Films can be a lot of things: A form of mass
communication; a means of personal expression;
or a business, big or small… depending on
how many superheroes you cram into one movie.
But films can also create, clarify, or reinforce
a national identity.
In many places outside of the United States
and Europe, cinema arrived relatively late,
and often at a time of political upheaval.
Filmmakers used their movies to tell their
own stories and establish new, collective identities.
Although the industries of Africa, South America,
and the Middle East relatively small,
these films and filmmakers are
vitally important both to local audiences
and to the diversity of world cinema.
[Opening Music Plays]
African cinema is generally divided between
North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
The biggest film producer in North Africa
is Egypt, and Egyptian cinema has dominated
the Arab world for decades.
Egyptian cinema’s “golden age” ran from
the 1940s to the 1960s.
In this era, the studios produced Hollywood-style
genre movies and prestige dramas.
In 1952, the Egyptian monarchy was overthrown,
and a new military regime was ushered in by
a charismatic leader, Gamal Abdel
Nasser.
Nasser’s government nationalized the film
industry in 1966 and began exercising significant
control over what movies got made.
Many filmmakers felt stifled, unable to produce
films even vaguely critical of the current regime.
But Egyptian filmmakers still found ways to
produce classics at the time, from Al Haram
by Henry Barakat to Shadi Abdel Salam’s
The Night of Counting the Years.
In the 1970s, Egyptian cinema began to find
a balance between politics and entertainment.
And during this time, their first internationally-recognized
director emerged.
Youssef Chahine was born
in 1926.
After college, he convinced his parents to
send him to Hollywood to study acting.
He then returned to Egypt and directed his
first feature film at just 23, a movie called
Daddy Amin... who said actors can't direct?
His second film, Nile Boy, was invited to
the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.
And his third, The Blazing Sun, introduced
the world to Omar Sharif, an actor who would
go on to international stardom in English
language films like Lawrence of Arabia and
Doctor Zhivago.
But Chahine’s major achievement was an autobiographical trilogy, made between 1978 and 1990,
which traced the social history of modern Egypt.
In the 1980s, as government censors relaxed
a bit, several women directors graduated from
the Egyptian Film Institute and began making
movies with explicitly feminist themes.
This marked a new and vital phase of Egyptian
production, as Asmaa El-Bakry directed
1991’s Beggars and Proud Ones
and Inas Al-Degheidy
released Lady Killers the following year.
The Gulf War in 1991 and the emergence of
satellite television brought the Egyptian
film industry to a near-standstill.
But by the mid-2000s, domestic production
had rebounded and continues to thrive to this day.
Algeria is home to another significant North
African film industry.
After a vicious war and winning their independence
from France in 1962, Algerian movies were
mostly what they called “freedom-fighter
cinema.”
These were films about the struggle to escape
colonial rule.
It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that
an Algerian film broke out onto the world stage.
Mohammed Lakdar-Hamima’s Chronicle of the
Years of Fire depicted one family’s epic
journey through the end of the colonial period.
The film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1975.
Beginning in 1992, a militant Islamic insurgency
took root in Algeria, and the ensuing violence
has forced most Algerian filmmakers to live
and work abroad.
Many contemporary films focus on characters
that have left Algeria and struggle with their
identities as expatriates.
Rachid Bouchareb’s 2010 film Outside the Law, for instance, deals
with three Algerian brothers living in France
between 1945 and 1962, during the Algerian
war for independence.
Now, one notable film-producing country in
sub-Saharan Africa is Senegal, another former
French colony.
And the undisputed father of Senegalese film
is Ousmane Sembène.
A veteran of World War II, Sembène moved
to France in 1947 and experienced racism while
working in a car factory and at the shipping
port of Marseille. He turned these experiences into his first
French-language novel, The Black Docker, in
1956.
And he would return time and again to themes
of isolation, persecution, and loss of identity
in his films.
After studying filmmaking in the Soviet Union,
Sembène returned to Senegal to make a twenty-minute
short called Borom Sarret in 1963, commonly
considered the first indigenous black African film.
Sembène’s next film, Black Girl, stands
as one of the first anti-colonial films to
come out of Africa and gain international
recognition.
The story follows a young Senegalese woman
working as a nanny for a French family in
the capital city of Dakar.
After accepting an offer to return to France
with them, she finds herself disrespected
and abused, surrounded by a culture that refuses
to accept her.
And at the end of the film, her story ends
in tragedy.
Sembène would go on to make films right up
to his death in 2007, wrestling with complex
issues of identity and culture in colonial
and post-colonial Africa.
Other African countries have their own vibrant
filmmaking traditions.
Angola established a film school in 1977,
two years after it won independence from Portugal.
The country of Burkina Faso is home to the
Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television,
the largest African film event in the world.
And Nigeria has a vital film culture with
its own star system, making it the third most
valuable film industry in the world.
Now, another region that boasts a long history
of post-colonial and indigenous cinema is
Latin America.
Although many Latin American film industries
have been dominated by films from the United
States, Cuba and Brazil have maintained some
autonomy.
Cuba produced about 150 feature films prior
to the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
But almost immediately after Fidel Castro
took over, the film industry became an arm
of his government.
He founded a national film institute and commissioned
films through the National Board of Culture.
Like many leaders before him, Castro understood
the power cinema had to influence masses of
people, many of whom were poor and illiterate.
Most established filmmakers fled or were pushed
out, so the revolutionary era of Cuban cinema
began with a handful of people with little
filmmaking experience and some old equipment.
Over the next two decades, they would produce
over 100 feature films, 900 documentary shorts,
and 1,300 weekly newsreels. That's a lot of content!
By the 1970s, Cuban cinema’s infrastructure
of domestic production and distribution were
in place, and the films got more sophisticated.
Genres and styles multiplied, encompassing everything from Sergio Giral’s experimental Marxist work The Other
Francisco,
to Sara Gómez’s One Way or Another, a fusion of Hollywood style and avant-garde social critique.
But the 1990s hit Cuban cinema hard.
With the fall of communism in Europe, Castro’s
government had few allies besides China and
North Korea.
Movie production fell off a cliff, dropping
from about 10 feature films per year to just
two or three.
And political repression got worse, so many
filmmakers left the country to live in exile
throughout Latin America.
Eventually, a combination of factors led to
a resurgence of film production in Cuba: like
digital technology making production less
expensive, coupled with relaxing tensions
with the United States.
Now, the other major Latin American film industry
hails from Brazil.
In 1924, the majority of films screened in
Brazil came from Hollywood, like the rest
of Latin America.
President Getùlio Vargas tried to end the
dominance of Hollywood cinema by establishing
quotas for local film production in 1932,
which continued into the 1950s.
But that didn’t do much.
The highly charged political atmosphere of
the 1960s was the real catalyst for change.
Inspired by the aesthetic of the Italian Neo-Realists
and the low-budget filmmaking techniques of
the French New Wave, a group of Brazilian
filmmakers created cinema novo or new cinema.
The cinema novo directors made films that
deliberately subverted the norms of classical
narrative cinema, in direct response to what
they saw as the colonization of Brazilian
cinema by Hollywood.
The group’s unofficial leader, Glauber Rocha,
made Black God, White Devil in 1964.
It’s about a poor ranch hand who’s cheated
out of his wages, kills his boss, and goes
on the run with his wife and a violent, apocalyptic
preacher.
There’s a fearlessness to the film, and
a rejection of a traditional moral code.
Nelson Pereira dos Santos made Barren Lives in 1963, another
key film in the early cinema novo movement,
and one invited to the Cannes Film Festival.
His film tells the story of an impoverished
family trying to survive in Brazil’s drought-ridden
northeastern plain.
This focus on low-budget productions that
examine the socio-political landscape caught
on in other Latin American countries.
Indigenous filmmakers found inspiration to
tell their stories without relying on traditional
film studios or government assistance.
And while their films might not screen much
internationally, filmmakers from Argentina
and Chile to Colombia and Peru have used this
model to forge their own cinematic identities.
Now, one of the major players in Middle
Eastern cinema is Iran, whose domestic market
was also dominated by U.S. movies for years,
until the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
The first Iranian-produced film to break out
internationally was Dariush Mehrjui’s
1969 film The Cow, telling the story
of a rural villager whose prized cow dies.
Mehrjui’s film was banned by the pre-revolutionary
Iranian government.
They wanted films that would project a modern
image to the rest of the world, not ones that
examined the day-to-day life of the downtrodden.
Nevertheless, The Cow went on to win top prizes
at the Chicago and Venice Film Festivals and
set the template for the Iranian New Wave.
Much like the French New Wave and Brazil’s
cinema novo, the Iranian New Wave produced
films that explored the lives of ordinary
people, especially those facing hardship and persecution.
After the Revolution, the government of Ayatollah Khomeini
exercised strict theocratic censorship over
Iranian film, decimating production and prompting
many established filmmakers to flee the country.
The Iranian film industry finally began to
recover in the 1990s, as filmmakers fell into
two main camps: the “populist cinema”
that made commercial entertainment; and the
“art cinema” that produced more personal,
esoteric films.
One of the major figures of recent Iranian
cinema is Abbas Kiarostami, whose film A Taste
of Cherry won the top prize at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1997.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 2001
film Kandahar made a Time magazine list of
the top 100 movies of all time.
And Asghar Farhadi has
won two Best Foreign Language Oscars for his
elliptical domestic mysteries: A Separation
from 2011, and The Salesman from 2016.
So although post-Revolution Iranian cinema
took a while to achieve serious global recognition,
it has since emerged as a narrative and stylistic
innovator on the world cinema stage, influencing
filmmakers and inspiring filmgoers around
the globe.
Today we explored more world cinema, beginning
with the post-colonial cinema of Africa.
We talked about the development of Latin American
cinema through the lens of Cuba and Brazil.
And we touched on the vital filmmaking tradition
of Iran established during the last 25 years.
Next time, we’ll jump into the strange and
exciting world of experimental and documentary filmmaking.
It's gonna get weird... and real!
Crash Course Film History is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check
out a playlist of their latest amazing shows,
like It's Okay to be Smart, PBS Idea Channel, and Deep Look.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of these nice Cannes Grand Prixs and our
amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.
