Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa

Viola Shafik

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9789774169588
• eBook ISBN: 9781649030351
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A comprehensive, in-depth study of Arab documentary filmmaking by leading experts in the field

While many of the Arab documentary films that emerged after the digital turn in the 1990s have been the subject of close scholarly and media attention, far less well studied is the immense wealth of Arab documentaries produced during the celluloid era. These ranged from newsreels to information, propaganda, and educational films, travelogues, as well as more radical, artistic formats, such as direct cinema and film essays. This book sets out to examine the long history of Arab nonfiction filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa across a range of national trajectories and documentary styles, from the early twentieth century to the present.

Bringing together a distinguished group of film scholars, practitioners, and critics, Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa traces the historical development of documentary filmmaking with an eye to the widely varied socio-political, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural contexts in which the films emerged. Thematically, the contributions provide insights into a whole range of relevant issues, both theoretical and historical, such as structural development and state intervention, formats and aesthetics, new media, politics of representation, auteurs, subjectivity, minority filmmaking, ‘Artivism,’ and revolution. Also unearthing previously unrecognized scholarly work in the field, this rich and theoretically informed collection sheds light on a hitherto neglected part of international film history.

Contributors:

Ali Abudlameer, Hend Alawadhi, Jamal Bahmad, Ahmed Bedjaoui, Dore Bowen, Shohini Chaudhuri, Donatella della Ratta, Yasmin Desouki, Kay Dickinson, Ali Essafi, Nouri Gana, Mohannad Ghawanmeh, Olivier Hadouchi, Ahmad Izzo, Alisa Lebow, Peter Limbrick, Florence Martin, Irit Neidhardt, Stefan Pethke, Mathilde Rouxel, Viviane Saglier, Viola Shafik, Ella Shohat, Mohamad Soueid, Hanan Toukan, Oraib Toukan, Stefanie van der Peer, Nadia Yaqub, Alia Yunis, Hady Zaccak

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributor Profiles
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Histories of ‘Arab’ Documentaries or Documentary Forms South and East of the Mediterranean?
• 1 Tracing Early News Cinema through the Pages of Egyptian Magazine al-Suwar al-Mutaharrika
• 2 Documenting Lebanon
• 3 Documentary Filmmaking in Iraq
• 4 Palestine Fights: Behind the Scenes of PLO–GDR Cooperation in Filmmaking
• 5 Documents Without Documentaries: Filmmaking in Postrevolutionary Tunisia
• 6 Algerian War for Independence: Documentaries Questioning History
• 7 A Brief History of Documentary Film in Morocco
• 8 Funding the “Creative Documentary”: An Art Cinema of Refugees
• 9 Arab Documentary Landscapes: Transnational Flow of Solidarity at Festivals
• 10 Negative/Positive: Newsreels in Nasserite Egypt and the Crafting of National Identity
• 11 From Poetics of Revolution to the Poetics of the Human: Voice-over in Egyptian Documentary, 1956–82
• 12 From Silhouettes to Superstars: Documenting HIV/AIDS in Egyptian Cinema
• 13 Me and Not Me: The Personal-collective Voice of First-person Films from the Egyptian Revolution
• 14 Gardening a Pitiless Mountain: Transcript of a Lecture Performance, 2011
• 15 The Arab–Jew and the Inscription of Memory
• 16 Lacan, Sontag and Israel on Screen
• 17 Political Issues in Tunisian Women’s Cinema
• 18 Memories and Legacies of Algerian Women’s Struggles During and After Independence
• 19 Spaces of Dispossession: Experiments with the Real in Contemporary Algerian Cinema
• 20 The Daring Lyrics of Women Music Documentary Filmmakers in the Maghreb
• 21 Three Hundred Kilometers South of Marrakech: Imider, Artivism, and the Environmental Documentary in Morocco
• 22 Screen Fighters: Filming and Killing in Contemporary Syria
• 23 Jean Chamoun and Lebanon’s Suspended History
• 24 Paper Airplanes: An Interview with Akram Zaatari
• 25 Catastrophe and Post-Catastrophe in the Films of Kamal Aljafari
• 26 Syria Portrayed in Two Documentaries by Omar Amiralay
• 27 The Berlin Ashlaa Incident: A Letter to Filmmaker Hakim Belabbes
• 28 The UAE’s Nujoom Alghanem: The Past, the Present, the Nation, and the Individual
• 29 Iraq War Home Movies: Abbas Fahdel’s Slow Documentary Homeland (Iraq Year Zero)
• Notes