Ahlam al-Medina ( Dreams of the City , 1984) and Al Layl ( The Night , 1992) form the first two parts of Muhammad Malas âs trilogy. Upon their debuts in international film festivals , Malas became firmly established in the world from Valencia, Spain, to New York 1 as an auteur of Arab cinema although he had already earned his credentials in shaping the independent cinema movement in Syria since the early 1970s with Quneitra 74 . The new Arab cinema in which he participated was distinguished by a style of personal filmmaking deeply connected to contemporary struggles and inherently critical of authoritarianism in the Arab world. 2 Such a ânewâ cinema had its relatives in the post-war international film waves that appeared in the 1950s and 1960s and that used a new cinematic language to challenge narrative form and introduce new forms of realism. For Malas, like Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos to whom his work has been compared, cinema is a means to understand realities larger than itself, to not only see the image but also look through it. 3
To this day, Dreams of the City and The Night are recognized as gems of Arab cinema with the former voted the sixth best Arab film of all time in 2013. 4 They are now available for viewing through Middle East Cinema, a distribution house in Berlin that distributes eleven of Muhammad Malas âs films to meet the global interest in his work. 5 Although there have been many retrospectives of his work, both in the Middle East and Europe, inside Syria, his films have barely screened at all despite some being funded by the National Film Organization , and despite receiving prestigious international awards. 6 This paradox has been widely noted by many scholars (Rebecca Porteous , Rasha Salti, Nadia Yaqub, and Kay Dickinson to name a few) but Miriam Cooke has observed that this treatment was a means of state-commissioned criticism âon special occasions when a display of freedom and democracy seemed necessary or warranted.â 7 While there was state support for an art house cinema, the products of which could only be exposed to the general public in regulated drips, there were always well-trafficked unofficial channels of passage ensuring that these films had their underground circuits in Syria. 8
On Quneitra, Damascus, and Memory
To understand why these particular films should require regulation of their exposure, we have only to look at the settings, time periods, and historical events they capture. Dreams of the City and The Night are set in Damascus and Quneitra , respectively, and their narratives unfold around child protagonists who witness the rise of nationalism and the fall of pan-Arabism as occurred in twentieth-century Syria , the developments of which are registered in the sounds and details of everyday life. It is noteworthy that these locations hold personal significance for Malas: Damascus, the epicenter of the establishment of the modern Syrian state, is where he came of age in the mid- to late 1950s, as we see in Dreams of the City , while Quneitra, his birthplace and the site of his formative years, was depopulated and demolished subsequent to the Israeli conquest of the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War. This loss left a defining wound we find in his films.
The significance of Quneitra also deserves serious consideration, and a snapshot view gives a sense of its importance on multiple levels. It is located on an important historic trade route between Palestine and Damascus , where the Ottomans built an important garrison to control the traffic between their governorates. Quneitra was the first stop for waves of Circassian refugees fleeing religious persecution in Bulgaria and Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It witnessed major battles between European armies during World War I and World War II, was overtaken by Israeli forces in the Six-Day War of 1967, was superficially recovered by Syria in the war of 1973, and then retaken by Israeli forces in 1974 after which they razed it to the ground, making it a virtually uninhabitable place. Malasâs own expulsion from the town had a profound effect on him, traces of which can be found in nearly all his works. Although Quneitra is barely mentioned in Dreams of the City , it is the reason the young boy, Deeb arrives in Damascus with his widowed mother and younger brother at the filmâs beginning. The Night fills in the blanks as to what happened in this structuring wound of a place and foregrounds the process of memory as the means to partially recuperate loss. In the earlier experimental film Quneitra 74 , Malas explores the decimated town through a mute woman protagonist who breaks off from a crowd of visitors following the Israeli withdrawal and runs into the ruins to claim and attempt to fix a ravaged roofless home. In A Plate of Sardines , the 1997 documentary collaboration with Omar Amiralay , Malas revisits Quneitra as himself and confesses that Quneitra is always in every film he makes.
Malas has much to say about his interest in memory and how it motivates his love of cinema. In Sardines , he mentions that cinema can sometimes preserve and protect what reality cannot solve in reference to the problem of Quneitra and the ArabâIsraeli conflict. One could argue that in all his films, including Dreams of the City and The Night , remembering and memory are important means to recover from and recuperate what is lost. If forgetting is to lose things, remembering is to be and become rooted, however much this needs to be continually renewed and reproduced. This explains in part the recurring themes of loss and memory in his films. We find this in the literal loss of the father in Dreams of the City and The Night , and in the resulting shattering and dislocation of families. Both of these instances of loss function as tropes for a divided society split into clashing allegiances in the post-colonial Syrian state, suppressed by a parade of authoritarian rulers and regimes which they must pretend to obey and observe, consistent with what they have done for centuries under different rulers.
In Dreams of the City , memory begins with the sound of wings fluttering as the image slowly pans from left to right across a stone building, establishing in its course that the sound belongs to the white doves flying around inside a second story window of the building. The pan continues rightward to encompass the Barada River, the main river in Damascus , with a small bridge crossing, setting the location in an oddly quiet and unpopulated street of the city. Shot by Turkish cinematographer Orhan Orguz who had just won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his work on Yilmaz Guneyâs 1982 film Yol, this scene captures a sense of disquiet. The strangeness of birds contained inside a building, and the singling out of the sound of their flapping wings directs us to read the scene allegorically as a metaphor for cultural imprisonment. This location is important as one of the key scenes early in the film that relates the historic plunging of a military tank into the river during a government parade, to the mean grandfather who harshly punishes Deeb, for attending the parade and Deebâs little brother, Omar, for shouting back at the angry patriarch. Later, in the opening shot of Malasâs 2004 film, Bab al-Maqam (Passion) , we see the opposite of this image with a flock of doves circling around one of the historic gates to the city of Aleppo and flying freely in the sky,...