Amiralay and Sabbagh in the Post-cinematic Age

Abstract

Two under-studied and deceased auteurs, the Lebanese Randa Chahal Sabbagh and the Syrian Omar Amiralay, are resounding voices of antagonistic discourse in the study of Arab cinema. From Our Heedless Wars to The Kite, Sabbagh was a maker of both fiction and nonfiction films during the 1980s until the early 2000s, all of which, in different modes and emotional registers, reflected on the violent intrusion of geo-national politics and sectarianism in Lebanese society. From Everyday Life in a Syrian Village to A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay used the documentary form to critique the paternalistic nature of the state apparatus in Syria. By examining the ways in which their films address processes of interpellation at the intersections of subject and state, ruler and ruled, occupier and occupied, and self and other, this chapter looks comparatively at two distinctly different approaches to cinema that bring questions of performativity and revolutionary Third Cinema into the contemporary foreground.