Since its onset, American cinema has been drawn to the East. Hollywood fabricated in an eroticized and exoticized Orient charged with romance and adventure. Middle Easteners were often depicted negatively, typically as buffoons, villains, and sexual predators. Women's roles were mostly relegated to harem and dancing girls.
Hollywood Harems examines these stereotypes, particularly women's roles. Footage from over three dozen feature films dating historically until the present are assembled together. In addition to harem and dancing girls, other fixed female icons which recur
include vamps/temptresses, queens, concubines and slaves.
Hollywood continues to produce films with Orientalist themes and characters; old stereotypes have been replaced with new ones. Harems and dancing girls have disappeared while the swashbucklers, sheiks, and lusty despots have been replaced with hijackers, kidnappers, and terrorists.
No other ethnic group continues to be disparaged in US media as Middle Easteners. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hollywood films. Hollywood Harems will make viewers aware of the stereotypes of Middle Easteners in American cinema and consequently, how much negative representations foster repercussions.
A Review of Hollywood Harems by Dr. Alice Swensen
Hollywood Harems, written and produced by Tania Kamal-Eldin, is a 25 minute documentary on Hollywood's perceptions and fantasies of Middle Eastern women in films. Although women are the focus of her documentary, men are also examined through stars such as Rudolph Valentino.Kamal-Eldin has arranged a compact, lavish montage of approximately thirty films, historically until the present.
Through the use of montage, Kamal-Eldin examines major themes or motifs incased in images of half-clothed dancing girls swirling about in glitzy, ersatz harems and robed men up to no good riding across the sands being pursued by white western males.
Beginning with D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Middle Eastern women are depicted in scant costumes behaving in an implausible manner, in a bizarre hodge-podge of dancing, jerking, thrusting, leering, beckoning, and pleading. Monkeys in cages have more decorum, which of course is Kamal-Eldin's point: the dehumanization of the "other." The "other" in this case being that which is outside the culture producing the art of artifact.
If in the second edition of the unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language, one of the definitions of "harem" reads "the women in a Muslim household including mothers, sisters, wives, concubines, daughters, entertainers, and servants," is it a surprise that the Hollywood perception of women in the Middle East is distorted?
Harem women are lumped together as belonging to a "Muslim household." However, if a harem woman is signaled out or given an identity, she is most often cast as a vamp. The actress Theda Bara was the first of such vamps, the harem woman gone wrong, the man-topper, the voracious seducer. Interestingly, her name, according to her publicists, is an anagram for "Death Arab." Like a black widow, she was death to any man on whom she set her sights; And so were Salome, Delilah, Sheba, and Cleopatra, to name a few of the infamous "others", cinematic anti-heroes who also lured men to their demise.
Usually silent, without identity, the harem woman is an amorphous erotic. As Kamal-Eldin's documentary shows, Hollywood indiscriminately heaps Middle Eastern women together with Far Eastern and Asian women-anyone who isn't white and Western becomes the exotic "other" and as such are a feast for the male "gaze." The "other" in this case is a product of male desire, specifically, of sexual fantasy splashed onto film for the entertainment of Western moviegoers.
Hollywood Harems is packed with images giving rise to "how we see others," and consequently is extremely valuable in opening our eyes to stereotypes that dehumanize.
Dr Swensen is an Emeritus professor at the University of Northern Iowa in the English Dept. She has lived and worked in the Middle East for over ten years.
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