THE NIGHT: A filmic image of memory comparable to those created by Tarkovsky and Fellini. |
One of the paradoxes of Syrian cinema, writes Rasha Salti, the curator of the traveling “Lens on Syria: Thirty Years of Contemporary Syrian Cinema,” which reaches the MFA this month, is that though they must submit their work to the oversight of a government that’s merciless in stamping out dissent, Syrian filmmakers “have succeeded in carving out an independent, critical, and often subversive cinema. . . . This is a state-sponsored cinema at the farthest possible remove from a cinema of propaganda.” This paradox finds brilliant demonstration in several films in the series, especially the documentaries of Omar Amiralay and the fiction films of Mohammad Malas, Ousamma Mohammad, and Abdullatif Abdul-Hamid.The earliest films in the MFA series are Amiralay’s, and they include his excellent EVERYDAY LIFE IN A SYRIAN VILLAGE (1974; September 9, noon), a precise, vivid, harsh study of the dismal effects of the Syrian government’s agrarian-reform policies on the peasants of a remote rural area. The government banned both this film and Amiralay’s next, THE CHICKENS (1977; September 16, 1:45 pm as part of “Three Documentaries by Omar Amiralay”), an attack on an ill-fated government effort to get the residents of a pilot village to devote themselves to chicken farming.
Mohammad Malas’s tough and beautiful debut feature, DREAMS OF THE CITY (1983; September 10, 3:15 pm), takes place during the hectic period following Syria’s 1954 military coup. It depicts a precarious world of sudden violence as perceived by a young boy whose mother has brought him to Damascus after the death of his father. Malas’s interweaving of the (autobiographical) personal story with its political and social context is deft and intelligent: he allows no certainties to stand, offering instead an increasingly complex and lucid questioning. His fluid, textured images evoke a tender, unsentimentalized sense of tragedy. In one startling scene, the young hero looks at his mother with love, smiles at her, and shakes her shoulders repeatedly, urging her to be happy: he plays the role of a lover, knowing he can’t really be the role but willing to accept everything, even his inadequacy, while behind the mother’s amusement her own helplessness becomes apparent.
Malas’s second feature film, THE NIGHT (1992; September 8, 7:45 pm), seems even better, though I would have to see it under proper conditions to be sure. (I viewed an abysmal video copy.) Again he links personal history to collective memory: here, the narrator tries to piece together the troubled life of his father, a Syrian peasant who fought in Palestine in 1936 and 1947. Through extended set pieces that he fills with constant movement, Malas creates a filmic image of memory — an achievement that invites comparison not only with Youssef Chahine’s fusions of autobiography and Egyptian history but also with the great memory films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Mirror) and Federico Fellini (Roma, Amarcord).
