Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series

Part 1 Egyptian realism and Arab cinema d'auteur

Salah Abu Seif b.1915 Tewfik Saleh b.1926 Youssef Chahine b. 1926 Shadi Abdel-Salam b.1930

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The first screenings of the Lumière's cinematographe in North Africa were arranged in cafes by local entrepreneurs only in cities with large populations of foreign residents like Cairo, Alexandria and Oran. Elsewhere in the Arab world the first public film shows were delayed for social or religious reasons being only for elite audiences – foreigners and members of the westernised bourgeoisie. A two-tiered system grew up: imported films in comfortably appointed locations, and in poorer, more improvised conditions for popular audiences. Like screenings, the first film productions were the work of foreigners but remained low in number through the 1920s – in Egypt only13 silent features were completed between 1926 and 1932. “In contrast European film-makers made great use of some parts of the Arab world as film locations with over sixty features being shot in North Africa alone before the end of the 1920s” ( Armes, Nowell-Smith ed, 662).

Roy Armes concludes that “Arab cinema remained synonymous with Egyptian cinema as Egyptian producers gradually came to dominate film markets throughout the Arab world.” The first film studio, Misr, opened in the mid-1930s, but production initially remaining at a low level until 1945. The end of the war Samir Farid described in Ecran (May 73 quoted Armes) as “the cinema of the war profiteers.” In postwar conditions the opportunity for the very profitable speculative investment of “parasitic capital” accumulated during the war in very low cost film production, more than doubled to rise above 50 features a year from 1945 to 1950, as did the number of cinemas although mainly in Cairo and Alexandria. This allowed Egyptian films and Egyptian dialect to play an important part in neighbouring countries. Otherwise, “the bulk of these films may have little value individually, but they did establish a lasting film tradition in Egypt” ( ibid).

The Will

Following two co-productions made in Iraq in 1945, a dozen or so select 'national' productions were made up to the revolt by army officers in 1952 which marked the end of British colonial dominance. This opened a gap between the commercial cinema and a small number of films made with more serious intent such as The Will/Al-Azima, also translated as Determination (1939), on which Abu Seif worked as an assistant, identified as a striking example of independent filmmaking. The story is set in the environment of petty bourgeoisie family life involving Muhammad a young man “with a good education” living with his parents (his father is “a simple barber”) in a traditional neighbourhood, who becomes caught in the vicissitudes of an arranged marriage - a plot complication is that neighbour's daughter happens to also be his beloved - linked to his inability to find a job which delivers an income to meet the requirements of the bride's parents.

Viola Shafik identifies the extent to which the conventional plot compromises social critique by introducing wish fulfilment (”fairytale”) elements in order to meet film industry demands for a romantic resolution. Nothing finally stands in the way of their marital happiness, however, when Muhammad is able to set up a company with the son of his supporting pasha, a compromise that allows the filmmakers to concentrate on the realistic portrayal of the setting, “the environment of the protagonist,” in a form of plot trade-off given “the increasingly unfavourable attitude of the industry towards realist representation” (ibid ). The original intention of the director was to call the film The Alley/ al-Hara) rejected by the producer “as not suitable for advertising.” Director and co-writer Kamal Selim (1913-45) took great care to accurately portray everyday life during economic crisis of the 1930s, the first Egyptian film “to deal realistically with a social problem drawn from real life and conditions in Egypt” (Galal el-Charkawi “ quoted Armes “Third World Cinema” 201).

The Will was the forerunner of realist filmmaking in Egypt from the early 50s, a few directors such as Abu Seif, Tewfik Saleh and Youseff Chahine becoming engaged, and prominent writers turned their attention to cinema, especially Naguib Mahfouz who completed 18 scripts and left deep traces especially on the work of Salah Abu Seif, the most popular representative of cinema realism in Egypt (Shafik 133). Claims for The Will as a precursor to postwar Egyptian “neorealism” have been based on works in 1957 of two of the most talented filmmakers : Abu Seif's The Tough Guy/ The Thug/Al-futuwa, and Chahine's Cairo Station/Bab al-hadid and At Land / Al-ard (1969), q.v.

The legacy of Seif and Chahine transformed the face of Arabic cinema reaching the 150 million Arabic speaking audience in cinema and on television in the Middle East and beyond. These directors in the course of their prolific careers made films like those mentioned above that dealt realistically with social problems drawn from social conditions in Egypt. Armes suggests that “the precise nature of this realism needs to be set against the prevailing attitudes and assumptions of Egyptian film-makers, rather than seen as a “source” for a postwar “Egyptian neorealism, if [such] qualities are to be established” (ibid 200). This includes their base in serious literary adaptation. Armes questions the approach made to Third World cinema in Africa and Asia in the Eurocentric construction of a “realist tradition” set against what is viewed as the mindless escapism of the popular commercial cinema of the time. Realist filmmaking in Egypt continued in varying degrees to be seen in the work of Henry Barakat*, Abu Seif, and Tewfik Saleh finding culmination in Chahine's At Land (q.v.). Viola Shafik suggests that

Egyptian realism is the only Arab realism that has entered film history under the name 'realism.' This is not to say that Egyptian realism was more 'realistic ' or more adequate to reality than other comparable trends in Arab cinema. Its name only expresses the changed attitude of a part of commercial Egyptian film making toward social reality. Its essential characteristics are description that attempted to be faithful to the environment and the choice of the simple man from the lower social strata as protagonist.

Egyptian realism's qualitative importance, according to Shafik, has caused “constant confusion in film history due to its marginality in numbers” (only about 32 films out of more than 1000 features 1951-71) confined to 3 directors. “Egyptian realism differs remarkably in its themes and narration from the other genres of the Egyptian film industry – farce, melodrama, or musical – while “having a strong commercial element” ( ibid 128).

Tewfik/Taufik Saleh (above, 1926-2013) was recognised in critics' circles, as “one of the pillars of Egyptian realist cinema who between 1955 and 1980 directed seven short films and seven full-length features without due appreciation” (Heshan Tata). Saleh's oeuvre is considered the only one in Egyptian cinema as a paradigm of Third World cinema advocated by Solanas and Getino's Third Cinema manifesto, q.v.6 (52). All Saleh's films dealt with the themes of social injustice, underdevelopment, political abuse and class struggle. (IMDB). The two most significant and controversial were The Rebels/Yiwmmyiat Na'eb fi Al Aryaf (1967) subject to censor modifications and accusations of defeatism on its release with “the theme of how oppressed societies repeat the mistakes of their oppressors when they lack knowledge of the past and future.” Saleh, a Marxist, further incorporated this theme into the form, particularly in the editing strategies, of his next film, a recognised masterpiece, The Duped/Al-Makhdu'un (1971) adapted from a short story by Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, a militant of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was assassinated in 1972 by the Israeli Mossad.

The Duped

The human tragedy of four Palestinian refugees of different generations and professions in The Duped representing the 'human excess baggage' in Arab countries attempting to escape across the border into Kuwait following Nukba (the catastrophe), the 1948 declaration of the independence of Israel. The unscrupulous driver of the empty water truck in whom they place their trust could be seen in his complexity as “embodying all Arab rulers seeking wealth rather than the well-being of their population” (Taha). The Dupes was made after the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel, Naksa (the setback), in 1967.

Roy Armes points out how apparent similarities between such work of these Arab directors and some of the key Indian directors of the 40s and 50s, such as Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, and Ritwik Ghatak, were wrongly viewed as precursors of a neorealism which found its fullest expression in reception of the first films of Satyajit Ray beginning with Pather Panchali. ”This is not to deny,” Armes suggests, “the fact of the effect of Italian neo-realism on Ray and many other non-western filmmakers.” As Third World critics and theorists published their own accounts of their national cinemas, Manthia Diawara on Black African cinema comes immediately to mind, it becomes clearer that such “racialist traditions” constructed by westerners, involve a distortion of both filmmakers' relation to their national industry and the particular qualities of their work, as Armes goes on to further discuss in “Third World Filmmaking and the West” (pp 69-74).

Salah Abu Seif (above,1915-1996) was born to landowning parents in Cairo. He saw his first feature film in 1927 at the age of 12 when films were either imports accompanied by Egyptian narrations or made by Europeans living in Egypt. Seif graduated in economics and commerce in 1932 while working as a freelance reporter following movie stars, and as a factory clerk during the day when he met Egyptian filmmaker Niazy Mustapha who offered Seif a job as a film editor.

In 1939 Seif won a scholarship to study film in Paris, encountering Italian neorealism in Rome. Returning to Cairo in 1942, he pioneered location techniques in impoverished city locations. When location shooting was not available to him, he reconstructed sets in great detail to represent real locations as accurately as possible. Seif's preference for realistic stories and settings based on seriously regarded novels with the addition of popular music, he saw as a means of establishing a closer relationship with the audience, earning him the description of “the artist for the Egyptian people.”

Seif's first film as a director, Number 6 (1942), a black comedy about the financial exploitation of families hit by sudden death, was banned after the Al Azhar, the official Muslim Church, protested that the subject was offensive to the Muslim majority in what was the first of Seif's many engagements with censorship during the course of his filmmaking career. In the 50s and 60s he directed two dozen of his 47 features as director ”making him a dominant figure in the Egyptian film industry.” In addition to tightly scripted studio dramas mostly with a realistic flavour, he ranged across other genres from musicals and action thrillers to dramas with a political edge such as Case 68/Al-Qadia 68 (1969) and Malatily Boathouse/ Hammam al Malatily (1973), both films attracting protest in the way they dealt with the social climate in Egypt after the Six Day War with Israel in 1967.

Your Day Will Come

Abu Seif led the way with a screenplay by Naguib Mahfouz (q.v.) of Emile Zola's seminal work of literary naturalism Thérèse Raquin re-titled Your Day Will Come /Lak yawm ya Zalim (1951) which he subsequently remade as The Criminal / Al-Mugram (1968). He followed with Foreman Hassan (1952), and The Tough Guy / The Thug (1957), from a Mahfouz script centred on Haradi, as a young peasant starting out in a Cairo vegetable market he seems young and foolish, but the film does not attempt a psychological study, his behavior suddenly changes from unskilled worker into an unscrupulous speculator threatening the position of the 'king of the market', the theme drawn from newspapers in what Shafik describes as “a typical example of Egyptian realism” that was also one of the most successful with audiences. “In Egyptian realism, Shafik suggests, “analysis of the totality of societal conditions is often undertaken only superficially and reflects the diffuse political convictions of the producer” (139).

Mahfouz and Seif equate the rules of the free market economy with the pre-Nasserist political system, which they see as leading to trade monopolies and illegal speculation. As becomes clear, the influential 'king of the market' has friends at the very top who support and profit from him […] but this system breaks down violently as a result of the police raid...[however] the ending is sceptical, a new 'Haradi' enters the market... (ibid)

Between Heaven and Earth/Baynaeme l-Samaa wa al-Ard (1959) and other such realistic studies of Egyptian lower- and middle-class life were Chahine's Cairo Station (q.v.) and Tewfik Saleh's first feature in 1957, an adaptation from Mahfouz's novel, Street of Fools/Darb al-nahabil (Armes “The Arab World” 665).

Youssef Chahine (above, 1926-2008) born into a middle class family he “experienced an education shaped by the realties of Britain's seventy-year occupation of Egypt.” His father was a financially unsuccessful lawyer, a supporter of the nationalist Wafd party. Youssef was brought up anti-British and Christian, educated at Victoria College Alexandria where he was taught in English. He persuaded his parents to allow him to study drama abroad spending two years at the Pasadena Playhouse near Los Angeles. According to Roy Armes, the cosmopolitanism inherited in Alexandria (Chahine was fluent in half a dozen languages) remained a regular presence in his work. He was also “a strong local patriot, his best films being profoundly Egyptian” even when made in another country such as Lebanon where he made two films that he nevertheless counted among his least important works. Chahine was always conscious of remaining in touch with the audience. Yet his films were also intensely personal.

Youssef Chahine in Cairo Station

Entering the industry as an assistant director, by the age of twenty-four Chahine directed his first feature Papa Amin/Baba Amin in1950 followed by seven more in the next 8 years. A concern for situating trauma socially comes remarkably together in his first signature feature, Cairo Station/Bab al-Hadid (a.k.a.The Iron Gate) (1958). Critical and international recognition of Chahine's bitingly effective, controlled direction (while also himself playing a crippled and simple newspaper boy maddened by repressed desire) and the analogy with Italian neorealism, was not so successful with home audiences “startled by the upfront sexuality [ as the film] fans out from a sweaty realistic base towards social observation, florid melodrama and dark suspense” in the portrayal of poor and dispossessed characters at the main railway station in Cairo (Trevor Johnston “Time Out').

Chahine's acceptance of the commercial failure of Cairo Statio did not lessen personal motivation. Armes observes that, as his technical skills increased, he allowed more of his intimate emotions and attitudes to emerge. “From the first he showed an interest in the psychology of the individual, madness and schizophrenia [becoming] a constant feature of his work.” At the same time he showed increasing concern with situating these traumas socially in working towards an analysis of interaction between the individual and society (Armes, Third World Cinema 245). His reaction was to move from the straightforward social realism of Cairo Station to a more questioning note in The Land /Al-ard (1969) which for Armes marks a considerable advance on Cairo Station. The technique is more assured and the political focus stronger in making an implicit critique of Nasser's failure to extend his reforms to the nationalisation of land. Not surprisingly the the novel's 1933 setting is retained - the powerfully told story of peasant unity emerges as far more than merely of historical interest” ( ibid 248).

Given its social origins, it was natural for Chahine to welcome the Nasser revolution of 1952, since at first it was essentially a bourgeois nationalist movement without an articulated ideology. In the spirit of national renaissance and renewed patriotism, the film industry flourished and took on a new seriousness.

In the 1950s, serious writers such as already noted Nobel prizewinner and author of 45 novels, Naguib Mahfouz (who worked with Chahine on three films (Jamila, Saladin and The Choice), and the socialist novelist Abderrahmane Sharkawai (author of Chahine's second 'realist masterpiece' The Land, Armes ibid 246).

The Land

Despite his disagreements with the Egyptian film censors, Chahine's politicisation during the period between the Suez crisis in 1956 and the Six Day War of 1967 took the form of commitment to Nasser's policies which “raised expectations in the Arabs neither Nasser nor Egypt could possibly fulfil” (Peter Mansfield 'The Arabs' quoted Armes 'Third World' 247). An image of a new Saladin who would unite all Arabs and liberate Palestine from Israel was what Chahine intended to project in the period epic Saladin (1963), the making of which he took on at short notice. The more complex allegory of The Choice/ Al-ikhtiar (1970) a murder mystery with a schizophrenic protagonist, a politicisation he admitted was “haphazard,” culminated with The Sparrow/Al-usfur (1973), in which blame for defeat by Israel in the 1967 war is lucidly laid on corruption in the political establishment leading to the film's banning for two years. Rather than abstract theorising Chahine ”continued to depict a living, contradictory reality.” Arguably his later films “achieve a quite remarkable fusion of the political and the personal” (ibid). This sense of growth, Armes suggests, means that “Chahine's work demands a chronological treatment that relates to social and political changes such as Egypt underwent following the overthrow of King Farouk

In 1952 in a military coup and replacement by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the presidency.

Following The Land (q.v.) and The Choice, the latter released in the year of Nasser's death, and his replacement by his designated successor Anwar El-Sadat, Chahine carefuly balanced his denouncement of high level corruption in The Choice / (1970) with a final affirmation of patriotic feeling. For the first time in 22 years articles appeared in the Egyptian press attacking the Nasserist revolution.

After the start of reprivatization [of the industry] in 1971, the production of realist films decreased rapidly and did not flourish again until after [the assassination] of Sadat in 1981 with the work of a second generation […] New realism appeared, at least regarding its subjects, to be much more pragmatic than the old version, although it functioned according to the same mechanisms. It similarly borrowed from commercial genres, but rather than melodrama it used elements of the action and police film […differing] externally in its choice of environment, mainly that of the urban petty bourgeoisie, and a stronger integration of original locations. (Shafik 142),

Shafik notes that in the late 1970s new cinema currents made their appearance in different Arab countries (184). ”It comprised numerous directions, sinima djidid (New cinema) in Algeria, sinima al-shab (Young cinema) in Egypt, and al-sinima ai-al badila (Alternative cinema) in Syria). These classifications rarely differentiate between genres in referring to realist or auteur works. In these new Arab cinema d'auteur, however, unlike in other forms of committed categories such as realism, the radical striving is for personal expression, be it on the formal, aesthetic or content level. In Chahine's The Sparrow /Al-Usfur (1973) the realist narrative showed signs of disintegration indicating the director's new formal orientation, his shift from mainstream and realist cinema toward the auteur film. The Sparrow was shot in 1971 but what Armes refers to as “a directly critical examination of the Nasser era, attacking corruption [in what Chahine] saw as characteristic of the time while celebrating the patriotism of ordinary people” (Armes, Nowell-Smith ed. 664). This did not please the political leadership. The Sparrow was released two years later, after Egypt's Yom Kuppur war against Israel in October 1973. “The basic dramatic structure of a crime and its investigations had been disintegrated by an imposed epic structure (Sharfick ibid).”

At the time Chahine was preparing a third increasingly disillusioned look at contemporary Egyptian society and the noveau riche in The Return of the Prodigal Son /Awdat al-ibn al-dall (1976), a wide gulf opening between the steadily more radical thinking of Chahine and the policies pursued by Sadat.

Alexandria...Why?

For Armes “it is not surprising that Chahine, by nature an eclectic director, should turn his attention elsewhere.” A heart attack when still in his early fifties led him to question his own life, and the first result was....Alexandria Why? / Iskandariyya...Iih? (1978), “a splendidly fluent picture of a vanished world - Alexandria in 1942 awaiting the arrival of Rommel's troops.” The autobiographical concerns of Alexandria...Why? are continued and strengthened in An Egyptian Story (1982), “a directorial self-revelation within the context of popular cinema to rank with anything in Fellini, especially in the fantasy sequences which refuse all claims to realism in a bold blending of the personal and the political; fictional and documentary, scenes follow the fortunes of Chahine's charismatic filmmaker-hero- alter ego Yehia in Fellini-esque images of his life on trial (Armes Third World Cinema 252).”

The third and fourth companions in the Alexandria series are Alexandria Again and Forever/ Iskandariyya Kaman wa Kaman (1989) and Alexandria-New York (2004). Chahine directed the last of his 37 features Is This Chaos?/ Hiya fawda...? in 2007.

1970 marked he appearance at the London Film Festival of the first film by Egyptian writer-director Shadi Abdel-Salam (above, 1930-86),The Night of Counting the Years. Salam had previously worked as an art director on Cleopatra, Jerzy Kawalarowicz 's Pharaoh, q.v. 6 (36), and on an episode of Roberto Rossellini's tv series, Mankind's Fight for Survival. Rossellini is acknowledged for his support in the credits of The Night. The original title, El Mummia/The Mummy, presumably was thought misleadingly evocative of a horror film entry, for what was an unexpected sudden art film breakaway from “the hidebound traditions of the local industry.” In this respect the road to release of The Night was suggested by John Russell Taylor as paralleling the reception of Satyajit Ray's first film Pather Panchali in Bengal, “both incurring envy and bureaucratic interference.” What Armes describes as “a complex study of modern and traditional values seemed to herald a renaissance of Egyptian cinema, the appearance of a “new cinema” familiar throughout the world in the1960s (203, Third World Cinema).” John Gillett described it as “something of an act of faith […] uncompromising and entirely personal. (Monthly Film Bulletin May 1972). ”

The Night of Counting the Years

Salam's film is based on real events. During Ancient Egypt's 21st Dynasty, priests in Thebes tried to stop robbers by moving more than 50 Royal mummies from the Valley of the Kings and burying them in a single tomb. In 1881, treasures from the tomb began appearing on the world antiquities market. Local Horrabat villagers had discovered the tomb and were systematically pillaging its archaeological booty. “The director has evoked the spirit of Ancient Egypt” through a studied, slow narrative creating a brooding atmosphere “concentrating on the moral dilemma of the tribe's younger members (ibid).“

Martin Scorsese (quoted by Rod Bishop) has spoken of “the extremely unusual tone of The Night of Counting theYears - ”stately, poetic, with a powerful grasp of time and the sadness it carries.” Scorsese further attributes this to “the carefully measured pace, the almost ceremonial movement of the camera, the desolate visually ravishing settings, the classical Arabic spoken on the soundtrack, the unsettling music score by the great Italian composer Mario Nascimbene, all working in perfect harmony to contribute to the feeling of fateful inevitability.” Ironically rather than being embraced as a breakthrough Egyptian art feature, the coalescing of these standout qualities kept The Night, an outlier on the shelf, from national release for at least two years despite its positive reception at its premiere, promoted by Rossellini at the Venice Film Festival, and at the 1970 London Film Festival.

Bishop notes that Salam spent the final decade of his life trying unsuccessfully to mount another feature provisionally a companion art film titled Akhenaton the Tragedy of the Great House – the life of Egypt's most fascinating Pharaoh who was labelled a heretic and criminal by many of his peers, and much later by some Egyptologists, as a visionary, the world's first monotheist and revolutionary. Bishop reports that in 2013 in a Dubai Film Festival publication, 475 critics, writers and academics chose The Night of the Living Dead as the greatest Arab film ever made.

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* Henry Barakat (1914-97) directed 65 features between 1942-93 including many adaptations of successful novels by Egyptian authors alongside popular genre films. He spent much of the thirties in France where he developed a special regard for poetic realism in French cinema and for 19th century classical novels.

Barakat's first feature was a successful adaptation of a Chekhov story, Vagabond/Ashareen (1942). He took 6 months to shoot on location what is regarded as his masterpiece, The Nightingale's Prayer/Doaa ei-Karawan (1959), about the oppression of a poor peasant girl by upper class men which challenged the then subject norms for Egyptian cinema, “its success an inspiration for young filmmakers.”

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NOTE - Renumbering is still due to take place

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links.

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror