UC Berkeley

Movement. Images. examines the relationship between militant images and social movements in the Arab world in the 1970s and 80s, in comparison to the so-called Arab Spring and our current conjuncture. It departs from questions raised in the process of making my film A Feeling Greater Than Love (FIPRESCI Prize, Berlinale Forum 2017), which revisits the role of women in two major popular uprisings in 1970s Lebanon, a strike at the Gandour chocolate factory in 1972 and a 1973 tobacco farmer uprising in South Lebanon in relation to militant cinema of that era. Gendered Geographies situates ethnographic research into historical on-the-ground organizing with contemporaneous film representations to investigate the changing modes of popular uprising and militant images from the late 1960s until the present, and the political stakes of those shifts. I make three primary interventions. First, I adopt the framework of the “housework of the movement” understood as the range of relational activities that build meaning and sustainability in movements, to highlight the invisible and gendered work which actively develops strategy and tactics by connecting movement praxis with peoples’ everyday lives. I suggest multiple instances in the strikes in which centering strategic insights of movement housework may have prevented setback and even changed the movements’ course. Second, I argue that we cannot isolate questions of representation from material and movement histories; rather, we must read social movements and militant images in relation to each other, and in relation to the interconnected spatially and temporally situated circumstances from which they emerge. Suggesting that resistance is a nonlinear cultural and material landscape of struggle, I consider the ways the strikes and films continue to intersect with ongoing political practice. Juxtaposing distinct moments of Arab militant cinema from the 1970s until the Arab Spring, I demonstrate that in each of these conjunctures, distinct dynamics of financing, circulation and popular discourse enabled certain narratives, movement organizing models, and modes of image production at the expense of others. 1970s and 1980s filmmakers, steeped in the praxes of tricontinentalism, harnessed formal experimentation to critique both colonialism and rigid hierarchies within anticolonial organizations that funded their films. In turn, introducing a framework called “character driven resilience doc,” I show how several critically acclaimed Arab Spring films emphasize personal change at the expense of illuminating structural inequality, subtly but powerfully limiting horizons for imagining social change. Finally, by bringing critical geography into conversation with film theory, I offer an expansive definition of the militant image — one based on an image’s function and active political interpretation with its concrete audience. I conclude by suggesting this relational mode of viewing images and movement histories — bringing images and critical movement histories in dialogue with our present, and through the lens of social movement housework — can help us discern new political directions. Returning to our current conjuncture and the brutal multifaceted war on Gaza, I search for emergent political actors, alliances and configurations that push the boundaries of cinematic and political horizons.