Abstract: This article argues for the existence of a genre of films termed the eastern that deals with the Middle East. Subgenres of the eastern (Arabian nights, sheik, foreign legion, foreign intrigue, and terrorist) vary in the degree of identification allowed the character of the Arab other, reflecting the political-historical context of their development, yet they share a number of narrative tropes that function as unifying attributes of the category as a whole.
In the beginning was the sword . . .
_An executioner leads his prisoners to a square and chops off their heads with a huge scimitar, then places the heads in a basket. As he dozes off, the heads pop out of the basket and back onto their rightful owners. The reheaded prisoners escape but not before giving their executioner a taste of his own medicine by slicing him in half with his own scimitar. The short film ends as the detached torso of the executioner frantically searches for his lower half._
This scene in _The Terrible Turkish Executioner_ (Georges Méliès, 1905) provides one of the earliest narrative depictions of the Middle East on film, yet it contains a series of narrative elements that can be found in most films made subsequently in Hollywood about the Middle East and its Muslim inhabitants, be they Turks, Arabs, or Iranians: imprisonment or slavery, mutilation or the threat of amputation with scimitars, and rescue. Subsequent films in this early period 1 added to the inventory of narrative devices and character types in the eastern, mainly by adopting them from earlier traditions of popular and literary Orientalism found in plays, operas, songs, novels, and the like. These elements included abduction and enslavement (of women) in a harem or imprisonment (of men) in jail; identity twists; and the depiction of the East as a place of both terror and redemption for sins. Hollywood's Orient thus shared many features with the Orient of the popular imagination, but its features became reduced and refined in the crucible of repeated reworkings until any film about the Middle East shared a limited set of elements.
Within the first two decades of cinema, a film tradition developed, which I will call the eastern film genre, which continues until today. . . .
In general . . . the earliest easterns are marked by the integration of the Arab characters into the story, as good, bad, or both. However, in later subgenres, the Arab characters are marginalized and their role is restricted to that of antagonist. Aside from the purely eastern Arabian nights type, the Arab character is marginalized, for instance, in sheik films by having the ostensible Arab hero turn out to be European, while in the foreign legion type, the eastern female love interest is abandoned rather early on, her place taken either by a marginalized European female "tramp/vamp," as played by Marlene Dietrich in _Morocco_ (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), or dropped entirely, as in the many _Beau Geste_ remakes and their numerous spin-offs.
In a subtype that developed primarily in the 1930s and 1940s, the foreign intrigue film, exemplified first in _Algiers_ (John Cromwell, 1938), based on _Pepe le Moko_ (Julien Duvivier, 1936), the marginalization of the Arab character is markedly increased. The romantic relationship, if there is one, is typically between a European man and a European woman, and the Arab characters are relegated to peripheral roles, if they appear at all, as in _Cairo_ (W. S. Van Dyke, 1942), _Casablanca_ (Michael Curtiz, 1943), and _Sirocco_ (Curtis Bernhardt, 1951), among others.
This trend is reversed in the terrorist subgenre, which began to appear in the 1970s. Here, the Arab is almost without exception antagonistic and his pure evil is counterpoised with the pure good of a European hero, or more often an American, as in _True Lies_ (James Cameron, 1994) and _Executive Decision_ (Stuart Baird, 1996).
In essence, then, the development has been away from identification with Arab characters as heroes, heroines, or love interests toward "disidentification" with them as antagonists, or "unseen" enemies, as in John Ford's _The Lost Patrol_ (1934); as faceless attackers crawling on their bellies, as in _Exodus_ (Otto Preminger, 1960), _Four Feathers_ (Don Sharp, 1977), and _Overseas_ (Brigitte Rouan, France, 1990); or as Nazi consorts, as in _A Yank in Libya_ (Arthur Herman, 1942), _Cairo, Action in Arabia_ (Leonide Moguy, 1944), and _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ (Steven Spielberg, 1981).
This development from "identification with" to "disidentification against" the Arab other contrasts with the development of the character of the Native American in the typical American western. Westerns produced throughout the first half of the twentieth century unerringly portrayed the Native American as an antagonistic other, adopting the representation of the "red Indian" provided by the pulp western novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were fed by news accounts of the Indian wars on the frontier. This film tradition bypassed for the most part an earlier tradition that viewed Native Americans as "noble savages" who were suffering a somewhat tragic fate at the inevitable onslaught of "civilization." Hollywood's view of the Native American other began to change slowly, most notably with the appearance of _Broken Arrow_ (Delmar Daves, 1950), until, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, well after the genre had hit its prime, the most popular westerns were those in which Native Americans played sympathetic characters, usually by having the hero be either a half-breed or a "white man" who "becomes an Indian," as in _Little Big Man_ (Arthur Penn, 1970), _A Man Called Horse_ (Elliot Silverstein, 1970), and, most notably, _Dances with Wolves_ (Kevin Costner, 1990). 12 Thus, in its depiction of its ethnic other, the western followed a course that was the exact opposite of that of the eastern: as the Native American moved slowly from the role of antagonist and "savage" enemy toward that of protagonist or at least sympathetic other, the Arab other moved from being a (sometime) protagonist and sympathetic other to being an antagonist and savage terrorist.
There are several possible explanations for these shifts in the "identification potential" of non-Europeans in Hollywood films. I will mention only the most obvious one at this point. In both cases, the antagonistic other represented a real or a recent threat to the political interests of the United States. 13 The cinematic representation of the Native American as antagonistic may be tied directly to the effects on public opinion of the Indian Wars, in which the armed resistance of some Indian tribes to the theft of their land and the unilateral abrogation of treaties by the U.S. government led to clashes resulting at times in casualties among the white settlers who were party to the theft. These clashes were represented to the public at large as massacres, and were exploited to increase public support for military campaigns. As the "Indian menace" was subdued and gradually faded into history, the Native American began to reacquire the status of "noble savage" and with the advent of countercultural movements in the 1960s became an icon for environmentalists and "back-to-nature" proponents, as well as a symbol of the ravages of the colonialist-capitalist system.
The Arab followed the opposite trajectory. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Arabs were not regarded as a threat to the interests of the United States. In fact, they supported the Allied cause against the Ottoman Empire. Zionist settlement and claims in Palestine, however, led to greater resistance among the Arab population to the loss of their land and sovereignty, and with the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 resulted in several wars between Israel and neighboring Arab countries. Yet, while the Arab continued to haunt the American imagination as a feared (or at least an exotic) ethnic other, it did so from the margins. It was only when Arabs began to threaten American interests directly during the 1973 oil embargo, following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, that the Arab (and later, the Muslim) emerged as a bona fide threat to American interests. This event, together with the expansion after 1971 of the PLO's guerrilla/terrorist campaign against the Israelis, led to the Arab being represented as embodying the antithesis of Western values and rationality in the popular narratives of films and television.
In sum, the histories of the eastern and the western converge in that both genres exploit an image of a non-European other, but they diverge based on when this other functions as a sympathetic character with whom the audience may identify. For the western, the Native American starts out as antagonistic but ends up as sympathetic, while the reverse is true of the eastern. In addition, these genres intersect since they both deal with a locale that is "elsewhere" or liminal, other than the site of the dominant ideology (for the western, this is the East Coast of the United States, while for the eastern, it is Western Europe and the United States). However, they differ in the orientation of this locale. For the western, the locale, although it is "not-East Coast" is still considered "America," while for the eastern, the locale has always been "not-America."
The genres also share a point of convergence in the nature of the historical event that forms the backdrop against which the development of the genres took place-namely, the dispossession of a native people of their land: for the western, the Native American; for the eastern, the Palestinian. Yet they differ as to when this dispossession took place vis-à-vis the development of the genre: for the western, it had already happened, while the eastern developed in the context of the dispossession, and its final subtype (the terrorist film) reflects the Palestinian resistance to this dispossession. The eastern genre is, in essence, an inversion of the western (hence the name), with both genres encapsulating in their development a record of the transcendent ideology of their times. . . .
<http://faculty.wm.edu/jceise/eastern%20clips/Wild%20East%20Cinema%20Journal.pdf>, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cinema_journal/v041/41.4eisele.html>, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cinema_journal/v041/41.4eisele.pdf> *****
John Eisele: <http://faculty.wm.edu/jceise/index.html> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>