12 November 2012

BEIRUT: Last March the Marrakech Biennale held a panel discussion on Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, which had been rumbling through the region for just 14 months. Curator and film programmer Rasha Salti made a point of mentioning that she was under tremendous pressure to produce something about the ongoing upheavals.

Salti, who lives and works in Beirut, gave a talk that day on audio-video material from a years worth of demonstrations in Syria. She said she was wary of jumping on the proverbial bandwagon and would resist the requests to repackage the protests too quickly.

She made an important distinction, however, between contemporary art and film faulting the former for being overly obsessed with whats new, distorting history and serving the market in the process, while crediting the latter for taking the time required to reflect on major political events in a more meaningful way.

Now, in collaboration with the curator Jytte Jensen, Salti is making a case for the long view through cinema with the final installment of an epic three-part film program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s to Now, Part III, which began on Nov. 1 and continues through Nov. 25, does not shy away from direct responses to the Arab Spring, with new films addressing the ongoing situations in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Syria.

Yousry Nasrallahs After the Battle, for example, deals with the pro-regime horsemen and camel riders who charged into Tahrir Square and attacked demonstrators there with whips and sticks.

The Tunisian filmmaker Ala Eddine Slims Babylon tells the trenchant story of a humanitarian camp built just over the Libyan border to absorb refugees, day laborers, aid workers and more.

Even the Moroccan director Faouzi Bensadis Death for Sale captures the dire socio-economic context of the regions current malaise.

That being said, Salti and Jensen have framed their program between clever brackets.

Mapping Subjectivity, Part III opened with the Algerian director Damien Ounouris Fida, a moving, multifaceted documentary for which the filmmaker asks his great-uncle, Mohamed El Hadi Benadouda, to re-enact the crimes he committed on behalf of the Front de Libration Nationale during Algerias 1954-62 war for independence from France.

The last screening session, on Nov. 25, includes another film from Algeria that offers a tentative response, or perhaps illustrates the inheritance, of the cruel histories exposed in Fida. Lamine Ammar-Khodjas Ask Your Shadow is a diaristic account of the filmmakers return to Algeria after eight years in France. He arrives, glum and despondent and reading too much Camus, just as riots break out in Algiers in January 2011.

Glancing in on events that were barely covered by the international media, the footage of the demonstrations is a revelation, not only because of their significant size and palpable volatility, but also because of the divisions cutting through the crowds, separating ineffectual leftists and affluent secularists from working class youth who leaven the film with humor, demanding increased supplies of hashish, for example, instead of the fall of the regime.

To situate Mapping Sitting, Part III between these two points in the history of Algerian cinema is no accident. The program coincides with the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence. After victory, the FLN went to great lengths to export its revolution and more often than not it did so through film, subsidizing radical works in politically charged contexts from Angola to Palestine.

The Algerian bookends are also an important key to understanding the greater aims of Mapping Subjectivity. What is most notable about the program is not the red-hot topicality of the films but their considerable historical depth.

For example, the current season hits its highpoint tonight with a talk by Wael Shawky and a screening of his film Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo, as part of the museums Modern Mondays series. Set between the 11th and 12th centuries, in the period between the first and second crusades, the film takes a long view of history and then some.

Loosely based on Amin Maaloufs readable history, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, Shawkys film is the second installment in an ongoing quartet, which began with Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File.

Each film takes on (and complicates our knowledge of) an episode in the medieval wars between religious factions, not only Christian and Muslim but the strife among sectarian splinter factions as well.

Each film is also acted by a completely different cast of marionettes, which means that we as viewers are asked to be either sympathetic or disdainful of, well, dolls. It is a testament to Shawkys talent that the fixed and unchanging faces of his puppets tug at our emotions as effectively as they do.

Like The Horror Show File, The Path to Cairo follows a macabre sequence, from scenes of slaughter to wedding ceremonies, shadowy court intrigues, and the political maneuverings of rebellious daughters. Unlike the earlier film, it takes the function of the films soundtrack to another level entirely, recalling the ancient practice of conveying history through song.

Not only is history a rich subject here, Mapping Subjectivity, Part III also unearths a number of forgotten cinematic treasures, some of which have never been seen. One of these, Simone Fattals mesmerizing Autoportrait (shot in 1971) has never until now been complete.

From Assia Djebars gorgeously retro La Nouba to Ridha Bhis Sun of the Hyenas, both from 1977, the selection opens one window after another into times that have passed, taking with them their visual poetry, their aesthetic sensibility and the great ease with which they crossed regions, countries, genres and disciplines to compose themselves anew.

Therein lies an interesting problem. The richness and complexity of the older films in Mapping Subjectivity, Part III shows Saltis dichotomy between contemporary art and cinema to be false, or at least misleading.

Even some the newer works included here, such as Shawkys film and Ali Cherris Pipe Dreams, which takes an ingenious approach to the horrors in Syria during the Assad regime, belong equally to the worlds of art and film. Cherris work, in many ways a victim of its own success, is actually a compressed version of a spatial installation, which may have been better off being shown in its original format.

Setting aside the attention to be paid to artists in the ecologies of their own work, the real criticism to be made about the program is that it would be nice to see all or even some of this work screened in the lands where it was made. This would allow the audiences who might be most challenged, as Salti was in Marrakech, to respond.

Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s to Now, Part III runs through Nov. 25 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. See www.moma.org for a full schedule of screenings and events, including tonights Modern Mondays: An Evening with Wael Shawky.

Copyright The Daily Star 2012.