Hollywood’s Bad Muslims: Misrepresentations and the Channeling of Racial Violence

The cinemas of Arab and Muslim societies encompass a substantial number of film genres produced locally or in the diaspora. Arab and Muslim filmmakers experiment with different cinematic narratives, styles, and hybrid forms: auteur, documentary, diasporic, migrant, Third Cinema, and transnational productions. Their richness, diverse thematic foci, creative stylistic characteristics, and ability to reach global audiences recently motivated film scholars and other academics in Europe and the United States to consider designating a category called “Muslim Cinema” and defining its contours. The influence of these rich cinemas in contesting Hollywood’s demonization of Muslims, the conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam, and the proliferation of anti-Muslim racism in Western discourse, however, remains very limited. Therefore, this article argues that the idea of such a category, if one were to be created, should explore venues to address Hollywood’s evolving forms of racializing Muslims and their relationship with the current institutionalization of anti-Muslim racism in the United States. Through a brief survey of Hollywood’s contemporary productions about Muslims, this article analyzes the impact of moving images on representation, particularly the fossilized characterization of Muslims as evil, and identifies three areas in American cinema and political discourse that could belong to this category: the first is Hollywood’s uninterrupted flow of making essentializing and essentialized narratives that conflate Arabs, Muslims, and Islam, and normalizes violence against them; the second deals with the transition from Islamophobia to anti-Muslim racism and explains its sanctioning by the US government; the third addresses the morphing of Islam into a race.

Beyond aesthetics: The long take as the nation-form in the cinema of Lav Diaz

This article argues that the extreme long take of Lav Diaz is not only his aesthetic method but also his ideological position as a filmmaker of Third Cinema, reinstating the theory’s critical arsenal in opposing the violent structure of the postcolonial nation state. It maintains that the Diaz shot is isomorphic to the nation-form and has two political dimensions: first, the extreme duration of the shot is Diaz’s resistance to the imperialism of mainstream cinema and its debilitating effects by employing ‘dead time’ which creates restlessness and reflexivity that disrupt absorption to enable a mode of critical spectatorship; second, the Diaz shot is a critique on Philippine postcolonial society which can be understood by examining the triadic structure of space, time and body. Using the film Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (From What Is Before) (2014), this article proposes an anatomy of the shot as a unitary system of environment, duration and progression of actions, labouring bodies of subalterns in the state of bare life. It expands the possibility of the long take from the narrowly held study of time and space to include a study of bodies.

Filmske Novosti: Filmed Diplomacy

This article maps out a network of cinematic collaboration established between Yugoslavia and the non-aligned countries in Africa, primarily via the institution of the Yugoslav Newsreels (Filmske novosti). Yugoslav newsreel activities developed to accompany the performative diplomacy of President Tito’s “Voyages of Peace,” playing a role both in cementing his image internationally and his political status at home. By the late 1950s, cinema would become one of the central instruments of Yugoslav information activities abroad, capitalizing on an expanding diplomatic network. In this context, Filmske novosti became the bearers of Yugoslav technical aid in the domain of cinema. Building on a trope of shared revolutionary struggles, they boosted Yugoslavia’s international reputation through the filming of the Algerian Liberation Movement. The unique nature of the cinematic aid provided by Filmske novosti to liberation movements such as the ALN and FRELIMO was continued, with assistance in setting up of national film centers in countries such as Mali and Tanzania. Throughout, Yugoslavia maintained a praxis of non-conditional and non-credited transnational ciné-kinship, which is one of the reasons this remains an unknown chapter in the history of Third Cinema and militant ciné-geographies.

(Re)imagined Possibilities

This essay and accompanying conversation examine the works of filmmaker and scholar Zeinabu irene Davis, whose work centers Black women, engaging their histories and contemporary stories, and thus representing their agency and complex personhood. Davis acknowledges Third Cinema and African/Afro diasporic influences in shaping her style of storytelling and in evolving her fierce Black aesthetic that disrupts the normativity of the dominant white gaze in mainstream media. These choices signify Davis’s ethos and priorities as a filmmaker, a documentarian, a womanist, and a community organizer who humanizes and celebrates her characters on-screen.