Cinematic Spaces of ‘the Arab Street’ : Mohamed Diab’s Inverted Road Movie Clash (2016)

This chapter examines how cinema challenges and inverts traditional spaces of social upheavals, such as streets and squares, in their capacity to be spaces of knowledge and solidarity, in conceptualizing them as enhanced media-sensible spaces. Through a close reading of Mohamed Diab’s feature film Clash (2016), I foreground the idea of the truck as a cinematic space predicated on its ability to accommodate movement, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. This allows for a discussion of cinematic spaces of the so-called ‘Arab street’, created by both mise en scène and cinematography that go against the more prevalent images of street fights and mass demonstrations as seen in documentaries about the popular upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region since 2009.