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Camera Obscura 18.2 (2003) 40-69


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What Is That and between Arab Women and Video?
The Case of Beirut

Laura U. Marks


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Still from Hadel Nazmy's open studio project, "Personal Diary in Desolate Town," at Cairo's Townhouse Gallery in 2002. Courtesy Hadel Nazmy

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For Western scholars and artists, the phrase "women and video" brings to mind the heady days of feminist video production in North American (as well as European and Australian) cities in the early 1970s. Compared to film, the newly available medium was cheap and portable, did not require a crew, could (in principle) be widely distributed, and, most importantly, was not institutionalized and thus already controlled by men. Individually and collectively, women took up video for personal expression (artists like Joan Jonas, Ardele Lister, Lisa Steele, and Hannah Wilke), formal experimentation (signal-disturbers like Carol Goss and Steina Vasulka), and activism (groups like New York Newsreel, Reel Feelings in Vancouver, and the National Film Board's Challenge for Change program). Women produced a vast and varied body of work characterized by a kind of organic relationship between the materiality of the medium and its expressive and political properties. The addition of "women and video" equaled a movement: feminist video. [End Page 41]

Thirty years later, for this dossier on women and video, I've undertaken to ask whether the conjunction "women and video" designates a similar movement in the Arab world. 1 What is the nature of the and in "Arab women and video"? Under pressure, this question generates a hailstorm of other ands: women and video, women and art; video and cinema, video and television, video and art; women and the Arab world, artists and the Arab world, Arab artists and the West; video and self-expression, video and politics, art and politics. My task became to press each of these conjunctions to see which yielded the most generative equation in turn.

Having heard much about the lively postwar independent media production scene in Beirut, I came to see it for myself during a year-long stay beginning August 2002. Stimulated by the powerful films and videos of the Lebanese and Arab diasporas, I wanted to learn what this production is like at the source. Watching the work and talking with artists and media organizers here, I began to find that, insofar as we continue to ask how the conjunction andis deployed in "Arab women and video," the answer seems to be: by the West. Arab women videomakers work along what we might call first-wave feminist lines mainly for outside funders and outside audiences. When they can produce with relative autonomy, Arab women videomakers take a situated approach in which gender, if it is a topic at all, remains entangled with other issues.

Still the question generates an entry to the scene of independent media production (much of which is in video formats) in the Arab world, to its sources of vitality, and to its interesting and gendered relationship to Western supporters and audiences. Currently Beirut is the only Arab city that has the critical mass of artists, activists, organizations, equipment, capital, and audience for a full-fledged local video scene.

Finally, almost all Arab independent media is what I have termed intercultural, with the local being inextricable from the global and the diasporan. 2 I shall suggest that autonomy for independent videomakers, both women and men, occurs in a delicate relationship between local and foreign interests. Beirut offers a possible model of how an independent video scene might develop [End Page 42] in other Arab cities. At the same time, the specificity of Beirut video emphasizes that it is important not to impose Western ideas of modernism and modernity on Arab art. The work produced within what have been called "Arab modernities" 3 manifests constellations of formal properties and social interventions that are particular to country, period, and local concerns.

Video has always been a homeless medium and never easy to define. For the purposes of this...

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