Dis-Illusions in the Near and Middle East

Far from festival trends and officially-dictated cinema, the Near and Middle East is developing a modern film and video culture which calls clichés into question and emphasizes personal points of view. Amin Farzanefar presents several of these filmmakers

photo: Akram Zaatari
Akram Zaatari - Her & Him Van Leo, Lebanon 2003

​​The works of the Lebanese Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad, the Egyptian Hassan Khan, the Iranian Maani Petgar and other filmmakers present the Near and Middle East in a way that moves beyond the image conveyed by the autocratic regimes: as a dynamic, mobile region that practices its own forms of modernity, influenced by global currents of capital and the new media, with even Bedouins and nomads owning cell phones and laptops.

The deluge of images on urban advertising posters already mocks the notion that the prohibition against images is still relevant. The terms "Islam" and "Islamism", regarded as so crucial in the west, are only individual components which are very inadequate at describing society as a whole.

It is a truism that the west's simplifying patterns of perception do not do justice to the region's diversity: Iran and the Arab world alone are two completely different cultural spheres with their own political and cultural histories. Is there a common element nonetheless, apart from the “Islam” factor, which plays little role in film?

Calling definitions into question

A common feature running through modern film and video art is a uniquely "deconstructivist" approach, playing with (official) truths and realities.

Many of the filmmakers share an aspiration to call into question and undermine unambiguous definitions of the nation, history, biography, identity, etc.

Photo: Walid Raad
Walid Raad - Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, Lebanon 2000

​​A common technique they use is the collage: personal memories and diary entries are recorded and images from the media are superimposed upon them; television recordings and film documents mingle imperceptibly with recreated, invented and fabricated events.

For example, Walid Raad's "Hostage: The Bachar Tapes" is the fictitious video diary of a hostage in the Lebanese civil war. The kidnapping actually occurred, but the account given by Bachar, supposedly the sole Arab prisoner, takes on a grotesque quality: in his story, the American hostages' physical reserve, even disgust, toward the bodies of the Middle Easterners gives way several weeks later to a homosexual orgy.

This "Mockumentary" plays with allusions on many levels: different cultural concepts of physicality, sexual fantasies about other ethnic groups, racism, and of course there is a reference to Abu Ghuraib.

Shimmering between being and appearance

The Iranian Maani Petgar uses the solar eclipse of 2000 as a many-faceted metaphor. "An Eclipse which Dropped from the Sky" starts by showing the uninterrupted, verbose but vapid commentary provided by the Iranian television stations, zapping back and forth between different experts who insist on seeing the imposing heavenly phenomenon as a manifestation of God. Petgaar loses interest and pans from the television to a little sick sparrow ...

Jalal Toufic works with similar devices: "Saving Face" documents how old Lebanese campaign posters with yesterday's slogans and candidates are scraped from the walls. When politicians from the day before yesterday appear underneath, not only is history exposed, new faces and new politicians come into being - an eye here, a chin there, a jacket there.

These kinds of illusions and superimpositions create a many-layered palimpsest which counters the media's simplifications and lack of ambiguity as well as their claim to truth - an issue that transcends cultural boundaries.

Taken further, this dissolution, this oscillation and shimmering between being, appearance and other positions is also a counter-program to the region's rigid, monolithic and authoritarian forms of government.

photo: Sinan Antoon
Sinan Antoon - About Baghdad, Iraq 2003

​​Here one potential criticism must be rebutted: the creative use of new media has deeper reasons than a mere desire to follow the trends of the western art market.

These include concerns of the individual, individualization, and the desire for questions rather than slogans: "What is Lebanon really - for me?", "What is the issue with the Near East conflict - for me?".

For example, Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi who returned from exile; his documentary traces the zeitgeist of de-Saddamization. "About Baghdad" is a spontaneously filmed essay that goes under the skin, leaving room for questions, contradictions, and the heated debates of the populace.

Like Antoon, many of the younger filmmakers cultivate a point of view that is both sober and radically subjective, and thus diametrically opposed to the mass of medially-transmitted, collectively-dictated and emotionally supercharged visual messages. Dis-illusions like these are a global theme as well.

Amin Farzanefar

© Qantara.de 2005

Translated from the German by Isabel Cole

The films mentioned here were shown in late October during the Cologne Art Film Biennale as part of the "Vision and Reality" series, curated by Catherine David. Since 1998 the director of Documenta X has headed the long-term project "Contemporary Arab Representation", which examines issues of the region's self- and outside perceptions. After two projects on Cairo and Beirut, beginning on 17 December Catherine David will be focusing on Iraq. She is organizing the event "The Iraqi Equation" in the Berlin Kunstwerke museum.

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