Cinema of the Arab World

Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice

Terri Ginsberg, Chris Lippard, Terri Ginsberg, Chris Lippard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030300807
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030300814
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This volume engages new films and modes of scholarly research in Arab cinema, and older, often neglected films and critical topics, while theorizing their structural relationship to contemporary developments in the Arab world. The volume considers the relationship of Arab cinema to transnational film production, distribution, and exhibition, in turn recontextualizing the works of acknowledged as well as new directorial figures, and country-specific phenomena. New documentary and experimental practices are referenced and critiqued, while commercial cinema is covered both as an industrial product and as one of several instances of contestation. The volume thus showcases the breadth and depth of Arab film culture and its multilayered connections to local conditions, regional affiliations, and the tendencies and aesthetics of global cinema.

Bloc IIFestival and Nation Reconsidered

© The Author(s) 2020

T. Ginsberg, C. Lippard (eds.)Cinema of the Arab WorldGlobal Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30081-4_4

Begin Abstract

4. Amateur Filmmaking in Tunisia: A Political Film Culture Eliding Contradictions in National Cinema

Patricia Caillé¹

(1)

Département Information-Communication, Université de Strasbourg—CREM EA 3476, Strasbourg, France

Patricia Caillé

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

From French and wider European standpoints, Tunisian cinema has been constructed around a limited range of films, starting with the very successful Halfaouine, Child of the Terraces [Halfaouine, l’enfant des terrasses/Asfour Stah] (Férid Boughedir, 1990) and The Silences of the Palace [Les Silences du palais/Samt al-Qsur] (Moufida Tlatli, 1993), and ending with the almost equally successful Satin Rouge (Raja Amari, 2002). All of these films have contributed significantly to defining Maghrebi cinema (Caillé, “Cinemas”). This regional categorization imbues the films with a wider cultural specificity related to the tension between tradition and modernity, and as a consequence tends to efface the specificities of Tunisian history as well as Tunisian film history. The imposition from outside of a regional cultural specificity drawn around a few very popular films has obfuscated a range of earlier films, from Abdellatif Ben Ammar’s Une si simple histoire (1970), Sejnane (1973), and Aziza (1980), Nacer Ktari’s The Ambassadors [Les Ambassadeurs] (1975), Selma Baccar’s Fatma 75 (1976), to Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud’s Crossing Over [Traversées] (1982) as well as Nouri Bouzid’s early films.¹ But Tunisian films—here we are considering only feature films—and filmmakers have been the object of significant academic attention in Tunisia (Chamkhi, Cinéma; Le Cinéma; Khélil Le Parcours; Abécédaire; Bendana) and beyond (Armes, Martin, Lang). Except for Hédi Khélil’s edited volume, Le Parcours et la trace and his somewhat idiosyncratic Abécédaire du cinéma tunisien, which focuses on a larger range of aspects of Tunisian film culture, as well as Ismaël’s Cinéma en Tunisie, such analyses take national cinema to refer to key Tunisian films and their filmmakers (Bendana), albeit with a real interest in the social, political, and cultural contexts of their production. In his seminal essay, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Andrew Higson points out that national cinema can neither circumscribe the analysis of a range of films produced by a particular nation-state at any given time, nor can it be reduced to the exploration of the aesthetic, social, and political characteristics of such films, no matter how important these may be considered. Beyond production, commercial distribution, and exhibition, which can be very limited in countries in the African and Arab worlds, national cinema entails a wide array of activities that also address the wider circulation of national and, more often, international films on different media, as well as issues of audience and reception.

I wish to divert attention from key films and filmmakers, by exploring the development of national film culture in Tunisia via the activities of a long-standing association, the Fédération tunisienne des cinéastes amateurs (FTCA), formed in 1968 out of the Association des jeunes cinéastes tunisiens (AJCT), itself created in 1962. Together with the Fédération tunisienne des ciné-clubs (FTCC), the FTCA has been involved in resistance to authoritarian regimes through a range of political activism and a small corpus of amateur films in Tunisia. The FTCA has also provided essential training opportunities for reputed Tunisian filmmakers, among them Selma Baccar, a film producer who has directed three feature-length films, Khaled Barsaoui who directed many shorts and a feature film, Par-delà les rivières (2006), and Kaouther Ben Hania, a film director who was awarded the Tanit d’Or at the 2016 session of the Journées cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC) for her most recent documentary, Zaineb Hates the Snow [Zaineb n’aime pas la neige] (2016), and at the 2017 session for her fiction film, Beauty and the Dogs [La Belle et la meute] (2017).

More specifically, this chapter will focus on the Festival International du Film Amateur de Kélibia (FIFAK). Created in 1964, FIFAK is the oldest film festival in Tunisia and the main platform for the FTCA. The chapter will seek to fill gaps and answer remaining questions in two previous articles about FIFAK, the first of which explores ways in which participants at the 2013 edition of FIFAK defined cinema, described their presence at the festival, their film cultures, and the films which were meaningful to them (Caillé, “Fifak”), while the second highlights ways in which a gendered conception of filmmaking affects young women amateur filmmakers’ perceptions of themselves and limits their agency (Caillé, “S’imaginer”). Much of this earlier research was driven by a curiosity about the younger generation of FTCA members, who are the primary target for FIFAK’s activities, and a desire to question certain assumptions about the ways in which young people who are interested in film define cinema as well as understand and watch films in the digital age. However, it has become clear that focusing on the younger generation meant placing too much emphasis on a political and technological rupture regarded as the outcome of the combined effect of the January 14, 2011 Revolution and of a fairly sudden, much wider access to films made available via the digital revolution. It has been necessary to reintegrate these new political and technological developments within the larger, 50-year development of a demanding film culture, the history of which has been told again and again but has yet to be written. Such an endeavor necessitates a more specific reflection on the terms of the “national,” a concept that has recently come under close scrutiny due to its inadequacy with respect to the transnational character of cinema (Ezra and Rowden). While the realities of film funding, film production, film circulation, and film cultures supply obvious reasons for arguing against the relevance of the national, one can also object that national film cultures have always been immersed in and nourished by international films. In this sense, the history of the FTCA and of its festival, FIFAK, shows a strong attachment to the international character of its film culture (Caillé, “Fifak”). The present research raises the question of the impact of digital access to a much wider array of films on the national character of Tunisian film culture.²

The present chapter is based primarily upon the testimonies of current and former leaders of the FTCA concerning their motivations for and conceptualizations of engagement and collective action,³ and upon observations between 2013 and 2016 of the rituals and practices that characterize FIFAK as it reaffirms the values of a particular film culture. The chapter’s main purpose is to understand the ways in which FIFAK has reconfigured its goals and objectives in view of the digital revolution, more specifically, the ways in which agents and witnesses of the FTCA’s development understand the objectives and the means of developing and contributing to film culture in Tunisia today. In order to do so, I will focus briefly on the questions raised in the academic conversation about film festivals, before delving into an analysis of the construction of the FTCA’s values, their continuities and discontinuities. This historical account, which is based not on archival work but rather on powerful storytelling and its mise-en-scène, will provide a framework for understanding the ways in which the construction of a national film history operates within a transnational film culture.

The summer of 2013, which corresponds to the onset of this research, was a period of bitter disillusionment. The Islamist Ennahda government generated much frustration across Tunisia due to its incapacity to curb the contemporary economic downturn or offer a viable political, social, and cultural project for the country. It also failed to investigate the brutal murders of two of its opponents, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, purportedly by a French-Tunisian member of ISIS. Once again, demonstrators filled the streets of Tunis and occupied the Place du Bardo downtown, exhibiting small red cards with the now famous slogan “#Ra7il—an Arabic version of the French slogan “Dégage” used by crowds of protesters at the turn of 2010 to oust President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The 2014 edition of FIFAK, which ran from August 17–23, coincided with another moment of popular disenchantment with national policy: Ennahda agreed to leave power and was replaced by technocrats. FIFAK participants endlessly discussed the upcoming presidential election, fearing the return of the Islamists. Without enthusiasm, they discussed the “Appel du 16 juin” launched a few weeks earlier by 88-year-old Beji Caïd Essebsi, one of Habib Bourguiba’s former Ministers—he had been both Minister of the Interior and of International Relations—the aim of which was to prevent human rights activist Moncef Marzouki from acceding to the presidency. Many feared that Essebsi’s maneuver meant the return of the old political regime. For many FIFAK participants, this lackluster day-to-day struggle by the Assemblée Nationale Constituante (ANC), elected on October 23, 2011, to draft a Constitution (ultimately adopted on January 26, 2014) that would guarantee democracy and gender equality and define a stable and democratic political regime capable of bringing about the political, economic, and cultural development of an empowered people, looked more and more like a bleak coming to terms with the nitty-gritty reality of a play for political power. National politics has become a common...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Bloc I. History, Positionality, Critique
• Bloc II. Festival and Nation Reconsidered
• Bloc III. From Resistance to Entrenchment and Back Again
• Bloc IV. Political Aesthetics of State and Revolution in Egypt
• Back Matter