Gauch, Suzanne. Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press, 2016.
This book analyzes nine key films and film cycles from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia made in the twenty-five years leading up to the Arab Spring. This study shows how each film draws on diverse cinematic and socio political legacies to prefigure and capture the shifts of perception and relation that so stunned onlookers worldwide when nonideological protests in Tunisia overthrewthe long-standing autocratic government. These films, directed by Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, Nacer Khemir, Nabil Ayouch, Lyès Salem, Nadia ElFani, Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaidi, and Nejib Belkadhi, reimagine the politics of film as well as political cinema as they move away from the social realism characteristic of early post independence cinema. Examining how they translate precinematic cultures into new kinds of popular film that unsettle hierarchies of modernity and tradition, reimagine global generic forms as embedded in the local, and position the Maghreb at the center of cinematic history and innovation, this book argues that all challenge the expectations attached to national and global cinemas. At the same time, the book demonstrates how, in their thematic and stylistic choices, all reflect a commitment to mobility that exacts equally mobile perspectives of their audiences.
[Source: Oxford University Press].
