Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series

The Maghreb (Arab West)

Algeria : Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina b.1934, Merzak Allouache b.1944, Mohamed Chouikh b.1935 Tunisia: Férid Boughedir* b.1944, Abdellatif Ben Ammar, Nouri Bouzid b.1946, Moufida Tiatli* b.1947 Morocco: Souheil Ben Barka b.1942 Jallali Ferhati b.1948 Farida Beniyazid* b.1944

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Brief reports on 6 African cinemas first appeared in the ninth issue of the 'International Film Guide' in 1972. It expanded in 1975 to a contacts listing of 11 countries in a short African dossier. Reports from Iran and Egypt first appeared in 1974. The 1975 dossier reported that 6 of the 11 countries listed had “no organised film Industry” with 5 - Algeria, Guinea, Senegal, Morocco, and Tunisia - having government supported national film industries post-independence. At this time Egypt was the only Arabian cinema with a substantial history of a film industry spanning more than four decades from its founding in the late1920s.

Three distinctive national cinemas emerged in the Maghreb. The decade preceding independence in 1956 in Tunisia, saw the beginnings of a film culture with the founding of ciné clubs, extensive amateur film making, and the creation of one of two film journals. By the mid1960s, a modern cinema of the Maghreb had come into existence in neighbouring Algeria which Viola Shafik labels “history and national identity revised” and Roy Armes stating that “the roots of this national cinema lie in the liberation struggle that was waged against increasingly ferocious French opposition from 1954 to 1962” (209). Centralisation of control by the National Liberation Front (FLN) over film-making including an independent co-production, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers/La battaglia di Alger (1966), ending in complete nationalisation of the cinema in1969.

Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina

Viola Shafik introduces the concept of Algerian realism by indicating that its prerequisites differ considerably from those of Egyptian realism which was peaking at the time that Algeria's cinema was starting in 1964 “as a child of the war of independence” (144). “Algerian cinema was characterized from the start by a considerable politicization, forming the basis of its revolutionary and didactic character and its constant endeavour to reshape society.” Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina (1934-2025) is often regarded as having dominated in Algerian filmmaking in its first period of independence as both filmmaker and director of the state filmmaking organisation, the OAA. His major achievement was tracing the development of differing Algerian resistance from the beginning of colonisation until the insurrection in 1954. Lakhdar-Hamina's fourth film, Chronicle of the Year of Embers/Chronique des années de braise (1975), won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the first African film to do so. A peasant family represents Algeria as a whole in an epic experiencing the three historical phases of colonialism. Lakhdar-Hamina's films are recognised as classics in representation of the struggle for liberation achieved (Spaas 136) which, Armes suggests, “only by echoing Western forms and expenditure [of a relatively] enormous amount of money […] stem less from costs than Lakhdar-Hamina's narrative stance.”

Chronicle of the Years of Embers

Works of this dimension can only be interpreted as epics of national consciousness, but looked at in this light, their inadequacies are clear. They offer little political insight but are rather purely lyrical protests […] Nothing could be more mystifying than [Lakhdar-Hamina's] depictions of the national revolution (Armes 211).

Mohamed Bouamari

“Because of the centralization of control over the development of Algerian cinema, its output [had] a remarkable thematic homogeneity” (ibid 209). By 1971 following the agrarian revolution, land reform began to open up other subjects for a so-called New Cinema (cinema jadid). While the subject of the war was not fully abandoned in the the second phase of Algerian cinema, new concerns emerged In Mohamed Bouamari's first feature, Le Charbonnier/The Charcoal Burner (1972) considered the first example of cinema jadid, a reaction against the Hollywood tone of earlier films.” The central character, Belkacem, a former resistance fighter now works making charcoal but bottled gas is becoming the main fuel so charcoal is no longer needed. The film is about Belkacem's attempts to deal with the new situation and how this affects his relationship with his wife who finds herself empowered by the prospect of work for women in the new textile factory.

“This new cinema did not abandon allegiance to the cause of Algerian socialism, but with it a new style emerges, focussing on the agrarian revolution” (ibid). A new tone was apparent in Omar Gatlato (1977) the first feature directed by Merzak Allouache. The children of independence fighters having grown up, and the people of the villages have moved to the city. Algiers is no longer divided between the French and Arab quarters. For Omar, both the main character and narrator, the war is a childhood memory of his docker father killed in a port bombardment. His family is poor and depends on Omar's office job. He “attempts to be in control of his life but like everyone else is constrained by social rules” (Spaas). The film offers “a shrewd and humorous look at the lives of contemporary urban youths, at their open passion for music and their hidden fear of women.” Armes finds the assurance shown in Allouache's first film echoed in his subsequent features. “The late 70s also saw a whole range of films looking, at times with sociological exactness, at diverse areas of Algerian society.”

Merzak Allouache

A well-established Algerian writer Assia Djebar (1936-2015) made La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua/The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1978) in which she interweaves documentary and staged reconstruction of actual events. Nouba refers to a form of traditional music which allows Djebar to fragment the narrative to let women speak their stories in interviews woven into that of Layla returning from abroad with her child and paralysed husband.

Mohamed Chouikh/Choukri (1935-2003) began as a child actor and then an assistant director also becoming a writer best known for his autobiography 'For Bread Alone', directing his first feature Rupture/Breakdown in 1982 and then writing and directing what Lieve Spaas describes as “three remarkable films.” The first, La Citadelle (1988), begins with a long torch-lit procession above the village for newly married men who are being escorted to their wives waiting for them. The future spouses do not know each other. The film shows the dramatic and decisive moment when, upon lifting the veil, a disappointed husband's fury is unleashed. “The procession's long, slow descent is like a descent into an abyss in which the characters are trapped by a tyrannical social structure, […] marriage portrayed as the central despotic unit.” This is the prelude to the cruelly ironic main drama involving an impoverished outsider, too poor to have a bride, being the victim of a cruel joke involving a pseudo-marriage. “The film denounces the abusive power of an ideology that imposes a monolithic identity on all members of society (ibid). In the three films “Chouikh depicts the conflict between individual and group identity. In each case an individual “fails to find a society with which he can identify” that is respectively destructive.

Mohamed Chouikh

The third phase of Algerian cinema starting in 1976 lasting until the mid 80s, introduced new themes including the problems of young people, women and marginal groups. There was a greater integration of style and social issues (Spaas 135).

Independence under Sultan Mohammed V in 1954 did not imply any kind of social revolution in Morocco - a cinema of “diversity and changed rhythm” (Shafik). In terms of the film industry the state organisation continued with the forms and structures established when it was under colonial rule in 1944. Although Morocco had by far the richest set of production facilities and a distribution circuit of three hundred film theatres there was no state policy for the film industry which was entirely in the hands of private entrepreneurs. The rate of production was the lowest of the three Maghreb states The first feature was produced in 1968. “The most striking achievements were “a handful of somewhat esoteric works that show formal innovation unmatched in the Arab world” (Armes 213).

Social mutations mark the work of several filmmakers and give a picture of Moroccan cinema's search for identity (Spaas 149). The situation of women in Islamic society is the main focus in the films of Jilalli Ferhati Poupées de roseaux/River Dolls (1982) and La Plage des enfants perdus/The Beach of Lost Children (1991) and Farida Benlyazid* Une Porte sur le ciel/Gateway to Heaven (1988) while Mohamed Abderrahmane Tazi offers insight into the Moroccan underworld in Le Grand Voyage/The Big Journey (1981)

Souheil Ben Barka

For Armes “the difficulties of sustaining a political stance in the Moroccan situation are revealed clearly in the career of Souheil Ben Barka. He was trained at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and was assistant to several filmmakers including Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ben Barka's first film Les Mille et une mains/A Thousand and One Hands (1972) shows how social conditions drive people into criminal behaviour. In Les Mille, when a highly skilled worker in a carpet factory is killed in an industrial accident, a brutal reality is revealed, the employer refusing to take any responsibility for employee protection or paying compensation while also rejecting the son's request for employment. This drives him to angrily disfigure valuable carpet stock for which he is imprisoned. “Capitalist society is depicted as a ruthless machine in which only the rich and powerful are able to survive” (Shafik). The film with minimal dialogue attracted considerable international interest in European film festivals but failed in Morocco where it was subjected to some censorship leading Ben Barka, as a writer-director, to shift his priorities to making films for the European rather than initially for the Moroccan market.

Looking at Ben Barka's subsequent career (6 features 1975-2002) up to the fourth, Amok (1982), “a kind of updated version of Alan Paton's account of the horrors of apartheid, 'Cry the Beloved Country',” Roy Armes finds “treatments of the themes not matching their ambitions” (213). In contrast Armes adds that “another European-trained filmmaker Ahmed el-Maanouni emerged in 1978 with The Days, The Days/Alyam! Alyam! giving a vivid and effective semi-documentary look at the contradictions in Moroccan society.” In the late 70s a new trend developed in Moroccan cinema in “the adoption of a more ethnographic approach to film narrative, exemplified by Alyam! Alyam!, in which the director captures the reactions of a farming family in a traditional village when a young member, dreaming of a better life, wants to leave.

Many Moroccan films dealt with social themes. Moumen Smithi's El Chergui/The Violent Silence (1975) addresses polygamy in portraying a wife's efforts to stop her husband taking a second wife, ending in tragedy. Smithi rejected conventional film narrative as a product of Western bourgeois society, structuring his narrative around variations on a theme with the intention of generating new forms of thinking.

Roy Armes explains that no clear government priorities, as existed in Algeria, were to be found at independence in Tunisia where, as mentioned above, a film culture was spontaneously evolving. The Carthage Film Festival founded in 1966 was important for African cinema. Cost of production at the mammoth Gammarth studios, set up in 1965, failed to produce revenue in the 60s and 70s, output being limited to two features a year which in the circumstances tended to be isolated projects of considerable range such as Brahim Babai's neorealist inspired And Tomorrow?/ Wa ghadari? (1972) and Ridha Behi's attack on the cultural impact of tourism in Sun of the Hyenas / Shams al-dibaa (1977). Abdellatif Ben Ammar's 's two features Sejnane (1974) and Aziza (1980) were “probing examinations of Tunisian society.” Later “Nouri Bouzid established a quite distinctive and controversial voice in Arab cinema in his exploration “of many aspects of identity such as religion and sexuality, politics and the community one relates to” (Spaas) in Rih al-sadd/Man of Ashes (1986), Sofaith min dhahab/Golden Horseshoes (1989) and Beznes (192).

Moufida Tiatli

Moufida Tiatli, her first feature in collaboration with Nouri Bouzid, Les Silences du palais The Silences of the Palace (1994), successfully focused on the childhood and adolescence of the illegitimate daughter of a palace servant, while the well-known critic Ferid Boughedir made an equally successful personal first fiction feature with Halfaouine (1990) portraying the private world of a family and its immediate neighbourhood through the eyes of a young boy on the threshold of adulthood.

The Mashreq (the Arab East)

There were no national organisations for film production elsewhere in the Mashreq (the Arab East) to match those in Syria and Iraq. In both countries, national sovereignty was practically lost through conflict ending in fragmentation of political control. In Syria the Film Organisation was still supported while Bashar al-Assad held on to power, while film production was in a critical condition. Back in the 90s art house features depended on foreign funding to continue to be made. “Like a number of other Arab countries, the major problem for Arab 'auteur' films was their often difficult relationship with local audiences” (Shafik 267). Another critic, Mayyar al-Roumi, further suggested that filmmakers are “unwilling to understand and meet the needs [and expectations] of local audiences and have taken [too much inspiration] from Bresson and Tarkovsky in internalising the low-brow / high-brow schism, or have fallen prey to all too dominant post-colonial modernist dogmas of 'cultural progress'.” (ibid).

There had been no film production in Syria before World War II. Following independence in the 40s, Armes reports there was a brief flurry of film production activity financed by profits made during wartime trading but these initial efforts were unsuccessful and for a decade (1951-60) no features were completed.” Since the 1963 revolution, Syrian film had two faces. ”On the one hand there was a commercial sector employing expatriate Egyptians which echoed standard Egyptian formulas. On the other, a state organization with control over a limited production program of features and documentaries which, since 1970, offered young directors backing to make their first features” (ibid 268).The only Syrian filmmaker to establish an international reputation over the decade was documentarist, Umar Amiralay (b.1944), who studied at the IDHEC in Paris and made his only feature-length film, “a remarkable documentary study” in 1974, Daily Life in a Syrian Village/Al-hayat al-yawmiyya fi qaria suriyya (Armes 206). At this time production was intermittent in a cinema which was ultimately “left in locked embrace” (Shafik) with a system of state or self-censorship. Artists opposed to Assad's regime or Islamic State largely emigrated. Despite its critical condition before the breakout of revolt in 2011 a few of “what can be classified as art house features” were made (ibid 269).

Umar Amiralay

A more ambitious and sustained program of state-organised feature film production was followed in Iraq – ultimately “a failed national cinema” (Shafik). About 20 features were made before 1964 but the scope for exhibition was restricted to the national market due to difficulties elsewhere with the limited comprehensibility of the Iraqi Arabic dialect spoken in the films. There were also failed attempts in the wider market to link big budget co-productions with an authentic national identity (207).

In Lebanon, although cinema attendance in the 50s was the highest in the Arab world (nevertheless in a home market of limited size), film production remained artisanal in nature until the 1960s. State intervention in the Egyptian industry drove many Egyptian producers into exile raising levels of production in Lebanon. Roy Armes quotes a Lebanese critic, Jarod Fabre, writing in 1966, that “the greatest problem of the Lebanese cinema is its lack of national background.” Many former Egyptian assistant and technical staff and even actors had settled permanently in Lebanon with “a cinema in search of a common denominator” (Shafik) amidst cultural diversity in “a mediascape characterised by the cosmopolitanism of its elites.”

The 70s saw the emergence of number of Western trained Lebanese directors such as Borhane Alaouié (b.41) with Kafr kasem (1981) a “truly remarkable sombre feature length study of the massacre of a Palestinian community by Israeli troops in 1956” (Armes 206). Writer-director Maroun Baghdadi (1950-93), internationally, was the best known and most successful Lebanese filmmaker of his generation. Increasingly his 18 features as writer-director (and sometimes also producer), 1975-92, were French productions. His first feature, Beirut Oh Beirut/Begroutou el fika (1975), is “an acutely observed Beirut classic” about life in the city on the eve of the civil war praised for “eschewing polemics for universal human values.” French-produced Out of Life/Hors la vie (1991) based on the actual kidnapping of a French photographer, Roger Augue, was awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes. Following a series of short documentaries committed to chronicling the Palestinian struggles (1974-82) Jocelyn Saab* b.45 followed with a feature, The Razor's Edge (1985), set amidst the civil war in Lebanon combining live, staged and fantasy sequences.

A few talented individuals made their appearance elsewhere in the Mashreq. In Kuwait, Khalid Siddik (b.48), who studied at the Pune Film and television Institute in India, returned to make documentaries for television before finding backing for “two well-received fictional features,” The Cruel Sea/Bas ya bahr (1971) and a Kuwaiti-Sudanese co-production The Wedding of Zein (1976). A few years later, the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs, the subject of innumerable documentaries, found an authentic local voice in Michael Khleifi, born in Nazareth in 1950, studied in Belgium. His feature length documentary, Fertile Memory/Al-dhakira al-khhasba (1980), “revealed a talent to set alongside Alawiya and Umar Amiralay“ (both q.v.) (Armes 208).

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NB This bibliography relates to chapter 6(57) Egypt and the Arab World and chapter 6(58) above

Roy Armes Third World Film Making and the West 1987

____ ”The Arab World” in The Oxford History of World Cinema 1996 Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith p.661

Mark Cousins The Story of Film 2004 pp.240-2

Viola Shafik Arab Cinema History and Cultural Identity 2016

John Russell Taylor “The Night of Counting the Years “ Sight and Sound Winter 1970-1

Rod Bishop “Note on The Night of Counting the Years” Cinema Reborn 2018 online

Adel Darwish “Obituary: Salah Abu-Seif The Independent 27 June 1996 online

Hesham Taha “Obituary: Tawfiq Saleh ahramonline 29 August 2013 online

Lucia Sorbera, “Note on Al-Makhdu'un /The Dupes; Cinema Reborn 2024 online

Tahar Cherlaa “Saleh's Cinema as a political act” 1971 reprinted Cinema Reborn 2024 online