Negotiating Dissidence the Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary
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NEGOTIATING DISSIDENCE THE PIONEERING WOMEN OF ARAB DOCUMENTARY STEFANIE VAN DE PEER Negotiating Dissidence Negotiating Dissidence The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary Stefanie Van de Peer For Richie McCaffery Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Stefanie Van de Peer, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9606 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9607 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2338 0 (epub) The right of Stefanie Van de Peer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Ateyyat El Abnoudy: Poetic Realism in Egyptian Documentaries 28 2 Jocelyne Saab: Artistic-Journalistic Documentaries in Lebanese Times of War 55 3 Selma Baccar: Non-fiction in Tunisia, the Land of Fictions 83 4 Assia Djebar: Algerian Images-son in Experimental Documentaries 110 5 Mai Masri: Mothering Film-makers in Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema 140 6 Izza Génini: The Performance of Heritage in Moroccan Music Documentaries 168 7 Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria 194 Works Cited 225 Index 233 Figures 1.1 The symbiotic relationship between a boy and his goat in The Sandwich 39 1.2 Aziza and her daughter in Permissible Dreams 44 2.1 Jocelyne Saab writing a letter to a friend, from Letter from Beirut 77 3.1 A close-up of Fatma’s facial expressions when she listens to the factory boss, from Fatma 75 106 4.1 Ali framed by the door to Lila’s room in La Nouba 129 5.1 Issa saying he can ‘see’ in Children of Shatila 156 6.1 A close-up of Fatna Bent El Hocine singing in Aita 181 6.2 The girls’ choir in La Nûba d’Or et de Lumière 192 7.1 Fadia’s insecurity in I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave 214 7.2 Rola finding it difficult to bear witness in I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave 215 7.3 Raghida’s anger in close-up in I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave 217 Acknowledgements Like all books, this is the result of a long gestation period and many years of thinking and re-thinking. I am indebted to family, friends, colleagues and mentors for inspiring me, for forgiving the little obsessions and uncer- tainties, and for indulging my single-mindedness. First, I want to thank colleagues and mentors David Murphy, Michael Marten, David Martin-Jones and Elizabeth Ezra. Their guidance and recommendations were of immense value. I truly treasure their support. I also thank the anonymous reader, who, through pointed questions, pro- vided clarity and confidence. I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding part of this project, and the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Centre for providing the time and space to continue to think, discuss and write at a crucial point in my early career. Second, I am very grateful to the film-makers whose work I discuss in this book – I have been very lucky to interview some of them. Ateyyat El Abnoudy is quick and generous; Selma Baccar is formidable as a film- maker and as a politician; Izza Génini is professional and honest; Jocelyne Saab is entertaining and forthcoming; and Hala Alabdallah Yakoub has been very kind and enthusiastic about the project. I feel privileged to have come across their work. I thank them for making the inspiring films that they did and for allowing me to ask so many questions. I also thank my many friends and family members who gracefully showed an interest: Clare Clements, Lizelle Bisschoff, Ana Grgic, Jonathan Owen, Allyna Ward, Paige Medlock Johnson, Leen Maes, Öznur Karaça, Laure Van den Broeck, Malikka Bouaissa, Kathleen Scott, Philippa Lovatt, Emilie and Valerie Van de Peer, Marjan Weyn, Dirk Van de Peer, Edmond Weyn, and Mari and Leon. I am immeasurably grateful to Richie McCaffery, my main source of inspiration for always wanting to be and do better. Introduction Film-making in the Arab world is often a matter of idealism and activism, especially for women making documentaries. In spite of many practi- cal and ideological difficulties, women have found ways to supply and subtly negotiate dissidence into their films. As a result, all films in this book – whether they are experimental, essayistic or poetic – are political in nature. I trace the histories of women making documentaries in the Mediterranean Arab world, and the inspirational political and cultural statements these pioneers made for their subjects, their spectators and the documentary-making women who followed in their footsteps. Pioneers are not always necessarily the first: they are the most sig- nificant or most influential examples for those who came later. The time frame with which this book is concerned overs an almost a fifty-year period, spanning the early 1970s until the 2010s, and the documentary form has, at several points in this half century in the Arab world (and elsewhere), been contested, problematised and censored. Likewise, the positions of women in the societies under discussion have fluctuated markedly, from relative freedom to increased oppression or vice versa. It is therefore necessary to look at national circumstances as well as transna- tional developments in women’s status and in film-making practices in the Arab world. To make matters even more complex, the term ‘Arab’ poses problems, in general and in this book, as we look here at countries in the Middle East and North Africa, not all wholly Arab, while one of the film- makers is in fact Jewish. In this book I discuss seven pioneering women documentary makers: in chronological order I look at Ateyyat El Abnoudy from Egypt, Jocelyne Saab from Lebanon, Tunisian Selma Baccar, Assia Djebar from Algeria, Palestinian Mai Masri, Moroccan Izza Génini and Hala Alabdallah Yakoub from Syria. I call these women ‘pioneers’ for several reasons, most effectively illustrated perhaps with concrete examples. For instance, while Izza Génini was not the first documentary maker in Morocco historically 2 negotiating dissidence (Farida Bourquia was, but Bourquia focused on TV documentaries), she has a consistent style and thematic preoccupation, as she looks at heritage, women, diversity and music in a filmography of more than twenty films. She has moreover made a considerable contribution to the production and distribution of Moroccan documentaries. Sometimes these pioneers start making their own films very late on in their lives, as we see with Hala Alabdallah Yakoub, who only started to make her own films in 2006, after having produced and co-directed countless other films by Omar Amiralay, among others. In other cases they have been the only woman to have made documentaries in their country, such as Assia Djebar in Algeria. Film- making tout court in Algeria is a very complex and dangerous undertaking, thus leading to the sometimes exilic and often transnational nature of film-making there. Equally, in Palestine, it is hard to find resident women film-makers as the Palestinian people are so dispersed in exile through- out the world, and finding the means to make films inside the Occupied Territories is extremely difficult. Mai Masri, a Palestinian resident in Lebanon, was the first woman to start to make films about Palestinians in refugee camps throughout the Middle East, initiating trends and tendencies followed by many later political film-makers both inside and outside Palestine. Perhaps the only ‘first’ documentary-making women in this book are Ateyyat El Abnoudy from Egypt and Jocelyne Saab from Lebanon. El Abnoudy is also called ‘the mother of Egyptian documen- tary’, as she started in the early 1970s, in a country mostly interested in its cinematic heritage of the golden years of the 1940s and 1950s, with belly- dancing melodramas. Likewise, Jocelyne Saab worked as a journalist of her country’s cinema, which was, at the time, growing fast and in parallel to Egyptian cinema (where a lot of Lebanese stars were active), but she committed herself to the less popular and usually controversial form of documentary making when the long Lebanese civil war started. What I aim to do in this book is to show how these documentary-making women developed their dissident film-making practices and ideals, their cultural as well as political dissent, in places where censorship, conservative morals and a lack of investment made it prohibitively difficult to create or distrib- ute documentaries, and how their interests and developments influenced future film-makers’ work. Documentary in the Arab World I write from the perspective of the awareness that I am an ‘outsider’ with a desire for a coming together of cultures and peoples through films and solidarity. Watching ‘other’ films (as opposed to ‘foreign’ films) shows introduction 3 that there exist whole worlds and peoples that may not be part of one’s lived experience, and that it is up to every individual cinephile to use cinema as a means of communication and dialogue, to learn to listen to, to see and understand each other better.