In the year 1999, an estimated one and a half billion viewing hours of moving images were produced with a substantial part of it being for cinema and television (Cherchi Usai 2001, 111). Some twenty-five years later, this number has exploded due to developments in the accessibility and affordability of recording devices and editing tools along with the rise of media platforms for user-generated content such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. In this context, the often proclaimed “death of the cinema” has also proven to be an end that never stops ending (Bellour 2012, 13) as cinema continues to expand, remediate, and prolong its lifespan by incorporating its forms and techniques into numerous new media environments (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Casetti 2015; Elsaesser 2016; Casetti and Pinotti 2020). Nonetheless, moving images are no longer just associated with cinema but operationalized for various purposes ranging from communication, satisfaction of sexual desires, transmission of sport events, surveillance, political campaigning, commercials, news broadcasting, entertainment, warfare, and facilitating social interaction, not to mention those images that for purposes of machine learning operate without ever being perceived (Somaini 2021).

As the cultural dominance of the moving image has shifted from the cinema to the cinematic, media theory has evolved a “deeper recognition of the active dimension of images and media” (Hoel 2018, 12). Spanning both its representational and operational dimensions, I propose that the notion of atmosphere[1] should be central for understanding how moving images in the age of their pervasive circulation are increasingly operationalized to organize how we think, feel, perceive, reflect, and act in relation to the places, people, ethnicities, and cultures they represent. The concept of “atmosphere” is here evoked according to two interrelated, yet different, meanings. First, in line with recent cross-disciplinary interest in the subject, atmosphere is understood as the affective character of an environment, a space, situation, interpersonal relation, landscape, or event (cf. Griffero 2019). In cinema, atmospheres do not simply paint the represented content in various feeling tones; they prefigure our perceptive, affective, and cognitive prehension of it (cf. Hven 2022). Secondly, and relatedly, the atmosphere concept pertains to the environmental conditioning of perception as it has been understood in the post-Aristotelean tradition of diaphanous media according to which everything that appears, appears through something that inevitably shines through in what it brings to appear (Alloa 2021, 10). It is in this tradition that Walter Benjamin suggested that we think of photography and cinema as constituting a new “medium of perception” introducing a new historical mode by which sensory experience could be organized, controlled, and refigured, enabling not only the capturing of the world through mechanical reproduction, but also, in the words of László Moholy-Nagy (1967), the seeing of it “with entirely different eyes” (29).

The notion of cinema’s atmospheric operations thus refers to those aesthetic-expressive means whereby cinema conjures up an affectively charged atmosphere that conditions our perception of the “film world” (Yacavone 2015) and also, by extension, the real world mirrored by it. It is exactly these operations that I argue are subjected to a new and exciting form of criticism in the short-form video “Movie Shows Arab Country/Hollywood:” (henceforth MSAC). This video, posted originally as an 8-second TikTok consisting solely of hands playing a Bedouin-style guitar riff and the title inscription, rapidly grew into the assembled form I am referring to here.[2] It is thus emblematic of a new form of collaborative critical enterprise directed towards cinema’s atmospheric image operations and the way they have been instrumentalized to manage the perception of non-Western people, regions, cultures, places, and ethnicities.

An inscription reading “Movie shows Arab country/Hollywood:” sets up the general premise of the video with the Bedouin-style guitar riff as a formulaic way of recalling the exotic Arabian desert. This riff does not appear to be citing any particular film but rather evokes a meta-Hollywood film’s satiric display of endless dunes of sand that may as well be the Sahara as the Rub’ al-Kahli. This video is composited with another of a man singing what appears to be a mawwāl below a textual inscription inviting us to imagine the atmospheric operation of a panning camera shot onto an eagle. Using a split screen, each segment is looped with each new introduction splitting the screen further until we are presented with a larger “ecology of operations” (Geoghegan 2019). In terms of audiovisual style, the segments are kept in an unconcealed DIY-character (such as the “random a$$ shot of a camel eating” that in fact is a woman chewing on French fries sticking out of her mouth) that underline how easily these tropes are produced and reproduced. Following the introduction of a “lady in lots of fabric” (i.e., a woman wearing a headscarf) staring directly and mysteriously into the camera, a heat-hazed image alludes to the phenomena of a desert mirage. A “random guy” welcoming the American protagonist in a sonorous and warm voice is then followed by the “one-dimensional black character only there to give funny one-liners,” thereby steering interpretation towards more traditional representational issues concerning who gets to be represented, in what roles, and by whom.  

What is new about this short video, however, is neither the problematization of Hollywood’s racial biases or its stereotypical depiction of non-Western people and cultures nor its targeting of Orientalism per se (Said 1977). Although it recalls important academic attempts to map out the exotification and vilification of Arab culture and Islam in Hollywood (Shaheen 2001), it also differs significantly from them. This is mainly due to the foregrounding of the affective image operations employed by Hollywood to shape our perception of the Middle East. As part of meme culture’s recent debates over “shithole colour-grading” (Bose 2021), the video’s affective regard is emblematic of a larger trend casting a critical eye at cinema’s modes of atmosphere production. An oft-cited example of this practice is the orange-yellow sepia tones that have become increasingly used for scenes playing out in Mexico (and Latin America more generally). This trend, now mockingly known as “the Mexico filter,” began with Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2001)—wherein this practice was at least narratively and aesthetically motivated—but its use is now widespread.

Drawing upon an opulent catalog of examples of Hollywood’s exotification of the Arab world including The Sheik (Melford, 1921), Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962), Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981), Alladin (Musker and Clements, 1992), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell, 2010), and most recently Dune (Villeneuve, 2021), MSAC targets the easily reproducible nature of the atmospheric techniques whereby this stereotypical treatment is achieved. At the same time, it is by means of reproducing them that the short video is able to expose their widespread nature and recognizable character (without this recognition necessarily being attached to any particular film) with great humoristic effects (“so true!” is an often-heard phrase in the reaction videos to MSAC). By leaving aside the (sometimes) more detailed and nuanced contexts pertaining to individual films and their narrative and aesthetic contexts, the spotlight can be fully devoted to the repetitive use of operative means that continue to shape our perception of the Arab world and the “Orient” as mentally, genealogically, and atmospherically unified according to its Western image as exotic, mystic, and otherworldly (cf. Said 1977, 42). This focus on operative means bereft of broader narrative contextualization allows for easy identification and affords collaborative content from several users, with the downside obviously being that the abstraction from particular works of art and their specific contexts make this form of criticism susceptible to the same kind of reductive crudity that it accuses others of. Nonetheless, we find here a potent audiovisual form for exploring the mechanisms underlying Hollywood’s portrayal of its “other,” one which renders visible affectively charged operations that often go unnoticed but rarely remain unregistered. Moreover, this schism could easily be used for addressing the operative means whereby other countries, regions, or people are portrayed in a stereotypical manner such as the former countries of the “Eastern Bloc,” which we could imagine consisting of an ambient industrial sound design, grey-toned images with low saturation, static shots over Brutalist architecture, a high-angle shot of a deserted pigeon-plagued city square, etc.    

This brings me to a final note, namely the important fact that this criticism is delivered in the moving image medium. As part of the “democratization of filmmaking,” it has become easier to pose a criticism of the cinema via a direct citation of its image operations—quite different from the moving image’s “unattainability” to language (cf. Bellour 1975). Noticeably, MSAC does not simply state that cinema portrays the Arab world in a mystic and exotic atmosphere, it effectively conjures up such an atmosphere while exposing the underlying operations used to produce it. By replacing the pen with basic editing tools, like with video essays, these short videos “don’t have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us” and are therefore able to invite their viewers to “feel, as well as know, about, the comparisons these videos enact” (Grant 2013, 7). Moreover, as per a point perceptively raised by Jaap Kooijman (2017), this also makes a form of critical engagement possible that critiques affect by means of affect; or in this specific case, it renders possible a more general critique of cinema’s modes of atmosphere production by means of using and exposing its atmospheric image operations.

 

Funding and Support

This essay is written as part of the research project CATNEMI: Cinematic Atmospheres: Towards a New Ecology of the Moving Image that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No.: 101076547.

 

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