Anticolonial Ideology, Cinema, and Infrastructure in Syria
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements............................................................................................2
Introduction: Of Dams and Floods..........................................................................3
Chapter 1: Capturing Revolution...........................................................................13
Chapter 2: Nondesertion....................................................................................29
Conclusion: In Lieu of the Nation.........................................................................30
Bibliography................................................................................................. 33
Acknowledgements
Academic writing and filmmaking, like other forms of creative labor, require an
infrastructure that creates its conditions of existence. This thesis and film could not have been
created without the support of my institutional home for the past two years, the Hagop Kevorkian
Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU. I am grateful to my professors Nasser Abourahme,
Jared McCormick, Toby Lee, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Robert Stam, and Tejaswini Ganti, whose
insights deeply inform the content of both the thesis and film. A special thank you to the
Network of Alternative Arab Screens, whose fellowship has supported and inspired me to think
with a transnational cohort of Arab writers. I am especially indebted to Saphe Shamoun, Max
Weiss, Nadine Fattaleh, and Hala Alabdalla with whom I have been in constant conversation
about Syrian cinema and politics over the past two years. Lastly, I am deeply grateful to Anaïs
Farine for supporting my thesis with crucial documents from Al-Tariq, which have been digitized
from Abboudi Abou Jawde’s personal archive.
Most importantly, this thesis and film were created at a time of immense personal
upheaval, anxiety, and confusion, and they could not have been completed without the love and
support of my peers and comrades. Utmost to be thanked in my mind are my roommates Rahaf
Salahat, Shikhar Goel, and Edrick Leong for their constant presence and support for the past two
years. Also to be thanked are my good friends Omar Alsayyed, Luisa Alarcon, Yara Hattab, Tess
Waggoner, Fabrice Nozier, Anisa Jackson, Muna Diaf, Ayah Kutmah, Enas Al-Safadi, Solomon
Medintz, and Nada Eldawy for their presence, warmth, intellectual curiosity and support. I would
be remiss to forget my primary political interlocutors in the Palestinian Youth Movement,
particularly my good friends Naye Idriss, Kaleem Hawa, Samar Al-Saleh, Tamar Ghabin, and
Miriam Osman. Most of all, the onus of my gratitude is to be extended to my family, from my
grandparents down to my youngest brother Waseem for their loving presence for the two years I
spent away from them in New York. Finally, I cannot express enough gratitude for Sheelan
Mirza, whose love has held me through the darkest pits of life as a graduate student in a city as
violently overwhelming as New York.
This thesis and film are dedicated to Syrian image-creators, many of whom have risked
death to leave us with fragments of life.
Introduction:
Of Dams and Floods
“Almost everywhere, anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares.”
- David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment1
"We have been sentenced to hope. And what is happening today cannot be the end of history.”
- Saadallah Wannous, Message for World Theater Day 19962
Among a few other relevant matters involving cinema and infrastructure, this thesis
attempts to think about anticolonialism in Ba’thist Syria, a subject that, in my own lifetime, has
more readily lent itself to bitter humor than to serious academic writing. In different times, it
would have been easier to open this piece of writing with that dormant idiom of sarcasm. But
even sarcasm, which has long held the contradictions of Syrian politics in its spacious embrace,
betrays the heaviness of Syria’s contemporary catastrophe. Irrespective of sarcasm, can there be
any academic writing on Syria today that does not confront hopelessness and banality? Resolved
to a future I have surrendered to a likely nonexistent reader, I submit this attempt: a begrudgingly
honest argument.
—
In 1971, Syria’s quietly prolific documentary filmmaker Omar Amiralay directed and
produced his first short film, Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam. Having just returned from his
“first encounter with the political” on the streets of Paris in 1968, Amiralay decided to make his
first film as a director working in Syria about the newly constructed Tabqa Dam. Released
shortly after the “corrective movement” that fatefully positioned Hafez al-Assad as the head of
2 Saadallah Wannous, “Thirst for Dialogue,” in Sentence to Hope: A Saadallah Wannous Reader, trans. by
Mysers, Robert and Nada Saab, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
1 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004), 2.
state, Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam became among the most buzzed about new films
participating in the exuberantly youthful, expressly militant 1972 Damascus Film Festival.
Relative to the rest of Amiralay’s filmography however, this debut is a relatively innocuous
endeavor, fitting in among a global panoply of developmentalist dam films. Nevertheless, in
Amiralay’s 40 year career as a documentary filmmaker, it is this modest short film that troubled
him enough to revisit at the end of his filmmaking career. Indeed, his youthful passion project
became the only film he ever expressed remorse for making.3
In his final film A Flood in Ba’th Country, Omar Amiralay revisits both the Dam and the
revolutionary slogans animating it with a much more somber tone rife with the caustic irony and
quiet critique customary of his voice as a filmmaker. The film opens with a self-critical
reflection: the Tabqa Dam that excited Amiralay so much in his youth resulted in flooding and
other long-term environmental degradation in nearby villages. After a brief meditation on the
ecological impacts of the newly formed Lake Assad, most of the film’s runtime focuses instead
on a nearby school administered by the Mashi clan, a tribe adhering to its Ba’th Party
membership since the late 1950s. In that school, students recite a narrative about the miraculous
sentience of the Euphrates River—a river “civilized” by the revolutionary Dam. Through these
quietly critical scenes of Mashi village classrooms, Amiralay paints a bleak picture of Syria after
40 years of Assadist-Ba’thist dictatorship, where Arab nationalist slogans and narratives have
faded into sterility, rote memorization and recitation. More poignantly, Amiralay laments what he
felt was his participation in this tragic outcome: his own “youthful enthusiasm” in the early
1970s.My preoccupation with Omar Amiralay’s aesthetic and political trajectory—between the
ecstatic Dam of 1971 and the despondent Flood of 2004—arises partly from a modest attempt to
3 Omar Amiralay, dir. A Flood in Ba’th Country, ARTE France - AMIP, 2003.
Alsubee 4
position Syria in relation to anticolonial thought and history on a global scale, specifically
through the work of Franz Fanon. For many scholars thinking across colonial peripheries,
Fanon’s oeuvre remains indispensable for reckoning with a world of ceaselessly unequal capital
accumulation, resurgent far-right populism, and ongoing indigenous dispossession.4 Curiously
however, Syria and Syria studies have been almost entirely absent from the vast academic
literature prefixing the colonial.5 Through this exploration of Syrian cinema history via Omar
Amiralay, my aim in this thesis is a double move: to read Fanon with an eye for Syria and to
think about Syria’s modern history with an eye for Fanon.6 As I will show, The Wretched of the
Earth is productive to read alongside Syria’s history not only because of its compelling analytical
tools and its ceaseless political urgency on a world-scale, but more provocatively, because of its
troublesome affinity with Ba’thist state discourse. Moreover, Fanon’s prescient analysis of the
revolutionary party turned single party dictatorship in a nation-state ruled by new elites applies in
haunting ways to the Ba’th Party’s transformation, from its social base in the peasantry to its
current neoliberal military-state apparatus. In this sense, my own thinking with Fanon is not too
different from the way Omar Amiralay has hauntingly cited him.
A brief look at Omar Amiralay’s engagement with the politics of anticolonial national
liberation reveals a familiar narrative of revolutionary fervor falling into bitter disillusionment.
In the early days of his career, Amiralay negotiated between Left Bank tendencies of the French
New Wave, Latin American Third Cinema, and Syrian oppositional arts engaging with the
Palestinian revolution. His magisterial second film, a collaboration with the experimental
6 Sara Salem, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (London: Cambridge University
Press, 2020).
5 Through this brief excursion into Syrian cinema history, I hope to show that this absence is not
accidental. In fact, part of what I gesture towards in my argument is precisely that Syria’s modern history
and catastrophic present are haunted by the weights of both colonial and anticolonial histories.
4 Abourahme, Nasser. 2018. “Of Monsters and Boomerangs: Colonial Returns in the Late Liberal City.”
City 22 (1): 106–15.
Alsubee 5
playwright Saadallah Wannous called Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, specifically invoked
Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s left-wing Peronist film The Hour
of the Furnaces by way of ending on a shared Fanon quote. Two years prior to completing the
film, Amiralay also became the first to translate Solanas and Getino’s seminal manifesto of
anticolonial cinema, “Towards a Third Cinema,” into Arabic.7 Yet in one of his final interviews,
Amiralay discusses his “exit from ideology” some time during the making of his third film
Chickens (1977), after which he discards his understated realism for a more modernist and
reflexive political documentary approach.8 From there, Amiralay’s film projects took him beyond
Syria to Lebanon, Pakistan, Egypt, and Yemen, ending back in Syria on the morose note of A
Flood in Ba’th Country. By then, Amiralay’s fervor had largely disappeared; between 2004 and
his untimely death in 2011, he typically expressed himself with a playful cynicism, if not jaded
hopelessness.9
In many ways, Amiralay’s political and aesthetic trajectory fits in perfectly with the
narrative mode of tragedy explored and articulated by David Scott. In Conscripts of Modernity,
Scott makes the argument for tragedy as an attitude and heuristic for reckoning not only with the
shattering of anticolonial hopes, but the historical subjectivities animating them, with an eye for
“the contingent, the ambiguous, and the paradoxical.”10 Scott reads CLR James’s The Black
10 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004), 13.
9
Iche Sandra, dir. Ellipses. Association Wagons libres, 2017.
Hala Alabdalla, Omar Amiralay: Sorrow, Time, Silence, RAMAD Films, 2021.
8 Hala Alabdalla, Omar Amiralay: Sorrow, Time, Silence. RAMAD Films, 2021. In many ways Omar’s
political and aesthetic transformations mirror broad transformations occurring among the Syrian Left
antagonistic to the Ba’ath Party’s progressive coalition by the 1980s after the Hama Massacre and Syrian
invasion of Lebanon, shifting away from eclectic blends of Arabism and Marxism-Leninism and closer
towards social democratic tendencies. This is also highlighted in Amiralay’s later participation in the
Damascus Spring, led by a growing wave of Syrian democrats such as Burhan Ghalyoun.
7 Anaïs Farine, “Vers un troisième cinéma: Une introduction à la traduction par Dirâsât ‘arabiyya du
manifeste de Fernando Solanas et Octavio Getino,” Cinematheque Beirut, 2020.
Jacobins generatively, and against a kind of presentist postcolonial critique that places James on
the Enlightenment side of an Enlightenment/anti-Enlightenment binary.
I quote Scott at length:
“To my mind, what James is offering us here is nothing less than a provocation: to think
the difference between the problem-space out of which he wrote—the questions he felt
obliged to answer, the arguments he undertook to intervene in, the positions he sought to
advance and defend—and the problem-space that constitutes the predicament and the
demand of our own present.”12
I find Scott’s reading helpful because it allows us to account for Amiralay’s youthful enthusiasm
and his later despondency as a dynamic question of different problem-spaces. Moreover, like
Scott, I am much more interested in the complicated contingencies of tragedy than in consoling
anticolonial stories—partly because, as I hope to show, these consoling anticolonial stories are
associated today with Syrian state discourse.13 Perhaps more importantly, I am interested in what
both Amiralay’s despondency and his enthusiasm can signal to us about anticolonialism in
relation to a tragic present full of indeterminacy and contradiction.
However, at stake in this thesis is not merely anticolonialism as academic theory or
political discourse, but its specific material and social manifestation through cinematic
infrastructure. Few scholars have written as compellingly about the relationship between cinema,
infrastructure, and collective subjectivity as Brian Larkin. By studying closely the histories of
media infrastructures in Nigeria, Larkin arrives at a different genealogy for cinema as “governed
not by commodity, but by political relations.”14 In the chapters on Nigerian cinema, Larkin shifts scholarly
attention away from strict focus on content and form and towards a focus on “the social
14 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008), 12
13
Ibid, 14.
12 Ibid, 30
11
Ibid, 20.
spaces of cinema”—in other words, cinematic infrastructures and the kinds of subjectivities and
social practices they allow for.
15 Bringing a more social and infrastructural approach to cinema
begs the question: what kind of infrastructure for cinema were Amiralay’s films embedded into?
What kinds of social subjectivities did they allow for, or at least were intended to allow for? In
other words, this angle for thinking about cinema allows us to take a closer look at the
relationship between state, ideology, and infrastructure—not necessarily at the expense of film
form and content, but in order to think more concretely about the social life revolving around the
form and content of cinema. When it comes to anticolonial cinema, as its most astute theorists
and practitioners understood, the question is not merely a search for a properly anticolonial
aesthetics but a cinematic infrastructure that would allow for the creation of politicized
anticolonial subjectivities.16
The irony in this line of inquiry lies precisely in the fact that, when it comes to Syrian
cinema, the question of infrastructure is precisely the question of its absence. The Syrian
National Film Organization (NFO) was established in 1969 by Syria’s then-president Salah
Jadid, just before the Hafez Al-Assad counter-coup. The NFO’s first director, Abdulhamid Mar’i,
shared the same general politics as the cohort of young filmmakers returning to Syria from their
studies abroad—namely, a more Marxist orientation towards a critique of social relations in
postcolonial Arab nation-states and the Palestinian liberation struggle.
17 Reflecting Mar’i’s
politics, the Damascus Film Festival of 1972 epitomized the various political currents running
17 Of course, there were ideological and personal variations between each of the filmmakers and their
respective politics, but most of them shared a generally leftist outlook on national questions, along with a
gradually emerging critique of the Asadist-Ba’thist ruling party in Syria. For more on Abdulhamid Mar’i:
“Al-Nadi al-Sinema’i fi Dimashq yu’eed dhakiratihi, wa-hayatihi.” Al-Jazeera, 2011.
16 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the
Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” Black Camera: An International Film
Journal 13, no. 1 (Fall 2021): 378–401.
15 Ibid, 1-3.
between Marxism and Arab nationalism, featuring experimental and socialist realist films from
the likes of Egypt’s Ateyyat Al-Abnoudy, Lebanon’s Christian Ghazi, and Kuwait’s Khalid
al-Siddiq.18 However, soon after the Damascus Film Festival, Abdulhamid Mar’i was removed
by state decree and replaced by Ahmad Qarnah, who more closely represented the political will
of the new president Hafez al-Assad.19 The fate of Syrian cinema afterwards became one of
intense marginalization and censorship, particularly through the closure of movie theaters and the
dismantlement of any infrastructure for distribution and exhibition.20 Omar Amiralay and a
cohort of Syrian filmmakers attempted to resist this fate by establishing the Damascus ciné club,
where vibrant gatherings to attend politicized film programming was tolerated by the state until
the rise of popular resistance movements in the late 1970s.21
In many ways, this history of Syrian
cinema is a reminder that, while an anticolonial cinema may interpellate politicized subjects, a
cinema with no screening infrastructure interpellates no subject.
Recounting this history allows us to understand more precisely the animus of Amiralay’s
political and artistic trajectory—in Syria, the foreclosure of the social life of a radical cinema has
gone hand-in-hand with the hollowing of anticolonial ideology, turning it into a frozen aesthetic
and political ideology known by many Syrians as khitab al-Ba’th (Ba’thist speech). As Amiralay
shows in A Flood in Ba’th Country, empty political sloganeering as well as quietly subversive
mocking became normative ways of performing political discourse in Syria. A Flood in Ba’th
Country, like so much of transgressive Syrian art before 2011, recalls Lisa Wedeen’s influential
21 Rasha Salti, “Nadi Al-Sinama in Damascus, or When Cinema Wielded Power to Threaten the Social
Order,” ArteEast, August 18, 2016. See also Noor Safouri, “Nidal al-Dibs Yatahaddath ‘An Nadi Sinema
Dimashq.” Malaffat-NAAS, 2016.
20 Basil AlSubee, “Poetics of Historical Contemplation With Syria and its Diaspora: An Interview with
Hala Alabdalla,” Malaffat-NAAS, 2023.
19 Jean-Louis Comolli and Serge Daney, “Entretien avec Omar Amiralay,” Cahiers du cinéma No.
290–291 (juillet-août 1978): 79–89, at 79.
18 “Arab Alternative Cinema.” Al-Tariq, Special Issue n.7-8, 1972.
argument that the Syrian state instantiates its power by interpellating its citizens into “saying the
ridiculous and to avowing the absurd.”22 More recently, in his rich and far-reaching study, Max
Weiss coins “speaking for” and “speaking to” as descriptors of a Ba’thist state aesthetic ideology,
which continues to be resisted by Syrian artists and writers through a counter-aesthetic of
“speaking with” and “speaking against.”23 My modest addition to these studies, which I am
deeply indebted to, points to the affinities and contradictions between state ideology—Asadist
Ba’thism—and anticolonial rhetoric which once had a more vibrant social and political life. By
posing the history of Syrian cinema as partly a struggle over an anticolonial realist aesthetic and
political project, I want to show how anticolonialism can be defanged once it finds its definitive
terminus in the nation-state for—once it is systematically transformed into an exercise of forcible
avowal at the expense of ongoing engagement with social transformation. In these circumstances
even calls for “politicized art” can become a banal exercise of avowing the absurd. It is no
wonder then, given this history, that Amiralay later became so cynical of his youthful political
enthusiasm.
In this study of Syrian cinema, I combine a film historian’s approach with a more
creative, open-ended way of thinking with images. The first chapter of this thesis “Capturing
Revolution” recounts the history of the “Arab Alternative Cinema” slogan—first as a militant,
youthful transnational cinematic movement that emphasizes a politicized realism, then as a state
dogma devoid of any social life. In my recounting of this history, I pay special attention to Omar
Amiralay’s intervention into this variegated movement of filmmakers—his translation of
“Towards a Third Cinema” and his annotation of Fanon in Everyday Life in a Syrian Village.
23 Max Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria, (Redwood City: Stanford
University Press, 2022), 2, 14.
22 Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria,
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 12
Other noteworthy documents include the article on Arab Alternative Cinema written in the
Lebanese communist journal Al-Tariq, and the National Film Organization’s publication
Al-Hayat Al-Sinima’iyah. The second chapter of my thesis, a 30 minute found footage film called
Nondesertion, takes on a more speculative approach. Through a montage of Syrian cinema,
theater, and popular television, I ponder what it would mean to reflect on this audiovisual history
from a post-2011 problem-space in which revolution is painfully marred by hope, despair, and
displacement. Finally, in my conclusion, I consider the kinds of affective infrastructures that can
counter state discourse in times of mass displacement, and whether or not stretching Fanon’s
project of decolonization beyond the nation-state form offers a productive window to think about
post-revolutionary Syria.
Following Amiralay’s trajectory from enthusiasm to despondency immediately begs the
question: why stay with anticolonialism, and why Fanon? The answer may lie in part with the
urgency of ongoing Palestinian resistance against Israeli settler-colonialism. But it also certainly
lies in that period of time immediately after Amiralay’s death, with the brutal aftermath of the
Arab uprisings of 2011. To read Fanon with an eye for the impasses of sovereignty is to think
creatively about different forms of life that may emerge between enthusiasm and despondency,
between dams and the floods that inevitably emerge from them. Thinking Fanon beyond nation,
state, and nation-state also anchors a broader project aimed at de-provincializing Syria and the
region as a whole beyond the political and geographic limitations of area studies paradigms. In
this specific thesis, this project manifests in thinking through how the Middle East and Latin
America may speak to one another through film and theory and politics. In doing so, I want to
embrace the intellectual and political indeterminacy of such a project—indeed, among my most
animating impulses may be a cautionary gesture against dams built out of normative political
commitments. The long durée of history, in all of its contingencies, often proves itself
troublesome to such dams.
Chapter 1:
Capturing Revolution (1969-1980)
Omar Amiralay ends his 1974 film Everyday Life in a Syrian Village with a piercing
repudiation, and a harsh call to action. After an hour and 20 minutes of footage depicting the
debilitating conditions of the peasantry in Eastern Syria, Amiralay refuses to let the film go to
black without having the last word. Evoking Franz Fanon, a subtitle before the final credits
reads: “We must involve ourselves in the struggle for our common liberation. There are no clean
hands, no innocents, no spectators. We must all plunge our hands into the soil of our land. Every
spectator is a coward, or a traitor.”24
In the aftermath of the 1970 “corrective movement” that
brought Hafez Al-Assad to power, Amiralay’s invocation of Fanon comes across as a militant
call to action against a compromised Ba’ath party now ruling Syria. Yet, interestingly enough,
Amiralay’s prophetic call finds a rather curious culprit: an unnamed spectator.
Over the course of this essay, I aim to historicize the lingering presence of Fanon’s
spectator in Amiralay’s film through the lens of the Fanonian project of creating an anticolonial
collective subjectivity in the name of “national culture.” In the Syrian context, anticolonial
national culture had necessarily transnational aesthetic links. For one, Syria became the hub for a
movement of young Arab filmmakers of various ideological shades between Arab nationalism
and Marxism hoping to transform social reality through film under the “Alternative Arab
Cinema” moniker. In another breath, these transnational aesthetic links go way beyond the
Arabic-speaking region: Everyday Life in a Syrian Village’s ending quote not only borrows from
Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, but specifically from Fanon’s invocation throughout the
Argentinian guerilla film The Hour of the Furnaces, a key film from the Latin American Third
24 Omar Amiralay, dir. Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, 1974, Damascus: National Film Organization.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 140.
Alsubee 13
Cinema movement. Prior to making Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, Omar Amiralay became
the first to translate Solanas and Getino’s infamous “Towards a Third Cinema” manifesto into
Arabic, which theorized film as a tool with the purpose of creating revolutionary actors
committed to Third Worldist national liberation. Tracing these histories, I show how “Arab
Alternative Cinema” transformed from a project with a vibrant social and political life into an
ossified state aesthetic after the hardening of a censorship regime by the Ba’ath Party in 1973.
After 1973, the ruling Ba’th Party systematically dismantled any collective screening
infrastructure in Syria, shelving cinema’s politicized social life away. In response, various Syrian
filmmakers, such as Amiralay, responded to these conditions through participating in a network
makeshift ciné clubs. By historicizing the struggle over a Fanonian national culture in Syria as an
infrastructural struggle for a cinematic social life—a struggle in which the state emerged
victorious by the end of the 1970s—I argue for stretching Fanonian anticolonialism beyond the
national to account for the weight of both colonial and anticolonial histories.
By bringing the Middle East and the Americas in conversation through my approach to
Syrian cinema and Third cinema, I aim to write against an analytical frame of enclosure:
analyzing Syria as a self-contained autocratic nation-state, or doing Middle East Studies as a
rigidly bordered field of study. Yasin al-Haj Saleh argues that it is impossible to think about
Syria today as anything but a global question, at a time where millions of Syrians are globally
displaced at the crosshairs of various geopolitical interventions.25 However, this insight does not
seem to accompany most studies of Syria, which remain tethered to the nation-state form as a
delimited site of inquiry. Similarly, the theoretical tools of area studies and even postcolonial
studies largely take the Middle East as a self-contained problem-space, a generic colonial
25 “Dialogue with Syrian Writer Yassin Al-Haj Saleh on Syria, the Left, and Political Islam in the
Contemporary Age,” Ahewar TV, December 5, 2021.
Alsubee 14
periphery replaceable with other colonial peripheries.26 Unfair as it may be to demand of
scholarship to undo the complex material legacies of colonial border-and-rule nation-states,
especially nation-states with as complex a social and political history as Syria, this will precisely
be the undertaking I gesture towards in this essay. By thinking about the transit of radical film
aesthetics across early Syrian cinema and Third cinema, I hope to move further towards a
deprovincialization of Syria, and of the region as a whole.
Nevertheless, the arc of this essay must inevitably begin within the borders of Syria at the
turn of the 1960s, with the rise of the Ba’th Party and establishment of the National Film
Organization (NFO). After a series of post-independence coup d’etats and a failed unification
with Nasser’s Egypt, Syria’s military wing of the Ba’ath Party, an Arab nationalist party with
deep connections to the peasantry, came into power through a coup d’etat in 1963.27 The Ba’ath
Party established the NFO to fund Syrian filmmakers to study filmmaking, primarily but not
exclusively in Moscow at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK).28 As in many
other nation-states at the moment of decolonization, Syrian-funded filmmakers traveled to
Europe with high ideals of bringing modernization and development to an underdeveloped,
colonized nation.29 These filmmakers returned to Syria throughout the 1970s, after the Hafez
Al-Assad counter-coup, to create a collaborative Pan-Arabist cinema with filmmakers from
29 Ibid, 25. The exception to the move to Soviet Bloc and Eastern European states is Omar Amiralay,
whose travels took him instead to Paris where he witnessed the 1968 Paris uprisings.
28 Joshka Wessels, Documenting Syria: Filmmaking, Video-Activism, and Revolution, (London:
Bloomsbury Publishing Press, 2019), 25.
27 Hanna Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Batatu follows the history of the Ba’th Party from an
intellectual project of Michel Aflaq and Salah Al-Din Bitar into its material manifestation as the Syrian
Ba’th Party with Hafez Al-Asad as head of state.
26 Bayan Aboubakr, “The Contradictions of Afro-Arab Solidarity(Ies): The Aswan High Dam and the
Erasure of the Global Black Experience,” Jadaliyya. Aboubakr highlights how this generic colonial
periphery in postcolonial studies is, in many ways, the inheritance of Third Worldist politics. These
approaches tend to be particularly problematic in approaches to race and indigeneity in the region.
Alsubee 15
Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Algeria.30By making the NFO the exclusive body for funding Syrian
cinema, the Ba’ath Party attempted to ensure that cinema could operate as a cog in a broader
project of anticolonial nation-building.
Grounding my approach to early Syrian cinema is the Fanonian conception of an
anticolonial national culture intertwined with anticolonial struggle. For Fanon, the development
of a national culture went hand-in-hand with combat—in his formulation, “national culture...
must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle these (colonized) countries are waging.”31This
national culture, Fanon crucially insisted, did not simply aim to “restore... former values and
reconfigurations” from a romantic pre-colonial past.32 Against this restorative register and its
“terribly sterile cliches,” Fanon argues for a national culture of combat, one constantly
articulating “a new reality in action” in response to a constantly evolving colonial condition.33
The aims of this national culture, Fanon insists, are nothing short of a dialectical struggle
“mobilizing every level of society” towards “a new humanism,” an issue to which we will return
at a later point in this paper.
34 For our current purposes, it is worth noting that Fanonian national
culture rejects a static address by highlighting the constantly evolving nature of the colonial
situation. Rather than ossifying revolutionary rhetoric or relying on romantic pasts, Fanonian
national culture remained committed to constantly forming horizons by attaching itself
inexplicably to the long durée of anticolonial struggle.
However, by the time that most Syrian filmmakers returned from their studies abroad to
partake in the project of national culture, it became apparent to many of them that the ruling
34 Ibid, 178.
33 Ibid, 158-159.
32 Ibid, 178.
31 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 168.
30 ArteEast. (2011, April 7). An evening with Hala Alabdalla and Omar Amiralay. Vimeo. Retrieved April
10, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/20761531
Alsubee 16
Ba’ath Party began transforming into a vehicle for state repression after the 1970 coup. Hafez
Al-Assad’s “corrective movement” after the 1967 defeat and Israeli invasion of the Golan
Heights came about as the result of an uneasy, yet mutually beneficial pact between a growing
state bourgeoisie and Syria’s mercantile classes against the more radical “February” wing of the
Ba’ath Party.
35These developments unfolded in tandem with a global neoliberal
counter-revolution, in which expanding private capital, the rolling back of welfare states, and a
growing US imperialist hegemony slowly engulfed colonial peripheries.36
In Syria, these global
developments manifested in ways that increasingly alienated the Ba’ath from its historic rural
base, while bolstering its secret police and carceral apparatuses to crush growing dissent.37
Expanding the carceral state became especially necessary after Ba’athist Syria’s highly
unpopular involvement in support of right-wing Phalangist and Zionist forces in the 1976
Lebanese Civil War against the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Lebanese National
Movement.38 All in all, to use the words of Hanna Batatu, the Ba’ath Party transformed in the
post-1970 moment from a party of “youthful visionaries and devotees” to one “increasingly
dominated by careerists and professional party operators,” whom, I would add, became among
the region’s many profiteers in the war against Zionist settler-colonialism.39 These circumstances
would be the political backdrop of the infrastructural-cinematic struggle for an anticolonial
realism in Syria.
39 Ibid, 133. This analysis also shares a lot in common with Fanon’s analysis of the revolutionary party
emptied of its revolutionary content, becoming a vehicle for native bourgeois opportunists.
38 Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics, 289-307.
37 Ibid, 211.
36 Ibid.
35 Max Ajl, “The Political Economy of Thermidor in Syria: National and International Dimensions,” in
Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War eds Ali Kadri and Linda Matar, (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2019), 210.
Alsubee 17
Nevertheless, following Fanon’s theorization, many of the earliest NFO-funded fiction
and documentary films dealt with Syria’s past and present not through the lens of restoring a
pre-colonial past, but through a more explicitly combative register of anticolonial struggle. Early
NFO films such as Nabil Maleh, Kais Al-Zubaidi, and Omar Amiralay’s first films, The Leopard,
The Visit and Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam narrativized revolution, peasant suffering at the
hands of wealthy landowners, and modernization through different registers of genre. These
themes, along with Palestinian liberation from Zionist settler-colonialism, ran deeply across not
just Syrian cinema, but the theater and literature of writers such as Saadallah Wannous,
Mamdooh Udwan and Mohammad Al-Maghut as well.40 Moreover, prior to 1973, the NFO’s
leadership operated relatively independently from the state ministry of culture, allowing
filmmakers to collaborate with other Pan-Arab filmmakers with little control—Omar Amiralay
called these years “the golden age of Syrian cinema.”41 What these pieces of national culture
shared was a commitment to a burgeoning national cinema, articulated in ideological opposition
to colonial representation.
These early Syrian films reflected the burgeoning transnational cinematic movement
under the “Arab Alternative Cinema” moniker, an umbrella term for young Arab filmmakers
with diverse film projects framed as interventions into social reality. The 1972 issue on “Arab
Alternative Cinema” by Lebanese communist newspaper Al-Tariq featured reflections from
various Arab filmmakers, writers, and critics who attended and participated in the Damascus
41 ArteEast. (2011, April 7). An evening with Hala Alabdalla and Omar Amiralay. Vimeo. Retrieved April
10, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/20761531
40 Much of this anticolonial national culture is depicted in detail in Max Weiss’s book, Revolutions
Aesthetic. Ted Ziter focuses on Syrian theater in this period, with special attention to playwright Saadallah
Wannous, whose theater aimed to mobilize the audience to such an extent as to start a revolution on its
own. Max Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria.
Edward Ziter, Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising, (London:
Palgrave Macmillon, 2015.)
Alsubee 18
Film Festival of that same year. The films at the festival ranged in genre—some, like Christian
Ghazi’s Hundred Faces for a Single Day took on a more experimental approach, while others
tended closer to more familiar formulas from more commercial and popular Egyptian cinema.42
Yet what united all of these filmmakers, across their different individual nation-states, was both
their youth, and their universal desire to stage their films as social interventions into each of their
national contexts in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat.43 While many of the theorists of
“Alternative Arab Cinema” proclaimed its militancy, many others decried it as an immature
posture in need of further political and aesthetic development.44 Some believed that films should
center the national question of Palestine above highlighting social contradictions, while others
thought these were false binaries.45 Finally, some posited fiction film as a necessarily bourgeois
mode of obscuring social reality, while others argued for a more complicated dialectic between
fictional and documentary cinema in relation to capturing and transforming “reality.”46
Regardless of all these disagreements, the “Alternative Arab Cinema” generation of filmmakers
could be understood as a generation invested in film not necessarily as a commodity, but as a
vehicle for social transformation.
Among these engaged filmmakers at the 1972 Damascus Film festival emerged the young
Omar Amiralay, whose approach entailed taking on a documentarian approach inspired by the
Left Bank of the French New Wave and—most notably for the purposes of this essay—Latin
46 Kassem Hawal, “Malamih wa-Afkar ‘An AlSinema Al-Arabiyah al-Badilah,” Al-Tariq, (Special Issue
n.7-8, 1972), 40.
45
Ibid, 85.
Walid Shumayt, “al-Sinema al-Siyasiyah wa-dawruha al-Nidali.” Al-Tariq, Special Issue n.7-8, 1972),52.
44 Farid Al-Jabr, “Dajij al-Sinema al-Arabiyah al-Badilah akbar min waqi’iha” (Al-Tariq, Special Issue
n.7-8, 1972), 85-86.
43 Kassem Hawal, “Malamih wa-Afkar ‘An AlSinema Al-Arabiyah al-Badilah,” Al-Tariq, (Special Issue
n.7-8, 1972), 38.
“Nadharat ila ba’d al-Aflam al-Riwa’iyah fi al-Mahrajan.” Al-Tariq, (Special Issue n.7-8, 1972), 108.
42 “Arab Alternative Cinema,” (Al-Tariq, Special Issue n.7-8, 1972), 74-87.
Alsubee 19
American Third Cinema. Amiralay, remembered affectionately by his generational peers as “the
farthest to the Left amongst us,” had a unique entryway to cinema.47 Unlike most other Syrian
filmmakers who studied in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Bloc states, Amiralay studied at La
Fémis in Paris, where the Paris Uprisings of 1968 became his fateful gateway into cinema and
into politics.48 Soon after returning to Syria, Amiralay directed his first documentary short Film
Essay on the Euphrates Dam, which earned him the “Best Documentary Short” prize at the 1972
Damascus Film Festival (tied with Ateyyat al-Abnoudy’s Horse of Mud).49
In that same year,
Amiralay also wrote a translation of Argentine filmmakers Solanas and Getino’s Towards a Third
Cinema for “Film,” the Syrian National Film Organization’s publication before 1973.50 At stake
in Amiralay’s documentary approach was what he later called “an austere cinema,” quietly
highlighting class contradictions and making film out of “the material of reality.”51
The Third Cinema movement in Latin America lent itself to Omar Amiralay’s
filmmaking for its theorization of film as an ideological tool in service of creating revolutionary
actors out of viewers. In their infamous 1970 manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” Octavio
Getino and Fernando Solanas understood their “Third Cinema” as existing in direct opposition to
the dominant address of Hollywood commercial cinema, in which cinema as a consumer good
mystifies its ideological impetus. For Getino and Solanas, this “cinema of mystification”
51 Jean-Louis Comolli and Serge Daney, “Entretien avec Omar Amiralay,” Cahiers du cinéma No.
290–291 (juillet-août 1978): 79–89, at 79.
50 Anaïs Farine, “Vers un troisième cinéma: Une introduction à la traduction par Dirâsât ‘arabiyya du
manifeste de Fernando Solanas et Octavio Getino,” Cinematheque Beirut, 2020.
49 “Arab Alternative Cinema,” (Al-Tariq, Special Issue n.7-8, 1972), 130.
48 Rasha Salti, Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers.
(New York: Rattapallax Press, 2006), 95.
,YouTube” ,سينما بديلة: مقابلة مع المخرج السوري محمد ملص Interview Malas Mohamad :Cinema Alternative “47
BBC, March 24, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HafNF-fj4yE&ab_channel=BBCNews%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8
%D9%8A.
Alsubee 20
functions as “a spectacle aimed at a digesting object.”52
Instead, Getino and Solanas insisted on a
cinema “at the service of life itself... dissolving aesthetics in the life of society” in service of “ a
cinema fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of
becoming.”53 This “new human being” emerges through participating in the screening of the film
as a facet of a broader anti-colonial struggle, transforming the viewer “from spectator to actor.”54
Like Fanon, Getino and Solanas were not content to rely simply on static depictions of a
romantic pre-colonial past. Directly citing Fanon while also taking aesthetic cues from Italian
neorealism, Getino and Solanas’ Third Cinema could only function by extending the work of
images onto viewers, turning them from consuming spectators into revolutionary actors by
involving them directly in the realities unfolding within and beyond the image.
Getino and Solanas’s 1968 film, The Hour of the Furnaces, sought to activate an
audience of revolutionary co-conspirators both through its form, and through the collective
subjectivity fostered via the guerilla screening space. The film, completed two years before the
manifesto, demonstrated Getino and Solanas’ manifesto on the relationship between film and
Fanonian anti-colonialism. By attaching itself to the left-wing orientation of Peronism, the
ideologically variegated populist movement named after exiled Argentinian leader Juan Peron,
Getino and Solanas’s film became quite dangerous to view.
55
Indeed, the politicization of the
audience began before the film even began. By making the decision to attend illegal guerilla
55 Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism, (London: Routledge, 1994), 269. It is also
fascinating to think about the affinity between Ba’athism and Peronism: namely, that they both posit an
anticolonialism that is at once anticommunist as well as ideologically opposed to imperialism. Both
Ba’athism and Peronism are also eventually hijacked by right-wing nationalist orientations of the
ideology.
54 Ibid, 397-398.
53 Ibid, 386, 400.
52 Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the
Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” (Black Camera: An International Film
Journal 13, no. 1 (Fall 2021): 378–401), 378.
Alsubee 21
screenings, the audience member immediately became a co-conspirator and actor liable to be
arrested.56 From there, the film itself allowed the audience to “see” what Solanas and Getino call
“the invisible hand of neocolonialism” by splicing intertitle quotes by Fanon, Che Guevara, and
Peron between montages of material conditions in Argentina. Moreover, the images are often
accompanied by narration directly addressing the audience, flowing between statistical
information and ideological slogans. Crucially however, Getino and Solanas did not treat the
production of the film itself as a foregone conclusion. The film, for Getino and Solanas, was a
“detonator”: the audience’s role as a participatory actor could only be fully materialized through
active discussion and reflection after the film ended, turning the film screening into “a
meeting.”57 As such, the guerilla screening space became just as crucial to the project of Third
Cinema as the formalistic realism of documentary filmmaking itself. Following Fanon’s national
culture, such a project necessarily refuses foreclosure, responding to an evolving colonial
situation through the audience’s active involvement.
Following Third Cinema’s emphasis on audience engagement and involvement, many
early Arab Alternative Cinema writers and filmmakers emphasized the importance of screening
infrastructure for their social and political projects, lamenting possible state censorship. On the
one hand, a few writers noted the necessity of state infrastructures as means of providing funding
for technology, employment, and distribution and exhibition capacities.58 However, these writers
and filmmakers were also aware of the limitations of this reliance on state infrastructure: possible
state censorship and allowing films to languish on shelves rather than be actively screened and
discussed.59 While these filmmakers and writers did not directly cite Solanas and Getino, they
59
Ibid, 98-99.
58 “Arab Alternative Cinema,” (Al-Tariq, Special Issue n.7-8, 1972), 83-84.
57 Ibid, 398.
56 Ibid, 397.
Alsubee 22
shared a vision of film as a pretense for social engagement at the screening space, which state
infrastructure could either allow for or repress. What became at stake, then, was an
infrastructural struggle to keep the horizon of anticolonialism alive through ongoing social
engagement. To that note, Iraqi filmmaker Qassem Hawal particularly cautioned against
Alternative Arab Cinema turning itself from a vibrant social movement into “an old tradition”
full of “clichés.”60
Many of the worst fears of the Arab Alternative Cinema’s theorists were soon to be
confirmed as the Ba’th Party began to crack down more seriously on the cultural sphere through
censorship and closing down of local screening spaces. Galvanized by “the victory” of the
October War against Israel in 1973, the Ba’ath Party replaced the NFO’s more independent
leadership with a more state-oriented leadership to maintain its monopoly over the culture
sphere.61 Simultaneously, the Ba’ath Party issued orders to close down theaters, as the new NFO
leadership began censoring the cultural sphere in Syria under the pretext of protecting national
security.
62 As a result, the NFO gradually transformed Syrian cinema into a commodity exported
into the global film festival circuit system, rather than a means of constant politicizing of the
masses in an internationalist anti-colonial struggle.63 As Rasha Salti points out, “when Syrian
films travel to film festivals worldwide, they almost always garner critical acclaim and awards,
but all initiatives for their screening originate from outside their country. Inside their country,
63 miriam cooke names this strategy “making the oppositional arts official” in her book Dissident Syria:
Making Oppositional Arts Of icial, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
62 Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria, 321. While film became seriously
restricted in Syria, television was interestingly widely promoted, especially with the influx of gulf capital.
Although Syrian television contains some subversive representation and critical politics, its more
individualized consumption setting makes it less politically dangerous than the movies, which rely on
collective screenings in theaters.
61 ArteEast. (2011, April 7). An evening with Hala Alabdalla and Omar Amiralay. Vimeo. Retrieved April
10, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/20761531
60 Kassem Hawal, “Malamih wa-Afkar ‘An AlSinema Al-Arabiyah al-Badilah,” Al-Tariq, (Special Issue
n.7-8, 1972), 40.
Alsubee 23
Syrian films are barely known.”64 Films such as Amiralay’s second, explicitly Fanonian
Everyday Life in a Syrian Village shared this fate. As such, by the mid-1970s in Syria,
anticolonial national culture paradoxically became a commodity itself, neutralizing its political
impulses and rendering the conditions for its social life an impossibility.
While neutralizing the social life of cinema, the NFO maintained its discursive monopoly
over the aesthetics of anticolonial cinema via the NFO’s newsletter, Al-Hayah al-Sinima’iyah.
By the time its first issues appeared in 1979, Al-Hayah al-Sinima’iyah devoted many articles to
Third World cinemas that rose from nothing (min al-sifr) in service of national consciousness
(al-wa’i al-watani).65 Among the most prominent of these prescriptive examples is the
documentary cinema of Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez, whose work is considered a prime
example of a politically committed cinema.66 However, unlike the earlier writings of the
Alternative Arab Cinema movement, this focus on the aesthetic work of a prescriptive
anticolonial cinema does not come with any sustained analysis of the present day of the region in
1979, a few years on the heels of the Lebanese Civil War and a time of growing opposition to the
Ba’ath Party. Nor does it include any concrete plans for this revolutionary cinema’s
transformative potential within and beyond Syria, outside of the realm of an ossified dogma. In
many ways, the NFO’s role in ossifying revolutionary rhetoric in cinema became part and parcel
of a broader project of creating an officially endorsed aesthetic of revolution at the hands of a
counter-revolutionary regime.67
67 Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria, 338-340.
66 Rimon Butros, “Notes on Cuban Cinema,” (Al Hayat al-Sinama’iyya Vol.3. Damascus: The National
Film Organization. 1979), 32.
65 Saleh Almani, “Documentary Cinema as a Political Weapon,” (Al Hayat al-Sinama’iyya Vol.3.
Damascus: The National Film Organization. 1979), 44.
64 Rasha Salti, Insights Into Syria Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers.
(New York: Rattapallax Press, 2006), 21-22.
Alsubee 24
This is the context behind the political and formal qualities of Amiralay’s charged second
film, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974), which reckoned visually with state ossification of
anticolonial aesthetics by annotating Fanon with images of rural suffering in Ba’athist Syria.
Much of Amiralay’s second film juxtaposes images of poor living conditions of the Syrian
peasantry with the rhetoric of state officials. Unlike Getino and Solanas however, Amiralay
offers very little by way of narration or commentary.
68
Interestingly, the film was a collaboration
with playwright Saadallah Wannous, whose theater stretched Brecht to consider staged and
unstaged audience participation a necessity in his infamous post-1967 plays.69 The result of their
collaboration is almost as anthropological as it is sardonic, letting the interviews recorded with
peasants and state officials speak for themselves, near one another, and near the viewer, rather
than hold the viewer’s hand. Yet, Amiralay makes the choice to end the film on an openly
ideological note, one that directly recalls Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces. At the
film’s climax, a peasant bemoans the inescapable poverty his family is subjected to at the hands
of wealthy landowners still supported by a supposedly revolutionary state party, before ripping
his shirt apart in frustration. After this scene, Amiralay ends his film with a Fanon quote from the
essay “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth,
accusing “spectators” of colluding with the injustice captured in the film. In a move that mirrors
Solanas and Getino’s, Amiralay’s invocation of the quote subtly replaces Fanon’s “bystander”
with a filmic spectator (mutafarrij). Recontextualized in Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, much
like in Hour of the Furnaces, Fanon’s scathing words imply that, if the spectator were to simply
69 See more of Saadallah Wannous’s recently translated works, Saadallah Wannous, Sentence to Hope: A
Saadallah Wannous Reader, trans. by Mysers, Robert and Nada Saab, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2019). Ted Ziter also writes about Wannous’s theater at great length in Political Performance in
Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising. London: Palgrave Macmillon, 2015.
68 Jean-Louis Comolli and Serge Daney, “Entretien avec Omar Amiralay,” Cahiers du cinéma No.
290–291 (juillet-août 1978): 79–89, at 79.
Alsubee 25
remain a spectator, any consumer of these images of rural suffering would be a traitor to those
filmed. The result is a transfixing call to revolt that takes state rhetoric beyond its ossification: an
urgent unlocking of the inventive potential of anticolonialism, once it is placed in dialogue with
evolving material conditions.
Much like The Hour of the Furnaces, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village could not be
legally screened within Syria, leading Amiralay and his peers to founding the Damascus Cinema
Club as a space for screenings and discussions on material conditions and political possibilities
within and beyond Syria. Amiralay recalls the “clashes” that took place between himself and a
number of filmmakers in his cohort with the NFO after 1973, when the NFO banned his
provocative film and discontinued avenues for screening most Syrian films.70 Between 1974 and
1978, Amiralay and his comrades worked tirelessly to develop a makeshift Cinema Club
independent of the NFO, which eventually boasted over 800 members and began expanding
throughout the rest of Syria.71 Similarly to Solanas and Getino’s theorization, the space of the
screening itself became just as crucial to the political projects of the films. While the film
screenings typically lasted about an hour and a half, the conversations after the film went
upwards of three or four hours, turning the Damascus Cinema Club into a forum of meetings for
dissenting Syrians of various political persuasions.72 However, the alternative public screenings
experiment did not last long—in 1980, the Damascus Cinema Club was banned by an executive
order, at a time in which the Ba’ath Party became threatened by growing opposition movements
among Communists, former Ba’athists, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
72 Ibid. Interestingly, the Cinema Club became a place where many Syrian communists often attended,
including Syrian filmmaker and collaborator with Amiralay, Hala Abadallah.
71 Ibid.
70 Rasha Salti, “Nadi Al-Sinama in Damascus, or When Cinema Wielded Power to Threaten the Social
Order.” ArteEast, August 18, 2016.
Alsubee 26
Seen through the prism of Syrian cinema, Fanonian anticolonialism relies on a constant
reinvention of politicized subjectivities through the use of a screening space, a praxis that
emphasizes points of departure rather than fixed endings—leading us to a political vision
delinked from the nation-state form.73 Over the course of this essay so far, I have attempted to
understand Fanonian national culture by looking at how anticolonial cinema has rendered the
relationship between image and spectator, between Syria and Argentina. Solanas and Getino
characterized the imperative of responding to an evolving neocolonial situation through the
guerilla film, which relied on the screening space just as much as it relied on a formalistic
realism to create revolutionary actors out of spectators. Omar Amiralay’s specific take on “Arab
Alternative Cinema,” before its transformation into state dogma, relied on an engagement with
Solanas and Getino’s work. Everyday Life in a Syrian Village deployed the contested idiom of
anticolonialism by directly citing Fanon, provided a unique formalistic register through which to
politicize the spectator: a more muted approach that gradually became more reflexive over the
course of his career. Crucially, both The Hour of the Furnaces and Everyday Life in a Syrian
Village point to how anticolonial cinema relies on a constant reinvention of a revolutionary
actor-spectator. Everyday Life offers a particularly incisive look at how such a cinema would
respond to the ossification of revolution itself, a facet of Ba’athist Syria’s gradual incorporation
into an increasingly neoliberal world system. As such, these films and their afterlives allow us to
think through what happens when Fanonism is taken to its inventive horizons, irreducible to a
fixed destination of a politically calculated sovereignty, itself often an impasse in a capitalist
world system. The demand is not to read Fanon in search of a utopia premised on a false
destination of perfectibility, but to read Fanon as a dialectical thinker whose horizon of inventing
73 David Marriott, “No Lords A-Leaping: Fanon, C.L.R. James, and the Politics of Invention,”
(Humanities 2014, 3, 517–545), 517.
Alsubee 27
“a new human being” remains beyond our reach.74 The historical experiment of transnational
anticolonial cinema allows us to see how the project of Fanonian reinvention plays out, in all of
its precarity, simultaneously within and beyond the “national” in national culture.
74
Ibid, 517-518.
Alsubee 28
Chapter 2:
Nondesertion //
An Interlude with Hala Alabdallah and Edouard Glissant
“For me personally, today is a moment that demands deep contemplation, meditation, searching,
questioning, and pulling apart the past, whether that be the history of our country before 2011 or
of the early days of the revolution or of the changes that unfolded afterwards. This history makes
it imperative to ask new kinds of questions which lead to a very different kind of cinema with a
wider horizon of possible ends.”75
- Hala Alabdallah
Nondesertion
“Today, the individual, without having to go anywhere, can be directly touched by things
elsewhere, sometimes even before his community, family, social group, or nation has been
enriched by the same effect... If, thus, we imagine that an aesthetics is an art of conceiving,
imagining, and acting, the other of Thought is the aesthetics implemented by me and by you to
join the dynamics to which we are to contribute. This is the part fallen to me in an aesthetics of
chaos, the work I am to undertake, the road I am to travel.”
- Eduard Glissant76
76 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 27, 155.
75 Basil AlSubee, “Poetics of Historical Contemplation With Syria and its Diaspora: An Interview with
Hala Alabdalla,” Malaffat-NAAS, 2023.
Alsubee 29
Conclusion:
In Lieu of the Nation
In an interview with SyriaUntold dated to July 2020, Syrian filmmaker Ali Al-Atassi
summarizes the predicaments facing contemporary Syrian filmmakers. Reflecting on artistic
production in a present of Syrian displacement, Atassi explains the goals of his Beirut-based
project, Bidayat (or “Beginnings”), which trains, funds, and distributes films by young Syrian,
Lebanese and Palestinian filmmakers.77 When probed about whether he considers the work of
Bidayat “a new Syrian national cinema,” he acknowledges the newness of cinematic techniques
and visual styles yet categorically rejects the “national” descriptor. To quote Atassi himself, “The
existence of a new Syrian ‘national’ cinema implies the existence of institutions, and of a
country. It would imply the existence of a people who are still living inside the borders of their
homeland.”78
In the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings, the subsequent war and mass displacement
of Syrians, a “nation” evidently cannot be the conditions of possibility for creating a vibrant,
socially active Syrian cinema.
Throughout this thesis however, I have argued that the nation has in fact never served as
the ground-zero for a socially active Syrian cinema. By tracing the history of “alternative Arab
cinema” from a contested political-aesthetic project into an ossified state slogan, I have
attempted a project of delinking anticolonialism from the insistence on the “national” in the
historical national liberation framework. If my attempt to delink Fanon from national concerns
arises from a critique of sovereignty and self-determination, it is because of both the
contemporary absence of a self-contained Syrian “nation” as well as the violence committed at
the hands of the nation, in the name of the nation. Yet, the persistence of thinking through
78 Ibid.
77 Maya Abyad, “Mohammed Ali Atassi: We Have Never Once Made a Film That Concerns a Western
Audience,” SyriaUntold, July 17, 2020.
Alsubee 30
anticolonialism also comes from a concern with a capitalist world-system in which the colonial is
always inevitably imbricated. How far that imbrication goes is a matter outside the bounds of this
paper. What I can certainly say without a doubt is that, in Syria’s case, the politics of
anticolonialism transformed from socially activating into dogmatic state discourse, into a regime
of censorship and silence.
Nondesertion is, in part, an attempt to respond to that history by insisting on the
continuity of dialogue and memory. In that sense, I move in parallel with Syrian filmmakers
whose methods of address have replaced state aesthetics of “speaking for” and “speaking to” for
an aesthetics of “speaking with.”79
In tandem with that move, Vietnamese American filmmaker
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s aesthetic style is instructive. In the writings that accompanied her earliest
films, Reassemblage, Naked Spaces, and Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, Minh-ha coined the
term “speaking nearby” to describe her filmmaking praxis.80 Elaborating on the concept,
Minh-ha explains:
“In other words, a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is
distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that
reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or
claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening
up to other possible moments of transition — these are forms of indirectness well
understood by anyone in tune with poetic language.”81
81 Nancy Chen, “‘Speaking Nearby:’ A Conversation with Trinh. T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology
Review: Vol 8(1):82–91.
80 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, (Bloomington: Indian
University Press, 2009).
79 Max Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria, (Redwood City: Stanford
University Press, 2022), 2, 14.
Alsubee 31
Minh-ha rejects making films that “speak about,” a proprietary form of speaking associated with
an objectifying spectator. Instead, Minh-ha articulates the need for speaking reflexively and in
proximity, a poetic language of care.
What remains to be seen is whether or not that aesthetics can also be manifested as an
entire affective infrastructure. Already, Syrian filmmakers and war survivors are self-consciously
breaking from the common human rights address of victimization, and its attendant politics of
immediation.82
In its place, filmmakers are experimenting with memory, poetry, intergenerational
questions, and responses to new environments and solidarity struggles. My hope is that these
films can come together to form an infrastructure of sorts, formless and attentive to the ruptures
of displacement. My second, more important hope is that the realm of the political ought not
replicate silence, death, and disavowal. As for anticolonialism, it may still have something to add
to this infrastructure—but never at the expense of attending to its remnant violences, its haunting
memories, its uncomfortable clichés. It may never be spoken in the realm of self-serious
commitment, except as contradictory, sarcastic speech.
82 Pooja Rangan, Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2017).
I refer to recent films such as Amal Alzakout’s Purple Sea, Abdullah al-Khatib’s Little Palestine, Rami
Farah’s Our Memory Belongs to Us, and Hala Alabdalla’s Omar Amiralay: Sorrow, Time, Silence. Of
course, Abounaddara’s critique of the “undignified image” is also instructive here.
Alsubee 32
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