Egypt

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Egypt

ECONOMICS AND POLITICS
FROM SILENT CINEMA TO GOLDEN AGE
REALISM
FURTHER READING

The history of Egyptian cinema is long and varied. From modest beginnings with the projection of Lumière shorts in the Tousson Pasha hall of Alexandria and the Hammam Schneider baths of Cairo in 1896, film was transformed from an exclusively foreign import for the foreign elite into a national industry by the 1940s. This "Hollywood on the Nile," established in its initial phase in the mid-1930s by nationalist financier Talaat Harb, was equipped with studios, a star system, the production of syncretic genres, and mastery of the three-tiered system of production, distribution, and exhibition. Its subsequent domination over the cinema of other Arab and North African countries was uniquely binding at the cultural level, working in conjunction with the radio (established in 1926) and music recording industries. Together these media familiarized the inhabitants of other countries with the Egyptian dialect and culture; drew upon the preexisting cultural diversity of Egypt to further the aims and sense of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, from the cosmopolitanism of Alexandria to the work of Lebanese and Syrian artists in Cairo's theater and recording industries; entertained the masses through generic forms copied from Hollywood but customized to fit the cultural context and issues specific to Egyptian culture; and proved that while the technology of cinema was a Western invention, it could be used to serve the needs and contexts of the non-Western world—in this case, cultures that were predominantly Islamic in religion but tolerant and culturally diverse.

ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

The evolution of Egyptian film history reflects the economic and political changes that have swept the country since the beginnings of a national film industry. These changes have been distinguished by widely divergent economic directions and opaque ideological systems that became more pronounced following the 1952 Free Officer's Coup—a revolution led by a group of young military officers. This group effectively unseated from power the former British mandate puppet, King Farouk, descendent of the Ottoman Turkish dynasty, in a bloodless coup that served as a model revolution to other Arab countries seeking independence from colonial European rule. The subsequent rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) to power in 1954 extended to his leadership of the Pan-Arab movement, which forged ties between Egypt, Syria, and Iraq after Egypt's successful resolution of the 1956 Suez crisis, when French and British air forces were overpowered by the Egyptians after Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal.

Nasser's social reforms included nationalizing the cinema in the 1960s, and this had a great and negative impact on the film industry. Soon after the establishment of the General Organization of Egyptian Cinema in 1961 and the nationalization of the theatres in 1963, directors, producers, and talent fled to Lebanon, where they worked in the Lebanese film industry until the outbreak of civil war in 1975. In spite of these problems, Egypt's nationalized cinema organization made most of the films of the 1960s. One positive contribution from this period was the opening of the Higher Institute of Cinema in 1959, by the Ministry of Culture, where students received training in different aspects of production. Since then, this institute has produced much of Egypt's film and television talent. After Egypt's demoralizing 1967 defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel, Nasser's death in 1970, and the rise of Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), who promoted normalization of economic ties with Israel and the United States, the country underwent a general shift back to privatization. Nationalization was over by 1972, but relations with neighboring Arab countries were strained by Egypt's open-door policy with Israel, and the country's economic and political ties with Syria were broken.

As soon as Nasser nationalized the radio and television industries in the early 1960s, attendance at movie theatres dropped drastically. In the period from 1955 to 1975, the number of film theatres declined from 350 to fewer than 250. Meanwhile, imported foreign films continued to flood the Egyptian market. Tickets to films were heavily taxed, and the state film organization lost about 7 million Egyptian pounds, slowly bringing state film production to a halt by the early 1970s. The pendulum effect in funding between private and public sectors was also damaged by the increasingly predominant investment from the oil-rich Gulf countries, which financed films for television in the 1980s and later for satellite distribution in the 1990s. In addition to their more stringent censorship requirements of the usual subjects (sex, politics, and religion), the Gulf producers generally lacked awareness of the aesthetics of cinema. After the 1981 assassination of Sadat by a member of the Islamic Brotherhood, Hosni Mubarek's (b. 1928) regime was installed and with it emergency law, eventually diffusing the student movement that had erupted in the 1970s in reaction to Sadat's economic and political moves.

The Gulf petrodollars of the 1980s caused an out-pouring of funded television shows, which led to further decline in the film industry. By 1994, Egyptian cinema was considered to be in a state of crisis: the annual production of films had fallen to single digits, a far cry from the annual output of fifty narrative features in 1944. More recently, independent directors have concentrated their efforts on serial television shows for Ramadan, the holy month in which Muslims fast during the day, then relax in the evening, creating large popular audiences. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of post-war Beirut was fueling the media explosion of the second half of the 1990s, which led to such satellite channels as Rotana and Good Day from Beirut and the Gulf states, which now produce many films for the Egyptian market.

Another challenge to independent Egyptian film is the power of censors to stifle artistic work and freedom of expression at the slightest hint of perceived criticism of religion or of taboo subjects presented in anything other than a denunciatory way. Between 1971 and 1973, during Sadat's early years, any films that dealt with the 1967 defeat were banned, including Il Usfur (The Sparrow, Youssef Chahine, 1973), but since the early 1990s, censorship has been more acutely attentive to religious issues.

FROM SILENT CINEMA TO GOLDEN AGE

In the early years of the twentieth century, only foreign studios (German, Italian, and French) operated in Egypt, most of them in Alexandria because of its optimal lighting conditions. It was not until the 1920s that Egyptians made their own films. The first long feature to be financed by Egyptian money was Leila (1927), produced by a woman, Aziza Amir (1901–1952), who also acted in the film, and directed by Estephan Rosti (1891–1964; not a native Egyptian). Mohamad Bayoumi (1894–1963) and Mohamad Karim (first Egyptian film actor), who studied filmmaking in Germany, were early pioneers. Bayoumi was the first Egyptian to produce and shoot anewsreel, Amun, about the return of nationalist Saad Zaghloul Pasha from exile in 1923, and the first Egyptian to shoot and direct a short fiction film, al-Bashkateb (The Head Clerk [1924]). Mohamad Karim, who claimed to have learned filmmaking at "the university of Metropolis," where he spent a year assisting and observing in the production of Fritz Lang's 1927 expressionist classic on the sets of Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft), directed his first film, Zaynab, based on the novel by Mohamad Husayn Haykal, in 1930. In 1932, he directed the first Egyptian talking film Awlad al-dhawat (The Children of the Aristocrats), starring theater actors Yussef Wahbi and Amina Rizq; in 1933, he directed his first musical, al-Warda al-bayda' (The White Rose), which showcased the talents of musician and composer Mohamad Abdel Wahab (1901–1991). This was also the first film to solve the problem of compressing long classical Arabic songs (usually 15 to 20 minutes in duration) into six-minute sequences. From then on, Karim was known as Mohamad Abdel Wahab's director, and they made several other films together.

Talaat Harb, the savvy businessman and nationalist financier, founded Bank Misr in the 1920s as well as Studio Misr in 1935, which produced its first talking feature in 1936, Widad, directed by Fritz Kramp after a dispute broke out between original Egyptian director Ahmed Badrakhan and the studio manager, Ahmed Salem. After this, Studio Misr dominated productions in the film industry for the next thirty years. To ensure technical and aesthetic quality, Talaat Harb sent young filmmakers abroad to acquire professional training and recruited European technicians as consultants in Cairo. With the preexisting industries of radio and music recording and with Cairo's position since the nineteenth century as a refuge for artists and musicians fleeing the more constraining conditions of Greater Syria, this unique confluence of talent and technology led to the hegemony of Egyptian cinema over the Arab and North African region.

YOUSSEF CHAHINE
b. Alexandria, Egypt, 25 January 1926

Born in 1926 to a middle-class Catholic family of Lebanese and Greek origins, Youssef Chahine's formative years were spent in the cultural melting pot of Alexandria, living under British occupation. There he was exposed to a polyphonic culture of Eastern and Western flavors, surrounded by English, Italian, French, Greek, and Arabic languages, and living in a religiously tolerant environment where Muslim, Christian, and Jew coexisted. These elements, along with Egypt's changing politics since 1950, have strongly influenced his body of work.

Adept at mixing genres and styles, Chahine has made films for over fifty years, during which time he has revealed a commitment to social and political critique. His early tendency toward social realism is hallmarked by Bab al Hadid (Cairo Station, 1958) and Al Ard (The Land, 1969). In the former, he played a disturbed and crippled newspaper vendor in the Cairo train station who murders a voluptuous drink vendor out of unrequited desire; in the latter, based on a novel by Marxist Abdel Rahman Sharkawi, he shows the bonds of kinship and rivalry that destroy the solidarity of the peasants under the new land reforms of the Nasser period. His historical epic, Nasr Salah el Din (Saladin, 1963), depicts the twelfth-century uniter of the Arabs, Salah el Din, as a merciful and religiously tolerant leader who is an obvious allegory for Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's leader from 1954 to 1971. In his 1973 film Il Usfur (The Sparrow), he attempts to reconcile the ideals of Nasserism with the disappointing results of Egypt's 1967 defeat in its war with Israel and the aftermath. His 1997 Le Destin (Destiny) about the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes (Ibn Sinna), is an allegory for the contemporary struggles in Arab countries between Islamic fundamentalism and political despots, on the one hand, and free thinkers, on the other, mirroring his own battles with censorship on religious grounds in his film Al Muhajir (The Immigrant, 1994), banned for representing a character who is somewhat similar to the Biblical and Quranic Joseph. His autobiographical films were the first in the Arab world to treat non-normative sexuality as something human, seen in his quartet Alexandria … Why? (1978), Egyptian Story (1982), Alexandria, Again and Forever (1989,) and Alexandria … New York (2004).

Chahine has offered a new model for the Arab filmmaker as an independent auteur of a personal cinema. While his films attempt to cater to popular Egyptian tastes with their musical numbers and well-known film stars, the majority of Egyptians relate best to his realist films, finding the others too obscure. Those he has mentored include established film auteurs Yousry Nasrallah and Atef Hetata, who face similar problems of censorship and lack of local markets for their films.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Bab al Hadid (Cairo Station, 1958), Nasr Salah el Din (Saladin, 1963), Al Ard (The Land, 1969), Il Usfur (The Sparrow, 1973), Return of the Prodigal Son (1974), Alexandria … Why ? (1978), Egyptian Story (1982), Adieu Bonaparte (1984), Alexandria Again and Forever (1989), Cairo as Illuminated by Her People (1991), Al Muhajir (The Immigrant, 1994), Le Destin (Destiny, 1997), Alexandria … New York (2004)

REALISM

Realism has been a tendency in Egyptian cinema since the 1939 classic, Determination (Kamal Selim, al-Azma), but this tendency became particularly strong in the 1950s when serious realist writers like Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911) and Abdel Rahman Sharkawi (1920–1987) involved themselves in the cinema, penning screenplays or lending their novels to filmic adaptations. Of all the directors, Salah Abu Seif (1915–1996) is hailed as the father of Egyptian film realism, especially after his 1951 film Lak yawm ya Zalim (Your Day Will Come), adapted from Zola's novel Therese Raquin by Naguib Mahfouz. Seif's adaptation of the Mahfouz novel into al futuwa (The Tough Guy [1957]) is joined by Tawfik Saleh's (b. 1927) notable 1955 adaptation from Mahfouz's novel Darb al mahabil (Street of Fools). Abu Seif made twenty-four features between 1946 and 1966; between 1963 and 1965, he was head of the General Organization of Egyptian Cinema. Many of his films are social melodramas about the city of Cairo, its neighborhoods and working-class inhabitants. Due to the problems related to the nationalized cinema, he had difficulties making films during the late 1960s and 1970s; his only film of the 1980s was his feature Al-Qadisiya (1981), made in Iraq. Saleh, a younger director, also had difficulties and made only four films in Egypt, including Al Mutamarridun (The Rebels [1966]), before leaving for Syria, where he directed his best-known film, al Makhdu'un (The Duped [1972]), based on the novel Men under the Sun by Palestinian writer Ghassan Khanafani. Saleh later moved to Iraq to become head of the film institute in Baghdad.

Among Saleh's peers, each of whom suffered from the decline in state funding, Shadi Abdel Salam (d. 1986), originally a set and costume designer on numerous Egyptian films, heralded a new kind of art cinema with his sole feature, Al Mumiya (Night of the Counting Years [1969]). This film was hailed as a "renaissance" in Egyptian cinema, but Salam has since left Egypt because he was unable to secure funding for other projects; he died in1986. The demands of the market have dominated the type and level of artistry in Egyptian cinema, with few exceptions, one of whom is Youssef Chahine (b. 1926). The most prolific independent film director of the post-war period, a master of different genres, and the instigator of an auteurist and critical cinema in the Arab world, Chahine is probably the best known Egyptian figure abroad. This is due to his cultural blend of East and West, idiosyncratic style, international acclaim at Cannes and major film institutes, and critical feelings about the West, which are evident in his films. Notable among his films are Bab al hadid (Cairo Station [1958]), Al Ard (The Land [1969]), il Usfur (The Sparrow [1973]), Alexandria … Why? (1978), and Le Destin (Destiny [1997]).

The New Realist directors of the 1980s are arguably the most interesting development in recent Egyptian cinema. Belonging to the post-1967 generation, they participated in the student movement that questioned the corruption of new businessmen and the economic policies of Anwar Sadat. While taking advantage of funding from the Gulf states, they have played with conventions of realism and melodrama and addressed serious social issues. Significant directors from this movement include Atef El Tayeb (d. 1995), Sawwaq al-utubis (Busdriver [1982]), Mohamed Khan (b. 1942), Zauga ragil muhim (Wife of an Important Man [1987]); Khairy Beshara (b. 1947), Yawm hulw, yaum murr (Bitter Day, Sweet Day [1988]), and Daoud Abd El-Sayyed (b. 1946), KitKat (1991).

SEE ALSO Arab Cinema;National Cinema