Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ son who has joined ISIS.

      BEIRUT THE ENCOUNTER (1981)

      Shot on location during the Lebanese Civil War, Borhane Alaouié’s film depicts a chance meeting between two young friends separated by the war. Their encounter is emblematic of the displacement and uncertainty faced when navigating intersectarian relationships and the obstacles of everyday political violence. Zeina and Haidar agree to meet at the airport to exchange audio letters before Zeina leaves Lebanon for America, where she plans to pursue her studies. Rather than overt violence, the backdrop of war shows a society paralyzed by the material signs of disjuncture (sporadic electricity, water, and phone connections, as well as roadblocks and traffic jams); time is hostage—no one knows how long it will take to cross the city or for the war to end. At film’s end, Zeina is stuck in traffic on the way to the airport, and Haidar gives up and leaves. A powerful symbol of departure and disconnection, the airport serves as a site of impossible good-byes. See also UNDER THE BOMBS (2007).

      BELKADHI, NÉJIB (1972–)

      Belkadhi is a Tunisian actor, filmmaker, and producer whose reputation has been built on a satirical television program, Chams Alik, which he produced and hosted on Canal Horizons in 2000. The characters in Belkadhi’s films have dreams that take them beyond the tough reality of their lives. VHS-Kahloucha (2006) is an upbeat documentary about the shooting of a film by a former mason turned filmmaker and actor, Kahloucha. This extraordinary character had featured as the protagonist in numerous low-budget genre films that he made and financed himself. These films have circulated widely on VHS in both Tunisia and the diaspora. Adopting a caustic and at times hilarious approach, Belkadhi presents Kahloucha while maintaining a keen awareness of the desperation of communities left behind in the modern race for economic prosperity.

      It took years for Belkhadi to make his first narrative feature. Based on a screenplay he wrote in 2007, Bastardo (2013) is an allegory about corruption and the submission of the majority to the will of the most powerful. In an enclosed district where the struggle for power justifies any kind of violence, the film’s protagonist, Mohsen, has come to be called “bastard” because he was found in a trash can as a baby. His lowly status changes overnight when he sets up a mobile phone antenna, which leads to conflict with local mobsters. Look at Me (2018), a later narrative feature that garnered large box-office returns in Tunisia, focuses on a deadbeat dad, Lotfi (Nidhal Saadi), who moves to Marseilles after having abandoned his wife and autistic son, Amr. Compelled to return to Tunisia when his wife has a stroke, Lotfi tries to bond with Amr, who is not receptive. Lotfi is in turn confronted with the lies that he told his family in Tunisia and his girlfriend in France in order to build his new life in diaspora. This sensitive evocation of the nature of family relationships under postcolonial conditions contributes along with Dear Son (Mohamed Ben Attia, 2018) and Fatwa (Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, 2018) to a series of contemporary portrayals in Tunisian cinema of more nuanced father figures, which foreground struggles with paternity.

      BELLABÈS, HAKIM (1961–)

      Born into the large family of a cinema owner in the small town of Bejjaad in Morocco, Bellabès studied African literature in Morocco and France before earning a master’s degree in film from Columbia College in Chicago. Belabbès is a prolific filmmaker who controls all the aspects of the production process; he has scripted and edited almost every film he has directed and has also at times been the director of photography and producer. Treading the thin line between documentary and fiction, Belabbès’s films are poetic evocations of separation, migration, and homecoming, often explored through autobiographical accounts, as in Boujad: A Nest in the Heat (1992), in which he presents a world of changing values, shedding light on the vulnerability and resilience of ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by inequity or their own inability to sustain relationships. His narrative feature Threads (2003) follows a Moroccan exile, Mehdi, who wants to return home to die in Bejjaad, where he was born. Mehdi is accompanied by his daughter, Hayat, with whom he meets a range of people also struggling to get by. In Pieces (2010) is a documentary that weaves together home movies of Belabbès’s extended family reunions in Morocco over the years. The film bears witness to the rarity of Belabbès’s presence at these events and constitutes a reflection on his relationship with his father. Weight of the Shadow (2015) picks up one of the threads left hanging in In Pieces, a story the filmmaker claims he should have told long ago, that of the quest for truth undertaken by a family whose son was kidnapped decades earlier for having organized a protest in a boarding school. Sweat Rain (2017) is a simple yet intimate tale about a rural family seeking to maintain its unity and bearings through the father Mbarek’s (Amine Ennaji) desperate attempt to save his land for his son, Ayoub, who has Down syndrome, when he can no longer afford the repayment of a loan. Piecing together close-ups of mineral and organic elements, Bellabès conveys the deep emotions and commitment of nearly silent characters whose material and spiritual lives revolve around tilling the soil. The land is, however, unresponsive to the efforts of the protagonists, who continue to struggle against their socioeconomic conditions, which relentlessly pull them down.

      BELLY DANCING

      Known in Arabic as raqs sharqi and in Turkish as çiftetelli or Oryantal tansi (“dance of the East”), belly dancing is a dance form indigenous to the Middle East. It was originally a communal folk dance (raqs biladi) held at social occasions not involving performance before an audience. These included meetings between women, often under gender-segregated conditions, and, reputedly, birth rituals, as a means of strengthening abdominal muscles.

      With the onset of European colonialism and the growth of an entertainment industry, belly dancing was co-opted by the West in orientalist fashion, as an exotic, sexually alluring performance by women (and sometimes men) for men. Its appropriation into cinema was facilitated by Sol Bloom, an American promoter of Egyptian culture (where belly dancing is rooted most strongly) at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Bloom coined the English term “belly dancing,” and by the 1920s, the form had achieved scandalous renown across the United States as “hoochy-koochy.” A vaudevillian precursor to burlesque, belly dancing was also incorporated into the avant-garde cinematic dance experiments of Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, belly dancing had become a tourist attraction at Cairene and Lebanese nightclubs, promoted largely by the mode’s modern progenitor, Lebanese Syrian Badia Musabni, who would help launch the careers of dancers Tahiyya Carioca, Samia Gamal, Naima Akef, and others who became Egyptian movie stars in musicals featuring a variety of belly dancing numbers, although Farida Fahmy would offer a less sexualized, more folkloric image of the art during the Gamal Abdel Nasser years, perhaps echoing the star persona of singer Umm Kulthum. Two of the most renowned contemporary belly dancers in the region are Fifi Abdo and Dina, both Egyptian.

      Since the events of 11 September 2001, belly dancing has undergone a popular revival among American women seeking intercultural understanding in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During this period, the revisionist belly dancing film Satin Rouge (Raja Amari, 2002) represented Tunisian women reappropriating the form for the sake of female solidarity and bonding, thus standing potentially to challenge the neo-orientalism of Western interests. A similar revision is offered in Viva Algeria (Nadir Moknèche, 2004). In The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007), belly dancing becomes a mode of resistance to the economic marginalization and disenfranchisement of the beur community in postcolonial France.

      Belly dancing has also been used as what Edward Said would call a self-orientalizing practice, within countless Middle Eastern СКАЧАТЬ