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Teaching with Film and Photography in Introductory Middle East Courses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2017

Nadia Yaqub
Nadia Yaqub*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

Some years ago, a colleague from another institution told me how much she was looking forward to screening Nasser 56 in her introductory Middle East history course. Students had just finished reading about the Nasser era, and the screening of Muhamad Fadel's stylish biopic starring the charismatic film star Ahmed Zaki would serve as an enjoyable way to round out the unit. I was surprised, not at my colleague's use of the film in her class, but at her timing. Released in 1996, Nasser 56 is very much the product of the Mubarak era. It offers rich opportunities to discuss the particular challenges Egypt faced in the 1990s and how this nostalgic look back at a triumphant moment in Gamal Abdel Nasser's (Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's) presidency was marshalled to animate an economically and politically fraught period. Its celebration of ʿAbd al-Nasir as an effective and caring patriarch to the nation could be interpreted as an endorsement of Egypt's authoritarian political system. However, the film is less useful as an explication of ʿAbd al-Nasir as a political figure, or of 1950s Egypt.

Type
Round Table
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 50 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2017 

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References

Endnotes

1 I do not want to suggest that funding is the sole determinant of film content and form. Filmmakers may resist or undermine such structures even while working within the institutions that funding and distribution networks create.

2 I use the term “traditional film” to refer to professionally produced fictional and documentary films. Of course, there now exists a rich body of alternative material—photographs, short videos, and at times full-fledged films—created by amateurs, citizen journalists, etc. that do not depend on such resources.

3 This exercise does not depend on quality equipment or expertise with a camera. Cellphone cameras work well. Brown's, Sarah Graham Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860-1950 (London: Quartet, 1988)Google Scholar and Gregory's, Derek “Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Practices and Productions of Space in Egypt 1839-1914” (In Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographic Imagination edited by Schwarz, Joan and Ryan, James, 196–225. London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2003)Google Scholar are useful texts to accompany such an exercise.