The Arab Spring was Critically Acclaimed: Militant Arab Cinema Conjunctures, and the Emergence of the Character-Driven Resilience Documentary

Abstract

In the decade since the so-called Arab Spring first drove debates around the relationship between images and militancy, hundreds of films have documented the uprisings and their aftermath. Yet little scholarship has considered the political consequences of films made in relation to the Arab Spring or situated new works in relation to earlier generations of militant cinema. This article will call attention to a new cinema subgenre I call the “character-driven resilience documentary”, that emerged as a prominent form amid the Arab Spring. I argue that the character-driven resilience documentary subtly but powerfully undermines the radical potential of the Arab uprisings. By tracing the evolution of militant Arab cinema in relation to global conjunctural moments, from its formal emergence in the 1960s through the 1990s video art era to the present, I show the political significance of this form and point to a new agenda for militant cinema.