RADICAL MODERNISMS: RETRACING ARAB AND NORTH AFRICAN FILM HISTORIES is a two-part program curated by Peter Limbrick, Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi.
This program addresses aesthetic and cultural experiments that emerged in Arab and North African cinema from the 1960s, experiments that showed filmmakers and artists responding to histories of colonialism and the challenges of the present. Drawing on local vernaculars and international influences alike, these filmmakers created radical forms that deserve continued attention and discussion as well as urgent efforts of preservation and recirculation.
Radical Modernisms: Retracing Arab and North African Film Histories (Part 1): A film screening and panel discussion based on Peter Limbrick’s recent book on the films of Moumen Smihi and on Arab and North African cinema within a modernist frame. Smihi’s films are remarkable for the way that they emerge from and reflect on contemporary Moroccan realities within a practice that is also rooted in broader cultural dialogues across the Arab world and with international cinema more generally. Smihi’s first film Si Moh, the Unlucky Man (Si Moh, pas de chance, 1971), was made in Paris shortly after he graduated from IDHEC. An investigation of the life of migrant workers in France, the film established him as an important voice in North African cinema. His later feature A Muslim Childhood (2015), the first in what has become a kind of semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, offers a tapestry of fifties Tangier–an international zone marked by the influence of Arab, Amazigh, European, and American histories. Together with these films, the program includes Mohammad Malas’s film Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina) (1984), a film that develops a complex history of Syria in the 1950s in light of the many traumas of the period, all in a mode with which Smihi’s own films are in sustained conversation.
LIvestream Panel Discussion: October 15 at 12 pm EDT
Arab Modernism as World Cinema: Moumen Smihi and Peter Limbrick in conversation with Tarek Elhaik
Join us for dialogue between Moumen Smihi (filmmaker) in conversation with Peter Limbrick (film historian and theorist at UC Santa Cruz) moderated by Tarek Elhaik (curator and anthropologist at UC Davis). The discussion will focus on the ideas underpinning Smihi’a films and those animating Limbrick’s book.
Film screening: October 14-17
Si Moh, the Unlucky Man (Si Moh, pas de chance) Moumen Smihi, France, 1971, 17 min
A Muslim Childhood (El Ayel/Le gosse de Tanger) Moumen Smihi, Morocco, 2005, 83 min
Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina) Mohammad Malas, Syria, 1984, 120 min
This program is co-sponsored by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz
Radical Modernisms: Retracing Arab and North African Film Histories is presented as part of the ArteEast legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, preserving and presenting over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast.
