Liora Lukitz
11-5-2017
A Thousand and One Nights: A Virtual Retrospective
Course Description: What are The Nights all about?
The Arabian Nights or A One Thousand and One Nights (Kitab alf layla wa layla) is a collection of Middle Eastern stories and folk tales from Arabic, Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian and Jewish sources. The stories, collected over centuries, were attributed to the tales told by Scheherazade,the Vizier’s daughter, to the Persian king Shahryar so to entice his curiosity and prevent him from executing her at dawn.
At the end of Thousand and One Nights, the king falls under the spell and takes Scheherazade as his new queen.
Among the characters in Scheherazade’s stories are jinns, monsters, evil spirits, magicians. Some tales were later attributed to the caliph Harun al- Rashid (the ruler of the Abbasid Empire during Islam’s golden ages) and his vizier Ja‘far al- Barmaki. the most famous stories are "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor".
This course will explain how images illustrate culture and how imagery helps reconnect individuals and groups to their original cultural roots. It will also explain the causes for The Nights’ influence on the West’s depiction of the East by reviving tales, creating new narratives and bringing imagery to life with the help of technology. It will explore new ways of representation that could also be multimodal: apps, games and presentations will be part of this enchanted adventure.
Class 1- “Legends on the Back of Camels”… Cultural influences during Islam’s Golden Ages.
Travelling from Byzantium to Persia, India, the Far East and back, caravans carried goods and legends along the Silk Road.
Originally from India, the collection of tales called now The Arabian Nights offers themes that have been explored in literature, television, movies and animation. The themes picked reflected the choices in the context of time. Explain how folk tales from India, Persia and other cultures in South and West Asia became to be known as The Arabian Nights? When did it happen and how Arab stories were added to the core of the compilation? Different versions of the same stories emerged against the backdrop of different cultures and geographical settings, with story tellers adding from their own conceptual world. These stories were later compiled in different collections (the Syrian and the Egyptian collections of The Thousand and One Nights among others) and later editions.
Class 2- What made Scheherazade’s stories so compelling?
The stories spoke to listeners and to readers because of the language, the cultural context. But also because of the wonder, suspense and irony underlying these tales. The stories are entertaining, spectacular and engaging leaving the reader puzzled on why and where would the wonder happen ..
Today we ask who was Scheherazade? What was her goal? Was she an early feminist, risking her life to protect other women from a very powerful king, while courageously expressing herself in a male dominated society? Or was she just trying to win the sultan over? Is our judgment affected by today’s perspectives?
We will deal with all the above by learning more about the origins of the most famous tales. Among them:
"The Fisherman and the Jinni", "The Story of the Three Apples", "Aladdin's Lamp" ,"Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" …can you find parallels in other cultures?
Class 3- What is in a text? What do the tales tell about the society in which the characters performed ?
Was it an autocratic society where the sultan was powerful and vindictive? Or was he interested on his subjects’ lives and able to change after understanding their plight?
What can you tell more about the societies where tales such as "Aladdin’s Lamp”, "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, "The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”, "The Fisherman and the Jinni" were created? Why have these tales become so popular?
We will stroll along the alleys of Suq al-Warraqyin (The Stationeries’ Market) in medieval Baghdad where paper (a marvelous innovation imported from China)became the hottest commodity in the capital, expanding from there to other parts of the empire. We will meet with scientists, astronomers and translators at Bayt al-Hikma (the House of Wisdom). We will discover how translations from Greek of scientific knowledge (algorithms, algebra, astrology) had been passed over to medieval Europe, laying the foundations of the Renaissance. We will then be transported to modern Baghdad’s al-Mutanabbi Street with treasures exposed on the book stalls.
We will discover how has the West become so enchanted by these tales by quoting from different translations. We will compare excerpts from the 19th translation by Sir Richard Burton to the later versions by Muhsin Mahdi (1984) and Husain Haddawy (1990) and discover how Jewish book sellers in ancient Cairo contributed to the preservation of the manuscripts.
Class 4 -What is in an image ? What is ‘dramatic visualization’?
How were these images redesigned in the West ?
Class 5 -Are Hollywood’s versions up to the text?
Aladdin by Disney borrowed from the book’s characters of the vizier and the caliph but its images were taken from The Thief of Bagdad (produced by London Films in
1940 and inspired on a 1924 production won the Academy Awards for Cinematography, Art Direction and Special Effects).
And learn how these stories have been reset in Western tales.
We will watch attempts through time to visualize The Nights From Georges Mieles The Palace of the Arabian Nights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agFLMKoqS9A
to Walt Disney’s Aladdin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVxUUotm1P4
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115491/
and to
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (the movie)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473075/videoplayer/vi3849520153?ref_=tt_ov_vi
Class 6 - Can you do better? Plots and structures: Can you become a screenwriter?
Let’s discover how story telling motivates readers to actively participate in the development of the characters and the construction of the plot.
We will learn story telling techniques, satire, suspense, murder, mysteries, crime, fiction, fantasy and more.. How are all these represented in The Nights?
We will work with flying carpets, magic lamps, breathtaking landscapes and fantastic texts and learn how to start writing a script based on the top ten stories of the Nights.
https://theculturetrip.com/middle-east/articles/the-top-10-stories-from-1001-nights/
or find one tale not yet explored ..
Class 7 – A multimedia workshop: ‘Screen, Video and Stage : Bringing the Audience In..’
We will chose a tale and translate it visually in class learning how to create new images by drawing on the work of Arab, Persian and Indian illustrators and then create games, apps and presentations based on more authentic characters and landscapes.
Class 8, 9 - Compare the clips and learn how to do better.
From Alif Laila (The Arabian Nights), a 1997–2002 Indian TV series produced by Sagar Entertainment and other productions :
Arabian Nights (2000), a two-part television mini-series adapted for BBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM4_cSK2fhE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_1nbLfvAo
Class 10 : So what have we learned about Imagery?
We will discuss frames, borders, limits from an interdisciplinary perspective by quoting from:
Leslie Boldt-Irons’ Images and Imagery (Peter Lang, 2005).
Class 11- How Does it Sound?
The Nights have inspired many pieces of music, let’s listen to them...
Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL85P0dmpAk&index=3&list=RDB6QgAkcjzpU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQNymNaTr-Y
Carl Maria Von Weber Abu Hassan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrcW_DSxXJk
Peter Cornelius’ Der Barbier von Baghdad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdWvhz4XcF4
Class 12 : How can The Thousand and One Nights inspire the younger generations?
Can you help create clips, games and texts for children to bridge different cultural contexts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRQjys1RlDI
Magic Box production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZykYiXkxm0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwM2pfh2Ow8
Tamil Productions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4LKPo9m0Wk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgGUHdXPYFA
Other Studios :
Big Bad Bood Studios
Le Monde des Enfants
And games, by building on texts and images? From history to fiction, and back..
Board Games and Digital Games
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34119/tales-arabian-nights
Among the most popular video games based on The Nights’ themes are:
Nadirim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvkMi0X36Og
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhRapIawX-Q
and
Prince of Persia (the game)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zyQ_OVyhNE
Class 13 - Final debate : So what was it all about? Marvels, wonders, astonishing tales or much more ? A return to reality…
We will start the debate by reading selected passages from Roy Mottahedeh’s " ‘Aja’ib in The Thousand and One Nights: The Tale Of ‘Ajib, The Curious Man, whose curiosity leads him to all sorts of ‘aja’ib" in Richard G. Hovannisian , George Sabagh (eds), Fedwa Malti Douglas (introduction) The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
We will then quote from Muhsin al-Musawi’s The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights (Columbia University Press, 2009) to understand how the tales of The Thousand and One Nights were embedded with Islamic motifs representing social, political, and economic institutions and how these are represented in this unique experience in storytelling. We will also learn about bridging cultural themes and understand how images and technology can enhance multi cultural experiments.
Sources :
Selected excerpts from:
Boldt-Irons, Leslie et al (eds.)
Images and Imagery ( New York, Washington DC, Oxford: Peter Lang , 2005).
Mottahedeh, Roy “ ‘Aja’ ib in The Thousand and One Nights” in Richard G. Hovannisian, George Sabagh (eds.), Fedwa Malti Douglas (introduction) The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Musawi, Muhsin J. al- The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights (Columbia University Press, 2009).
Pinault , David Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Brill Publishers, 1992).
Sallis, Eva Scheherazade Through the Looking-Glass: The Metamorphosis of The Thousand and One Nights (Routledge, 1999).
http://www.uexpress.com/tell-me-a-story/2014/1/19/the-fisherman-and-the-jinni-an
https://1000into1night.wordpress.com/3-the-tale-of-the-three-apples/
