Mark Westmoreland’s insightful study on experimental video and filmmaking by Lebanese artists provides a productive framework from which to discuss postwar filmmaking not only in Lebanon, but in Iran. He finds Hamid Naficy’s concept of “deterritorialized” cinema, cinemas that defy the concept of a national cinema and or some singular cultural logic a point of departure for his study. Thus, Westmoreland suggests a translocal framework over a transnational one. If the transnational consists of the “global forces that link people or institutions across nations” (Ezra and Rowden, 1) then the translocal are those visible and apparent aspects of these forces that have traversed the national borders into the local sphere of language, aesthetics, and cultural practices. For example, in his research on the experimental documentary in Lebanon, Westmoreland locates the translocality between Lebanon, Syria and Palestine in the momentous Arab defeat of 1967. He claims that this conflict between the nations of Israel and Egypt made an impact in the creative practices of filmmakers of the Arab world. Indeed, Tunisian filmmaker and critic Nouri Bouzid argues that several strategies emerge from the consciousness of an Arab defeat in what he calls the “defeat-conscious cinema” of this period (242). Westmoreland considers this difficult condition of representing defeat a shared burden by filmmakers of the region whose national public discourse also adopted the Arab-Israeli narrative as its own.
Moreover, the concept of post-orientalist aesthetics challenges the notion that artists working from subaltern positions lack agency. The massive artistic output generated by artists in Lebanon and Iran speak to this overdetermined assumption given credence by Edward Said’s Orientalism. Thus, the aesthetics exhibited in works by such artists and critics as Jalal Toufic10 and Walid Raad11 are a testament to the active role artists have played in envisioning the nation. Here, I pause to consider the limitations of a framework by which we misuse or confuse visual representation for affective strategies. As this study is not a quantitative account of audience reception, I do not delve into the effectiveness of strategies implemented by the filmmakers discussed in this dissertation. However, I find it extremely important to document the ways artists attempt to counter narratives that are more public and widespread. This highlights another characteristic of post-orientalist aesthetics whereby open-endedness and ambiguity welcome disorientation, even misunderstanding. Westmoreland finds interventions posed by Lebanese artists in the form of “ficto-criticisms” a particularly Lebanese form of visuality.
For my study I take as one context of comparison, the post-Cold War period, when, according to Rashid Khalidi, the Middle East was fertile ground for sowing crisis by foreign intervention and consolidating local executive power.12 He quotes James Madison that “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement” (163). For Iran,
10 Jalal Toufic is a Lebanese video artist, writer and professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. 11 Walid Raad is co-founder of the Atlas Group, a fictional collective that created an archive of the
Lebanese war. Raad is associate professor of Art at Cooper Union in New York.
the Iran-Iraq war that lasted eight long years between 1980 and 1988 became a focal point for Khomeini and necessarily a platform from which his legitimization arose. Thus, the postwar society of Iran saw the glorification of war on a mass scale through murals, posters, TV shows, documentaries and of course cinema. Morteza Avini’s TV series, Revāyat-e Fath was key to the project of glorifying the Iran-Iraq war in Iran. Taking Westmoreland’s study as a model, how do Iranian filmmakers fare in the context of Iran’s postwar glorification of war compared to the “war amnesia” of Lebanon? If part of the basis of post-orientalist aesthetics in Lebanon lies in the efforts to recover a lost memory of war and reconciliation, what can an analogous aesthetics in Iranian filmmaking uncover about the nature of post-orientalist aesthetics?
The politics of representation in particular, figure prominently in the works of Iranian and Lebanese filmmakers of the postwar periods. When read with an eye towards their aesthetic manipulations we understand their filmic reflexivity and comment on the unreliability of mimetic codes as a way to attend to the loss or purported unreliability of witnessing. Through the consistent re-telling of traumatic experience these films emphasize the precarious moment of not only their own postwar contexts, but also the post-Cold War period when walls are being torn down and identities being constructed. In terms of scholarship, if the study of post-revolution Iranian cinema has largely been dominated by its relationship with politics, it can be said that studies on Lebanese cinema have been greatly defined by its relation to the Lebanese Civil War.13
Critics now avoid such terms as ‘third world’ cinema in favor of the more neutral term ‘global art cinema.’ However, the debates continue on what this category, in fact, entails. Galt and Schoonover claim that while art cinema has been taking great leaps worldwide, little scholarship has been dedicated to it since the 1970s.14 When considering Middle Eastern cinema, this estimation mirrors a trend in the scholarship on cinema in Middle Eastern area studies. Thus, most recently there has been a large corpus of studies on Iranian cinema, claiming to resist the attention paid solely to Iranian art cinema. This sentiment comes from the international, not necessarily scholarly, attention that Iranian cinema has received in international film festivals. Considering the dearth of academic studies on Iranian and Lebanese cinema these claims reveal more about the intellectual communities of Middle Eastern Studies than the state of the discipline of cinema studies and the Middle East. In fact, the decline in the studies on art cinema came with the cultural turn of the 1980s when art cinema received the death mark of ‘elitist’ (Galt).