Contested topographies, collaborative testimonies: Remapping the politics of movement, music and the road (movie) in the Middle east

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the connections between representational forms of movement and musical expression in two Middle Eastern films, Slingshot Hip Hop (Jackie Reem Salloum, 2008) and No One Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi, 2009), and recent revolutionary movements in the region. It charts the physical and representational restrictions on movement in the films‘respective settings (Palestine and Israel, and Iran), as well as their mappings of the local and global through audio-visual images of musical performance. In the process, it also analyses the films’ reworkings of the road movie genre. Furthermore, it draws upon discourses on digital video and its facilitation of a new hybrid documentary aesthetic to make the case for the intricate local testimonies produced by the films' blurring of documentary and fiction, as participants play roles related to their own lives in creative collaboration with the film-makers. As explorations of representational forms of movement and musical expression, these films construct alternative spaces for critical, creative expression and significant testimonies.