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The notes below were issued by Channel Four
television to accompany a season of Arab films shown
on British TV in the late 1980s. See also:
In search of an audience
BY
THE TIME most countries were producing their first
films, the West was already promoting its film stars, who are
known throughout the world, while those of even the Egyptian
cinema are only known in the Arab world by Arab audiences. In
Morocco in 1959, of 2,267 films in circulation, 1,061 were
American, 492 French, 347 Egyptian, 108 Indian, the rest from
other European countries. In the same year in Libya, there were
394 films from America, 126 from Italy and 147 from Egypt.
Today
American soaps are seen on Arab television screens, alongside
those from Egypt which will probably never be bought for ours. The
films we have discussed here will probably only be seen in arthouse
cinemas, and even so in Britain today there are less than a
handful of them in distribution. The 1986 screening on Channel 4
of Heiny Srour’s Leila And The Wolves was a notably
unprecedented broadcast of an Arab film.
Even worse, many of the films will
not be seen by audiences in other Arab countries than their own
and possibly not even in those. "In the Arab countries ...
authority is carried by an accumulation of parameters,
identifiable by their use, whose function is to induce
self-censorship ... I have never seen a single kiss in Algerian
films! Yet there is no law preventing it ..." (Abdou B). This
self-censorship is "internalised by the absence of a set of
written guidelines", he continues. Religion is a major source
of censorship (self or otherwise imposed), because although
representation of the Prophet Mohamed in human form is forbidden
in order to prevent idolatry, there is nothing written that
prevents the cinema dealing with religious themes. Yet the absence
of real debate, writes Abdou B, allows Islam to act "as a
check on artistic expression (which strictly speaking is not its
concern)".
There are many stories of
censorship. Chahine was stripped of the (national) prizes Saladin
had won and threatened with prison because of a script
dispute. In Camera Arabe, Souhel Ben Barka describes his
application to some five Ministers of Information to have The
Petrol War Won’t Happen shown in Morocco and his
determination to go on asking. Other films may only be seen at
home, in film clubs, or small cultural festival contexts, rather
than on a commercially viable circuit. Often the filmmakers are,
as a result of this or other political pressures in exile.
Heiny Srour, whose film is about
Palestinian and Lebanese women - today and in the past - lives in
England and the film, although she is Lebanese, was shot partly in
Syria. Najia Ben Mabrouk, whose feature La Trace, is still
the subject of a production dispute and not yet released, lives in
Belgium. Both filmmakers have experienced the ‘censorship’
women usually find: "Men are very priviliged in our
societies, so they profit from their privilege -naturally. I must
say that even if they (male directors) are well-meaning sometimes
they idealise women. Woman is not a dream, she is a reality ...
That’s what I want to talk about." (Najia Ben Mabrouk in Camera
Arabe)
Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay
lives in Paris: "We are seeing the death of Arab cinemas and
the birth of new Arab films…" Also in Paris are (at least)
four Lebanese filmmakers, three or four Algerians, two or three
Moroccans, ditto Tunisians. Michel Khleifi, Palestinian filmmaker
of two excellent films shot (no doubt with difficulty) on location
in the occupied territories (The Fertile Memory, 1980,
about two women in the West Bank, and Wedding
in Galilee,
1987, his first fiction) also lives in Brussels, as does the
Tunisian, Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud. He made Crossing Over (1982)
on video because he could not raise the money for a film version,
even trying in Britain. The story is of an East European dissident
and an Arab visiting a friend in England, who find themselves
refused entry at Dover. It being Christmas they are sent back to
Belgium on the ferry but rejected there too: a series of
humiliating journeys back and forth follow and a nightmare
incident in between.
A film which deals with the kind
of issues raised by Tahar Ben Jalloun above also has to tackle, in
the European context, the kind of issues raised by Edward Said. In
France, where there are more resident Arabs than in England, and
where racism towards them is as present as it is towards Black and
Asian people here, young first generation Arabs in France (les
beurs) have begun their own film movement - cinema beur -
often producing collectively and, of necessity, on the cheap
format Super 8 film: "the way to get out of the city, not
physically, but to make sure, since such a film is easily
circulated, that their voice is heard even if they cannot be
present" (Farida Belghoul).
See also:
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