Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique ed. by Josef Gugler (review)

Josef Gugler’s latest edited volume, Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique, is a treasure trove of scholarship on Arab films and filmmakers. It follows on the heels of his comprehensive Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (University of Texas Press, 2011), and, as Gugler states at the outset of his introduction, is meant to complement this earlier work. The volume is organized into ten chapters, each of which focuses on a single filmmaker and is written by a leading scholar in the field of Arab film or media studies. Gugler’s goal is to expose the reader to a range of “auteur directors” (2) who often struggle to get their films made but who have much more control over their artistic practice than filmmakers working in commercial industries such as that of Egypt.

Gugler’s work is generally both very accessible and very teachable, from his African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent (Indiana University Press, 2003) to Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence, and this volume is no exception. The chapters are set up as case studies weaving together information from the filmmakers’ lives, their working methodologies, and the influences on their most important films. The contributors often refer the reader to other sources such as Viola Shafik’s landmark volume on Arab cinema (Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. American University in Cairo Press; 2007) or Sandra Carter’s historical overview of Moroccan cinema (What Moroccan Cinema? A Historical and Critical Study 1956–2006, Lexington Books; 2009), inviting the reader to probe further into a specific issue, filmmaker, or national history. This is an excellent way to engage students and researchers in research methodologies around film history.

Egypt is well represented in the volume with three chapters, two of which are written by renowned scholar of Arab cinema and documentary film-maker, Shafik. She shares with the reader the fact that she was hesitant to write about legendary filmmaker Youssef Chahine—director of over forty films—because so much has already been written about him. Nevertheless, she deftly traces his stylistic and thematic evolution, including the “Chahinian” (100) factor of such a politically-committed auteur filmmaker. Her second contribution focuses on the work of lesser-known “New Realist” Egyptian film-maker Daoud Abd El-Sayed, outlining his focus on social critique and use of irony and self-reflexivity when depicting sociopolitical issues. The third chapter on Egypt is written by Benjamin Geer, who makes a convincing case for Yousry Nasrallah’s films as art cinema. Taken together, these three directors, all auteurs in their own right, are diverse in their stylistic approaches to what are essentially politically oriented films.

In her chapter on Syrian filmmaker Nabil Maleh, Christa Salamandra describes how Maleh’s concern for ethics and aesthetics has helped shape his cinematic depictions of resistance to political oppression. She convincingly argues that Maleh’s 1972 The Leopard set the stage for the gloomy “dark aesthetic” (20) that would pervade much of Syrian screen media’s visual aesthetics in the following decades. In the sole chapter devoted to a woman filmmaker, the well-known Jocelyne Saab from Lebanon, Dalia Said Mostafa offers a compelling reading of “Saab’s Beirut” (38), from her early documentary city symphonies of Beirut to her later feature fiction films in which her characters’ (especially women) quests for freedom to be themselves are staged within the urban spaces of Beirut and Cairo. Mostafa argues that the cities themselves are transformed by their citizens who seek their own “social and economic” change (47).

Two important figures in Palestinian cinema are included among the volume’s “specially commissioned essays on ten leading directors of the Arab world” (1). Tim Kennedy writes convincingly of Michel Khleifi’s work on memory, conflict and cooperation, and land rights and Palestinian cultural identity. Best known for his 1987 Wedding in Galilee, Khleificontributes, according to Kennedy, to a “discourse of resistance” (68) by...