Mark Westmoreland

In the wake of the Lebanese civil war, many filmmakers turned to formal experimentation in ways that accentuated the inescapable paradox between representation and lived experience. While these works often levied critiques of the reductive ways in which Lebanon had been represented, these artists also grappled with the vexed relationship between memory, mediation, and materiality. These formal critiques often centered on the problematic status of the archive both in its conceptual and material forms and provided important models for the burgeoning art and film culture in Beirut to critically work through the complexity of preserving the effects of perpetuated political violence. Jocelyn Saab’s Once Upon a Time, Beirut (1995) serves as one notable effort to work through the dubious cinematic portrayal of Beirut through a mashup of hundreds of films, while nevertheless recognizing its sentimental pull that precludes critical distance for those personally engulfed in this catastrophe.T...

For my family. Acknowledgements I have come to realize that a dissertation is a collaborative exercise. Although most of the pain and suffering rest squarely on my shoulders, there are many people I wish to thank in helping me stick to it and produce a significant piece of scholarship. Over the course of nine years, many people have played a role in different contexts and periods of this project. As the halls of academia are perpetually depopulating and repopulating with new faces, the cohort of students I began this doctoral endeavor with have either passed on or remain in a displaced field site or state of writing. In the first few years of coursework I learned more from these colleagues than any course of reading. Their intellect and creativity continually inspired me in my own pursuits. In no particular order, I want to thank several of these individuals by name, John Schaefer, Alisa Perkins,

The increased accessibility of digital video has facilitated the proliferation of selfrepresentations and “autoethnographies,” which provide important critiques of anthropological and postcolonial idioms. For example, video has played an instrumental role in the emergence of Lebanon’s independent cinema, creating many linkages between documentary, narrative, and experimental films. Some filmmakers utilize conventional models to get the perspective of underrepresented populations broadcast and screened internationally, while others use more experimental approaches to challenge presumptions of objectivity and realism as well as the tautology of the Orientalist critique. This paper discusses the way these filmmakers enhance and complicate the project of “audiovisual anthropology.” Visual media have become a pervasive and highly desired form of cultural expression for those dispossessed of their histories, traditions, and land. Teaming with transformational and constraining qualities, v...

The Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema covers the production and exhibition of cinema in the Middle East and in communities whose heritage is from the region and whose films commonly reflect this background. It covers the cinemas of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In addition, it includes the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, as well as the Jewish state of Israel. To a substantial degree, cinema has served to define the character of the ...

AV: In putting together this volume on Arab cultural studies, I have had to be sensitive to the discursively loaded term “culture”. What would you say are the areas most in need of critical attention today? TS: One question concerning Arab “culture” that has yet to be answered in any systematic or meaningful way is that of “cultural temporality” or what we call in Arabic, since this is a volume about Arab cultural studies, al-zaman al-thakafi. What is the relationship between time and culture? How do we define cultural time? Making use of Jean Piaget’s concept of l’inconscient cognitif, alJabri (1991, p. 44) argues that Arab cultural temporality is itself problematic and calls for the structural reorganization of its parts or phases so that it can function in a linear fashion. He shows how the temporality of a reason’s structure shares the same temporality with the culture to which it belongs. As such, he argues that Arab reason’s temporality is also the temporality of Arab culture. In the case of Arab culture, and unlike European cultural temporality, argues alJabri (1991, pp. 38–39), the old and the contemporary coexist on the same stage, creating a kind of confusion in Arab cultural temporality. This relationship we have between the old and the new, argues al-Jabri, is unconscious, as what we forget of culture does not simply vanish but stays in the unconscious. In this case, advances al-Jabri (1991, pp. 38–39), reason as an epistemological tool produces and is constructed in “an unconscious way”. Other examples can be given from Arab “cultural criticism”, especially work by the Saudi scholar Abdullah al-Ghathami, whose archaeological project on modern Arab poetry JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 16 NUMBER 2–3 (APRIL–JULY 2012)

Abstract Based on long-term research with contemporary artists in Lebanon, who utilise documentary practices to advance experimental forms of evidence, this article explores the generative possibilities enabled by crossing disciplinary borders between anthropological and artistic modes of social inquiry. In the wake of an unresolved civil war in the country (1975–1990), a vibrant art movement emerged with a set of critical aesthetics aimed at identifying and working through a postwar crisis of representation. Although typically consigned to artistic engagements with the archive, the work of Jayce Salloum, Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari elucidates a motif of research curiously under-examined. Because they each have systematically grappled with the epistemological and methodological aspects of researching the war, their oeuvres provide a germane triptych for assessing alternative forms of evidence. By closely examining the way their work rethinks the taken-for-granted modes of knowledge production, this article argues that their experimental visual practices poignantly critique the politics of representation, redefine the codes of documentary evidence, and ‘make sense’ of the war on an affective level. Although these artists express antagonism toward traditional anthropology, the article contends that their minority perspectives, research methodologies and practice-based accounts work as alternative ethnographies of Lebanon. Drawing upon recent anthropology, film and art theory, this article demonstrates how disciplinary differences serve as ‘productive irritants’ (Schneider and Wright 2006b) and provides glimpses of different forms of knowledge.

I arrived in Kafa during the summer of 2000, where I became acquainted with a cultural group actively resistant to the existing stereotypes of Ethiopia on the whole and yet invested in advancing reified notions of cultural “authenticity.” My video production, largely driven by the desires of my contacts and informants from the Kafa region of southwestern Ethiopia, was to be a visual representation that transcended the negative depictions unwillingly inherited by them and their community of Ethiopia as drought- and famine-stricken. Moreover, there was an implied agenda to attract the economic interest of the outside world through the medium of ethnographic film/video that went beyond a mere celebration of a previously undocumented culture. This video production established my own complicity in the tradition of ethnographic representation. Unlike my predecessors who have made ethnographic films in Ethiopia, I did not enter a pastoral, drought-threatened landscape. The region of Kafa sits securely within a lush and bountiful highland, home to some of the last existing rainforest area in this part of Africa (so I was told). Furthermore, I had been invited to come and make a film about the Kafa culture by indigenous members of this group, rather than arriving unannounced. This invitation carried a mixed blessing. For an aspiring ethnographic filmmaker the serendipitous offer was rich with opportunity, but also rife with unexpected challenges for the uninitiated.

Book: This book is the first comprehensive publication that is dedicated to the universe of Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, addressing the subject of desire and the depiction of the human body in photography and popular culture. For a while Zaatari has been using the world around him as the ultimate archive that allowed him lead his &...

Akram Zaatari, a founder of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut in 1997, has emerged as one of the most prominent commentators on photography of the Middle East. Overseeing AIF’s mission to preserve and study the photographic culture of the region, Zaatari has, as both an artist and a cultural critic, pushed for more experimental approaches to understanding this collection. Through books, installations, and videos, Zaatari’s visual studies provide new ways of seeing and thinking about images. This work parallels his long-term engagement with “the state of image making in situations of war,” highlighted in his book Earth of Endless Secrets (2009). More recently, Akram Zaatari: The Uneasy Subject (2011) explores the way photography and other imaging practices capture vernacular expressions of masculinity and sexuality. The following interview with anthropologist Mark Westmoreland took place last October via email correspondence.

This article engages with several artists and filmmakers working in Lebanon's postwar period and the way they use experimental media in order to envision the experience of social catastrophe. Advancing the idea of a withdrawn subjectivity, likened to a state of" undeath", these projects accentuate the gap between sign and signified in order to mediate the phantoms of war without necessarily rendering them visible. Like vampires, the phantoms of Lebanon's wars bear no reflection and cannot be imaged directly. This article ...

Made in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Inti Mabsoota? is an experimental pedagogical video project that draws upon the emerging mobile esthetics of cell phone filmmaking and public encounters with revolutionary spontaneity. Inspired by the landmark cinéma-vérité film, Chronique d’un été (1960), in which participants ask people on the streets of Paris if they are happy, several of my students at the American University in Cairo became mobile film units, asking people the same innocuous question, “Inta mabsoot?/Inti mabsoota?”—Are you happy? Are you content? This seemingly benign exercise belies a variety of conceptual and methodological frictions, which offered productive pedagogical possibilities. Drawing upon the emergent revolutionary visual culture, this student project complicated both the reductive assessments of the “Arab Spring” as a manifestation of digital democracy and the heavy-handed way that western journalism has tended to address the “Arab Street” as a volatile mob. Using an embodied visual approach allowed students to apprehend modes of lived experience that might not register as political in more normative models, but which nonetheless form the basis of how people live and experience political life. Highlighting the non-representational aspects of the encounter also foregrounds the corporeal and visceral dimensions of the students’ experience. Accordingly, the critical video methods employed elucidate the kinds of affective knowledge produced for those on screen, behind the camera, and viewing from a distance.

Based on long-term research with contemporary artists in Lebanon, who utilise documentary practices to advance experimental forms of evidence, this paper explores the generative possibilities enabled by crossing disciplinary borders between anthropological and artistic modes of social inquiry. In the wake of an unresolved civil war in the country (1975-1990), a vibrant art movement emerged with a set of critical aesthetics aimed at identifying and working through  a postwar  crisis of representation. Although typically consigned to artistic engagements with the archive (cf. Merewether 2006), the work of Jayce Salloum, Walid Raad, and Akram Zaatari elucidates a motif of research curiously under- examined. Because they each have systematically grappled with the epistemological and methodological aspects of researching the war, their oeuvres provide a germane triptych for assessing alternative forms of evidence. By closely examining the way their work rethinks the taken-for-granted modes of knowledge production, this article argues that their experimental visual practices poignantly critique the politics of representation, redefine the codes of documentary evidence, and ‘make sense’ of the war on an affective level. Although these artists express antagonism toward traditional anthropology, the article contends that their minority perspectives, research methodologies, and practice-based accounts work as alternative ethnographies of Lebanon. Drawing upon recent anthropology, film, and art theory, this article demonstrates how disciplinary differences serve as “productive irritants” (Schneider & Wright 2006 ) and  provides glimpses of different forms of knowledge.

Book: This book is the first comprehensive publication that is dedicated to the universe of Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, addressing the subject of desire and the depiction of the human body in photography and popular culture. For a while Zaatari has been using the world around him as the ultimate archive that allowed him lead his "excavations," while unearthing all sorts of hidden objects, documents and stories, and using them to study a multitude of situations related to image making and modern times. Marked in his childhood by popular Egyptian cinema, but also by filmmakers such as Bresson, Fassbinder and Pasolini and later by the documentary practice of his fellow Lebanese filmmaker Mohammed Soueid, Zaatari’swork shows special attention to the capturing of fleeting desire in daily attitudes among men, and to the study of sex practices in an Arab culture that is Lebanon. This book presents us with a rare occasion to see a documentary practice deliver the poetry of daily Life.

Many contemporary Lebanese artists and filmmakers subversively engage visual media in an effort to disrupt the expectations of official and objective ‘truth telling.’ This body of experimental media provides a critical historiography of Lebanon’s recent past, particularly in regards to the country’s fifteen-year civil war. The intent is not to replace one ‘false’ history with another ‘true’ one, but to go against the grain of sanctioned forgetfulness, commonly referred to as “official amnesia.” This cadre of experimentalists who dominate the public culture of art, documentary, and cinema have engendered a mission to challenge the dominant political and social discourses implicated by the Lebanese wars. In a manner of speaking, this particular constellation of artists has kidnapped the historical record in an act of urgent sabotage. This article examines the types of mediated subjectivities engendered by experimental historiographies of unresolved trauma. I suggest that within Lebanon’s catastrophic time and space, governed by selective amnesia, reproductive media has enabled the articulation of an imaginary world. This is not a false or pretend world, nor is it an objective and factual one. Rather, this mediated world opens up vantage points for seeing parallel realities inhabited by phantoms and monstrous subjects. Faced with all these violent forms of disappearance, Lebanese experimental documentary has endeavored to reincarnate these latent bodies in order to break the official silence and collective amnesia that keeps the Lebanese distracted from collectively engaging the trauma of the past.

"Mark Westmoreland proposes a set of “post-orientalist aesthetics” at work in the non-linear narratives of two Lebanese films, Maroun Baghdadi’s Hors de la vie (1991) and Jocelyn Saab’s Once Upon a Time, Beirut (1994). Westmoreland discusses the films and their critical reception to suggest that the post-orientalist aesthetic presentation of narratives reflect the incomplete and impossible attempt to imagine the self in post-war Lebanon." From Introduction: After Post-Colonialism?
Maia Dauner and Cynthia Foo

This dissertation investigates the social world of contemporary filmmakers in the Middle East and the way they use visual media to re-imagine existent forms of identity, envision new modes of social agency, and transform public culture in the face of dramatic instability. In the wake of the Lebanese civil war and through the tenuous postwar period, video art and experimental documentary have critiqued the politics of representation and negotiated the theoretical and structural difficulties in representing the war. These artists have activated intersections where experimental media has generated a vibrant visual culture by both building on local notions of cosmopolitanism and by participating in transnational sites of postcolonial representation. Methodologically, I employ ethnography to grapple with the public culture of Beirut as a site of avant-garde experimentation, but also to examine the city as a contested site affected by periods of rapid growth, intense violence, and urban reconstruction. To explain this cultural phenomenon, I advance the idea of ‘post-orientalist aesthetic’ to describe a mode of intellectual critique and artistic style that goes beyond Edward Said’s critique to give greater attention to self-representation in the post-911 period. This aesthetic interrogates western representational practices and also develops a localized critical analysis of Middle Eastern visual culture. This aesthetic informs a better understanding of postwar subjectivity, particularly in the way memory and lived experience becomes mediated through the materiality of objects, images, and architecture affectively inscribed with destruction and violence. The notion of the archive or the personal collection becomes of particular interest here; especially in the way these artifacts embody personalized narratives and testimonials that push back from abstracted notions of a monolithic historical narrative. Drawing on visual anthropology, media ethnography, and nonwestern film theory, this text examines the way these artists challenge realist modes of representation by utilizing both ethnographic and artistic approaches to grapple with the experience of everyday violence. In order to explore methodologies for conducting visual research in conflict zones, I conclude with an experimental auto-ethnography that appropriates these aesthetics in an effort to interrogate my positionality as an American researcher in the Middle East.

The Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema covers the production and exhibition of cinema in the Middle East and in communities whose heritage is from the region and whose films commonly reflect this background. It covers the cinemas of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In addition, it includes the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, as well as the Jewish state of Israel.

One of the key issues in discussions of visual culture in the Middle East today concerns the role of research methodology and how we approach and understand the plurality of artistic practice. Although complicated by its relationship to Orientalist endeavours, a qualified version of anthropological methodology still has a foothold in any discussion of heuristics and the interpretation of history.

In this essay, Mark R. Westmoreland questions, in the first instance, any easy appropriation of anthropology as a methodology and thereafter suggests, in both the content and the form of his essay, that we need a more radical version of anthropological investigation with which to explore contemporary art practices. More specifically, he argues that certain ideas - the performative aspects of quotidian experience, embodied meaning, affective intensity, and agency of objects and images - are not only shared areas of interest but pivotal in our understanding of both contemporary visual art and anthropology alike.

David MacDougall's Doon School Quintet, released between 2000 and 2004 and spanning more than eight hours, provides an in-depth visual study of India's most prestigious boys' boarding school. These films move between social situations and intimate settings to explore the acculturation of children through everyday cultural practices of middle class modernity. MacDougall's project provides a sustained effort to revalue the capabilities of cross-cultural documentary to portray emotional and sensory worlds largely inaccessible in written ethnography. By revealing the way the adolescent boys at the school must negotiate the tensions between agency and conformity in the process of becoming members of India's national elite, MacDougall's cultural portrait shows how modes of social belonging are experienced both rationally and viscerally. The "social aesthetics" formed under the pressure of various national and class interests, however, necessarily exists in contrast to the subaltern Indian citizenry who nevertheless provide a crucial labor force for the school to operate. This paper evaluates the Doon School Quintet's treatment of these cultural politics and considers the role of "observational cinema" vis-à-vis political critique. Drawing upon personal footage taken at the Doon School during a workshop with David and Judith MacDougall on cross-cultural video methods, my paper evaluates the way the marginalized labor force oscillates between visibility and invisibility in MacDougall's films.

Red Persimmons and A Visit to Ogawa Productions both offer wonderful tributes to Ogawa Shinsuke, the renowned Japanese documentary filmmaker who helped establish the prestigious Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Together these films chronicle the work of Ogawa and his team during their tenure at the Yamagata Prefecture (1974–1992). In the final period of Ogawa’s career, his work was especially concerned with the ethnographic and ecological detail of Japanese agricultural traditions.

I arrived in Kafa during the summer of 2000, where I became acquainted with a cultural group actively resistant to the existing stereotypes of Ethiopia on the whole and yet invested in advancing reified notions of cultural “authenticity.” My video production, largely driven by the desires of my contacts and informants from the Kafa region of southwestern Ethiopia, was to be a visual representation that transcended the negative depictions unwillingly inherited by them and their community of Ethiopia as drought- and famine-stricken. Moreover, there was an implied agenda to attract the economic interest of the outside world through the medium of ethnographic film/video that went beyond a mere celebration of a previously undocumented culture. This video production established my own complicity in the tradition of ethnographic representation. Unlike my predecessors who have made ethnographic films in Ethiopia, I did not enter a pastoral, drought-threatened landscape. The region of Kafa sits securely within a lush and bountiful highland, home to some of the last existing rainforest area in this part of Africa (so I was told). Furthermore, I had been invited to come and make a film about the Kafa culture by indigenous members of this group, rather than arriving unannounced. This invitation carried a mixed blessing. For an aspiring ethnographic filmmaker the serendipitous offer was rich with opportunity, but also rife with unexpected challenges for the uninitiated.