This article was downloaded by: [Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia - Sistema Bibliotecario Ateneo] On: 22 March 2015, At: 10:46 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Middle Eastern Literatures Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/came20 A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies Robert Irwin Published online: 27 Sep 2010. To cite this article: Robert Irwin (2004) A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies, Middle Eastern Literatures, 7:2, 223-233, DOI: 10.1080/1366616042000236905 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1366616042000236905 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 7, No. 2, July 2004 A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies ROBERT IRWIN Abstract A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies sketches the history of celluloid presentations of the Nights, starting in the early 1900s with Me´lie`s’s experimental film. Although there are many Nights films only a few stand out and deserve serious discussion, among them films by Fairbanks, Korda and Pasolini. Most Nights films are aimed at children and make heavy use of special effects in order to achieve a sense of wonder. Although almost all films in this genre rely heavily on Western stereotypes of the Orient, in general these stereotypes seem quite benign. These films share a repertoire of visual cliche´ that helps to give this subgenre of film a visual identity. Despite the frequent appearance of sinister viziers and monsters in these films, the Orient portrayed is a strikingly innocent place. From at least the 1920s onwards the filmic tradition of the Nights has developed a cult of the thief and the pirate. Equally striking is the films’ reliance on the quest as a plot motif—on the whole, a Western literary genre rather than an Arab one. Although Edward Said did produce an article, ‘Jungle Calling’ that discussed the appearance of Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films, he did not tackle the presen- tation of the Arabs and Islam in any sustained fashion either in Orientalism or in Covering Islam.1 He only briefly commented on film very briefly in Orientalism as follows: ‘In films and television the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty. He appears as an oversexed degenerate, capable it is true of cleverly devious intrigues, but essentially sadistic, treacherous and low’.2 But this is too much of a throwaway generalization to be remotely satisfactory and it is not obvious that such a verdict would apply to such films as The Thief of Bagdad (in either the Fairbanks or the Korda version), King Richard and the Crusaders, Kismet (the 1955 version with Howard Keel), Lawrence of Arabia or The Lion of the Desert. Said did not address broader issues concerning the presentation of the Orient in popular culture. It is possible that he thought the matter too trivial for serious discussion. A fuller account of Orientalism in the cinema has been left to others—most notably Ella Shohat in a well-known essay ‘Gender and Culture of Empire’.3 In this essay she made an explicit link between serious, academic Orientalism and popular Orientalism: Downloaded by [Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia - Sistema Bibliotecario Ateneo] at 10:46 22 March 2015 ‘Western popular culture … has operated on the same Eurocentric discursive contin- uum as such disciplines as philosophy, Egyptology, anthropology, historiography and geography’.4 It is evident from the general tenor of her article that she finds the one form of Orientalism as blameworthy as the other. However, I found her discussion of particular films inadequate and inaccurate. In a review in The Times Literary Supplement Robert Irwin, 39 Harleyford Road, London SE11 5AX, UK. ISSN 1475-262X print/ISSN 1475-2638 online/04/020223-11 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1366616042000236905 224 Robert Irwin of Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (the volume in which her essay appeared) I wrote as follows: The Douglas Fairbanks version of The Thief of Bagdad (1924) is singled out by Shohat as one of the films ‘which claim to initiate the Western spectator into an unknown culture’ and in which ‘the spectator is invited on an ethnographic tour of a celluloid- “preserved” culture’. In such a manner, the Middle East ‘becomes the object of study and spectacle’. Such a solemn academic ap- proach to the Fairbanks romp may seem overblown, even bizarre. But why should not the citizens of Fairbanks’s Old Baghdad be blessed with an ethnography, in just the same way as the Munchkins of Oz and the winged men of the Flash Gordon films? The citizens of the Fairbanks city work and stroll amid eerily tall buildings built in the German Expressionist manner; the interiors of their houses conform to Art Nouveau principles; they take their shade under ink-plume cypresses which might have been drawn by the pen of Dulac. These citizens seem prosperous and hard-working. (Even Ahmed the thief comes, in time, to recognize the value of hard work.) By the end of the film, a foreign invasion has been repelled. There does not seem anything in the topography, ethnography or the brief snatch of celluloid Baghdad’s fantasy history which would legitimize a colonialist annexation of the city.5 The history of the Thousand and One Nights on film is nearly as old as the history film itself. In 1897 Antoine Lumie`re showed the first film ever in the Indian salon at the Grand Cafe´ at the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. This film showed workers leaving the Lumie`re factory, but fantasy soon supplanted realism. In 1902 Thomas Edison produced a film version of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, directed by the comic actor Ferdinand Zecca. Soon after it came Georges Me´lie`s’s Palais des Mille et Une Nuits (1905). Then Zecca did an Aladdin or the Marvelous Lamp in 1906; thereafter the floodgates were opened. There is a Popeye version of Aladdin, a Fairbanks junior version of Sinbad the Sailor, Phil Silvers starred in A Thousand and One Nights (1945) (as a bespectacled Abdullah the Touched One). There have been Nights films starring Dorothy Lamour, Abbott and Costello, Eddy Cantor, the Three Stooges, Mickey Mouse, Gene Kelly, Steve Reeves, Micky Rooney, Christopher Lee, Howard Keel, Tom Baker, Patrick Troughton, Fernandel, Maureen O Hara, Krazy Kat, Terence Stamp, Woody Woodpecker, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis, Lucille Ball, Bugs Bunny, Roddy McDowall and Elvis Presley. So the first point is that the Thousand and One Nights genre includes hundreds of films.6 The second point is that most of them have been forgotten and deserve to be so. Still, there at least half a dozen masterpieces among the rich mulch of trash—from the wonderful early German films such as Lubitch’s Sumurun (1920), Pabst’s Der Mude Tod (1921) and Geheimnisse des Orients (1928) to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Fiore della Mille e Una Notte (1974). I have found only two or three Arabian Nights-type films produced by Arab film-makers, but doubtless there are others. Arab films in the genre include Downloaded by [Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia - Sistema Bibliotecario Ateneo] at 10:46 22 March 2015 Nasser Khemir’s Les Balisseurs du Desert (1984) and his T awq al-H ama¯ma al-Mafqu¯d (‘The Lost Ring of the Dove,’ 1999), described by Viola Shafik as ‘a colourful and exotic Thousand and One Nights picture-book of a film’.7 All literary adaptations for the screen have their problems. When one is producing or discussing the film script of a novel, then one normally is dealing with contractions of the original text. Of course, skilled scriptwriters do not merely excise and abridge, they also find ways of saying things visually, when there is no time available to squeeze that A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies 225 material into the dialogue or voice-over narration. Apart from the necessary com- pression, there are also industrial–commercial pressures to vulgarize literary sources. Usually the film, when it is released, is a disappointment—for example, the film of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin comes to mind—usually but not always. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity do not seem to have suffered much, if at all, from their transfer to celluloid.