Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Since its early beginnings in the late 1920s and until the
late 1940s, the influential Arab Egyptian cinema evolved
and reinvented itself largely by incorporating Hollywood’s
well-tested formulas. By the mid-1950s Egyptian cinema
was loosely amalgamating various realist cinematic trends,
including French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, and
socialist realism. It also began to incorporate modernist
German expressionist tendencies as well as early Soviet
dialectical montage. These impulses, however, were
assimilated by Egyptian and other Arab filmmakers as
complementary rather than antithetical to existing local film practices. By the early 1990s Arab films were frequently using self-reflexive stylistic strategies.
In the Palestinian film Divine Intervention (2002),
directed by Elia Suleiman, the story of a young
Palestinian filmmaker (played by Suleiman himself) is
punctuated by shots of the filmmaker placing the film’s
cue cards on the wall of his apartment. Kanya Ya Ma
Kan, Beyrouth (Once Upon a Time in Beirut, 1995), by
Jocelyn Saab (b. 1948), concerns the search by two young
women for their own city. It presents a barrage of
archival footage, film clips, and images of old downtown
movie theaters, as the two women attempt a sort of
excavation of the Lebanese capital before the civil war.
Their search ends in the discovery of Western and Arabic
film clips—including ones made by the Lumie`re
Brothers—from the 1920s up to the early 1970s. And
in West Beyrouth (Ziad Doueiri, 1998), a young boy’s
infatuation with his Super-8 camera results in his becoming a witness to the destruction of his war-torn city.
Developments in communications technologies,
including the mushrooming of Arab satellite film and
television networks, were a major element in the expansion of Arab cinema at the end of the twentieth century.
Film festivals in the region are also growing. Among the
most influential annual events that screen films from the
Arab world and elsewhere are the Cairo, Beirut,
Marrakesh, Damascus, and Carthage Film Festivals as
well as the Dubai Film Festival, created in 2004. The
burgeoning annual Ismailiah International Documentary
Film Festival in Egypt has also become a major outlet for
screening and discussing the latest trends in Arab documentary and experimental filmmaking. All these events
are increasingly informing and informed by a renaissance
of a pan-Arab national cultural interaction.
Important distribution centers for Arab film in the
West include New Yorker Video, Winstar Home Video,
and Kino International, all in New York. The largest
source of Arab films remains Arab Film Distribution in
Seattle. Among the major events that regularly screen Arab
films are the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco (organized by Cinemayaat), the Seattle Film Festival (Arab Film
Distribution), the Arab Film Festival in Montreal (organized in coordination with Cine´mathe`que Que´be´coise),
the Biennial of Arab Cinemas (organized in Paris by
l’Institut du Monde Arabe), and Arabscreen, a documentary and short festival in London.
On the one hand, and more than ever before in
contemporary Arab history, a cultural revival is transcending divisions and borders between various Arab
states, regions and peoples—a division originally prescribed and designed by colonial powers in the first
decade of the twentieth century. This revival appears to
be ushering in a new period in the development of Arab
cinema. On the other hand, political tensions in the
Middle East—including the continuing Palestinian
dilemma, and the ramifications of the Gulf War (1992)
and the Iraq War (2003) (both of which are widely
viewed in the area as reflections of neocolonialist designs
and interventions)—continue to stimulate politically and
culturally conscious preoccupations in film. This complex backdrop has encouraged the emergence of new
thematic trends and stylistic patterns in various areas of
cultural production, including filmmaking. It has
allowed for the growth of film practices that favor breaking down artificial barriers—of form, nationality, and
‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ art—that so often delineate cinematic
practices in the West. All this can only signal new beginnings for a cinema that bears the responsibility of expressing the struggles of its people.