Mark R. Westmoreland coordinates the Visual Ethnography specialization at Leiden University. He previously served as co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review before co-founding the Writing with Light journal for anthropological photo-essays. His work engages both scholarly and practice-based approaches at the intersection between art, ethnography, and politics. He has written extensively on the interface between sensory embodiment and media aesthetics in on-going legacies of contentious politics, including the crucial role experimental documentary practices play in addressing recurrent political violence in Lebanon and the activist mode of resistance-by-recording in mass street protests in Egypt.
In the wake of the Lebanese civil war, many filmmakers turned to formal experimentation in ways t... more 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 exe... more 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 selfrepresentat... more 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... more 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 d... more 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 documentar... more 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 acti... more 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.
In the wake of the Lebanese civil war, many filmmakers turned to formal experimentation in ways t... more 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 exe... more 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 selfrepresentat... more 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... more 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 d... more 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 documentar... more 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 acti... more 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.
"Ginsberg (Holocaust Film) and Lippard (By Angels Driven), along with eight distinguished field s... more "Ginsberg (Holocaust Film) and Lippard (By Angels Driven), along with eight distinguished field scholars, provide the foremost subject dictionary, intended to support deeper inquiry into Middle Eastern filmmakers' representation of culture, history, and self. Entries cover films, figures, production companies, cinematic concepts, and key terms relevant to the various nations positioned between Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. However, among the 500 alphabetized entries are also productions made by exiled or otherwise politically dispersed Middle Easterners. While acknowledging North American and European filmic depictions, the authors devote less time to these outsider interpretations. Instead, the multiparagraph, fully cross-referenced entries offer specifics on whether profiled films were intended for domestic or international audiences, and consideration is given to how these particulars impact characterization and self-depiction. The entries are bookended by a chronology, dating the inception of Middle Eastern cinema to 1896 Lumière screenings in Egypt, and a 51-page film list, organized by country. A 31-page further reading list rounds out the work. BOTTOM LINE While it extends well beyond the chronological boundaries of Lina Khatib's Filming the Modern Middle East, this is still a fitting complement. Recommended for collections serving Middle Eastern-focused studies and film studies." -- Savannah Schroll Guz, LIBRARY JOURNAL
"This work by Ginsberg (International Council for Middle East Studies) and Lippard (Univ. of Utah) will be a necessary purchase for most academic and large public libraries because it is the first English-language dictionary published on Middle Eastern cinema as a whole....This new historical dictionary opens with a valuable chronology, covering 1896-2009, and dealing with outstanding cinematic events in the region. Key sociopolitical events are also mentioned, to provide context. Following a brief but helpful introduction, the body of the dictionary provides A-Z entries on significant films, filmmakers, stars, and topics of concern. These topics include but are not limited to film schools, festivals, centers, organizations, movements, genres and types of film (e.g., Beur cinema), themes (e.g., women, Islam), and historical summaries of national cinemas under the nation's name. This volume offers pioneering coverage of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and provides references for their nascent cinematic developments. It is blessed with a substantial and valuable filmography and bibliography, the latter classified into general works and then into works by nation; it covers both journal articles and books....This is an excellent buy and should see heavy use in libraries. Essential." -- Carmen Hendershott, CHOICE
"For students or aficionados of specialized topics, the various Historical Dictionary series can mean the difference between starting the research process or finding nothing at all. HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF MIDDLE EASTERN CINEMA, part of the Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts series, is a prime example. The authors are both specialists in the field, with substantial publication credentials. The volume starts with a chronology that begins in 1896 (the first Lumiere screenings in Egypt) and concludes in 2009 (the use of YouTube for political purposes in Iran; the first Palestinian American feature film). The lengthy introductory essay that follows concludes with an explanation of what countries are not included and why. The 500 or so A–Z entries cover people (including actors, directors, critics, composers, writers, and important historic figures), specific films, styles of film, concepts, and more. Entries on individual countries are several pages long and outline the place of the country within the region, its contribution to the history of the film, and important films and individuals. Entries about concepts such as Gender and sexuality and Nationalism focus on how these have been treated in film. The entries on the films themselves, which include information on the director, actors, plot, and significance, may be the most consulted entries in the volume. An alphabetically arranged filmography is cross-referenced to the dictionary entries. The bibliography that follows is divided by subject. This book is essential for all academic libraries where film study is important and should be given consideration by larger public libraries in areas with a large Middle Eastern population." -- Danise Hoover, BOOKLIST
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"This work by Ginsberg (International Council for Middle East Studies) and Lippard (Univ. of Utah) will be a necessary purchase for most academic and large public libraries because it is the first English-language dictionary published on Middle Eastern cinema as a whole....This new historical dictionary opens with a valuable chronology, covering 1896-2009, and dealing with outstanding cinematic events in the region. Key sociopolitical events are also mentioned, to provide context. Following a brief but helpful introduction, the body of the dictionary provides A-Z entries on significant films, filmmakers, stars, and topics of concern. These topics include but are not limited to film schools, festivals, centers, organizations, movements, genres and types of film (e.g., Beur cinema), themes (e.g., women, Islam), and historical summaries of national cinemas under the nation's name. This volume offers pioneering coverage of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and provides references for their nascent cinematic developments. It is blessed with a substantial and valuable filmography and bibliography, the latter classified into general works and then into works by nation; it covers both journal articles and books....This is an excellent buy and should see heavy use in libraries. Essential." -- Carmen Hendershott, CHOICE
"For students or aficionados of specialized topics, the various Historical Dictionary series can mean the difference between starting the research process or finding nothing at all. HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF MIDDLE EASTERN CINEMA, part of the Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts series, is a prime example. The authors are both specialists in the field, with substantial publication credentials. The volume starts with a chronology that begins in 1896 (the first Lumiere screenings in Egypt) and concludes in 2009 (the use of YouTube for political purposes in Iran; the first Palestinian American feature film). The lengthy introductory essay that follows concludes with an explanation of what countries are not included and why. The 500 or so A–Z entries cover people (including actors, directors, critics, composers, writers, and important historic figures), specific films, styles of film, concepts, and more. Entries on individual countries are several pages long and outline the place of the country within the region, its contribution to the history of the film, and important films and individuals. Entries about concepts such as Gender and sexuality and Nationalism focus on how these have been treated in film. The entries on the films themselves, which include information on the director, actors, plot, and significance, may be the most consulted entries in the volume. An alphabetically arranged filmography is cross-referenced to the dictionary entries. The bibliography that follows is divided by subject. This book is essential for all academic libraries where film study is important and should be given consideration by larger public libraries in areas with a large Middle Eastern population." -- Danise Hoover, BOOKLIST