The Political Promise of Present Cinema
At times of deep uncertainty and alienation, does cinema continue to offer the promise of political potentiality? In the “doom scroll” era, how can we resist the weaponization of violent imagery and engage critically with a fundamentally compromised industry? In this essay, cultural organizer Jowe Harfouche goes in search of a more equitable and accountable cinema.
Still from The Kite (Randa Chahal Sabbag, Lebanon/France, 2003)
During the Cinema of Commoning Symposium in Berlin this past summer, I had the chance to moderate a group discussion on cinema as a site for hospitality and collaboration. It seems pertinent to question how far these notions still serve as cornerstones of a more present and accountable cinema practice in this period of severe political alienation. Does cinema continue to hold political potential while unabashed genocidal violence fills our screens in real time, never making a dent in the ironclad impunity of the perpetrators? It can feel as if images have become complicit in a culture of doom scrolling, contributing to the normalization of endless carnage and perpetual anger. How colonized is storytelling today, and how entrenched is cinema in a war of narratives?
I set out to focus on why these reflections matter now and the promise that cinema really held out for us all along.
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The first time I felt an absolute belonging to a group of strangers was to a cinema audience, in total darkness, engrossed in what felt like a collective dream. Through this moment of togetherness, cinema would make me feel part of a singular experience that transcended my notion of the self. I felt like I was tapping into a communal consciousness of sorts; I was allowed a peek into the psyche of the world through film language, and it looked immaculate.
Still from Out of Life (Maroun Baghdadi, France/Italy/Belgium, 1991).
By the time the Arab revolts started in the early 2010s, as a film practitioner I had come to experience cinema as a unique art form, unmatched in its ability to harness collective political imaginaries: a community-making project that is constantly done and undone, intangible yet cumulative, fleeting and all-the-more precious. So long as an audience was going through the sensorial experience of a film within physical proximity of each other, so long as they endeavored together toward critical thinking, a common project was within reach, and it was boundless.
This enchantment was followed by a period of bewilderment, if not dismay. Since I was working within cinema structures and cultural institutions, I soon became disillusioned with artistic practice and the labels that categorize cultural output. I came to witness first-hand the direct effects of the heavy financialization of arts and culture. I observed how national agendas and transnational funding bodies shaped it into an economic sector, an industry to reproduce neoliberal values and uphold meritocracy, gatekeeping and hierarchical organization. Such notions are well documented by Hanan Toukan, as she expands in her research on “the role of art in society within liberal economies and its entanglement with international politics.”1
Writer and filmmaker Rijin Sahakian also goes to great lengths in her work to reveal the extent to which “the arts establishment often works in parallel with political and corporate establishments … [although] commonly viewed as disparate.”2 In other words, contemporary art institutions are enmeshed with colonial powers and profit-making interests. The soft powers of cultural diplomacy and the laws of the market affect film institutions too— particularly as film is generally an expensive medium. For perspective, a recent study on social mobility in the British cultural sector, found the proportion of working-class origin individuals becoming artists, musicians, and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s.3 It would not be surprising to observe similar or even more disproportionate results as a global trend.
What kind of cinema is still able to circumvent these geopolitical and economic dynamics? Has the realm of political imagination been hopelessly vanquished by the very powers so many films have successfully fought against? And what margins for action and resistance remain in the wake of the collapse of the human-rights discourse?
Ali Hussein Al-Adawy, a film curator and researcher, offers some cause for hope. He focuses on the intimate relationship between contemporary art and human rights complexes, pointing to the potential of “multiple strategies of infrastructural critique in art practice” and toward “a critique of ideology, where human rights and contemporary art really do intersect.”4 Ultimately then, critique as praxis and mode of engagement is not hopeless. To paraphrase Al-Adawy, a cinematic infrastructural critique becomes more than just making different narratives. It’s about making them differently.
For cinema, this means rethinking its origin story as an industrial art form. Concretely, this translates into radical ways of (re)organizing labor and profit distribution within the filmmaking production chain, leaning into the intrinsically collective aspects of filmmaking. This could extend to involving audiences along new terms of engagement, such as, for example, entrusting entire communities with commissioning filmmakers for specific projects. In that sense, the very practice of making films would regain the potential to transcend the authorship of a single artist credentialed by institutions, overcoming trappings of status, and exploding the ownership of narratives into a flatter model closer to reality. This must go hand in hand with allowing fairer access to arts education and image literacy.
Still from The Infiltrators (Khaled Jarrar, Palestine/United Arab Emirates/Lebanon, 2012).
Similarly, in the context of film exhibition, as researcher Nour El Safoury states, cinema spaces can further “define their function as exceeding that of a traditional exhibitor. They are spaces to gather around films and to grow and nurture a film culture.”5 We need our cinemas to be multifunctional spaces for political organizing much more than we need them to be temples for consumption and sedation; spaces for radical hospitality that engage in going toward and working with an unlikely audience, one that would otherwise lack access to or feel unwelcome at a cultural space.
I had the privilege to lead, for a number of years, the Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS), a constellation of mission-driven cinema spaces from across the region with whom I experienced the joys of collaboration and of collective decision-making. Together, we witnessed the relative success of a horizontal governance model resulting in a network that was more than the sum of its parts; a film body that represented the interests of the many while still honoring the specific contexts of each. One of the network’s programs consisted of a participatory grant-making scheme whereby members take ownership of the resources available to them and of the decision around their allocation among themselves. Such an approach serves to alleviate the pressures of a culture of competition over what appear to be limited and scarce sources of funding. It promotes collaboration contingent on deep knowledge and mutual trust.
Such an overhaul seems far reaching and requires wide-ranging participation, but it would avoid the risk of arthouse cinema increasingly becoming a space by and for the economic elite. Numerous initiatives of filmmaking collectives with independent exhibition spaces and alternative economic models already exist: they are striving for a cinema that transcends mere storytelling and documentation, toward a broader mission of knowledge production and transmission, all while skirting its business proclivities.
This proposition mirrors one made by Yazan Khalili, the previous director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, calling for the “total work of the cultural institution.” “Culture, in this sense, is the way we think of politics, economy, and society … has to be consistent and intentional, a platform to challenge, connect to, and be involved in the different struggles in the community, ” Khalili explains. “It is not a means of representation; it has to be challenged all the time within its structures.”6 In the same vein, a present cinema is one that foregrounds collaboration and hospitality, is aware of its limitations and constantly allows for shifting the paradigm of “business as usual” for filmmakers and audiences alike.
In this moment of major political realignment, it is as urgent as ever to reconfigure the functions that cinema serves. It is precisely because of this atmosphere of uncertainty, fear and precarity, that we must continue to question the international aesthetics of film and the modes of exhibition we take for granted, as well as the money that shapes them. Through this continuing work, we can strive toward more accountable and equitable models of resources, labor and profit distribution, and learn from cinema’s rich history, resisting its weaponization and imagining anew.
Jowe Harfouche is a cultural organizer. He managed the Culture and Ideas portfolio for Open Society-MENA up until 2024, and NAAS | Network of Arab Alternative Screens from 2016 to 2022 establishing it as a nonprofit in both Beirut and Berlin. Prior to that, he worked on film productions in different capacities for over ten years. He currently lives in Berlin.
