A2Q - Issue One

Orientalism and the Image of Arab Cinema in QNL’s Exhibition, Arab Cinema Posters: Art and Memory

by Anusheh Zaman On November 25, 2020, The Qatar National Library (QNL) premiered Arab Cinema Posters: Art and Memory. The exhibition showcases a variety of 20th-century Arab Cinema posters from the Library's heritage collection. Such posters placed inside and outside the cinema halls were the primary advertising tool for films. However, more than just showing the plot or advertising the movie, film posters exhibit a soft power of reflecting cultural and societal representations.

The exhibition highlights how these posters reflected Arab societies and contestes the negative representation enforced by Orientalism.

Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said was the founder of post-colonial studies whose work redefined the concept of Orientalism. The Orient refers to cultures and peoples outside the Western lens of Western culture. Orientalism refers to the West’s selective, prejudiced seeing of the East heavily influenced by the "Us vs. Them" mentality of European imperialists. Under the auspices of 20th Century colonization, the development of stereotypes and misrepresentation simultaneously came about. Some of that misrepresentation still looms over Arab and Islamic societies today.

Some common Western depictions of said cultures 36 A2Q