Sensuous Cinema: The Body in ­Contemporary Maghrebi Film

Description

Description: Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Film examines a cluster of recent films that feature Maghrebi(-French) people and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb, France and, to a lesser degree, Switzerland, and often adopt a sensual aesthetic that prioritizes embodied knowledge, the interrelation of the senses and the material realities of emotional experience. However, despite the importance of the body in these films, no study to date has taken corporeality as its primary point of concern This new addition to the Thinking Cinema series interweaves corporeal phenomenology with theological and feminist scholarship on the body from the Maghreb and the Middle East to examine how Maghrebi(-French) people of different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages and classes have been represented corporeally in contemporary Maghrebi and French cinemas. Via detailed textual and phenomenological analyses of films such as Red Satin (Amari 2002), Exiles (Gatlif 2004), Couscous (Kechiche 2007) and Salvation Army (Taïa 2014), Kaya Hayon Davies conveys the pivotal role that corporeality plays in articulating identity and the emotions in these films Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction A note on terminology The body in contemporary Maghrebi(-French) cinemas From transnationalism to transvergence: Situating Maghrebi(-French) cinemas Understanding embodiment: Phenomenology, Islamic mysticism and feminist (film) theory A note on chapter structure and corpus selection Notes Chapter 2: The Materiality of Exile Introduction ‘Je suis une étrangère de partout’: The material realities of exile in Tony Gatlif’s Exils Physical displacement and corporeal alienation in Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s Bled Number One Embodied encounters in Mehdi Charef’s La Fille de Keltoum Conclusion Notes Chapter 3: Dance, Performance and the Moving Body Introduction From exoticism to empowerment: Belly dance in Arab culture From the cabaret to the silver screen: Images of belly dance in cinema Trance and the spiritual body Representations of belly dance and trance in contemporary Maghrebi and French cinemas Resistance and reinvention in Raja Amari’s Satin rouge Reclaiming the belly dancing body in Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet Embodying the intercultural encounter: The Sufi trance scene in Tony Gatlif’s Exils Conclusion Notes Chapter 4: Embodying Islam Women, gender and the body in early Islamic discourse Islamic family law in the countries of the Maghreb The female body in Islamic culture and tradition Islam and the veil: (Un)covering the female body Embodying religious oppression: Women in contemporary Maghrebi cinema Subverting spiritualism in Yasmine Kassari’s L’Enfant endormi Veiled desires in Aziz Salmy’s Amours voilées ‘Tu es une femme, un tabou, un corps interdit’: Uncovering Tunisian women’s bodies in Nouri Bouzid’s Millefeuille Veiling in Tunisia: A contested history Gender, secularism and the body in Millefeuille Conclusion Notes Chapter 5: Queer Desires in the Maghreb and France Introduction Divergent sexual practices, the Qur’an and the Muslim nation-state today Queer Arab cinemas Corporeal alienation and sexual exploitation in Abdellah Taïa’s L’Armée du salut Sexual and spatial (re-)orientations in Rémi Lange’s Tarik el hob Embodying queer sexual citizenship: Amal Bedjaoui’s Un fils Sexual citizenship in France Conclusion Notes Chapter 6: Conclusion Bibliography Filmography Index