Crisis Cinema in the Middle East - by Shohini Chaudhuri (Paperback)

About the Book

"In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them brutal state crackdowns of revolutions. Yet, filmmakers have persisted in their desire to tell their stories, against the odds, in creative acts that attest to their imagination, courage and resilience. In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad scope of international films, ranging from award-winning, festival favourites such as Five Broken Cameras (2011), Persepolis (2007) and Kiarostami's About Elly (2009) to lesser-known films originating from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Using various regional film archives and interviews with filmmakers such as Yasmin Fedda, Ossama Mohammed, Leila Sansour and Sam Kadi, Chaudhuri identifies how witnessing, humour, animation and adaptation have become prevalent creative strategies for producing work under the socio-political and material limitations of crisis. Through an interrogation of terms such as 'crisis' and 'creativity', Chaudhuri explores how films from the Arab world and Iran creatively rework the key tropes of crisis reporting perpetuated by western media. She develops the argument that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints - whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities - resulting in different kinds of constrained art"--

Book Synopsis

In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them brutal state crackdowns of revolutions. Yet, filmmakers have persisted in their desire to tell their stories, against the odds, in creative acts that attest to their imagination, courage and resilience.

In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous period since 2009, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum(2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015), to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of obstacles that filmmakers face and their strategies for overcoming them so that those constraints are transformed into creative opportunities. Using her original interviews with filmmakers such as Waad al-Kateab, Yasmin Fedda, Larissa Sansour, Mani Haghighi and Ossama Mohammed, she identifies nine creative strategies for producing work under conditions of crisis.

Chaudhuri argues that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints, whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities.She shows that the range of creative strategies emanating from the region is much wider than allegory and becoming ever more direct. She thus opens up new lines of inquiry into cinematic creativity in sites of conflict and crisis in the Middle East and beyond.

Review Quotes

Crisis Cinema in the Middle East is an absolute tour de force. Chaudhuri's account of the dynamics of creativity and constraint in Iranian and Middle Eastern filmmaking offers deep and compelling insights into the nature of freedom of expression. Engagingly written and theoretically astute, this is, quite simply, one of the best books I have read in a very long time.



Elegantly written and highly informed, Chaudhuri's book first expands our understanding of the immense constraints - political, social, economical - facing Iranian and Arab filmmakers to quickly transcend them through meticulous examinations into an incredibly wide array of creative responses and strategies. A must-read in Middle Eastern Film Studies!

Shohini Chaudhuri masterfully captures the complex and paradoxical relationship between the notion of creativity and various constraints filmmakers face in Iran and the Arab world. This book offers a fresh and unique study of filmmaking practices across the region from production to distribution organised in nine chapters, each representing a creative solution these filmmakers have employed considering those constraints. This is an essential reading for anyone interested in cinema of the region and an important contribution to global and transnational cinema studies in general.

About the Author

Shohini Chaudhuri is a Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, UK. Her main research and teaching area is World Cinema, with particular interests in film and human rights, film-philosophy, feminist and postcolonial theory. Her work develops transnational and comparative frameworks to explore links between different film cultures. She is the author of Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship (2014), Feminist Film Theorists (2006) and Contemporary World Cinema (2005).