This quote reminds me of slavery and race issues that pervade U.S. culture and consciousness today. It seems lately that more people are looking to have conversations about race and the horrifying past of this country, but I wonder how cinema has already and will continue to present and engage many of these issues. I wonder how cinema will be able to help foster these conversations and help uncover "forgotten" or brushed aside traumas. As Khatib notes, cinema can be destructive and can misrepresent things too, and I wonder what we are still misrepresenting about our own past.

This line reminds me of the scene in which the teacher tells Tarek that the French essentially "invented" Lebanon and were civilizing him. Tarek certainly finds it ridiculous, as it is, but I wondered what more of the characters thought about the French colonial influence, and I wonder how the movie would have been different if it explored that more.

The extent to which cinema impacts language features really prominently here. The Egyptian dialect is so well understood and widely heard that it seems via cinema to have had a profound effect on the Arabic language. I wonder if the Egyptian vocabulary is more common in other dialects now and how they have changed linguistically.

This poetic use of meter and broken meter resembles her own life. Farrokhzad, at times, lost her "meter" and questioned her own decisions about leaving her family, but ultimately she regains confidence in her choice.

Farrokhzad seems to have felt that sexual or romantic love "liberated" her, and she encourages other women to follow that same path. Perhaps for others maternal or marital love is empowering or immortalizing. I wonder if these other paths of love could somehow be included with the one she outlines to "liberate" women.

With poetry being such an integral and important piece of "classical" Iranian culture, Farrokhzad's use of it to express her feelings of confinement and captivity seem more powerful. It seems that she almost forces her voice into the pre-existing "traditional, patriarchal, literary circles;" she is able to garner attention for her cause by using "their" own medium "against" them.

Clearly Farrokhzad felt "Captive" in this simultaneously patriarchal and "trying-to-modernize" Iranian society, but I think setting up this dichotomy between the "role as a wife and mother" and that of "a liberated woman artist" can be extremely slippery. Farrokhzad felt she personally had to choose one over the other, but marriage and motherhood aren't necessarily or always contrary to women's liberation as they often are implied to be, especially when the West tries to look at the Middle East.

"The House is Black" works similarly. The film tries to break through misconceptions about leprosy and the isolation of the people in this village by "reaching out to establish a human relationship." The film provides a "Window" into the daily lives of these people in order that its audience might see, relate, understand, and find mutual humanity.

This particular image in the film reminded me of the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy." In the "Gods Must be Crazy," a pilot drops a coke bottle out of his window and it ends up in the hands of an indigenous African community. This unknown object causes fights and fears amongst them. If the coke bottle can be seen as a sign of "social and sexual engagement," it seems that Kinawi is as lost, frustrated, and confused by the coke bottle (e.g. when he smashes one against the wall) as the man who ends up with the coke bottle in "The Gods Must be Crazy." Both are confused and frustrated by the changing world that passes by in front of them.

In some ways, this scene begins similar to the belly dancing scenes from "Shore of Love." Hanouma dances traditionally. Then, in contrast to "Shore of Love," she is overtaken with this new rhythm and subsequently scolded for it.. What is Chahine trying to say about this sort-of embrace of modernization by putting it in juxtaposition with more conventional attitudes towards women in the public sphere?

Mashrabiya are protruding windows that are enclosed with lattice-like wood work. Sometimes including stained glass. Generally they are found in houses, but they can also be found in more public buildings.

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The way Cairo Station is depicted with this "constant motion" and the way that depiction interplays with ideas of "shattered" or "demented dreams" reminds me of the presently popular Hollywood movie "La La Land." In several interviews, the cinematographer of "La La Land," Linus Sandgren, has talked about his use of long takes and wide camera shots. Sandgren has commented that long takes and wide shots were used to make the camera "dance," evoking again this sense of constant movement. For "La La Land," the idea behind creating this movement was to make the story simultaneously (though somewhat paradoxically) more magical and more realistic. "Cairo Station" seems to use this constant motion for the similar purpose of making the story more realistic and chaotic. It is interesting to see how a presently popular and acclaimed Hollywood movie (albeit a nostalgic one) shares this concept of motion with Cairo Station.

Later on in this article it reads: "Chahine shot the entire film on location utilizing a hand-held camera to lend a“wobbly” effect and, for the first time, spurning fade-outs (Chahine 2006).The crowd scenes and the many shots of trains moving through the yards,whether framed from above or at ground level, look very different from thestylized urban landscapes reproduced on Giza’s (then) 30-year-old studio lots" (page 6). This too suggests the connection between showing motion in film and evoking a perhaps clearer sense of reality.

The Black Saturday riots are also known as "the Cairo fire.” On January 26, 1952 750 (roughly) buildings were burned and looted, including the country’s Opera House. The riots were set off when 50 Egyptian policemen were killed by British troops in the city of Ismailia. Anti-British protests ensued and then turned into the Black Saturday riots. Historically, these riots are considered by some to mark the end of the “Kingdom of Egypt.”

Recently, these protests and riots have been compared to the anti-government protests that took place in Egypt in Tahrir Square beginning on January 28, 2011, though, as with many historical comparisons, it is a difficult comparison to make accurately and effectively.