1 Cinematic Friendships: Intercessors, Collectives, Perturbations

1 Cinematic Friendships: Intercessors, Collectives, Perturbations Independent and experimental cinema in Arabic-speaking countries, as elsewhere, often arises from affinities, shared interests, and temporary collaborations, characterized by fluidity and adaptability. Friendship is a useful way to think about the flexible and sometimes nonlocal relationships in which experimenting cinema and media art get made, similar to the term hubs that Thomas Burkhalter uses to analyze the Beirut music scene’s local-transnational networks.1 This chapter cannot survey all the sites for training, production, exhibition, distri- bution, and archiving of experimental media art, in the broad sense this book under- stands, for there are so many organizations. Instead I present some case studies of cinematic friendships, grounded in concepts of self-organization, metastability, perturbation, and individuation. The guiding question is, “Looking at the various kinds of infrastructures for experiments in Arab cinema, how can we tell which ones best support and sustain an experimental and creative practice?” It’s practically a truism that top-down institutional structures are bad for creativity. It’s also usually the case that funding comes with strings and imposes unwanted criteria on creative practices. But rather than reject institutions and outside influence out of hand, this chapter examines how creative practice individuates under the influence of these structures. Does it pro- duce more interesting connections? Does its output become more rewarding, more complex? Similarly, though I begin with the assumption, based on observation, that local organizations are best at nurturing creativity, I don’t want to fetishize the local. Friendship, an Emergent Form of Organization The most radical understandings of friendship cast it as a corrosive force. When Nietzsche had Zarathustra say, “I do not teach you the neighbor but the friend,” this characterized alliances among people who reject ideologies of religious and national belonging. Nietzsche defied the Greek ideal of friendship based on hearth and the Christian ideal of friendship based on pity, and instead proposed a concept of friendship as based on taste.2 The best friendships do not confirm what we already are but Copyright © 2015. MIT Press. All rights reserved. © 2015. MIT Press. Copyright Marks, Laura U.. Hanan Al-Cinema : Affections for the Moving Image. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Accessed August 3, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from sfu-ebooks on 2021-08-03 22:15:09. 24 Chapter 1 make us become better, that is, they bring out our potentialities. Sometimes this feels painful, because it breaks the shell of our current being to bring something inside us in contact with something outside. In his small book Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El Azma , Hassan Khan gives an example of viewers’ responses to two of Sherif El Azma’s films that shows that audi- ences often prefer stable systems that confirm their identity. The audience loved Inter- view with a Housewife , in which El Azma’s mother half-unwittingly gives voice to a feminist critique of the family, because it allowed them to “smile that superior smile,” Khan writes. They hated A Prayer to the Sound of Dogs , dismissing it as the work of a “troubled, dangerous, misogynistic artist” and ignored its formal qualities and metastable structure. 3 Friendship perturbs our systems: it catalyzes potentials in Gilbert Simondon’s sense. Friendship is a force of individuation, channeling a flow of change that produces and continually shapes individuals.4 Simondon describes individuation as bringing potentials in a metastable system into contact with catalysts outside the system. Not just any contacts will do, though: they need to preserve complexity by actualizing more potential relationships between what precedes us and what surrounds us. If we are stable systems, then good luck to us, for we are as good as dead; but if we are metastable systems, systems out of step with themselves, then we can keep on individuating. “Becom- ing is a mode of resolving an initial incompatibility that was rife with potentials.” 5 For example, Khan writes that for him, coming from an Egyptian Marxist family, El Azma provided a new perspective: “Sherif El Azma never searched for explanations, he didn't deconstruct the world. Rather, through his actions and commentary, he acciden- tally provided another lens through which to view it. Biases, prejudices, fears and desires were not anymore proof or explanations of how the class system operated— about who was bad and who was good—but valid driving forces in themselves.”6 El Azma perturbed Khan’s system, undermining the received truths that had constituted him as an individual and allowing Khan’s creative potential to get in touch with outside forces. Creative “expression” expresses not something deep within the artist’s psyche or the environment the artist observes, but the forces that traverse an individual. Simondon’s concept of transduction describes the best potential of cinematic friendships: “the dis- covery of dimensions that are made to communicate by the system for each of the terms such that the total reality of each of the areas’ terms can find a place in the newly discovered structures without loss or reduction.” 7 This means that you help others grow by helping them actualize their potentials in widening circuits of relations. Good friends are intercessors, people who intervene in a story to bring out its incom- mensurable elements. It might seem that intercessors act as their friends’ psychoana- lysts, bringing out unconscious content that the other had repressed; but it is more accurate to say that intercessors bring out the world that is latent within their friend, Copyright © 2015. MIT Press. All rights reserved. © 2015. MIT Press. Copyright Marks, Laura U.. Hanan Al-Cinema : Affections for the Moving Image. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Accessed August 3, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from sfu-ebooks on 2021-08-03 22:15:09. Cinematic Friendships 25 elements quite beyond their identity: the swarm within. Intercessors act politically to give form to potentials that cannot be expressed in a given ideological framework, so of course they are agents of emergent truths in the Arab world, as elsewhere. Khan identifies paranoia as the operative energy in El Azma’s films. 8 Thinking in terms of transduction, we could say paranoia is the awareness of potential connections between inside the individual and outside and the fear that those connections will tear the individual apart. Thus, paranoia is a useful attitude for anyone contemplating a cinematic friendship. Top-Down versus Emergent Structures Creativity arises as a perturbation of a system. But relevance is imposed from without. Here is the difference between a hylomorphic system, a top-down structure in which external forces shape culture, and a self-organized system that finds its own shape in relation to a flux of forces. 9 Most people who make art struggle between the desire to be relevant and the wish to create. This struggle is particularly intense for artists in the Arabic-speaking world, many of whom understand acutely that relevance is a reaction- ary criterion. Institutions of all sorts impose criteria of relevance: artists and filmmakers are demanded in turn to represent the nation favorably, criticize religion, uphold religion, self-Orientalize, critique Orientalism, explain the Arab world to the West, tell stories that everyone can relate to, be authentic, be expressive, be conceptual, and on and on. These criteria are expressed in admission to universities, funding applications, acceptance at festivals and exhibitions, and other gateways. Relevance imposes mean- ing from outside, and while these may be important meanings and they may be just what the artist wants to do, an opportunity for creativity and experimentation is lost. This chapter is on the lookout for emergent connections. Creative friendships operate at many levels, including connections between individuals, loosely structured local collectives, alliances that become institutions, and international networks of financial support. The following case studies focus on just a few of the metastable systems of alliance that support independent and experimental media arts in Arab countries. I leave many others out. It would be revealing to study the changing local and transnational relationships centered on Ramallah between the large number of filmmakers and media artists based there, organizations such as ArtSchool Palestine, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Shashat Women Cinema, Birzeit Univer- sity (where Elia Suleiman, Annemarie Jacir, and Khalil al-Mozian, among others, have taught), independent film production companies, the film festivals that have faced enormous challenges over the years, and funders such as the A. M. Qattan Foundation as well as international nongovernmental organizations. At the Baghdad International Film Festival, founded in 2005 and restarted in 2011, the quantity of short films made in Iraq indicates a creative rejuvenation despite occupation and near-civil-war. In Tunis, Copyright © 2015. MIT Press. All rights reserved. © 2015. MIT Press. Copyright Marks, Laura U.. Hanan Al-Cinema : Affections for the Moving Image. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Accessed August 3, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from sfu-ebooks on 2021-08-03 22:15:09. 26 Chapter 1 Rabat, Algiers, Alexandria, East Jerusalem,

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