By the 1950s, as the Maghrebi independence movements were gaining ground, the commercial nature of Egyptian cinema had come under criticism for its largely escapist quality. The Free Officers coup of 1952 and subsequent government of Gamal Abdel Nasser facilitated a shift in focus toward socially more conscious films that formed what became known as the second “golden age” of Egyptian cinema. Film industry nationalization during the early 1960s led to a sharpening of this focus, with the emergence of both a realist aesthetic and the beginnings of an auteur cinema, the exemplary figure of which was Youssef Chahine. Unlike the European new waves, however, the ensuing Egyptian films did not break from the industrial system so much as negotiate its parameters, blurring art and commercial boundaries and compelling some committed filmmakers to seek work abroad, for instance, in Iraq and in Syria, where the very existence of cinema was and remains a struggle. This blurring continued into the post-Nasser era, with the reprivatization begun during the late 1970s providing the conditions for a New Realist wave of filmmaking in the 1980s. The rise of satellite television and digital video during the 1990s, as well as Saudi investment, especially since the start of the 21st century, have enabled a wider access to films that has also sparked a cinema revival, including a nostalgia craze for the first “golden age” and somewhat increased attention to Egyptian cinema in the West, but also a concomitant push toward renewed social criticism, as in In the Last Days of the City (Tamer El Said, 2016) and The Nile Hilton Incident (Tarek Saleh, 2017), which were nonetheless subject to the country’s currently heightened regime of censorship.
In its 50-year history, by contrast, Turkey’s Yeşilçam underwent waves of productivity—the most prolific of which was the “high” Yeşilçam period of the 1960s–1970s—each one of them both framed and disrupted by civil strife. Official, Republican calls for “Turkification” in Yeşilçam films, moreover, may have limited external access and interest, already significantly precluded by world cinema’s tightly controlled worldwide systems of distribution. As the 20th century waned, these limitations were relaxed, as industry production declined and, gradually, was mostly replaced by the onset of a new Turkish cinema, a loosely defined movement in which an auteurist filmmaking practice distinguished itself more fully from the popular-commercial. While a boom in comedy and horror genre films has characterized the latter of late, the former, particularly in the work of film festival favorite Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has received much more attention abroad on the art-house circuit. In addition, an important aspect of this new cinema has been its acknowledgment of Turkish minorities and of diasporic filmmaking, primarily of German provenance.
There is also a significant, although more widely dispersed, Iranian diasporic/exilic cinema. Many of its filmmakers left the country in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution of 1979. Prior to this, the domestic cinema of Iran had established a strong popular presence in the country, with powerful stars. Censorship restrictions meant that little of this work was politically engaged, and some of it has been viewed as passively supporting the despotic regimes of Shah Reza Pahlavi and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. A new wave, signaled most decisively, perhaps, by the release of U.S.-educated Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1970), disturbed this status quo, although commentators continue to dispute whether other key films of the period, such as Qeysar (Massud Kimiai, 1969), are more usefully considered new wave or simply as developments of standard industry genres. In any case, a much bigger change followed the revolution: many earlier films, both domestic and foreign, were banned from theaters, while much more severe restrictions on the depiction of women comprised one of the most notable constraints on new productions. Despite these developments, the Islamic authorities, personified by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were not opposed to cinema per se, and, following the establishment of the Farabi Cinema Foundation, which facilitated various aspects of their work, Iranian directors, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, developed a strong art sector by the 1990s that helped foster a substantial presence for Iranian cinema in international film festivals and resulted in a transnational art cinema largely distinct from, though inevitably drawing upon, the country’s continuing popular cinematic traditions. As in Turkey and Egypt, and increasingly in Morocco and Tunisia, domestic comedies are today the predominant box-office hits in Iran.
Unlike the above cinemas, those of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Israel have been relatively less prolific, with the Lebanese example being the most productive through a genre- and star-driven industry bolstered with logistical support over the years from Egypt; however, its fate has been bound up with the destructiveness of civil wars and external pressures. The influence of Egyptian cinema led to early Lebanese films of the 1930s being produced in the Egyptian rather than Levantine vernacular. Lebanese commercial cinema carried an orientalist tenor conducive to popular formula films during the country’s “golden age” of the 1950s, although some Lebanese films resisted the postcolonialist Egyptian model. In many instances, such films, which served to fortify the country’s national cinema, were made by Christian filmmakers, in contrast to the works of their Muslim compatriots, which tended to identify more with Nasserist pan-Arabism and, therefore, the Egyptian system. On the other hand, Lebanon occasionally welcomed Egyptian filmmakers, disenchanted with Nasser, who lent talent and prestige to the Lebanese industry. The Lebanese Civil War, however, made consistent film production nearly impossible, and a much more artisanal practice, often with an explicitly avant-garde orientation, was characteristic of Lebanese cinema in the years leading up to and immediately following the turn of the 21st century. Such an experimental emphasis remains an important part of the Lebanese cinemascape, although more festival-oriented, transnational productions such as Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2019) are beginning to appear.
The Israeli film industry has also been limited by the exigencies of war and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands, the high cost of which has historically precluded sustained funding for quality filmmaking. Hence, the Israeli cinema has always sought funding abroad. The earliest Israeli films made about historical Palestine were actualité films and short pastoral dramas produced by the European-based Jewish National Fund or Palestine Foundation Fund/United Israel Appeal and were themselves intended as fundraising vehicles for the nascent Zionist cause. After Israel was established in 1948, two national production facilities opened that produced less nostalgic, more forward-looking films for domestic Jewish audiences. Since 1954, a series of state funding agencies has supplied these facilities with financial assistance that has enabled a relatively small but consistent output of popular-commercial melodramas, war films, and comedies, of which the bourekas genre, centered on stereotyped Mizrahi Jews, is perhaps the most noteworthy. Persistent war and violence through the 1960s prompted a series of generic transformations contextualizing the Six-Day and Yom Kippur–Ramadan Wars, known generally as the Young Israeli Cinema. This period also witnessed the emergence of the country’s foremost auteur, Amos Gitai, and the producer-director Menachem Golan, whose Cannon Films was one of the earliest players in contemporary transnational cinematic production. In the wake of the First Intifada, popular demand for films that would address sociopolitical concerns more directly and explicitly led to the production of numerous independent documentaries about the Palestinian–Israeli struggle, the OPTs, and related matters, as well as some concerned with Palestinian–Israeli society outside the matter of the struggle. Perhaps in response, the Israeli Censorship Board was dismantled in 1991, and film censorship came under the control of the Interior Ministry. Since then, Israeli industry–art hybrids, mostly psychological melodramas funded through international appeal, have been released on the world cinema circuit. While presenting the damage caused to the Israeli psyche by the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict, they have often attempted to put a gentler face on the continuing occupation of Palestine. Between 2002 and 2010, this attempt became codified as hasbara, a highly visible, state-sponsored public diplomacy campaign, largely funded internationally, that has found occasional cinematic coproducers in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, India, and sometimes among Palestinians, as well as in Europe and the United States. Perhaps the most controversial of these collaborators is Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri.
Just as Israeli national cinema arose, Palestinian cinema was prevented from doing so, as part of the general restrictions placed on the Palestinian population. Indeed, not until the mid-1980s would Palestinian cinema develop domestically, after a lengthy period of flourishing