Spring 2008
Jacques Aswad
By Jacques Aswad Spring 2008 | Gallery Excerpted from Saloua Raouda Choucair: Her Life and Art, pp. 17-35, Catalogue raisonné (Beirut, Lebanon, 2002). Translated by Kirsten Scheid.[1] From the beginning, that is (as far as Saloua Raouda Choucair can recall of the young school-girl she was in the 1920s), from her very first contact with the…
Kirsten Scheid
By Kirsten Scheid Spring 2008 | Gallery Excerpted and revised from Painters, Picture-makers, and Lebanon: Ambiguous Identities in an Unsettled State (Princeton University, 2005). A clear plastic bag, bursting with papers of various yellows and grays – this is what Saloua Raouda Choucair reached for in the cupboard next to her bed. She pulled out of…
Rasha Salti, Daikha Dridi
By Rasha Salti and Daikha Dridi Spring 2008 | ArteZine Between the ardor of militants and passions of aesthetes, a retrospective visit to the golden era of ciné-clubs in the Arab world. There was a time in the contemporary history of Arab world, a mere forty or thirty years ago, when the passion for non-commercial cinema and the…
By Rasha Salti and Daikha Dridi Spring 2008 | ArteZine In the 1960s, 1970s, and sometimes until the 1980s, almost all big Arab cities lived a spectacular infatuation with ciné-clubs. In the Maghreb especially, many of these ciné-clubs were founded by militants affiliated to leftist political organizations, with the intention to create spaces for free expression and activism…
Walid Chmeit
By Walid Chmeit Spring 2008 | ArteZine Daikha Dridi interviews veteran Lebanese film critic and essayist Walid Chmeit, a founding member of the Beirut Arab Ciné-Club. Available here in French (PDF). What led you to grow an interest in cinema and ciné-clubs? At the outset, I was mostly interested in theater, and I remember discovering cinema…
Raja Shehada
By Raja Shehada Spring 2008 | ArteZine When I think of cinema in Ramallah, I think of Esther Jallad. She and her family were expelled from their wealthy home in the port city of Jaffa in 1948 and found themselves in the hilly village of Ramallah. In her displacement, Esther carried one passion with her: she…
Rasha Salti, Omar Amiralay
By Rasha Salti and Omar Amiralay Spring 2008 | ArteZine Rasha Salti interviews Omar Amiralay. How did the ciné-club begin? It was founded in 1952 by a man whose name was Dr. Haddad, if my memory serves me right, he was a French-language professor at the university. The Damascus Ciné-club was instituted to show films to catholic schools…
Omar Zelig
By Omar Zelig Spring 2008 | ArteZine Available here in French (PDF). One sure way of sounding like an old fart to younger generations of Algerians, is to keep reminiscing about the good old days when you could still go to the movies in Algiers, before the wide spread of video and satellite television in the…
Nigol Bezjian
By Nigol Bezjian Spring 2008 | ArteZine A long time ago the Syrian Baathist government nationalized cultural institutions, swiftly placing the iron noose around their necks. I must have been 14 years old when I woke up one morning to found the Cinema Orient (Cinema Al-Sharq) moniker covered with a white canvas that read, in red…
Daikha Dridi, Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan
By Daikha Dridi and Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan Spring 2008 | ArteZine Daikha Dridi interviews Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan, a veteran film critic in Lebanon and one of the founding members of the Beirut Ciné-club. At 88 years and a few specs (“but don’t write down specs”, he prompted me laughing), Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan tried to resurrect recollections of the years in…
