Arab World Cinemas: A Reader and Guide

From the exaggerated emotions of 1930s Egyptian melodrama to the cryptic allegories of late 20th-century Palestinian cinema, Arab World Cinemas guides you through 28 Arabic-language feature films released between 1933 and 2021, including Muhammad Khan’s ’Dreams of Hind and Camilia’ (1989), Moufida Tlatli’s ’Silences of the Palace’ (1994) and Elia Suleiman’s ’Divine Intervention’ (2002). Written specially for students, the book is split into 3 parts: Egypt, North Africa and the eastern Arab world. Each part begins with an introductory essay that highlights the aesthetic and socio-historical trends and currents in the cinematic traditions particular to that region. Marlé Hammond then dedicates individual chapters to a group of films from the highlighted region, interpreting their form and content through the lenses of cinematic technique and concepts drawn from various disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Marlé Hammond is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Popular Literature and Culture at SOAS University of London where she teaches classes on Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern and North African cinema. She is the author of The Tale of al-Barraq Son of Rahwan and Layla the Chaste: A Bilingual Edition and Study (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the award-winning monograph Beyond Elegy: Classical Arabic Women’s Poetry in Context (Oxford University Press, 2010). She also edited Arabic Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2014). Having studied film modules at Columbia University in New York and The American University in Cairo, she started teaching about Arabic-language cinema in 2006 and began integrating it into her research in 2007, when she was awarded a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University to explore representations of ancient female poets in modern Arabic literature and film. This led to her publication of studies of two films: Togo Mizrahi’s Sallama (1945) and Bahiga Hafez’s Layla, Daughter of the Desert (1937). She has also authored a book chapter on the role of the kiss in Egyptian film language of the 1940s. Her work at the archival collection of (primarily Egyptian) film scripts at the New York State museum in her home town of Albany, has enabled her to ’reconstruct’ bowdlerized films, such as Yusuf Wahbi’s Love and Revenge (1945), the subject of Chapter 1.3, and have informed the regional essays at certain junctures. Whilst this ’expertise’ has been focused on Egypt, over a decade of teaching of teaching on the subject of Arabic-language cinema more generally has resulted in her researching the cinemas of North Africa and the Eastern Arab world rather extensively.