{"title":"A 1973 Aramco World Magazine Feature on Location Shooting in Lebanon","authors":"Samhita Sunya","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.12","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:A 1973 feature on location shooting in Lebanon, published in Aramco World magazine, highlights the contemporaneous status of Beirut as an urban center of transnational and transregional media production. The feature's coverage of Honey Baby Honey Baby (1974), a US Black independent prestige film shot on location in Lebanon, occasions a reconsideration of the film's largely lost legacies, alongside the possibilities and limits of Middle East oil company publications for archival historiographies of globally circulating media.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124481388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: South by South/West Asia: Transregional Histories of Middle East–South Asia Cinemas","authors":"Kaveh Askari, Samhita Sunya","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.01","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123871845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editors' Note: On a Press Booklet for Black Eyes (1936)","authors":"Kaveh Askari, Samhita Sunya","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.08","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:A 1935 press booklet—mostly in Persian, with one section in English—high lights Iranian actress Fakhri Vaziri as the major attraction of Black Eyes (1936). Black Eyes was the third of the first five Iranian talkies by Abdolhossein Sepanta, all of which were produced in India. The earliest of these productions was directed by Ardeshir Irani in collaboration with Sepanta. Only the first of these features, The Lor Girl (1933), remains accessible for viewing in a form that is more than a collection of fragments. In the absence of the film, the booklet for Black Eyes offers an opportunity to consider the relationship between publicity materials and films in a transregional context. It also points to the specific challenges that visual and print ephemera posed to colonial film policy in light of a 1935 debate over the censorship of promotional materials.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121762691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword: The Long Arabesque: Economies of Affect between South Asia and the Middle East","authors":"A. Kapse","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.14","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The term Arabesque has often been used as a verbal shorthand for an ornate pattern of interlaced flowers, leaves, or animal motifs. This essay attempts to retrace a longer affective history of the Arabesque in a contemporary Perso-Arabic context, made possible by the emergence of the cinema. Paying particular attention to trade routes that developed between Bombay, Persia, and the Middle East, it makes a polemical case for the long history of the Arabesque as a repertoire of Persianate or brown cultural sounds, images, tales, or motifs that circulate in the Global South and thrive by competing with or appropriating tropes from Western Orientalism. I argue that the mobility of the cinema across India, Iran, and beyond inaugurated systems of cultural exchange and collabora tion that went beyond the mere figural understanding of the Arabesque. Sound cinema and, more recently, digital media formats are capable of expanding the frontiers of the Arabesque in unprecedented ways, allowing for new forms of play with physical space, as well as aural and temporal articulations of long-shared Persianate idioms addressed to a global collective imagined as brown.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126717121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Falasteen Ka Matlab Kya? (What Does Palestine Mean?) in Riaz Shahid's Zerqa (1969)","authors":"A. Petiwala","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.04","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The year 1969 saw the release of the Pakistani political fantasy film Zerqa, directed by socialist filmmaker Riaz Shahid. At once a leftist critique of the Ayub Khan regime and an endorsement of Palestinian armed struggle, Zerqa refracted Pakistan's political crisis through the question of Palestine. This paper historicizes Zerqa against Pakistani and third-worldist creative responses to Palestine in the 1950s and 1960s. Through textual analysis of the film and its ephemera, I argue that Zerqa's approach to solidarity, gender, and the figure of the Arab-Jew both captures the nuances of the identities imbricated in the Palestinian struggle and universalizes Palestine toward its own political ends.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"24 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131416073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Soundscape of a National Cinema Industry: Filmfarsi and Its Sonic Connections with Egyptian and Indian Cinemas, 1940s–1960s","authors":"Cooley","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.03","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article considers the release of Siamak Yasemi's 1965 commercial Iranian hit Qarun's Treasure in the context of Iranian cinema's historic and competitive relationship with Egyptian and Indian cinemas in the mid-twentieth century. I trace the development of a national cinema industry in Iran through sound practice in order to demonstrate that fīlmfārsī was born out of its sonic and material connections to the film industries in the Middle East and South Asia. Through a focus on sound and industry, my article expands Iranian cinema historiography beyond national frameworks and methods of textual analysis.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122325492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Cinema Programmes\" of the British Public Relations Office in the Persian Gulf, 1944–1948","authors":"Firat Oruc","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.09","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This commentary introduces the \"Cinema Programmes\" of the British Public Relations Office in Bahrain from 1944 to 1948. In addition to propaganda-based newsreels and information films, the programs included Hollywood feature films that were borrowed from Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO). BAPCO rented the films from distributors in India for screening in its employees-only cinema in Awali. Following screenings in the com pany cinema, the films were exhibited in a range of nontheatrical venues and for different audiences. These programs, which were collected and archived in the India Office Records, provide us with one of the few sources to track the formative years of film culture in the Gulf.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126475466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transnational Ethical Screens: Empathetic Networks in Malayalam Short Films from the Gulf","authors":"D. S. Mini","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.06","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper explores the emergence of ethical and empathetic modes of transnationality in the specific context of Malayali diasporic media in the Middle Eastern Gulf. Through a combined analysis of short films, literature, advertisements, bureaucratic policies, and ethnographic vignettes, this paper looks at the figure of the migrant laborer as both a social force and a media object around which ideas of justice and empathy cohere. I argue that such film and media constitute a mediated vision of ethical transna tionalism—one that bypasses the red tape of the state and instead emphasizes an affective recognition of the other.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"8 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120988666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Record with Two Songs from the Iranian Film Qarun's Treasure (1965) Found in India","authors":"Cooley","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.10","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay considers an Iranian record of two film songs from the megahit Qarun's Treasure (1965) that was found in Bombay and is now owned by a private col lector in the US. I analyze the record's material qualities and circulation to demonstrate that midcentury Iranian commercial cinema's connections to sonic infrastructures in the Middle East and South Asia are integral to its history. Through focus on the record's travels and sonic qualities, my essay expands the archive of Iranian cinema in ways that challenge national narratives and other limiting frameworks.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"94 9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129047709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Petrocolonial Circulations and Cinema's Arrival in the Gulf","authors":"Firat Oruc","doi":"10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.02","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article traces the introduction of cinema to the Gulf through the archives of the India Office Records (IOR). The records of the political agent in Bahrain illustrate clearly the extent to which cinema was closely monitored and regulated by the British colonial network of administrative functions in the Persian Gulf, India, and England. Following the discovery of oil in 1932, hydrocarbon modernity gave rise to new spaces of urban culture, most prominently cinema. But in the oil cities of the Gulf, film spectatorship in its early years was refracted through three spheres of moving-image culture: private, corporate-sponsored, and commercial public cinemas. What was common to these three spheres was a certain logic of exclusion and restricted access norms. Administrators in the Gulf looked to how cinema was handled in India for models and ideas to create actual policies on the ground. The bureaucratic traffic over the case of early public cinema peti tions in Bahrain shows how regulatory practices and norms of governance over cinematic spheres circulated from one colonial context (South Asia) to another (the Gulf). The core political issue of the emergence of a cinema culture in the Gulf was the restriction of cinematic medium and space to certain populations. As such, regulating cinema was linked to the question of managing the social forces of hydrocarbon modernity that the discovery of oil unleashed. The arrival of cinema in the Gulf took place in an exclusionary and uneven world, entangled with circulations of colonial practices, regimes of segrega tion, expansionist oil capital, international labor, and film cans.","PeriodicalId":426632,"journal":{"name":"Film History: An International Journal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132423629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}