Post-Doc, Winchester School of Art
University of Stirling, Languages, Cultures and Religions
Thesis Title: The Aesthetics of Moderation in Documentaries by North African Women
About
My research focuses on film and video making in the Middle East and North Arica, specifically documentary making and images of war and atrocity as represented by women.
I recently finished my PhD thesis at the University of Stirling. I explored the documentaries of four pioneering North African women. Analysing the work of Ateyyat El Abnoudy from Egypt, Selma Baccar from Tunisia, Assia Djebar from Algeria and Izza Genini from Morocco, I uncovered diverse female subject matters treated by a similar aesthetic. Their preoccupation with representing ‘the other half’ puts a new spin on perceptions of anti-establishment filming with subtly emancipating consequences. I suggest that their common aesthetic is one that foregrounds moderation and negotiation in terms of context, content and style. Building on new understandings of empathy and intersubjectivity, my work on these films crosses disciplines like philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and politics. Looking more closely at the development and agenda of Third Cinema and New Arab Cinema, we see a trend emerging that is both claimed by female directors and that answered calls for transnationalism before it truly developed. In answer to several (Third) world movements in the sixties and seventies, these pioneers found a cinematic way of subverting not only the (colonial) past but also the (neo-colonial) present implicitly, which goes further than re-inscription or compensation. These women’s films rewrite, imply and contemplate rather than denounce and attack heroically. This is echoed in the filmmaker’s sensitive analysis of the subjects’ expression and voice, and in particular of the non-vocal expression or the gaze. I conclude with the idea that moderation is the foundational concept of a post-Third Cinema transnational aesthetic in North Africa.
At the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, I am now working on Syrian women making documentaries. Syrian cinema has been sponsored and controlled vigorously by the National Film Organization. Nevertheless, the Syrian sensibility allows for a critique on the government, under the auspices of fiction. Documentary is a very controversial genre. Film is therefore no longer a medium of entertainment or propaganda. It becomes a necessary vehicle to record reality and express identity, particularly in recent months. I focus on young women’s films for this research, specifically Reem Ali’s film Zabad and Soudade Kaadan’s film Damascus Roofs and Tales of Paradise. I have interviewed them about their filmic reactions to the Arab Revolutions. It is interesting to follow their itinerary on online video streaming channels and further on world film festival circuits and on the global distribution network.
