"Roots of the New Arab Film deals with the generation of filmmakers from across North Africa and the Middle East who created an international awareness of Arab film from the mid-1980s onwards. These seminal filmmakers experienced the moment of national independence first-hand in their youth and reta
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ined a deep attachment to their homeland. Although these aspiring filmmakers had to seek their training abroad, they witnessed a time of filmic revival in Europe - Fellini and Antonioni in Italy, the French New Wave, and British Free Cinema. Returning home, these filmmakers brought a unique insider/outsider perspective to bear on local developments in society since independence, including the divide between urban and rural communities, the continuing power of traditional values and the status of women in a changing society. As they made their first films back home, the feelings of participation in a worldwide movement of new, independent filmmaking was palpable." (Publisher description)
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"[...] Roy Armes examines the political and cultural context of the films and the film industry in the post-independence era. Since the birth of cinema, North Africa has been the site of countless
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European and U.S. film productions. This book, however, focuses on the postcolonial period, when indigenous filmmaking in each of the three Maghreb countries--Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia--arose with the newly independent nations. Comparative analyses of each country's filmmaking in the decades following independence provide a historical portrait of the conditions and environment for the development of a postcolonial cinema. Armes then turns his attention to an in-depth examination of 10 key films produced between the 1970s and the 1990s, including Omar Gatlato, La Nouba, Halfaouine, Silences of the Palace, and Ali Zaoua. The book includes a dictionary of more than 135 North African filmmakers and a chronological filmography." (Publisher description)
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"The Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film is a unique, one volume work which illuminates a fascinating variety of cinema which is little known outside its own area. The Encyclopedia is divided into nine chapters, each written by a leading scholar in the field. Each chapter
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covers the history and major issues of film within that area, as well as providing bibliographies of the leading films, directors and actors. The areas covered are: Central Asia, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, The Magreb, Palestine, Turkey. It contains more than 60 black and white photographs of featured films, includes references and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, and the volume concludes with comprehensive name, film and general indexes." (Publisher description)
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"This volume is the first fully comprehensive account of film production in the Third World. Although they are usually ignored or marginalized in histories of world cinema," Third World countries now produce well over half of the world's films. Roy
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Armes sets out initially to place this huge output in a wider context, examining the forces of tradition and colonialism that have shaped the Third World--defined as those countries that have emerged from Western control but have not fully developed their economic potential or rejected the capitalist system in favor of some socialist alternative. He then considers the paradoxes of social structure and cultural life in the post-independence world, where even such basic concepts as "nation," "national culture," and "language" are problematic. The first experience of cinema for such countries has invariably been that of imported Western films, which created the audience and, in most cases, still dominate the market today. Thus, Third World film makers have had to ssert their identity against formidable outside pressures. The later sections of the book look at their output from a number of angles: in terms of the stages of overall growth and corresponding stages of cinematic development; from the point of view of regional evolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and through a detailed examination of the work of some of the Third World's most striking film innovators. In addition to charting the broad outlines of filmic developments too little known in Europe and the United States, the book calls into question many of the assumptions that shape conventional film history. It stresse the role of distribution in defining and limiting production, queries simplistic notions of independent "national cinemas," and points to the need to take social and economic factors into account when considering authorship in cinema. Above all, the book celebrates the achievements of a mass of largely unknown film makers who, in difficult circumstances, have distinctively expanded our definitions of the art of cinema." (Publisher description)
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