Desert Movies Are There!

"Deserts are places that have exhausted their future so that we begin to see things happen there stripped of their worldly context." Chaos-Rampant, 2010.

Desert Movies Are There!


The desert.
The uninterrupted expanse of undulating sand.
The dunes of golden mystery.
The thirst in hasty foot--print--s.
The shadows cast in futility.

Desert glorifies movies made in it. Even a desert over an actor s shoulder is captivating.
Wim Wenders Paris, Texas (1984) derives incredible visuals from the desert. Travis, emerging from the desert, attempts to fix relationships in his divided family. In the film, Travis wandered away several times into the place without language´-or-streets . He was obsessed by visualizing Paris, a town in Texas as a desert which it is not! The movie s first shot is a bird s eye view of the desert.The Palme de´-or-the film won at Cannes was probably a re-embodiment of the golden sands of the desert. Newsweek saw the film as a story of a "richly endowed land where people can get desperately lost." So here enters Baudrillard s take on America along similar lines to those in Wenders treatment of life in America. Both men are Europeans. Baudrillard, though not a filmmaker, also uses the metaphor of the movie. He describes why he came several times from France s Paris to travel through the States: "I went in search of astral America (that which is a mirror for reflecting the rays of a star), not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked...in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, faces, and ritual acts on the road...[I] looked for...a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages."
With cinematic pictures in his mind, Baudrillard writes: "It is not the least of America s charms that even outside the movie theater the whole country is cinematic. The desert you pass through is like the set of a Western, the city a screen of signs and formulas....The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies." He is employing his theory of false representations (simulacrum) in which reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality . European critics of the American way of life" resort to the desert to negate the facts of American life! The tragic thing, to the eyes of their American critics, is they associate the American, who is the universal subject of the hyperreal new world with an astral America , which is a wasteland of the desert. America, to Baudrillard, in essence, is an empty desert.
Pretty hot!
These European intrusions into the structure of American life. But what matters here is to elaborate how a diversion from the loose definition of Road Movies into a distinct Desert Movies genre has found such a huge intellectual backing that will hail this genre as a genre of its own.

It is quite perplexing that Americans find European take on American life negative and condescending and almost ban Baudrillard s book just for trying to understand what happened to Europe in America. Early US Americans where none other than European.
However, let us stick to this idea of European intrusions into elements of American popular culture as it proves the eligibility of desert movies to stand out as a genre of its own. Of course it is not the only deciding factor in this matter, but some of the most interesting desert movies were actually made by prominent European filmmakers. Midnight Cowboy is one good example at least in the opening scenes. I believe Wim Wenders was influenced most visibly by this 1969 movie by British filmmaker John Schlesinger in his 2005 movie "Don t Come Knocking", a great movie in its own right. Other memorable desert movies include British made Lawrence of Arabia 1962 by David Lean, Fata Morgana 1971 by Werner Herzog, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 1966 by Sergio Leone, Zabriskie Point 1970 by Michelangelo Antonioni etc. But as you can see, these are not American movies.
There is a huge list of American desert movies. There ought to be. Desert in America has a huge metaphoric presence, apart from it huge physical presence. But what do we mean by desert in the context of cinema?
It is definitely not the climatic territory we are after. Within this climate lies what was unconquered by man. The magic and mystery of the vast expanses and the immediate recall of senses that happens when we approach it´-or-find ourselves in it. This sharp call for sharpening the senses stills our abstract mind and we begin to think more in a matter-of-fact way. I imagine if ever I was forced to live in the desert, then I would enjoy my senses better and to a fuller extent.
There are lots of American desert movies but only few of them are listed as great ones. In fact the list for the best 10 desert movies include no US production! But listing seldom has an authority over its subject. Remember Vera Cruz 1954 by Robert Aldrich. The Hired Hand 1971 by Peter Fonda. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia 1974, by Sam Peckinpah. Ice Cold in Alex 1958, by J. Lee Thompson. Badlands 1973, by Terrence Malick. The Shooting 1966, by Monte Hellman. No Country for Old Men 2007, by the Coen brothers. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada 2005, by Tommy Lee Jones. One cannot have an exhaustive list of American desert movies.
On the international scene, there are remarkable desert movies, indeed. Again, the list cannot be conclusive. Take almost all the Sergio Leone movies! Then, there are: Greed 1924, by Erich von Stroheim. Simon of The Desert 1965, by Luis Bunuel. Gerry 2002, by Gus van Sant. Walkabout 1971 by Nicholas Roeg. Ashes of Time 1994 by Chinese Kar Wai Wong, Daratt 2006, by Chadian Mohamed Saleh Haron. Woman of the Dunes 1964, by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Genesis 1997, by Oumar Sissoko of Mali.
Narrowing down to the middle east, we have, not only a history of the magic of the desert which extends from the mu allaqat (odes) to the social origins of Islam and on to the birth of oil-rich emirates and kingdoms. The desert is not a place for the abstract. You have to have your senses wide awake. Just in case you get a call from the heavens! And this is how all that concerns the Arabs came to exist. The recent move by Arab film and video-makers into the desert has been duly observed by critics and researchers. In her valuable essay on the cinema of the desert , Laura U. Marks describes the Arab film and video-makers as nomadic thinkers in that their practice stays close to the material and conceptual reality of life in the Arab world . Marks believes that the desert movie, which we are trying to set as a genre of its own, is part of the road movie! She believes that the new cinema of the desert is set on the asphalt, just before stepping into and striating ´-or-disturbing the desert. This is because nomads, actually, do not live in the high of the desert, but move through it.
Marks goes on to examine some examples of the new desert movies . She sites Youssef Chahine s The Emigrant which is a retelling of the Biblical story of Joseph in which the narrative is built around the importance of water to the nomads. The researcher goes on to say that "The Egyptian Arak al-balah (Date wine) 1998, by Radwan El-Kashef, the Algerian Desert Rose 1989, by Mohamed Rachid Benhadj, and the Sudanese short Insan (Human Being) 1988, by Ibrahim Shaddad, all suggest that modernity means leaving the desert and the village. Men leave, emigrating to work--;-- women and children stay behind. To do otherwise, like the bewitched settlers in Nacir Khémir’s The Wanderers of the Desert 1986, is to plunge backwards into history". Marks lays down a remarkable de--script--ion of how the desert is seen today by people in the Arab world. "Now the desert is seen.., in the occasional love story and video clip, with a romantic view similar to that of the European colonials. A place to be simple again, to get lost, to revert to a fantasy life, on the weekends. Travel to the desert is time travel."
The term Asphalt Nomadism employed by the essay writer becomes comprehensible as she sites the noteworthy example of the Lebanese movie Baalbeck 2001, in which little of the desert is shown but a lot of driving and driving and getting nowhere appears to be the aim of the movie. The film is interesting in that it was shared by three filmmakers who divided the movie into three chronologically equal parts. Each one told his own story but their goal was one, that is to get to Baalbeck to attend and cover a music concert. They never got to Baalbeck as a result of distractions!
Similarly, another movie, Baghdad On/Off is sited as a roadblock movie in which the filmmaker is unable to reach Baghdad to see his ailing mother because of delays, wrong turns, dead ends and roadblocks. Apart from having a plot of failures, the movie was not received well by either the Arabs´-or-France where the filmmaker resides!
Both movies, Baghdad On/Off and Baalbeck obviously refer to Arab failure which led later to turmoils and transformations (the Arab Spring) which also seem to take the Arabs to roadblocks and possibly u-turns. Watch the full movie Baghdad On/Off below. In my blog.
It is needless to remind the reader that it is very difficult to make a movie in Iraq without having it listed as a desert movie. But of course, while I try to accumulate evidences to the eligibility of desert movies to stand as a rich genre, research blurs the borders between genres instead of solidifying them.
It is worth mentioning that the first part of this article relied on information from the book Images of Postmodern Society by Norman K. Denzin.
Please take time to visit this article in my blog, like it and share it, thanks!
http://yamustafaya.blogspot.ca/2015/01/desert-movies-are-there-part-two.html
Mustafa Mudathir
Jan. 27/2015

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