Hammour directs the reading sensors towards the cinematic products that took place after the revolution, not to analyze them as films with coherent artistic structures, but rather as documents demonstrating the mechanisms of domination!
The research presented by Hammour, to the Syrian reader first, and to interested Arab and foreign intellectuals and researchers, is an academic study he presented in a Turkish university, under the scientific supervision of Dr. Tolga Hebdinkler. According to the definition of the objectives: “focuses … on the idea of the government’s role in culture in general and cinema in particular. It also sheds light on the use of cinema to serve an ideology, as well as the exploitation of cinema to impose control. The research also focuses on cinema and government tutelage, especially after the year 2011 in Syria”.
From this point of view, the body of the research will define the features of the role that the General Film Corporation has played, and is still playing, as the government tool to impose its policy in the cinematic entertainment sector. cinema in the country through these methods.
Here, the researcher will not fail to explain the vocabulary of this detail, and that is in the core of his study, when he examines the roles of the actors, and he mentions that between the years 2011 and 2022, the Syrian government, represented by the Cinema Foundation, produced about 20 films, including 10 films, with only three filmmakers. They take turns taking it out. The three directors rose to the top of Syrian society, and one of them was the deputy speaker of Parliament!
How the regime established this method, in leading the artistic scene in general, and the cinematic scene in particular, required the researcher to restore the political backgrounds of the Syrian reality, in a way that serves the purposes of the study, and establishes the basis for showing how the situation reached this threshold, of crushing under the weight of the regime’s dictates, and it was necessary From taking a look at the mechanisms of legislating legal control, and thinking about the laws that were imposed in favor of full control, not only of the Syrian film industry, but also of the nature of the films, which the public can watch in the halls, which were also subjected to economic destruction, due to the policies imposed on them.
But analyzing the films deepens thinking about reality, and about the psychological and mental structure with which it goes, those who line up behind the mighty clubs of repression. In this regard, and by analyzing the movie “Rain Homs” (2017) by director Joud Saeed, whose sectarian tendency is not hidden in the analysis of the Syrian event, the researcher believes that “the broader picture of the film’s story completely exonerates the regime from the destructive fate of the city and the people, and reduces the opposition and the revolution to Being armed militias or terrorist groups are tools of destruction. With the film being produced under the banner of the regime, represented by the Ministry of Culture and the Cinema Foundation, it is difficult to deal with it outside the context of propaganda and propaganda, just as Leni Riefenstahl’s films were in the era of Hitler.”
The director, Najdat Anzour, did the same thing, in his movie “Reply of the Judiciary,” when he “painted…the Syrian army forces as the most innocent through scenes of the film that were filled with car bombs by “terrorists” (…) and he did not mention in his turn Any violations against civilians in the city of Aleppo and its countryside!
The results of the research on the reality of Syrian cinema, during the period of regime rule that continues until today, do not come with actual new, but by linking with the introductions, it shows how the reality of the film industry itself is tense and dysfunctional, without being dealt with critically from various points of view. A “hostile” view, and it cannot produce different artistic values, as it is completely linked to the security services that manage everything in the country through interfaces such as the Ministry of Culture, the Film Corporation, and others. This assertion made by Ghaith Hammour, for those who wish to know the reality of the state of Syrian cinema, is very important, as it works on the subject through intellectual norms, which the defenders of the regime cannot consider as non-neutral, as it analyzes the models of domination through its motives and formations, in isolation from those who wear its faces.
The testimonies provided by the researcher to the personalities he listened to will not go out of context, but will tell realistic details of what happened and is still happening on the ground. However, what deserves to be given additional space in the research is the relationship between politics and art in Syria, in the stages prior to the arrival of the “Baath” to power, and also the period of the sixties that passed quickly despite its importance in reading the background of the subject, especially the period between the two years. 1963, that is, the year in which the decision was issued to establish the General Film Corporation, and 1970, when al-Assad the father seized the reins of power, and after that he began a process of purging all institutions, through which he expelled those with views that differed from his directions, even in the least aspects of administration.
However, this does not negate the importance of proposing the study of partial reality, or exposing a piece of the scene to careful academic analysis, especially since this academic field has remained a current subject for Western scholars, and has not turned into a popular scientific research subject among the Syrians themselves.
The culture of hegemony under totalitarian regimes: Syrian cinema after 2011 as a model First Edition- 2023,
