Cinema of the Arab World

An overview of the major developments in the art and industry of cinema in the Arab World, ranging from its earliest days to the most recent works of the digital era. Especially since the Sixties, Arab filmmakers have developed dynamic national cinemas that have sought to tell their own stories in their own ways—even when those accounts often reveal problems and contradictions in their societies. The interaction of Arab filmmakers with international movements such as neorealism, modernism, cinema vérité, and postmodernism also will be addressed. Among the filmmakers to be studied are Youssef Chahine, Elia Suleiman, Mohammed Malas and Tamer El-Said. 

Learning Outcomes:  This class introduce to students a rich and powerful regional cinema that is barely known in the United States. Films from across the Arab world will be analyzed in relationship to their political/historical moment, its relationship to contemporaneous trends in other artistic fields, and its correspondence with film movements in other parts of the world.

Students taking this course, beyond receiving an intense study of a formally fascinating and culturally rich cinema will also have the chance to study the interaction between cultural production and national politics, the function of intertextual relations with other artistic disciplines, and how a non-western cinema sought to create its own film poetics.