Tracing the social and political relevance of post-independence Maghrebi cinema, Suzanne Gauch's Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements aims to address the lack of international awareness of developments in Maghrebi film between the acclaimed 1966 The Battle of Algiers and the revolutionary Arab Spring beginning in 2011. With mobility as her point of inquiry, Gauch selects works from nine directors whose films are connected not by plot or genre but by thematic, narrative, and cinematographic motion. As suggested by the term “movements,” she treats these groupings of films as three dynamic segments of a single symphony, with each movement section experimenting with different formal methods and techniques to negotiate both the practical limitations of funding, distribution, and reception and the restrictive, binary conditions of the opposing forces of national censorship and colonial influence. Gauch avoids sweeping generalizations about Maghrebi cinema, instead opting for thoughtful and nuanced close readings of oft-overlooked or underappreciated texts that were met with mixed reviews from local, regional, and international critics and audiences. By giving critical attention to films made on relatively low budgets for local and regional audiences, Gauch demonstrates that international attention, popularity, and funding are not necessary for the formation of a rich and varied industry.

The first film cycle connects the works of Moroccan Farida Benlyazid, Algerian Mohamed Chouikh, and Tunisian Nacer Khemir by exploring the ways in which these directors invoke elements of magical or pre-colonial Sufi art, calligraphy, and poetry both aesthetically and narratively in order to reject the divisive political and temporal markers of colonial and post-independence social issues. Even though they all address serious country-specific social and economic inequalities, Gauch examines how these directors apply contemplative cinematographic styles and fantastical motifs and images to reject the tropes of social realism and expository documentary, mobilizing characters who might otherwise be relegated to peripheral stasis. Gauch demonstrates that, while the protagonists of these films come from different national, class, educational, and cultural backgrounds, they negotiate and traverse otherwise immobilizing boundaries and obstacles by rejecting the two given methods of enacting agency – global/westernization and capitulation to the conservative backlash of post-independence politics. With the mediation of fantastical, theatrical, and poetic elements, these protagonists can achieve subjectivity and construct identities without relying on either Western or nationalistic systems of thought.

In the second film cycle, Gauch turns to the popular genre films of Nabil Ayouch, Lyes Salem, and Nadia El Fani to illustrate how they adapt and rework the tropes of melodrama, slapstick comedy, and cyberthriller for a regional context. Paralleling the first cycle, Gauch divides this section by country into three smaller movements that provide local context while speaking to the development of regional cinema characteristics bound by more than just a common French colonial history. While their national and local experiences may differ, Maghrebs in Motion identifies the underlying links that connect these films of varying style and composition. She asserts that one of these links can be detected in a methodology of cinematographic techniques that reconsider progress or modernity via experimental forms of popular contemporary cinema. Hence, although these films differ in style and genre, they all incorporate and reject both Western and national tropes. In addition to her close readings of style and narrative, Gauch remains attentive to the realities and influences of distribution and reception, especially in this second cycle in which the chosen films are also linked by mass local, regional, and international popularity, even in the face of governmental censorship and struggles with distribution. Gauch further emphasizes the significance of this popular consumption in terms of identity politics, as characters of marginalized sexuality, gender, and class navigate and negotiate social and political boundaries without these questions of identity politics becoming the primary focus. Thus, the link of genre and methodology between these three movements extends to characterization, as these characters’ identities are not defined or limited by difference but by otherness in terms of action, plot, and mobility.

Although the third cycle of films in Maghrebs in Motion, which examines works by Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaïdi, and Nejib Belkadhi, does not include any female directors, in this section Gauch pays careful attention to gender as one of many conditions of marginalization that restrict social and political mobility. As in the previous cycles, the final three movements are linked thematically in terms of mobility; however, in contrast to the meditative films of Part 1 and the action-genre films of Part 2, the films from Part 3 break from the conventions of social realism, nationalist propaganda, and traditional narrative expectations in order to self-reflexively critique and lay claim to the practice and history of filmmaking as art. Emphasizing the power of geographical setting in coastal cities with ties to past and present cultural production, Gauch argues that these films, which refuse neat conclusions and which were received ambivalently by critics and public audiences alike, depict a temporal and physical sense of fluidity that parallel the characters’ hypermobile capacities to transgress the borders of systematic marginalization.

With her elegant and intensive close readings, Gauch underscores the necessity within formal and thematic scholarly analyses of a third cinema analytical frame to dismantle and deconstruct stereotypes that restrict the mobility not just of characters but of the films themselves at different levels of distribution. Furthermore, favoring in-depth over quantitative analyses enables Gauch to make time and space for these works, rendering this detailed treatment of individual films a political act and a declaration of their inherent artistic value as more than mere representations of Maghrebi cultural production. Even though the post-independence period challenged the power of cinema to act simultaneously as art and social critique, Gauch's dynamic study in nine movements proves that Maghrebi film after The Battle of Algiers is subject to experimentation and transformation and that themes and practices of motion and mobility give it continued vibrancy and life. While the book is directed towards an academic audience of primarily researchers in Maghrebi film, Gauch's writing is accessible enough to use in upper-level undergraduate classrooms and could prove useful in Arab and Middle Eastern, or even more general global, cinema classes.