The more things change, the more they stay the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Your quote on the current state of Muslim popular culture, to generalize for a brief moment, glued itself to my thoughts and made me think deeply as I reflected on Lina Matta’s session on contemporary Arab cinema. All of these elements have traces of Huntington and Said on their dusty roads and this is what I will reflect on in my blogpost below.

 

 

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We need more forward-looking people like Lina Matta to bridge the intellectual gap between the reality and our perception of it, especially when we are talking about faraway places, such as the Middle East, from the comfort of our Western lives.

 

Lina’s vision to expand Western popular knowledge on the Middle East perfectly fits with humanizing and diversifying the region that has so much more to offer than timeless mysticism of quasi realistic Orient. To that extent, she is the on-ground, practical extension and application of Edward Said from within the West. Her apolitical intention to (finally) de-mystify the place that provided her with a fabulous childhood in the “Paris of the Middle East”, as she says it, cosmopolitanism of culture and language, and rich family roots, is applaud worthy. It can be quite arduous to move beyond stereotype-confirming films such as the famous “American Sniper” (the video below) that flatten out an entire people and their history into a single bullet and drain it down the terrorism and Islamic radicalism canal. Trump uses no other rhetoric anyway.

 

 

Historically, I firmly believe that Orwell’s description from “Marrakesh” fits the supremacists view that the Western governments and regimes have had on the Middle East since the beginning of time, formally during colonialism and the age of protectorates, and informally, almost insidiously subtle, in the subsequent period that we are still in.

The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects?

(an excerpt from Marrakesh)

 

Many things have changed since Orwell wrote Marrakesh and since the fall of many Western colonialist outposts in the Middle East. However, the mystifying, timeless image of the backward-looking Orient with all its religion- and culture-induced evils has remained. With the development of popular culture and cinema, the popularity of quasi Arab terrorists and villains has reached exponential heights. Blockbusters sell and millions of eyes absorb scenes from “True Lies” and tens of thousands of children grow up with “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba”. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same, indeed.

 

So… How did Lina do it?

 

I think the key in her success was her unbiased, apolitical approach to representing true Contemporary Arab Cinema to Western audiences, in all its glory and dirt. The movies spoke for themselves and revealed locally heated problems within and across societies that humanized the Middle East as a region and, perhaps, recalibrated the view of the West on the daily lives and troubles of real people. Real people, that’s the catch word. The West had the chance to understand real people of the region and how their problems differ across countries and even across cities and communities within one country. They were also given a chance to see the problems that persist in the region and understand how regional moviemakers cope with them and balance them out through some heavy drama or some good laughter.

I do have to note that the Western audience Lina’s festival was portrayed to is not the mainstream audience that might benefit the most from such a film-based window into the region. This only means that there is more work to do. And that is why we need more people like Lina to humanize and diversify entire countries and communities and give them a voice that represents them, in all their glory and dirt, rather than a Western lens that strips them of their agency.

 

However, even the films that come from the region primarily seek funding and acknowledgment in the West, followed by their sporadic and irregular releases in their home countries. Even in the development of grassroots Arab cinematography that Lina uses in the West to decrease the gap between their perception of and the realistic Middle East, we can safely say that, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps my next blog might be on the cultural colonization that stayed after the military one retreated to its Western borders. In my opinion, things that are not palpable require plenty of time and energy to be removed once they’re put in place, including cultural colonization.

 

But in the spirit of a positive ending, I do want to say that I admire Lina Matta’s work and her enormous contribution to repainting the image of the Middle East in the West through popular culture and film.

 

 

Sources:

Contemporary Arab Cinema – Ana (website)

“The American Sniper” fim (You Tube video trailer)

Orwell, George; “Marrakesh” (excerpt)