The inhabitants of the Moroccan city of Fez were on a date with an artistic and cultural event that dealt with a visual, cultural and architectural history of their cinematic history.

Pictures of various Moroccan cinemas decorated the walls of one of the halls of the French Cultural Institute in the city in an exhibition of the French photographer Francois Bouran, who settled in Rabat about 10 years ago.

The exhibition is the outcome of 3 years that Bouran spent roaming the various cities and towns of Morocco from the far north to the far south in order to explore the depths of cinemas, especially the old ones, to write the book “Moroccan Cinemas, Lights on the Dark Halls of the Kingdom,” which was published this year 2022.

The book tells the history of these halls, especially those that opened at the beginning of the last century in 1913, such as El Kassar Cinema in Tangiers, in addition to the film festivals hosted by these halls.

All of this is mixed with the shapes of its geometric designs and how it bears witness to the nature of the architectural transformations in the country.

In addition to launching the book, Buran photographed these places to present a visual harvest in an art gallery.

The book is one of the experiences of cinematography aimed at documentation.

It is a rich experience like other writing experiences in the field of cinema, which Western readers and authors are accustomed to, as well as publishing houses.

The function of the film book is not to complement the artistic aspect presented by the cinema, but rather to establish it to raise awareness.

On the one hand, it enhances the culture of the image in the viewer when it enables him to grasp the keys to decipher it and follow its aesthetics. It also links it to the most important art schools that have appeared or appear in the world, and also presents the most prominent artistic and technical developments in the world around it.

Writing a film book is not limited to critics or academics. It has a documentary role, such as the aforementioned French book about cinemas in Morocco, and it also has an educational role, such as simplified educational books for the foundations of montage, for example, or the steps of writing a script.

I remember when I visited the headquarters of the British Film Institute in London in the "South Bank" I was horrified by the size of the bookstore attached to the institute overlooking the River Thames.

These books include all aspects of cinematic activity and everything related to the production and directing of films, in addition to the cultural aspects associated with them.

The most important thing is the existence of an active publishing house affiliated to the Institute that publishes cinematic books on a continuous basis.

The main problem in many Arab cinema books is that they resort to the last solution as a quick way to publish and distribute, as happens in the Alexandria Film Festival for Mediterranean countries.

The festival resorted to printing 11 books, almost all of them about movie celebrities and stars in its session, which will be held in October 2022, such as the book "Mahmoud Hamida, the Seventh Art Star" by Atef Beshai and "Donia Bint Samir and Dalal" by Tariq Al-Shennawi.

I was drawn to the presence of books dealing with specific films, for example, the book "Titanic" written by David Lubin about the famous American movie in a series of books on modern classics.

The book provides an overview of the film supported by images, as if you are re-watching the film again, but from a cultural and epistemological perspective.

The book presents the opinions of intellectuals about the film, who see it as a superficial work that is suitable for obsessive girls, and how the author of the book disagrees with this view.

He believes that the film's story bears a lot of symbolism in which viewers find themselves reviewing the current social class problems between the rich and the poor, the nature of love and the nature of sacrifice.

Which was one of the factors that made it the first movie to make a billion dollars in cinemas around the world.

The Arab Film Book

Arab cinema may not be as advanced in terms of form and content as the European or American cinema experience, but it definitely has an experience worthy of recording and documenting.

There is another story about every movie that deserves to be told and known to the audience.

It is a novel that may relate to the essence of the artwork itself, its evaluation and knowledge of the levels of beauty and expression in it or the production conditions surrounding it.

This novel may be written by directors, producers, actors, critics, or even all of these.

  • The movie book has prior marketing opportunities for success, the first and most notable of which is that it is based on a work of art that has an audience that has seen and interacted with it.

  • Secondly, if it is associated with a star or celebrity, it adds another marketing value.

  • The main problem in many Arab cinema books is that they resort to the last solution as a quick way to publish and distribute, as happens in the Alexandria Film Festival for Mediterranean countries.

    The festival resorted to printing eleven books, almost all of them about movie celebrities and stars in its session, which will be held in October 2022, such as the book "Mahmoud Hamida, the Seventh Art Star" by Atef Beshai and "Donia Bint Samir and Dalal" by Tariq Al-Shennawi.

    In addition to a book about the career of director Saeed Hamed, who will be honored.

    If there was an urgent need to focus on these personalities in particular, it would have been better and more useful for Mahmoud Hemida to write a book himself about his cinematic experience and in the film press in particular, as the founder of the Seventh Art magazine.

  • The same applies to the experience of director Said Hamed and actress Donia Samir Ghanem.

    It is a type of writing different from the critic's view of them.

This problem is not present in rare publications such as the "Horizons of Cinema" series of books issued by the General Authority for Egyptian Cultural Palaces.

Perhaps what this series suffers from is not the quality of the topics or the translation as much as the lack of distribution, promotion and attractive directing that attracts the audience.

The list of authors also lacks those who practice the profession at its various levels.

Let’s imagine if we had books written by directors like the Egyptian Atef Al-Tayeb about his Egyptian films or the Syrian-American Mustafa Al-Akkad about his Hollywood experience and with the films Al-Risala and Omar Al-Mukhtar or the Syrian director Omar Amiralay about his pioneering experience in the documentary film.

The crisis of Arab cinema does not only lie in the lifting of the hand of many countries from their support, but the absence of an image culture and critical sense of viewers contribute to the deepening of the crisis.

Here stems the importance of dealing with cinema as a culture and looking at the film book from this perspective in order to raise the artistic awareness of the recipient and make him not digest everything that is presented to him, but rather accept, reject and evaluate, and then the producers and directors evaluate him a thousand considerations, which contributes to the quality of the presented cinematic works.