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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2016
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2016
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Golden age divas on the silver screen: Challenging or conforming to dominant gender norms?
Authors: Mona Abdel-Fadil and Koen Van EyndeAbstractEgyptian cinema has been hugely influential throughout the Arab world, and has produced several divas. Fatin Hamama (d. 2015) and Soad Hosny (d. 2001) were very popular among their contemporaries and still continue to enchant audiences. Yet, there has been little systematic study of the cinema roles such enthralling divas were cast in. In this article, we discuss the genre melodrama, and the roles played by these two highly successful Egyptian actresses and stars over decades. We ask: to what degree do Fatin Hamama and Soad Hosny’s iconic screen characters conform to or challenge dominant gender norms? We broaden our inquiry so as to examine what characterizes the gender dynamics in the films that Fatin Hamama and Soad Hosny star in, thereby exploring what kind of male characters they are pitted against and how the gendered power dynamics play out in the storyline. The films we analyse, illustrate how numerous themes and narratives on class, patriarchy, education, modernity and nationalism overlap and play into the definition of power and relations across both class and gender. Against the backdrop of a highly politicised cinema, we discuss the various ‘state narratives’ or counter-narratives that appear to be informing the films, and demonstrate how productions from the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s betray wider political sentiments of their time. We argue that Fatin Hamama and Soad Hosny’s screen choices and famous stage personae developed in line with the capacity of the national modernist project to produce the desired results on the ground.
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Resistance and reinvention: Representations of the belly dancing body in Raja Amari’s Satin rouge/Red Satin (2002)
More LessAbstractDuring the French colonial era, belly dancers were defined in terms of their somatic alterity and their bodies were constructed as sites of degradation, lasciviousness, exoticisation and eroticisation. Though belly dancers remain key signifiers of eastern exoticism in both eastern and western societies today, a number of feminist critics and practitioners have (re)claimed the belly dancing body as a space of agency and empowerment (Keft-Kennedy 2005; Moe 2008). This paper argues that Raja Amari’s film, Satin rouge/Red Satin (2002b), contributes to such debates through its unusual focus on a Tunisian housewife and mother’s (sexual) liberation through belly dancing and her body. Through close analyses of key sequences in the film, I argue that Amari (re)conceptualises the belly dancing body as the primary means by which her protagonist is able to resist the restrictive roles of mother, housewife and widow imposed upon her by dominant Tunisian society. Reading the film alongside Reason and Reynolds’ (2012) work on ‘kinesthetic empathy’, I illustrate how Amari draws the spectator into an empathic kinesthetic relationship with her heroine that undermines the distance necessary for visual objectification and opens up new, more ethical ways of representing the belly dancing body. This paper concludes that Amari’s film resists dominant orientalist images of Maghrebi femininity and reinvents the belly dancing body as a symbol of (female) agency and power.
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Constructions of sexuality in recent Maghrebi films by women film-makers
More LessAbstractSince 1978 in Algeria and Tunisia and since 1982 in Morocco, women film-makers have sought to account for the oppression of women, for their struggle for freedom including artistic freedom. For the last ten years, films by women film-makers have become more numerous much more diverse moving away from naturalism and the narratives of emancipation that made the commercial success of Maghrebi films in Europe. Dealing with sexuality is complex because such images are often taboo and transgression may not be liberating for women film-makers who need to find a way to expose the shackles of patriarchy without catering to the pleasure of western audiences keen on orientalist fictions. This article that focuses on more recent films, like Karin Albou’s Le Chant des Mariées (2008), Raja Amari’s Les Secrets (2010) or even Leila Kilani’s Sur la planche (2010), or social films like Nadia Cherabi’s L’envers du miroir (2007), Myriam Bakir’s Agadir-Bombay (2011), explores national and regional specificities regarding images of sexuality. The goal of this analysis is to understand the terms within which such images that entail sexual pleasure or repression, rape and masturbation may redefine relationships of power.
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The sacrificial sheep in three French-North African films: Displacements and reappropriations
More LessAbstractIn this article I will examine three films featuring Maghrebi migrant families between the 1960s and the present day, Le Gone du Chaâba (1997) by Christophe Ruggia, Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) by Yamina Benguigui and Le Grand Voyage (2004) by Ismaël Ferroukhi. Each film portrays tensions between generations, between sexes, between societies and between beliefs and values. The tradition of the sacrifice of a sheep in Islam features in all three films and I use this theme to highlight how different members of the families sacrifice themselves or are sacrificed in the process of accommodating to a new way of life. I also deconstruct other subtextual references to Islamic culture and belief as representations of dilemmas and forms of reconciliation and belonging.
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Religion and individual civil rights: Moroccan Jewish citizens in Where Are You Going Moshe?
More LessAbstractFor decades, questions about Jewish mass emigration from Morocco were never discussed openly, and it is only in the last few years that historians, writers, politicians and film-makers have turned their attention to this delicate subject by debating it in a public forum. While we use Hassan Benjelloun’s light-hearted film Where Are You Going Moshe? (2007) as a starting point to review questions of religion, identity and citizenship, we propose that Moroccan Jews left their country en masse because they were deprived of their mobility rights.
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Algerian cinema between commercial and political pressures: The double distortion
More LessAbstractAlthough ‘transnational’ cinema is now a widely-used category in the literature, to understand what ‘transnational’ means we need also to be able to conceptualize the ‘national’. This article argues that ‘Algerian cinema’ no longer exists. Instead, what is today termed ‘Algerian cinema’ often deals with social problems that are in fact French issues transposed into an Algerian context. The article demonstrates how this situation has arisen by examining the funding of films ‘about’ Algeria via the French Centre national de la cinématographie (CNC), the language quotas that such bodies impose and how these funding mechanisms give films a linguistic identity which is often at odds with the sociocultural context of the scenario. It then turns to explore the academic reception of these films and the way in which they are often used as documentary snapshots into contemporary Algeria, with little attention paid to the ways in which they are products of a particular funding context. Finally, it considers how the Algerian state interacts with these ‘Algerian films’ and the political factors at play in the state’s selective instrumentalization of them. It concludes that in both subject matter and academic analyses, ‘Algerian cinema’ is subject to a double distortion, a situation which the term ‘transnational’ does not capture. The paper will refer to the work of film-makers including Merzak Allouache, Nadir Moknèche and Djamila Sahraoui.
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Accented Algerian documentary: Jean-Pierre Lledo’s ‘Trilogy of Exile’
By Sophie BélotAbstractThe history of North African countries is defined by waves of emigration to their former colonies and other countries. After its independence in 1962, Algeria experienced one of its most important exoduses, mostly towards its former coloniser, France. Rarely documented, this migration concerned pied-noirs2, Europeans, harkis3 and Algerian Jews who moved to France for safety reasons and work opportunities. Expelled from Algeria and unwelcome in France, these groups became invisible and silenced. The invisibility and silence of certain groups of people in Algeria continued well after independence. During the Algerian crisis of the 1990s and early 2000s, minority groups (Berbers) as well as dissidents to the national identity (Arabo-Muslim) became the target of Islamist rebels. As an Algerian film-maker with Berber Jewish and Spanish origins, Jean-Pierre Lledo’s work is concerned with the memory of Algeria’s multi-ethnic groups who experienced the war of independence and its aftermath. Not easily fitting the official history, his films were often subject to censorship, which meant that in the turbulent years of the 1990s, Lledo was forced to leave Algeria because of Islamist pressure. Whilst in Algeria creativity was stifled, in France Lledo could resume his work to make his ‘Trilogy in Exile’, three documentaries dealing with Algeria’s past and present which focus on its dispossessed and displaced groups of individuals (like himself). Lledo’s personal and exilic stance is a distinctive feature of his (Algerian) documentaries. Travelling through France as well as returning to Algeria to travel through it, Lledo meets with what he calls, ‘his phantoms’. Looking at his ‘Trilogy in Exile’ documentaries, which include An Algerian Dream (2003), Algerias: My Phantoms (2004) and Algeria: Unspoken Stories (2007), this article will show how his exilic position informs his documentaries’ aesthetics as well as political stance to facilitate a multi-ethnic exchange and dialogue.
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Documenting defiance: Women film-makers in Tahrir Square
More LessAbstractThis article discusses the work of national and transnational women film-makers who contributed to the discourse on the Egyptian Revolution in the three years that followed the fall of Mubarak and who documented forms and expressions of female defiance through the lens of their camera. I argue that, in women-made documentaries, the social and political defiance vis-à-vis systems of governance and instances of authority (familial, religious and political) is shaped through the representation of a far-reaching form of disobedience, breaking the rules of social patriarchy and political paternalism, destabilizing the common knowledge on oppressed women and defying the overarching essentialist views on women’s conditions in Egypt. I argue that civic defiance cannot be understood without examining the more radical epistemic defiance to the established régime du savoir (regime of knowledge) informed by power relationships, and the way in which knowledge circulates and functions in relation to power centers and authoritarian elites.
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