Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements by Suzanne Gauch

Abstract

Gauch, Suzanne. Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-19-026258-7. Pp. 234. Highlighting themes of cinematic transnationalism, this study analyzes works by nine directors from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The essays are organized according to formal and critical considerations and will be useful to scholars working on Mohamed Chouikh, Lyès Salem, and Tariq Teguia (Algeria); Nabil Ayouch, Farida Benlyazid, and Faouzi Bensaïdi (Morocco); and Nejib Belkadhi, Nadia El Fani, and Nacer Khemir (Tunisia). Because the book brings together a wide variety of films (1988 to 2008) available to spectators in North America, it also provides rich material for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels.As in her Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (2006), Gauch engages with various theoretical, disciplinary, and area studies models. She dialogues, notably, withViola Shafik—whose now-classic Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (1998, 2007) established the historial importance of popular cinema as a post-independence vehicle of critique— as well as with key voices in comparatist, postcolonial, and film studies (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam).A central focus of Maghrebs in Motion is to explore how Maghrebi filmmakers have eschewed the traditional “didacticism and romanticism” (7) of popular cinema in favor of more nuanced and critically generative approaches. While the filmmakers in part 1 reformulate “the popular” by drawing innovatively upon“precinematic”regional and transnational texts (Beynlayzid, Chouikh, Khemir), those in part 2 critique history through the adaptation and hybridization of mainstream genres (Ayouch, Salem, El Fani). A third grouping of filmmakers pushes further in stylistic terms, offering autoreflexive and satirical meditations on the past and future of regional cinema (Teguia,Bensaïdi,Belkadhi).Contrasting with and complementing recent works by scholars such as Roy Armes, Guy Austin, Sandra Carter, Florence Martin, and Valerie Orlando, Gauch’s close readings explore the films’ aesthetic and figural dimensions in order to address broad sociological and historical questions. As she explains, while each film discussed is “distinct in [its] thematic, generic, narrative, and aesthetic approach,” each attempts to “dismiss the regional rivalries, easy dualisms, and fetishized signs that were colonialism’s deepest legacies” (6). The curatorial texture of Gauch’s work echoes her initial discussion of the “vexed” category of “Maghrebi cinema” (6) and reveals the irony of her opening evocation of the Orientalism-tinged“wonder,”“astonishment,”and“admiring inquisitiveness ” (2) with which the Northern gaze has tended to perceive the Maghrebi cultural and historical landscape.Countering the blinkering effect of major historical-spectatorial events such as The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966) or media representations of the “Arab Spring” (2011–), Gauch convincingly underscores the myriad powerful ways in which Maghrebi cinema continues to reveal and bypass the limits of “statesponsored [...] and civilizational discourses” (115). University of North Carolina, Wilmington Greta Bliss 206 FRENCH REVIEW 91.2 ...