Damluji - Cinematic Baghdad
Cinematic Baghdad: Re-imagining the City in Iraq Petroleum Company Films
In one of the most famous scenes from the film, the Sultan soars out of his palace walls and high above Baghdad on his golden horse. An image of a make-believe Baghdad is pasted into the background as a two-dimensional cutout of a hilltop cluster of desert toned structures, foregrounded by a sea of pastel domes and minarets.
The Thief of Bagdad epitomizes Orientalist cinema, in which filmmakers used motion pictures to animate rich imaginary worlds of the so-called Orient that were crafted in the letters, oil paintings, and photographs of European Orientalists during the previous two centuries. Central to this production of an imagined geography is the fact that despite the specificity of location, the relevance of historical time has no significant bearing on the depiction of space and society. In other words, Baghdad is imagined as a city frozen in time and space. Orientalist depictions in every medium are a closed loop of spatial tropes: the city depicted in the fantasy film mirrors the urban scenery portrayed in lavish orientalist paintings from the late 19th century, which echo the passages of orientalist literature from the 18th century, which harken to the translated tales of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
Although the filmmakers conceived the film as a fantasy epic located in an invented version of Baghdad from centuries ago, the cinematic city borrowed its imagery directly from the painters who claimed to document urban life there in the late nineteenth century. Examining two depictions of Baghdad side-by-side, the first a still taken from the 1940 final cut of The Thief of Bagdad and the second a watercolor painting by the British artist Arthur Melville from 1882, the visual parallels are evident. Copious fruit baskets decorate the foreground, while the central action takes place in front of informal market stalls crowded by mass of nearly indistinguishable covered bodies with sand-colored facades featuring pointed arches filling in the distant background. The interchangeable characteristics of these portraits of Baghdad endow the city with timelessness that persists in popular British imaginaries of the city regardless of medium (e.g. narrative film or “documentary” painting) and historical time.
Orientalist Hollywood film fantasies of a timeless Baghdad, including but not limited to the backdrop sets constructed in London for The Thief of Bagdad, conceal the socio-economic transformations and spatial practices in the making of the modern capital. In their essay, “The Imperial Imaginary,” Ella Shohat and Robert Stam examine the work that cinema has done in the context of Empire during the twentieth century. They write, “The dominant European/American form of cinema not only inherited and disseminated a hegemonic colonial discourse, it also created a powerful hegemony of its own through monopolistic control of film distribution and exhibition in much of Asia, Africa and the Americas. Eurocolonial cinema thus mapped history not only for domestic audiences but also for the world.” Accordingly, the imperial imaginary operated through cinema that narrated history from the colonizer’s perspective, using “programmatically negative portrayals” of the colonized to help rationalize the human price of empire. However, this definition is based on consideration of narrative feature films, and thus excludes the cinematic depictions of modern space and society in the context of neo-colonial British hegemony in the Arabian Gulf region that appear in the oil documentary film archives.
Orientalist Hollywood film fantasies of a timeless Baghdad, including but not limited to the backdrop sets constructed in London for The Thief of Bagdad, conceal the socio-economic transformations and spatial practices in the making of the modern capital. In their essay, “The Imperial Imaginary,” Ella Shohat and Robert Stam examine the work that cinema has done in the context of Empire during the twentieth century. They write, “The dominant European/American form of cinema not only inherited and disseminated a hegemonic colonial discourse, it also created a powerful hegemony of its own through monopolistic control of film distribution and exhibition in much of Asia, Africa and the Americas. Eurocolonial cinema thus mapped history not only for domestic audiences but also for the world.” Accordingly, the imperial imaginary operated through cinema that narrated history from the colonizer’s perspective, using “programmatically negative portrayals” of the colonized to help rationalize the human price of empire. However, this definition is based on consideration of narrative feature films, and thus excludes the cinematic depictions of modern space and society in the context of neo-colonial British hegemony in the Arabian Gulf region that appear in the oil documentary film archives.
Just ten years after the theatrical release of The Thief of Bagdad, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) began to produce its own films about the legendary city. In stark contrast to the popular fantasy films which relied on hackneyed visual tropes in order to conjure a city backdrop, IPC documentaries of the 1950s attempted to project the the first "real" images of contemporary Baghdad to general audiences in Europe and the Middle East. These films recast the imagined fantasy of flying carpets and genies in the lamp as a modern oil metropolis. The documentaries framed Baghdad, not as an exotic backdrop, but as the central stage for the modernization of Iraq, the so-called ‘cradle of civilization’. These documentaries and their related publications, advertisements, and photographs captured nuanced aspects of the production of urban space and transformation of urban society. In other words, they were the first cinematic representations of Baghdad to depict a perspective on the making of the modern oil city that otherwise remained invisible in the imperial imaginary of the so-called orient. This new imaginary, embodied in the corpus of documentary films produced by the IPC, worked to reproduce the idea of modern Iraq as an interest of British and Iraqi publics through cinematic encounters with urban modernity in Baghdad.
