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Afghanistan, Hollywood and Representation

“It took just a few years after the US withdrew from Vietnam for some great films to arrive, including Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978). The Covenant and other tentative responses suggest that while filmmakers are now setting their stories in Afghanistan, coming to grips with that conflict on screen may take a lot longer. The Hollywood landscape is more cautious than ever today, and the US too politically divided for movies to risk alienating half the audience.” State terrorism is represented as a victim or a hero.  Kandahar (released in the US on 26 May) is a Gerard Butler action movie about a CIA operative trapped in a dangerous part of Afghanistan with his interpreter. The trailer shows Butler saying "Nobody's coming to save us", a cue for the two of them to battle the enemies and save each other.” “Most films about battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are determinedly apolitical, praising the heroism of the soldiers as a way of sidestepping deeper issues ab
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American Movies

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies. – Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathiser , 2015 ed., chapter 11
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Iranian Cinema

Tehran's Universal Studios (A good mapping of the Iranian cinema, but subscription is required) Further reading Tehran: Paradox City  (free access) Hollywood's New Wave  (subscription required)
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Apocalypse Now at 40 “I always thought the perfect anti-war film would be a story in Iraq about a family who were going to have their daughter be married, and different relatives were going to come to the wedding. The people manage to come, maybe there’d be some dangers, but no one would get blown up, nobody would get hurt. They would dance at the wedding. That would be an anti-war film. An anti-war film cannot glorify war, and Apocalypse Now arguably does. Certain sequences have been used to rev up people to be warlike." Apocalypse Now wasn't an anti-war movie, says Coppola
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Yes. An Egyptian filmmaker is planning a rejoinder to the Hollywood blockbuster  American Sniper , with a film focusing on the "other side of the story" - the Iraqi fighter said to have killed dozens of American soldiers during the occupation. ' Iraqi Sniper': An Egyptian film-maker plans a response to American Sniper
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"There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up! It’s only a movie!”–as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically." Wonder Woman: The hero of The military-industrial complex See also My 2006 interview with Lina Khatib: Filming the Middle East My interview with Johnathan Cook: Blood and Religion
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"La La Land is a film for our time. With our self-nurturing, self-promotion, clicktivism, Twitterstorms, sexts and selfies, we are all narcissists now." — David Cox, the Guardian
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24 January 2010

Selection from previous shows - "The Myths of Zionism" by John Rose (May 2008) "Class and Sect in the Middle East" by Anne Alexander (Jan 2008) "Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World" by Lina Khatib (August 2008)
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17 August 2008

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or http://www.resonancefm.com/ (worldwide) A repeat: Lina Khatib to speak about Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World . Today the world's media have a pressing need to understand and interpret the modern Middle East. In her book (released by I B Tauris on 27 September 2006) Khatib examines how contemporary American cinema and the cinemas of the Arab world contribute to this global preoccupation in their representations of Middle Eastern politics. The writer, a lecturer in world cinema, also uncovers the challenges presented by Arab cinemas to Hollywood's ways of representing Middle East politics. A repeat: Obituary : More celebrated abroad than in his own country, Yousssef Chahine tried every film genre, from historical epic to musical comedy. The Egyptian director, who died last Sunday, 27 July in Cairo, received the lifetime achievement award on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival in 1997.
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