Arab Modernism as World Cinema explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Addressing the legacy of the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—when Arab writers and artists reenergized Arab culture by engaging with other languages and societies—Peter Limbrick argues that Smihi’s films take up the spirit of the Nahda for a new age. Examining Smihi’s oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South. This original study offers new routes for thinking about world cinema and modernism in the Middle East and North Africa, and about Arab cinema in the world.

About the Author

Peter Limbrick is Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Moumen Smihi, World Cinema, Arab Modernism
Chapter One: Radical Realities: Form and Politics in the New Arab Cinema
Chapter Two: The Voice of the Arabs: Smihi’s Soundscapes
Chapter Three: Kan ya makan: Intertextuality and Arab Modernism
Chapter Four: Religion, Secularism, Modernity
Chapter Five: For a New Nahda: Gender, Sexuality, and Freedom

Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Weaving together close film analysis, studies of cinematic techniques, and scholarly engagement with a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary material, Limbrick offers an unprecedented window into Smihi’s 'multifaceted and polyphonic' filmography. At the same time, he demonstrates that Arab film culture, when studied in its global ramifications and affinities, reveals an inner complexity that resists systematic and univocal readings, and invites to rethink Arab modernism as a dynamic and multidimensional concept."
— Critical Inquiry

"Smihi’s gorgeous, multivocal, and politically sophisticated films are too little known to world cinema enthusiasts and students of Arab modernism. In this beautifully written and compelling book, Limbrick shows why the Tangier filmmaker’s oeuvre deserves our extended attention. Curatorial, biographical, and critical at once, this book forces us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about postcolonial cinema and Moroccan modernism."––Brian T. Edwards, After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

"A truly extraordinary book: gorgeously written, richly researched and contextualized, and generous on every page to the great cineaste Moumen Smihi and to the reader. Limbrick brings Smihi the accord he has long been due, showing that his films, by drawing voices religious and secular, Arab and Western, into convivial encounters, embody the ecumenical spirit of the Nahda."—Laura U. Marks, author of Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image

"In this well-researched and compelling volume, Limbrick reveals the intellectual, political, and artistic energies of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi. Complementing the book’s focus on authorship is a complex analysis of a wide range of Arab and non-Arab films, taking us beyond national cinema frameworks to a rich study of cinematic intertextuality and modernist translocality."—Viola Shafik, author of Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity

"This book will change the way scholars approach the history of Arab cinema and of global modernism more generally."—Tarek El-Ariss, Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies, Dartmouth College

Awards

L. Carl Brown Book Prize 2021 2021, American Institute for Maghrib Studies

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards