Hollywood Films in North Africa and the Middle East

A History of Circulation

Nolwenn Mingant

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781438488547
  9781438488554
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438488561
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: African History

Traces the circulation of Hollywood films in North Africa and the Middle East from the early twentieth century to the present.

Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, from trade and government publications to interviews, Hollywood Films in North Africa and the Middle East traces the circulation of Hollywood films across the region from the early twentieth century to the present. Originally introduced by French distributors, Hollywood films have been a key component of film culture in North Africa and the Middle East. These films became a favored mode of entertainment during the first half of the century as the major US film studios built a strong distribution structure. After World War II, the changing geopolitical context of decolonization pushed US distributors out of the market. Hollywood films, however, have continued to be favored by audiences. Today, in a landscape that also includes Egyptian and Indian films, Hollywood remains a relevant force in the region's film culture, experienced by audiences in myriad ways from the pirate markets of North Africa to state-of-the-art theatres in the United Arab Emirates.

Part I

Winning Hearts in the
Colonial Era
(1910s–1950s)

1

Entering the Market (1910s–1940s)

IN THE FIRST DECADE OF THE twentieth century, the first movie theaters were opening their doors in Egypt, Algeria, and Persia. In the US, cinema was a fledgling industry, and US producers and distributors were focused on developing their home market. Competition was particularly strong, with French companies pioneering film distribution all over the world. Four years after opening its US office in 1904, Pathé had become the largest film provider in the country (Salmon 2014, 131; K. Thompson 1985, 4). The same year, Pathé, as well as another renowned French company, Méliès, became part of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), the association founded by Thomas Edison in the hope of organizing—or monopolizing—the US film market (Augros and Kitsopanidou 2009, 24–25). The structure of the US film industry stabilized in the mid-1920s around a small number of powerful companies: Universal, Fox (which became Twentieth Century Fox in 1935), First National (which was taken over by Warner Bros. in 1929), Loew’s Inc. (which merged with MGM in 1924), Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky, Columbia, and RKO.¹ In the early years of US cinema, only Vitagraph had looked abroad for profit. It acted as a forerunner in international distribution when it opened direct distribution offices in Paris and London in 1906 (K. Thompson 1985, 3). Three years later, the MPPC had begun a “systematic push into foreign markets” (28), and by the 1910s, the international market represented from 20% to 40% of a film’s revenue and complemented the grosses of films that had already broken even on the home market (100). The basis of a powerful international distribution network was slowly being established. US film distributors focused primarily on Western markets, using London as a film distribution hub (34–43). North Africa and the Middle East was a largely unknown territory, in the hands of French distributors. At that time, a large portion of the Middle East was under Ottoman rule, including part of today’s Iraq (notably Baghdad), Syria (Alep, Damascus), Lebanon (Beirut), Israel (Jerusalem), and Saudi Arabia (Medina, Mecca) (Balanche 2014). Before, during, and after World War I, a strong battle of political influence over the Middle East was raging between the British and the French authorities, and France had already established its authority over most of North Africa. Although the region must at first have appeared quite far away and nebulous to US film distributors, it soon became one more commercial territory to conquer in their new international expansion strategy.

Hollywood Films under the French Monopoly

The circulation of US films in North Africa and the Middle East in fact predates the presence of US film distributors. While the Hollywood studios were still in their infancy, the nascent international film market was dominated by the French Pathé, a company founded in 1896 to produce and distribute phonographs, and that developed quickly after 1904, with branch offices in New York, Berlin, Moscow, Brussels, and Vienna (Salmon 2014, 130). In 1907, at a time when films had become more profitable than phonographs (Meusy 2009, 103), Pathé initiated a groundbreaking practice: renting films instead of selling them (Salmon 2014, 162–63). By the late 1910s, Pathé had opened ten additional foreign branches and had deals with intermediaries in Latin America (Buenos Aires, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro), Asia (Calcutta, Shanghai, Tokyo), Northern and Eastern Europe (Helsinki, Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Vienna), and Africa (Alexandria) (Salmon 2014, 194). Important branch offices included a theater, a laboratory, a film rental agency, and a phonograph agency (275). By 1912, Pathé could boast that,

from Transvaal to Peru, from Borneo, Sumatra, Java to the far reaches of Siberia and Alaska, from Canada to the Tierra del Fuego, from China and Japan to Greenland, there is not one inch of earth on which man has set foot, where there is no Pathé representative. (quoted in Garçon 2006, 33)

In effect, Pathé monopolized the market (K. Thompson 1985, 5). By the mid-1910s, Gaumont, the other major French film distribution company at the time, also had a strong international presence, with branches in England, Argentina, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Italy, and Spain, as well as trading posts in Calcutta, Saigon, and Australia (D’Hugues and Muller 1986, 27–28).

For these companies, North Africa was a natural extension of the French market (Corriou 2011, 83). Algeria had been officially part of France since 1848; Tunisia and most of Morocco had become French protectorates in 1882 and 1912, respectively. In 1907, Pathé entered the area indirectly by signing a subdistribution contract for Algeria/North Africa with the company Omnia,² which opened the Omnia-Pathé movie theater in Tunis in 1908 (Meusy 2009, 103; Corriou 2011, 83). As the market became more lucrative in 1914, Pathé put an end to the concession contract and took over distribution (Corriou 2011, 105). By 1919, the two major French companies, as well as a few smaller ones, were firmly established in North Africa. The regional agencies in Algiers and subagencies in Tunis, functioned like similar offices in Bordeaux, Lille, Rennes, and Strasbourg (Corriou 2011, 105; Garçon 2006, 64; D’Hugues and Muller 1986, 27–28). Middle Eastern countries, in which France was influential, were also part of the French film companies’ domain. Between 1911 and 1913, Pathé distributed directly in the Egyptian market before handing over operations to a local intermediary, Mr. Buccianti.³ In 1924, Gaumont was apparently the only European distributor present in the French mandates of the Great Lebanon, which spanned present-day Lebanon and Syria.⁴ Pathé’s influence reached as far as Persia where, in 1912–1913, Pathé opened a movie theater in partnership with local Armenian entrepreneur Artashes Patmagrian (Thoraval 2000, 16; Sadr 2006, 10).

Several factors explain the domination of French companies in the North African and Middle Eastern markets in the early years of cinema. Although Charles Pathé himself attributed his company’s international predominance merely to the fact that it had started expanding earlier than others, Thompson emphasized the importance of Pathé’s strategic choices: establishing in “numerous small markets which could initially support only one film company,” and financing further expansion with the profits generated there (K. Thompson 1985, 5). The existence of Pathé’s phonograph distribution network, established as early as 1895, was also a strong basis from which to launch the film export business (Salmon 2014, 107). Film distribution was actually only one activity among others in Pathé’s and Gaumont’s expansion strategies. Both were vertically integrated, manufacturing film equipment and shooting, editing, and distributing films (Garçon 2006, 15, 24). Just as the Lumière operators had shot and shown their views, Gaumont’s branches were both dedicated to selling Gaumont’s film and news production, and to the shooting of newsreels (D’Hugues and Muller 1986, 28).

Another strategic function of the branches was the sale of projection equipment. Between September 1919 and August 1920, Pathé sold 49 items of projection equipment in Algeria, 11 in Tunisia, and 5 in Morocco (Corriou 2011, 98). A 1930 report by the US Department of Commerce reveals the extent of the French monopoly on film equipment in the territories under French influence: in Algeria’s 50 cinemas, only 3 theaters had US-brand projectors, while all the others were French (Pathé, Gaumont) or German (Krupp) (US Department of Commerce 1930). In Egypt, Gaumont, Pathé, and Krupp-Ernemann provided all the projectors. The only projector in the whole region called “Arabia,” that is, the Gulf countries, was a Pathé model. This domination was attributed both to the quality of the French equipment and to technological support: “An able demonstrator installed the machines when purchased” (US Department of Commerce 1930). When screens were used, they were also bought from Pathé and Gaumont. By creating a strong relationship with exhibitors and controlling both film and film equipment sale—that is, hardware and software—the two French majors had built a captive market. In fact, as the 1930 report noted, “All projectors and equipment of all kinds are purchased in Paris at the same time the films are contracted” (US Department of Commerce 1930). Pathé and Gaumont offered another valuable service: by the early 1920s they had turned into schedulers, providing ready-made film programs in their catalogs and thus saving exhibitors the annual trip to Paris to preview and select films (Garçon 2006, 64). In the late 1920s, for example, European companies provided the Egyptian markets with “complete program[s]” made of news weekly, short comedy, travel picture, and one feature film, or, alternatively, news weekly, short comedy, and two feature films (US Department of Commerce [c. 1928]). This practice, which was a form of blind bidding, epitomized monopolistic tendencies (Corriou 2011, 106–7). The force of the two French companies was thus to have established themselves as the only major interlocutor for North African exhibitors.

Although they monopolized distribution in the region, the major and smaller French companies did not deal in French films only. In the 1910s, pictures by Selznick, Griffith Productions, and Universal were respectively distributed in France by Select Distribution, Cosmograph, and Ciné-Location Eclipse (Garçon 2006, 66). After World War I, Gaumont strategically turned into a “multi-brand company,” handling a film distribution slate comprising Hollywood films from Paramount Pictures, Famous Players, Jesse Lasky, C. B. de Mille, and Fairbanks Corporation (60). One can infer that, since they were included in the preestablished programs, US productions such as the films by Harold Lloyd, Goldwyn, Cosmopolitan, and Distinctive, acquired by Pathé Consortium Cinema in 1913, and Douglas Fairbank’s The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919) and Will Hart’s Square Deal Sanderson (1919), handled by Gaumont, traveled through the whole international network of the companies (D’Hugues and Muller 1986, 33).⁵ Archival traces of this circulation exist: the Persian theater co-owned by Pathé and Patmagrian in the early 1910s was showing Charlie Chaplin films (Thoraval 2000, 16); in 1918, Famous Players-Lasky Films signed a deal with Gaumont for a zone covering Switzerland, Belgium, and Egypt (K. Thompson 1985, 73); in the early 1920s, Associated First National made a four-year deal with Gaumont for the distribution of four Jackie Coogan films—Peck’s Bad Boy (1921), My Boy (1921), Trouble (1922), and Daddy (1923)—in a zone covering Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.⁶ In effect, French companies were the first to introduce Hollywood films in North Africa and the Middle East.

Beside entry through Pathé and Gaumont, other distribution paths existed, such as the servicing of 1912 Syria through a British company in London (K. Thompson 1985, 33). At the time, US producers routinely sold British rights to London companies, offering the rights for the rest of the world as a bonus (31). This practice must have been quite marginal, as deals with French companies covering larger area must have appeared more efficient. Another route took Hollywood films east: in the early 1920s, “many of the fledgling early exhibitors ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Winning Hearts in the Colonial Era (1910s–1950s)
• Part II: Losing Ground in a Changing Market: Political Independence and VCRs (1950s–1990s)
• Part III: US Films Galore in the Digital Era (2000s–2010s)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover