Film Depictions of Arabs
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Edward Said and others write about the issue of Orientalism, the way the East is represented and viewed by the West. The term "Orient" signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning and Western consciousness, and the Orient can be seen as a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West. Orientalism is the image of the "Orient" expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship and as seen in popular media during any given era. The way Orientalism is currently treated in the media suggests a number of villainous stereotypes and prevailing attitudes in the West regarding Arabs and others. The old idea of the Yellow Peril was used when Asians were seen as prime villains, while more recently it is the Arab that has become the target of choice. Hollywood deals to a great extent with stereotypes in order to convey aspects of character in an immediate way in order to draw the viewer into a film and advance the plot quickly. Because of this tendency, certain social attitudes regarding race and ethnicity are perpetuated from generation to generation. The treatment of Arabs and Muslims in American films is a case in point, and from the beginning of the American film industry, the Arab has served as both an exotic character and a villain. The use of the Arab as a villain seems to have increased in recent years in a way that shows that Americans have an antipathy to Muslims, fueled, no doubt
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lack Sunday (1977), Delta Force (1986), and recently True Lies (1994) (Quinn 19).
These changed manifestatons of Orientalism show that certain things about the treatment of Arabs in American films remain relatively constant. For one thing, whatever the specific treatment given to the Arab people in these films, little attention is paid to the reality of Arabic life or Arab culture. The image of Arabia that abounds in these films consists of a relatively few clich?s, such as picturesque alleys, teeming markets, and palm groves surrounded by sand dunes. Since P?p? le Moko (1936), the Casbah in Algiers has been seen as a hideout for crooks and gangsters, and cities such as Beirut, Tangiers, Cairo, and Casablanca are seen again and again as capitals of vice, crime, and corruption. Filmmakers tend to treat all Arab people as if they were the same, and such distinctions as language, dress, and habits are ignored or confused:
The casual way in which Western filmmakers appropriate Arab landscapes, characters and stories and reshape them as they please in a rubbishy celluloid Orient is evidence of a longstanding unscrupulousness (Fahdel 26).
Compare the reality of Saudi Arabia with Saudi Arabia on film. Although Saudi Arabia wa
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Approximate Word count = 2754
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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