enterprise featuring actualité films depicting tourist attractions for foreigners and local elites. The success and favorable reception of these films led to the establishment of a series of increasingly influential studios, notably Studio Misr, the first productions of which, in 1936, positioned Egyptian cinema as a purveyor of genre films. These incorporated famous singing stars such as Umm Kulthum and Mohamed Abdel Wahab—thus drawing in their already substantial audiences—and created numerous others, in an industry that became, by the 1940s, one of the world’s largest and a significant exporter to the neighboring Arab countries. This period launched the first “golden age” of Egyptian cinema, when industry opportunities attracted filmmakers from other Arab countries, especially Lebanon.
In Turkey and Iran, cinema flourished somewhat later, but eventually substantial popular industries aimed at domestic audiences developed. Like Egyptian cinema, Turkish industry or Yeşilçam cinema was born of actualité filmmaking, in this case during the late Ottoman Empire, and was influenced—as it was to a lesser degree in Egypt and Iran—by the shadow-play tradition. Under the single-party rule of Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, however, Yeşilçam’s autocratic directorship constrained cinematic output, a situation that changed after World War II. Iranian cinema, too, began with the filming of actual events, first among them a royal visit to Belgium, recorded on film by the court photographer. Although early filmmakers/producers (described in the next section of this introduction) made films prior to World War II, a star-driven industry that focused on melodramas, historical epics, and song-and-dance films developed only in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the Maghreb, cinema prior to the gaining of independence was almost exclusively controlled by colonial forces, and featured films made by and for the settler population, although some of the institutions established under colonialism, such as Morocco’s Centre Cinéma Marocain (CCM), were retained following independence. Algerian cinema during this period existed only in exile in Tunisia, but—as shall be elaborated shortly—independence fostered a filmmaking practice that would permit emphasis on the oppressive nature of colonialism and celebrate the establishment of the postcolonial state. The vast majority of Algerian cinema was state funded by one of a series of film production agencies—of which the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (ONCIC) was perhaps the most significant—or by the national television network, Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne (RTA), until privatization in 1993. In the later 1990s, however, civil war, the growing influence of political Islam, and, in reaction, increasing state censorship severely limited this once very significant cinema.
In neighboring Tunisia, a state-run production agency, Société Anonyme Tunisienne de Production et d’Expansion Cinématographiques (SATPEC), was also dominant, although it failed in its attempt to control cinema distribution in the country. The mid-1960s witnessed the establishment of the major Arab film festival, held biannually in Carthage, and the Gammarth studio facilities, which, however, struggled to remain up-to-date—a factor in the impoverishment and eventual closure of SATPEC in 1994. Nevertheless, Tunisian cinema achieved an international presence in the late 1980s and 1990s, largely through the efforts of producer Ahmed Attia, working with directors and film commentators Nouri Bouzid (whose films have continued to offer a series of meditations on masculinity, gender positioning, religion, and nationalism), Férid Boughedir—also with a recent film—and editor-turned-director Moufida Tlatli. In Morocco, a significant, more widely attended cinema was slower to emerge, with the immediate postindependence government having shown little interest in supporting film. The country’s first features, sponsored by the CCM, appeared during the late 1960s, and a change in funding mechanisms led to a considerable increase in output in the 1980s, but, with Hollywood and Egyptian cinema dominating local screens, there was little chance of finding an audience or revenues. These problems have been somewhat resolved since a more generous, but also more closely monitored, system of incentives was instituted during the 1990s, whereupon Morocco now produces more films, and they are more widely seen, than is the case in Tunisia. In both countries, however, as throughout the region, dwindling distribution and exhibition opportunities remain a problem. Another issue is dependence on foreign coproduction, which remains a vital enabling condition of Maghrebi cinema. Frequently, the partnership is with France through funding mechanisms that require postproduction work to take place there. In another sense, too, Maghrebi cinema remains tied to the former colonial power, since a diasporic beur cinema—made by filmmakers who were either born in North Africa themselves or whose parents were—also exists. This movement, which came to wider attention with Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory (2006) and Outside the Law (2010), is an important part of French cinema, while its previously strong ties to the Maghreb, with many filmmakers passing back and forth between countries, have somewhat declined in recent years, and some nominally beur directors—for example, Abdellatif Kechiche—have begun to focus on topics other than the beur experience, as in his Mektoub, My Love series (2017–2019). The beginning of Maghrebi film production in Amazigh languages during the 1990s should also be noted in relation to the emergence of minority perspectives suggested by beur initiatives.
By the 1950s, as the Maghrebi independence movements were gaining ground, the commercial nature of Egyptian cinema had come under criticism for its largely escapist quality. The Free Officers coup of 1952 and subsequent government of Gamal Abdel Nasser facilitated a shift in focus toward socially more conscious films that formed what became known as the second “golden age” of Egyptian cinema. Film industry nationalization during the early 1960s led to a sharpening of this focus, with the emergence of both a realist aesthetic and the beginnings of an auteur cinema, the exemplary figure of which was Youssef Chahine. Unlike the European new waves, however, the ensuing Egyptian films did not break from the industrial system so much as negotiate its parameters, blurring art and commercial boundaries and compelling some committed filmmakers to seek work abroad, for instance, in Iraq and in Syria, where the very existence of cinema was and remains a struggle. This blurring continued into the post-Nasser era, with the reprivatization begun during the late 1970s providing the conditions for a New Realist wave of filmmaking in the 1980s. The rise of satellite television and digital video during the 1990s, as well as Saudi investment, especially since the start of the 21st century, have enabled a wider access to films that has also sparked a cinema revival, including a nostalgia craze for the first “golden age” and somewhat increased attention to Egyptian cinema in the West, but also a concomitant push toward renewed social criticism, as in In the Last Days of the City (Tamer El Said, 2016) and The Nile Hilton Incident (Tarek Saleh, 2017), which were nonetheless subject to the country’s currently heightened regime of censorship.
In its 50-year history, by contrast, Turkey’s Yeşilçam underwent waves of productivity—the most prolific of which was the “high” Yeşilçam period of the 1960s–1970s—each one of them both framed and disrupted by civil strife. Official, Republican calls for “Turkification” in Yeşilçam films, moreover, may have limited external access and interest, already significantly precluded by world cinema’s tightly controlled worldwide systems of distribution. As the 20th century waned, these limitations were relaxed, as industry production declined and, gradually, was mostly replaced by the onset of a new Turkish cinema, a loosely defined movement in which an auteurist filmmaking practice distinguished itself more fully from the popular-commercial. While a boom in comedy and horror genre films has characterized the latter of late, the former, particularly in the work of film festival favorite Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has received much more attention abroad on the art-house circuit. In addition, an important aspect of this new cinema has been its acknowledgment of Turkish minorities and of diasporic filmmaking, primarily of German provenance.
There is also a significant, although more widely dispersed, Iranian diasporic/exilic cinema. Many of its filmmakers left the country in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution of 1979. Prior to this, the domestic cinema of Iran had established a strong popular presence in the country, with powerful stars. Censorship restrictions meant that little of this work was politically engaged, and some of it has been viewed as passively supporting the despotic regimes of Shah Reza Pahlavi and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. A new wave, signaled most decisively, perhaps, by the release of U.S.-educated Dariush Mehrjui’s
