Dreams of a Nation: on Palestinian Cinema * Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World * Iranian Cinema: a Political History

Abstract

At the start of the twenty-first century, Middle Eastern politics have penetrated the global imagination and claimed media attention as never before. But while in the films and narratives of others the region's inhabitants are often exoticized or demonized in orientalist fashion as terrorists or religious fundamentalists, Middle Eastern cinemas engage with their politics rather differently, as these three books testify, all of them firmly situating the region's cinemas on the map of ‘world cinema’. Thus they offer not only important reflections on what is politically at stake in cinematic representation but also a provocative dialogue with international affairs that is rare in film scholarship. In Dreams of a Nation, a collection of essays by scholars and filmmakers (including Michel Khleifi and Nizar Hassan), Dabashi has produced a valuable archive on Palestinian cinema, unlike any other. Its publication follows a Palestinian film festival of the same name, held in New York in January 2003, and the setting up of a project dedicated to screening and providing information on Palestinian cinema.1 Opening with Edward Said's keynote address at the festival, the book clearly sets out its agenda: given the Zionist ideology of ‘a people without a land’ laying claim to ‘a land without a people’, the Palestinian struggle has, from the outset, been concerned with ‘the desire to be visible’ (p. 2). In the volume as a whole, cinema is seen as a crucial cultural expression of Palestinian resistance – against dispossession, denial and erasure, on the one hand, and a stereotyped media identity, on the other. A key theme is how ‘a stateless nation generates a national cinema’ – a paradox that, as Dabashi comments, both facilitates and problematizes the idea of ‘national cinema’ (p. 7).