and explaining one of the least-known areas of cinema, but one that deserves to be known better. As in other books in this series, this book sets the scene with a chronology, one longer and more extensive than one might expect, and then an introduction, which is certainly more complex than most. But the bulk of the material is contained in a dictionary section full of informative entries on the various countries concerned and the composite regions; their directors, producers, and actors; dozens of the better films; most of the genres; and many of the themes, from exile to gender and sexuality. Other entries deal with significant political leaders and events, including the Arab–Israeli conflict, the Defeat, and the Iraq War, which have generated films. And mention is also made of film schools, festivals, and currents, such as New Realism and Third Cinema. In short, the field of cinema is studied from many different angles, and it would not be easy to find more in a smaller space. Finally, for those who want to learn more, there is a bibliography with further reading on cinema in the region and in each part as well. Nor should one forget the amazingly long filmography.
Considering that this volume covers 18 different national cinemas, it could not have been written as competently as has been done without the participation of a team of contributors, each specialized in certain aspects and countries, and two editors who coordinated the work and produced parts of the manuscript themselves. The contributors are Hend Alawadhi, Samirah Alkassim, Farshad Aminian, Savaş Arslan, Sandra G. Carter, Patricia Caillé, Anne Ciecko, Gayatri Devi, Iman Hamam, Dale Hudson, Wissam Mouawad, Helga Tawil-Souri, Negar Taymoorzadeh, Mark R. Westmoreland, and Alia Yunis. The two editors, who both selected the various contributors and made contributions of their own, are Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard. This able and diligent team certainly deserves a vote of thanks for creating an essential reference tool for anyone interested in Middle Eastern cinema or the Middle East in general.
Jon Woronoff
Series Editor
Preface
This volume covers the production and exhibition of cinema in the Middle East and in exilic and diasporic communities whose heritage is from the region and whose films commonly reflect this background. Much of the Middle East consists of the Arab Muslim world, stretching from Morocco in North Africa (the Maghreb) to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the west and to Iraq in the east and northeast (both in southwest Asia, or the Mashreq). In addition, it includes the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, as well as the Jewish state of Israel. Although we include an entry on Afghanistan, this is largely in view of its interrelationship with Iran. Entries on the stateless peoples of the Western Sahara and Kurdistan are provided and contextualized in their interrelationships with Morocco and with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, respectively, while the first stirrings of a revival of cinema in Sudan have prompted an entry on that country, partly in light of its relationship with Egypt. The history and current position of cinema in each of these countries and regions is different, and the cinema of the Middle East covers a remarkably diverse range of topics and aesthetic approaches. With minor exceptions, however, Middle Eastern films are some of the least known to audiences and scholars outside the region, their global distribution and exhibition being limited largely to international film festivals in major urban centers. In some instances—for example, Syria, where rarely more than three films per year are produced—they have hardly been seen. This is a pity, because the quality and breadth of much Middle Eastern cinema is undeniable.
We cannot expect a volume such as this to address fully all the implications raised by the geographical and political constraints of the above, but we do firmly believe that the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema will provide a useful resource to support inquiry and analysis of the ways Middle Easterners have depicted themselves, their societies, and their histories on film. Although the volume does lend minor attention to North American and European depictions of the region and its peoples, which have often repeated the long tradition of orientalism that variously discredits or demeans its subject, this is not our emphasis: we assume that a majority of our readers will have encountered that “Middle East” in popular Hollywood films about the region, and perhaps in the Western media more broadly speaking. In fact, the Middle East is a part of the world that remains poorly understood, and we believe that examining the aesthetic quality and intellectual breadth of its cinema can supply a powerful means toward helping change that. We have tried to emphasize, in the difficult process of deciding what to include, material that may be available to our readers; nevertheless, much Middle Eastern cinema is regrettably inaccessible, and we can only hope that publicizing such films will contribute to improving the likelihood of their future dissemination. Comprehensiveness is an impossible and, perhaps, undesirable goal, so we have endeavored to choose significant films, directors, performers, production agencies, exhibition venues, cinematic organizations, and pertinent historical and political figures, events, and sociocultural practices that, together, provide a representative image of Middle Eastern cinema.
Very broadly, two distinct, but frequently overlapping, categories of filmmaking are traceable throughout the entries: industrial and auteurist. In the former, the dominant determinant of style and subject is the system of relations and conditions of production, both local and international; in the latter, it is the individual—or independent collective—working within or against that system and its transnational parameters. In most Middle Eastern countries, both categories of filmmaking have, at least periodically, existed simultaneously. Perhaps paradoxically, the films most widely available and seen in some of these countries—Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Israel, for instance—are those least likely to be distributed to foreign audiences—and probably the least geared to their tastes. It has been argued, on one hand, that such industry genre films, meant to attract large domestic audiences in their countries of origin and typically screened less frequently outside them, are more “true” to their particular national cultures than are films distributed largely internationally (auteur or festival cinema). For Middle East cultural critic Walter Armbrust, for example, art cinema funding and the pull of Western(ized) film festival exhibition venues serve to disguise the cultural richness of the popular Egyptian cinema. Roy Armes, on the other hand, argues that the rejection or transformative revision of genre cinema provides the best evidence of national-cultural “authenticity.” This debate reflects the important work of Cuban theorist and filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, whose writings address the nature and character of the films that might be made in Cuba following the revolution. García Espinosa establishes a distinction between a popular cinema that emanates from and articulates the people’s concerns and a mass cinema that is a commodified product drawing on stereotypes and aiming at a presumed lowest common denominator ultimately remote from those concerns. Armbrust is inclined to see the potential for studio-based genre cinema to push away from the latter toward the former; Armes less so.
With these debates in mind, we have developed a historical dictionary that includes a larger proportion of entries regarding the popular industry cinemas of Egypt and Turkey (Yeşilçam) than regarding those countries’ independent cinemas; such commercial, if occasionally “quality” or auteur, products constitute these countries’ more significant cinematic contributions nationally and regionally, and while therefore canonically central, have received limited exposure beyond the Middle East. However, the volume also includes a larger proportion of entries regarding the independent cinemas of Iran, Lebanon, and Israel than regarding the industry cinemas in those countries; these auteur and independent works also constitute, we postulate, their countries’ more significant cinematic contributions, but they have frequently received more attention internationally than at home—due both to exilic and diasporic filmmaking conditions and to political restrictions involving censorship. In this second edition, nevertheless, we have included additional entries on the commercial cinemas of Lebanon and Iran, on state-funded cinema in Israel, and on independent cinema in Egypt, both in an effort to redress historical gaps in the earlier volume and to reflect, in hindsight, the reemergence of earlier directions and practices under new circumstances. The relative importance of Palestinian cinema to its national liberation struggle is duly represented, as is the predominance of art cinema production in the Maghreb, notwithstanding, indeed in light of, the continued necessity of European funding—although we also
