Читать книгу Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema - Terri Ginsberg - Страница 8

Films were shot and viewed in the Middle East soon after they were in Europe. First, Lumière cameramen toured the region, but soon regional and national cinemas began to appear. In Egypt, the earliest efforts at filmmaking involved a colonial 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 The Cow (1970), disturbed this status quo, although commentators continue to dispute whether other key films of the period, such as Qeysar (Massud Kimiai, 1969), are more usefully considered new wave or simply as developments of standard industry genres. In any case, a much bigger change followed the revolution: many earlier films, both domestic and foreign, were banned from theaters, while much more severe restrictions on the depiction of women comprised one of the most notable constraints on new productions. Despite these developments, the Islamic authorities, personified by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were not opposed to cinema per se, and, following the establishment of the Farabi Cinema Foundation, which facilitated various aspects of their work, Iranian directors, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, developed a strong art sector by the 1990s that helped foster a substantial presence for Iranian cinema in international film festivals and resulted in a transnational art cinema largely distinct from, though inevitably drawing upon, the country’s continuing popular cinematic traditions. As in Turkey and Egypt, and increasingly in Morocco and Tunisia, domestic comedies are today the predominant box-office hits in Iran.

Unlike the above cinemas, those of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Israel have been relatively less prolific, with the Lebanese example being the most productive through a genre- and star-driven industry bolstered with logistical support over the years from Egypt; however, its fate has been bound up with the destructiveness of civil wars and external pressures. The influence of Egyptian cinema led to early Lebanese films of the 1930s being produced in the Egyptian rather than Levantine vernacular. Lebanese commercial cinema carried an orientalist tenor conducive to popular formula films during the country’s “golden age” of the 1950s, although some Lebanese films resisted the postcolonialist Egyptian model. In many instances, such films, which served to fortify the country’s national cinema, were made by Christian filmmakers, in contrast to the works of their Muslim compatriots, which tended to identify more with Nasserist pan-Arabism and, therefore, the Egyptian system. On the other hand, Lebanon occasionally welcomed Egyptian filmmakers, disenchanted with Nasser, who lent talent and prestige to the Lebanese industry. The Lebanese Civil War, however, made consistent film production nearly impossible, and a much more artisanal practice, often with an explicitly avant-garde orientation, was characteristic of Lebanese cinema in the years leading up to and immediately following the turn of the 21st century. Such an experimental emphasis remains an important part of the Lebanese cinemascape, although more festival-oriented, transnational productions such as Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2019) are beginning to appear.

The Israeli film industry has also been limited by the exigencies of war and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands, the high cost of which has historically precluded sustained funding for quality filmmaking. Hence, the Israeli cinema has always sought funding abroad. The earliest Israeli films made about historical Palestine were actualité films and short pastoral dramas produced by the European-based Jewish National Fund or Palestine Foundation Fund/United Israel Appeal and were themselves intended as fundraising vehicles for the nascent Zionist cause. After Israel was established in 1948, two national production facilities opened that produced less nostalgic, more forward-looking films for domestic Jewish audiences. Since 1954, a series of state funding agencies has supplied these facilities with financial assistance that has enabled a relatively small but consistent output of popular-commercial melodramas, war films, and comedies, of which the bourekas genre, centered on stereotyped Mizrahi Jews, is perhaps the most noteworthy. Persistent war and violence through the 1960s prompted a series of generic transformations contextualizing the Six-Day and Yom Kippur–Ramadan Wars, known generally as the Young Israeli Cinema. This period also witnessed the emergence of the country’s foremost auteur, Amos Gitai, and the producer-director Menachem Golan, whose Cannon Films was one of the earliest players in contemporary transnational cinematic production. In the wake of the First Intifada, popular demand for films that would address sociopolitical concerns more directly and explicitly led to the production of numerous independent documentaries about the Palestinian–Israeli struggle, the OPTs, and related matters, as well as some concerned with Palestinian–Israeli society outside the matter of the struggle. Perhaps in response, the Israeli Censorship Board was dismantled in 1991, and film censorship came under the control of the Interior Ministry. Since then, Israeli industry–art hybrids, mostly psychological melodramas funded through international appeal, have been released on the world cinema circuit. While presenting the damage caused to the Israeli psyche by the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict, they have often attempted to put a gentler face on the continuing occupation of Palestine. Between 2002 and 2010, this attempt became codified as hasbara, a highly visible, state-sponsored public diplomacy campaign, largely funded internationally, that has found occasional cinematic coproducers in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, India, and sometimes among Palestinians, as well as in Europe and the United States. Perhaps the most controversial of these collaborators is Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri.

Just as Israeli national cinema arose, Palestinian cinema was prevented from doing so, as part of the general restrictions placed on the Palestinian population. Indeed, not until the mid-1980s would Palestinian cinema develop domestically, after a lengthy period of flourishing in exile. The complex relationship of Palestinian cinema with Israel and with sources of funding outside the region that contributed to the political art cinema of such figures as Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, and more recently Hany Abu-Assad, Rashid Masharawi, and Annemarie Jacir is discussed in the next section.

State restrictions—of another stripe—have also been instrumental in constraining Iraqi and Syrian filmmaking, both historically limited, as in Algeria, to state-run monopolies. Production in Ba‘thist Syria’s National Film Organization (NFO) never resulted in more than a few films per year, and the situation was little better in postindependence Iraq, either during its period of private production or during its nationalization under the Ba‘th government into the General Organization for Cinema and Theatre (GOCT). Moreover, the Iran–Iraq War and subsequent 1991 Gulf War as well as the 2003 Anglo-American invasion and occupation all but ended film production in the country. Syrian cinema, however, continued to produce a slow, uneven stream of quality films, often directed by former students of the prestigious Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow and meant ideally for domestic audiences yet frequently restricted, censorially, to international distribution due to their varied critiques, many quite allegorical, of the regime. Perhaps the most widely viewed film of this sort is Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid’s Nights of the Jackal (1989). This limited cinematic production was severely curtailed by the civil and military crisis that erupted during the 2010s, whereupon the remaining, major established Syrian directors, all quite elderly, left the country—although Oussama Mohammad, at least, has contributed a coauthored film, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), using footage shot by a collaborator still in the country. The traditionally more substantial production of televisual material in Syria has been somewhat better sustained. Because of their ostensible support for pan-Arabism, both the Syrian NFO and the Iraqi GOCT welcomed guest directors from Egypt and other Arab countries in order to lend much-needed caché to their faltering industries and to encourage international diplomacy.

Recently, cinema has emerged in Jordan, although government incentives and encouragement during the 2000s subsequently declined during the 2010s, while the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia have also started production, and still more recently have begun to institute initiatives for previously absent—or in the case of the UAE, where several high-profile international film festivals have seen their international financial backing rather suddenly withdrawn, foreclosed—opportunities for domestic exhibition. The first stirrings of cinema in Yemen, evident in the early 21st century, have not significantly materialized due to the civil and military crisis that has now engulfed and impoverished the country. The recent revival of interest in cinema in Sudan, a country from which it has been relatively absent, however, may suggest a future for the medium there, especially since the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Each of these countries is now the subject of an entry in the second edition of this historical dictionary.