Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image

Leonardo

Roger F. Malina, Executive Editor

Sean Cubitt, Editor-in-Chief

From Technological to Virtual Art, Frank Popper, 2007

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, Mark Amerika, 2007

Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, Eduardo Kac, 2007

The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science, Cretien van Campen, 2007

Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Susan Kozel, 2007

Video: The Reflexive Medium, Yvonne Spielmann, 2007

Software Studies: A Lexicon, Matthew Fuller, 2008

Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, 2008

White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980, edited by Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason, 2008

Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, 2010

Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution, George Gessert, 2010

Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, Laura U. Marks, 2010

Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956–1975, Stephen Jones, 2011

Hybrid Cultures: Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the West, Yvonne Spielmann, 2012

Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, Karen O’Rourke, 2013

The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, revised edition, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 2013

Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles, Erkki Huhtamo, 2013

Relive: Media Art Histories, edited by Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, 2013

Re-collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, 2014

Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain, Pasi Väliaho, 2014

The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, Sean Cubitt, 2014

The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology, Frances Dyson, 2014

The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema, Gloria Sutton, 2014

Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, Laura U. Marks, 2015

See http://mitpress.mit.edu for a complete list of titles in this series.

Hanan al-Cinema

Affections for the Moving Image

Laura U. Marks

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-02930-8

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

In loving memory of Jack Diamond (1928–2014) and Aida Kaouk (1946–2006)

Table of Contents

Leonardo

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Cinematic Friendships: Intercessors, Collectives, Perturbations

2 The Language of Terrorism: Elia Suleiman’s Film Practice

3 Arab Cinema Unfolds

4 Mohamed Soueid’s Cinema of Immanence

5 Communism, Dream Deferred

6 Can Cinema Slow the Flow of Blood?

7 Asphalt Nomadism

8 Archival Romances

9 Hala Elkoussy: Framing Chaos

10 Hassan Khan: The Social Contract

11 Mounir Fatmi: Protective Aniconism

12 Algorithm, Decryption, Glitch

13 Images in Motion, from Haptic Vision to Networked Space

14 Sherif El Azma: A Cinema of Cruelty

15 What Can a Body Do?

Distributors

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Omar Amiralay, Le plat de sardines, ou la première fois que j'ai entendu parler d'Israël (1997)

Figure 1.2 Rami Farah, Silence (2006)

Figure 1.3 Masasit Mati, Top Goon (2011)

Figure 1.4 Saeed Albatal and Ghiath-Had, Have You Ever Met a Sniper? (2014)

Figure 1.5 Jasmina Metwaly, Remarks on Medan (2011)

Figure 1.6 Sudan Film Factory, Nomads (2012)

Figure 2.1 Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum, Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) (1990)

Figure 2.2 Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal

Figure 2.3 Elia Suleiman, Homage by Assassination (1992)

Figure 2.4 Homage by Assassination

Figure 3.1 Omar Amiralay, A Flood in Baath Country (2004)

Figure 3.2 Meyar al-Roumi, Cinema muet (2002)

Figure 3.3 Akram Zaatari, In This House (2005)

Figure 3.4 Object of Khiam. (Photograph by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2000. Courtesy of the artists.)

Figure 3.5 Yousry Nasrallah, The Door to the Sun (2004)

Figure 4.1 Mohamed Soueid, Nightfall (2000)

Figure 4.2 Nightfall

Figure 4.3 Mohamed Soueid, Civil War (2002)

Figure 4.4 Civil War

Figure 4.5 Civil War

Figure 4.6 Mohamed Soueid, Tango of Yearning (1998)

Figure 5.1 Samir, Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs—The Iraqi Connection (2003)

Figure 5.2 Reem Ali, Zabad (Foam, 2008)

Figure 5.3 Namir Abdel Messeeh, Toi, Waguih (2005)

Figure 5.4 Damien Ounouri, Fidaï (2012)

Figure 5.5 Ali Essafi, Wanted! (2010)

Figure 5.6 Wanted!

Figure 5.7 Azza El-Hassan, Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (2004)

Figure 5.8 Mounir Fatmi, The History of History (2006)

Figure 5.9 Mohamed Soueid, My Heart Beats Only for Her (2008)

Figure 5.10 My Heart Beats Only for Her

Figure 5.11 My Heart Beats Only for Her

Figure 5.12 Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, Three Posters (2000)

Figure 5.13 Ali Kays, Nothing Matters (2005)

Figure 5.14 Marwa Arsanios, Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (2014)

Figure 5.15 Hassan Choubassi, I Am the All Knowing, the Deceased (2008)

Figure 5.16 Ahmad Ghossein, My Father Is Still a Communist: Intimate Secrets to Be Published (2011)

Figure 5.17 Gheith al-Amine, The Sheikh Imam Project (2014)

Figure 6.1 Jalal Toufic, Ashura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2002)

Figure 6.2 Ashura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins

Figure 6.3 Vatche Boulghourjian, Noble Sacrifice (2002)

Figure 6.4 Noble Sacrifice

Figure 6.5 Kinda Hassan, Come as I Rise (2009)

Figure 7.1 Ziad Antar, Tokyo Tonight (2003)

Figure 7.2 Akram Zaatari’s section of Baalbeck (2001)

Figure 7.3 Saad Salman, Baghdad On/Off (2002)

Figure 7.4 Isak Berbic, There, before (2014)

Figure 7.5 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Rounds (2001)

Figure 7.6 Hani Abu-Assad, Ford Transit (2002)

Figure 7.7 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Lost Film (2003)

Figure 7.8 Akram Zaatari, This Day (2003)

Figure 7.9 Adel Abidin, Vacuum (2005)

Figure 8.1 Nahed Awwad, 5 Minutes from Home (2008)

Figure 8.2 Shakir Abal, The Winds Are Fair, Same as Our Intentions (2012)

Figure 8.3 Mohamed Nabil, Interview with Three Artists (2008)

Figure 8.4 Yto Barrada, Hand-Me-Downs (2011)

Figure 8.5 Hisham Bizri, Asmahan (2005)

Figure 8.6 Rania Stephan, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2012)

Figure 8.7 The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni

Figure 8.8 Raed Yassin, The New Film (2009)

Figure 8.9 Ayreen Anastas, Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2005)

Figure 8.10 Khalil al-Mozian, Gaza 36mm (2012)

Figure 8.11 Adel Sabit, production still, Oil and Sand. (Courtesy of Mahmoud Sabit)

Figure 8.12 Rabih Mroué, slide from The Pixelated Revolution (2012). (Courtesy of the artist)

Figure 8.13 Installation view, Akram Zaatari, Dance to the End of Love (2011). (Courtesy of the artist)

Figure 8.14 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, A Letter Can Always Reach Its Destination (2012)

Figure 8.15 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)

Figure 8.16 The Lebanese Rocket Society

Figure 8.17 The Lebanese Rocket Society

Figure 9.1 Hala Elkoussy, We’re by the Sea Now (2006)

Figure 9.2 We’re by the Sea Now

Figure 9.3 Hala Elkoussy, Peripheral Stories (2005)

Figure 10.1 Hassan Khan, The Hidden Location (2004)

Figure 10.2 The Hidden Location

Figure 10.3 Hassan Khan, Blind Ambition (2012)

Figure 10.4 Blind Ambition

Figure 11.1 Mounir Fatmi, Technologia (2010)

Figure 11.2 Mounir Fatmi, Dieu me pardonne (2001–2004)

Figure 11.3 Mounir Fatmi, Who Is Joseph Anton? (2013)

Figure 11.4 Mounir Fatmi, Les égarés (2004)

Figure 12.1 Mohssin Harraki, Problème 5 (arabes généalogiques) (2010–2011)

Figure 12.2 Roy Samaha, A Secret of Secrets (2013)

Figure 12.3 Ahmed Mater, Artificial Light (2012)

Figure 12.4 Mounir Fatmi, Les temps modernes, une histoire de la machine (2010)

Figure 12.5 Jananne Al-Ani, film still from Shadow Sites II (2011), single-channel digital video. Courtesy the artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photography Adrian Warren.

Figures 12.6, 12.7 Ahmed Nagy, The Holy Zero (2010)

Figure 12.8 Gheith al-Amine, King Lost His Tooth (2012)

Figure 12.9 Hassan Khan, Conspiracy: Dialogue/Diatribe (2006–2010)

Figure 12.10 Hassan Khan, The Dead Dog Speaks (2010)

Figure 12.11 Gheith al-Amine, Once Upon a Sidewalk (2009)

Figure 12.12 Ammar Bouras, Un aller simple (2002/2003)

Figure 12.13 Ammar Bouras, Et + Si Aff (2004)

Figure 12.14 Roy Dib, Under a Rainbow (2011)

Figure 12.15 Under a Rainbow

Figure 12.16 Roy Samaha, Pink White Green Black: Noise/Silence Insinuated (2005)

Figure 12.17 Roy Samaha, Transparent Evil (2011)

Figure 12.18 Tariq Hashim, www.gilgamesh.21 (2007)

Figure 12.19 Mahmoud Khaled, Camaraderie (2009)

Figure 12.20 Detail, carpet with guli farangi motif, Senneh, Iran (undated). (Tehran Carpet Museum. Photo: Laura Marks)

Figure 12.21 Mounira Al Solh, A Double Burger and Two Metamorphoses (2011)

Figure 12.22 Nadia Elfani, Bedwin Hacker (2003)

Figure 12.23 Ahmed Elshaer, Home (2006)

Figure 12.24 Installation view, with Ahmed Basiony, in his ASCII Does Not Speak Arabic (2010). (Courtesy of Shady Elnoshokaty)

Figure 12.25 Ahmed Kamel, Monologue (2010)

Figure 13.1 Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance (1988)

Figure 13.2 Basma Alsharif, We Began by Measuring Distance (2009)

Figure 13.3 We Began by Measuring Distance

Figure 13.4 Abdel Salam Shehadeh, To My Father (2008)

Figure 13.5 To My Father

Figure 13.6 Khalil al-Mozian, Gaza 36mm (2012)

Figure 13.7 Saed Andoni, A Number Zero (2002)

Figure 13.8 CAMP, Al Jaar Qabla Al Dar (2009), footage on https://pad.ma.

Figure 14.1 Sherif El Azma, Television Pilot for an Egyptian Air Hostess Soap Opera (2003)

Figure 14.2 Television Pilot for an Egyptian Air Hostess Soap Opera

Figure 14.3 Sherif El Azma, Rice City (2010)

Figure 14.4 Rice City

Figure 15.1 Rami Abdul Jabbar, Hadeed (2004)

Figure 15.2 Nigol Bezjian, Muron (2003)

Figure 15.3 Dima el-Horr, The Blue Sea in Your Eyes (2006)

Figure 15.4 Hala Elkoussy, White Bra (2006)

Figure 15.5 Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, Tayeb, Khalas, Yalla (2010)

Figure 15.6 Tayeb, Khalas, Yalla

Figure 15.7 Akram Zaatari, Tomorrow Everything Will Be All Right (2010)

Figure 15.8 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Ramad (2003)

Figure 15.9 Coming Forth by Day

Figure 15.10 Hala Lotfy, Coming Forth by Day (2012)

Figure 15.11 Jocelyne Sa‘ab, Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes (2005)

Figure 15.12 Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes

Figure 15.13 Meyar al-Roumi, Round Trip (2012)

Figure 15.14 Round Trip

Figure 15.15 Narimane Mari, Loubia Hamra (2013)

Figure 15.16 Loubia Hamra

Figure 15.17 Hind Meddeb, Electro Chaabi

Figure 15.18 Electro Chaabi

Series Foreword

Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST)

Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and the affiliated French organization Association Leonardo have some very simple goals:

To advocate, document and make known the work of artists, researchers, and scholars developing the new ways that the contemporary arts interact with science and technology and society.

To create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engineers can meet, exchange ideas, and, where appropriate, collaborate.

To contribute, through the interaction of the arts and sciences, to the creation of the new culture that will be needed to transition to a sustainable planetary society.

When the journal Leonardo was started some forty-five years ago, these creative disciplines existed in segregated institutional and social networks, a situation dramatized at that time by the two cultures debates initiated by C. P. Snow. Today we live in a different time of cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration, and intellectual confrontation enabled by new hybrid organizations, new funding sponsors, and the shared tools of computers and the Internet. Above all, new generations of artist-researchers and researcher-artists are now at work individually and in collaborative teams bridging the art, science, and technology disciplines. For some of the hard problems in our society, we have no choice but to find new ways to couple the arts and sciences. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of new Leonardos, hybrid creative individuals or teams that will not only develop a meaningful art for our times but also drive new agendas in science and stimulate technological innovation that addresses today’s human needs.

For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organizations and networks, please visit our websites at http://www.leonardo.info and http://www.olats.org.

Roger F. Malina

Executive editor, Leonardo Publications

ISAST governing board of directors: Nina Czegledy, Greg Harper, Marc Hebert (Chair), Gordon Knox, Roger Malina, Tami Spector, Darlene Tong

Acknowledgments

A book so long in the making relies on the support of a lot of people. The friends and colleagues who have helped me in numerous ways over these years are far too many to list, but I must warmly thank Tarek El-Ariss, Samirah Alkassim, Vatche Boulghourjian, Shady Elnoshokaty, Hani Hajj, Mireille Kassar, Aïda Kaouk, Peter Limbrick, Dorit Naaman, Denise Oleksijczuk, Bernadette Phan, Walid Ra‘ad, Grahame Weinbren, Akram Zaatari, and Farid Zahi, each of whom has inspired, supported, and encouraged me in more ways that I can say. As well as these friends I thank Touda Bouanani, Mia Jankowicz, Vincent Melilli, Ania Szremski, and William Wells for going out of their way to put me in contact with artists and works. It wasn’t easy to get hold of the rare films and artworks that I explore in this book. I cannot thank here all the programmers who brought them to audiences of which I was fortunate to be part, but I must acknowledge Coco Fusco and Steve Gallagher, Nat Muller, Jack Persekian, Jayce Salloum, Rasha Salti, and Christine Tohme. The wonderful organizations that gave me access to the works in their collections include Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Beirut DC; the Beirut Art Center; the Cinémathèque de Tanger; Docudays, Beirut; the DOXA festival, Vancouver; DOX BOX, Damascus; and the distributors Arab Film Distribution, Video Data Bank, and V-Tape.

To think about these unusual movies, it helps to show them to others, and so I am most grateful to the numerous organizations that invited me to show programs of experimenting Arab cinema and learn from their audiences over these many years. Warm thanks as well to the students who have watched these works with me, some of whom are mentioned in the footnotes: their responses and insights inform, surprise, and delight me. I thank the many editors who worked with me over the years as I published earlier forays into this work; they are named in the relevant chapters. My kind and patient Arabic teachers over these many years also have my deepest gratitude. Thanks to my fabulous research assistants Elysia Bourne, Matthew MacLellan, Fay Nass, and Daisy Thompson.

At MIT Press I thank Doug Sery and the editorial staff who shepherded this book with such care, Susan Buckley and Marcy Ross; it was also a pleasure to work with copy editor Beverly Miller and designer Margarita Encomienda. Thank you, anonymous reviewers for the Press, for both your enthusiasm and criticism.

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and, at Simon Fraser University, the Dena Wosk University Professorship.

My three scientist parents, Anne Foerster, Bill Marks, and Jack Diamond, have always supported and inspired me; I can never thank them enough. Finally, Richard Mark Coccia has given me not only all the support and encouragement one could ever hope for from a spouse, but also a cinephilic sensitivity and love of the written word that have improved this book greatly.

Introduction

Hanan al-cinema means the sympathy, fondness, or affection of cinema and also our fondness for the cinema. This book’s subtitle, affections for the moving image, translates the title and hints at the way moving images and sounds affect our bodies, a theme that is important in much of this book. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image embraces some of the works that have affected me over the past twenty years or so, transmits to you, my readers, these works’ creative sympathies with the world and invites you to feel similar affections. I hope to show that works from the Arab world over this period, from the early 1990s to 2014, constitute one of the world’s most impressive bodies of experimenting cinema.

Palestine: The Aesthetics of Exile was the title of the first film program I ever organized, in Rochester, New York, in 1992, with the hope of bringing people interested in Palestine and people interested in experimental cinema together around a set of rare movies. Works like Mona Hatoum’s incantation of a refugee’s longing, Measures of Distance (1988), Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum’s bracingly accusatory montage of Orientalist movies, Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) (1990), and Michel Khleifi’s elegiac Canticle of the Stones (1990) challenged representation itself as much as they did the Israeli occupation; they seemed to offer a way of redefining political filmmaking energized by the first intifada of 1987 and upturned by the Lebanese civil war. They were experimenting.

One of the local organizations that got involved in the program was the National Association of Palestinian Americans (NAPA). When I gave preview tapes of some of the more experimental works to a committee at NAPA, the committee members didn’t like them. They pointed out that the very elements I thought made the films and videos politically rich—the disjunctive narrative styles, the intrusion of the filmmaker’s presence, the ambiguity between fiction and documentary, and the pastiche of found footage—diluted their political messages. They wanted positive images of Palestinians, films that tell the story about their situation without ambiguity. It was not that the Palestinians found the works confusing. Rather, they were concerned with how audiences in Rochester, non-Arab audiences, would respond to the films. Their objection was valid: academics and activists to whom I mentioned the show had expressed astonishment that Palestinian cinema even existed. In response to the committee’s criticism, I added a couple of good films that were aesthetically more conventional.

Despite its formidable title, Palestine: The Aesthetics of Exile turned out to be a successful event. The five weeks of screenings were a political event based on forming connections: the necessarily incomplete films and videos responded to each other, and people with academic, Arab, art, and activist affiliations exchanged opinions and (in this pre-Internet age) phone numbers. By the last screening, the devoted viewers who came to all or almost all the screenings in the series had witnessed—and by their participation created—a fruitfully complex picture of Palestinian cinema in exile.

Palestine: The Aesthetics of Exile was the germ of the unlikely Venn diagram, Arab + Experimental, that I would pursue for the next two decades. I learned from the response to this program, and have continued to learn over the decades since, that that Venn diagram has an enormous power at the same time that it is extremely fragile. The Arab contexts demand creative struggle and invention from artists, so these works don’t just adapt existing modes of experimental cinema; they introduce new kinds of experiments that change the shape of cinema as a whole. Yet these brave assays are often dismissed as too difficult, too strange, not what we need now.

Experimentation

If the term experimental cinema makes you think of a genre of formalist and structural works on 16mm film from the 1960s, please stretch your mind to accommodate a vaster notion. Experimental cinema, or, more broadly, experimental media art, includes films and videos that experiment formally with the medium, from film formats to low-end video formats to HD to mobile and online platforms. It includes experiments, drawn from critiques of cinema and TV, with sound, montage, structure, reflexivity, and other means. It experiments with the relationship between fiction and documentary, in questions about truth, presence, index, and performance. Indeed some of the richest experimentation works with performativity, treating cinema as an event, from the pro-filmic act to the act of reception. Experimentation also regards content: experimental narrative, essay films, experimental documentary, certain political work. Most experimental cinema is doing philosophy: dealing with epistemology, what we can know; ontology, what is real or true; and phenomenology, what our perceptions can tell us about the world, to name a few. A negative definition is whatever doesn’t fit into standards for commercially viable fiction and documentary. Yet the best narrative feature films contain experimental moments.

The works I examine in this book are experiments in two senses: they carry out experiments or try things out, and they are experiential, or based on experience. In both ways, experimentation cuts through convention and gets close to something newly emerging, to life itself. This double sense of experiment and experience is more familiar to the Arabic word tajriba, like the French expérience, than it is to the English experiment: one can speak in Arab of sînemâ tajribî with that double sense of experiment and experience (though it tends to connote experimental film of the 1960s and 1970s).1 Some of these experimenting strategies are shared by filmmakers and video artists all over the world, while others arise from economic, social, political, and historical circumstances particular to Arab countries.

In the early 1990s, some artists and filmmakers from the Arab world and its diaspora began to depart from narrative fiction and documentary cinema and work in explicitly experimental ways. The Palestinian films and videos mentioned above (among others at that time) were deconstructing political systems of naming and practicing new, stuttering kinds of speech; they were establishing new first principles from the givens of sense experience. A bit later, in the mid-1990s, some extremely intelligent works that we could call experimental documentary appeared in Lebanon. The Taif Agreement of 1989 had concluded the Lebanese civil war without a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, making official the divergence (in Deleuzian terms, incompossibility) of accounts of the war. The Lebanese, having barely survived a devastating sixteen-year civil conflict, needed the very finest of philosophical and creative tools in order to try to address what happened. These films and videos by Walid Ra‘ad, Eliane Raheb, Jocelyne Saab, Mohamed Soueid, Rania Stephan, Jalal Toufic, Akram Zaatari, and others, drawing on earlier inspirations like the work of Marwan Bagdadi and Borhane Alaouie, experimented not just formally but epistemologically. We can recognize the critical thought of Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Antonio Gramsci in these works. But most of all, they were distinguished by the artists’ invention of methods based on the problems at hand. These were experiments that mattered more than almost any I had seen.

Experiments were occurring across the Arab world, and more and more people began to have access to the means to make these experiments audiovisual. The fact that most of this work is noncommercial gives the makers a great deal of liberty, though it also limits their audience. In Egypt, the large commercial film industry ironically diminished opportunities to experiment with form and address, but this has changed, especially since artists began to work in video in the early 1990s. In Syria, filmmakers and videomakers began to produce some astonishingly radical works, with and without government sanction. North African artisanal film and video, often made by artists educated or working in France, has considerable freedom to experiment. Iraqi filmmakers, in that country and in exile, have made fiery experimental documentaries. Works from the Gulf countries, relatively new to film and media art production, indicate the ways these countries’ wealth and conservatism restrict cinematic experiments, but those same qualities may give rise to new forms. And of course filmmakers and artists living away from their home countries are in unique positions to experiment.

Arab Affection-Images, Time-Images, and Enfolded Images

In these experiments, we witness a kind of eruptive power. In the Arab world in the late twentieth century, political pressures, fraught histories, divergent narratives, and competing notions of where the truth is founded and can be found (in memory? in the archive? in the body?) created a crucible that practically demanded experimentation. We can characterize some of these works according to Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of images that create within a gap. The affection-image (a concept adapted from Henri Bergson) occupies the gap between perception and action; this is usually a brief moment for the organism because it is easy to deduce and effect a course of action based on what is perceived. But when action cannot be taken, the affection-image dilates; affection becomes passion, an agitated state of passive activity or active passivity. This moment of suspension can give rise to what Deleuze calls the time-image, images produced in creatively widened circuits of perception, memory, dream, and imagination. The affection-image suspends qualities that might become the basis for reactive acts and instead makes them vibrate with the potential for new kinds of acts, feelings, or perceptions. The time-image elevates the incapacity to act to a high creative principle that allows any image to connect with any other.2

The state of creative and painful suspension that these images describe characterizes a great deal of contemporary Arab intellectual culture. Many Arabs have detailed knowledge of both Arab and Western history and a keen awareness of the current circumstances of their society and its relations with others. They can parse the political significance of extremely local or seemingly slight events with stunning acuteness. Those who can afford higher education also often possess both a local and a Western or Western-style education.

Yet in recent decades, this capacity to perceive and to know has not been matched by a capacity to act. This has occurred for historical and geographical reasons. The political events of the twentieth century—colonization, the division of Arab lands, the imposition of Israel and dispossession of Palestinians, the U.S. invasions of Iraq on slim or fabricated justifications, and other neoimperialist acts—combine to create a feeling of powerlessness with regard to outsiders’ strategic interest in the Arabic-speaking lands. Appealing to justice makes little difference, given that international law has little effect: Israel continually flouts United Nations resolutions, and in 2003 the United States and United Kingdom illegally invaded Iraq on fabricated grounds that it held weapons of mass destruction.

Furthermore, Arabs know their governments are more or less corrupt and unresponsive, so that civic organization has seemed little more than symbolic. The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and, to most tragic result, Syria challenged Arab governments to respond. Surely the efforts of organized and, in Libya and Syria, armed citizens will leave a permanent mark on those nations, but in Syria, the citizen uprisings of the war’s first months were eclipsed by the powers of a tenacious tyrant and a Medusa-headed racket of armed fundamentalists. After the successes of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square, Egyptians howled in protest in summer 2012 at the calculatedly meager roster of presidential candidates offered them; witnessed the imprisonment of elected president Mohammed Morsi and the military-led massacre of his supporters from the Muslim Brotherhood in July and August 2013; and since the July 2014 election of president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi are dealing with a status quo even worse than the one the Tahrir protesters risked their lives to oppose.3 Egypt’s new military government permits military trials of civilians, imprisons journalists on the lightest of pretexts, and bans protests not sanctioned by security authorities, practically guaranteeing that the arts of protest will need to take covert forms.

The Lebanese writer Samir Kassir characterized this feeling of incapacity at the point it had reached after the Iraq War of 2003:

Powerlessness to be what you think you should be. Powerlessness to act to affirm your existence, even merely theoretically, in the face of the Other, who denies your right to exist, despises you and has once again reasserted his domination over you. Powerlessness to suppress the feeling that you are no more than a lowly pawn on the global chessboard even as the game is being played in your backyard. This feeling, it has to be said, has been hard to dispel since the first Iraq war, when Arab land once again came under foreign occupation and the era of independence was relegated to a parenthesis.4

Kassir wrote this in 2004. He was assassinated in 2005, possibly by Syrian agents.5 His words have continued to ring true in the aftermath of the attempted revolutions that began in 2011, especially in Egypt and Syria, where the people’s uprisings could not match the power of their states given the political and financial intervention by the United States, the Gulf countries, Iran, Russia, and other countries.

A diagnosis similar to Kassir’s could be made of other places in the world where people struggle against colonialism, neoimperialism, and internal corruption, but it has probably been true of the Arab world for longer than anywhere else. What feeling of resentment could be more justified—where, as Nietzsche said, resentment is the action of those who are not free? Experiments are free acts, not reactive acts: they gain the power to affect others to the degree that they harness active forces.6 Resentment, by contrast, prickles from actual and invented slights, intensifying itself in a feedback loop. It feeds conspiracy theories and turns the closest allies against each other. In the 1960s the Egyptian sociologist Anouar Abdel Malek posited the Nietzschean argument that Arabs were animated by a resentment that autonomy and political self-determination would heal.7 But since that time, the conditions that inculcate resentment have worsened.

Kassir does not date this affect of powerlessness to the crushing defeat of the Six-Day War of 1967. Why not? The war put an end to the creative rejuvenation of the long twentieth-century cultural renaissance, or nahda, as well as to pan-Arab nationalism. Arab intellectual and cultural production since 1967, despite its profound sadness, has bristled with the resurgence of critical thought, dry-eyed and devoid of the comforts of ideology. In 1968, before there was an independent Arab film movement, the great Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous set a powerful example of critical creative practice in light of Arab leaders’ ideological bankruptcy. His play Soirée for the Fifth of June (1968), drawing deep not only on Brechtian critique and Beckettian absurdity but also on the nested narrative structure familiar from Arabic literature, stages a failed attempt to depict and explain the events of the disastrous Six-Day War. The Playwright refuses to deliver a script. The Director invents victories to attribute to the regime, which the Actors reject. Spectator characters ask, Why have we cut off our tongues? Even the attempt to replace the play with a folkloric dance collapses under the audience’s criticism—in a dynamic similar to the censorious responses of both Arab and Western audiences that I discuss below.8 Wannous demonstrates the cruel choreography of state repression, humiliation, and despair that push many people into the arms of fundamentalist religion and other opiates, when rigorous historical critique is both the most difficult and the most necessary path that Arabs need to take, in a play that was immediately banned.

Given that Arab societies have continued to face the same problems in the subsequent decades, including and since the 2011 uprisings, Wannous’s work is a precedent for the most visionary and caustic works I discuss in this book. He was a longtime friend of Omar Amiralay, one of the founding voices of radical Arab cinema.9 At one point, two of the Spectator characters look into a mirror and see no reflection; one says, Because we are erased images, images that were erased by the national interest before they had fully formed.10 Creativity springs from the ardent desire, as well as the responsibility, to create one’s own image despite the massive odds.

Wannous’s caustic absurdism is one of the strongest examples of the many great literary, artistic, and intellectual creations that were impelled by the terrible defeat of 1967.11 However, Kassir, writing in 2004, dates the feeling of powerlessness he is describing to the first Gulf War of 1990–1991. He is describing a new affect, a deep disillusionment and disgust that are not even powered by solidarity in defeat. It is not as cleanly tragic, if I may put it that way, as the post-1967 feeling of defeat across the Arab world. Tarek El-Ariss identifies this new affect in a literary approach that has supplanted the culture of the post-1967 generation of defeat. This new approach, which he identifies in Ahmed Alaidy’s novel An Takun ‘Abbas Al-‘Abd (Being ‘Abbas Al-‘Abd, 2003), "is no longer concerned with being suspended between present and future, but rather engages the present as something that just is, a flickering, regenerating moment that appears, disappears and reappears."12 El-Ariss argues that

unlike the reader of the literature of Defeat who is conjured up as a participant in a historical struggle, seeking to mend the break between the Arab past and future after 1967, Alaidy's reader is interpellated as the subject of an immediate experience inscribed in the body and expressed in the affects of frustration, anger, and sabotage.13

I extrapolate El-Ariss’s argument to suggest that it is even more difficult now than it was after 1967 to believe in a meaningful course of historical self-determination, especially one that is worldly rather than religious. The most rational response would be to inhabit the present without expectation—and anybody who has tried to meditate knows how difficult that is.

Those self-destructive affects El-Ariss describes also press out of the screen toward the viewer in some of the works I discuss in this book. Joyful affects arise too, and sometimes it takes a while to know which is which. They suggest that to get out of a bad situation, you have to plunge into its depths. Apparent dilettantism or frivolity, seeming not to care, can be an effective way for creativity to sneak up. With a slight shift of energy, apathy converts into play, possessing a speculative lightness that might survive where more earnest attempts get bogged down under the weight of good intentions and ideology. I try to cultivate embodied responses in myself and the reader, so that we may accompany the films on their creative passage through the body: this approach and its findings are the subject of chapter 15.

As Kassir reminds us, The contemporary Arab malaise is just a historical moment, not a destiny.14 In order to avoid fatalism and keep thinking historically, you need to try to include your body in the chain of causes and effects, as Spinoza urged. Creative experiments, then, arise from feelings of powerlessness that are in many ways accurate diagnoses of the historical situation. The incapacity to act intensifies the conditions of creativity. It presses Arab artists to perceive even more keenly, inform themselves even more precisely, plunge into public archives and private memory, dream, fantasize, and invent. Moreover, when the feeling of incapacity moves through the body—when either the film or the viewer really owns that feeling of powerlessness—reaction and resentment disperse and give way to free acts.

These decades of struggle have given rise to Arab affection-images and Arab time-images that are some of the most potent artistic achievements of our time. These emergent images are gifts to the entire world, for Arab artists are in a position to see what the rest of the world cannot see. Creative communities and alliances all across the Arab world support and nurture these acts, as chapter 1 details.

Another way to conceive of Arab creativity in the face of the historical events of the past century is in terms of Jalal Toufic’s influential concept of the withdrawal of tradition after a surpassing disaster.15 As Theodor Adorno stated that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, so Toufic argues that the series of tragedies in the Arab world amount to a surpassing calamity, encompassing both material destruction and immaterial withdrawal, after which simple representation is impossible. This concept is grounded in Shi‘ite mysticism: after the murder of Imam ‘Ali’s son Hussein at Karbala in 680, the true meaning of the Quran was occulted because there would no longer be a spiritual leader on earth until the coming of the Mahdi, or quasi-Messiah. In contemporary times, Toufic argues, it means that art’s task is to reveal the withdrawal of what we think is still there. The withdrawal of tradition after a surpassing disaster prescribes an art that is radically aniconic or even iconoclastic, a black hole where images used to be.

Slightly different from Toufic’s argument, in a secular version of some strands of Shi‘ite thought, as well as that of Deleuze, Leibniz, and others, I consider that lost, dead, forgotten, and otherwise inaccessible beings and events are enfolded. The past persists, enfolded, in virtual form, and some of its facets may unfold to some degree in the present. Acknowledging artists’ ability to invent and create from almost nothing, I prefer to endow the concept of withdrawal with fluidity— to acknowledge different manners of unfolding, of which aniconism, or complete enfoldment, is only one.

Toufic writes that the attempt to record things whose referent is withdrawn is a vicious circle: What has to be recorded has been withdrawn, so that, unless it is resurrected, it is going to be overlooked; but in order to accomplish that prerequisite work of resurrection to avoid its overlooking, one has initially to have, however minimally, perceived it; that is countered its withdrawal, i.e. resurrected it.16 This paradoxical condition suggests that art needs to receive some kind of flash, some little seed, of what has been withdrawn in order to show that it is withdrawn. I suggest that it is possible, with patience and devotion, to unfold some aspect, some seed, of what has been forgotten or repudiated or is too unbearable to behold. From these seeds it may be possible, not to revive the past, but to quicken new kinds of growth.

There are many manners of unfolding: some of them are sternly aniconic or iconoclastic; some of them unfold histories in partial, elastic ways; some of them involve lightness, tenderness, humor, and play. Another form of enfoldment is taqiyya, dissimulation, long practiced by Muslims who had to hide their minority faith: a way of saying one thing while meaning another. Taqiyya invites us to perceive work that seems to be simple or banal as radically enfolded.17

Experimentation is in a sense prepolitical. Often it does not make political statements, for to do so crams the experiment into a mold whose outcome is known. Rather, in its freedom it creates a foundation and source of strength for political acts. In 2008 Khaled D. Ramadan and Silke Schmicki characterized the current generation of Arab video artists and independent documentary filmmakers as a resisting generation. It is not necessarily a political resistance and is far from an organized common movement. It is rather a colourful mosaic of individual statements, a diversification of points of view, a playful association of ideas; resistance in the sense of Deleuze’s: ‘Creating is not communication, but resisting. … Art is what resists: it resists against death, servitude, infamy, shame.’18

So far I have been suggesting that creative experiments arise from sociopolitical malaise. Does this mean that Arab people have to keep suffering so Arab artists can keep making great art? No, it doesn’t. I do think that the creative and intellectual ferment in the Arab world now, including the work examined in this book, constitutes a new nahda, or cultural revival, in the Arab world. I hope it continues to strengthen and consolidate, to build more ambitious and independent laboratories for its experiments. Some of this ferment has already settled and stratified, producing new genres and marketing categories. Maybe someday Arab life will be so stable on so many fronts that artists will struggle for subject matter, as Western artists often do now.

Arab

This book focuses on films and videos from the Arabic-speaking world, a flexible definition that does not essentialize ethnicity or religion. The term Arab world is simpler, but some think this excludes North Africa.19 So the corrective Arabophone seemed called for. Then there’s Middle East, or the shorthand Mideast, terms that anchor the world map to Europe and all that lies east and west of it. Middle East, rarely employed inside the countries that it designates, is used as a mealy-mouthed metonym for the majority Muslim, oil-producing region from which Israel pokes like a sore thumb. It tends to be shorthand for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, jihad, and oil. Middle East also designates majority-Muslim countries whose language is not Arabic, especially Iran and Turkey. It jumbles together Muslim countries with quite different cultures into a modern Orient.

There’s the term Middle East and North Africa, with its bland acronym MENA. The map it brings to mind is a Muslim map, as it indicates the early spread of Islam, though it excludes sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Islamic Central Asia, and Indonesia. Lazily, Arab often stands in for Muslim for Westerners, erasing Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews. Most people in the Arabic-speaking world are Muslim, in practice or in heritage. Muslim culture, with its foundation in the Arabic Quran, provides a cohesion among Arabic and non-Arabic speakers. It also informs the identity of Christians and Jews in the region. This book maintains a gap between Arab and Muslim, as many of the Arabic-speaking filmmakers whose work I write about here are not Muslim, and though Islam provides the cultural background for many of the works I discuss, it comes to the fore in only a few of them.

To focus on the Arabic-speaking world, as this book does, designates the large region where people speak and read Arabic, in its many dialects, and its diaspora. Dialects are so different that Arabic speakers from Morocco and Iraq may not understand each other, but they can listen to the same Modern Standard Arabic on the television news, in political speeches, and in poetry. The Arabic language designates an imagined community, in Benedict Anderson’s term, indicating shared history, knowledge, and culture. The Arabic-speaking world also includes Israel. A friend reminds me, Israel is an Arabic-speaking country; in fact it's the only country in the world where Arabic is the second official language.20

This book ascribes national origins to filmmakers, but most of the Arabic-speaking nations are colonial constructions. In our time, Arab designates the political history of a region that has been violently transformed by Western imperial intervention, culminating (but by no means ending) in the imposition of the state of Israel. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, though weakening, still loosely united a large region that included most of the Arabic-speaking world: the Levant (now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq), the eastern border of the Red Sea (now Saudi Arabia and Yemen), and North Africa with the exception of the sultanate of Morocco. The Ottoman Empire maintained a loose and expansive unity among people of different languages and faiths. European nations invaded the region in search of agricultural land, minerals, and cheap labor. France colonized Algeria in 1830 and protected Tunisia in 1881 and Morocco in 1912; Britain occupied or made agreements with Bahrain in 1881, Egypt in 1882, Oman and Aden in 1891, Sudan and Kuwait in 1899, Qatar in 1916; Italy colonized Libya in 1911.

After World War I, Britain and France, in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, carved the former Ottoman lands into the arbitrarily designated new states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq. In 1917 Britain broke its promise to the colony of Palestine with Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration. British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour declared support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, saying, In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.21 The European powers involved in the post–World War I cut-and-paste avoided the seemingly obvious option of designating a single Arab state, likely because such a state would have been too powerful and would have rendered the establishment of Israel difficult or impossible.22

Despite the fact that the modern Arab world has always been subject to outside powers, first the Ottoman Empire, then the West, the period from the late nineteenth century to World War II witnessed a flowering of political openness and cultural creativity: the first nahda. The Tanzimat reforms coming from the Ottoman capital, Mohammed ‘Ali in Egypt and Khayr al-Din in Tunisia, proposed and carried out reforms to modernize and democratize the state. In Arab metropoli, electricity flowed, streetcars clanged, movie houses drew crowds. Arab intellectuals, many educated in Europe, founded movements to democratize government, advocate for political accountability and the rule of law, adapt a Marxist analysis to the Arab situation, enfranchise poor people, educate women, and either secularize the state or define modern reforms in Islamic terms.23 New art forms flourished, quickly adapting and indigenizing Western literary forms, theater, visual arts, and of course cinema: artists in all of these forms expressed the new modernist and populist ideals. Like the European Enlightenment, the nahda was largely a bourgeois phenomenon, but its expressions, especially in theater and cinema, also touched and changed the lives of poor people.

This first nahda survived the abolition of the Ottoman Empire and colonizers’ cut-ups of Arab lands. But the recently created and not yet independent Arab nations neighboring Palestine were overwhelmed by the Zionist military coalition, the Haganah, in the war of 1948–1949 that established the state of Israel and killed and displaced the Palestinians, rendering them stateless. This event is referred to as the nakba, or disaster. As Kassir points out, the nakba was a catastrophe not only because of what happened to Palestine but because it signified to the Arabs—at least those in the Levant—that foreign rule, which seemed to be on its way out after World War II, was there to stay and that they were as helpless to confront it as they were at the end of the First World War.24

The independence movements of the 1940s, especially in North Africa, and subsequent nationalist movements defined Arab nations from within. The colonies gained independence after World War II in a staggered series of dates: Libya first, in 1949, while Britain did not relinquish the Gulf region until 1971 when the United Arab Emirates was formed. Of