The Cinema Renaissance in the Arab World

The Arab world stands today on the threshold of a comprehensive renaissance embracing every walk of life without exception. No wonder, then, that we see its peoples showing great hesitation between the past and the present, and looking to the future with an eye full of anxiety and misgiving. This troubled condition must have its causes and reasons, which appear plain and clear upon study and analysis. Yet I believe the first and most important cause relates to a fundamental principle affirmed by scholars and experts alike: that every renaissance, whether political or industrial, must be prepared for by a social and cultural renaissance if it is to succeed and endure. The making of political and industrial renaissances may require no great pains if they stand upon a firm foundation of social and cultural renaissance. And I do not exaggerate when I say that every attempt at political and industrial advancement made before attention is given to the social and cultural sides will inevitably end in failure — nor is it unlikely to lead to the very opposite of the desired result. Can success be hoped for in an industrial or political renaissance in which the people is the principal agent, if the great majority is ignorant of the true scientific foundations upon which that renaissance rests? Informed men in every country agree that cultural advancement is the basis of all progress and prosperity. It is not reasonable that the standard of health should rise in a nation, for example, if its members do not know the elementary rules for warding off disease; nor can a country be expected to rise to the highest ranks in the political sphere if its sons are ignorant of the road that leads there. I shall confine myself here to a single facet of the cultural side.

Culture has three fields — the home, the school, and public life; but this last is the widest of them in scope, for in it experiences ramify, perceptions vary, and the means of knowledge multiply — among them, taken together, the broadcasting stations, the newspapers, books, the literary clubs, the artistic clubs, the cinema, and much else besides. As for the cinema, it is still the subject of sharp dispute in the Arab world between the new generation and the old: you will find one man saying that it is a pickaxe of demolition, another affirming that it is an instrument of reform and good, while some look upon it as a means of amusement and of killing time. Many are those who do not frequent its houses, out of a conviction rooted in their minds that it corrupts morals and stirs the animal instincts — while we see no small number of the sons of these very abstainers going constantly to the cinema despite every warning, with no fixed aim or limited purpose, but for pleasure and out of desire for the forbidden.

As for myself, I am not a man of extreme opinions, but I incline to the belief that the cinema is a useful instrument, provided that those in charge of it aim at improvement and refinement. Its industry has risen so high in the West that it has become one of the elements of culture and society which neither young nor old can do without.

The scholars of education say that the best method of teaching the young is that which relies on tangible means of demonstration, for it has been proved that when the child sees with his own eyes the practical applications of theoretical lessons, the required knowledge takes root in his mind swiftly and is not effaced with the passage of time. In many modern kindergartens teaching is confined to practical lessons. The cinema thus appears, this being the case, the best of the means of demonstration — not for the young alone, but for advanced students as well, for it helps them to understand historical events in detail, and shows them true scenes of countries about which they have read or heard a great deal but to which they have had no opportunity to travel. It also

helps to imprint countless necessary pieces of information on their minds. The merchant, the workman, the clerk, the housewife, and others profit from the cinema as much as the schoolboy does, for it offers them lessons and morals about their own lives and the lives of peoples from all corners of the globe; and, like the radio, the newspapers, and books, it is among the most important means of instruction in the great school of life.

There is no doubt that the reason which moves every grown one of us to watch a drama on the silver screen is the same reason that leads him to read a story in a book or to attend a play upon the stage. What the story contains of events and matters, and what the play brings out of parts and characters, is what draws us to read the one and to watch the other; and in both cases we expect to feel the truthfulness of the setting of the drama's events — in other words, we want a kind of entertainment in which there passes something resembling the events of our own lives, resembling them closely enough to convince us that it might belong to the world of reality and not to the world of fancy, yet not to the degree of making us feel that we are watching nothing but a display of naked facts. By this I mean to point to the feature films, which we expect to differ from the cultural or documentary films. There are strange films of fantasy, too, but they are not without wisdom or moral. And television is nothing but a new variety of cinema — the presentation of information in moving, tangible form. Those who enjoy the benefits of this great invention can view the contents of the archaeological museums, the exhibitions of art, the laboratories of science, and what goes on in the great political conferences, all while sitting at home, without toil or trouble.