Ethnographic movies as artistic memory An ethnosemotic study for the Jewish character in the Iraqi short movie (Venice of the East)
Authors: M. Ali Jabara Kawthar 
Published: August 2022

Usually, cinematic research and critical studies combine documentary movie and ethnography, as the movie that deals with reality and reformulates it in an artistic way, and refers to the ethnographic movie as an artistic memory that aims to reveal an aspect of the tragedy of minorities, and presents an aspect of their culture and traditions. “Ethnographic movies enable us to draw attention to the tragedy of persecuted minorities, and thanks to ethnographic movie it has become possible for thousands of viewers in the West to learn about marginal and distant cultures,” says Jean-Paul Colin. This study came to put forward the hypothesis that the ethnographic movie is not limited to documentaries, but the narrative movie, despite being fictional, can be an ethnographic movie, and an artistic memory that indicates what the other suffers from, in case a number of conditions are met. Our interest in the ethnographic movie came from the fact that it represents a visual memory documenting a people separated from others, whether by religion, nationalism or cultural customs and traditions. The ideal model for discussing and proving this hypothesis was the Iraqi short movie (Venice of the East) by addressing the character of the Iraqi Jew, that character that was absent from Iraqi cinematic works, especially movies after the year 2003, which witnessed a greater boom in the production of cinematic movies, especially short ones, but it attended the short movie, subject of this research. The movie (Venice of the East 2018) by screenwriter Mustafa Sattar Al-Rikabi and the director Bahaa Al-Kazemi, which we chose for technical reasons, due to the quality of the cinematic language that the director used to express what he wants in this movie, whose only hero is the character of the Jewish man who does not have a name, whose role was played by the Iraqi actor (Sami Kaftan), as well as many of the signs contained in the visual text that provide signals that may be conscious or unconscious of the situation of this segment of Iraqis, and this will become clear in the course of the research, and other non-technical reasons we have mentioned above from the fact that the Iraqi fictional cinema did not address this segment of the Iraqi citizens. We proved the hypothesis of the research in the first topic, which is a theoretical topic entitled (Ethnographic movie between documentary and fiction), in which we discussed two subjects: (The definition of the ethnographic movie) and (Can the feature movie be considered an ethnographic movie?!). The second topic, is applied and critical, in which we presented the research method (the ethnographic approach) followed by (a critical view of the movie), then we touched on (the customs of the Jewish community in the movie) and finally how it expressed all this through the signs contained in the cinematic language in which the movie was presented. We concluded the research with the most important findings. It is worth mentioning that this research is a founding research and a first study on the ethnographic movie and its importance lies in that, it presents for the first time the hypothesis that the feature movie can be ethnographic and proves this. This research was followed by a second unpublished study entitled (( Forced displacement of Jews and manifestations of return in the movie (Venice of the East)) .