Posted: December 22nd, 2015

Historiography of Kuwaiti cinema

f there are Kuwaiti nationals who made films before 1964 do include them in your account.
Then ask yourself: who produced these films? Where they small or large companies, or the state, or television?
What kind of films were/are they? Documentaries, fiction, what kind of fiction (melodramas, thrillers, i.e. what kind of genre)?
As for where people where watching these films: it is not the people as such I am intersted in. Rather, if you can find the information, look where the cinemas were in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc, when they opened, and in which areas of Kuwait.
Who distributed the films? Were/are there distribution companies?
Where were/are the films adversised?
If you have information on censorship, it is also useful.
You will not find information on all of these, but these are the questions you should ask yourself. I attach a chapter of one of a book. It focuses on the cinema in the 1920s in India. Have a look: it may be useful to get a sense of what it means to write the history of a cinema at a particular time. I am not asking you to write something similar. My chapter should focus more on the filmography (the list of films made in Kuwait to date), but these films have a background, and writing about this background means giving a sense to your reader of who produced them, distributed them and where they were shown.