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Framework 53, No. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 99116.Copyright 2012 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

On April 8, 2011, swift on the heels of several Arab insurrections and verymuch in the midst of others, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issuedan economic assessment of the region. Given the prior strong overall growthof countries like Egypt and Tunisia, the orga niza tion confessed it had beencaught somewhat unawares by this turn of events. Wealth, it admitted, could

no longer be judged at averaged-out mathematical face value: The IMFshould have paid more attention to the distribution of income, not just aggre-gate results ... [it will] begin incorporating more data on unemployment and inequality into its analysis.1 The eyes of leftist observers might roll here;some told you sos over the inadequacy and callousness of neoliberal doc-trines of accounting would not be unwarranted. But, beyond such easy, reac-tive rejoinders, the fact remains that work and wealth allocation have stronglyaffected the contours of each Arab communitys commitments to revolution-ary change, and will continue to do so. Their diverse responses to unemploy-

ment and inequality, the kinds that have been negligently sidelined withinthe IMFs factorings, will serve as a starting point for the following argument.The media industries lie rmly implanted within the lived experience

of the uprisings and their provocations. Furthermore, as most commentatorsobserve, the media have proven pivotal to the demands for change, certainlyby transmitting recorded incitements to and distributable documents of pro-test, but also, as I argue here, because as places of work , the media are vigor-ously shaped by the very same gurings of nancial and labor inegality towhich the IMF belatedly alert us. A thorough understanding of these relation-

ships, I contest, must tackle the tight political and economic bonds between thestate and the media industries in the Arab world. The ght for fair employment

The State of Labor and

Labor for the State:Syrian and EgyptianCinema beyond the2011 UprisingsKay Dickinson

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rights (class struggle, ultimately) has long been waged in front of the camera and behind it; revolution is far from an unfamiliar concept in these spaces,although previous denitions may not conform to todays incarnations.

Darting between Syrian and Egyptian history, this article assumes a comparative demeanor in order to highlight, sometimes through jarring juxtaposition, the repercussions of these countries dissimilar labor policies.More particularly, a to-and-fro between their very different national movieindustries allows for a tracing out of the relativity of antigovernmental rebel-lions. Doing so can also unearth paradigms for circumventing some of theinsufferable conditions that prompted them and that the IMF has so damag-ingly overlooked. I have specically selected these two nation-states becausethey once shared a commitment to Arab socialism and now unite in outwardly

similar antiautocratic revolution. However, their routes from the former tothe latter markedly digress due to divergent choices over economic governancethat raise an abundance of questions about, and perhaps even answers tohow, unemployment and inequality might best be abated. The analysisbelow concentrates more lingeringly on Syria, precisely because Syria hassought to spurn the types of economic dogma insisted upon by the IMF. Myprioritization therefore allows for a prolonged engagement with Syrias con-ceptualizations of labor, wealth, value, and freedom. Such postulates havemuch to offer a critique of the capitalist actualities that dominate throughout

the world, including in Egypta country that has been unsuccessfully attempt-ing to make good through IMF structural adjustment programs since 1991.There is one fundamental disparity: Egypts unrest in 2011 sprung

dramatically from a groundswell of labor activism; Syrias not so declaredly.Syrians have pitted themselves much more singularly against their entrenchedruling dictatorship. Undoubtedly, as the Western press have euphoricallyreported (and its humanities academics eagerly absorbed), Egypts uppermiddle classes were mobilized via social media like Twitter and Facebook.But the poorer demonstrators, the majority, were more likely politicized into

action in sympathy for or by involvement in the nineteen hundred or so indus-trial actions of the last seven years. These strikes and sit-ins have been almost exclusively deemed illegal; they were met with brutal governmental andextrajudicial suppression that has not stopped short of intimidation, torture,even murder.2 And, just as industrial dispute protrudes less into the Syrianrevolt, so too do the privatized media and telecommunications networks takea backseat (for reasons explained below).

The two nation-states have not always operated at such variance and,for this reason, I pay closest attention to how they drifted away from each

other. At such a juncture, it is easiest to assess how fairly recent modicationsin labor culture have dramatically altered social reality. In the mid-twentiethcentury, Egypt and Syria were governed according to closely allied uptakesof Arab socialism and they even briey merged into one nation-state, theUnited Arab Republic, between 1958 and 1961. Their ideologies were fervently

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promoted through movies and, what is more, their lm industries fully assim-ilated the regimes leftist aspirations for full citizen employment into theirinfrastructural designs.

According to a number of economic indicators, they still appear fairlyalike. Mean wages are comparable, with Syrias ($2.61/hour) slightly higherthan Egypts ($2.45/hour), and the same goes for unemployment (9.2 percent and 9.7 percent, respectively). But one stark and highly illuminating differ-ence exists, whose grounds become clear herein: 20 percent of Egypts popu-lation is considered below the poverty line against Syrias less-perturbing 11.9percent.3 It comes as little surprise, then, that remonstration against unevendistribution of wealth features more prominently in the Egyptian protest-ers demands than it does for the Syrians. On both sides, and most probably

because of the socialist legacy, income iniquity has proven a persistent andpopular lm narrative propeller. Debates about social equality drive theplots of Syrian movies, whether they deal with the rights of the urban poor,as inThe Extras (Nabil al-Maleh, 1993); rural citizens,Al Lajat (Riad Shaya,1995); domestic abuse sufferers,Dreams of the City (Mohammad Malas, 1985);or refugees,Something Is Burning (Ghassan Shmeit, 1993). Syrian directorMohammad Malas reveals, When we started our life in cinema, we hadmany, many hopes of making something of our society. We dreamt that cul-ture and cinema could bring about change in our society, our lives and our

relationships with power.4

This essay could never hope to encompass theubiquitous representa tion of class conict within Egypts prolic, thousands-strong cinematic output.

Instead, I stress how it pays well to focus attention on discrepanciesbetween the labor rights of each countryoffscreen those afforded to lm andnonlm workers alike. This, in turn, leads to an understanding of how theresulting aesthetics become politicized, how both labor rights and internation-alist solidarity mark these texts. With the service sector on the rise, employing 67 percent of Syrias workforce and 51 percent of Egypts, analysis of arenas

like the lm industry can prove educative for an appreciation of how to fosterfair vocational relations.5 In this respect, Syrian cinema, as elaborated below,stands out as highly exceptional in its conductexemplary, perhapseven asit enters an uncertain future that may well render its practices untenable.

But rst it is necessary to set the scene for the two industries, zooming out to take in their strategic positions amid a larger political picture. Casting wider for context can also bring forth means of comprehending how militaris-tic despotism has held sway for more than half a century. Rigidly, ambitiouslyplanned economies that amalgamated cinematic production launched these

regimes. Upon his accession to power, President Nassers nationalizationdrive for Egypt was perhaps somewhat more day-to-day and on the hoof thanSyrias. Syrias Bathism, by contrast, had been thoroughly systematized inthe 1940s by its founding gures, Michel Aaq and Salah al-Din Bitar. Themotivations for folding moviemaking into the public sector can be found in

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the original Bath Constitution, which expressly mentions cinema, deemsintellectual work the most sacred type, and insists that the state must protect and encourage intellectuals.6 Regardless of the degree of prior fore-thought, however, pan-Arab socialist principles coincided across the twocountries, taking the form of state ownership and planned production, lim-ited private landholding with little scope for turning prot, state provision(free health care, education, pensions and the like, and heavy subsidies foressentials like wheat and fuel), unionized and protected labor, equal rightsfor women, and an energetic anticolonial regionalism. True to these ideals,from the mid-1960s onward, Syrias command economy assumed whole ormajority control of most of the countrys main industries and banks, withthree-quarters of the gross domestic product (GDP) eventually nationalized

as part of itsinqilab (profound transformation) initiatives.7

Filmmaking played its minor part here. The year 1963 saw the inaugu-ration of the Syrian National Film Orga niza tion (NFO), a wing of the Min-istry of Culture, which busily administered production, distribution, andthe import and export of lm goods.8 In 1969, the NFO was awarded theexclusive rights to all these activities, crowding out private enterprise withits monopoly status and striving toward a vertically integrated, protection-ist schema. In this way, the NFO could stand up to the pressurizing tacticsof the movie multinationals and also foster a brand of cinema dedicated to

socialist themes and structures of labor. Jobs were assured for a group of directors who had been hand selected to attend lm school in communist Eastern Europe, a guarantee practically unheard of elsewhere in the world.Rare too is the idea that lms might exist and circulate under terms otherthan those of consumerism. Cinema is culture and culture is not supposedto make monetary gain, opines Nidal al-Debs, one of these lmmakers.9 Mohammad Malas, another NFO director, points to the synchronization of this viewpoint with the realities of productionWe make lms without anycommercial pressure10a precondition that powerfully shapes the working

lives of those in the sector. Unlike the nationalized movie industries of most previously socialist countries, Syrian public-sector cinema still exists, albeit just barely. For many, it is now an underfunded and lazy bureaucracy, losing out to the transregional success of Syrian television serials and threatenedby Syrias recent tentative steps toward the global free market economyand, more recently, the open animosity toward the ruling Bathist regime.Nevertheless, I argue that the NFO still serves an important function as anexample of how to imagine a manufacture and distribution of culture that departs from exploitative capitalist norms, and how media production can

play a role in the prevention of unemployment and inequality.Parallel developments were afoot in Egypt throughout the 1960s. Nass-ers presidency cleared the path for the nationalization of all foreign busi-nesses and most large- and medium-scale Egyptian enterprises, including cinema. In 1960, the countrys lm studios were expropriated by the state, as

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were a third of the movie theatres, although a private cinema sector wasallowed to run alongside these throughout much of this period in both coun-tries. During the years that followed, most aspects of lm production werelaid out and strategized from within government agencies. Meantime, acrossthe Egyptian public sector at large, workers were promised job security, sub-sidized food and housing, pensions, and a one-third increase in wages,alongside a 10 percent decrease in working hours.11 Filmmaking staff wereretained on permanent state salaries. Accordingly, the insecurities of pack-age unit production did not threaten the Egyptian lm industry, which func-tioned pretty much in line with a more classic Fordist model.

Then came the moment when Syria and Egypt parted ways, the moment we might cite as fundamental to dening the different characters of their lm

industries and revolutions. The Egyptian tide turned soon after Anwar Sadat came to power. Sadat digressed from Nassers dream of a centralized econ-omy, making way for theintah (open door) period of 1974 onward, with itsencouragement of private enterprise, exible labor markets, and ultimatelythe sale of public assets. Egypt, at this juncture, slipped back into a less evendistribution of income, backtracking on the aspiration for full employment.12 In 1971, the lm industry was reprivatized. The states careful investmentsnow ultimately beneted only the limited few rich nanciers who were ableto buy them up.

When the price of oil dipped in the 1980s, the Egyptian economy wasforced to absorb unanticipated knocks, affecting the ow of remittance intothe country from the Gulf as well as the local (and fairly meager) oil market.By the mid-1980s, Egypts balance of payments betrayed how unsustainabletheir external debts were, prompting an IMF intervention in 1991. The gov-ernment bore the brunt of the IMFs dictates, having single-mindedly con-centrated for years on infrastructure (education, utilities, and so on) ratherthan export productivity. The IMFs structural adjustment programs insisted,among other things, upon the scaling back not only of public-sector employ-

ment but also of job protection and benets, particularly in areas where cost efciencyas an almost sole term of evaluationwas seen to be wanting.13 Publicly owned concerns would either have to prove themselves protable orbe sold in order to help pay off the debts, a policy still in force throughout Mubaraks reign. Certainly, many who lived through the switch-over periodtestify that lm productions overshot their deadlines and budgets. Unfortu-nately, a pervasive devil-may-care attitude to splashing government cash hadbecome something of a norm. According to the new methods of accounting,millions had been lost through mismanagement. When such inscriptions of

cinemas worth are compared to Syrias, we can begin to confront the neolib-eral concept of culture advanced by the IMF and fostered within Egypt, along with the responsibility its logic must assume in Egyptian worker discontent.

Syria has stayed more in check of what it owes, which weighs in at 32.3percent of its current GDP, as against Egypts shocking 80.5 percent. Thus,

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while Egypt has appeared richer according to certain models of account-ing (a 5.3 percent GDP growth rate, beating Syrias 2.2 percent), external debt has indubitably taken its toll.14 Syria, unlike Egypt, has managed its loanswithout equivalent IMF intercession. Its particular relationship with itslenderschiey erstwhile Comecon nations, especially what is now Russiahas also colored Syrian cinemas formation, both infrastructural and stylistic.Reecting on the history that underpins Syrias borrowing recalls a united journey through political afliation into lm training and therefore, fairlylogically, into aesthetics. The majority of the NFOs employees were schooledin Moscow, Kiev, or Prague, dispatched on government scholarships or trav-eling of their own accord. This connection, in turn, can still point to ways of guring ownership that defy those espoused, at this point, within Egypt just

as much as almost everywhere else. The look and sound of these lms, I argue,insist upon an understanding of property that contradicts the insistences of bodies like the IMF. Credit, ultimately, is more than nancial, but need not be thought through in accordance with dominant economic principles.

Precious little is written in English on Syrian movies, but what does exist seeks to categorize it textually by remarking on its parallel debt to EasternEuropean idioms. Richard Pena observes how Syrian lms are ne exem-plars of the VGIK [Moscows All-Union State Institute of Cinematography]style, an approach that opts for carefully composed, almost iconographic

shotsthe opposite perhaps of the more uid, hand-held style adopted widelyafter the explosion of the French New Wave.15 A hunt for analogy might alsohave tracked downThe Leopard (Nabil al-Maleh, 1972) with its striking Eisen-steinian crosscuts between victory parties to mark the end of World War IIand peasants brutalized by Syrian soldiers on French salaries. There is alsoThe Extras , with its afnity for the bleak comedy, the surrealism, and the pre-occupation with menacing bureaucracies to be found in Kafka and the CzechNew Wave, among whom its director had trained in Prague. OrNights of the

Jackal s (Abdullatif Abdulhamid, 1989) quotation of the Soviet coproduction

I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, SU/CU, 1964), which sees Abu Kamalsetting re to his wheat crop rather than have it captured by the Israeli forcesthreatening Syrias borders. But is this stylistic plagiarism? The fact of intercul-tural trafc need not always stimulate the laying and limiting of claims onaesthetic assets.

Penas comment brings to light a particular geography of education,which is key to unlocking some of the complexities of anticapitalist forms of creativity that challenge the Egypt governments (and much of the worlds)appetite for privatization. Writers like him also need to be cautious of how a

formalist teleology, the forging of a chain of inuence, would edge toward a client-state model of innovation and derivativeness, something that couldseverely restrict how these lms might be motivated, interpreted, or couldfunction dynamically within present-day analysis. Concentrating on repli-cation when reading these sequences would imply a politics of ownership

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that severely curtails the political potential of how Syrian lms operate. It islimiting to ignore these movies and their circuits particular concepts of property, ones in keeping with broader public ownership ideals. In short,the overlaps in these projects compellingly insist that culture can be thought of, and can function,outside and in opposition to the ambits of private prop-erty, ideals that Egypt has very much enforced over the last twenty years andresis tance to which has fueled the current protests. NFO output demands aninterrogation of novelty as a value within marketplace demarcation. Schol-arly and technical expertise, aesthetic registers, common aspirations fornationalization, universal education, and social betterment of a particularideological persuasion all need to be taken into consideration. The logisticsof their development and the casting of various roles in these tasks hold up

for scrutiny the typical investment of inuence with dubious notions of cul-tural or intellectual property. Solidarity might be a better term for all this;Mette Hjorts afnitive transnationalism another.16 Syrian society is cur-rently playing an anxious waiting game with the capitalist concept of theasset. While counterfeit products and state holdings are both the norm, it isonly a matter of time before the World Intellectual Property Orga niza tion,which Syria joined in 2004, will make its presence more vehemently felt.

What ever lies on Syrias horizon, it still serves to read these lmmakersas translators of pertinent political ideals rather than imitators. The act of

translation strives to transmit otherwise obscure knowledge, and communismcan perhaps be dened as such since 1989. At the same time, translation isalways also the delicate conciliation of the gaps that lie between languagesand cultures, just as Arab socialism has been. The Moroccan philosopherAbdelkebir Khatibi has much to offer a reading of this knot of techniques,investments, and their politics. He advocates a variant of the dialectic that forgoes the more linear chuggings of developmental history, concentrating,as an alternative, on charged, largely asymmetrical interaction between geo-political units that are proclaimed to be distinct. Syria in relation to com-

munist Europe, Syria in contradistinction to World Trade Orga niza tion(WTO) members. For Khatibi, any factor contributing to thought and actionoppressive and liberationist alike can function as an ingredient within what he calls double critique or an other thinking. In his own words, he callsfor a plural thinking that does not reduce others (societies and individuals)to the sphere of its self-sufciency. To disappropriate itself from such a reduc-tion is, for all thought, an incalculable prospect.17 Neither a mealymouthedapologist for the supremacy that inspiration can breed, nor someone whothrows the baby out with the bathwater, Khatibi proposes plundering all cul-

tures to hand for their revolutionary potency. At a time when many Syriansare locked in a bloody battle with the more heinous realities of a Far Left regime, but when overthrow (and of what, exactly?) may multiply their sacri-ces, this could prove sage advice. NFO lmmakers stand in a complicatedposition here: employed by the state, but often highly critical of it in the movies

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they make. Directors Oussama Mohammad, Nidal al-Debs, Nabil al-Maleh,and Mohammad Malas have all publicly put their name to a petition that urges lmmakers in the world to contribute to stopping the killing [in Syria]by exposing and denouncing it, and by announcing their solidarity with theSyrian people and with their dreams of justice, equality and freedom.18 Cer-tainly, Khatibi too speaks in the vocabulary of resis tance, but a resistancethat assimilates its oppressors ideas as not entirely tarnished and, further-more, inextricable from the resistors makeupsomething that is very muchthe case with the NFOs sustained employment of the VGIK style. Khati-bis double critique muddles the impossibly divided positions of leader andfollower, oppressed and oppressor, colonizer and colonized as they scarifythe curtailed possibilities of those who have been interpellated as the latter.

Khatibi also militates against falling into Western globalization projectsterms of opposition, inquiry, and facilitation. To confound and denounce theepistemologies of this divorce, signiers of each should be pushed to theirlimits, roughly restitched together, and even ironized. They then bring about the sorts of revealing geopolitical conjecture evident when, as inThe Extras ,the cinematic cousins of the Czech secret police break into a small Dama-scene apartment, or whenNights of the Jackal , via citation, quietly comparesIsraels invasion of Syria to American aggression toward Cuba. Decoupling stylistic concurrence from contentions over origins and possession in this

climate allows for a more sustained investigation of how both communismand Arab socialism have aimed to protect culture from a particular businessmodel, as well as, I contend, create what they deemed to be fair working con-ditions for its laborers. Khatibis approach can encourage such endeavors tocontinue, even if the current Syrian government is deposed.

Certainly, the political and economic history that links Syria to EasternEurope has not only enabled a transfer of aesthetics, and allowed Syria toswerve clear of much of the neoliberal strong-arming of the IMF and theWorld Bank, but has also intently reinforced the manufacturing ethics of

Syrian cinema. As was pointed out, the NFO is an organ of the state, as itsrelatives in the socialist bloc had been. Consequently, there is a stabilizing,collaborative spirit implanted within NFO moviemaking. Samir Zikra wroteDreams of the City for Mohammad Malas to direct; Abdullatif Abdulhamidprovided the music for Oussama MohammadsStep by Step (1978); while Ous-sama Mohammad coauthoredThe Night (Mohammad Malas, 1992). Abdul-latif Abdulhamid assumes a leading acting role inStars in Broad Daylight (Oussama Mohammad, 1988), while Riad Shaya contributed as an assistant director. And so such lists go on, pointing clearly to the extent to which these

lmmakers are a solid team, a set of employees of the same institution whohave been awarded permanent salaries. Most movies elsewhere in the world,including Egypt, are made according to the post-Fordist principles of exi-ble, precarious labor: a new team for each project and no guaranteed income

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in between jobs. Upholding a completely different logic, the NFO provideslong-term civil service jobs for all those it hires. Today, the public sectoremploys 58 percent of university graduates in urban areas and 75 percent inthe countryside, people attracted by the job security, enhanced retirement benets, and shorter working hours.19 Yet 60 percent of Syrias citizens arenow under the age of twenty.20 When job-for-life assurance confronts popu-lation statistics like these, youth unemployment could well rise to Egyptianlevels (87.1 percent for the fteen- to twenty-nine-year-old range), and thiswas one of the major catalysts for the recent Egyptian uprisings.

For those on the payroll, the salaries are not particularly high, and de-nitely lower than one might expect in similar private-sector work, but therewards are 20 percent above the average government wage and, most impor-

tant, remain constant, regardless of production schedules.21

In this sense, thetake-home might balance out as higher overall than the salaries to be foundthrough commercial work, a trend mirrored across the Egyptian employment landscape too.22

Moreover, the health care, sick pay, and pension losses that have plaguedcasualized workers in Egypts private or informal sectors do not afict theSyrian lmmakersfor the moment. Civil servants can expect to retire at sixtyand are not supposed to work for more than forty-two hours per week.23 Likewise, Egyptian public-sector legislation demands overtime compensa-

tion on the ofcial day of rest and, otherwise, maximum shifts of eight hoursthat are rarely met by the average employee.24 Just to broaden this compari-son outward, for freelancers in the British lm industry, seventy-two hoursis more typical, a norm that sees them waiving their rights to protection underEuropean labor law, matching beleaguered Egyptian textile workers in theirtemporal commitment.25

Syrias nancial support for movie production is not proigate: about one million U.S. dollars per lm.26 All the same, as director Riad Shaya attests: Work like mine would have been impossible without the existence

of the National Film Orga niza tion, which provides all lmmakers with thechance to direct intellectually- and technically-distinguished material ... itsvery different from [the rest of] the cinema industry.27 What is peculiar toSyrian cinemas chosenmodus operandi is that the lmslook much moreexpensive. Although production is resource poor in many respects, it takestrue advantage of how the civil service model renders it rich in both timeand human power. Tricky crowd scenes, complex tracking and crane shots,arduous chiaroscuro compositions, and exacting framing that are in no waynecessary to plotsand stretch the time frame for shooting well beyond

those of the average lmmake for a very lush body of work.The Night (Mohammad Malas, 1992) showcases some particularly chal-lenging setups. A nocturnal air-raid scene, for example, contrapuntally playsoff approaching horses, running children, incendiaries, and the general chaos

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of war, all within lengthy, uid camera movements. Orchestrating and ade-quately rehearsing such a sequence, with highly unpredictable contributors,is an impressive achievement that would be incredibly expensive if every-one involved was paid by the hour. Resetting the scene, should anything havegone wrong midtake, would have consumed considerable time. There arequite a few such moments inThe Night , made all the more impressive by thefact that the crew were working with a rickety old dolly that only had threerather than four wheels.Stars in Broad Daylight does not go easy on itself either,notably in the scene at the Lattakia docks, where characters wend their waythrough some elegantly choreographed heavy machinery. The wedding scene ropes in animals, children, and a setting sunstaging, again, demand-ing precision from notoriously uncontrollable participants.Verbal Letters

(Abdullatif Abdulhamid, 1991) encases two dawn incidents, andSacrices (Oussamma Mohammad, 2002) weaves in fastidious positioning of chick-ens, doves, cows, a snake, and a donkey. The opening sequence of A Land for a Stranger (Samir Zikra, 1988) parades the Ottoman elite, scores of costumedextras, a marching band, and a childrens choir through the streets of Aleppo.This list gives merely a cursory impression; similar determination blazesforth from practically every NFO endeavor. In a state where full employment is the goal and where, within the twenty-ve- to forty-ve-year-old cohort,male participation is close to 100 percent, such ambitious ventures become

possible for a low-income cinema.28

Temporal and human resources are similarly milked in how cameras arewielded with the prolonged tracking shot, often through the help of a crane,which is a staple, for example, the riverbank chase sequence inAlgae (Ray-mond Butros, 1991) or the lms many meanderings through the corridors of the court house.The Night s opening sequence is a long, single take that followsWisal through her derelict house, with masonry falling at dened, punctuat-ing moments (something that would have required a signicant rebuild hadthe process gone awry).Nights of the Jackal s second scene commences with a

dexterous four-minute, thirty-ve-second single take during which adroit camera movement and careful composition engross these farmers with thesoil they work, sanctifying the labor undertaken by the second-largest portionof the Syrian population.29

As with the highly wrought staging of the set pieces, such camera workis onerous, especially if ones dolly is missing a wheel. Oussama Moham-mad remarks on the uniqueness of the Syrian situation in this respect:

Syria might very well be the last place in this world where a lmmaker is givenlicense to re-shoot a sequence until it is deemed right, where time and space for

editing or sound mixing of an entire lm can be redone, without a recongura-tion of the lms overall budget. Furthermore Syria is perhaps the only place inthis world where a young lmmaker without signicant prior experience is pro-vided the opportunity to make a feature-length lm, regardless of the viabilityof the lm once it is released.30

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Here, the stylistic imprint of modestly tenured public-sector lmmaking contrasts vividly with the rationalized and pressurized schedules of most other post-Fordist cinematic production. More usually, drawn-out manufac-turing is considered the preserve of wealthier projects, yet this is not thecase within the working practices of the NFO, where the high salaries of thefreelance approach, designed to cushion fallow periods, do not intervenewith these ambitions. NFO director Nidal al-Debs corroborates: We makethe lms slowly and at an easy pace. We dont have a producer or a com-pany harassing us, so we can make the lms we want to make.31 A pleasant,unrushed working environment is favored over maximized output, mean-ingfully reengaging the questions about thwarted prot expansion that areposed, as discussed below, by the narrow circulation of these movies.

More sardonically, another NFO director, Mohammad Malas, exclaims:Time ... yes, we have all the time in the world.32 At Syrias completion rateof one and a half lms per year and with half of the men and 80 percent of the women on public-sector contracts clocking up less than forty-hour weeks,33 people of a certain get-up-and-go temperament are inclined to grow twitchy.There is a hefty backlog of scripts awaiting ofcial approval (which is moreforgiving of critical perspectives than many would imagine, but still censo-rial) and dozens are never given the green light. Once they are, they standpatiently in line while other production schedules drag on. For all these rea-

sons, more daring and dynamic directors, such as Omar Amiralay, trans-ferred their loyalties to foreign production companies, and most NFOemployees grumble that their oeuvre does not reach the screen regularly orquickly enough. Even the lms themselves shufe along with a ponderouspacing, the majority running beyond the hour and a half norm for features.Output and efciency, so much the darlings of exploitative employers else-where in the world, hold less currency here. While the lms may ask theirviewers to contemplate a particular kind of temporality, their protractionmight well stem from other desires. Samir Zikra entreats audiences to be

diligent with the noteworthy length of our lms, their perplexity and burdenof detail, for every single lm was either the rst, or second ... and even pos-sibly the last ... every lm was made to say everything.34

In no realm is this more palpable than it is within the mise-en-scne. Thecomplex sequences described above form part of this, but conspicuous pre-cision is loaded into practically all the other shots too. There is signicanceto every element of the lm, Nidal al-Debs insists, Nothing is there purelyby coincidence and that is because we actually have the time to work on thesedetails.35 Al Lajat provides excellent examples here; light on dialogue, it

creates an evocative ambience through its captivation with visual texturesand thoughtful, paint erly compositions. The quotient of daylight in thesemovies is lower than normal, with lmmakers preferring to experiment withnocturnal atmospheresagain, much harder to shoot and rarely necessitatedby plots in any strict sense. The extensive play of light and shadow (often

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through mashrabiyya window screens), the creation of ornate chiaroscurorhythms, and the enjoyment of saturated colors distinguishes such lms asDreams of the City , A Land for a Stranger , Verbal Messages , Stars in Broad Daylight ,and, naturally,

The Night and

Nights of the Jackal . Deep focus (again, hard to

achieve in moody lighting) lavishes attention on multiple planes within theframe throughout Malass and Mohammads movies.

There is also a profound affection for mirrors and other reective surfacesin the lms of both these directors, as well as in Raymond Butross work.Sacrices brandishes the mirror motif because it is appropriate to its doubledcharacters, the three unnamed and often interchangeable sons in particular.Elsewhere, it is more an exuberant aesthetic ourish. One particularly man-nerist scene inStars in Broad Daylight is shot through a glass table, which ips

the image upside down, then boldly fractures the action as the camera sub-tly shifts its angle (see gure 1). Certainly, all this betrays the time the lm-makers are afforded to experiment and push their equipment, capabilities,and Eastern Bloc training to the limit. These techniques simultaneously bring their labor resolutely to the fore. The mirrors (notoriously hard for soundcrews to negotiate) become frames within frames, as do the various photog-raphy sessions in, say,The Night , and the video playback loop that is createdfor the wedding inStars in Broad Daylight . Perhaps a dry comment on Syriancinemas small audiences worldwide, there are rarely too many people watch-

ing the live feed on the television in the corner of the garden. Worse still, thetelevision that emerges from the fathers military kit bag inSacrices not onlytransmits images of one of the unnamed sons carrying a television (relaying

Figure 1. A scene fromStars in Broad Daylight (Oussama Mohammad, 1988),shot partially through a glass table that inverts a portion of the action

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images of himself amid war-torn landscapes), but the appliance also strikeshis sibling down with blindness. Less damagingly,Under the Ceiling s (Nidalal-Debs, 2005) protagonist, Marwan, earns his living as a lmmaker, hisfootage bleeding across the narrative and prompting many of the moviesashbacks. Later into the story, Marwan makes a start on a tourist docu-mentary about Syria. His nancial pragmatism triggers debates about thesocial position of the artist, ones that are also raised in relation to his friendAhmad, a politically committed poet who rushes to the front in the Leba-nese Civil War, leaving behind, unbeknownst to him, a pregnant Lina whois then obliged by her family, against her will, to abort the baby.

These instances overwhelmingly induce, through their content and style,a sense of the weight and labor of representa tion; the intellectual and techni-

cal toil involved in producing such expressions is not allowed to escape theviewer. If the net result of so many lms the world over is the effacement of the effort required to create them, all in the name of uninterrupted enter-tainment, Syrian public-sector movies achieve something different: a respect for work and a contemplation of its politics within Arab socialism and, nowa-days, Arab insurrection. Regardless of what is to be lost or gained in Syriasimpending future, there is something striking and inspiring in these moviesrefusal of the casualized economy of lmmaking that is dominant almost everywhere else, where free labor (such as the internship) is an essential start-

ing point and each year people in the industry die in accidents caused byextreme fatigue.In sharp relief sits Egypts Media Production City. In its last throes of

public asset construction, the government built what was then known asFilm City. Completed in 1973, the site encompasses fourteen studios, repletewith complex permanent sets, workshops of all descriptions, color laborato-ries, postproduction suites, and a training college, as well as hotels and a sports club. Long evacuated from this space, however, is the costly protec-tionism of the Nasserite public sector. This absence greatly impacts the

types of the cinema made here and throughout Egypt more generally. Asin Syria, the work of the production team is never smoothed away, but thedeviating end results stand for revealing differences in motivation. Musicalscores are lush and all-pervading; zooms and mobile cameras proliferatewhen static shots would sufce; acting can be scene-stealing rather thanmea sured. It is almost as if each lmmaking department would rather risk jeopardizing the overall coherence of the lm in order to overload their con-tribution with conspicuous displays of skill. The effect is one of an orchestra entirely composed of virtuosos, an aesthetic, it has to be noted, beloved of

many fans of Egyptian cinema.The Embassy in the Building (Amr Arafa, 2005),for instance, is launched by a throng of spectacular swirling helicopter shots.Not to be outdone, the editing makes its presence felt through languorousdissolves rather than more-expected straight cuts.The Yacoubian Building (Marwan Hamed, 2006) presumes to start with a pastiche of grainy archival

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documentary footage, but the dgety cameras, aerial shots, and drawn-out dissolves belie the generic markers that the lm professes to mimic at thismoment. Even sequences that would appear fairly straightforward in script form take on a baroque ambience. The establishing scene in

Birds of Dark- ness (Sherif Arafa, 1995) can function as one typical example out of possiblehundreds here. Three characters are introduced within the connes of theprotagonists humble apartment. While the diegesis maintains a simple clar-ity at this point, the lighting creates elaborate shadows, sheen on pinpointedcorners of the room and the actors faces, halos around their hair. Anglesand levels interchange intoxicatingly; deep focus and frames within framesabound. On the face of it, these few minutes would not seem out of place ina Syrian movie, save for the fact that very few of the multiple elements of mise-

en- scne that have been underscored arise again as noteworthy plot hinges.They bear little, if any, symbolic import. The stylistic inclinations of thiscinema instead come across as a deluge of calling cards from lmmaking personnel desperately trying to stand out in an extremely competitive mar-ketplace. To add to this instability, Media Production City, where movieslike this were shot, now lives life as a Special Economic Zone, exempting investors from tax and custom duty and enticing them with notoriously lowwages, very little job security, and heavy, often coercive discouragement fromunionization.36 Within Syrian accounting, monetary gain is less of a motivat-

ing factor than avoiding these forms of exploitation.In establishing a not-for-prot lm industry, Syria has also formulatedtrading practices that contradict the dogma and undermine the commercialdominance of the capitalist-inclined nations. Syrian cinemas value as anindustry and as a set of texts dwells, additionally, in the highly apposite asser-tions it makes about how ideas and skills can circulate via its representa tionalpredilections and its modes of dissemination. No one expects these lms torecoup their outlay costs, although it is crucial to note that many have beenextremely popular in their day, withThe Leopard , The Extras , and Stars in Broad

Daylight running for weeks throughout the country. Socialism organizes what these lms discuss and how they are manufactured, but it also dictates howif at allthey are seen. Only two or three are commercially available. Even inSyria, the DVD stores do not carry them. Sometimes even lmmakers donot possess copies of their own movies and the NFO is cagey about allowing study screenings. It is easier to source ofcial Ministry of Culture publicationsabout these lms than it is to actually watch them. Nidal al-Debs explains:The National Film Orga niza tion owns the lms and does not care to makeprints or distribute them. It nds no need for that. Why do it? They will simply

be screened at festivals and that will be enough. Syrian cinema makes noprot anyway, so why strike more than one print?37 A fair few movies canbe viewed on video at the National Library, but these are in ropy condition,often demagnetized or missing a reel in the transfer process. While a matrixof spectatorship once existed between various second world and nonaligned

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nations, this is now drastically diminished, meaning that new Syrian lmsare more likely to air only at the Damascus Film Festival, and then neveragain resurface in a theater. Positioned thus, they unequivocally refuse that cornerstone of capitalism: the maximization of prot. In practice, the unavail-ability of the movies demands that we detach from our standard, predictableattr ibutions of value when it comes to cinema, be they commercially orsocially focused, and confront the elements within life that evade such tidyconscriptions.38 Our attention can then be redirected from the value of theend product toward its mode of manufacture, which is perhaps a more prom-ising site for political action, and denitely a motivating factor for politicalunrest.

The dual scarcity and (in capitalistic terms) squander endemic to Syr-

ian cinema merits much more academic contemplation than it has hereto-fore attracted. The oeuvre and its inaccessibility provide an object lesson inhow impossible circulation can be for material that is not primarily com-modied, that does not function hand in glove with the oligarchic structureof global lm distribution. The atypical character of Syrian cinema insteadcoaxes us toward urgent questions about the continuity of not-for-prot cin-ema and the political ideals it might harbor in a post-Soviet or, perhapsmore optimistically, radically anti-neoliberal age. Bypassing the dominant networks of access in the name of socialism, this material becomes the prop-

erty of everyone, but no one.Syrian ethics are all the more poignant, perhaps, at a time when the logicof prot has not brought forth noticeable nancial gains for Egyptian cinema.Industry insiders claim that privatized, commercial lm production loses out by the day to television and illegal copying, leading ofcial distributors tohawk their own DVDs outside rst-run theaters in the hope of gaining someof the prots lost to pirates.39 Although Egyptian movies are cheap to make(less than a couple million dollars per production), the returns are small andprivate investment scant. It therefore remains to be seen what will happen to

the increasingly post-Fordist Egyptian lm industry. In the meantime, manyworkers are trying their luck in television and music videos instead.If the 2011 protests around Maspero (Egypts state media production

headquarters near Tahrir Square) are testament to anything, it is a mistrust of all traditional media outlets. The governments response has been to swathethe building in razor wire and armed guards. And, in turn, homeless com-munities, displaced from their lodgings by landlords fearing their real estatewill be expropriated by a new regime, have taken up residence in tents closeto the fences to protest the lack of affordable housing in the capital.40 Amid

all this, can the private sectorwithin housing or the mediatruly weigh inas a revolutionary alternative to state-run operations, especially given thedevastating impact of divestiture upon the country? There are good reasonsto be leery of how commercial corporations and foreign agencies alike havetrumpeted their potential to change things for the better. Here it should be

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noted that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)has long been an avid supporter of the deregulation of Egyptian media as,all the while, the United States climbed upward to become Egypts most prof-itable import partner.41 Freedom of speech and trade are wont to get tangledhere; liberalism with liberalization. In April 2011, Maspero employees oncemore voiced dissatisfaction with the supercial and cosmetic restructuring of their institutions proffered as a tokenistic response to the January and Feb-ruary uprisings. They also denounced the biased, progovernment coverageof the ensuing events. Among their demands, the media workers stipulated a minimum wage of $336.59.42 Fair working conditions remain a paramount concern, something not only latterly acknowledged by the IMF but also con-spicuous to the massive Syrian state security sector. At the time of this writ-

ing, the military and secret police are themselves ghting for the survival of their jobs, at war with their own people to protect their employment security,even as it is insured by an unpopular dictatorship. Labor rights, as the SyrianNational Film Orga niza tions output insists, must remain center frame asthese revolutions evolvewith respect to not just on the ground lived experi-ences but also their international afliations, their economics, and the valuesascribed to their results.

Kay Dickinson teaches in the Media and Communications Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Off Key: When Film and MusicWont Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008) and has published on Arab cinema in journals such as Screen, Camera Obscura,and Screening the Past.She has edited three anthologies, including, with Thomas Burkhalter and Benjamin Har- bert,The Arab Avant-Garde (Wesleyan Press, forthcoming) and is currently nish- ing a second monograph entitled Arab Cinema Travels: Syria, Palestine, Dubaiand Beyond.

Notes

1. International Monetary Fund, Mideast Unrest Shows Need to ConsiderBigger Picture, www.imf .org /external/pubs/ft /survey/so/2011/car040811b.htm(accessed May 4, 2011).

2. Solidarity Center, Justice for All: The Struggle for Workers Rights in Egypt (Wash-ington, DC: Solidarity Center, 2010), 14.

3. All of these statistics were gleaned from: Central Intelligence Agency, TheWorld Fact Book: Egypt, www.cia .gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/eg .html; and Central Intelligence Agency, The World Fact Book: Syria,www.cia .gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sy.html (bothaccessed May 4, 2010).

4. Interview with Mohammad Malas, December 16, 2009.5. Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book: Egypt and World Fact Book:Syria.

6. Bath Party, The Social Policy of the Party (Article 41, The Culture of theSociety, Number 3),The Bath Party Constitution , www.baath-party.org /old/

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constitution6.htm, available in English with a different translation via: www.baath-party.org /eng /constitution6.htm (accessed December 27, 2010).

7. Derek Hopwood,Syria, 1945 1986: Politics and Society (London: Unwin Hyman,1988), 110111; Efraim Karsh,Soviet Policy towards Syria since 1970 (London: Mac-millan, 1991), 54.8. Rasha Salti, Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema, inInsights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers , ed.Rasha Salti (New York: AIC Film Editions/Rattapallax Press, 2006), 4.

9. Interview with Nidal al-Debs, April 17, 2010. 10. Interview with Mohammad Malas, December 16, 2009.11. Marsha Pripstein Posusney,Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions, and

Economic Restructuring (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 7072. 12. See Heba Handoussa, Crisis and Challenge: Prospects for the 1990s, in

Employment and Structural Adjustment: Egypt in the 1990s , ed. Heba Handoussa

and Gillian Potter (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1991), 4. 13. Solidarity Center, Justice for All , 13; Handoussa, Crisis and Challenge, 45. 14. Again, this volley of statistics derives from the Central Intelligence Agency,

World Fact Book: Egypt and World Fact Book: Syria. 15. Richard Pena, Foreword, inInsights into Syrian Cinema , 15. 16. Mette Hjort, On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism, inWorld Cine-

mas, Transnational Perspectives , ed. Nataa D urovicov and Kathleen Newman(London: Routledge, 2010), 17.

17. Abdelkebir Khatibi,Maghreb Pluriel (Paris: Denol, 1983), 1718 (my translation). 18. A Call from Syrian Filmmakers to Filmmakers Everywhere,Facebook , April

29, 2011, www.facebook.com/notes/syrian-lmmakers-call/a -call-from-syrian-lmmakers -to -lmmakers -everywhere - %D9 %86 %D8 %AF %D8 %A7 %D8%A1 - %D9 %85 %D9 %86 - %D8 %B3 %D9 %8A %D9 %86 %D9 %85 %D8 %A7%D8 %A6 %D9 %8A %D9 %8A %D9 %86 - %D8 %B3 %D9 %88 %D8 %B1 %D9%8A%D9%8A%D9%86/126777020733985 (accessed July 25, 2011).

19. Geri vensen and Pl Sletten,The Syrian Labor Market: Findings from the 2003 Unemployment Survey (Oslo, Norway: Fafo 2007), 3031.

20. Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book: Syria; Central Agency forPublic Mobilization and Statistics, Arab Republic of Egypt: Labor ForceSearch Result for the Third Quarter, November 21, 2010, www.capmas.gov.eg /news.aspx?nid=503&lang =2 (accessed May 4, 2011).

21. Lawrence Wright, Disillusioned, inInsights into Syrian Cinema , 46. 22. In Egypt, the average government worker receives $8.58/day, other public sec-

tor employees $7.88, followed by the private sector mean of $5.45; CentralAgency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, Arab Republic of Egypt: LaborForce Search Result.

23. Emporiki Bank, Country Trading Proles: SyriaLabor Market, www.emporikitrade .com /uk /countries -trading -profiles /syria / labor -market (accessed December 22, 2010).

24. Solidarity Center, Justice for All , 14; Central Agency for Public Mobilizationand Statistics Arab Republic of Egypt: Labor Force Search Result.

25. Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union, How ManyHours Are You Doing Today? www.bectu.org .uk/news/gen/ng0217.html(accessed December 28, 2010); Solidarity Center, Justice for All , 14.

26. March du Film,Focus 2009: World Film Market Trends (Cannes: Festival deCannes, 2009), 67.

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27. Uncited quotation of Riad Shaya, sourced from Mahmud Qasim,Syrian Fiction Films (Damascus, Syria: Publications of the Ministry of Culture, 2003), 250.

28. vensen and Sletten,Syrian Labor Market , 94. 29. Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book: Syria. 30. Oussama Mohammad, Tea Is Coffee, Coffee Is Tea: Freedom in a Closed Room,in Insights into Syrian Cinema , 157.31. Interview with Nidal al-Debs, April 17, 2010. 32. Interview with Mohammad Malas, December 16, 2009. 33. vensen and Sletten,Syrian Labor Market , 47. 34. Samir Zikra, A Cinema of Dreams and ... Bequest, inInsights into Syrian Cinema ,

147148. 35. Interview with Nidal al-Debs, April 17, 2010. 36. Solidarity Center, Justice for All , 49.37. Interview with Nidal al-Debs, April 17, 2010.

38. For a full examination of this idea and the repercussions of waste of this order,see Georges Bataille,The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume One (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

39. During a panel discussion entitled Variety-DIFF Spotlight: Arab Talent, ArabProducers, held at the Dubai International Film Festival on December 12,2009, Sheikah Al-Zain Al-Sabah (Ea gle Vision Media Group), Georges Schou-cair (About Productions), Rita Dagher (Yalla Productions), and Layaly Badr(ART) all concurred over these readings of the current state of affairs withinEgyptian cinema.

40. Nicole Salazar, Egyptians Protest Evictions after Losing Their HomesAl Ahram

Online , July 6, 2011, http://pulitzercenter.org /articles/egypt -homeless-protest -evictions-housing -mubarak-landlord-tenant (accessed August 4, 2011).41. As anecdotal evidence, the International Association of Media and Communi-

cation Research conference of 2006, which was held at the American Univer-sity in Cairo (a private English medium institution), witnessed many papers bylocal academics strongly advocating the privatization of the media industries.Their talks were delivered from lecterns and using equipment supplied by USAID,as the obtrusive stickers on them revealed. Data on Egypts trading partnersprovided by Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book: Egypt.

42. Ekram Ibrahim, The Old Regime Still Rules Egypt State TV: Employees Pro-test,Al Ahram Online , April 4, 2011, http://english.ahram.org .eg /NewsContent /1 /4 /9223 /Egypt /Media /The -old -regime -still -r ules -Egypt -stat e -TV-Employee.aspx (accessed May 7, 2011).

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