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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253034182 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2018 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
The International Era
Across the Maghreb and Mashreq, the past few decades have seen major transformations, ably detailed by Ami Elad-Bouskila: "In the spheres of politics — the decline of pan-Arabism and Nasserism; economics — increased industrialization at the expense of agriculture, open-door policies; and society — increased urbanization, social and religious polarization, urban Westernization which parallels growing Islamicism, a faster pace of living, and the alienation of the individual — especially city-dwellers."
One of the consequences of these changes has been that, since the 1960s, "literature is less in the service of ideology and has a more personal orientation," a shift that, Elad-Bouskila argues, has made possible, among other things, the development of a "woman's literature." A similar movement away from filmmaking at the service of the state can be traced a decade or two later in cinema, but here the real breakthrough of women's creativity has had to wait largely until the 2000s.
As far as Arab filmmaking outside Egypt is concerned, Andrea Khalil's specific comments on North African cinema, in her introduction to North African Cinema in a Global Context, have equal resonance for Arab filmmaking throughout the Middle East. Whereas once the national was defined in relation to the former colonizing power, now the "outside" is increasingly "a more expansive, globalising and hegemonic cultural political force that both frees and restricts the production of North African cinema." This outside is "manifested as both imaginary, in geographical flights as well as flights of fantasy, and very material."
Whereas once filmmakers were embedded in their national communities, even on occasion working as salaried state employees, now they are more likely to be foreign educated and trained and often resident in Europe. They travel between Europe and the Arab world, looking "at each shore of the globe's waters with the other shore already imprinted on their film of vision." As Hamid Naficy observes, "Thanks to globalization of travel, media, and capital, exile appears to have become the post-modern condition. But exile must not be thought of as a generalized condition of alienation and difference." Indeed, as we shall see, there are almost always very specific factors at play that shape the careers of the individual filmmakers with whom we are concerned here.
Foreign Influences
For many contemporary Arab filmmakers, one of their first tastes of Western culture was the films screened at the film clubs and cultural institutes that the French established throughout their former colonies in Africa and their mandated territories in the Middle East. This is perhaps one reason why the models these filmmakers refer to in interviews tend to be European auteurs or Hollywood filmmakers. Ferid Boughedir, for example, recalls his early film viewings at the Lycée Carnot film club in Tunis on Sunday mornings, noting that all their favorite filmmakers were Westerners: Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Roberto Rossellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan. "For us at that time," he adds, "film masterpieces could only come from abroad." The film society movement — as well as an accompanying and ongoing tradition of amateur filmmaking — was particularly strong in Tunisia. Nouri Bouzid describes himself as "a child of the Louis Lumière film club in Sfax. It's there I first learned to read images, thanks particularly to Tahar Cheriaa." For Néjia Ben Mabrouk, too, the Saturday film club was "a precious transition from the cinema of my childhood — mass audience films, mostly Indian and American — to a more demanding form of cinema." Like Boughedir, she mentions Youssef Chahine, seeing him and Chadi Abdel Salam as the two filmmakers who opened her eyes to the possibilities of a new kind of Arab cinema. The foreign experiences of most future Maghrebian filmmakers of this generation have been largely limited to Europe, but at least one Lebanese director actually managed to work for his Hollywood hero: Maroun Bagdadi, who trained under Francis Ford Coppola in Hollywood.
Another way in which many of the filmmakers who pioneered Arab cinema from the mid-1970s onward were influenced by the West was through the film training they received in Europe. For those pioneers seeking professional training in western Europe, the choice at the time was largely between the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris and the Institut National des Arts et du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS) in Brussels. Moumen Smihi, who trained at IDHEC and made his first feature, El Chergui, in Morocco in 1975, notes, "The IDHEC courses were very bookish at the time, and it can't be said there was great openness to what is called the Third Cinema. No one was really interested in that, except for Georges Sadoul. Then, the cinema was only really considered from two angles: the Hollywood angle and the angle of French cinema, old or new wave. In fact the teaching was essentially technicist, and kept to that."
The approach to teaching at INSAS was somewhat different. Tunisian Lotfi Thabet, who cowrote and codirected the feature-length documentary It Is Not Enough for God to Be on the Side of the Poor with a fellow INSAS graduate, Borhan Alawiya from Lebanon, in 1976, observes, "We didn't really learn to make cinema as it was: comedy, thrillers, musicals. We only learned only how to express ourselves, in the way Belgian cinema allowed. As a result, one of the strong links between Tunisian and Belgian cinemas is the production of an auteur cinema." In Thabet's view, Belgian training corresponded to Tunisian needs at the time: "An auteur cinema bringing to bear a subjective look at both people's personal and collective problems."
This is a point also made with slightly different emphasis by Rebecca Hillauer: "The returnees from European film school brought with them the idea of making films that deal with current social and political problems facing the country." This is backed up, again from a Tunisian viewpoint, by Néjia Ben Mabrouk (another INSAS graduate), who has said of her own work that it "was less a reference to an Arab history of film, than it was what we had been taught in European film schools. ... For many of us, our film 'education' was based on the critical documentary film. We wanted our films to reach Tunisian audiences, to show them their own problems in order to make changes."
The third of the shaping factors is that, because of the history of French and English colonization and the current Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, there has been a continued European public interest in what has happened (and, more especially, what is happening now) in Palestine and Lebanon. As a result, there has been a potential audience for television documentaries that deal with issues arising in the Middle East. A major initial source of funding for foreign-based or exiled Arab filmmakers has been the network of European and US television stations. Naficy lists just a few of the more prominent of these: "Channel 4 (in the United Kingdom), ZDF (in Germany), Canal Plus (in France), Arte (in Germany and France), and PBS, Bravo (including its Independent Film Channel), Sundance Independent Channel, and Arts and Entertainment (in the United States)."
A good example of the extent of this funding is offered by the work of the man who established Palestinian cinema on the international map, Michel Khleifi. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi offer a listing of his 1980s documentary works, with their sources of funding: Fertile Memory (1980), "which was pre-financed by the German television channel ZDF, and the Dutch networks IKON and NOVIB; The An-Naim Route (1981), which was produced by the Belgian network RTBF; Ma'aloul Celebrates Its Destruction (1984), mainly financed by the Brussels foundation for the Audio Visual Arts, CBA." The full funding credits for Khleifi's first fictional feature, Wedding in Galilee (1987), include Khleifi's own production company, Marisa Film, in Brussels; QA Production in London; the German television network ZDF; the Ministry for the French Community in Belgium; the French production company LPA (Société Les Productions Audiovisuelles) in Paris; a French coproducing company, Avidia Films; the French television organization Canal Plus; the French distributor Lasa Films; and the French Ministry of Culture (through the Centre National Cinématographique prefinancing scheme — the avance sur recettes).
Throughout the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s, and continuing into the 2000s, major documentaries and feature films have been partially or wholly financed by European television organizations and through various European (especially French) government funding agencies. Filmmakers are very aware of the issues this funding has raised. Soudade Kaadan sums up the Syrian (and other Arab) filmmaker's problem precisely as one of audience: though the intended viewer is Arabic, Arabs do not watch documentaries, whereas Europeans do. Kaadan's aspiration is clear: "I don't want to fall into a European vision. I'm not trying to make a film for a European festival. I don't want to make any compromise. I make documentaries for an Arab public ... that's the hard part. As Arab directors we run the great risk of falling into a European vision."
An additional foreign influence on contemporary Arab filmmaking — often one chosen by the filmmakers themselves — is the use of foreign production crews. Michel Khleifi, who lives in Brussels, has often used Belgian crews. The use of French technicians in key roles is common among Maghrebian filmmakers and in certain Middle East countries, such as Lebanon. In addition, Samir Habchi used a Russian crew for The Tornado and Maroun Bagdadi an American one for Little Wars.
In part, the problem of foreign influence for documentary filmmakers has been answered from within the Arab world by the rise of the Al-Jazeera television channel, which increasingly commissions Arab documentaries (though, obviously, it imposes its own constraints on independent-minded filmmakers). More recently Gulf funding has also extended to feature filmmaking, with the Doha Film Institute cofunding not only Jean-Jacques Annaud's super-production Black Gold but also a number of independent productions by Arab filmmakers, including Ghassan Salhab's totally personal film, The Mountain.
It would be wrong, however, to see this response to the potential of European training, aid, and technical assistance as somehow constituting a diminution of Arab identity. In absorbing European and American influences in their work, filmmakers are doing no more than following the general pattern established in modern Arabic literature from the 1960s. As Ami Elad-Bouskila notes, contemporary writers have focused on "the individual rather than the community at large": "The individual at the centre is engrossed in problems of alienation, loneliness and estrangement, especially in urban existence — together with questions of tradition, style of life, customs and religion, especially in rural areas." These are definitions that apply equally to the majority of contemporary filmmakers, and certainly those at work since the 1980s.
As far as the specific filmmakers are concerned, while it is true that exile brings a new international perspective, it does not inevitably cut off links to one's place of origin. As Hamid Naficy rightly observes, "Exile is inexorably tied to homeland and to the possibility of return." On a wider level, the shared experiences of filmmakers — authoritarian governments at home and a precarious existence abroad, alternations of exile and return — form part of a wider development in Arab culture, captured by Samir Kassir when he talks of "the growth of a homogenous and, at the same time, plural field of Arab culture": "Despite the fragmentation of states and hence the market, and despite the cultural borders patrolled by national censors, this field of Arab culture is in many ways the most definitive expression of a cohesive Arabness at a time when all other attempts at integration — economical, political, pan-Arab and sub-regional — are deadlocked."
The Role of Television
The challenges of documenting the realities of Palestine and Lebanon, exploring the issues raised, and constructing appropriate narratives have provided a stimulus for the establishment of a documentary tradition in Middle Eastern Arab filmmaking. The struggle of the Palestinian people and the impact of the fifteen-year Lebanese Civil War, which broke out in 1975, have given a real impetus to documentary production in Palestine (much of it by filmmakers of Palestinian descent) and in Lebanon. In both areas, the work of major figures has been supplemented by dozens of short films by committed newcomers. A key format is the fifty-minute documentary of the kind favored by most European television channels. Such works herald the beginning of the new international era of Arab filmmaking. The documentaries produced bear many of the marks of exile — recording devastation, chronicling expulsion, sharing the anguish of blocked return to a shattered land. But, unlike so many of the films dealt with by Hamid Naficy in his studies of exilic and diasporic cinema, they are public statements, works addressing a known audience, inevitably shaped in part by the market for which they have been produced. Even a personal story, such as Mohamed Bakri's Zahara, which explores the filmmaker's own family history, is fashioned in this way. Since the mid-1970s onward, there have been half a dozen or so Middle Eastern Arab documentary filmmakers who have stood out for their efforts to create accessible, but at the same time personal, family-orientated films.
Feature Film Funding Mechanisms
As Martin Dale notes, "France has the highest level of state subsidy and regulation in Europe." State support for filmmaking in France has a long history, the chief component being automatic funding for any film that meets the basic criteria for being considered "French" (i.e., use of the French language, French actors and technicians, and so on). State support increased with the founding of the Centre National Cinématographique in 1946, though this organization did not begin to operate fully until 1959, when it came under the auspices of the newly formed Ministry of Cultural Affairs. It was in 1959 that a new and additional system of support for film production — in terms of an advance against box office takings (avance sur recettes), funded by an additional tax on the box office receipts of all films (including foreign imports) — came into being. The new funding was reserved for "films shot in French as the original language, which represent a cinema, whose independence and audacity with respect to the norms of the market make public aid necessary for the establishment of financial equilibrium, so favouring a creative renewal and the production of works with a clear cultural ambition." Dale, who is no advocate of the state support system, argues forcefully that though the system — in theory, at least — frees the filmmaker from dependence on the market, it in effect makes the filmmaker "wholly dependent on the state, which is no greater a freedom than being dependent on a capitalist corporation."
The French state commitment to film strengthened after Jack Lang became minister of culture in 1981 and advanced his arguments in favor of the concept of "cultural exception," which achieved prominence at the 1993 GATT negotiations: "Cultural exceptionalism positioned the concept of discrimination as both the positive act of being intellectually discriminating and a response to discriminatory global market forces dominated by the Hollywood culture industry." The aim was both "to accentuate a distinctive vision of Frenchness" and to provide "the distinctive patina of enlightened cultural policies with international ambitions." In addition, as Dale notes, "subsidies are granted to those projects with the greatest 'cultural merit' and funds are allocated directly to the director or scriptwriter." This gives the auteur "a significant bargaining tool in negotiating with producers and distributors."
Peter J. Bloom argues that the French Social Action Fund (Fonds d'Action Sociale [FAS]) — which was charged with the affairs of the members of the immigrant community in France, mostly of Algerian origin and known generally as beurs — used this context to develop a cinema that would reflect immigrant concerns: "Within this context, beur cinema became linked to new sources of public financing that empowered FAS to serve as an intermediary for small-scale productions through the French National Film Centre." Bloom makes an explicit comparison with the funding accorded, originally under the Cultural and Technical Cooperation Agency, the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (ACCT), to filmmakers from the former French colonies in West Africa, in that both schemes produced films that "never made it beyond the circuit of theatres in the Quartier Latin or the international French cultural affairs circuit."
Whether this kind of ghettoization was intended, beur cinema, like Cinema South of the Sahara, blossomed after its circumscribed and low-funded beginnings in the 1970s as its filmmakers grew in assurance and widened their cultural horizons.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Roots of the New Arab Film"
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Copyright © 2018 Roy Armes.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction 1. The International Era- Foreign Influences- The Role of Television- Feature Film Funding Mechanisms- Francophonie- Aid to the Cinemas of the South2. A New Independence- Beur Filmmaking in France- Algeria- Morocco- Tunisia- Egypt- Lebanon- Palestine- Iraq- SyriaBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Roy Armes, who has already established himself as one of the most insightful and productive writers on Arab cinema, looks both backward and forward, showing how this generation of Arab filmmakers extends and innovates with regard to earlier generations, laying the groudwork for filmmakers working in the 2000s."
The structure, argument, and content of this volume treat a timely topic that will meet a welcoming readership. It will make a nice companion to New Voices in Arab Cinema and fill a void in scholarship on the Arab world and in cinema in general.
Roy Armes, who has already established himself as one of the most insightful and productive writers on Arab cinema, looks both backward and forward, showing how this generation of Arab filmmakers extends and innovates with regard to earlier generations, laying the groudwork for filmmakers working in the 2000s.
"The structure, argument, and content of this volume treat a timely topic that will meet a welcoming readership. It will make a nice companion to New Voices in Arab Cinema and fill a void in scholarship on the Arab world and in cinema in general."
Roy Armes, who has already established himself as one of the most insightful and productive writers on Arab cinema, looks both backward and forward, showing how this generation of Arab filmmakers extends and innovates with regard to earlier generations, laying the groudwork for filmmakers working in the 2000s.
The structure, argument, and content of this volume treat a timely topic that will meet a welcoming readership. It will make a nice companion to New Voices in Arab Cinema and fill a void in scholarship on the Arab world and in cinema in general.