conditions of exile did not deter Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon from producing a significant, often aesthetically challenging corpus of short films, mostly documentaries—some of which have recently been rediscovered and newly disseminated, as explained in Off Frame (AKA Revolution until Victory) (Mohanad Yaqubi, 2015)—that in retrospect came to be called Palestinian Revolution Cinema. Many of its remaining extant works are stored in the Dreams of a Nation Archive, cocurated by Dabashi and Palestinian diasporic filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, among others. The unremitting nationalist and often revolutionary internationalist character of these films influenced the later Palestinian cinema that emerged in the years following the Camp David Accords, exemplified by Michel Khleifi’s landmark Wedding in Galilee (1986), in which, however, the question of nationalism is rearticulated in terms of gender roles. Palestinian Israeli directors could at this time receive financial support from the Israeli government, although many chose to seek funding abroad, mostly from European sources. Palestinian cinematic output increased, even and especially under deteriorating political-economic conditions, following the First Intifada and ensuing Oslo Accords, and a series of auteurs emerged in addition to Khleifi (who would later collaborate with Jewish Israeli director Eyal Sivan on the critical documentary feature Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine–Israel [2004]). Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002), the second film in a highly self-critical, national-allegorical series, exorcises Palestinian woes with the help of supernatural forces—but also the superior humor and intelligence of its Palestinian protagonists in comparison with their Israeli opponents—while Rashid Masharawi and Hany Abu-Assad, in Ticket to Jerusalem (2002) and Ford Transit (2002), respectively, and Annemarie Jacir in Salt of This Sea (2008) all demonstrate exemplary Palestinian steadfastness—sumud—in the face of the occupation’s social and spatial restrictions, characterized by military checkpoints, the construction of the Apartheid Wall/Fence, and the continued construction of Jewish-only settlements.
The new edition of this historical dictionary likewise draws attention to a third displaced and stateless people, the Sahrawis, whose ancestral lands in the Western Sahara are also divided by a wall constructed by the Moroccan state, which claims the land for itself. Israeli cinema, by contrast, has throughout its history variously invoked and supported Zionism, the ideology of Jewish nationalism. Exemplifying this aim are the aforementioned popular genre films, as well as a small but significant array of Holocaust films that attempt to justify the Zionist project as a means of ensuring Jewish safety.
Transnationalism in the Middle East
Much film scholarship of late has emphasized the transnational character of Middle Eastern cinema not only in recent decades but historically, the earliest films having frequently been made by outsiders in one or another sense of that term. In addition to colonial filmmaking and the use of Middle Eastern countries as backdrops for Western films, such as the Josephine Baker vehicle Princess Tam-Tam (1934) or David Lean’s study of Englishness abroad, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), filmmakers frequently not of Middle Eastern background, or otherwise from elsewhere in the region, were prominent in starting local industries. Thus, in Iran, for example, Avanes Ohanian, who directed the earliest features, was an Armenian and longtime resident of Russia who spoke little Persian. The first Persian-language sound films were made in India by Abdolhossein Sepanta and Ardeshir Irani; nevertheless, they were powerful nationalist documents, serving to legitimize the shah’s rule and to celebrate Iranian cultural traditions. Many of the earliest Egyptian films were made by filmmakers of Italian origin, such as the Egyptian-born Stephane Rosti, who directed Layla in 1927. This film’s position as the first full-length Egyptian feature has been challenged by Shafik, who substitutes another film directed by an Italian, Victor Rositto’s In the Land of Tutankhamen (1923). She points out, too, that the highly successful early Egyptian Jewish director Togo Mizrahi also held Italian citizenship, while other important pioneers were the Lama brothers, Ibrahim and Badr, who were Chilean Lebanese—or possibly Palestinian. The connection of the Egyptian industry to Lebanon has continued to be very strong, with many major stars, especially those with musical connections, such as Farid al-Atrache, having originated there. A striking example of the impact of transnational exchange on the construction of iconic national figures in this cinema is the dancer, singer, and actress Tahiyya Carioca, whose stage name is adopted from the Brazilian dance, the “Karioka,” made famous by Carmen Miranda and at one time immensely popular in Egypt. (To her credit, Carioca was able to sustain a long and distinguished career, which extended in later years to key roles in realist and auteur films, that prevented her descent into the sort of demeaning self-parody characteristic of Miranda’s Brazilian exoticism in Hollywood.)
These conditions of transnational exchange and interdependence have been accelerated since World War II with the implementation of neoliberal trade practices, concomitant tariffs and taxation of films, and multinational funding models. The effects of such developments are especially evident in the growth of Middle Eastern immigrant and diasporic populations beyond the region, and the artistic cultures, including cinema, that they have carved out in sometimes inhospitable environments. Such cinema’s numerous determinants include considerable French influence on the Maghreb, especially during the colonial period, the persisting cultural links of which have compelled many Tunisians, Moroccans, and Algerians seeking work, education, and political asylum to settle in France. Palestinians, displaced from their lands and properties since at least 1948, have mostly resettled as refugees in Israel and in refugee camps in the OPTs and neighboring Arab countries, as well as throughout the West, and many Palestinian filmmakers have been educated abroad. A significant Palestinian diasporic cinema has developed under these conditions, with Bethlehem-born Annemarie Jacir and Norma Marcos beginning their filmmaking careers in New York City and Paris, respectively, and U.S.-born Mai Masri basing her filmmaking practice in Lebanon. Similarly, Lebanese directors-in-exile, notably Walid Raad, have made avant-garde and documentary films about that country’s civil war, often—like Palestinian cinema—challenging related notions of nationalism and ethnic and religious chauvinism. (In many ways, indeed the same has been true of nonexilic Lebanese filmmakers such as Jocelyn Saab, Maroun Baghdadi, and Borhane Alaouié, whose works have opened up a discussion of internal exile.)
These films are instances of what Hamid Naficy has termed an “accented” cinema, one that carries specific modes of production, themes, and formal characteristics, such as an interest in movement, entrapment, and epistolary structures. Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless, a prerevolutionary exile whose melancholic works made in Germany express a yearning for a home he seemingly never achieved, are perhaps prototypical; while the formally very different work of Fatih Akın, a German of Turkish background, grapples explicitly with issues of national displacement and transnational existence in the narratives of relatively more widely distributed films, such as Head-On (2004) and Edge of Heaven (2007). As these examples illustrate, the multiple lines of connection constituting “world cinema” are often as enabling as they are constraining, a film’s ideological tenor and aesthetic quality dependent as much on a director’s individual fortune and tenacity as on larger global forces. Tawfik Saleh, for example, unwilling to compromise with the persisting commercialism and abiding censorship of the Egyptian studio system, was able to make films in socialist Syria (The Dupes [1973], itself an allegorical film about the difficulty faced by displaced workers when crossing borders) and Iraq, where he taught at the Cinema Academy, although he struggled to maintain a consistent output worthy of his considerable talents and commitments.
Perhaps the most obvious way Middle Eastern cinema now operates in a transnational world is through the ubiquitous use of coproductions, especially outside the industrial cinemas of Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Israel. This means of funding, typified by the French Fonds du Sud, incorporates Middle Eastern filmmaking with transnational economic systems controlled more or less by agencies outside filmmakers’ home countries or regions. Major auteurs such as Youssef Chahine and, particularly, Iranians Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi, who have been able to secure a measure of independence from the vicissitudes of production in their respective countries by securing European—again often French—funding for their projects, have sometimes been criticized as “festival
