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 otherwise forbidden in conventional realms by the […]
Chic Point (Video, 7:00 min., 2003) by Sharif Waked. Sharif Waked’s seven-minute video, Chic Point: Fashion For Israeli Checkpoints has solicited a bevy of artistic and critical responses and unleashed strong reverberations throughout intellectual and artistic circles. In 2007, Andalus Publishing House released a book about Waked’s video work and its implications. The trilingual book (Arabic, […]
Q: How do you see the state of contemporary international art? How does art function in today’s global society? A: Artists are struggling to find a way to deal with the complexity of the world today as it is made manifest in multiple and interlinking political, cultural, and social contexts. What makes […]
As I board a plane to Stockholm to give a lecture at the Museum of Ethnography I ponder upon the perhaps preposterous idea of walking a BILL in Stockholm as a kind of homage (or counter homage) to Bill Drummond’s essay, ‘A Smell of Money Under Ground’, published in the book, ’45’. The essay is, […]
The cover to volume seven of “Grendizer”, locally illustrated and colored. Well, not really –but for the majority of us growing up in the eighties and early nineties in Lebanon, we were beamed an invincible father figure in the form of a Japanese giant robot, whose rousing adventures appeared on our screens whenever gaps […]
On October 6th 2008, when my short video, Israel’s Generals Speak came out on the internet, the media in Israel had a field day. “Israeli Generals Mislead,” cried the headlines, because one of the military people whom we interviewed for the piece said we took his words out of context. In the video, seven senior retired military […]
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 through Antonioni, I had […]
I well remember the first time I saw an Ahmed Zaki film. The year was 1998. It was late at night and I was sitting in my Dokki apartment taking a break from Arabic homework That night, Channel Two was showing the film (The Wife of an Important Man, 1988), directed by the venerable Mohammed […]
Chic Point starts with a fashion show. We see a dimly lit catwalk and hear the rhythmic music associated with fashion shows. By virtue of the placement of the camera and the mise en scène of the frame, the viewer of the video is at once satisfying two functions and assuming two positions: the viewer […]
Q: How do you see the state of contemporary international art? How does art function in today’s global society? A: The cultural critic Homi Bhabha has argued that: “The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced of the dispossessed, the migrant or the refugee, no distance is more awesome […]