Where To? Filming Emigration Anxiety in Prewar Lebanese Cinema

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8965295
AutoresGhenwa Hayek (0000-0001-9741-9462, University of Chicago, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen51
Número2
Páginas183-201
Fecha de publicación2019-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743819000011
OpenAlexW2944059662
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas30

I propose that careful reading of films and film coverage provides a new research avenue for scholars interested in the social and cultural history of the 1950s and the 1960s in Lebanon. Looking specifically at the manner in which George Nasser's 1957 film Ila Ayn? (Where To?) embraces and modifies the generic conventions of neorealist melodrama to articulate anxieties over the effects of emigration on Lebanon, this article explores the manner in which contemporaneous cultural critics used the film to, in turn, express their dismay at migration from Lebanon. Reading the film closely for the affects it contains and for those it produced in its readers, I argue that this technique, attendant to both sides of this dynamic, affords us new insights into the manner in which cinema produced during Lebanon's golden period interacted with and complicated the dominant cultural narratives of that era

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Emigration · Literature · Movie theater · Narrative · Objectivism · Period (music · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · North African History and Literature