HP3151 CRN 14256Cinema of the Middle East

Although the term “Middle East” came into common parlance after World War II, its other iterations were already in circulation in the nineteenth century, designating an imaginary geography which consigned “the East” to the periphery and further solidified the privileged position of Europe. Since the term reflected such European self-universalizing assumptions, it cast its geographic referent as the object of patronizing systems of Eurocentric political representations. In this course, we will turn to various film cultures of the Middle East and will situate its national film traditions within regional and global perspectives. We will investigate how the filmmakers emerging from the region represent their cultures as deeply embedded within a globalized world too replete with unexpected combinations to be discretely divided into the civilizational hierarchies of the West and the East. Taking a critical approach to national cinema studies in a world of increasingly globalized film audiences, we will explore both the influence of world cinema on the film cultures of the Middle East and, in turn, the extent to which the aesthetics of the movies of this region proves integral to our conception of world cinema. Our discussions of films in class will be supplemented by pertinent scholarly analyses in order to complicate any facile understanding of the region, but also to further deepen our awareness of the cultural contexts through which cinema has emerged as an aesthetic form. Drawing on various national traditions, this course will include movies from Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.