Contemporary Arab Films

Contemporary Arab Films:

Narrative, Social Commentary and Artistic Integrity

—Good-bye, sir.

—Where to?

—Madness.

—Which madness?

—Any madness, for I have turned into words.

—Mahmud Darwish

As a religion Islam embodies vast numbers of people and cultures across vast lands. The common thread among these disparate groups is the religion of Islam, a submission unto Allah, unto God. The central unity of such a religion, as with other religions that have a global presence, is the language of the central doctrines and dogmatic teachings of the religion. Thus, to submit, or to surrender, is to give one’s self up to the language by which one is to live one’s life. Similarities can be seen within the orthopraxy of Judaism’s 613 laws and the commandments of the Christian bible. According to Adonis language doesn’t exist to understand meaning outside of itself, but more accurately meaning is contained within the language and the rules that define it[1]. Arabic’s linguistic rules are not only a codified grammar that organizes thought into communicable modules, but legitimates artistic forms and mediums that can not exist, or attain legitimacy, outside of a religious context that also contained the political, inextricably linked to the religious. The plight of the Arab poet is a crisis of modernity struggling with the ancient past; one can not exist outside of the other. Although Adonis sees that this crisis, for poetry, has its locus in an attempted split of the new from the old, or of truth (al-batin)[2], from the language that justifies the truths, he admonishes us from peering at this problem from outside the very lexicon that prevents transcendence outside of itself. The crisis for poetry, on the level of language exists in regard to image and narrative for the Arab filmmaker. It is impossible to make a film of the Arab world without in some way borrowing from the rich mythology of its language and religion regardless of which language it is, it will always convey the Qur’an if it’s to be successful and bring a native viewer into the reality of its narrative. To scrutinize such a film one must in essence step inside the movie and not assume a truly “western” objectivity; this, according to Adonis, would be a mistake in the form of modern criticism, or modernity’s lens:

“If we are to treat the problem of modernity, we must first re-examine the structures of Arab thought. To question modernity, Arab thought must question itself. Arab modernity can be studied only within the perspective of Arab thought, on the level of principles and actual historical developments, within the framework of its specific assumptions, using its epistemological tools and in the context of the issues which gave rise to the phenomenon and have resulted from it. To study it from a western perspective would be to distort it and distance oneself from the real issues.”

(Adonis pg. 93)

The means by which criticism happens in film varies from filmmaker to filmmaker but this year’s crop of films in the Arab Film Festival[3] take different approaches to discuss culture and identity through the medium of film. Heaven’s Door, an Algerian film by Imad and Swel Noury, three interconnecting stories weave a haphazard chronology that moves forward and back through time so that the audience is entreated to partake in the “organization” or, a second retelling in reordering the narratives.

The first vignette concerns a young man by the name of Ney who digs ditches for a living. He supports his blind mother and adolescent sister. As the sole bread winner and head of the small but tight house hold the responsibility for the survival of the family is squarely on his shoulders. Fast money seduces him when his friends introduce him to Mr. Monsour, who says "Let's be honest, we are breaking the law, but we will make lots of money." The dynamics of the family, albeit in a foreign tongue, aren't that far removed from western archetypes of poverty and the struggle for survival in an urban landscape.

Ney’s world is the byproduct of globalization where American Rap music reigns supreme, the soundtrack of the film never really touches native tone, but instead keeps its frenetic pace with angry hip hop, youths break dancing, chase scenes through shadowy corners, over exposed cinematography where shapes become ethereal and rooftop vistas of Ney jumping rope to stay in shape. Money flows, for a while, but like all crime sagas, the street catches up. Ney is wounded in an altercation and sent to the hospital. He recovers and seeks revenge. The premonition that Ney’s life will end badly comes to pass during a shoot out in an apartment that leaves 3 people dead.

Flash forward, there's one survivor in the bathroom of the apartment, you don't know this until the second vignette that centers on the survivor, Salim, and his mother who is in a coma after being shot. Salim and his mother are taken in by an American ex-pat art professor whose dead husband was the brother of Salim’s now dead father. Lisa, Salim’s aunt by marriage, is a bitter woman who nurses her despair with Jack Daniels and a kind of labyrinthian solitude as she lives in a foreign land and society where her position as a woman precludes her from integration, and moreover, her national identity as an American ex-pat is yet another absolute road block.

The story takes a bit of a contrived turn here, Lisa, in her anger and solitude, unable to have children, is cold and distant. She sets harsh rules for the gentle Salim and expects a distraught child who walked out of the bathroom to find a scene reminiscent of the shootout at the OK Coral on his living room floor. With time Lisa melts and falls in love with Salim, "Je t'aime" she says to Salim as she tells him he's the son she never had.

The shadowy Mr. Monsour makes an appearance offering to take care or help out with the family by contacting the social worker, Jalil, who has a crush on Lisa. This is incredibly strange when you consider that Monsour gave Ney the address of Salim's father to exact his revenge and provided the firearms with which to carry out his plan. Eventually another relative surfaces and Lisa must give up Salim and his mother's still silent body in a painful agony that returns her to solitude. She says that there was a time before Salim and then there's the time after Salim. What will become of her is uncertain, but she chooses to go home for a bit to deal with her "phantoms" and dysfunctional family back in San Francisco. The collision of east and west is sharply contrasted by the way that families deal with each other. Lisa’s forced to give up Salim and his mother because by law she has less right as the wife of Salim’s deceased uncle, but more to the point as a woman. The struggle exemplifies the plight of a woman in terms of her lack of rights when those rights come into conflict with the demands of a man. The law is always on the side of a man.

Between the Vignettes a narrator reads poetry, obscure and haunting verses, illuminating, foreboding, somewhat beautifully lyrical and foreshadowing of events to come. Poetry becomes a living voice, not a cold academic rhetoric or a childish limerick, but an important part of contemporary society. The present drama and narrative is in essence couched in an older voice, something almost mythological in its reliance on an older traditional form. The living voice of poetry is in an integral part of the society as it legitimizes the film by its reliance on the past. This “eastern” paradigm recites poetry, as with the Ghazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the Pakistani poet, recitation is a normal part of every day speech, it’s a way of communication that realizes the present through the ancient, and in some way brings both speaker and listener closer to al-batin, the truth. Poetry’s presence, to the ear of the listener, is a kind of open ended question, however within the context of the film, however in terms of what Adonis posits as its absolute necessity to garner legitimacy, questioning is almost nonexistent, in practice politics is a sort of submission as must be questioning[4].

On a trip to the beach, Lisa meets a homeless woman, an old beggar asking for alms. She sits like a sage fresh from the desert and issues Lisa oracular wisdom about solitude; loosely put: some run from solitude because they aren't comfortable with it, some run to solitude because they can't live without it. Lisa's nature is of the first variety, the old woman on the other hand is the latter. As she lives, Lisa offers her money, and she refuses, saying next time, as if to mean “this time you’re the one in need”.

Through the first two stories an old man is seen in prison, in brief clips, an arresting image of solitude. The man’s identity is finally established, Smail, an old con, a sage in his own right who tells a younger cell mate "we are not friends, we are both here in this situation and have to rely on each other, when we get out we might be friends." The story of Smail starts with him at the slain man's apartment, recently release from prison, trying to procure a gun. He leaves and passes a young man in the hallway on the way to the elevator, Ney, the connections are now complete. Smail's story, and at this point, the whole montage, seems very much like narrative lines of Alejandro González Iñárritu Amores Perros, an older man has debts to settle in a self-righteous manner which comes off as compelling that weaves into the story of two younger individuals that exist at the pace of the world, rather than setting their own.

Smail takes up residence is in a small bungalow by the beach, he funds his life with a modest treasure that he stashed before going to prison for 15 years because he was ratted out by one of his partners. The details of his movements read more like those of Redford in Spy Game than Freeman in Shawshank Redemption. He acquires a fake passport, hooks up with his only dear friend left, Omar; he bids goodbye to his mother, who he said, in his prison monologues, is the only one who will wait for me. His contention is that wives and children will abandon you, but the love of the mother will keep you safe. This very much parallel's Ney's mother who says "mothers hold the keys to Heaven's Doors" and that "children must obey and respect their mothers for they have the power to curse their children" in the sense of 'I brought you into this world I can take you out.'

The familial hierarchy is confusing, for within both of these examples, it is the mother who acts like a kind of glue, but outside of the family unit, the mother is powerless, so her power is a kind of mythological power invested in by her children, and actuated by a web of curses and paradises that define ‘mother’. However, even in a distant land, the Sudan, the same mythological voice that represents “family” exists in Tayeb Salih’s The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid. The father of the story in essence is pleading for a kind of ancestral or tribal memory that sustains not only the family unit but the extended family. The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid, in a Jungian[5] sense, isn’t just a creation myth of how Wad Hamid founded the village, but places the village and the villagers in the story and creates a meaning for both villagers and tree just as the mother places herself into a position of mythological power over her son as a means to respect. So to does the father of the story end it by pleading for his son not to judge his past, the villagers and their myths too harshly[6].

As the narrative of Noury’s film pushes on, Smail arrives late, his mother is near death in the hospital; his goodbye is short lived as she never regains consciousness. With that detail of his life settled he sees the woman he lost when he went to prison, Omar's sister, and holds a quiet and painful conversation fifteen years overdue. While at the beach, an old drunk imparts similar knowledge about solitude and "being" in that Schoppenhauerian sense of being. He is the masculine component to the feminine solitude that Lisa experiences within society, Smail experienced it outside of society through prison. Albeit has left prison, he is firmly rooted in the prison of the past. Not too surprisingly, we learn that the partner who betrayed Smail is Monsour and that he's going to exact his revenge before vanishing to Bangkok. The killing field, and empty unplowed field of dead grass, is repeated ominously through the film and between Vignettes punctuated by a gun shot. The final scene is that of Smail driving off in Monsour’s BMW, his hand fondling the air outside the window in a playful and childish act of abandon. Everything is resolved, the curse comes true, Ney perishes, Salim melts Lisa's heart and Smail exacts his revenge.

Revenge isn’t at the heart of Algerian director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s film Bled Number One. Nor is the film told through hand held shaky cam shots, on the contrary the film is very much in the spirit of cinéma vérité[7]. Although the film isn’t a documentary because of its fictive narrative, it retains the feeling cinéma vérité, through its moment in time portrayal and use of non professional actors and village locals for a cast. The soundtrack is a clever hodge-podge of ambient sounds that seem to somehow create background rhythms from conversations and the sounds of birds in the rural setting of the Algerian village. This montage is sharply contrasted by the climax “concerto” on the hill of Rodolphe Burger's heavy and haunting guitar solo.

The narrative revolves around Kamel, an Algerian ex-pat who returns to a small village in Algeria following a stay in France. The film's quiet moments reflect perfectly the nearly pond-like life of the village that seems to effortlessly revolve around the seasons and practices that are as old as the stones in the hills. A cow is brought to the village and slaughtered on film. The graphic realism highlights the tradition of Hillel butchery. After the cow is bled and dismembered all the meat is arranged in small piles on fresh cut leafy branches. The men of the village stand around this square and pray, wishing each other and the people of the Earth good will and of course, praise be to Allah. Each man then comes forward and takes one small pile of meat and puts it into a basket as his fair share of the sacrifice. The ceremony is a beautiful scene in stark contrast to the death of the animal. Together, there’s continuity to the lives of the animals and the people that links them to the land and vice versa. The disjointing effect of urban life where meat grows in supermarkets is instantly discarded and replaced with an agrarian tradition of inclusive community in this simple act.

The communal harmony of the village doesn't seem to last long. Enter a young band of ruffians who begin to terrorize the villagers with a brand of radical Islam. They go into the local cafe and declare that playing dominos is a sin, to which one of the villagers replies: "look, we're all Muslims, we're not rejecting Islam, but to each their own." The zealots are pushed out of the village and a guard post is erected at the road leading into the village following a meeting to mobilize the men of the village in defense of their way of life.

Now this egalitarianism is all well and good until Louisa arrives home and the darker side of this patriarchal society is shown. Louisa, as you later find out, has left her husband and taken their young boy Yanis. She has come home because she wants to sing American Jazz and Cabaret which goes against the wishes of her family. She is reprimanded by her Mother and urged to return to her husband. Louisa has a tired and half defeated look in her eyes as she listens to her Mother’s chiding and her brother Bouzid looks on, dubious and plotting. Flash forward, Bouzid is stumbling through the hills with two cases of alcohol and the religious zealots catch up to him and threaten to cut off his head. For a moment you think they’re really going to do it, but they eventually let him go. The next day Louisa's husband shows up to collect her and his child. Her husband spends the evening in the local cafe drinking and chewing tchim. In the cafe there are discussions of politics and what people are doing about their relative situations. There's no real animosity toward the west in the discussion, there is a kind of removal, an odd sort of objectivism about contemporary events that is disarming. Eventually Louisa and Yanis leave in a car with Louisa’s husband. Half way down the road Louisa's husband stops the car, steps out of it, throws her suitcase to the side of the road and then drags Louisa out of the car by her hair and takes off with the boy.

Here is where Louisa's troubles begin. For every insult that befalls her there is an injury waiting to happen. When she returns home late at night alone Bouzid, her brother, takes her to her room and proceeds to beat her bloody. She has shamed the family and he exacts a kind of revenge. The interesting parallel between this Heaven's Doors is the absence of a father in all of this. The brother is effectively running the household and distributes a kind of patriarchal justice, or at least has the final say in how things will happen. The sad fact of the matter is that Louisa is exercising her freedom of dissent with her spouse in a society where there’s no room for dissent either linguistically or through self actuation. She is ostracized by her family, shunned by her husband's family and beaten for her insolence. After this incident she is taken to the local cleric for advice and told to put her faith in Allah that the husband will come back for her. She is also told to absolve her sins by allowing seven waves to lash her in the face and then to run around the mosque seven times.

As effective outsiders, Louisa and Kamel share a strange attraction. Kamel calls Bouzid on his brutality and accuses him of not being a man for beating his sister. Although the villagers seem to be progressive and liberal in their contemplations about world politics, they don’t spring to support Kamel in calling out Bouzis. There is a definite sense that tragedy rolls down hill and that Bouzid’s castration at the hands of the ruffians is ultimately paid for by Louisa. Nothing can console Louisa at the loss of her child so she leaves the village for the city and her Husband's family who tells her he has taken the child and throws her out of her own home.

Distraught, she attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge and is stopped and taken to a mental institution that resembles more of a battered women's shelter than anything else. The occupants are all women, or at least we're not shown the male ward, but you get the feeling that they are all there for the same exact reason. The images and deft cinematography is reminiscent of Diane Arbus's photographs from mental institutions that are simply numbered, denying her subjects a kind of human dignity in terms of a name as they jostle through the black and white images in their stark white robes in their role as patient and subject blur the distinguishing lines of doctor vs. patient.

Louisa stages a concert at the institution in a long black evening dress contrasting the gowns most of the audience is wearing in a rather touching scene that is as odd as it is surreal. This performance is juxtaposed with two strange scenes of Rodolphe Burger sitting on a hillside with an electric guitar plugged into an amp and Kamel wandering around. These two scenes come in pivotal moments in the film, one in the middle and then the very last scene after Kamel decides that he's in love with Louisa, who is now gone, and that he has to leave the village and will go so far as sneaking into Tunisia, as he's going mad and his sense of democracy and women's rights is completely at odds with the accepted pace of village life. It is Rodolphe's guitar that closes out the film with a haunting melody. You never quite find out what happens to Louisa or Kamel for that matter, but you are left with the knowledge that life will not change much in the village, it can’t, its existence depends on the uniform continuity of the inhabitants that consider themselves Muslims but not extremists, however are all socially conservative if examined from the western perspective. This tension between East and West through the character of Kamel, is a kind of invasion, he enters back into his own community but is changed, and the community resists the change that he brings. Change in a sense is a form of madness within such a community as it is essentially contrary to the daily act of surrender that is both religious and practical in order to preserve the harmony.

Mohamed Al Daradji takes on a journey into post Saddam Iraq with his 2005 feature film Ahlaam. The film revolves around 3 people, like the triptych of Heaven’s Doors; the story in Daradji’s film revolves around three people in an impossible situation. Chronologically, the narrative begins in the “present”; the film opens in a mental hospital with two inmates reacting to the sound of explosions outside their barred cells. The brief and dark introduction is interrupted as a long flashback sequence explains their situations.

Ali is a soldier confined to the mental hospital after he was nearly killed in a US air attack in 1998 as part of operation Desert Fox. Dr. Mehdi is a young doctor fresh from the military service that he was forced to join when his academic career was cut short by his family's past history: his father was a communist and executed for treason. Mehdi isn't a member of the Bath party, and because of his family's traitorous past, can't continue up the chain, so he joins the army without realizing his dream of becoming a full fledged doctor. The last, Ahlaam, is a young literature student, who walks her cell still wearing the wedding dress she was in the day the secret police came and took her fiancé never to be seen again.

In the hospital, Ali is almost unrecognizable as a gaunt figure cowering in the corner thoroughly broken. This portrait of Ali is completely contrary to how he is show before coming to the mental hospital. From the beginning of his flashback sequence you quickly understand that Ali is a fundamentally good person: he gives money to those less fortunate, a ferry man refuses to take money for the passage across the Tigris, he is his mother’s pride and he takes care of his friends.

In 1998 Mehdi was a promising and over achieving med student who passes his finals and dreams of doing a master's degree. His over protective mother says "Son, don't study so much, rest, they say sleeping more and studying less will help you pass the test." As he sits by candle light in his home at a desk the size of a cafeteria tray, scribbling in his notebook and reading while smoking cigarettes. His classmates think highly of him, he has velocity and trajectory in his life, yet his father's crimes and subsequent execution forestalls his ascent, and he falls like Icarus into the ocean of the Iraqi military.

Ahlaam isn’t what you would call a beautiful woman, but she has a sweetness about her that’s compelling. She’s on the verge of becoming a wife, and as she says, dawning a true Abaya, becoming a woman in a certain sense. She is the bridge between families, between the future and the past when she finds herself in a mental institution, still wearing a wedding gown for the day that Ahmed will return and make of her a wife. Ahlaam and Ahmed’s love affair is short but intense; it’s made up mostly of words, declarations, and skipping stones across the river. There is a sense that mutatis mutandis will bring about even greater joy to the families and these two people, albeit arranged, there’s an assumption that they’re genuinely in love.

Ali heads up to the Syrian border with his friend Hassan who is openly critical of the regime. Ali quiets him over and over again, worried about who might be listening, and who could report Hassan. Hassan’s other problem, his hair, is falling out in patches, and he believes all his misfortune in life and in love stem from his "condition"; he's something of a Samson without a Delilah. If it weren't for his hair he would be braver, more able to cope with the realities of living in Iraq. When the bus full of soldiers reaches a checkpoint the security officers come on board and check the soldier's papers. Those returning late, or have lost their orders or passes, those with excuses other than what the document says, are removed from the bus, presumably, never to be heard from again.

Once Ali and Hassan reach the desolate no-man's land of the Syrian-Iraqi border there's not much to do until the bombs start falling. A joint US & Great Britain operation bombs the north. Their camp is hit. Ali is knocked out and shell-shocked, unable to hear. He wakes up bloody and stumbles around looking for Hassan who’s lying amidst a litter of soldiers clutching the stumps of where limbs used to be yelling for help or an officer, both in short supply. Delirious, Ali picks up Hassan and begins to carry him, looking for a doctor. Stumbling through the night he crosses into Syria and then back into Iraq when he’s picked up by military police, still carrying Hassan’s body. He's accused of desertion and thrown in prison. His trial is a mockery; naturally he’s found guilty and condemned to have his ear surgically cut off for treachery and cowardice. After the sentence is carried out he’s committed to the mental hospital.

The film resumes its “present” narrative chronology with a cruel doctor at the mental hospital who believes in electro shock therapy, yells at the patients, kicks them, and has about as much mercy as Torquemada. Mehdi is the absolute opposite; he has the penetrating insight to know that Ali isn't mentally insane, but that how you treat a man will determine how that man will live, and how he will react to such inhuman conditions. The chief psychologist wheels the screaming Ahlaam in for electro shock, and during the delivery of the first round the hospital is hit by a bomb.

It’s the morning after, 2 days, to be precise, before Sadaam’s regime collapses. Pandemonium has broken out, bodies are lying the streets, houses collapsing as a mostly civil society that has lived together under the unflinching rule of the regime comes apart at the seems. The patients are fleeing the hospital as it’s being looted, Ali and Mehdi try to intervene with the looters but find themselves targets when they get in the way of the looters. Search parties are organized to track down the patients and Ali begins to run around the streets, in nothing but his boxers, barefoot, looking for patients. Ahlaam's parents take to the street with a cleric to help them; they walk around showing people her picture, as she wanders seeing her husband in every strange face and shadow. Her dreams and her waking hours become one and the same and she suffers for her inability to see clearly. Her delusions serve to comfort her in that Ahmed is very much alive in her mind, but when every brigand turns into Ahmed her punishment becomes a prison not of her own making.

The story becomes a bleak portrayal of the worst of human nature when a sniper opens fire on innocent people in the street. There isn't any anxiety that isn't explored in this first film since the fall of the regime. The film understands and is capable of conveying beautiful gestures in the simple act of giving a naked man a coat, and how that has a resounding effect through so many other "coats" in cinema history, most recently The Pianist and the scene at the end where the Russian army officer quite bluntly says "why the fucking coat?" Ali is eventually shot down by the sniper while herding patients back to the hospital in a horrific moment, a naked soldier dying in the street.

These small codified messages, intentional or not, make the film a rich presentation of east and west, as the east's fate seems to rest in western hands. The final scenes of the film are exasperating as the family spots Ahlaam just as US soldiers arrive and fighting breaks out, she flees into a building they are barred from entering. "This is what I get for a lifetime of service and obedience, to be knocked to the dirt in my own country?!" cries Ahlaam's mother as she is toppled by a soldier. And up the flights of deserted stairs goes the frightened Ahlaam, lead by voices, the dead speak, and she answers. Finally on the roof, looking out over what Ali earlier called "beautiful Baghdad" the camera pans round and round and round and it ends, at the height of the narrative, rendering the audience unable to speak, unable to make any sense of the impossible situation, and equally powerless to forget it. The women of this film seem to suffer the worst atrocities when you consider how utterly powerless they are to begin with. There’s an understanding that women are due a measure of respect, but in the terrible scene of Ahlaam’s mother being knocked down by the soldier as she tries to save her daughter, that respect is lost and insult is added to injury as she cries in the dust of her broken country.

Respect and consideration cut to the heart of Jocelyn Saab’s Kiss me not on the Eyes. The film derives its title from a piece of Egyptian music that is and played during the film. The story is relatively simple and even predictable at times. A young girl, daughter of a famous belly dancer, is chasing her mother's ghost as she studies the dance. She is courted by a young man who she has affection for, but isn't quite sure she's in love with him. Love becomes equated with loss in the sense of possession and the fear of loosing him forces her hand, she agrees to marry. Not surprisingly, once married, her artistry, her dance, becomes a point of contention between her and her new husband who wants to keep her body to himself. She calls herself an artist, he sees her as his wife; the controlling hand of the patriarchal society creates the tension, the necessary tension, to allow Dunia, our dancer and protagonist, the courage to blaze her own trail.

The film really takes shape through the supporting cast and the tangential plot lines that are woven around Dunia’s somewhat hectic and complicated life. Take for instance her friend, a woman and a cab driver who runs what must be the only “American Graffiti” styled cab in all of Cairo with colorful vinyl seats, chach-kas and a matching attitude. Then there's the woman who runs the Guest House where the famous poet lives who struggles against the censors to keep 1001 Arabian Nights from being banned.

Egypt is painted as a wonderfully complex place, as far as its cinema portrays it. The secular government allows women more freedom than what is portrayed in the previous three films. Here they run businesses, teach at the university and live, what appears to be, a life that affords them the right to make choices. Yet, in all of this, a dark specter stalks the story and characters: excision, or female circumcision. It is estimated that 97% of all Egyptian women are genitally mutilated at a young age. Prescription holds that a young girl is to be excised when she begins to menstruate and this will help her lead a happier and more fulfilling life. The terrible act is at the heart of one of the sub plots involving a young girl named Yasmine, with a very old fashioned grandmother. A woman arrives in a black cloak and the procedure is carried out at home with nothing more than a razor blade. It’s a difficult seen to watch, as Dunia arrives too late to save Yasmine's body: "congratulations" she says to the grandmother, "instead of protecting her, you've made her just like you, her kitchen will forever be cold and not all the spices of the world will bring her cooking to life." This same grandmother had been trying to convince Dunia to have an excision, and that she, the grandmother, had found a doctor who would only cut out a fraction, instead of the whole clitoris.

It’s truly difficult to be critical without realizing that the criticism is a superimposition of one culture’s values on another. There’s a myriad of contradictions in making such a judgment when you take into account the west’s predilection toward advertising and how that advertising leads to our experience of other people based on what we see in regard to what they look like[8]. The lack of judgment based on action and true communication stunt our ability to interact with “other”, such a dislocation, person to person estrangement is not unlike a piece of us, cut out, with a visual razor.

To complicate matters of appearance, of living in her mother’s Ghost, Dunia is also a poet who apprentice for an intellectual, Beshir, who supervises her thesis on ecstasy in Sufi Poetry. Beshir begins to teach Dunia to trust herself while simultaneously teaching her about the problem in love poetry. The central problem seems to be one of direct addresses. True passion, a kind of rapture and suffering because of love is freely written about in lyric and song, but as for passion and love itself, the moment of departure rather than the aftermath of that departure, or as Beshir puts it "we're afraid of it openly" is completely stifled. This tension of aftermath vs. actuality, or real presence vs. assumed pitfall, is almost a modern analogy for the preventions/prescriptions of religion in dictating morality. The ability to live life undaunted according to a universal law of live and let live, like the men at the café in Bled Number One, may not be a fall from grace, through the eyes of a tradition built on religion, but a more fulfilling way to live, according to Beshir.

Dunia is hell bent on living as she wants to live. There’s a powerful scene when she says to the committee, as she attends an audition for a dance competition by reciting poetry while standing perfectly still: “I've never seen my body.” She sits down on the stage with her knees pulled to her chin, her toes wrapped in the hem of her skirt; this is her fetal pose where she is safe. As she discovers more and more poetry, listening to the now blind Beshir, the victim of an attacker wishing to defend Islam and its opponents who would have Egyptian society revel in the immorality of the Arabian nights, Dunia decides to look at her body. She buys a mirror and hangs it near her bed. She undresses out of the shot and then returns to the round mirror wrapped in bubble wrap that the mirror came in, still modest, but only in so far as the bubble wrapping is the appearance of modesty. She peers, opening the cellular curtain that surrounds her in order to take not of her body’s appearance for what seems to be the first time.

Mamhoud, Dunia's husband, becomes ever stricter, asking her to put her hair up when she goes out and asking her not to dance anymore. Eventually, as you might've guessed, following Yasmine's excision, a fight with Mamhoud, she flees her own apartment where he is now living, taking Yasmine with her, and winds up in the guest house where Beshir lives. There she discovers sensuality, she dresses in the garb of Beshir’s lover, the woman who runs the hotel, and enters his room, shaking the many gold bracelets on her left arm that Beshir is accustomed to hearing from his love. She steps into the role, breaking all tradition, marital vows, everything, to discover, or more accurately, pursue something taboo, and more importantly, something direct and real.

Dunia’s entrance into a sensual realm seems to reverberate in her dance. Her teacher says that there is equilibrium of the universe when you dance and that equilibrium is present through all the axes of the body from north to south, east to west front and back. It is only then, when she enters the room in garb, and the professor tells her "never dress as another, never disguise yourself, never wear another's makeup" that this seems to become a reality. The axes have realigned themselves because she has begun to live her life according to her own rules, even if she stumbles a bit in a dress that's too long for her. Dunia, in a sense, realizes her Gender on two levels, not only the ascribed gender as a social relation but a mental or internal understanding of that gender based on her ability to make decisions that help her identify with her inherent gender[9].
Dance, on the order of social interaction, and according to Dunia’s teacher, is a balance between heaven and Earth. One hand is arched toward the heavens, the other channels power into the ground. The posture that Dunia assumes is that of a whirling dervish in the midst of a dhikr. Knowledge moves from Allah, through Dunia and into the Earth. The hand gestures are similar to medieval painting, especially the depiction of Plato and Aristotle in Raphael’s School of Athens where they acknowledge heaven and Earth, or abstract ideas and a kind of practical dialectic. This double perception of dance is not unlike what Kowan calls both the “spectacle” and the process of “intersubjectivity” that the dancer enters into. In one sense the dance, for Dunia, is between her and the Earth, a kind of rhythm that happens from the beginning when she taps it, and at the same time it is about her past, about her mother’s ghost, a renowned artist in her own right.

To be caught between these fires, the past and the present, between religious prescriptions and personal desire are addressed by modern Arab film makers as they struggle with the price of surrender. The medium of film allows for a critical meditation on these problems, however, in order to be critical the story must live within the tradition as Adonis says, it can not be an outsider in its judgment and criticism.

The struggle couldn’t be more eloquently illustrated than in the 2005 Iranian film Café Transit by Kambuzia Partovi’s. Reyhan is a woman that seems to be caught in the world of Sharia while living on the Iranian border with Syria. Her husband owned a cafe before his death. According to tribal law she is supposed to marry her brother in-law and to join his family so she can be looked after. There are two things satisfied here, 1) family honor in that family takes care of its own, 2) established tradition and saving face for the dead, so that his wife doesn't shame his memory.

Reyhan isn't from this area, nor does she have any intention of marrying Nasser as wife #2. Nasser is somewhat diplomatic at first as Reyhan defies his wishes; she reopens the cafe and fills it with a domestic hospitality that brings to mind the hospitality of the Phoecians to Odysseus in Homer.

In addition running the café, Reyhan begins to take in strays of all kinds including a young Russian girl running away from the war in Chechnya, en route to find her sister in Italy. Neither woman speaks the other's language, but that doesn’t preclude them from crying on each other's shoulder through some innate understanding that can only described as the plight of the gender. According to Sharia Reyhan is only entitled to 1/8th of her husband’s estate, the smallest share, because her husband left no written will. The lion's share of the inheritance and the rights to the property of her husband’s café belong to Nasser. Eventually, Nasser's diplomacy runs out and he takes her to court. The café is closed and she’s locked out.

The narrative plot of the film is told through a kind of "remembering" and "witness" to the magic of Reyhan created through the eyes of the young Russian girl and Zakario a Greek Trucker who falls in love with Reyhan. There is a mystic quality to the food and the scenes of her cooking, chopping vegetables, grilling eggplants and potatoes, plates of steaming basmati rice and saffron with heaps of lamb. The film fits into that long tradition of "foodie" cinema punctuated by such gems as Big Night, Babbette's Feast, The Dinner Party, Mystic Pizza, Chocolate, Water For Chocolate, Eat Drink Man Woman, Fried Green Tomatoes, Vatel and maybe and the delightfully perverse, The Cook The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

The climax of the film and its virtual end are a kind of beacon of hope. Reyhan goes to the café across the road from Nasser’s, she asks the owner to hire her on as a cook or rent out the establishment to her. As she is unable to undertake land ownership herself, or even running a business, she bring along her husband’s partner and waiter to make the arrangements that she “doesn’t understand” or more accurately can’t according to the law. Nasser watches her, anxiously, from across the way, stubborn, and now in a position to affect his livelihood as his business did suffer while she ran the Border Café, and now she is in his backyard and this time there’s little he can do. Such an ending signals hope, and the potential for change. Each of these films deals with some aspect of the culture in which it was made in a critical fashion, weather it’s the pull of crime for the disenfranchised youth of Morocco, or excision in Egypt, Arab film makers are using the medium of film as a means for dissent, sometimes quiet and sometimes with a critical resolve that works simultaneously as narrative and social commentary without betraying their artistic integrity.

Bibliography:

Books:

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id), An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans: Catherin Cobham, Texas University Press, Austin, TX, 1990

Darwish, Mahmoud, Memory for Forgetfulness: Beirut 1982, UC Press, Berkeley, CA, 1995

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, The Rebel’s Silhoutte, Univ of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA 1995

Jung, C. G., The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, No. 9, Pt. 1, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1981

Kowan, Jane K., Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990

McGrane, Bernard, The Un-TV and then 10 MPH Car, The Small Press, Ft. Bragg, CA 1994

Salih, Tayeb, The Wedding of Zein, Heinemann Education Books, Arab Author Series London, UK, 1978

Films:

Ahlaam, Mohamed Al Daradji, Iraq, 2005

Bled Number One, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Algiers, 2006

Café Transit (Border Café), Kambuzia Partovi, Iran, 2005

Dunia (Kiss Me Not On The Eyes), Jocelyn Saab, Egypt, 2005

Heaven’s Doors, Imad & Swel Noury, Morocco, 2006

Other films seen, considered but not directly cited:

I know I’m not Alone, Michael Franit, 2005 (Iraq/Palestine Documentary)

Occupation 101, Abdallah & Sufyan Omeish, 2006 (Palestine Documentary)

The Blood of my Brother, Andrew Berends, 2005 (Iraq Documentary)

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[1] Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id), An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans: Catherin Cobham, Texas University Press, Austin, TX, 1990 pg. 82.

[2] “The authorities viewed the mystical elements in these movements as constituting an attack on the law and practice of islam; this was because they made a distinction between ‘the evident’ (al-zahir) and ‘the hidden’ (al-batin), or between ‘the law’ and ‘the truth’, asserting that knowledge and truth come from ‘te hidden’, hence the possibility of achieving a kind of unity or union between God and existence and between God and man.” Adonis pg. 76

[3] San Francisco Arab Film Festival, 2006

[4] Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, pg. 84

[5] C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, No. 9, Pt. 1, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1981, One of the key contextualizing ideas in the essay and study of archetypes is that individuals require myth as a means not only of describing natural phenomenon in age prior to scientific research, e.g. why does the sun rise, but more importantly, for the individual, as a means of writing yourself into the story and creating a sense of meaning and purpose for the individual. In a sense, this unique connection and meaning, becomes a shared conscience among a community of people. (pgs. 7-8)

[6] Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein, Heinemann Education Books, Arab Author Series London, UK, 1978.

[7] The French movement of naturalism in cinema that evolved a new style of documentary film making, the rough translation means "cinema of truth" or from the Russian progenitor of the movement 'kino-pravda'.

[8] Bernard McGrane, The Un-TV and then 10 MPH Car, The Small Press, Ft. Bragg, CA 1994

“A spectre is haunting the mirrors of the modern world, the spectre of advertising. The genius of cinema, Frederico Fellini, once said in an interview: “Each person’s face is the perfect expression of the being of that person.” How far is that from the established way of seeing ruled by our advertising culture! Instead of seeing our self or someone else for who they are we see them for what they look like.”

[9] Jane K. Kowan, Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990, citing Edwin Ardener’s 1975 essay Belief and the Problem of Women: “The study of gender relations entails at least two levels of analysis of gender as a thought construct or category that helps us to make sense out of particular social worlds and histories; and of gender as a social relation that enters into and partially constitutes all other social relations and activities.” (Kowan, Pg. 8)