitable for printing.
I cherish the support my wife and our daughters gave me in spite of my sins of neglect and distraction while I was working on this project.
Doctors Without Borders have done remarkable work in Arab countries un der difficult circumstances, and they have helped to bring the plight of people living amid war to the attention of the world; all royalties will support their work.
Josef Gugler
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
We strove for consistency in transliterations, except that we have adhered to the transliterations of the names of characters used in the English subtitles of films and to the transliterations of the names of directors and actors used in the anglophone world by distribution companies. Arabic transliterations follow American University in Cairo Press guidelines.
Ten Arab
FILMMAKERS
Introduction
AUTEUR DIRECTORS, POLITICAL DISSENT, AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE
Josef Gugler
This volume brings together specially commissioned essays on ten leading directors of the Arab world. They have produced many of the region s most renowned films, gaining recognition at major international festivals, and yet, except for Youssef Chahine, none has received major critical attention to date. They have supported the aspirations of the oppressed in some or all of their films. All have articulated political protest, most have denounced the deeply entrenched patriarchal culture, and several have taken positions in the cultural conflict that pits fundamentalist movements against moderate Islam. The chapters, by leading scholars in Arab film and media studies, combine accounts of the filmmakers lives and works with in-depth analyses of their most important films. This collection is designed to complement Film in the Middle East and North Africa (Gugler 2011) and offers an up-to-date overview of much of the best of Arab cinema. 1
Film producers in the Arab world face formidable competition from powerful producers in the United States and India who are firmly established in the region. The Arab-language film market in turn is dominated by the privately financed Egyptian film industry. Its production dwarfs film production in the other Arab countries: from its origins in the 1920s to 2008 it produced over three thousand films, while all the other Arab countries together produced less than a thousand. 2 The relative size of its production, its formulaic productions for a mass market, and its star system earned it the nickname Hollywood on the Nile. These characteristics invite comparison with Bollywood as well. The three industries produce for large populations sharing the same language. Egypt s population numbers more than twice that of any other Arab country, and Egypt s film industry has been able to export to other Arab countries. While films from other Arab countries face a veritable language barrier because their local vernaculars are not readily understood across the Arab world, Egyptian music stars have spread the Egyptian vernacular throughout the Arab world for generations, and Egyptian films have come to be readily understood everywhere. Exports to the affluent Gulf countries, much of it for private viewing, have seen major expansion since the 1980s.
AUTEUR DIRECTORS IN POOR COUNTRIES
Outside the commercial cinema of Egypt, most directors find themselves in extremely difficult circumstances. Commonly they develop their own scripts; they embark on what are usually protracted searches for funding; they try to avoid censorship and, when that fails, engage in difficult negotiations with censors; they proceed on minuscule budgets; they take on multiple production roles, recruit actors (oftentimes amateurs they search out and train), and assemble crews; they edit; they struggle to get their films distributed. They are truly filmmakers. If they face multiple constraints, they also exert much more control over their productions than directors of high-budget films. Commonly they establish their own production companies to co-produce their films. Theirs is a cin ma d auteur , and it comes at a price-usually they manage to make only one or two films a decade. The notable exception is Youssef Chahine, who produced about forty films over his distinguished career.
Training opportunities for the older generation of filmmakers featured here were limited. Mohamed Chouikh, Elia Suleiman, and Jocelyne Saab did not have the benefit of film studies. They pursued varied paths. Chouikh started out in theater, then took on leading roles in cinema. Within a few years he went on to directing in the nascent Algerian film industry. Suleiman spent his twenties in New York with its rich cinematic offerings. He eventually produced his first documentary jointly with Jayce Salloum, a Lebanese-Canadian who had pursued film studies in the United States and had filmed in the Occupied Territories. Saab moved from journal