Western Need for Distance

Is there such a thing as "Islamic cinema"? Western critics struggle to get to grips with films made in the Islamic world. In this essay, art historian Hans Belting argues that the notion of Islamic cinema is a deceptive cliché

Directors from Arab nations have become a familiar aspect of the film world. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who now runs a flourishing film business with his daughters Samira and Hana, has long secured his place in our cinematic experience. But the question does however still persist – how can a film critic appraise a film by a director whose milieu he does not know, and whose work he can only judge by assigning it to one of the pigeon-holes on hand for regular (western) cinematic productions.

This question is tackled by a special edition of the British magazine "Third Text" (January 2010), on this occasion put together by a guest editor, the journalist and historian Ali Nobil Ahmad. The problematic nature of its choice of subject matter – "Cinema in Muslim Societies" – is expounded early on, with the statement in the introduction that Muslim societies in Asia, the Middle East or Africa are barely comparable.

As the publisher explains to one specialist who turned down the invitation to contribute to this edition, the intention of this volume is to unmask – in consideration of the many quite diverse societies thrown together within it – the category "Islamic cinema" as a cliché that merely satisfies a western need for distance.

The academic gravediggers of cinema

But above and beyond this, the publication examines the western view of film production that reflects a spectrum of quite different social realities, realities that are then defined as "Islamic". In his contribution Hamid Dabashi, a lecturer in Iranian Studies at New York's Columbia University, takes the debate over the film "Paradise Now" to task, a film that scooped a European Film Award for best screenplay in 2005, and a Golden Globe in 2006 for Best Foreign Language Film. Dabashi travelled to the Palestinian territories with the director Hany Abu-Assad, and acquainted himself with the experiences that underlie Abu-Assad's arrested aesthetics.

Dabashi claims that film critics, as well as the academic anthropology of Visual Studies, only considered the form of the work while suppressing its political dimension. In this way, he writes, film studies accelerate the "death of cinema", and ethnology becomes "a grotesque burial for every art form with which it deals", because it sucks up its life, with all its pain and its appetite, and neutralises the rebellious nature of the material. For this reason, writes Dabashi, one is professionally blinded to the Palestinian film with its "traumatic realism", in which a far-reaching "mimetic crisis" of the film genre reveals itself.

The dominance of the western viewpoint

This criticism goes far beyond the motives for making film and the film medium itself, because it repudiates the academic claim on interpretative primacy, something which non-western contemporary art in the age of globalisation is also subjected to. Even under the banner of liberality and openness, a divide is quickly reinstated between the western view and the rest of the world.

The divide becomes ever greater in places where film criticism, just as art criticism, is underdeveloped in newly industrialised nations and thereby professional appraisal again falls to the old guard. Not that the western view is gravely erroneous, it is actually basically inescapable for us, but we should not lose awareness of the fact that it is governed by western thought patterns and cannot do justice to other cultures and their visual traditions.

When it comes to films produced in the Arab world, it should be noted that they are not only produced for the western market and western interpreters, but also and primarily aimed at a large audience in the place where they are produced. The asymmetry that has emerged between reception at western film festivals and how a film is received locally is all the more obvious.

This again puts into perspective the advantage that film has over the art world, in that fine arts have to be sold on the market and exhibited in places that are only sought out by art consumers, places that in some newly-industrialised nations do not yet even exist. The film's chief concern is production costs that have to be recouped, funds that have often only materialised through cooperation with western foundations. As opposed to the fine arts, which remain an exclusive medium even at installation stage, a film is also appreciated by the society in which and for which it was made.

Forgotten question of images

The images question, which is being given more attention in the debate surrounding "Islam" at present, because it promises a swift orientation, is rarely applied to film, which only consists of images and should therefore be a top priority in consideration of this matter.

The impact of modern media and television means the practice of viewing images in public has prevailed even in places with no cinemas, in societies dominated by Islam. But this sort of image production follows visual conventions and is also subjected to political censorship or self-censorship.

In the meantime, films in these societies run the gamut from folklore to film art, fairytale film to allegorical drama and documentary film, by dismantling barriers that they no longer recognise. In their efforts to free themselves from the shadow of western film, directors produce work in which this alternative view is explicitly or implicitly so present, that it is not clear which of the regular film categorisations the directors have decided against, and misinterpretations, despite all enthusiasm for an exotic aesthetic, appear unavoidable.

Poetic visions and oral storytelling

In this respect, the volume under discussion is insightful because its contributors include several English nationals who are able to look beyond culturally determined borders. At this point we should mention authorities such as Roy Armes, who published a handbook for African filmmakers in 2008. In his text on the "poetic vision" of the great Nacer Khemir, born in Tunisia in 1948, he invokes statements by the filmmaker himself – that his narrative films live from the tradition of oral storytelling and rival the beauty of miniature painting – for example when they sketch the dream of an invisible garden.

Another contribution discusses the "golden age" of Pakistani cinema, followed since the 80s by a wave of films on horror themes. Rachel Dwywe, a lecturer in "Indian Cultures and Cinema" in London, examines neo-ethnic image politics in Hindi film. In this manner, the contributions soon reveal the wisdom of acquainting oneself with the cultures that are expressed in film. At its close, the volume makes light work of dispensing with the cliché of a monolithic "Islamic world".

Obsolete thought patterns

Rasheed Araeen, founder and long-time publisher of "Third Text" since 1987, has provided the world with a unique magazine for "critical perspectives on contemporary art and culture". While the concept of the Third World has in the meantime been rendered obsolete, it will be a while before perspectives from developing nations are.

The artist arrived in England as an immigrant from Pakistan in the 1960s. Once there, he clashed with the dominant art scene to the extent that he was barred from attending exhibitions. He responded by organising his own exhibitions presenting "the other story" behind modern art. As a gesture of solidarity with all colleagues in the art world who had experienced similar things, he also profiled himself now and again as "Black Artist", to highlight the fact that he was different.

His achievement at the helm of an opposition movement against exclusion by an official art scene – a scene that casts itself as universal – and against paternalism by a so-called modern art movement, is indisputable. His magazine, which has almost effortlessly maintained its intellectual level over the course of 102 editions (unfortunately it is rare to find it in libraries here in Germany), has also succeeded in exploding the ghettoisation of art and, as the contributions from writers and philosophers show, in appreciating art and culture as a unified whole.

Hans Belting

The art historian Hans Belting recently published the essay "Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks". (Florence and Baghdad. A West-Eastern History of Perception)

Translated from the German by Nina Coon

Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de

Qantara.de

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