Of Marabouts, Acrobats, and Auteurs: Framing the Global-Popular in Moumen Smihi's World Cinema

Abstract

Of Marabouts, Acrobats, and Auteurs:Framing the Global-Popular in Moumen Smihi's World Cinema Peter Limbrick (bio) One of the critical commonplaces in the study of Arab cinemas is the idea that we can distinguish between Egyptian cinema, a dominant popular and industrial cinema akin to Hollywood, and smaller national or regional cinemas (Palestinian, Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan), which are typically discussed as auteur or art cinemas. While historically defensible, in that Egypt preceded these others in having its own studios and industry, such an assessment nonetheless tends to foreclose on the possibilities for those films inhabiting the "non-Egyptian" model to ever be accorded the status of popular cinema. Moreover, where local distribution and exhibition for North African films has been historically partial or nonexistent (due to commercial decisions that have historically favored Egyptian, Indian, and Euro-American productions), it has been difficult for many directors in countries like Morocco to avoid the charge that their films—which are often more visible in European festivals than at home—are made for other markets or audiences. Whether in sympathy with the idea of distinctive local or national cinemas and resistance to cultural hegemony or in suspicion of the politics of international funding and coproduction, many critical treatments of non-Egyptian Arab films make of the popular an evaluative term that signifies local authenticity and a resistance toward European art cinema tendencies and that privileges commercial success over experimentation. This essay takes a more expansive approach to the idea of the popular in an Arab cinematic context. Using the work of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi as an example, I will show how the history of Maghribi cinema forces us to rethink notions of the popular in a global frame. Smihi's films construct a dialogue between vernacular, local, and popular elements in Morocco and the Maghrib and elements [End Page 60] of the wider culture of the Arab world. More than that, however, his films construct a global-popular that is also in dialogue with European, Asian, and American cultural forms—both cinematic and literary. While treating Smihi's cinema as a global modernist form within the history of world cinema, I show here that the assumed characteristics and preoccupations of art cinema can mask a surprisingly thoroughgoing and transformative engagement with the popular. Addressing Smihi's development of a global-popular is thus instructive not only for elucidating his films' deep emplacement within the local but for thinking about wider discourses of art cinema, global modernist forms, and cinematic histories. 1 In deploying the term "world cinema" in its very title, and below, this essay does not suggest some kind of flattened terrain where everything circulates either in relation to Hollywood or in a multicultural sameness. In keeping with the cautionary perspectives on nomenclature developed in this issue's introduction, I here deploy the term "world" in productive tension with the term "global" in order to suggest the world-making, generative possibilities that the global-popular can unleash. I mean to recognize not only the "irreducible contradictions" invoked by the editors with respect to global cinematic practices but also the sense that the "flexible geographies" (Nagib, 35) created by Smihi's cinema can reconfigure the relations that so far separate "the Arab world" from "the West" or that structure Maghribi production along axes assumed to follow those established by colonialism. By forging connections across different and more unpredictable paths, Smihi's films engage and exploit the global in service of what I've elsewhere termed a new kind of Nahda, a renewed Arab renaissance (Limbrick 2020). It's for that reason especially—to hold on to the possibilities for reconfigured relations within and between Arab and non-Arab worlds as engaged by a cinema of the global-popular—that I use the term "world cinema" here. With its purchase on the transformative power of cinema's imaginaries, it offers not only the space for critique of what is but also a gesture to what might still be, a doubled perspective that is particularly helpful in assessing Smihi's work. Born and raised in Tangier, Moumen Smihi began a degree in literature in Rabat before winning a scholarship to study filmmaking...