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Nationalist Cinema

On the cusp of the Age of Reason and with the decline of the institution of the church to the State, the hold of religion over people’s lives began slipping. The psycho-social impact of this loss of faith meant that there was little continuity for identity beyond the veil of death. Humanity was robbed of its immortality yet again.

Benedict Anderson proposes that in the face of this existential nihilism, fatalism transformed into a politically ideological continuity. The reason that helped this transformation is the geographical discovery and expansion into the Americas and the Orient which brought about a newfound relativism to a now interconnected world. Instead of a constant immediacy to one’s life, there became an extended consciousness that perceived the individual as a subject of a certain set of parameters that were somewhat dependent on his location in the world. The fall of the sacred language to print was a big change as well- Latin died, so country specific languages and local dialects found eminence in local print production. And finally, in God’s absence the king was demoted to a public official, which promoted his subjects into citizens. People were thus united under a new language of continuity; the nation state.

The nation state has been continually defined and redefined by various thinkers. Eric Hobsbawm describes it as a construct that preserves the threatened life of the privileged through a programme of implicating historicity. While not as Marxist, Ernest Gellner sees nationhood as a shared cultural basis for social homogeneity that smoothes the functioning model of society and division of labour. In his introduction to a book on Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, Wimal Dissanayake says “Nationhood, as with all other forms of identity, turns on the question of difference- how the uniqueness of one nation differs from the uniqueness of other comparable nations. Nationhood is at the point of intersection with a plurality of discourses related to geography, history, culture, politics, ideology, ethnicity, religion, materiality, economy and the social”.

Thus the methods of transmitting the unifying mythology of the nation become crucial. The language of the state always seeks to invoke history as a way of situating itself in as distant a past as possible, despite (and perhaps because of) the concept’s recent origin. The earliest tool of this transmission is the print media. Capable of organizing time and space in a social conscience, newspapers were the primary bastions of the nation-state. However, cinema was soon to go further, as the Russians thinkers and leaders were first to realize, crossing geographical borders and boundaries of literacy in a single reel. From the outset, it was held that film would be the ideal propaganda tool for the Soviet Union because of its mass popularity among the established citizenry of the new land; Lenin, in fact, declared it the most important medium for educating the masses in the ways, means and successes of Communism, a position which was later echoed by Joseph Stalin. While cinema spoke no one particular language it was still understood by everyone.

A History of Arab Cinema

Commercial film was introduced to the Middle East by colonialism right before the Arab nations were to be drawn up and their identities reforged. By then Arabic had been demoted from the official language to one that was guarded by Islamic schools, where the Word of God (the Koran) was affixed in Arabic writing and could not be changed, whilst English and French were taught at schools. The canon of filmmaking up till then had been steeped in the Western Orientalist attitude towards the Middle East and hence was viewed as a product to be imitated when striving for Westernization.

Later, when the newly partitioned Arab states gained their independence, this attitude towards the new art came into clash with the new found nationalism which required authenticity of its cultural output, and “authenticity can only exist within an impermeable cultural environment, cut off from foreign influence.” The colonial forces as well were using cinema as a propaganda tool; the French putting out films like “Serenade to Maryam”, “Cobbler from Cairo” and the “Seventh Gate” that discouraged the uprising and painted a beautiful Orientalist picture as a rosy alternative.

Zionist cinema would be the second encounter that the fledgling Arab states would have with a nationalist narrative that was painting a rather skewed picture of their lives. Zionist propaganda films began production even before the foundation of the state of Israel (in 1899 ) and at their heart always espoused the motto “a country without a people for a people without a country”. The newly demarcated Palestinian nation found its history erased by films that showed an arid land transformed into a blooming paradise under the artful hands of Jewish settlers, the Palestinians themselves portrayed as barbaric, violent villains who did not really live on the land but marauder it instead. An interesting example of a nationalist cinema of one country being communicated within the commercial cinema of another, this systematic programme of historical rewriting was spread across many media (literature, television, radio…), and would become a sizeable hurdle in validating the Palestinian nation to both the outside world and the Palestinians themselves.

The Egyptian Cinema Experience

As the Arab states came to terms with their newly installed borders they began to tell stories about it, experimenting with small films and television. In contrast to the rest of the Arab World, Egypt was the first to establish a national cinema that was self-sufficient and locally consumed. Colonial Egypt was unique in its existence in that it had a dynamic multicultural life where Egyptians were central. Egypt was also somewhat undisturbed by colonial authorities and run by proxy through locally appointed liaisons. After the national upheavals of 1919, theatre actors, directors and crew started to take interest in this new form and in 1920, a nationalist-oriented entrepreneur by the name of Talaat Harb poured money into the works thus paving the way for an independent Egyptian cinema for an independent Egypt. This successful model of filmmaking would become the template that many of the other Arab states would try to imitate in varying degrees of success, none achieving the similar self-sustaining momentum. Lebanon in particular would create an industry in the same style as its Egyptian counterpart during the heydays of the 60’s (at some point venturing into co-productions with Egyptian companies, sharing artists and crew), only to have it cut down with the outbreak of civil war.

The Egyptian cinema experience succeeded because at its heart, the culture it was borne of enjoyed an active, populist discourse. Preceding the introduction of film the theatre and the hakawati (travelling storyteller) were strong popular media in the Middle East. Naturally Arab cinema co-opted much of the tropes in both when introduced and this marriage provided an approach to filmic storytelling that was quite different to that of the West.

Roots of Arab Cinema

The Arab world, though familiar with ancient Greek drama as Arab scholars (like Ibn Baschar) had translated and preserved much of it through the Middle Ages, spurned and did not absorb these dramatic and structural conventions as they were based within a pagan culture. If the Western hero is seen as an individualist squaring off against the cruelty of fate, nature (the gods) or another individual, the Arab hero would rather extol the pleasure of life or accept the inevitability of death. Arabic storytelling did not posit its hero as the vanquisher of a polar evil but rather as a flaneur of life, death and their in betweens.

The two direct influences from theatre in cinema were the theatre of the farce and the shadowplay; karakoz. An early sibling of Punch and Judy, the shadowplay consisted of cut-outs that were moved with sticks behind a backlit screen. The characters were visually abstracted to be immediately recognizable and were stereotypical prototypes that would interact in a two dimensional world of semi-improvised humour. This mis-en scene would find its way into Egyptian cinema as a mainstay, the characters lacking realistic complexity and dominating a single axis in the interaction. On the other hand, the theatre of the farce also had its version of the karakoz, a low-brow comedy with little narrative and dramatic conflict but transgressing social limitations and taboos (inverting the rich and poor, sexual and gender taboos). The forbearer of this tradition into cinema and television was Doreid Lahham, who transformed the karakoz into the character of Ghawar, a mischievous urchin who survived by his wits through tricking others to attain his own goals.

To go further back, however, the basis of Arab cinema would be the basis of Islamic/Arabic arts; a fundamentally different conception to Judaeo/Christian European arts. While both are based in a Greek aesthetic, they followed it to wildly differing ends. Islamic art and architecture veered away from representation and iconic narration as it was discouraged by a religion seeking to stamp out preceding paganism. Instead, the Islamic craftsman (for he wasn’t viewed as an artist as such and found the egocentrism of the Western artists vain) sought to engage his audience in a contemplation of God’s splendour through rhythm, pattern, growth, light and shadow. Thus was born the Arabesque which was a non-iconic art, free of imagery and didactic meaning (as opposed to the use of perspective in Europe which placed the viewer in an individualist point of view)-using instead a precise mathematical and geometric beauty to express the symphony of God’s creation. The spectator was also an active participant in the “storytelling” process, deciding what distance to engage the art (closer inspections revealing more microscopic relations of the pattern), the tempo and even its beginning and end as the piece itself had no marked bookends. This artisanal view of Islamic art would have clear reverberations in the formation of an Arab cinema aesthetic.

Thus it could be concluded that Arab filmmakers never showed the same interest that the West did with visual aesthetic. The German Expressionist movement or the films by Man Ray and Leger would never have been considered in Arab Cinema. Instead, the musical flourished (like those of Umm Kalthoum, Abdel Wahab, Sabah and Fayrouz) hand in hand with comedic and theatrical translations to film on both an aesthetic and narrative level. Characters interacted with each other in the foreground while the background was used merely as a backdrop. Plots revolved around the public sphere, never venturing inwards, as the privacy of family is sacred in the Middle East. That is not to say that Arab cinema was a homogenous blob of farce, musicals and people talking at each other.

The first film “The Night of Counting Years” by the Egyptian, Chadi Adel Salaam, was the only feature of this renowned production designer, yet it dealt with the nationalist identity of Egypt in an innovatively visual manner. The story is of a young local who betrays the location of hidden pharaonic tombs to archaeologists in the hopes of having them help him decipher their hieroglyphics and thus, uncover his own past. Adel Salaam contrasts a modern secular Egypt bereft with poverty with the monumentality of ancient Egypt by superimposing the diminished lead from his diminished town with the imposing grandeur of ancient Egypt fallen to ruins. The film itself is less fawning nostalgia and more of a social critique achieved through a subversive use of visuals.

Another film that deals with an Arab identity through a visual aesthetic is Nacer Khemir’s “Lost Necklace of the Dove” which cleverly uses the bright saturated palette of Islamic miniaturists to paint an Egypt lost in time. Khemir also negates regularized space and flattens it out through a mixture of models and painting, ending up with an Arabesque urban sprawl for a city. Unfortunately these pioneering works never held much sway with a public untrained for such a visual aesthetic and the films are forgotten amongst the rubble of collective memory.

Arab Cinema After the Six Day War

A turning point in Arab culture took place in the late sixties and would be reflected largely in its cinema output. The importance of the Six Day War in the history of the region is in its psychological impact on the Arab psyche. The gloves were off and any residual pomp that had trickled down from the Ottomans and the newly gained independence was quashed in a most humiliating display of sheer power by the young Israeli state. To understand the effect of that defeat one must consider the importance of honour within Arab culture and take into account the conjuration of the bygone days of Arab splendour by the Nasserite movement which imbued the region with delusions of grandeur whilst cementing it together with a combined destiny. Yet in a bumbling display of antiquated military tactics the Arab nations watched in horror as they were destroyed by a Jewish nation they had severely underestimated. That loss sparked the new age of defeat and victimization in the Arab region and it was almost as if the countries turned upon themselves for blood; despotic regimes enforcing strict politics and censorship on the masses and the masses lamenting the state of their affairs. Emerging after the 1970’s and marked by a heavy national disillusionment after the Six Day War, the New Arab Cinema manifested itself as a cold, distant and alienating expression, actively rejecting the pan-Arab ideology of the 60’s.

The New Arab Cinema took a stance that was distant and ironic in opposition to the political conformism espoused in state-controlled media. Some, like Doreid Lahham in Syria, subverted the media from the inside by producing TV movies in the same vein as those praising the government but phrasing it within that ironic tone that only highlighted the silliness of it all. Other filmmakers escaped economic and political constraints by playing several roles, like that of the actor, director, writer and editor, to minimize their costs and reliance and thus escape governmental pressures.

Heavy-handed and strict censorship was and still is a major factor for Arab films. Every movie must pass a state committee before, after, and, sometimes, even during shooting. The sacred taboos are politics, sex and religion. These three however are taken as the fundamentals of bad taste and can thus be extended in any direction to blanket other areas that the censors might find offensive or that the state might find far-reaching. The particularities of every country must be taken into account as well; as in Lebanon where it became an unsaid rule to divide roles according to the various sects in the country (almost mirroring the sectarian divisional allotments of the government). Because of the highly strung sectarian situation, this ridiculous situation became more and more truculent with time until movies which used blasphemous curses found themselves divvying up the names of the lord used in vain between Muslims and Christians. A different kind of censorship was a historical one; Egyptians found themselves unable to mention their country’s 1967 defeat to Israel as it was deigned shameful to the government, making it look weak. Today, mention of the Lebanese civil war is closely watched for anonymity, as a wholesale amnesty issued at its end exonerated all involved and abandoned the war itself to a recollective limbo. Censorship also extends beyond that of a committee to retroactively punish people who had made subversive films prior as achieved by withholding public funds and money awards in some countries like Morocco and Tunis.

Recent Films

The emergence of a new cinema “Al-cinema Aljadida” has seen the adoption of video and documentary as a cheaper and easier alternative to “proper” cinema and all its incumbent constraints. In Egypt, the likes of Rashid Mashrawi (a documentary filmmaker) began producing docu-dramas which blurred the margins between documentary and fiction with films like “the Curfew”. Documentary being a nascent genre in the Arab world it still enjoys the innocent naiveté of an audience expecting reality from it and the new cinema filmmakers have used that to good effect. In Syria, Omar Amiralay found his documentaries overlooked by the government as their impact was underestimated and their distribution and visibility minimal.

On the other hand, Lebanon has seen an interesting growth of video art and installations since the end of the war. With a generation that grew up reading their world through the television news broadcast for lack of access to a normal life, the years since the war has seen the likes of Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Walid Sadek, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige to name a few, establishing a budding art movement that focuses on memory and readings of history.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict “Imagined communities : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism” Verso, 1991

Armes, Roy “Third World film making and the West” University of California Press, 1987

Dissanayake, Wimal “Colonialism & Nationalism in Asian Cinema” Indiana University Press, 1994

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, "Towards a Third Cinema" in: Movies and Methods. An Anthology”, edited by Bill Nichols, University of Arizona Press 1976

Gellner, Ernest “Nations and Nationalism (New Perspectives on the Past)” Blackwell Publishers, 1983

Grainge, Paul (editor) “Memory and Popular Film” Manchester University Press, 2003

Halachmi, Joseph “The Zionist film: origin of the Israeli film” Israeli Educational Television, Tel-Aviv, Israel

Hobsbawm, Eric “Nations and nationalism since 1780 : programme, myth, reality” Cambridge University Press, 1992

Shafik, Viola “Arab cinema : history and cultural identity” American University in Cairo Press, 1998