Abd el-Krim's guerrilla war against Spain and France in North Africa: An adventure setting for screen melodramas

Mevliyar Er and Paul B. Rich

Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2015, vol. 26, issue 4, 597-615

Abstract: The Riffian rebel leader Mohammed Abd el-Krim Al-Khattabi (1882–1963) became an important early guerrilla leader by successfully initiating extensively organized resistance in the Moroccan Rif against Spanish and French imperial power in the early 1920s. The Rif War triggered a wave of adventure films since the 1930s. This article will look at some of these, especially Sergeant Klems (1971) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), and suggest that they can be seen in terms of the wider impact of screen Orientalism derived from the iconic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) directed by David Lean. The article will show that these films promoted what it terms a colonial gaze by underlining many stereotyped cinematic clichés relating to the Islamic cultural area and Abd el-Krim's revolt that stretch back to the early history of cinema.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09592318.2015.1050847 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:fswixx:v:26:y:2015:i:4:p:597-615

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/fswi20

DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2015.1050847

Access Statistics for this article

Small Wars and Insurgencies is currently edited by Paul Rich

More articles in Small Wars and Insurgencies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().