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REVIEW:
That rare book on film that grips readers from cover
to cover (The Daily Star, Beirut)
'Insights
into Syrian Cinema' shines light on how the beneficiaries
- and prisoners - of a state-run bureaucracy have learned
to fight back. By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. Daily Star
staff. Thursday, November 02, 2006. Buy
Book $15
Rassa'el Shafahiyyah
(Verbal Letters) by
Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid |
BEIRUT:
"A popular adage amongst filmmakers is that making
cinema is like making love," suggests Lebanese
filmmaker Mohamed Soueid, to which Syrian filmmaker
Omar Amiralay responds: "When I hear these things,
I hate cinema." This exchange is one of many choice
gems scattered throughout "Insights into Syrian
Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers,"
an anthology of essays, interviews and experimental
writings by artists, scholars and filmmakers - all published
as part of a festival of rarely seen yet highly influential
Syrian films that opened at New York's Lincoln Center
this past spring and has since been traveling to museums,
universities and other institutions from Boston, Massachusetts,
to Portland, Washington.
Soueid's interview with Amiralay crackles with the humor
of two artists who know each other well, even as the
interviewer tries to pin down the source of the interviewee's
caustic sarcasm, which borders at times on outright
hostility.
This level of knowledgeable intimacy is precisely what
makes "Insights into Syrian Cinema" such a
surprising - and vital - read. Rare is the book on cinema
studies that grips readers fully from cover to cover.
Rarer still is the book on cinema studies that shines
so much light on the life of the mind among Syria's
socially, culturally and politically disenfranchised
artists and intellectuals.
"Insights into Syrian Cinema" is like the
bookshelf in the study that swivels open to reveal a
hidden door opening onto a maze of mysterious and otherwise
unknown rooms. You read, you laugh, you learn, you gain
a sliver of greater understanding and most of all, you
crave the opportunity to see more of these films - most
of which have been produced under the auspices of the
Syrian state and the influence of Soviet formalism,
allowing the filmmakers to elevate to a highly subversive
art the act of biting the hand that feeds them.
Edited by curator Rasha Salti, who organized the "Lens
of Syria" series with Arte East director Livia
Alexander, the book features contributions by Tunisian
film critic Tahar Chikhaoui, film scholar Hamid Dabashi
(also a professor of comparative literature and Iranian
studies at Columbia University who has written extensively
on Palestinian cinema) and Lawrence Wright, a staff
writer for The New Yorker and the author of "The
Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,"
published to much acclaim earlier this year.
Equally edifying are the often highly experimental entrees
by the filmmakers themselves: Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid's
"Mother's Milk"; Mohammad Malas' "Between
Imaging and Imagining: Women in Film," which digs
into the literary meat of his film scripts; and Hala
Alabdallah's impressionistic diary of creating a film
that doubles as her sense of self.
According to Salti's cogent introductory essay, "Critical
Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema," "the
first film to have ever been screened in Syria took
place in a cafe in Aleppo in 1908. The Ottoman administration
established the first movie theater in Damascus in 1916
... [It] burned down barely a month later."
The first properly Syrian film came in 1928 with "The
Innocent Suspect," which was deemed questionable
by the French Mandate authorities, weary of the film's
rambunctious attitude toward colonial rule. The second
properly Syrian film, 1932's "Under the Damascus
Sky," had the misfortune of premiering alongside
the first Egyptian musical talkie, "Song of the
Heart." It was promptly banned by the French and
lost a wild amount of money for the time, its primary
infraction being "the production's use of a musical
piece without paying copyright dues." (Nota bene,
young filmmakers in Beirut sountracking your early efforts
with unlicensed tracks.)
This
history sets the stage for the creation of the National
Film Organization, which holds a near-total monopoly
over the production of cinema in Syria and represents
one of the weirdest systems of control to be found anywhere.
Syria rarely churns out more than two films a year.
Some of its most visually accomplished and aesthetically
sophisticated directors - Nabil Maleh, Oussama Mohammad
and Mohammad Malas - must wait decades between the completion
of one project and the start of another, beholden to
a cumbersome, inefficient and ultimately nasty government
bureaucracy.
When
the films are finished, they are rarely shown at home
and are only occasionally ferreted out to international
film festivals (where they tend to be welcomed with
enthusiasm).
"By producing films that are essentially for export,"
notes Wright, "the Syrian regime presents a far
more open face to the rest of the world than it does
to its own society."
But this leaves the filmmakers to create their masterpieces
in the utter absence of an audience, resulting in what
Dabashi describes as "an unconjugated visual lexicon."
"Syrian cinema has been hibernating within itself
and self-reflecting on its own internal terms,"
Dabashi explains, "like a rare and surreal object
imagining itself a mirror it wished it had."
As Salti notes, the paradoxes of Syrian cinema are many.
There simply isn't enough output to speak of Syrian
cinema as a "national cinema," yet the body
of work that does exist serves as a kind of national
archive for collective memory, lived experience, the
traumatic and more. State-made Syrian films are barely
known except by the most insufferable of film snobs.
Syrian films, despite their sources of funding, are
intensely critical of the Syrian regime and deeply subversive,
never propagandistic. And finally, Syrian films are,
by and large, all art-house fare - not a derivative
action thriller or a cheesy romantic comedy in the lot.
"Insights into Syrian Cinema" throws up several
points of contention - Wright quotes a journalist for
Al-Hayat, Ibrahim Hamidi, who states: "By allowing
Oussama Mohammad and others to do movies financed by
the government, the regime is harming the filmmakers'
credibility and also trying to contain them. They get
awards and prizes, which is good publicity for the regime.
But at the same time Syrians aren't allowed to see the
films because the government doesn't want these filmmakers
to make a difference. They are isolated from the society.
In the end, the regime is winning out [in] this game."
Food for thought, that.
The book is also rife with examples of both outrageous
censorship and irrepressible creativity. When the influential
French film journal Cahiers du Cinema came to an Aleppo
film club founded by Malas and Amiralay to collaborate
on a festival of "cinema and politics," the
government nixed more than half the films lined up to
screen. Undeterred, critic Serge Daney took to the stage
and vividly narrated each film. According to Wright's
report, Amiralay remarks: "It was a screening without
an image - an absolutely beautiful happening."
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