Mapping Subjectivity

The cinema of the Middle East is often stereotypically seen under the restrictive frame of realism. Euro-American audiences tend to associate formal experimentation with Western culture and often consider it an exclusive characteristic of their own aesthetic tradition. This widespread assumption underlines a deep preconception that sees non-Western cultures unable to reflect upon themselves and to deconstruct their own formal conventions. Dominant narratives often depict Arab countries as prisoners of their own culture while the very same term, ‘culture’, stands for creativity and critical production when used in a ‘democratic’ context. Curiously enough, typical traits of experimental cinema happen to be characteristic of Islamic visual culture that “quite consciously sought to emphasize surface over shape and gave itself the means to be as free as possible of an object’s or monument’s physical properties.”(Oleg Grabar, ‘The Formation of Islamic Art’)

Hence the predilection for flow over classical form, abstraction and open-ended signs and, most interestingly, embodied perception, are all elements we find in Islamic art. Since Islam does not contemplate the visual figuration of God, the body, unlike that of Christ, is not something to be represented but to be evoked. Consequently, images, freed from the burden of figurative representation, suggest instead of dictate possible compositions whose final shape depends upon the viewer’s elaboration. The arabesque, carpets’ hypnotic motifs and the very lettering of the Arabic language feature flowing signs where image, information and spirituality unfold from each other.

When rigid figurative patterns are missing the spectator is ‘forced’ to actively engage with the work of art in order to make sense of it. Only in the 20th century has Western art embraced abstraction through modernism and considered for the first time non-figurative representation. Western experimental filmmaking is very much the child of this artistic experience. To seek a correspondence between the image and reality is the quintessential concern of cinema. It is important to stress how this preoccupation derives from the Euro-American tradition from which Arab cinema descends and whose traits were obviously highly influenced by the former. If we were to place cinema within the continuum of visual arts though, we would see that non-figurative forms are very much part of Islamic history. Observed under this perspective the work of Elia Suleiman is not merely derived from Buster Keaton, of the rarefied narratives of European cinema and so on, but conceptually linked to an older history.

What this ongoing retrospective has been presenting is a largely unknown story of experimentation in the Arab world preceding international recognition of the director of Chronicle of a Disappearance. This is a movement that saw unexpected trans-continental collaborations without the need for patronizing distributors on the trail of gold, as in the case of Summer ’70 (Un Film Girato Nell’Estate del ’70) by Nagy Shaker and Paolo Isaja. Unable to finance their own ambitions with their individual budgets the Egyptian and Italian directors joined forces to produce an eerie mediation on change and difference with an original score by Suleiman Jamil and the unselfconscious beauty of a young American friend of theirs.

Freed from the distortions of historical linearization audiences will hopefully be invited to look beyond the surface to discover the unfolding beauty of a rich but sadly criminalized culture.

By Celluloid Liberation Front