Quand Bollywood fabrique la ville : une (contre) histoire de la péninsule Arabique à l’écran

• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa 2019-10-01
• Series: Arabian Humanities
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cy/4205

Love in Tokyo (Pramod Chakravorty, 1966), An Evening in Paris (Shakti Samanta, 1967), Namastey London (Vipul Amrutlal Shah, 2007) or New York (Kabir Khan, 2009), are only a few examples of Bollywood films cities into the spotlight. In the mid-2000s, Dubai had just started to appear on this list with Dubai Return (Aditya Bhattacharya, 2005) and Hungama in Dubai (Masood Ali, 2007). While visions of Paris or New York are sprawling in the production of images, Dubai remains on the margins of urban imaginaries in film. At the same time, the grandeur of this spectacular and cinematic city inspires Bollywood. What are the images of Dubai produced on screen by the Bombay film industry? From an indistinct space, that of Arabia, to a specific urban incarnation that embodies the imaginary of Gulf cities, Bollywood turns its nationalist politics into pictures while redefining its own stereotypical iconography of the Arabian Peninsula.