This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

The post post Presents: Unsettled Dust—Archives, Epistemologies, Images appeared first on post.

In the middle of debris and ruin, the Seville Oranges (naranj) were shining from behind dusty leaves. And again it was pickaxes that would come down on the rooftops, and the mud brick and dirt that would fall.

—Ebrahim Golestan, From the Days Gone Narrate

The wind is blowing through the street, the beginning of ruination.

—Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season

Parviz Kimiavi’s 1973 film The Mongols is a collage of disparate images, sounds, and narrative components that come at the audience like a whirlwind. Produced by National Iranian Radio and Television, The Mongols revolves around various forms of “unearthing,” of old artifacts buried in the soil, of old medieval texts, of fragments of history (writing), of moving images from cinema technology, even its prehistory, and of the “new media” of the time, the television. There are two main characters in the film, a young filmmaker for the national television network (played by Kimiavi himself) and his wife (played by the late Fahimeh Rastkar), who is completing her doctoral research on the Mongol invasion of medieval Persia. As he avidly reads on film history and worries about his assignment to a remote and underdeveloped province, his world is invaded by phantasms of Mongol soldiers from the script of her unfinished dissertation. The “Mongols” of the film (who, as the opening scene reveals, are in fact nonactors recruited from ethnic Turkmens from the northeast of Iran), both spectral and documentary-like, make their first appearance in the present time at an excavation site, a ruin.

The Iranian New Wave, as that large and heterogeneous body of Iranian art films produced before the 1979 revolution came to be known, was besieged by ruins and ruination from the start. Retaining a faith in what Siegfried Kracauer (whose work at MoMA in the 1940s was a forerunner in thinking film history at a museum) saw as the cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality, this essay sets out to explore the cinematic renderings of the ruin and that of the body. ¹ The New Wave still occupies an unsettled space, at once affectionately remembered and orphaned. On the one hand, in Iran, it has finally gained an honored place in film historiography, represented in books and articles published every year in Persian. On the other hand, many of the New Wave’s great films still cannot be shown in Iran, just as the academic film historiography, presumably global now, has yet to give it a chance to find its deserving place within the international canon of art (read modernist) cinema. Almost all of the examples presented here are drawn from MoMA’s upcoming film series Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979, a selection unparalleled in its scope and insight. In time, certain material formations come to the fore in this piece—the ruin, the anguished body, the museum display, the mud-brick wall, the old neighborhood passageway. ²

Persepolis (Fereydoun Rahnema, 1960)

Fereydoun Rahnema’s 1960 essay film Persepolis is constructed as a lyrical portrayal of the most iconic archaeological site in contemporary Iran, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). Persepolis is drenched in a sense of historical loss and grief. The destruction of the palace, which the voice-over declares was once a garden, is evoked through the imagery, music, and sound. The scale of ruin is expansive. Not naming the invading army responsible, adding so subtly yet another shade to the film’s overall ambiance of ambiguity, the tragedy of destruction is instilled into all of Iranian history, if not into all history.

The expansion of the temporality of destruction across the ages means opening the door to another form of allegorical arrangement, that of the slow destruction, the decay. Differentiated from abrupt “destruction by man,” the decay (in a built structure) is, for Georg Simmel, significant as it was brought about by the nonconscious, yet creative, forces of nature.³Persepolis dwells on the gradual, still ongoing, destruction brought on by the elements. Nature is still advancing over the ruin, a reality emphasized not only by the voice-over narrative but also by the images of broken stone, stumps of pillars amid grass and flowers, shots of small animals wandering about the place, birds singing, sounds of wind and water.

The sight of antiquity here interrupts the continuity of the present time. Ruined structures, ancient or modern, it should be remembered, evoke other lives and worlds. Again, as Simmel saw it, the genuine ruin (ancient and decayed but not yet rendered unrecognizable in its fundamental formal features) creates “the present form of a past life,” and it does so in the fashion of “an immediately perceived presence.”⁴ But in the place where Simmel looked for “balance,” “unity of form,” “metaphysical calm,” and the reconnections of nature and the spirit in the face of opposition and conflict, cinema is capable of opening radical fissures even as it brings together. And so in Persepolis the ruin of the past, set against a forceful and lively present time, emerges as a ghostly interruption.

The Hills of Marlik (Ebrahim Golestan, 1963)

This year,

last year,

thousands and thousands of years,

With the wind, the smell of pine’s oldness. . .

These words begin Golestan’s 1963 documentary The Hills of Marlik. Repeated again and again, these words mark the film as one concerned with temporality. The images preceding these words are of a pair of hands piecing together the broken parts of what seems to be an ancient artifact. A man sitting by a stream, the camera reveals. When this (re)assemblage is finished, a shot of a stylized clay pitcher placed by the water. “This year, last year, thousands and thousands of years . . .” We see a group of men, the archaeological excavation team of Marlik, with their small picks and brushes, unearthing the remains of a human skeleton. Suddenly, to the cue of a developing atonal music, a wipe cut radically changes the setting. The new scene is opened by a traveling camera moving through a dark space, passing by rows of objects suspended in the air. This twofold engagement with “archaeology” and the “museum display,” this fascination with excavation, with bringing old objects into the present time, shaped in the formative years of the New Wave, was to come back in its later years again and again.

The scenes built around displayed artifacts in The Hills of Marlik establish Golestan’s montage virtuosity beyond the field of word and syntax. The film’s “museum display sequences” principally consist of images of sharply lit excavated objects suspended in the air and filmed in various angles and from changing distances, at times moving and at other times static. They have an ethereal appearance against a background that is immaculately black. These museum sequences are striking in their broad array of editing and lighting arrangements, camera movements, and optical printing methods; the cinematic techniques put on display, most of them drawn from the inventory of cinematic modernism, include jump cuts, traveling shots, close-ups, extreme close-ups, stop-motion cinematography, dissolves, and fades. The “museum pieces” spread and are scattered, with or without justification from the voice-over commentary, into the rural landscape, appearing within or next to images of the villagers standing in front of their mud-brick homes. A result of these unexpected juxtapositions is a collage-like quality. In the face of this high degree of fragmentation, it is the flawless blackness of the background and Golestan’s words that conceive connection and lucidity.

In The Hills of Marlik, the image offered of (Iranian) history is one of loss and rupture. Reminiscent of Persepolis, the excavated skeletons, the ancient objects displayed on museum pedestals, and, above all, the commentary, point to a long process of destruction and decay. “History was lost, the cast became dust, and head that was the bowl of thought is no more.” The calamity, the voice-over continues, perhaps started by terror of an invasion from the outside, by a “tribe,” an “evil idea,” a “deceiving tyrant.” The gravest consequence of this history of disintegration and ruination is the disappearance of “seeing” and its interchangeable properties of “thinking” and “giving birth” (zaeeidan). But, suddenly, in the midst of this thousand-year-long destruction, the possibility of renewal. Golestan’s poetic discourse gives the promise of a life-giving force that can come, across the boundary of time, to this land. “May the ancient roots blossom again! May the god of seed salute the valley! May the eyes see! And seeing becomes life anew.”

The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1963)

Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black starts with Ebrahim Golestan’s voice. Golestan’s detached commentary offers a brief introduction to leprosy, stating that what is going to be seen is “an image of an ugliness” and a “vision of a pain.” What follows is an intricate and dense twenty-minute-long film with multiple currents and countercurrents in imagery, sound, and verbal components. We glance the people who inhabit the never-named leper colony going about their daily activities, attending classes and prayer sessions, standing still, undergoing medical treatments. With The House, Farrokhzad introduced the two elements of body and religious motifs into the Iranian New Wave. Farrokhzad reads from the Old Testament: “For I’ve been made in strange and frightening shape. My bones were not hidden from you when I was being created in the hidden, and was being molded in the bowels of the earth.” In The House the body is diseased, photographed, and in ruin. The dominant human body here is a figure of excess, its flesh either constantly in lack or in overflow. This is a body in complete alterity to that healthy productive body of progressive history, an ideal that modern Iran has been fully committed to for a very long time. The human body’s excess here is also a feature of the uncanny. A lot of things in The House cannot be explained with certainty, and to this, the foregrounding of the body element contributes. The diseased human body, then, adds to the film’s photographic realism as well as to its undoing. Like in ancient ruins, the flesh in its very materiality is a register of temporality. Through time the elements leave their marks on our bodies, and so does the process of aging. Scars leave their sign on the skin, and passage of time deepens the lines. But in The House Is Black, the life of the lepers has altered these processes. The age of many of the subjects filmed cannot be easily determined. Although there is an awareness of temporality that comes with the effects of decay, the historical trajectory that the decay has taken remains unclear.

As a lyrical avant-garde work, the body of the filmic text in The House Is Black is also a ruin. It is as though the filmic text itself, like the bodies inhabiting it, is constantly on the verge of overspill and breakage. Passing glimpses of people, body parts (or their absence), trees, water, and animals seem to have been amassed free of narrative considerations and more for rhythmic and affective impact. The sound and Farrokhzad’s voice-over contribute to the rhythm but seldom, if at all, coincide with the diegetic space. In one of the earliest scenes in The House, a man dressed in rags is shown walking back and forth in front of a building, at every few steps, reaching and touching ever so lightly the brick wall of the dilapidated structure. The facade, made of bricks and windows, stretches from one side of the frame to near infinity. Over this intriguing scene, Farrokhzad’s voice slowly reads the names of the days of the week again and again: “Saturday . . . Sunday . . . Monday . . .” and so on. The world of The House Is Black seems to revolve around the cyclical time of the myth and not a progressive one, and that, too, is a messenger of horror.

The Wind of Jinn (Nasser Taghvai, 1969)

The 1969 documentary The Wind of Jinn, by Nasser Taghvai, brings together our two themes, the ruined built structure and the body. The Wind of Jinn’s opening scene is of waves from the sea hitting a harbor town that appears to be emptied of its inhabitants. Mixing with the sound of waves is the sound of wind. The voice-over, this time belonging to Ahmad Shamlou, an icon of modern Persian poetry, gives somewhat of an introduction to the place. “In the broken and ruined port of Lengeh still comes the sound of relentless battle, of waves and the rocks of shores without men.” What follows are shots of decaying buildings, alleyways, and dusty cemeteries. With the images of ruination, the soundtrack picks up a lullaby in a mournful female voice (remarkably reminiscent of Rahnema’s Persepolis). Here, too, as in The Hills of Marlik and Persepolis, the ruin simultaneously points to a past synonymous with life and to the long process of decay that has followed.

The male voice-over’s grieving is also for the “Southern Blacks” and their pains. The Winds, specially the one called the Wind of Jinn, are said to be responsible for the outburst of untold maladies among the remaining populace as well as for the destruction of the port city. Amid the death and decay, though, the locals have found the remedy, a gift deposited within those who (reportedly) have come from the shores of Africa. It is not that the Winds did not exist before the arrival of the Africans, as the commentary intriguingly discloses, but that they had remained “unknown,” “like the power in a diseased body, like the oil under the sea, like consciousness in the head of the uncultured.” The Winds have existed for a long time but they needed the “tradition of the Black” in order to become known, as that tradition was able to recognize the “resemblance” and become the healer. The healing was in mimesis.

From its highly fragmented early scenes of fallen alleyways and objects, The Wind of Jinn moves on to a relatively long possession/exorcism sequence. If so far the film has been finding pleasure in the haunting beauty of open spaces, of stormy seas and deserted shores, with the possession scene we move into the closed space of a crowded room. Slowly some in the group start to move to the center of the room, their bodies convulsing at an increasing rate. Cutaway shots to the ruins outside interrupt the flow of the visual and soundtracks alike. Is there a link between the two? Others in presence stand to shroud the bodies of those in trance, to assist and comfort them, covering them with white sheets. The film ends with a shot of a man wrapped in the middle of the room, as the lullaby we heard earlier returns.    

Arbaeen (Nasser Taghvai, 1970)

The young director of The Wind of Jinn made a number of the most influential documentaries of the New Wave, some of which are among the best representatives of the subgenre of ritual films, a category that centers on bodies more than others. Taghvai’s Arbaeen starts with a slow zoom in on an illuminated object in the middle of a large room, a small replica of a Shia shrine. The music has already started and the image cuts to a small dusty back alley where men are beating on large drums. Arbaeen is going to be the first documentary discussed in this essay that does not have a voice-over commentary. Until this point, the camera is handheld and the whole scene has a rather informal touch. Then, suddenly, as soon as we might think we are seeing an Iranian equivalent of direct cinema, another scene opens that launches the film’s predilection for fragmentation and stylization. An abrupt cut to a black fabric edged with flowers and Qur’anic scripture is followed by a quick succession of shots of stained glass. These backlit glass windows, perfectly symmetrical and two-dimensional, appear to be suspended against the pitch black framing them. This “stained glass segment” in Arbaeen corresponds with what I refer to as the “museum aesthetics” of the New Wave.

Soon after, the scenery changes to a large, brightly lit interior, and the ritual sequence, or what I see as the film’s “body sequence,” begins. In contrast to the streets outside, the interior space is male territory. Its inhabitants form circles around circles, each with one hand holding the next person in line, and with the other, beating his bare chest in a steady beat. In this sequence, by far the longest in the film, the human body not only becomes central thematically, it also bursts onto the screen in its very materiality. With the arrival of this sequence, the film’s rhythm slows down; longer takes take precedence, and the camera’s gaze follows the mourners. Longer duration of the shots and their deep focus allow the viewer to see significantly more. This affirmation of the visual evidence becomes even more intimate as the camera slowly moves closer and closer to the center of the room and among the men engaged in the ritual. Different body types, skin textures, muscle contractions, the shine of sweat, bodily eccentricities, occasional tattoos become visible. As the men beat their bare chests, the redness of the skin where their hands hit comes into view. Moreover, this act of hitting the upper body, simultaneously measured and improvisational, personal and collective, produces another effect, a rhythm. The rhythm generated here, itself in a “dialogue” with the sad lament sang by the singer, sets the tempo for the group’s movement in the pro-filmic world and, in turn, informs the pace of the film. Both the activities of the crew at the moment of filming, as Jean Rouch’s utopian ideas on cine-trance remind us, and the choices made at the editing table are affected by the sounds and movements produced by the bodies of mourners, in a somewhat diffused form of materiality proclaiming and “redeeming” itself. That bodily movements and sounds produced by the “subjects” being filmed have an impact on the documentary/ethnographer filmmakers (sound as well as filming crew) might be by now a part of an old wisdom, an old wish of the participatory cinema and its kin in the ideal of “shared anthropology.” The idea is still alive, though, even if we only take up Rouch’s thesis on “cine-trance” at its minimum reach, and not its maximalist dream of complete dissolve in the native’s ritual.

In Arbaeen, nonetheless, the movement toward more detail and visibility is paralleled by something different: a drive toward fissure and instability. As the ritual continues, as the mourners’ circular movement intensifies, the camera gets closer and closer to its subjects. As expected, this closeness first brings more clarity of sight, which can continue only to a point as, after a while, the now fast-moving hands and torsos start to fall out of focus and become a blurred mass. This arrangement of bodies enmeshed into one another, organized in tight circular lines ringing other circles made of human forms, as though in a whirlwind of flesh, becomes a visual celebration of the possibility of collectivity.

The Brick and the Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1964)

Already well-known as a writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan made his first fiction feature The Brick and the Mirror in 1964. The film opens with a long take of a busy Tehran street, the only thing visible at night, the city’s lights and cars in sharp black and white. What follows is a long driving sequence. Passing cars, flickering streetlights, rotating neon signs, their hazy reflections. The driver switches between radio stations. As the car travels through the city, it is called over by a female voice: “Taxi!” The driver pulls over and a woman covered in a black chador, played by Forough Farrokhzad, gets into the back seat. The destination turns out to be a faraway neighborhood, desolate, only half-built and half-lit. The car stops on a road next to a mud-brick wall. When the woman exits and disappears into the night, the driver realizes that she has left behind a child. He runs into the thick of the dark and enters what appears to be a ruined building. This desolate structure is inhabited by three ghostly characters: an older woman, a disabled man, and a pregnant woman. The older woman is waiting for her son to come back, the younger woman is languishing in the dream of her husband’s return, and the disabled man, too, is hoping that the older woman’s son, “his friend,” is going to come back one day. At the same time, the first woman seems to believe in something else: “Here is a ruin. Nobody comes here.”

But the ruin in The Brick and the Mirror is a ruin with a difference. Golestan, on different occasions, has used the same term, as in a booklet accompanying the film’s release, while also contesting the designation at other times by insisting that it was an “unfinished home.” This inconsistency is perhaps a continuation of the larger semantic uncertainties of the ruin as an idea, a representation, and as a material formation. The discrepancy we face in the accounts of the building in this most hard-to-pin-down scene in The Brick and the Mirror might not be a bad thing. Between a ruin and an “unfinished home” is, in their existence in the lexicon and beyond, I believe a built-in tension that when further aggravated will bear good results for critical analysis.

An unfinished structure looks to the future. That is to say that it is shadowed by a particular, more flamboyant futurity invested in the site from the moment its material construction begins. An unfinished building is not only different from the ruins of antiquity (like Persepolis in Rahnema’s documentary) but also different from the ruins with chronicles of ruination falling within modern times in one way or another. The unfinished structure, unlike other ruins of modernity, has hardly had its chance under the sun to experience the effects of decay and destruction, natural or otherwise.⁵

Rendering an unfinished building as the ruin, in naming, in conception, contains within it a buried critique of the original project of chronological progress. If the classical ruin in its romantic representation stands as a testimony to the transient nature of history, the unfinished structure as ruin points to the blind eye of the faith in the future. If, as Golestan insists, the building in The Brick and the Mirror’s ruin scene is “a home unfinished,” it is one with all its deformities, in fact stillborn. The stairways cut across darkness, connecting the different floors, the driver with the child in his arms traverses them, only to find out that each layer holds very little except stories of separation. The old woman, her figure and voice progressively disembodied:

Poor souls, they still are hopeful.

But nobody is coming back.

Here was once farmland.

One day they came and sold it all.

The wheat and barley were ready to seed.

But one day they came

with steel. 

The ruin scene in The Brick and the Mirror, standing somewhat apart from the film’s plot and overall style, might be the only passage in the film conjuring a pre-urban past and, in so doing, carries a particular weight. The unfinished structure built on farmland is now standing on the edges of an ever-expanding metropolis. The walls of the city that emerged from the destruction not only divided people from each other but also discursively fractured the temporality of the place. The two distinctive worlds created live simultaneously side by side in their materiality as well as, ethereally, in memory.

In Tehran, too, the country plays hide-and-seek with the city, as Walter Benjamin once observed on Moscow.⁶ The perception that the great metropolis by the Alborz mountain range is divided by a multiplicity of temporal planes finds its most well-known dualistic manifestation in the division between the South and the North. In many regards, this is a split that projects inward the already existing division between the rural and the urban. The “south of the city” stands for the working class, underdevelopment, narrow alleyways (koochehs), buildings in decline, mosques and calls to prayer, men with black open shirts, fallen women, women with chadors, camaraderie, but also poverty, lonely souls, crowds, and crime. South of the City was also the name of a 1958 film by Farrokh Ghaffari, a film that could have been regarded as the Iranian New Wave’s first fiction feature if its negatives had not been destroyed by the authorities.

The Brick and the Mirror ends where it begins, on a busy street with a woman in a black chador calling, “Taxi!” It is getting dark and Hashem is sitting behind the wheel of his car. But right before the final scene, there is another scene. In this scene before the last, the female protagonist enters the orphanage where, earlier in the day, her lover had abandoned the child. Inside she discovers countless little children on different floors. Some in groups on the floor, some in tightly set rows of beds, some smiling, some crying. Most look back at the camera. Many of the kids have an unusual repetitive body movement, back and forth, back and forth. With these images of entrapment and anguish it is as though The Brick and the Mirror opens a door to The House Is Black.

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

Then, in The Cow I moved a little more daring and fearless. In The Cow I was even able to create metaphysical and surreal ambiences, or the ambience of meaningful silences. —Dariush Mehrjui⁷

The most celebrated film of the Iranian New Wave until not long ago, Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow has a simple narrative. ⁸ It is a story of a village, unnamed and unlocated, a man living in that village called Mashhadi Hassan, and his cow. One night when he is away, his cow dies. The villagers at first try to hide the bad news from him but to no avail. Mashhadi Hassan metamorphoses into something new, something frightening. In both its narrative and its visuality, The Cow shows a disposition for shedding the “nonessential” to the point that only the formative outlines of the story or image remain. Instead of resulting in simplicity, however, the film’s fascination for austere structures produces a form of stylization.

These austere sets, especially those in the exterior shots of the village, contribute greatly to the film’s particular and hard-to-forget look. ⁹The walls, the houses, and the alleys they create, are made of mud bricks covered with a coating of mud plaster. This adobe material is formed into smooth curvaceous surfaces. The adobe soil is of course a common element used in buildings in Iran (and around the world). It is used as bricks and plaster. Until recently, in rural Iran particularly, unbaked soil mixed with dry hay was the basic building material (called kah-gel). In their earthlike tone and texture, and in their association with the homes of the “down-to-earth people,” these materials of construction stand for authenticity in architecture and in culture. In many of the New Wave films shot in the countryside, mud bricks and mud plaster are inevitably part of the scenery; in that, Mehrjui’s The Cow is an exception only because of the overwhelming degree of this visibility of earth, mud, and dust.

Even before Mehrjui made his classical New Wave film, the adobe earth had entered, discursively and in its very physicality, the world of Iranian visual modernism. Marcos Grigorian (1925–2007) stands as a great example. A graduate of Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti, Grigorian returned to Iran in 1954 and immediately became influential as an artist, teacher, and gallery owner. He was among the earliest proponents of “traditional” and “naïve” creative practices like the local popular genre known as “coffee house painting,” which often uses themes and motifs from Persian literature and mythology as well as Shia hagiology. The soil, in which dissolved the expressionism of Grigorian’s early years in Italy, became increasingly important in his milieu from the early 1960s onward, the time span that also saw the emergence of the New Wave. This creative use of Iran’s “parched earth and mud” by Grigorian can be seen in such works as Kharg Island (1963), Spiral (1967), and Desert (1972), eventually culminating in a series entitled Earthworks. Made out of adobe soil, at times mixed with dry hay, that other old-fashioned building material, Grigorian’s Earthworks are distinguished by a minimalism that allows the texture of the adobe, cracked and rustic, to come to the fore. At the same time, the compositional sparseness takes in simple rectangular or curved shapes. Rectangles framing other rectangles and circles.

Curvaceous and symmetrical at the same time, the sunbaked walls and rooftops of the “décor” in Mehrjui’s film have a pronounced presence in most of the scenes. The characters of the story, the villagers, are filmed against them, more often in frontal tableau-like shots. The facades of the humble homes crafted out of these adobe walls and roofs are also symmetrical, complicated by curves of windows and arches. Though time after time, through cinematography and lighting, the surfaces of the buildings are framed in such a manner as to separate them from their surroundings, a strategy that creates geometrically minimal graphics. Unlike in Grigorian’s paintings/installations, in Mehrjui’s films the rectangular orifices of windows and doors constantly slip into the narrative as openings into other spaces. Within multiple mediums, whether on celluloid, on the walls of country homes, or on the walls of art galleries, this quotidian building material was entangled with a literary-ethnographic register.

The transmutation that the grieving Mashhadi Hassan undergoes is of the most radical form, affecting him both within and without. It is a source of unimaginable agony for him and the people around him, and it places the film’s narrative on a new, unexpected course. When he is told of his cow’s death, Mashhadi Hassan refuses to accept the calamity and begins to change. He becomes the dead animal. An inventory of bodily excess is put on display, rolling eyes, crying aloud, head hitting against walls, eating cattle feed, howling. Is this a story of a spirit possession or one of a metamorphosis? Part of the strangeness of the film comes exactly from the tension between these two modes of alterity-becoming, from the fact that it is both. Like in possession/trance films, Mashhadi Hassan’s condition finds its primary medium in the body. If mimesis in possession rituals is a performance/dance of empowerment over an alterity (à la Michael Taussig), in The Cow it leads to the horrors of alienation. 

Soon after the release of The Cow, in 1971 Mehrjui made The Postman (Postchi) based on Georg Büchner’s stage play Woyzeck. The story of The Postman takes place in the countryside, unfolding, at least on one level, along a country-city schema. This is a dynamic that is also at play within the two other features directed by Mehrjui before the Revolution, Mr. Simpleton (1970) and The Cycle (1974). In all of these films made after The Cow, a major part of the tragedy, the modern horrors befallen on the characters’ lives, comes not just from the opposition between the country and the city, but, more exactly, from the predestined victory of the latter over the former. The Cycle, based on a script cowritten with Saedi, is yet another celebrated film of the New Wave taking up the tragic theme of the arrival in Tehran. The film begins with images of a young man and an ailing old man against an industrial landscape and ends with the son looking on as his father is buried in a desolate landscape. What takes place in between is the story of their fall, physical and moral, in an urban scene overwhelmed by deceit and corruption.

Film and History in Pieces

Ruins are at the heart of Kimiavi’s cinema, including in The Mongols, the film with which we opened this essay. They are the sites of illegal excavations, where the Mongols, invaders from another time and place, first arrive in the flesh. The landscape, at once breaking into the vision of the filmmaker-turned-protagonist (played by Kimiavi himself, you remember) and into the body of the film, is mainly made of sand dunes minimal in composition and colors, and the scattered, decaying ruins of mud-brick structures. There is also a guillotine, a device more associated with modern France and its terrors than with the Mongol armies of the past, but also the capacity of the cinematic apparatus for cutting and montage. In some shots, the blade of the guillotine is replaced with a TV monitor, as the filmmaker lies down in the place of the condemned.

Kimiavi had engaged before with the imagery of archaeology and museums, the two closely related material formations with the New Wave from its inception, shaping its thematic and aesthetic contours. In 1969 his highly playful and lyrical documentary The Hills of Gheytarieh begins with these words: “We are in touch, with the world of the dead, with those who were lost in history. We renew our historical affinity.” Produced by National Iranian Radio and Television, it is a film that brings together excavation scenes and museum imagery (as did The Hills of Marlik before it). The film depicts an excavation team at work at an archaeological site. Batches of three-thousand-year-old artifacts are unearthed in pieces and then put back together. Meanwhile, in a movement in reverse, the film breaks up the pro-filmic world and then reassembles it. Showing a degree of self-consciousness and autocriticism both toward the medium of cinema and what we now call the heritage/memory industry, The Hills of Gheytarieh takes up an ironic tone in its museum scene, evoking an art auction through its accompanying soundtrack. The critical angle, however, is more apropos to the loss of “authenticity,” indeed, the loss of “life” of the appropriated artifacts.

The last things before the last. In The Mongols, excavating old artifacts includes unearthing old film and media. In many ways a found-footage film, the images are taken out of their contexts and reassembled. We see men dressed in some local attire from the eastern parts of Iran digging holes in the ground in search of ancient artifacts and, suddenly, the Mongols. The film’s treatment of film history moves in parallel to what these men are doing, back in time, as a form of excavation of “primitive” relics. So what comes to the fore, breaking the continuity of the present time, is an onslaught from the cinema’s primal years and the precursors to the apparatus: Eadweard Muybridge’s horses and men; Georges Demenÿ uttering, “Je vous aime!” in 1891; and William Kennedy Dickson’s The Gay Brothers (c. 1896), among others. The ancient relics taken out of the dry earth and the earliest moving images of history emerge, in Raymond Williams’s prediction, as “sources and as fragments against the modern world.”¹⁰The newness of media, like television and cinema before it, are confirmed (in their impact) and thrown into question (in the recurrence of their forms and conditions). Film and media archaeology before its time.

In Memory of Dariush Mehrjui (1939-2023).

This article is published in conjunction with the most comprehensive survey of Iranian pre-revolutionary cinema ever assembled in North America, “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925-1979,” on view at MoMA in October and November 2023. The series is organized by guest curator Ehsan Khoshbakht, Codirector, Il Cinema Ritrovato, with Joshua Siegel and La Frances Hui, Curators in the Department of Film at MoMA.

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Akram Zaatari’s mixed-media installation Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) was first presented in the Lebanese Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. The pavilion was housed in one of the Arsenale’s warehouse-scale galleries. At one end, a large projection looped a thirty-five-minute digital video, while at the other, a 16mm film was projected onto a vertical slab rising from the floor. Oriented toward the latter was a single spotlighted cinema seat, which was upholstered in an inviting, deep red. Eight circular flat-topped stools were scattered around the space. Containing remnants of both the cinema house and the media gallery, the installation’s carefully conceived architecture signaled the breadth of Zaatari’s influences and references. Its construction and configuration drew on the history of cinema as well as the now widespread phenomenon of projection-based works made for gallery spaces, placing it within a genealogy of expanded media practices that marked a historical break from cinematic illusionism. In this brief text, I explore the installation’s citation of multiple media apparatuses and the conceptual implications of its archival and narrative engagements while contextualizing it within the trajectory of Zaatari’s artistic practice.

Arguably the core of the installation, the projected video opens with the whir of a motor and a blurry image that soon comes into focus, seemingly the feed from a camera attached to a drone that lifts off the tiled roof of a modernist building and rises well above what appears to be a Lebanese city, most likely Beirut or Saida. A series of disparate images and materials are presented one after another, including the opening pages of Le Petit Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupéry and photographs from the artist’s personal and family albums. The latter offer glimpses into Zaatari’s childhood years in Saida, where he spent a considerable amount of time in the gardens of the Saida Public Secondary School for Boys, which his father founded. The titular narrative of the “refusing pilot” involves an Israeli Air Force pilot who, during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, defied orders to bomb a building in Saida that he recognized from the air as either a school or hospital. Another pilot sent to complete the mission bombed the school a few hours later. This anchoring story evades explicit narration until the very end of the video, though Zaatari offers clues and alludes to it through archival fragments and aerial views, images, and sounds.

Letter to a Refusing Pilot stages a negotiation between rumor, memory, evidence, and the archive, revealing a tenuous and temporally extended process of revisiting and reconstructing a past that has consistently evaded official historical record and is increasingly being reinterpreted and represented through imaginative acts of artistic mediation. Zaatari’s installation needs to be read in tandem with the larger body of work he has produced since the 1990s, which engages questions of materiality, methods of assembly, and modes of display while working with archival media and documentary forms. Zaatari studied architecture in Beirut and media studies in New York before returning to Lebanon and working for a television network (Future TV) owned by former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005.¹ This early engagement with television significantly shaped his thinking and artistic formation. In the context of an early work All Is Well on the Border Front (1997), Zaatari discusses the case of Lebanese resistance fighters and former political prisoners whose accounts were often manipulated and broadcast on television as pictures of patriotic heroism that entirely ignore the enormous psychological and physical damage inflicted upon their subjects.² 

Born in 1966, Zaatari grew up in a middle-class family in the southern Lebanese city of Saida while it was under Israeli occupation. He was sixteen and already a keen photographer when the Israeli invasion of 1982 took place. Standing on the balcony of his family’s apartment, he recorded the sounds of fighter planes flying overhead, and photographed smoke rising from the hillsides surrounding his hometown as Israeli bombs struck. A selection from this series of photographs, which he plucked from his personal albums, was composited to create Saida June 6, 1982 (2006), a work that depicts numerous explosions around Saida over an extended period of time in a single frame. These photographs were then transferred onto 16mm film to create the filmic component in Letter to a Refusing Pilot. In the projected video across the gallery, other materials from Zaatari’s personal archive appear, including a text entry from his brother’s diary, dated July 2, 1982, which, accompanied by a newspaper cutout of an image of an Israeli jet, reads, “Today my father took us to visit the school, which was damaged during an airstrike, and Akram took a few pictures.”³ In the video’s closing moments, an Israeli news broadcaster tells of the bombings of Ain El-Hilweh camp, a stronghold of the Palestinian resistance located adjacent to the school.

Zaatari grew up with various versions of the refusing pilot’s story. He recalls hearing from his uncle of a former Lebanese Jew turned Israeli pilot who had attended school in Saida and refused to bomb his alma mater, instead dropping the explosives into the sea. In fact, the school was bombed, purportedly by another pilot sent to complete the mission abandoned by his colleague. Yet the rumor—a touching tale of wartime empathy, childhood attachment, and a somewhat naïve expression of peaceful coexistence in the Levant—persisted. Zaatari recounts the tale in A Conversation with an Imagined Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi (2010–12), the published script of a staged public conversation between him and Mograbi, two real filmmakers assuming fictional identities in a bid to overcome the seeming impossibility (both logistical and conceptual) of conversing openly across enemy lines.⁴ Seth Anziska, then a doctoral candidate in International History at Columbia University conducting research on the 1982 occupation, found himself flipping through the pages of Zaatari’s new book at the Arab Image Foundation, an organization co-founded by the artist in 1997 that seeks to, “collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora.”⁵ As he reached the section where Zaatari mentions his uncle’s telling of the refusing pilot story, Anziska was immediately reminded of a research interview he had conducted in Jaffa, Israel, two years before.⁶ The subject was an architect named Hagai Tamir—a pilot in the Israeli Air Force during the bombing campaign in question—who told of his own refusal to carry out a mission when he recognized (based on his professional training) that the target was a school. Stripping the rumor of the flourishes it had acquired during the course of its decades-long circulation, including the pilot’s Lebanese Jewish heritage and personal attachment to the school in question, it matched Tamir’s telling perfectly, setting off a chain of events that connected Zaatari to Tamir and catalyzed the making of Letter to a Refusing Pilot.

The multimedia work’s reference to both cinema history and the capabilities of digital video are palpable and deliberate, specifically a combination of montage and editing techniques that allows multiple views and times to be compressed and displayed in a single frame. The lone cinema seat, the whirring projector, and the grainy images from Zaatari’s personal archive–deliberately transferred to 16mm film–evoke the cinematic apparatus, while occupying a larger installation that moves away from nostalgia and commemoration toward an incisive inquiry into the image itself. An influential figure in this regard, and a recurring reference for Zaatari, is French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (born 1930), whose ambitious Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) is a fitting culmination to a practice that has straddled both film and video, traversing the traditionally distinct genres of narrative, avant-garde, and documentary.⁷ Godard’s 2004 film Notre Musique explicitly addresses questions of violence and its cinematic representation, making reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the following terms: “In 1948, the Israelites walked in the water towards the Promised Land. The Palestinians walked in the water to drown. Shot and reverse shot. Shot and reverse shot. The Jewish people join fiction. The Palestinian people, the documentary.”⁸

Godard uses the language of mainstream commercial film editing to compare the historical fates of two peoples affected by a state of constant conflict. Ultimately, fiction is the idiom of victors and documentary that of the oppressed. Overturning this hierarchy, a political gesture in its own right, is where Zaatari and Godard intersect. In Zaatari’s work, the coalescence—of private and public, records from both sides of the border, mainstream media accounts, the archives of the Arab Image Foundation, personal photographs, recollections, and possessions—and the corresponding subversion of victor and victim archetypes are orchestrated through mixed-media constructions that engage in historical speculation and perform an archaeology of rumor, one that has only recently been verified as fact.

On a related note, the negotiation between analog and digital formats, in the contexts of storage, preservation, and use, finds some reflection in Zaatari’s changing view of the role, priorities, and modus operandi of the Arab Image Foundation. A decade ago, he proposed that the Foundation digitize its collection and then return the photographs to the contexts they originally inhabited (a family album, a bedroom wall), where they may ultimately meet their end.⁹ This proposal, rejected by the Foundation’s current members, reflects a preoccupation with de-fetishizing the photograph as a collectible to be preserved for its material qualities and perishable nature. Instead, the proposed digital archive would continue to provide material with which to work, its critical potential resting on gestures of juxtaposition, montage, and the creation of new constellations of image, text, sound, and storytelling located at a strategic distance from the dominant narratives rehearsed and replayed by the mass media. Zaatari’s installation profanes every apparatus it engages—cinema, television, radio—rendering their constitutive elements as tropes within the space of the installation.¹⁰ In this, the work unseats the unproductive and facile binary between “passive” and “active” spectatorship, the former associated with cinema and the latter with a multimedia installation that prompts movement.¹¹ The composite media installation in a darkened room—itself an interstitial space between “black box” and “white cube”—with its challenge to both conventional cinema and the ideologically inflected gallery, is the setting in which Zaatari’s work is sited and experienced.

T. J. Demos’s arguments in The Migrant Image—The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (2013) acknowledge recent artistic innovation in the face of a formidable “challenge [to] traditional documentary conventions, in order to investigate what political value accrues from those innovative strategies that negotiate the limits of representation yet nevertheless bring visibility to those who exist in globalization’s shadows.”¹² Demos’s discussion of the exhibition Out of Beirut, held at Modern Art Oxford in 2006, is particularly useful in laying out the specific conditions within which the post–Civil War generation of Lebanese artists employs a poetics of the image, straddling their “fictional and conflictual aspects,”¹³ in engaging with a traumatic and unresolved history while resisting a “state-sponsored amnesia.”¹⁴ In a political scenario marked by constant conflict, destruction, and loss, the task of re-creating history through the interpretation and study of fragmentary visual and textual information becomes a pressing concern for the artist. Mark Godfrey, in his 2007 essay “The Artist as Historian,” theorizes the origins of this trend and addresses—among other things—the work of Zaatari’s contemporary and occasional collaborator Walid Raad (Lebanese, born 1967), whose Atlas Group, a fictional collective that he conceived and cites as the author of many of his works, has engaged in the creation of a fictional archive of the Lebanese Civil War in an effort “to represent historical experience more adequately.”¹⁵ If Raad’s frequent inclusion in exhibitions and biennials has allowed his ideas around fiction and the political potential of the image’s questionable truth claims to gain traction within the spaces and discourses of contemporary art, Zaatari’s work with images and objects has emerged in a different vein. In many of his works, Zaatari relies on the study and presentation of shifting constellations of found elements, using them to uncover individual behaviors and personal experiences within the conditions produced by major historical events. In the work of both artists, fabrication plays a significant part—ranging from the invention of fictional accounts, individuals, and institutions (Raad) to the bringing together of disparate materials and narratives into multilayered assemblages (Zaatari). 

The awareness of and interaction with multiple media apparatuses in the gallery space and the modes of spectatorship they produce is undoubtedly informed by the now canonical early experiments of artists like Paul Sharits (American, 1943–1993), Michael Snow (Canadian, born 1928), and Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941), with their revelation of the screen-reliant installation’s “phenomenological, psychic, institutional and ideological effects.”¹⁶ However, as curator Chrissie Iles pointed out in an October roundtable discussion following her important 2001 Whitney Museum exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–77, there was a reappearance of narrative in the work of experimental filmmakers and artists in the late 1970s and ’80s, marked by a move in the direction of “increasingly complex narratives and away from structural ideas, or process-based explorations of space.”¹⁷ Another participant in the roundtable, the early pioneer of projection-based works Anthony McCall (American, born England 1946), reiterated Peter Wollen’s thesis about the two avant-gardes and argued that the Godardian legacy that “stressed not material, but signification” has returned in the last decade “albeit in a new context—the art world.”¹⁸

Nearly two decades after this discussion and the accompanying exhibition took place, the regime of images and information is evermore subject to the insidious mechanisms of control exerted by both political actors and corporate behemoths. Within these conditions, Zaatari’s work uses multifarious apparatuses configured into an elaborate media architecture to present archival fragments and historical vignettes that underscore the politics of the image, and engage the dialectic between reception and distraction, awareness and immersion, art and documentary.¹⁹

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Meghan Forbes

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The Mediterranean Sea has long acted as the geographical embodiment of a paradox at the heart of Europe: On the one hand, Europe strives to separate itself politically and socially from its southern and eastern Mediterranean neighbors by using the sea as a border. On the other hand, Europe relies on the Mediterranean as a connector for much of what constitutes “European” cultural heritage. This double impulse is evident in the ongoing reactions to the most recent refugee crisis in Europe, which has cast refugee arrivals as both vulnerable individuals who the European Union is morally obliged to protect and as threats to the very existence of the European project. In today’s increasingly xenophobic political climate, it’s easy to forget that the Mediterranean, and Mediterranean migrations, are neither unprecedented nor extrinsic to Europe. They have, in fact, shaped European culture, history, and identity for centuries. 

For most people in Europe and the West, the most recent refugee crisis in the Mediterranean has unfolded primarily as moving image. Video footage of refugee boats in the Mediterranean has been circulated all over the world by the news media and individual witnesses. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the topic of Mediterranean migration has become a dominant theme in contemporary art in Europe and the West more broadly.¹ Works in film and video have especially taken the topic of migration and displacement in stride, with film critic Catherine Russell noting that movies “about people fleeing intolerable conditions, heading for promised lands of opportunity, have been flooding festival screens for at least the last ten years.”²

One of the centerpieces of this “migratory turn”³ in contemporary visual art is Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11). The eight-channel video installation—part of The Museum of Modern Art’s collection—features the accounts of eight displaced persons, each of whom describes his or her journey (fig.1). The faces of the subjects are absent; what we see are their hands retracing their migration trajectories on a map using permanent marker. In the years since its completion, the installation has been exhibited in more than ten venues across four continents⁴—undoubtedly helping propel its creator to worldwide recognition. Last year, Khalili was short-listed for the Hugo Boss Prize, the jury for which stressed the importance of each shortlisted artist’s “commitment to bringing art to the center of timely debates in society.”⁵

When art committed to sociopolitical issues deals in the same media and images as news outlets, political campaigns, documentary films, humanitarian organizations, and fake news—like video works do—what are its responsibilities vis-à-vis its often-disenfranchised subjects? In an ever-expanding contemporary art field, what, if any, rules or expectations govern the ethics of representation? Using the stories of real-life migrants, but displaying them in galleries, art fairs, and museums around the world, Khalili’s installation offers a platform for discussing the complex issues to which the aestheticization of human hardship gives rise.

The Mapping Journey Project is as much about migration as it is about the way an artist’s formal choices contribute to or resist existing modes of representation in documentary visual art practices. This is evident from Khalili’s distinct use of geopolitical maps. An entrenched tool of power, bureaucracy, and control, the map serves two purposes in The Mapping Journey Project: it is the literal backdrop of the migrants’ trajectories as well as the symbol of a geopolitical and visual order that both produces the migrant condition and refuses to acknowledge it. The hyper-specific trajectories of displacement that comprise Khalili’s installation defy the map’s restrictive—and prescriptive—borders. In Mapping Journey #1, the narrator recounts his sea crossing from Annaba, Algeria, to the Italian island of Sardinia, which was planned so as to elude the often-invisible technologies, such as radar, that are used to police and enforce national and international borders in the Mediterranean basin (fig.2). Each singular itinerary of displacement in Khalili’s installation also offers a counterweight to the conventional representation of migration as a mass phenomenon, something that often forecloses the migrating individual. (Here, I am reminded of those ubiquitous, overly schematic diagrams that illustrate the mass flow of people using arrows, which get thicker or thinner depending on the quantitative data of migrating populations.) In the hand of each migrant narrator, the permanent markers in Khalili’s installation bear testament to the powerful fact that individual action is never totally reducible to the structures in which it occurs. By focusing on each narrator’s intervention on “the most normative drawing”⁶ that exists, Khalili’s work produces a new cartography, one that points to the shortcomings of the geopolitical map as an all-encompassing, scientific view of the world. 

The Mapping Journey Project enacts a series of formal strategies that intend to give its audience a much more granular understanding of the migrant condition. According to Khalili, her project aims to give the subjects of her videos their agency back, and “to investigate how individuals with their own voices, with their own words try to resist arbitrary boundaries and restrictive conceptions of identity and nation-state.”⁷ A few of the ways in which Khalili’s formal choices in The Mapping Journey Project push against mainstream representations of displacement include the noticeable absence of faces in her videos; the complete erasure of her own voice; and the choice of the still frame, unperturbed by camera movement and montage. 

Echoing Hal Foster’s assessment of the artist as ethnographer,⁸ Khalili insists that her artistic process is “natural and simple in the sense that it’s all mixed up with real life.”⁹ According to the artist, she came across the subjects of The Mapping Journey Project at various transportation hubs in European cities, and asked them to tell her their stories on camera after hours of off-the-record conversations. These claims seem at odds with documentary art practices that, from the 1990s onward, “offer skeptical and subversive readings of documentary jargons of authenticity,”¹⁰ jargons that derive from “non-fiction filmmaking and ethnographic practices [and are] rooted in 19th-century colonial painting.”¹¹ So how do we reconcile the need for a robust documentary practice with a well-founded suspicion of naturalism and claims of authenticity? 

Indeed, as an example of “a more participatory cinema,”¹² yielding a certain level of control over her work’s content to migrant narrators is Khalili’s way of dealing with the ethical questions around the decontextualization and formalization of refugee or migrant stories. Her work presents these narratives in a dignified and non-sensationalized manner, contrasting sharply with representations prevalent in mainstream broadcast media. Nevertheless, this strategy remains open to the criticism of appropriation. Like the inclusion of indigenous narratives in ethnographic film, the use of the subject’s voice in documentary or nonfiction practices begs the question of whether a work is actually “making indigenous statements or merely absorbing a device into its own narrative strategies.”¹³ In the words of documentary film theorist Bill Nichols, if filmmakers or artists “incorporate other voices, what textual independence do these voices actually have?”¹⁴ Whether one can go as far as saying that Khalili “empowers her speakers”¹⁵ by simply prioritizing and amplifying their voices is therefore debatable. Such a discussion would involve considering to what extent an artistic representation of a disenfranchised person or group intended for Western cultural forums can ever in fact “empower” its subject(s). It would also almost certainly revert to the age-old question of whether any aesthetically oriented work that seeks to be unique can ever transcend its own aesthetic ambition and successfully enter the realm of activism or politics “untainted” by the stamp of singular authorship. While there can be no definite answer, the question is nonetheless worth raising—and discussing. 

By far the most striking formal choice that Khalili makes in The Mapping Journey Project is to leave each narrator’s face out of the video frame. According to critic Quinn Latimer, this is part of Khalili’s subversion of “the ways in which her subjects are most often represented; instead of seen and voiceless, her subjects are articulate and decisively heard, but not seen (visibility being linked to surveillance, not agency).”¹⁶ A focus on the narrators’ faces would “betray” their identities, aiding policing technologies that rely on facial recognition. By keeping her narrators’ faces out of the frame, Bouchra Khalili turns the very marginality of her subjects into a central quality of a dignified representation of displacement. Khalili’s choice also serves to critique the abuse of emotionally charged imagery by the international community, which uses certain visual tropes to raise awareness of vulnerable populations such as refugees. In the past thirty years, certain representational strategies prevalent in the media and adopted by humanitarian campaigns have been denounced by critics such as Susan Sontag, Thomas Keenan, Sarah Sentilles, and Ariella Azoulay for overly relying on images of suffering without giving the viewer sufficient context or adequate critical distance. This genre of representation focuses on the personification of human hardship, mostly through the use of the close-up, which perpetuates the dynamics of the colonial gaze and depoliticizes the causes of each individual’s plight. The closeup framing of vulnerable people looking directly into the camera—a mainstay of humanitarian iconography—is one of many characteristics of what critics have dubbed “disaster pornography.”¹⁷ This was the main charge hurled at Chinese artist Ai Weiwei after he posed as Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose lifeless body was found on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey, in a photograph for the newspaper India Today in early 2016 (fig. 3).

Despite Khalili’s formally controlled, ethically preemptive representation of displacement, art historian and curator Emma Chubb has nonetheless accused her of “migratory orientalism.”¹⁸ Chubb argues that the installation’s strict formalism contributes to a politically problematic equivalence between all eight narrators, which goes against the artist’s stated intentions: “rather than depicting ‘singular lives’ . . . these videos emphasize the very interchangeability and generalizability of these lives and journeys.”¹⁹ Chubb especially takes issue with Khalili’s representation of migration as comprised of subjects who are “always suffering, illegal, non-white, and Europe-bound.”²⁰ Such criticism illustrates the challenges artists face when choosing to take on sociopolitical topics. 

Art historian and cultural critic T. J. Demos writes that among other things, migration is a “transformative experience [that] may inspire both critical and creative energies, complicating the existential vulnerability and material destitution it otherwise may bring,”²¹ and by extension, the monolithic representation of migrants as just suffering victims. And while it is true that Khalili’s selection of migrants does not include white migrants, this may simply reflect the fact that a majority of recent migrants and refugees to Europe have visual features that differentiate them from a predominantly white European population. Chubb’s argument echoes the shortcomings of “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter”; unless her expectation is that Khalili, or any artist grappling with migration, has to engage in an interminable project addressing every different type of migrant in the world.²² Chubb’s claims seem to be more motivated by a prescriptive understanding of what she, a US national and a US-based scholar, thinks are certain “right ways” to represent migrants and other disenfranchised groups in Europe and the Middle East, which can itself be construed as a kind of orientalism.

One of Chubb’s recommendations for more responsible or ethical art is for artists to shift the attention to the lives that people migrating have left behind. Chubb poses the following question: “How might analyses of migration-themed art change if, instead of describing migration as a consequence of recent globalization, we . . . contextualized it within the longer arc of postcolonial nation building?”²³ As if the (often culturally specific) trajectories of displacement featured in Khalili’s work—especially the points of departure and desired destinations of each individual—do not themselves bear testament to the “longer,” and geographically broader, may I add, “arc of postcolonial nation building.” In Mapping Journey #4, a Somali woman recounts her journey from Mogadishu to Bari, Italy, in fluent Italian (fig. 4). Italy colonized parts of Somalia for more than fifty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, in Mapping Journey #2, a Tunisian man narrates his journey of displacement from the filming location in Marseille, France, a port city with a long history of receiving immigrants from former French colonies in Africa (fig. 5). 

If showing faces inappropriately aestheticizes, and documenting real-life migrants’ stories orientalizes, what tropes are left for the artist to represent migration? A prescriptive-heavy focus in art criticism risks hampering the production of visual art on politically charged topics such as migration, potentially resulting in a “condescending and moralistic strain of ethnocentrism.”²⁴ Paradoxically then, the radical egalitarianism that exists on the theoretical level would only be achieved by restricting creative practices to narrowly conceived tactics of subversion.²⁵ Accepting that the formalization of migration, through artistic representation, will always draw criticism for one reason or another (be it aesthetic, ethical, political), it might be more productive to redefine the scope of what is “ethical” in representation, to shift from that which goes “beyond a reactive gesture” to that which “actively [seeks] to establish or redefine spaces of shared social experience.”²⁶

The cinema’s capability to “establish [a] space of shared social experience” could be one of the reasons why the use of film and video dominates the representation of migration among contemporary artists today. In Khalili’s case, the formal restrictions of The Mapping Journey Project highlight the shared social experience between migrants of different nationalities and with different trajectories of displacement; but it also creates a space for viewers to immerse themselves—for the duration of each video—in the inevitably social experience of the work’s narrators.

One of the distinct advantages of art-making in times of crisis is precisely its capacity for formal experimentation. In the case of urgent, transnational sociopolitical phenomena, such as migration, that deal in real lives and lived experiences, formal experimentation can offer a platform for ethical inquiries that go beyond the formulas and stereotypes of mainstream media, paving the way for new collective imaginaries. In an era of fake news and deep fakes, with distrust in traditional documentary forms at record highs, film and media art are well positioned to respond to our desire for truth and inclusivity, so long as they continue to experiment with the political relationship between content and form. The compelling effect of each migrant trajectory recorded in permanent marker in The Mapping Journey Project suggests that ethically minded documentary representations may be moving away from straightforward observational strategies toward more abstracted forms, which perhaps counterintuitively, offer more intimate ways of knowing the world. 

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The 1999 text was first published in Insights  into  Syrian  Cinema: Essays and conversations with contemporary filmmakers. Ed. Rasha Salti. New York: ArteEast : AIC Film Editions/Rattapallax Press, 2006. 149-163.

Prologue

I stood on a street in Paris, dialing Syria from a public phone to share the happy news with my family that my first film, Nujum al-Nahar (Stars in Broad Daylight) was accepted at the Cannes Film Festival. They sobbed, laughed and cheered and announced the birth of Leila, a daughter to my sister Amal. The year was 1988. Until now, I have not made a second film¹, but one night, when she was eight years old, before turning the lights out and going to sleep, Leila babbled: “As long as the veto is in effect, what is this democracy are you talking about?”²

Everything resembles everything else, coffee is tea and tea is coffee. The television is there, facing you; the television set, your entire universe. Your least bitter choice from betwixt bitter predicaments, the showcase duel between a sword and a Tomahawk cruise missile, the herald of the decadence of our century.

I pledge not to do unto you as you have done unto us (for too long now), in your American crime and detective films, where the identity of the murderer remains a secret until the last minute. Neither will I follow the rules of the noir of real life, where the identity of the murderer is clear from the first moment, and you spend your life waiting, as one waits for destiny, judgement, tyranny, or globalization, for him or her to fall into the trap. Instead, I will allow myself to propose an arithmetic riddle so we embark as equals on this collective journey —be it Noah’s Arc or the Titanic— and so as to level the ground for communication so we would not require subtitles. And by the way, you ought to be informed that whoever solves the riddle will be awarded with marrying the princess.

In a faraway, beautiful, somnolent country called Syria, early one morning, in the year 1963, a messenger (blowing a horn) announced the enactment of “Legislative Decree Number 258 of the Year 1963” (please imagine a musical interlude here). He blew his horn twice (in fact) and proclaimed: “A public institution has been established, it shall be known as the National Film Organization; it shall be bound to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance but shall have its own operational, administrative and financial sovereignty; its seat shall be in the city of Damascus. Its objectives are: firstly, to develop the film industry in Syria; secondly, to support healthy production in the private sector; thirdly, to foster documentary and fiction films that will raise the standards of cultural and artistic appreciation amongst the people.”

And here we are on this Wednesday, morning or evening, of the year 1999, gath- ered to discuss cinema in Syria, in a country known as the United States of America that preaches its own new gospel and punishes the unbelieving heathens that don’t endorse it. 

To this day, the single agency producing cinema exclusively in Syria is the National Film Organization. Everything mirrors itself and what surrounds it: the single pole, the single party, the single producer, the single film. This is the endgame: the single film production agency produces the equivalent of a single film every single year. Ventures in the private sector evaporated soon enough, their evanescent vapors wafted to the sector of television production. They are all giddy over there now, peeping at strip-tease and lap- dances, smitten with the pretenses of television, purportedly enraptured.

The private sector seems to have expired its last sigh, without sorrow over its years of youth, or its intellectual and artistic contributions. It spent stubborn years waddling to produce bad copies of commercial Egyptian films, which in their turn, were bad copies of American commercial films. Before the angel of death misunderstands me, and for the angel on my right shoulder not to misquote my words, I hasten to correct the record. I am a staunch believer in freedom and plurality, and regardless of their artistic worth, I am absolutely not an advocate of the annihilation of the private sector, nor did I rejoice when it ended. Plurality, diversity, remain until this fine hour, sacred values I endorse whole- heartedly.

But let’s go back to the single film produced in a single year, and a thirty-six year old National Film Organization, pacing slowly, step after step (a single step every year), as if afflicted with plegia from childhood. Our (mother) state granted itself the guardianship of cinema under its mercy, without mercy. It drew cinema into the realm of public administration, and informed by deep lack of experience and foresight it pushed the National Film Organization to fend for itself on its own, and decreed it ought to generate its own financial resources. Thus were the very precepts proclaimed in the infamous decree that marked the birth of the organization and ignored entirely. The National Film Organization and the cultural value of film production eerily transformed to a commodity, subservient to the market and the whims of supply and-demand. This happened under the aegis of state boastful of its socialist creed that admonished the demons of capitalism and the evils of the market.

From its birth, the National Film Organization was bound by labyrinthine laws and codes of the Ministry of Finance and the Commission for Censorship and Inspection that regulate inbound and outbound blood flow for all public institutions, the General Establishment for Meat, the General Establishment for Fruits and Vegetables, and the National Film Organization. The sequence of this previous sentence, draws the full tableau, a still life, or nature morte: meat, fruits, vegetables, cinema. An agreeable ornament to enliven the walls of a living room. In Arabic, nature morte is usually translated as mute nature. Youssef Abdelké, the Syrian printmaker, preferred to call it “nature in waiting.” I am more keen on “nature in somnolence”.

Nature morte has all the evocations of death, murder and crime, and reminds of the riddle I promised to deliver in the preface. The page-long exposé of fact and information that deferred its delivery was unavoidable. I am not a Cartesian, but for the sake of making sense now, ladies and gentlemen, here is the riddle! (I mentioned the reward earlier, but I need to specify that according to the rule, whoever fails to marry the princess will be decapitated. The rule is the same, everywhere and under the rule of every democracy, everyday until today, in some place in this world, a head is decapitated. In some place or other, like Iraq or Palestine.)

And here, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the arithmetic riddle: If the single film producing establishment in Syria produces no more than a single film per year, and if the number of film directors in the employ of this organization is no less than thirty, then, according to the principle of equal opportunities, how many films can one director make in his lifetime? Well, the answer is: one film every thirty years. If given an early chance, the filmmaker would be thirty years old when making his first film, and for the second, he would be sixty years old, obviously, ninety for the third.

Simple enough. Now take me for example (a specimen from Syria who, for reasons of grave importance, does not wish to enlist to an American think tank), and suppose that I wanted to wait until my seventh film to transcribe my autobiography, like Frederico Fellini in Eight and the Half, or Elia Kazan in The Arrangement. A fair estimate to assume that by my seventh film I would have achieved the required maturity of emotional intelligence and depth of insight to tell my story. According to the arithmetic equation just laid out before you, I would have to be 242 years old.

And thus, you will see now, how Syrian cinema holds within itself the essential ingredients of science fiction and fantasy, because 242 is also the number of the UN Security Council resolution that has yet to be implemented. From the lack of implementation of resolution 242, follows the implementation of the Emergency Laws. (There is no riddle. Life itself is the riddle.)

Is Israel alone to be held responsible for the Emergency Laws?

The Emergency Laws don’t recognize the full meaning of freedom because we are in a moment of confrontation, and our land is occupied. They also don’t recognize the primacy of cinema, nor its importance, because we are in a state of emergency. And land comes first. If Israel were to pull out of the Golan in 242 days and demand compensations for dismantling the settlements, we, the filmmakers of Syria would squarely demand compensation from Israel in our turn for the three hundred films that were never produced because their funding had to be diverted to the country’s defense. At least the first third of that total amount. The second third of the figure was absorbed by the Emergency Laws themselves, at a speed faster than a Mercedes 242. As for the third third of that figure (or the equivalent of the cost of a hundred Syrian films), it can only be accounted for by the American veto on the implementation of UN resolution 242, which only served to prolong the life of the riddle.

Obviously, I did not come here to challenge you with a riddle, knowing all too well it has no resolution. Most of the thirty filmmakers have long deserted the camera and eloped, looking to fend for a living elsewhere. Some work as carpenters, others as marketing consultants, advertising film directors, and others have been granted a “green card” to dwell in the land of television where job opportunities multiply at a rate faster than population growth. Only a few of us stayed where we are, doing what we do, like a band of quixotic musketeers at the service of Her Majesty, Queen Cinema.

And everything resembles everything else. We have become the legacy of cinema, with our films, our sounds, our images. We are like the song that the prisoner in Cell Number Six sings, “Oh Hassan! I brought you up when you were a child, why do you deny me?”

Everything resembles everything else, tea is coffee and coffee is tea in this long nightmare (it will become clearer to you after this brief commercial break).

I once ventured into one of the al-Kindi movie theaters (they are owned and managed by the National Film Organization) to see for myself how Syrians experience Syrian cinema, how they read the signs, the meanings. I walked into the theater, and in the space between the front door and the screening room, Abou Walid greeted me. He sat behind a counter, where he had placed a small television set. Despite the fact that it had earned some golden European award, the film did not attract more than ten spectators. They were lost in the room. When the film sequences that I cherished most (and considered vanguard) unfurled and I began to unwind in the darkness, I suddenly took notice of the sound. It was not the sound of the film, nor was it the voices of the actors. It was the sound of the television set near the front door, the sound of the serial. It occurred to me that the physical presence of the sound of the television serial was at par with the physical manifestation of image and sound on the large film screen. Unencumbered from allegorical significance (or not), the sound from the television serial had latched itself onto the large screen, merged with the sound of the film, supplanted it, dubbed it, garbled it.

Sound and image are distinct, but everything resembles everything else; the room resembled a screening room and yet it was not that, the dialogue resembled a dialogue and yet it was not that. I confess that for a few minutes I was mystified by the eeriness, but soon I realized I was enjoying an aberration and betraying a principle, so I sprang up from my seat in the direction of the entrance hall where Abu Walid was absorbed watching the television serial. From behind the glass window of the box office, the television beamed images, whose hybrid aesthetics were intended for fast digestion, and a sound whose reach prevailed over the film inside the screening room. I coughed to get the man’s attention and with one intent stare I held him responsible for marginalizing culture. Out of my keen commitment to pluralism and democracy, I urged him to lower the volume on his television set. 

The following day I found myself mulling over the incident and its significance. The day after, I was given more reasons to ponder. Pasted on the wall, at the entrance to the al-Kindi theater, as well as at the entrance to the National Film Organization, a notice of death announced the passing of Abu Walid after a sudden heart attack. He was forty-three years old, exactly my age then. Abu Walid had first worked at the National Film Organization as the coffee server, but after he was deemed to have failed the expectations of that function, he was dismissed and assigned with the lesser task of tearing filmgoers’ tickets at the door of the state-run al-Kindi theater. Because spectators were scarce and ticket holders even fewer, he had installed the black and white television set in the entrance hall to assuage his loneliness.

Abu Walid had failed as the coffee server because he attempted to embody the persona of the late coffee server Abu Badr, the jovial elderly man who was loved by all. Abu Badr noted down everyone’s orders, from the bottom of the hierarchy to its top, nodding his head knowingly and invariably returned with tea instead of coffee. If anyone protested, he retorted first with an affectionate smile that grew into a childlike giggle. He placed the tea down and demured ever so sweetly(even to the director): “Tea is better.”

He said: “Everything is the same”, and continued. laughing, “the only difference between an Arab and a foreigner is coffee.” He said it knowing all too well it would be the occasion to choose tea over coffee, television over cinema, habit over love.

As spectators were individuals, he disregarded their rights and took license to raise the volume of the sound.

Abu Walid tried to resurrect Abu Badr’s voice, he cracked jokes but flopped. The sound did not conform to the image, so… he died. Should there be a causal relationship? He died, and after I read the notice and climbed the stairs of the building, a voice whispered in my ears that donations for his family were being collected, that some had given money and others not. (Here I am reminded of a Russian joke I heard during my schooldays in Moscow. One day, Ivan (then a Soviet) took his television set for repair to another Ivan. The second Ivan asked: “What is wrong with it?” “The sound does not conform to the image, ” answered the first Ivan. “And you expect me to repair the whole of the Soviet Union?!” the second Ivan replied.)

Neither does our own image conform with our sounds-voices, we, the handful of Syrian filmmakers. We were quelled by the routine of everyday life. When questions press us in the media we are jolted into awakening and answer in our idiom of allegories and metaphors. In reality however, we are absent from the screen. And there is no longer a screen, in fact not in allegory, there is no longer a large white screen, no image, no sound, no comfortable seats and no toilets. In the nation’s capital, Damascus, there are only eight movie theaters serving six million citizens, in the city of Homs, there are three, two of which have been under renovation for decades, in Lattakia four movie theaters are still operational as compared to the total eleven, when I was eleven years old.

In 1969, the horn-blowing messenger that announced the establishment of the National Film Organization manifested himself once again. He read a new decree that bestowed the role of import and distribution of films in the country exclusively to the state through its expert appendage, the National Film Organization. As recently as this past March, on the occasion of the celebration of the anniversary of the revolution, the daily al-Thawra reminded us of the wisdom behind these edicts, namely, that many films conveyed ideas antithetical and hostile to the principles of our revolution.

Even if such actions were animated by good intentions, and regardless of the fact that coerced guidance underlines an implicit mistrust of people’s ability to draw judgements on their own and without mentorship, the National Film Organization’s good intentions did not save it from endemic and sustained poverty. It was never afforded the means to import the best or the most contemporary of world cinema, nor was it able to foster a culture of appreciation of cinema. Its monopoly over access was dwarfed by television and the informal traffic of video cassettes. They invaded the “well-guarded” homes and consciousness of people with seamless efficiency. The cherished tenets of our revolution’s ideology were thus defeated by poverty, and the bright image of the Tomahawk, centered in frames unfolding on television sets, beamed into our people’s households. Nor was the National Film Organization able to rival Beirut, only a shy few kilometers away, where film releases are apace with the rest of the world, movie theaters multiply steadily and people don agreeable attire to watch films. It is almost as if the messenger who proclaimed the state’s decrees had blown nefarious winds of a looming tempest from his horn, rather than the National Film Organization’s good intentions, and inspired spectators and films to forsake movie theaters. And we woke up one day to find deserted movie theaters void of lifeblood, rotting in decay, hollowed of their guts. This is not an allegorical image, movie theaters had to dismantle and discard half their seats to lighten the burden of taxation because they are tabulated according to the number of seats, not spectators in attendance. The eight surviving movie theaters in Damascus are now in deep comatose slumber. No radical surgery, heart or spinal transplant can save them, they have been declared clinically dead, at least for the time being.

We are absent from the screen. We are absent from consciousness, from the social consciousness that hungers for freedom, from people’s collective memory, distant or near. The word “film” is never hinged with the attribute Syrian in collective awareness, there is no place for Syrian cinema in people’s collective memory. The notion of a living, breathing, contemporary Syrian cinema registers so much like an aberration that it is perceived to elude the laws that regulate the nation’s everyday life, like the succession of seasons, increasing cost of living, spread of corruption and suffusion of fear. All the things that comprise the cadence of people’s consciousness of living in this country.

The single film produced every year, once released, is allotted a peculiar space, almost apart. Like a drop of serum injected in the veins of a solitude old by a hundred years, it stirs sentiments, sometimes it stings and sometimes it elates, in a worn-out body that has long grown habituated to living without its presence.

Back in the day when socialism still wielded magic and held the promise to bring bliss to nations and peoples, the Syrian regime purported to borrow the Soviet mode of organizing cultural production, in parts or in whole. To the contrary of their Soviet authenticators, however, the Syrian regime did not populate its cities and villages with movie theaters, playgrounds, parks, nor was the production output sustained. As early as its beginnings, the public sector drifted from these foundational premises, seceding to forge its own experience. Encumbered with the good intentions of their producer, our films come to life, step by step, drop by drop.

And yet, in spite of our poverty and of all the implications that a third world state- sponsored film production entail, the National Film Organization has produced thirty-six films in thirty-seven years, all of a distinguished artistic and intellectual standing, that have earned a total of seventy-two awards, internationally and in the Arab world. There is a real paradox between the historical conditions in which films are produced and the final out- come of the films themselves.

The paradox can be traced to the inner workings of film production, the kitchen of the institution so to speak, where films are made. There, a counter-intuitive redress of the injustice of the paucity of material resources takes place, and at times with rare generosity. As such, Syria might very well be the last place in this world where a filmmaker is given license to re-shoot a sequence until it is deemed right, where time and space for editing or sound mixing of an entire film can be redone, without a reconfiguration the film’s overall budget. Furthermore, Syria is perhaps the only place in this world where a young filmmaker without significant prior experience is provided the opportunity to make a feature-length film, regardless of the viability of the film once it is released. This generosity, which runs against the grain of the prevailing mores of our century, comes at a high cost. The tremendous burdens of producing a single film, or a film and a half every year is shouldered at the expense of an output that would sustain a dialogue with spectators, with our society. Syrian cinema is trapped in a conversation with itself, an eerie monologue that the National Film Organization (despite its hard labor) has failed at bridging into a dialogue with society at large, year after year.

And time knows no mercy. Generosity not withstanding, we all pay the wages of backwardness and poverty, and there are most likely, hundreds of talents craving for air to breathe, and for opportunities to find expression; they lie in waiting, time slowly extinguishing their flame. In this third world of ours, creative innovation and genial ideas dwell in gestation, in their largest share, hostage to poverty and backwardness. I have always lived with the belief that Fellini’s groundbreaking approach, for example, must have long been dreamed in the imagination of a captive soul in our part of the world.

Its generosity not withstanding, the National Film Organization has turned its back on venturing into creative solutions to alleviate the weight of its mission.

At a time when we are unanimously convinced that only works of art and the language of creativity are able to obliterate, through dialogue and communication, the sinister thick of backwardness, the tyranny of globalization and the insuperable polarization that pulls geographies apart, the National Film Organization has turned its back on every opportunity at co-production and cooperation that has frayed its passage to Syria. Under the guise of protecting the self-styled “purity” of its mission, it has cowered in its destitution, hostage to fear and suspicion. And so we too remain, suspended in that atrophied space; with our hopes and dreams we struggle for air.

The National Film Organization regards collaboration with European counterparts as the road map for colonization. The argument goes like this: How could countries that once colonized us, or coveted our riches with colonial designs be attributed good intentions. Europe does not really recognize Israel’s occupation of our territory as a crime, and they have absolved Zionism from the occupation of Palestine, the expulsion of its people from their homes. Europe does not see Zionism as an ideology of terrorism. How can we collaborate hand in hand with countries that defend all these crimes?

These facts are true, and I would go further and deepen the notion of terrorism, it should not be restricted to opening fire, setting up checkpoints or administering violence. Terrorism is also the violent death that comes packaged in a hamburger and vetoes the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions. The flaw in the argument is not in the veracity of the evidence it lists, but in the question it asks. Firstly, it presumes that European countries, their governments, their civil society, their intelligentsia and their cultural actors are all one and the same block. As such, it imputes the same agency and intentions to all these distinct and independent entities. Secondly, it presumes that the mandate of cinema and film production is to oversee (or lobby) fer the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions. It does not regard cinema as the sovereign site for existential interrogation by individuals and collectivities, for forging freedom and unveiling life’s small secrets, lived and imagined.

A conversation with the world is the only (and most effective) strategy afforded to the quixotic musketeers of the Third World. The absence or failure of that dialogue is a loss to the entire world, east and west, it compounds the toll of global poverty because the riches of culture cannot be plundered, usurped, or seized like oil or diamonds. Our countries may be stunted in abject poverty, but we claim novels, poems, music and films unsuspected by the western world, marvels that bring so much wonder they lengthen a human being’s short life by at least a few years.

Amongst their accomplishments, Americans and Europeans claim airplanes that break the sound barrier, state of the art technologies of extermination and stealth industries of well-being and leisure. This does not imply that their poetry is superior, their imaginary more sophisticated and their commitment to life, dignity and justice more legitimate than ours. I am aware of the hard reality and that with the resources at her or his disposal, the American and European artist is able to chase her or his flights of fancy, while our wings are clipped by the weight of historical contingency, and our dreams or flights of fancy remain folded in our shirts. However, at the risk of sounding like a missionary for culture and the arts — and I don’t consider myself an intellectual —, it is my unshakable belief that art and culture are the realms where humanity finds freedom, justice and equality.

Before you are allowed into the American Cultural Center in Damascus, before you can grab a seat to listen to Richard Peña, the director of the New York Film Festival who has traveled all the way to Damascus to deliver a lecture, you have to pass through the metal-detector at the gate of the building and endure a security search. In a single stroke, all the curses against imperialism dormant in the back of your head, awaken suddenly and growl. In one fell swoop, you find yourself emboldened anew in solidarity with Che Guevara, the massacred victims of Maï Laï (the Vietnamese village) and slain Iraqi singer Nazem al-Ghazali. Richard Peña, or Richard the First as we re-christened him that day, began with boasting his Spanish and Latin extraction, but he made an observation on Syrian cinema that struck us all. He postulated that the common denominator to all Syrian films, regardless of artistic accomplishment, was their independence and individualism, and the absence of opportunism. In the whole lot of Syrian films, he could not find a single propaganda film. This, he added, was a unique virtue. “Not a single film, Mr. Richard?” you find yourself asking. “No,” he replies to you in English. That Richardian assertion led me to reflect on the conversation that binds us all, we Syrian filmmakers, that lonely monologue I deplored earlier. How could we have missed seeing that common denominator? My perception of our collectivity until then was that we were generally divided in two camps. The camp that despises a colleague’s film because it does not fulfill the standard of what is considered to be art, and the camp that does not care and dispatches film and filmmaker to hell. In reality, and for the sake of precision, we are divided into at least seventy camps, the camp of those of who tell the truth fearlessly versus the camp of the hypocrites, the camp of the honest versus the camp of the dishonest, the camp of those adept at grabbing opportunities, the camp of those who know how to bluff… We are indeed the cultural vanguard of our society, and its backwardness finds expression in our collectivity in many ways. We manipulate, philosophize, theorize, each single-handedly scheming in the pursuit of self-interest. And thus we divide and multiply to form seventy camps, seventy voices each singing its own tune.

Standing on the field of the final battle that defeated Spartacus, the Roman general asked the captured black slaves: “Which one of you is Spartacus?” The noble freedom fighter rose and said: “I am Spartacus.” I remember weeping in the movie theater, compelled with his courage and nobility. But then, one after the other, the black slaves stood up and said: “I am Spartacus!” “I am Spartacus!” I wept more and more. They were all executed. Would you consider me a Spartacus, me the Syrian filmmaker (now also philosopher), if I were to make a confession? That everytime the National Film Organization prepares to consider a new (single) production, and each one of us knows it could be the one and only chance to make a film, I begin daydreaming the appropriate scenario for my colleague, whose name is on the same list and has been waiting for that one and only chance as eagerly as I, to perish in a noble yet untimely death. (The very same colleague I embraced just a moment ago, and who embraced me back.) Martyred after a savage air-raid shelling by the American-Israeli F-16 or F-17 planes (despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the Nazi crematorium or European anti-semitism)? Crushed under the brand new tires of a speeding luxury vehicle driven by the precious progeny of a nouveau riche patriarch (the very cast of nouveaux riches created by the veto on the UN Security Council resolution)? Of course I would be the first to deliver the compelling eulogy, a poem in classical sonnets. I would do more, I would dedicate that one and only film of my career to him. I am not the only protagonist in this real-life noir, and I am certainly not the most evil.

This is why Richard the First’s observation was striking. He did not see our opportunism. He saw us as honest filmmakers. Had we developed a singular strain of Machiavellianism, I wondered, were we sinister opportunists to whom the end justified all means, but the moment our hand grabs hold of the camera, we become honest and conscientious filmmakers? In truth, our circumstances are dire and the stakes are very high, because we don’t apprehend opportunities as merely the occasion to make another film, but to articulate our subjective vision of the world, to speak and innovate our individual cinematic language. This hunger for expression is the key to unlocking the paradox that mystifies all those who stumble on the productions of our National Film Organization. We are fierce about speaking our minds, it is our right, our raison d’étre.

Our right as filmmakers to innovate and explore, to craft our art according to our vision, to reconfigure our society and national aspirations according to our own pulse and sensibility, is what animates our cinema. We understand the very personal to be very humanist, and to be the other face that coins the very patriotic, and very universal. This is the confession in its totality, it is what has allowed Syrian cinema to cast the national anthem in the most forbidden, impenetrable and unsuspected places, to the surprise of all.

It is premature to distill attributes of an identity to Syrian cinema, in the way Italian, French or American cinema have carved identities for themselves. The identity of Syrian cinema is yet in its embryonic stages, growing slowly, alone, at the rate of one film per year. The common feature thus far palpable, is the motivation of its filmmakers for a tireless search, in the self, the social, the political, the aesthetic. That search has been its salvation from mediocrity, from aping other cinemas and pandering to a calling lesser than art. The National Film Organization is unfortunately the only haven for making films that meet the ambitions of cinema as art. It would be a mistake to regard it as the contingency itself, rather, it is the result of the overarching contingency that shapes the fate of our country. It is not right that it should hold monopoly over film production, but this is the reality today. And today too, it seems worn out from exhaustion, like a tire churning to come unstuck from mud, or a film reel beaming into emptiness: at once tangible and ephemeral, not unlike mercy.

The National Film Organization is the progeniture of our regime, its cadres are the sons of our state, and so are we, the filmmakers, sons of this nation. In the circus showcase of life we chose the tightrope, despite the dangers, because we wanted to make sure the rope would be stretched, that thin rope hinging between reality and imagination, freedom of expression and artistic creation.

Our cinema is free, but its freedom is like a whisper in a closed room. We too are free, but locked in an enclosure, the historic contingency that weighs over our sky. It is as if we sneaked into that closed room from the keyhole, and we grew inside it. In its turn, it sneaked inside us and grew. And we are stuck in this locked embrace.

On the outside of that enclosed room, the invitation to jump ship and join television production lurks with insistence. It is like the call to surrender and negotiate a truce: “Come to television, your voice will be heard, instead of your metaphors and alle- gories and that art, you will be seen, you will have a presence, you will make a difference.”

The city of Homs, which grew irritated with its football team’s lot of continuous defeats against its arch-rival team from the city of Hama, tells a popular Syrian joke. The residents of the city raised millions of pounds to sign the star player, Maradona. The Homs team was defeated once again, this time, by the humiliating score of 10 to 0. “What about Maradona?” someone asked. “The coach kept him on the sidelines” came the answer. And one morning, Pushkin, the Russian poet, went to meet his fate at a duel. Revolver to revolver, not poetry against Tomahawk. But poetry was still in the man’s heart. And coffee is coffee, not tea.

Epilogue

I will conclude with an anecdote, also popular in Syria. In a world competition amongst cats in the world, the expert-trained American cat was defeating every cat he fought with. The last confrontation had him duel the Somali cat. To everyone’s surprise, the Somali defeated the American. There was much alarm in America. The White House issued orders to increase training of their contender and a second match was called. The American cat was defeated a second time. After much consternation, president Clinton invited the Somali cat for a closed-door meeting. “How were you able to defeat the cleverest, smartest and best-trained cat in the world?” he asked. “Look at me, Mr. President” said the Somali cat, “look deep into my eyes. I am not a cat, I have never been one. I am a tiger, but hunger and poverty made me look like this.”

The text was presented by Ossama Mohammed at a conference organized by Georgetown University in 1999.

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Art and Arab Life, a Questionnaire

Publication al-Adab
Date 1956
Language Arabic

“Where do our arts stand with regard to the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation?” This question was posed in 1956 in a questionnaire on “Art and Arab Life” that was circulated to artists in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria in a special issue devoted to the arts of the Arab world of the Beirut-based, pan-Arab journal al-Adab, which was established in 1953 as an outlet for politically engaged thought and cultural analysis. The resulting answers reflect a diversity of viewpoints on the status of the arts vis-à-vis burgeoning independent nations, cultural heritage, and historical tradition, as well as on the legacies of colonial artistic influence.

The questionnaire, here represented in full, was excerpted for the 2018 publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. To access a PDF of the original roundtable in Arabic and other sources translated for the book, please visit the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) website.

Art and Us

In presenting this special edition, we are led to ask ourselves about the state of art in the Arab world in this period in which a true awareness is violently impelling us to renew our strength and exploit our potential. There is no doubt that the answer to this question will point to the state of the artistic sense within our being, indicating whether it is healthy or ill, whether it is active or ailing. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the artistic sense of a particular nation is a measure of its quality of life and its ability to create a civilization.

To what extent is this artistic sense healthy within our being?

Upon reviewing the state of contemporary Arab arts—including painting, sculpture, photography, music, singing, dance, theater, and cinema—those who know a bit about culture will find no difficulty in recognizing that those arts collectively inspire a sense of reassurance, and may promise a better future than their current reality.

Without fear of generalizing, we can say that all of these arts suffer, first and foremost, from the fact that they have not found a distinctive personal style, a style that would convey their characteristics. These arts have nearly lost their character, and for this reason, they are on the verge of being exposed as unworthy of immortality.

There may be individual painters who have found a particular style that reflects the integration of a character with clear features. However, they are all a long way from making painting an art with distinctive traits that are the result of inspiration from the geographical environment and social milieus, and from the historical heritage. It is rare that we find in the effects of our painters a focused direction, whether psychological or social. Although there are ties that could bind a number of these painters together to form a group, these ties generally fail to indicate a clear trend, let alone an outlined school. Perhaps the most prominent shortcoming that appears in painting in our region is that many who practice this art form are more likely to incorporate the characteristics of foreign schools of art—at the expense of seeking vibrant and genuine inspiration from the reality of their own lives and the lives of their people. Such painters do not have proper awareness of the issue of content, for if they did, they also would have proper awareness of form. Let any one of us question, upon seeing Surrealist, Cubist, or abstract paintings, the value of the psychological and artistic development that their creators went through before reaching this stage in their production!

We might not be wrong to say the same about our region’s sculpture, which is the brother of its painting. Most works produced in sculpture have, until now, been limited to statues of great, important, and notable figures; rare are the works that are produced by an “idea,” or that depict a “condition,” or denote a “trend.” Rather, in all cases they remain linked to the principle of commerce—a principle that is forever fated to corrupt the artistry of any work that seeks to be artistic. Among the reasons for this—or the results of this—may be the fact that we have yet to have the chance to see exquisite sculptural work that aspires to stand before one of those foreign works carved by nervous, creative fingers through whose veins runs the essence of sacrifice and burning inspiration.

As for instrumental music in our region, it verges on being absent. We cannot find a single Arab musician who has tried to compose a complete piece of music that expresses a thematic unity, such as the well-known classical works that, based in science, enjoy undisputed aesthetic value. It is almost strange that our modern musicians evidence such shortcomings in musical capacity, and that their utmost in composing is to make melodies to accompany the genre of poetic material being sung. As for sung music, it falls into one of two categories: The first is popular music, which may have personal characteristics. However, it is nearly petrified, for it is not developing, and it remains in a primitive state insofar as it is not following a course to becoming art. The second illegitimate form, in its claims to represent a renewal, is dependent on stealing foreign melodies without even attempting to be influenced or enriched by them, or to draw from them.

Whether this music is instrumental or sung, it has created for itself, within the realm of expression, a suffocating framework in which melodies and tunes revolve only around the subject of bemoaned love. This music is guilty of the greatest negligence in attempting to emulate the consciousness that the Arab nation is struggling to bring forth.

In terms of dance, I believe that no country has seen a deterioration like the one that has occurred in our countries. Individual dancing, almost entirely restricted to silly bodily movements based on repetition, shaking, and vibrations, lacks any artistic flair. Indeed, this dancing aims to arouse the senses in a superficial manner incapable of producing any refined pleasure. As for popular group dancing (folkloric dancing), it is virtually nonexistent, and there is not anyone who attributes any artistic value to this dance in its modern form.

Theater and cinema are what remain, and they are—outside of Egypt—nearly nonexistent. Within Egypt, the former has made significant headway but it has been unable to reach an artistic level that would satisfy an informed intellectual. We do not need to stop too long to consider cinema, as its value is deteriorating in all aspects. As such, it is no exaggeration to describe the cinema as being in a state of decline.

Now then, I am not painting a bleak picture of art in our region, but rather detailing the reality of the situation. What can we conclude from this review? Is our artistic sense ailing? Or has our ability to produce beautiful works of art disappeared, or at the very least, been reduced?

I myself am not able to answer these questions, for to do so would require that I study the subject more faithfully than I have—despite the fact that I consider this quick overview to be close to the truth, for it represents what many believe to be true, even though they may disagree as to why. 

However, I believe that publishing this special issue on the arts, both Arab and Western, is a broad way of posing the questions: Where do our arts stand in terms of the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation in this period? Is it possible for us to discern from the current state of these arts anything that points us away from pessimism and toward more positive signs about the future, in either the short or long term?

I doubt that the literature of our region, in terms of poetry and the novel at least, finds itself in a better state than that of the plastic arts. In order to experience a civilizational renaissance that is fruitful and productive, we should be provided with this important aspect—the artistic aspect—in the life of every idea. This art must be maintained at a high level to ensure that our artistic sense is alive and well.

—Souheil Idriss

Artists’ Questionnaire: “Art and Arab Life” (1956)

Modern Arab societies have gone through important periods of development and growth, to which numerous factors have contributed—and art has been one of these driving, influential factors. What role has art played in the field of your specialty (painting, music, theater, cinema, etc.) in terms of its impact on Arab society, and in terms of the impact of Arab society on it?

al-Adab posed this question to a group of people working in art in different Arab countries and received from them the following responses:

Response of Mr. Moustafa Farroukh (Lebanon)

If we examine the truth of our artistic production, and its relationship with our reality and our lives, we find that everything connected with culture in the Arab world is unconnected to anything of our reality. We find that chaos, unbelief, and turmoil dominate our reality and that the Arab thinker “lives in one valley” while the rest of the Arab nation lives in another completely.

Art, as one of the elements of culture and guidance, is rarely linked to our current reality. It fumbles about in the chaos of different foreign artistic currents. It is not inspired, whether in small or large part, by personal or national feelings, with the exception of certain phenomena. Most of this art was transferred or copied from foreign arts.

And we can see that art in Lebanon—which we might claim to be more developed than the other Arab countries due to its antiquity as well as for other reasons—is for the most part a copy, an imitation, and a repetition of foreign arts. Rarely does it express its reality, or derive from its surroundings and history or from personal feelings.

I do not wish to narrate events or to disclose certain artistic scandals; this is not my goal. Instead, I will leave this to time and the people’s cultural development, which will guarantee that all of it comes to light.

In sum, the dominant spirit of art in our region is a spirit of commercialism and the endless pursuit of money. Any careful observer will note that the jealousy, animosity, disaffection, and loss of communication between artists all comprise irrefutable evidence of the soundness of this statement. Thus, one does not hope that present-day art will undergo improvement or revival, for art anywhere in the world—and including in Lebanon—must be based on a spirit of love, and an artistic work must be for the sake of art and nothing but that.

As for the state of art in the rest of the Arab countries, it is no better off. Most of this art is based on copying and imitating art movements established in Europe, without making any attempt to deny this or to draw inspiration from the present realities and exigencies of Arab countries. At the same time, the mission of art, as we know, is the truthful expression of the feelings and reality of the nation.

For all these reasons, I am of the opinion that true artists must move away from the idea of commercialism and work solely for the sake of the art. They must seek inspiration from within themselves and from the nature of their countries, clearly after studying the principles and laws of art in proper art schools. Then they must leave behind the idea of commercialism and the acquisition of wealth, for art has never, throughout its long history, been a means of acquiring money and wealth. Finally, the adherents of art in our countries must not let envy permeate their being. Instead, they should possess a beautiful spirit and a good character, for this is the fertile soil in which true art can be established, and from which it can carry out its noble mission.

Response of Mr. Kaiser al-Jamil (Lebanon)

There is no relationship between our current reality and our artistic production. The artist has lived throughout the ages in a world of pleasure, pain, and imagination. He has lived among the people, with legends and the gods of legends. He, like the poet, if shaken by a sudden real event, will resort to symbolism to express his feelings.

Our social reality is not devoid of alluring novelty. If an artist is affected by this novelty, and if it penetrates the depths, he will transform it into a painting or sculpture, or compose it into a poem. However, adherence to reality limits the imagination and results in codification, which the artist’s nature abhors and to which it refuses to submit. I wish to say that the value of the subject of a painting is very insignificant, for the painting is in itself an independent artistic work—it is the world of the artist, in which he gathers his things, orders them, and then bestows on them from his mind and heart what tinges them with this strange hue that is what the tune is to the string, what the scent is to perfume, and what love is to the heart.

Response of Mr. Rachid Wehbe (Lebanon)

It is well known that art is considered the truthful mirror of every people. Indeed, it seeks inspiration from images of its past and its heritage, and it expresses its present and portrays its desires and hopes for the future. As such, art is a symbol of the spirit of that people. It echoes their responses to their environment and times, and in doing so presents a vibrant picture of life over time. If we search in the light of this truth for the relationship between our artistic production and our current reality, we will not find it to be a closely linked relationship. This is because, if we mention certain artistic works that attempt to approach this reality, and its stamping by national traits, we cannot forget that our present artistic production is represented by the theory of “art is for art’s sake,” where art exists in its ivory tower, far from the environment and the people; and literary ideas remain secondary to formal considerations, which center artistic value around the creation of a harmonious composition of volumes, lines, and colors.

Even though this theory enjoys a great deal of support from international artistic circles, we should nevertheless take into account our specific circumstances, as a people who are building for history, and ensure that we improve the alignment of the pillars onto which our solid edifice will be raised, so that our works present a true picture of what we feel and experience. Art is one of the most prominent of the intellectual aspects that accompany the renaissances of nations. The true artist is the person who lives in his environment, searching and inquiring in order to convey the feelings and impressions that influence him. Art in our region suffers from the foreign influences that nearly divert it from its ideal direction and separate it from our current realities. In many cases, our production comes as if it were another image from those schools whose artistic principles we have borrowed or taken. Drawing from others is necessary to develop our artistic culture, yet there is a major difference between consciously drawing from another’s work and adopting his ideas to the point of becoming lost in his personality, estranged from our context and our environment. Here, in order to successfully navigate this critical stage of our artistic life, we should work to liberate ourselves from all that obstructs our proper nationalist direction, in order to be rid of all foreign influence on our artistic thinking and to establish sound foundations for the independence of our artistic personality. We must search for this personality in our Eastern, Lebanese surroundings, which are full of vibrant, exciting light, as well as in our glorious national heritage and in the subjects that have value for us. We should remember that these surroundings have already enchanted Western artists and served as a source of innovation and inspiration for them. What would be more appropriate for us, as we revive these surroundings, than to draw from them the impetus for an elevated artistic production, consistent with our environmental circumstances—which we sense more fully than anyone else. Let us adopt them as a basis on which we plant the foundations of our artistic renaissance, that very renaissance we are working to bring about. And let us move forward by its light with strength, determination, and faith.

Response of Mr. Fouad Kamel (Egypt)

The art of Mahmoud Said is considered the first stage in the history of modern Egyptian art. He who researches Said’s two paintings zhat al-jada’il al-zhahabeyya [The One with Golden Locks] and ad-da’wa ila as-safar [A Call to Travel] will see in them the logical and emotional development of an artist who wished to link his studies of Western composition—including of light, shadow, and perspective—to the heritage of Coptic and Islamic art, so as to grow with his art in terms of humanism and populism. 

Just prior to 1940, sets of liberated ideas began to be formulated, based on a social awareness built on a material and psychological understanding. The magazine at-Tatawwur [Development] and then al-Majalla al-Jadeeda [The New Magazine] continued to publish these ideas, alongside the activities of the Art and Liberty group, who organized exhibitions of free art. We saw for the first time in modern history a union between art and literature, for the sake of achieving a revolutionary social language. Egypt read the poetry of George Hanin, the stories of Albert Cossery, and the articles of Anwar Kamel, Hussein Yousef Amin, and Yousef al-Afifi. It also saw the images of Ramses Younan, Kamel al-Telmasany, and Fouad Kamel. A revolutionary spirit filled the air, denouncing the facts of this corrupt life. Images and hopes of a new life were crafted out of the symbols of this dream.

Yousef al-Afifi and Hussein Yousef Amin made a significant contribution to the field of art education by developing the “New Awareness” current, and especially when Yousef al-Afifi dedicated himself to establishing the Higher Institute of Art Education for Teachers. A generation, led by Mahmoud Y. el-Bassiouny, Hamdy Khamees, Saad al-Khadim, and Latfy Zakki, completed their studies abroad. They resumed the work of spreading artistic awareness by forming art schools in public education.

The Contemporary Art group, established by Hussein Yousef Amin, drew from Egyptian legend and popular literature as the basis for its philosophy. It also took the tools used in daily life as forms for its artistic composition. Myth emerged for the first time from the literary domain into the realm of form and color. We find in the art of Aj-Jazzar and Hamed Nada a trend that is more compatible in this respect, while we find in the paintings of Samir Rafa’, Ibrahim Massa’ouda, Kamel Yousef, Mahmoud Khalil, and Salem Habashy certain subjective, rational, or poetic traits that are the result of the encounter with world cultures. As for art criticism and its value in defining and creating artistic currents, there was no clearly defined dogmatic criticism prior to the writings, lectures, and discussions of George Hanin, Yousef al-Afifi, Hussein Yousef Amin, Erik de Ghosh, and Cyril de Bou. This criticism and argumentation was only rarely published in the press. Rather, it was circulated within the art community and at private events. These discussions played an important role in forming and developing numerous artistic personalities.

We cannot ignore the importance of the attempts of Ahmed Rassem, who wrote for the first time to the Arab Library about modern Egyptian art in its first stages. We must also note that Rassem was interested in presenting the art of Kamel al-Telmasani in a lengthy article in the al-Ahram newspaper.

It was necessary for critics to emerge to re-create the history of Egyptian art and awaken the youth to its treasures and sources. Philip Darscott wrote and provided general images in which he chronicled and critiqued modern trends, yet he did not adopt a specific viewpoint, in contrast to the critic Aimé Azar, whose book The History of Modern Art in Egypt is comprised of six parts. After establishing a philosophy and objective for the book, Azar gathered together an assortment of modern Egyptian art. We should mention the crime that is committed by the Egyptian press today against these rising generations through its atrocious disregard for art criticism—or its recourse to personalities who are not knowledgeable or studied in either the origins of criticism or providing guidance. Numerous artistic personalities attempt to continue producing art, and they come together or split apart when showing their works. We find Yousef Sayyeda, Taheyya Haleem, Hassan al-Telmasani, Hamed Abdullah, Fathi al-Bakri, Ezzeddin Hamouda, Saleh Yosri, and Walim Ishaq, and yet this is an irresolute and ambiguous continuation.

Since 1953, Egyptian artists have felt the need to establish more vibrant arenas in which to display their developing art. Discussions in some of the newspapers have begun to ask about the role of art in relation to society, and debates have been initiated regarding the methods of realism in art—thereby following the current trend of freethinking that began with the establishment of the Art and Liberty group. Today we see that the Egyptian artist is nearly suffocating in his own art. If he does not set out for new horizons, armed with a progressive awareness of art and science, this artistic generation will be doomed to annihilation, and Egypt will continue to wait for another new generation to hold its dreams in their minds and hearts. These new horizons are the mural arts. And fortunately, the modern Egyptian artist has a long artistic heritage at his disposal, beginning with cave paintings from the prehistoric era and including pharaonic art and the art of churches and mosques. These different images and various materials can well serve as a fertile source for study, revival, and development. The Egyptian artist may be assured that the mural is also found in modern artistic heritage, as in the creations of Mexico’s artists such as [José Clemente] Orozco, [Diego] Rivera, and [Rufino] Tamayo, which occupy government buildings, halls of science, theaters, restaurants, and all the popular institutions. These are tall, broad pages, on which developed, modern artistic principles may be manifested in murals, without slipping into prevalent academic taste.

Today’s insightful critic senses the seeds of this art in the works of Hamed Nada in its latest phase.

The collective dreams of today should push beyond the limits of the frame and the salons, to be rejuvenated and to live under the sun, before the eyes of millions.

Response of Mr. Hamed Abdalla (Egypt)

Art and society simultaneously influence and are influenced by each other. The true artist takes reality as his raw material. He does not convey this reality literally, but rather revives it through his whole living being, “viewing it from within” as he creates it anew as a more vibrant reality. Society is also impacted by art and responds to its inspiration. For this reason, the content of art is the content of life. 

As for the artists who, adhering to pure formalism, imagine that pedantically creating empty forms is art, or the artists who imitate external reality or depict it in an anecdotal manner, considering art to be a means of comprehension and not an actual modality of knowledge, or who create art for the purpose of propaganda in any of its forms—those artists represent superficiality and stagnation in art, for they are only grazing the surface of life.

We note that every phase of society’s development is also a phase of the development of art and all sorts of ways of thinking. We find in Egyptian society’s phases of struggle—in the middle of this century, for example, for the cause of independence—that modern Egyptian representational art has been liberated from the influence of Western art and has been guided to its correct path: connected with its ancient, inherited past, and with the well of the art of the people and their traditions, adopting the principles of the artistic origins of the ancient East without imitating them, in contrast to the artistic origins of the West, which observe the rules of perspective painting, or the personification through the Modèle or Modulation. Those original principles of the West aimed to depict objects as seen by the eye without regard for their truth, and constitute a certain submission to the false appearance of nature—the principle that the contemporary West rejected when it abandoned easel painting for wall painting.

Response of Mr. Hamdy Ghaith (Egypt)

I would like us first to agree on the concept of the word theater, which is contained in the question. The theater, as I understand it, is this work or that artistic phenomenon that we see in the Dar al-Ta’lil and that comprises the literary text as well as production and acting in all their elements of movement, gesture, rhythm, music, sound, silence, lighting, and decor. In this way, theater becomes the complete dramatic act, not just the written play—for the written play, as long as it remains such, is not a theatrical act but merely a literary work.

If we understand the word theater in this way, then we are able to say that theater cannot influence nationalist thought, because it is, by nature, a result of this nationalist thinking, meaning, it follows from it rather than precedes it. If theater in Egypt (as opposed to Egyptian theater) has influenced nationalist thinking, this influence is reflected only in the men behind it, in that the producer and the actor have surpassed the playwright. This is because theater in Egypt began through the translation of Western literature. As such, its sole influence is in having established the art form of drama in Egyptian literature. If we wish to speak about theater in terms of the literary text that we call the play, it cannot be said that theater has influenced or been influenced by nationalist thought. This is because nationalist thought is a continuous current that takes on various forms, including the novel, poetry, photography, and plays. It cannot be said that the novel, for example, has influenced nationalist thought or been influenced by it, as the story itself is among the forms of this thought.

Thus, it is not possible to speak about the extent to which Egyptian theater has influenced or been influenced by nationalist thought. However, we can ask whether Egyptian theater has moved in pace with nationalist thought, or lagged behind it.

The nationalist thought contemporaneous to the establishment of Egyptian theater was itself what paved the way for the revolution of 1919. It preached political and social liberation. As for Egyptian theater, we unfortunately have to affirm that it has always lagged behind nationalist thought. In political terms, Egyptian theater did not play the same role as that played by other artistic and literary forms. Theater was never an expression of the Egyptian revolution; rather, it was surprised by it. Theater’s only role was to cry out in the wake of the revolution. The theater was highly insignificant on the battlefield, as the revolution’s events were always greater than it.

As the theater was mired in the melodrama that was translated or composed and that overran the Ramses troupe, Egyptian literature took a different course—a new path blazed by Taha Hussein, al-Mazni, and al-Aqqad. Though romantic theater may have been considered an expression of the middle class, meaning a natural expression of the Egyptian political and social revolution, it was incapable of comprehending this awareness; instead it took melodrama itself as a means of expression, but of what?

Perhaps we know that the melodrama was a theatrical expression of the regret of the collapsing landed gentry and its sense of doom in the face of the revolutionary tide of the middle class. In this way, the theater—represented first and foremost by the work of the Ramses troupe—was reactionary and misleading. This is absolutely clear not only from nationalist novels, but also from the novels that address social problems. We can take as an example of this the issue of women’s liberation, which has pervaded nationalist ideas in Egypt from the beginning of this century. On this issue, Egyptian theater adopted a reactionary position that, expressed in novels such as Zawgatina [Our Wives], asserts that the natural place for women is in the home.

All of this applies to Egyptian theater in the period in which we are living. The theater until now remains unable to adapt to new nationalist thought, for many reasons that cannot be mentioned here. While the realist school emerges in Egyptian literature, theater remains stuck in melodrama and vaudeville. And while Egyptian society is shaken from time to time by political and social uprisings, the theater is always surprised by these uprisings and never joins the calls for such uprisings in anything more than—in the best of cases—a weak voice that is quickly drowned out by these decisive popular movements. This is because the theater dealt with and continues to deal with political and social matters in an unsophisticated manner—rather than undertaking a real analysis and coming to a clear understanding of the truth of these matters in terms of their economic and social aspects, instead of solely within a socially regressive framework.

Finally, I wish to say that Egyptian theater has not been born yet, even if many signs indicate that its birth is not far off.

*Mr. Ghaith restricted his response to Arab theater in Egypt, due to its connection to his particular experience and his depiction of the general characteristics of theater in other Arab countries.

Response of Mr. Khalil al-Masry (Egypt)

Many researchers differ in their views of the arts in general, and of music in particular. Some say that art leads to renaissances. Others assert that art follows renaissances or, more clearly put, that art is a depiction of these renaissances, and that true art gives us a true picture. Since our views of this picture may differ, we may think of it as a point of origin, one that influences and guides society. Yet the meticulous researcher does not overlook the fact that this so-called true picture is merely a copy of the original, which is society. As such, art is but a chronicler of history, not an instigator of renaissances. If we accept this position, we find that Arab art has been able to depict the renaissances of its peoples and, with its limited or local capabilities, to give us a true picture of their prevalent anxiety. Arab music was influenced by Turkish music when the Turks had a say in the rule of our country, and it was influenced by the Western music that was present among us when we looked to the West and moved toward it. However, Arab music did not become completely devoted to the West, nor did it lose its identity and its ancient civilization. Rather, this influence embellished and enhanced Arab music, and moved it toward becoming a global art.

However, many factors existed in Arab countries that led to the decline of the arts, two of which are extremely important and thus worthy of mention: 

These two factors caused feelings of inadequacy among the Arab people and divided them into two groups, which moved in opposite directions. The first looked to the West, believed that Egypt was capable of rising to its level, and demanded the highest degree of freedom possible. The second was oriented toward the East, struggled to admit its own inadequacy, and clung to the flimsy threads of its Eastern identity—it called for conserving this identity by imposing strict censorship.

Despite this there is significant evidence today that Arab music is responding to and being influenced by the renaissances of the people. However, I disagree with those who say that Arab music is the creator and inspiration behind this reawakening.

Response of Mr. Maher Ra’ef (Egypt)

The West came before the East in revolting against men of religion—not religious teachings—who, without good intentions, appointed themselves the protectors and advocates of religion, after placing stumbling blocks on the road to the progress of civilization for so long. The impact of this was that the West made great strides in the fields of science, discovery, and invention, which with the East has been unable to keep pace. The West thus extended its authority over the East and launched a siege to prevent it from progressing, and even to block it from freedom. This became clearer than ever in art in general and particularly in the plastic arts, which are the topic of this discussion.

If art is the equal of science in the field of human progress, then we attempt to understand the truth of our external reality through science and to probe the depths of our internal reality through art. The two are linked in a way that reveals the extent of the importance of art to human life and the extent of its influence in the field of human progress.

The East, led by Egypt, has attempted to awaken from its ignorance and to cast off the effects of the political occupation and the foreign monopoly on Eastern thought and taste. By the East, I mean the Arab East. The effect of this revolution against this occupation and monopoly emerged in the field of plastic arts. And if it was right for us to keep pace with the West’s scientific progress and to take from the West its latest inventions, we do not have the least right to keep pace with the West in terms of its art, for art has a nation from which it must spring forth. And it has traditions, customs, and norms associated with a group of people who define its form and subject, and even the direction of its development. Those who attempt this not only carry within themselves the tools of their own destruction and the obliteration of their identity, they also help the West to directly or indirectly solidify its hold on the East.

Currently in Egypt, there are those doing all they can to embrace artistic trends to liberate Egyptian art from its slavery to foreign art, and even from a return to ancient Egyptian art—despite the fact that others claim the latter would return originality to Egyptian art. Yet this is not in accordance with the social environment, which defines the general image of art, even if the geographical environment is the same in both cases.

These modern trends have succeeded. In art, more or less, those embracing them have achieved their objective through their dedication to the principle upon which these ideas are based and through their keenness to expose themselves to modern global culture, which is necessary for the contemporary artist to be successful in realizing his mission. That he shares in abundance in addressing subjects related to social life in Egypt, with a view permeated by the logic of modern thought.

If the Egyptian public as a whole does not appreciate works of modern art, it is because these works are not as familiar to them as the thousand varieties of art presented to them by foreign artists and by teaching professors who took art from the institutes of Europe and circulated it, or worked to circulate it, in our region.

Response of Mr. Jewad Selim (Iraq)

In any time or place, all important and good artistic production is a mirror that reflects the reality in which it exists. How we perceive this product—whether it is truly human, and how it can be a genuine and powerful expression—all this is related to the freedom of the artist to express his surroundings. This is simultaneously an intellectual freedom and an economic one. There are hundreds of “shoulds” and “musts” that are repeatedly mentioned in our newspapers and magazines, and in most cases the writer is attempting to express his own superiority or the nobleness of his ideas, trying to extricate the artist from his stupefaction or backwardness. This generally indicates the presence of old commonplaces in new molds. Most authors who are agitated with lofty human ideas are quick to offer guidance to writers or artists, even when they themselves do not know or intentionally forget the contents of museums and books, and all the art that humanity has produced that restores our trust in humanity’s goodness.

Response of Mr. Hafidh al-Droubi (Iraq)

Our reality suffers in its appearance, but not in its essence, from the dominance of European character. Our way of life has taken on affectation in order to fit with European life. Local dress is on the verge of being swept aside by European styles as we leave the countryside and move to the cities. Moreover, there is a great contradiction between our core equilibrium as Eastern people and these almost completely false and affected appearances. This is in terms of our reality. In terms of art, the problem is different, for art in our region suffers from Western domination in both its essence and its external forms. In other words, the contradiction mentioned above is nearly nonexistent, for art in our region is in fact Western in its entirety. The reason for this goes back to the fact that painters, and Iraqi painters in particular, had their artistic beginnings and studies in Europe and in the style of European schools, and as such their views of things became that of a Western person. In addition, there was a dark period that cut us off from our heritage—whether ancient or Islamic civilizations—following which Iraqi artists opened their eyes and saw nothing but mature European art before them. As for our civilizational heritage, it remained concealed until only recently, when museums were established. As for local art, it is extremely simple in impression, so much so that is difficult to use it as any kind of basis. Another thing is that the local art market is invaded by an artistic culture with a European art affect, whether in in inquiry or in outline. We have barely any access to authentic Eastern art—such as Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art—despite the fact that the West has also been influenced by it, and despite its maturity and importance.

Today, we feel intense pain at this move away from local reality and national character. Most of us attempt and endeavor to establish an art that represents this reality, that influences it and is influenced by it, and each of us seeks to achieve it according to his specific point of view. Some deal with line and composition, attempting through them to claim something of the Assyrian and Sumerian spirit, yet they remain European nevertheless. Yet these artists try—always, they try.

Others continuously call for a specifically Iraqi art, yet they themselves have not found such a character. One of the Europeans who said that “dusty colors are of an Iraqi character” may have been mistaken, for Iraq is never dusty. And these are our colors. And this is our sun.

There are artists who consider their attempts to be Iraqi art, even as they follow the direction of the modern European school, and the French school in particular. This is because France had a major educational influence on these artists.

As for me personally, despite the fact that I continually endeavor to paint Iraqi subjects, on the basis of my upbringing in a purely Iraqi context, I continue to think of the work of European painters when picking up the brush and painting. As such, I continue to consider myself to be playing the role of attempting to establish a modern Iraqi school. Even though I have at times proceeded along the lines of the ancient Iraqi way, these were an imitation and nothing more.

As for how this relationship should be: we believe it should be a close relationship. Artistic tendencies are not subject to logical controls, but rather to the circumstances surrounding the art, the abovementioned factors, and other factors. These current schools will endeavor to create a sound, strong connection with reality, which continues to develop, and to strive to find its particular character.

Response of Mr. Ismaeil al-Sheikhly (Iraq)

For a long time, the Arab world has lagged behind the rest of the world in scientific progress as well as in social and political spheres. The inevitable result is a backwardness that is reflected in our social reality and that has led to a backwardness in thought, literature, and art.

The Arab world has been isolated from the rest of the world and thus rarely influenced by the intellectual currents that affect our times. The Baghdad school of painting under Abbasid rule deserves mention, although it ended with the Abbasid era. Al-Wasiti was one of the most prominent painters of this period. Yet throughout the last fifty years, the experience from which Iraq and the other Arab countries have suffered due to their contact with the civilized world—and to its innovations in the fields of science, industry, and thought—has led them to “borrow” from it. I doubt whether this assimilation of Western intellectual and artistic currents is deep and true, as our regressive reality is different from the natural, progressive reality of the West. For example, the appearance of Cubism in the Western world is justified, as it is an artistic form that evolved from previous artistic forms. We can say the same about the other artistic schools in the West. The Cubist trends in our country, however, fail to represent a genuine reality not only in terms of the type of production, but also in terms of our present historical circumstances. Owing to this, the artistic movement in Iraq has yet to acquire distinguishing characteristics and a clear identity in either form or content. The truth is that the artistic movement in our country represents nothing but confusion and turbulence resulting from the underdevelopment of the Iraqi identity in terms of expressing its condition, environment, and historical circumstances.

However, Iraq is on the verge of making major social, economic, and cultural progress, which will surely impact the production of our artists. Iraqi artists must seek inspiration from this new life, yet imbue it with their own particular Iraqi character. In my opinion, Iraqi artists should work toward establishing a connection to the public, for the purpose of developing the artistic taste of its people. This will not happen unless artists channel public concerns and feelings, through the expression of public and private subjects directly related to daily life, and unless the public acknowledges its own reality. However, at present this production carries no more than the purpose we envisage for it, which is only the development of artistic taste, a sense of beauty, and the artistic feelings of the public. The natural relationship between the artist and his audience will undoubtedly influence both the quality of artistic production and the public’s taste. Indeed, one of these factors will affect the other until art takes on an authentic form or many authentic forms that express the needs of the people and are simultaneously understood by them.

Response of Mr. Atta Sabri (Iraq)

Artistic production and reality have been interrelated since time immemorial. The first humans expressed the shape of animals due to their dire need for those animals and in order to cast away the dangers posed by them. Later came arts that expressed the ancient civilizations, such as in China, followed by those in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. In Mesopotamia, art represented power, might, and the conquests that were undertaken, such as the Lion of Babylon, the winged lion, and the reliefs that represent the kings of Assyria and others in their wars and conquests.

If we move on to thirteenth-century Baghdad and its famous artistic school, we see that the painter [Yehia bin Mahmoud al-Wasiti], in his illustrations of the Maqamat of al-Hariri, held today in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris, realistically depicted views of human social life in the form of large drawings that remind us of wall reliefs. He depicted thirteenth-century Arabs in mosques, in the desert or field, in libraries, or in inns. Another famous manuscript, Kalila wa Dimnah, was painted by other artists to express their social circumstances and events through pictures of animals.

Moving ahead to Europe, particularly the age of the Renaissance in Italy and other countries, we see the artistic productions of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci in paintings such as The Last Supperby Leonardo, The Resurrection by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, as well as his great sculptures of Moses and David, and Raphael’s many paintings of the Virgin and Christ. Then came [Francisco de] Goya in Spain, who expressed in his paintings the atrocities of the French and their occupation, as well as the scandals of war.

If we move forward to today’s era, we find that the chaos, decadence, confusion, moral collapse, and apathy that followed the two [world] wars have had a major impact on artists. We find them defeated by reality and moving in different, confused directions. Their artistic production was in ebb and flood, until artists in some domains arrived at Social Realism and began to assert their social and political opinions in murals that gave expression to the working class, peasants, and others. This is what happened in Mexico at the hands of the artist [Diego] Rivera and others.

Here we see that the state entered the field and supported and directed artists, or imposed its will on them, so that these artists give voice to their society or political regime, either directly or indirectly. Whereas [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, with his regime known as the “New Deal,” moved to encourage artists materially and morally and left the field open to them with complete freedom of artistic production, the dictatorships prior to World War II imposed restrictions and conditions on the kinds of art permitted.

As for today in Iraq, following a long period of stagnation, we have embarked on a new and blessed artistic movement, initiated about a quarter of a century ago with our deceased artist Abdul Qadir al-Rassam, the “artist of Tigris and Baghdad,” who captured peaceful views of the landscape in his oil paintings. Then, after 1930, artistic missions began to go to Europe at the behest of the Iraqi Ministry of Education, and returned to their homeland after lengthy study in a new mold and with a European character. These new Iraqi artists, and their students after them, began to look to Europe as a source of revelation and inspiration for their artistic paintings and even their subjects, which became Leda and the Swan, flowers, landscapes, etc. They forgot all but a very little of their surroundings and the environment in which they lived.

Others then emerged who conducted their artistic experiments in the manner of the European artists who were prominent between the two wars, with distinguishing circumstances and causes. They began, in painting their pictures and images, to adopt the schools and methods of Cubism, Surrealism, or abstraction, regardless of the reasons that led European artists to use such modes of expression in their own paintings. As such, they imitated [Pablo] Picasso and others in order to be “modernized” painters. The truth is that we today are facing social, economic, and political problems and circumstances and going through new developments that differ completely from those of European artists.

We noticed that the exhibition of Indian art held in Baghdad three years ago bore a distinctly Indian character, and was tending toward the formation of a modern Indian school. Undoubtedly, that had a pronounced effect on the psyches of Iraqi artists and on a majority of those who visited this exhibition, thus prompting Iraqi artists to think about new and prospective ways to arrive at an Iraqi artistic school, or create a local character, or to form a style that represents Baghdad. Yet this cannot be attained in a single day, or even in a year. Rather, writers, literary figures, and artists must unite to establish the solutions and capacities for attaining a local character, with connection to the international artistic movement.

The new generation in Iraq today has begun to appreciate art in a very encouraging manner for this goal. For we must present more art exhibitions, with facilitation from the Ministry of Education via the Institute of Fine Arts, so as to connect with foreign countries and bring art exhibitions to Iraq, whether of the old works by their masters and schools or of the contemporary. And I think it is incumbent for artists to work to create an artistic and literary magazine to consolidate a public of readers who are thirsty for arts and literature.

Iraq today is going through the birth of a comprehensive architectural and industrial movement. As such, our architects must open the field to painters and sculptors to create murals and bas-relief sculptures on the walls of these buildings, and particularly government buildings, so as to be completely integrated. On the other hand, attention must be paid to commercial art, so that it can meet the needs of the country’s industrial production for images, advertisements, and other commercial art forms. Art must also be used for social purposes, such as social services and other uses. The new and expansive squares and open areas to be created upon completion of Baghdad’s city planning will be among the best arenas for sculptors in our country to erect monumental statues, which will become a Ka’aba for visitors and for excursionists who seek an escape from the people or fill their free time, just as in the squares of Rome, Paris, and London.

Our artistic production should be a true expression of our current reality. It must reflect the pains of the people as well as their joys, in social and popular subjects. The artist faces an open field, for these subjects have not been addressed previously. Art today is moving toward a kind of new realism, by which it is possible to record daily life in our country in tremendous, expressive paintings.

Response of Mr. Fateh al-Moudarres (Syria)

The Arab arts have suffered through a long period of decline, from painting to styles of buildings, from metal engraving to textiles, and even popular traditions of dress and song. In addition, a permanent religious opposition, combined with the shallowness of the scientific culture, and the lack of genuine, constructive attempts by Arab governments to revive popular Arab heritage—all this has led to the obliteration of what remained of a distinctive artistic heritage.

Along with all these urgent ailments, European imperialism arrived to spread distortion and poverty and poisoned relations between the remaining religious sects so as to politicize them. All this destroyed the last remaining bastion of Arab art in the East, and it remains in ruins.

If we wish to define a character for any Arab artistic production, or if we wish to find a link between any such production and our reality, we will fail. If a European critic today were to view any painting by an Arab painter, he would not find anything but a Turkish fez, the face of a dome, an ancient minaret, a strangely designed water pipe in a carnival of cafés, or a piece of embroidery from a worn-out Shiraz carpet!

The modern concept of contemporary realist Arab art is difficult to define, as the nonexistence of inherited artistic features has, to a great extent, rendered our Arab artistic production weak in terms of its identity. Indeed, the contemporary art of each state in the world is based on substantial inheritances. In India, we see in the paintings of modern artists clear references to the ancient Indian artistic heritage. The same is true of modern China, as well as Japan. We see in the exhibitions of all the nations an originality and differentiation that indicate that this painting is Indian or that painting is Chinese or Finnish. However, the painting created in the Arab East has no identity, for its character is lost, its originality erased, and it consists of a distorted, mixed-up imitation of the European schools. We can thus assert, for all the preceding reasons, that Arab artistic production has no relationship at all with our reality or our renaissance.

In order to bless contemporary Arab taste with a truly Arab art that interprets its reality and its social struggle on all fronts, we must begin a new “renaissance” era—meaning an era based on the rebirth of ancient Arab art, grafted to current modern concepts, in a light rich in distinctive color and inherited, authentic designs.

The reasons for the chaos to be found in the exhibitions held in Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad have become clear: There is no close coordination between governments and painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, and authors. Nor is there even a sense that this collaboration is lacking.

Come with me: Stand next to me before an Arab painting, and let us assume that its creator has called it an Arabic name meaning “Awakening” or “Revolution” or “Protest.” What would you find in this painting? You would not find anything except a carnival of influences, firstly because the artist has no personal style. You would not find any colors from the East, nor would you find that authentic effort to highlight originality in the orientation of the design and the subject as a whole. Perhaps the reason for this goes back to the fact that Arab history is not studied, on one hand, and on the other to the dearth of understanding of common artistic schools. Thus, painters, sculptors, musicians, and architects are unable to establish a distinctive character by which they might define their place in the ranks of universal art.

The development of the artistic understanding of a contemporary people is not incompatible with the inherited ancient values that have a unique character. If you were to take even the most contemporary of schools, such as Surrealism, and if you as an artist fervently cling to your Arab nationalism, you would be able to render an original expression from your lines. And even if you were an advocate of the abstract or the nonobjective schools, you would be able to maintain a distinctive Arab character. This matter is inevitable for modern architects who insist on taking from the style of Le Corbusier! Indeed, if Le Corbusier had been Eastern or Arab, he would have given his school a distinctive character, while still observing the latest requirements of the age, because comprehending character requires it, and national pride as well!

I visited Europe this year, and found a unique character in every country I visited. When the steamer docked us back on Syrian shores, the absurd hodgepodge became apparent in the buildings, the music, and all signs of life—even in people’s faces! The East appeared before me as if it had been hit by a hydrogen bomb! How, then, can we respond to the original question: Does contemporary Arab artistic production have a connection to our reality—apart from what we have said in the preceding lines?

Our situation is disgraceful, our values cheap, and our confidence nonexistent. As such, our distinctive Arab identity is also absent. If we have been allowed to stand among the many nations, it is only because we have not yet died out completely.

Look: This man is Chinese, that one is Siamese; this man is Filipino, that one is French—and who do we have here? Tell me, by God, who is this strange creation who wears a fez on his head and on top of that a hat, and below them a tie, and on his shoulders an overcoat, and over that an abaya, and on his feet crepe-soled shoes. He speaks in a language that is neither Arabic nor Chinese nor Siamese, nor anything recognizable—his language does not even resemble the language of the birds! Now look at his face, and you will not even find distinctive Eastern features in it! After all this, how does your stomach accept and digest the painting the Arab holds in his hands, as if he were a beggar holding out an empty bowl, begging for the peoples’ sympathy before they judge him with sweeping verdicts, but not daring to reveal it! How do we accept to call this a painting? Such an Arab, when standing among the ranks of nations, should bow his head in shame.

We can lie to ourselves, but the matter is different in the eyes of others, who must see us as we truly are—who must see that our pride in our distinctive values has ceased to exist.

If we wish to have a modern Arab art, we must initiate an era of rebirth for all that has become extinct. We must build it up and graft to it what we will, according to what the old outlines will accept in terms of new turns and appearances. As I say this, regret fills my heart, because the matter applies to my own work as well!

Response of Mr. Munir Sulayman (Syria)

The question about art and its link to our Arab reality is frequently repeated, and the people respond to it with a host of different answers. The most important of these answers is that the greatest purpose of art is to express the features of life in its various aspects. In all Arab countries, art remains far from this. If you were to see a painting that represents a landscape or face or still life, you would feel that there is a dense veil blocking you from seeing the truth of these objects or separating you and the life that pulses within each of them.

The important thing in painting is that people see in every canvas something of themselves, something of their hopes and dreams for life. Even more, the artist seeks to depict through his painting the life that is lived by the people, as well as the hopes that stir in his heart and in theirs. The artist succeeds to the extent that he expresses these dreams and makes them speak in his painting with a power to affect the people, even influencing the simple souls among them who have not had the good fortune to enjoy a culture of art.

The function of art, whatever its color and whatever its form, is to serve life. A beautiful painting—whether of a river, or the breast or legs of a beautiful woman, or the shoulders of a man of great stature, or his arm—is beautiful because it suits its organic function, and its concept is nothing but the elevated rendering of our many needs. Indeed, it is the perpetual extension of these needs, meaning that the concept distills the future of these powerful, unrestrained needs and makes it evident, just as the flower and the fruit condense the tree, promulgate it, and extend its life into immortality.

Yet this eternal truth remains unfamiliar to artists in all the Arab countries. For this reason, we cannot claim that there is art in the Arab countries, and we will remain far from it so long as artists are distantly removed from the essence and secret of art, and even from its fundamental components.

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In Morocco in the mid-1960s, the National School of Fine Arts in Casablanca offered a new cohort of avant-garde thinkers—including artists Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi—a platform for developing new models of decolonized, integrated artistic practice. Such an agenda is set forth in this position statement written by Chebaa on the occasion of the three-person Belkahia, Chebaa, and Melehi exhibition at the Mohammed V Theatre gallery in Rabat, and published in January 1966 in the Arabic daily al-‘Alam. In it, Chebaa argues for an authenticity of representation in modern Moroccan art. The poster by Mohammed Melehi that advertised the exhibition, in MoMA’s collection, signals this group of artists’ contemporary practice, grounded in vernacular forms and international graphic arts and design modes.

Author Mohammed Chebaa
Date 1966
Language Arabic

On the Concept of Painting and the Plastic Language (1966)

Mohammed Chebaa

The exhibition is a fitting occasion to take a look at the situation of our plastic arts in recent years.¹

We cannot deny that we are subject to the various problems that this situation poses, despite the impossibility of doing justice to them, with all their ramifications and complications, in a single essay or presentation. I believe that this plight comes from the fact that all of these problems have been fully raised, and now various opinions regarding them contend with one another.

Before we examine these problems, we need to take a small step back to see how the phenomenon of painting emerged in our country and what ultimately has become of it—virtually the only manifestation of the plastic arts movement that we have—and to examine the social and political influences it was subject to.

Our preliminary investigation foregrounds paintings by the oldest of the painters among us, who are now well-known figures: the likes of [Mohammed] Ben Ali Rbati of Tangier, around 1920, for example. Rbati’s paintings are not entirely primitive; rather they are symbolic figurative paintings. I believe that they are an extension of the paintings that typically accompany illuminated manuscripts—an art form still practiced by a small number of Moroccan artists, the most famous of whom is al- Qadiri of Fez—for they are closer to Persian painting than to European painting, not least because Persian artists have employed similar methods for ornamental painting on architecture as well as furniture, such as tables and chairs.

To this extent, this phenomenon remains purely Moroccan, although we notice that the abundance of painting production by these older artists often was due to the support of certain foreigners who discovered them and then exploited their production for various reasons, the most common being the quest for the exotic and the primitive. Rbati, for example, was a cook in one of the large English families living in Tangier at the time. And after this phase, which is still characterized by a Moroccan authenticity, came another phase that included many foreign patrons, most of who were expatriates in Morocco during the Protectorate and after it, whose inclinations and intentions varied.

We will only be concerning ourselves with two examples here. One of them is from the north, and the other is from the south. In the north, the Spanish painter [Mariano] Bertuchi was commissioned by the Spanish Protectorate to preside over the fine arts, and the most important of his initiatives was the founding of a school of fine arts, which, in Tétouan, is there to this day, and a school of Islamic arts. The school of fine arts played an important role in preparing Moroccan painters and sculptors to pursue studies abroad, in particular in Spain, just as the school of Islamic arts took part in revitalizing the national arts of the north: wood, metal, and plaster engraving; pottery; and mosaics. In the school of fine arts, Moroccan pupils became familiar with painting according to an academic concept of representation.

I believe the most important example in the south was undertaken in Marrakesh by the French painter [Jacques] Majorelle, who had both direct and indirect influence on the emergence of painting there. I once heard that the first female painter in Morocco was a woman who worked with Majorelle and who he guided toward painting.

In addition to these two examples, which are positive to a certain extent, there were also deleterious elements among the foreign painters, some of who exerted a negative influence on the emergence of our painting, for in their painting, they were only interested in views of daily life. This lent their work, and that of those Moroccan painters who were influenced by them, a touristic and documentary quality.

It is for this reason that those paintings are not in any way characterized by a Moroccan authenticity; rather, they are nothing more than distortions of what Moroccan painting might be, in addition to being inferior examples of what might be characterized as European art. And if we recall that European painting was, in that particular phase, in the process of distancing itself greatly from purely representational classical painting, we further realize that those foreign painters did not present us with good examples of what authentic Moroccan painting might be. After this, there came a phase that is much nearer to us, in which the phenomena of primitive painting and the naïf painter arose. The strongest examples are works by Mohamed Ben Allal and Moulay Ahmed Drissi, both of whom are from Marrakesh. It is common knowledge that the backers of these two artists were foreign patrons, led by a few foreign painters. I believe that this foreign support—first by the French Protectorate’s fine arts administration prior to independence, and by the French cultural mission after independence—was a way of highlighting an artistic phenomenon based (given our backward characteristics) upon exoticism, and not by any means upon support of popular art, as some people might believe.

Immediately after this, certain young painters emerged who demonstrated a particular openness to modern art, and especially to abstraction. They were sponsored by those same circles, and were sent to Paris to benefit from its school. All those painters did in fact return to Morocco, and most of them were greatly influenced by the city of Paris, and they are the ones who now represent the abstractionist trend in general, and Art Informel in particular, with [Jilali] Gharbaoui being their most prominent figure.

As a result, most of those painters also fail to demonstrate a trace of Moroccan authenticity, still less any African authenticity. The patrons and supporters I mentioned sense this, and so they seek a new outlet. When they opt to abandon these artists by renouncing their most prominent representative, Gharbaoui, then they soon find him wandering the streets without food or shelter, with illness gnawing away at his body!² And in their search they find “new talents,” but this time we see those talents returning to the ranks of the primitives. For the best those foreign supporters can find among the artists who come after Ben Allal—who has become too old for them—is [Ahmed] Ouardighi. And so they bring Ouardighi out into the open, and set up exhibitions for him at home and abroad, and create a market that no Moroccan painter has ever even dreamed of (some of his paintings have sold for record sums).

Although this presentation was brief due to space constraints, we can see that our manifestation of painting is closely linked to our associations with foreigners, and consequently to our lived historical and political circumstances during the Protectorate, and during the independence after it. Indeed, some of the aforementioned foreign circles imposed their patrimony on the artistic and cultural renaissance. Painting’s turn away from African and Arab traditions goes back, firstly, to the guidance of those circles, and secondly to a lack of awareness on the part of our painters with our cultural and intellectual identity, in light of the weakness of their own education—most of our painters are illiterate.

The disadvantages of that artistic orientation do not stop here, however. Their repercussions also include the fact that some of our intellectuals now associate representational painting with Moroccan reality, unaware of the fact that the essence of our art was not and will never be representational, for there is nothing representational in either our Islamic art or our Berber art. Rather, it is abstraction and symbol—the abstraction of nature in geometric painting, engraving, mosaic ornament, and Berber carpets. It is impossible for us to be authentic in our work by orienting ourselves toward representation in painting, so how would such an orientation be appropriate for us at a time when research in the plastic arts in the West is turning toward the symbolic and abstract, after abandoning their classical traditions; attempting to draw benefit in that new research from our [collective] mentalities so as to reach a rejuvenation, a symbolism and art that is in keeping with what might be a foundation for art of the future?! This leads to a certain confusion between the understanding of plastic arts and that of literary language, and consequently to a lack of understanding of the true function of painting: they demand from the painting that it tell stories, that it depict events for them, as if it were a report or a narrative record. And they also demand that the painting perform the same task that the newspaper—or writing in general—performs, or that photography performs, and here there is a serious confusion between the characteristics of languages and their identity. For if I demanded of a painting that it merely record an event for me, then it would be more appropriate for me to read an article in the newspaper, which might very well be a clearer and more faithful rendering of that event!

The language of the plastic arts is not subject to the requirements of verbal or literary language, for these are two separate entities, each with its own rules and characteristics, and neither of them needs the other in order to accomplish its task fully, although both of them do have certain points in common with other languages —mathematics, music, theater, etc.—in embodying the human intellect and its civilization.

The treatment of this topic leads us to discuss an important problem: that of commitment in art. There are many conflicting opinions concerning this principle, but those who have hitherto posed this problem have, in my opinion, made the same mistake that we mentioned earlier: for in their understanding, commitment comprises “representational” painting, and the personification of the feelings and problems that the people are subject to in their bitter struggles. They also believe—and rightly so, this time—that painting must express the people and be understood by the people.

From this erroneous perspective, it appears as if the woman who weaves carpets in the remotest tribe of the Atlas Mountains does not understand the carpets she has woven, the designs of which she herself has created. A few conclusions can be drawn from this:

“Representational realism is not at the core of our artistic mentality. Rather, it was imposed by a different, European mentality—a reactionary one—which is alien to us.

Primitive art is not the only fitting direction our plastic art movement can take.

True commitment does not necessarily mean returning to regressive artistic models that are alien to us.”

So what is the solution, then?

Just as I do not claim here to comprehensively treat all the elements that were at the origin of our current situation in the plastic arts, neither do I claim to be able to put forward solutions to the problems that this situation poses. All I can do is suggest elements of solutions, which I hope we can discuss.

My presentation should not lead anyone to think that I am defending what is called abstraction simply for abstraction’s sake. Instead, I want to have been of benefit to the reader by demonstrating that the problem is not that of “abstraction vs. realism?” Rather, it is the following: research within the plastic arts befitting our rich traditions, our mentality, and our true perspective on the future.

And I believe that the best research within our plastic arts will be none other than investigation that takes the facts that we mentioned earlier into account. In my opinion, we must stop equating representation and figuration in painting with realism, since our artistic heritage—that of geometric ornament—is more realist and expressive of our historical mentality than any image that depicts a scene from everyday life!

I believe that this is the path of our true commitment.

Translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu Zeid.

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