Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi
ISBN: 9780520974333
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Smihi Moumen 1945-; Motion pictures -- Arab countries; Motion picture producers and directors -- Morocco;

Arab Modernism as World Cinema explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Addressing the legacy of the Nahda or "Arab Renaissance" of the nineteenth and early twentieth century--when Arab writers and artists reenergized Arab culture by engaging with other languages and societies--Peter Limbrick argues that Smihi's films take up the spirit of the Nahda for a new age. Examining Smihi's oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South. This original study offers new routes for thinking about world cinema and modernism in the Middle East and North Africa, and about Arab cinema in the world.

Peter Limbrick is Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.