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Censorship as Enabling: Importing, distributing and translating foreign films in the Middle East

Abstract:

While there is evidence of growing interest in the Arab world in the scholarly examination of the relationship between manipulation, censorship and audiovisual translation, this examination remains partial in scope as, whether in the context of cinema or television, writers have tended to consider the products of translation and the decisions of the translator in isolation from the broader system that controls the complex process of preparing audiovisual content for exhibition. In other words, there has been a focus on product, effectively ignoring key shaping processes related to the importation, monitoring, and distribution of audiovisual content in the Arab world. This thesis seeks to address that deficit by offering a more holistic analysis of the current system of foreign film importation, selection, filtering, translation, distribution, censorship, and exhibition in cinemas in the Arab Middle East, with special reference to Jordan.

Accordingly, the thesis contextualises censorship in the Arab Middle East within the process of translation and, within that, the correspondingly prescribed role of the film translator within the system of foreign film exhibition. The analysis of the interrelationship between the various processes that make up this system enables the discussion to focus on the various agents - mainly the exhibitor, the translators, and the classifiers - who together constitute this system. This analysis of their various censorial practices in terms of their relationship to wider political and religious strictures, as well as cultural and societal beliefs and assumptions, facilitates an understanding of censorship that goes beyond the conventional sense of the practice as negative prohibition, which is the predominant perception of censorship in the exiting literature, but rather investigates the extent to which it underpins and enables film exhibition in the Middle East at all. It is not that this thesis condones censorship in its own right, but that it recognizes the work of these agents in terms of ensuring the survival and development of screen culture in the Middle East. In that respect, the discussion of the entire system of foreign film exhibition is compared to the approach of posibilismo which was adopted by some of the playwrights of Francoist Spain who opted to engage with the censor rather than simply fall silent. There is a parallel here that seeks to provide a new way of understanding how censorship is implemented in the context of foreign film translation and exhibition in cinemas in the Arab Middle East. This understanding is informed by a series of interviews carried out in Jordan and Lebanon between December 2017 and October 2018. The interviewees are agents involved in the processes of the selection, filtering, importation, translation, distribution, and classification of foreign films to be screened in Arab Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan.​