Arab World Cinemas: A Reader and Guide [1 ed.] 1474435777, 9781474435772

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration and Filmic Citation
Preface
Part 1 Egypt
Egypt: Regional Essay
1.1 The White Rose, Muhammad Karim (1933)
1.2 Determination, Kamal Salim (1939)
1.3 Love and Revenge, Yusuf Wahbi (1944)
1.4 Struggle on the Nile, ʿAtif Salim (1959)
1.5 The Open Door, Henri Barakat (1963)
1.6 Night of Counting the Years/The Mummy, Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam (1969)
1.7 Alexandria, Why?, Youssef Chahine (1978)
1.8 Dreams of Hind and Camilia, Muhammad Khan (1989)
1.9 I Love Cinema, Osama Fawzi (2004)
1.10 Souad, Ayten Amin (2021)
Part 2 North Africa: The Maghrib and Beyond
North Africa: Regional Essay
2.1 Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina (Algeria, 1975)
2.2 Omar Gatlato, Merzak Allouache (Algeria, 1976)
2.3 Bab el-Oued City, Merzak Allouache (Algeria, 1994)
2.4 Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia, 1994)
2.5 Season of Men, Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia, 2000)
2.6 Waiting for Happiness, Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania, 2002)
2.7 A Thousand Months, Faouzi Bensaidi (Morocco, 2003)
2.8 aKasha, Hajooj Kuka (Sudan, 2018)
2.9 Casablanca Beats, Nabil Ayouch (Morocco, 2021)
Part 3 The Eastern Arab World
The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay
3.1 The Dupes, Tewfik Saleh (Syria, 1972)
3.2 Wedding in Galilee, Michel Khleifi (Palestine, 1987)
3.3 The Extras, Nabil Maleh (Syria, 1993)
3.4 Chronicle of a Disappearance, Elia Suleiman (Palestine, 1996)
3.5 Divine Intervention, Elia Suleiman (Palestine, 2002)
3.6 The Time That Remains, Elia Suleiman (Palestine, 2009)
3.7 Caramel, Nadine Labaki (Lebanon, 2007)
3.8 Dawn of the World, Abbas Fahdel ([Iraq], 2008)
3.9 Wadjda, Haifaa Al-Mansour (Saudi Arabia, 2012)
Bibliography
Materials from the New York State Archives Motion Picture Scripts Collection
Index

Citation preview

 

Arab World Cinemas

A Reader and Guide

Marlé Hammond

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Marlé Hammond, 2024 Cover image: Ahmed Marei, Ahmad Hegazi in Al Mummia (The Mummy) 1969, Egypt, Director: Chadi Abdel Salam. Photo12/7e Art/General Egyptian Cinema Organisation. Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com Edinburgh University Press Ltd 13 Infirmary Street Edinburgh EH1 1LT Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Adobe Text by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3577 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3578 9 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3579 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3580 2 (epub) The right of Marlé Hammond to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

 

Contents

List of Tables v List of Figures vi Acknowledgementsxi Note on Transliteration and Filmic Citation xiii Prefacexv Part 1  Egypt Egypt: Regional Essay 1.1 The White Rose, Muhammad Karim (1933) 1.2 Determination, Kamal Salim (1939) 1.3 Love and Revenge, Yusuf Wahbi (1944) 1.4 Struggle on the Nile, ʿAtif Salim (1959) 1.5 The Open Door, Henri Barakat (1963) 1.6 Night of Counting the Years/The Mummy, Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam (1969) 1.7 Alexandria, Why?, Youssef Chahine (1978) 1.8 Dreams of Hind and Camilia, Muhammad Khan (1989) 1.9 I Love Cinema, Osama Fawzi (2004) 1.10 Souad, Ayten Amin (2021)

3 25 31 37 43 48 53 58 63 69 76

Part 2  North Africa: The Maghrib and Beyond North Africa: Regional Essay 2.1 Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina (Algeria, 1975) 2.2 Omar Gatlato, Merzak Allouache (Algeria, 1976) 2.3 Bab el-Oued City, Merzak Allouache (Algeria, 1994) 2.4 Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia, 1994)

85 102 108 113 119

iv  Contents 2.5 Season of Men, Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia, 2000) 2.6 Waiting for Happiness, Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania, 2002) 2.7 A Thousand Months, Faouzi Bensaidi (Morocco, 2003) 2.8 aKasha, Hajooj Kuka (Sudan, 2018) 2.9 Casablanca Beats, Nabil Ayouch (Morocco, 2021)

124 129 135 141 146

Part 3  The Eastern Arab World The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay 3.1 The Dupes, Tewfik Saleh (Syria, 1972) 3.2 Wedding in Galilee, Michel Khleifi (Palestine, 1987) 3.3 The Extras, Nabil Maleh (Syria, 1993) 3.4 Chronicle of a Disappearance, Elia Suleiman (Palestine, 1996) 3.5 Divine Intervention, Elia Suleiman (Palestine, 2002) 3.6 The Time That Remains, Elia Suleiman (Palestine, 2009) 3.7 Caramel, Nadine Labaki (Lebanon, 2007) 3.8 Dawn of the World, Abbas Fahdel ([Iraq], 2008) 3.9 Wadjda, Haifaa Al-Mansour (Saudi Arabia, 2012)

153 170 174 178 183 188 193 198 203 207

Bibliography212 Materials from the New York State Archives Motion Picture Scripts Collection 223 Index  224

 

Tables

1a 1b 1.1.1 1.7.1 2.4.1 2.4.2 2.5.1 2.7.1

Film production in the Arab world, 1933–40 12 Cinematic firsts 24 Western music versus Arabic music 28 Chahine’s arthouse and mainstream styles 62 Spatial division in Silences of the Palace120 Temporal framework of Silences of the Palace120 Undermining of women’s rights in Season of Men125 Opening point of view structure in A Thousand Months137

 

Figures

1.1.1 Muhammad Galal Effendi positioned before Islamic calligraphy27 1.2.1 Fatima as a bint al-balad (RT 15:55) 34 1.2.2 Fatima as a middle-class housewife (RT 1:17:59) 34 1.2.3 Muhammad greets Fatima from his window (RT 4:56) 35 1.2.4 Muhammad, Fatima and ʿAdli enjoying antics on the street below (RT 1:46:32) 35 1.3.1 A crazed Gamal plays the violin (RT 4:13) 38 1.3.2 Suhayr Sultan on stage (RT 7:29) 38 1.3.3 Suhayr Sultan headshot with Quran (RT 1:29:39) 39 1.3.4 Mulabbas speaks to Suhayr over the telephone (RT 18:45) 41 1.3.5 Graphic matches between the characters, notably the head towel and the turban, provide a visual representation of their bond (RT 18:49) 41 1.4.1 Female tourist photographs Mujahid (RT 4:48) 45 1.4.2 Emerging from the hold, Narguiss gazes desirously at Mujahid (RT 54:41) 46 1.4.3 A muscular Mujahid, as seen by Narguiss (RT 54:43) 46 1.4.4 Ward and Muhassab positioned before Pharaonic statues (RT 11:58) 46 1.4.5 Ward and Muhassab stand before an iconic water-wheel (13:35) 46 1.5.1 Layla gazes at the maid cleaning spilt coffee from the carpet (RT 37:24) 50 1.5.2 The camera zooms in on the cleaning action (RT 37:27) 50 1.5.3 Layla pictured against the smoke of the ‘Black Saturday’ fires (RT 41:32) 51 1.5.4 Gamila’s head and torso align with smoke and cityscape (RT 42:19) 51

Figures  vii 1.5.5 Men offer Layla helping hands as she boards the train to Port Said (RT 1:42:25) 52 1.6.1 Wanis descending staircase into family home (RT 20:24) 55 1.6.2 An atypical representation of prostitutes (RT32:31) 56 1.6.3 An aerial view of Wanis lying flat at the water’s edge (RT 1:05:55) 56 1.7.1 A shot from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (RT 01:58) 60 1.7.2 A shot from Charles Walters’ Easy to Love (RT 2:09) 60 1.7.3 Tommy with his ‘Middlesex’ arm label (RT 59:50) 61 1.8.1 The German Opel brand featuring prominently in a shot of the mechanics workshop (RT 1:28:32) 65 1.8.2 Eid pictured behind bars as Hind and Ahlam visit him in prison (RT 1:31:39) 65 1.8.3 Hind and Ahlam barely discernible from Eid’s point-of-view (RT 1:31:42) 65 1.8.4 Hind, Camilia and Ahlam as a happy family unit (RT 1:34:33) 66 1.9.1 Naʿim pleads with God to let him go to the cinema (RT 41:40) 72 1.9.2 The film Female Idol appearing on a cinema marquee (RT 1:05:45) 73 1.9.3 Portrait of Nasser appears behind Niʿma as she addresses her student body (RT 20:45, detail) 73 1.9.4 A portrait of the deceased ʿAdli hangs prominently on the wall (RT 1:35:52) 74 1.10.1 Souad’s face first appears as it is captured in her mobile phone (RT 01:19) 77 1.10.2 Souad’s face illuminated by blue light (RT 26:31) 78 1.10.3 Souad taking a selfie in the bathroom (RT 28:32) 78 1.10.4 Souad gazes at the street below as she airs laundry from the balcony (RT 19:24) 80 1.10.5 Rabab gazes at Souad after she has jumped to her death (RT 42:37) 80 2.1.1 Close-up of Ahmad (RT 05:55) 104 2.1.2 Ahmad on a lunch break with his son (RT 44:12) 105 2.1.3 Camera zooms in on Ahmad’s strong arms (RT 44:32) 105 2.1.4 Ahmad holds Larbi, who has been beaten by police (RT 2:05:18) 106 2.1.5 As Miloud dies, his profile merges with the landscape (RT 2:55:08) 106

viii  Figures 2.2.1 Omar manhandles an elderly, veiled black-market trader (RT 22:53) 2.2.2 Omar’s friends and colleagues hide behind the newspaper (RT 1:10:20) 2.2.3 Omar combs hair whilst speaking to Salma in a phonebooth (RT 1:12:28) 2.2.4 Omar combs hair as he waits with Mo for Salma to emerge from her office (RT 1:23:35) 2.3.1 Said applies to kohl to his eyes (RT 06:13) 2.3.2 One of a series of shots taken from inside a car with mysteriously threatening characters (RT circa 30:00) 2.3.3 A satellite dish dominates the roof of a building where Said and his gang are installing a loudspeaker (RT 1:18:31) 2.4.1 Khedija watches Alia play the oud through a window (RT 27:36) 2.4.2 Si Ali watches Alia play the oud and sing through the same window (RT 46:10) 2.4.3 Close-up of Alia’s face as she hears her mother’s rape (RT 1:03:46) 2.4.4 Alia screams silently at the mansion’s gate (RT 1:04:02) 2.4.5 Khedija screams as she dies from an induced miscarriage (RT 1:56:32) 2.5.1 Mother-in-law sabotages Aicha’s loom (RT 1:09:18) 2.5.2 A young man attempts to assault Mariam (RT 1:04:19) 2.5.3 Mariam’s grandmother and a servant subject her to a virginity check (RT 1:06:22) 2.6.1 The low window that serves as Abdallah’s screen onto the outside world (RT 11:33) 2.6.2 Television set serving as window onto France (RT 24:36) 2.6.3 Abdallah finds himself in a peculiar position (RT 40:43) 2.6.4 Police carry Mickaël on stretcher (RT 48:09) 2.6.5 Officer gazes at photo of Mickaël with friend posing in front of image of Eiffel Tower (RT 49:43) 2.7.1 Women on hill establish a gaze (Shot A, RT 0:47) 2.7.2 Blind man’s gaze guided to the moon (Shot H, RT 2:12) 2.7.3 Mehdi and friend sit on rocky terrain, with Mehdi gazing up at candy wrapper (RT 1:22:50) 2.7.4 Mehdi’s view of candy wrapper against the sky revealed (RT 1:22:53) 2.7.5 View of Amina peering through candy wrapper (RT 1:27:11)

110 110 111 111 115 116 117 121 121 122 122 122 125 126 126 131 131 132 133 133 137 137 138 138 138

Figures  ix 2.7.6 Spectator’s alignment with Amina’s point of view thwarted (RT 1:27:20) 2.7.7 Mehdi stands against wall holding chair as a form of protection (RT 4:59) 2.8.1 Lina admires Adnan’s beauty as he lies on her bed (RT 7:44) 2.8.2 Angered, Lina stands up, positioning herself symbolically with respect to ‘Nancy’ and the poster of Angela Davis (RT 8:34) 2.8.3 Rebel soldiers prepare to return to battle with Girifna painted on their jeep (RT 44:12) 2.9.1 The face of Anas is profiled as he stands on a roof overlooking a crowd of worshippers (RT 21:33) 2.9.2 View of Anas from the back as he looks up to his students gathered on the roof (RT 1:36:42) 2.9.3 Female student dances amidst laundry airing on a roof (RT 48:23) 2.9.4 Dancing student climbs window grill towards the sky (RT 49:16) 3.1.1 Abu al-Khayzuran as qaʾid - both ‘driver’ and ‘leader’ (RT 1:05:21) 3.1.2 Abu al-Khayzuran slumped over the driving wheel (RT 1:08:09) 3.2.1 Interior of a room where guests are to be served coffee (RT 09:09) 3.2.2 Close-up of groom’s mother as she ululates (RT 06:11) 3.3.1 Salem gazes on the legs of a female passenger as he washes a car window (RT 1:36) 3.3.2 Salem experiences a pornographic fantasy (RT 22:30) 3.3.3 Salem and Nada ‘caged’ under the wire frame of Adel’s bed (RT 1:22:30) 3.4.1 Jericho resort with large mural of Yasser Arafat (RT 1:11:09) 3.4.2 Profile of ES’s father as he has fallen asleep resting head on hand (RT 01:16) 3.5.1 Balloon with Yasser Arafat’s portrait tours the skies over Jerusalem (RT 56:23) 3.5.2 Close-up of a kufiyye-clad ‘terrorist’ on billboard advertising a shooting range (RT 1:10:57) 3.5.3 ES in his car, staring at the settler (RT 1:11:36) 3.5.4 Cryptic positioning of ES and his gaze upon his father (RT 31:24)

138 140 143 143 144 148 148 149 149 171 171 176 176 179 179 181 185 186 190 191 191 192

x  Figures 3.6.1 Fuad’s blindfolded gaze over prisoners in an olive grove (RT 28:19) 3.6.2 Fuad’s view of the prisoners in the olive grove (RT 28:21) 3.6.3 View of historic ‘Visit Palestine’ poster where the word ‘Palestine’ has been replaced (RT 0:41) 3.7.1 Siham enters the salon and stands in front of the very large portrait of the red-headed model (RT 22:53) 3.7.2 Siham gazes at Rim during a hair wash (RT 33:01) 3.7.3 Siham maintains her gaze during an electricity outage (RT 33:12) 3.8.1 Zahra’s form is indeterminate as she lies on the ground with her arms in a loop (RT 2:05) 3.9.1 Wadjda’s mother gazes at a headless mannequin in a red dress at the mall (RT 31:15) 3.9.2 Wadjda’s mother tries on a red dress in the ladies’ room (RT 32:42)

195 195 196 199 201 201 204 209 209

Acknowledgements

The people who have contributed, both directly and indirectly, to the formulation of this book are too numerous to count. Here I list only the most immediate and essential. First, I would like to thank my colleagues at SOAS: Wen-chin Ouyang, who first invited me to teach the Arabic Cinema module as an extra academic assistant back in 2006–7; Keya Anjaria, who, as coteacher on the Cinemas of the Middle East and North Africa course, has influenced my interpretations of several of the films included in this volume; Nada Elzeer, whose friendship was motivational as I was drafting the manuscript and whose knowledge of popular culture proved to be an invaluable resource; Lindiwe Dovey, who is an inspirational figure and always ready to offer logistical advice; and Andrea Cornwall, whose impromptu virtual writing retreats gave me the space and time to put the finishing touches on my draft. Of all the people outside SOAS I need to thank, perhaps no one has been as instrumental as Walter Armbrust. He is a fount of knowledge whose passion for his subject is infectious. He has provided me with resources, made me aware of important scholarship and introduced me to contacts. I would also like to thank Chihab El Khachab, for allowing me to test some ideas on him, and May Telmissany, for sending me a copy of her book on the neighbourhood (hara) in Egyptian film. Refqa Abu-Remaileh, furthermore, has kindly provided me with copies of two of her publications. Informing my approach are the ideas and opinions of two teachers and countless students. First, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, in the 1989–90 academic year, I had the pleasure of studying ‘Third World Cinema’ with Richard Peña, programme director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Although I do not reproduce any part of that filmography here – the one Egyptian film we watched was Salah Abu Sayf ’s Youth of a Woman (Shabab Imraʾa, 1956) – his methods of film analysis and the creative ways in which he assigned secondary literature made a profound impact

xii  Acknowledgements on me. Second, whilst living in Cairo in 1991, I took a course on Egyptian cinema with Doriya Sharaf El-dine, who would later become Egyptian Minister of Culture. Her insider’s view of the film industry, complete with a tour of Egyptian film studios, made the module a very dynamic one. These two experiences I had learning from the masters, so to speak, gave me the confidence to say yes when I was first approached about the possibility of teaching Arabic Cinema at SOAS, even though my training had been in Arabic literature. However, it is the students I have worked with who have taught me the most. They now collectively number in the hundreds, but I would like to single out a few to whom I am particularly indebted and whose names appear in my footnotes accordingly: Salma Khamis Shaaban, Emilia Astrom and Berit Schlumbohm. Salima Odeh, too, deserves a special mention. I learned about film studies through the practice of teaching all my students, and they have helped me to refine my ideas and situate them in ways that are meaningful to others. I thank Nicola Ramsey at Edinburgh University Press for initially approaching me about the possibility of producing this book and for seeing me through the proposal process. I also thank the anonymous readers for their comments and ideas on the proposal. Isobel Birks, too, has been ­consistently gracious and supportive. Family members, also, are deserving of my gratitude. I thank my husband, Avner Gidron, and my mother, Sigrid Hammond, for their feedback on drafts of the manuscript. I furthermore thank my father-in-law, Daniel Gidron, for assisting me with the identification of music in The White Rose. Last but not least, I have two filmmakers to thank: Louis Pepe, for helping me gather production information, and Hajooj Kuka, both for the way in which his films challenge existing categories of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’, thereby exposing the fault lines between them, and for allowing me to interview him.

Note on Transliteration and Filmic Citation

Throughout this book I have transliterated Arabic words and names using the system outlined by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I have not employed full transliteration but rather have omitted the macrons and dots. Where film titles have a standard spelling in the Roman alphabet, I have used those versions rather than proper transliterations. For example, I speak of Omar Gatlato and not ʿUmar qatalathu. When it comes to referencing particular moments from a film, especially in connection with the screen-grabs that illustrate certain points, I use running time (RT) wherever possible – that is when the films are sourced from professionally released DVDs or commercial streaming services. On the other hand, when I am drawing upon private recordings of television broadcasts or on streaming platforms such as YouTube, I generally situate the still with respect to the plot.

Preface: Reflections on the Book and its Representation of Arabic-Language Cinema

Arab World Cinemas: A Reader and Guide aims to celebrate the variety and richness of the Arab world’s cinematic traditions, from the early twentieth century through to the early twenty-first. The book immerses the reader in the marvels of Arabic-language cinema through contextualisation and analysis of fictional feature-length films. Regional essays, on Egypt, North Africa and the Eastern Arab World, respectively opening the three parts of the book, highlight aesthetic and sociohistorical trends and currents in the cinematic traditions of those regions. Within these parts, short chapters devoted to individual films locate the films in their cultural milieus and interpret them as artistic artefacts. Analyses are grounded in cinematic technique, and theories drawn from various disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences inform the discussion. Chapters unfold along geographical and chronological trajectories in order to situate the films with respect to regional and local cinematic histories. Although the term ‘Arab’ suggests cultural and ethnic affiliations and affinities, in the context of this book, those affiliations and affinities are expressed specifically through the Arabic language. In other words, all the films featured in this book are Arabophone. It is about the l­ anguage of the script rather than the identity of the director. Certain technical terms from film studies are emphasised and described in order to ensure the reader has a firm grasp on the cinematic techniques upon which interpretations are based. These include sound, mise-en-scène and editing. Analyses of the deployments of these techniques coalesce around prisms for understanding narrative modes such as allegory, melodrama and realism. These modes are then related to cultural and historical phenomena in the countries of the films’ origins. For example, an examination of the neo-realist techniques in Muhammad Khan’s Dreams of Hind and Camilia (1989) uncovers the filmmaker’s scathing critique of the harmful effects of the policy of the infitah – the ‘opening up’ of the Egyptian economy to foreign investment – under the Sadat and early Mubarak regimes. Similarly,

xvi  Preface in her film Souad (2021), Ayten Amin draws on techniques of vérité cinema, such as the hand-held camera, to explore the deleterious effects of social media on the mental health of Egyptian youth. The regional essays, whilst treating individual national traditions independently, also consider the thematic correspondences and circumstances of production that bind them together. The role of colonisation, for example, in the establishment of local film industries, is a constant factor throughout all three regions; yet the varying experiences of colonised countries, that is the different paradigms of control exerted by the colonising authorities, led to different cinematic outcomes. The distinct case of Algeria within the French-ruled Maghrib, and the nature of British colonisation in Egypt and Palestine will be compared and assessed against each other. Other themes the regional essays explore are the conflict with Israel, economic, social and political rights, sexual liberation, and women’s rights. Further issues arise in the short, analytical chapters. Several of the highlighted films have storylines that treat queer subjectivities. Still others pose difficult questions about race and racism. While the book attempts to be comprehensive and inclusive in outlook, my selection of twenty-eight films will inevitably appear problematic to readers who want the selection to be a representative or decolonised sampling. It is not, and I cannot imagine any list of films which would be. Rather, the filmography has formed organically over the course of more than a decade of teaching about the subject. Two factors, in particular, have shaped the selection, one practical, the other personal. On a practical level, in order to teach a film, I have to find a copy subtitled in English and available to screen in a SOAS classroom. This rules out a lot of non-canonical films, particularly older commercial films or films that have not been released on the international arthouse circuit. Moreover, many fascinating North African films are available only with French subtitles – again, this is especially the case with older films. The second factor is personal: all the films in this book are films either that I admire or that yield what are to me interesting lines of inquiry. Most are both. Some may wonder why I exclude documentary films, when this has been and continues to be an important and flourishing genre throughout the Arab world. I have to admit that this is arbitrary. The simple reason is that I prefer teaching imaginary content. Given that there are only twenty-eight films included, some may question my decision to include multiple films by individual filmmakers, notably two films by Merzak Allouache, two films by Moufida Tlatli, and three by Elia Suleiman. Are they not taking up a disproportionate amount of space? The answer is, of course, yes, and I would never reproduce such a list on a s­ yllabus

Preface  xvii of a course in which one of my aims is to expose students to as many filmmakers as possible. However, from year to year I tend to change things up and make substitutions on my syllabus, swapping, for example, Allouache’s Omar Gatlato with his Bab El-Oued City, and I find that reading these films in dialogue with each other can deepen our understandings of their meanings, the cinematic traditions in which they operate and their contexts of production. I would like to demonstrate, in other words, the benefits in investigating the corpus of a particular artist. Others may find it strange that I include all three films in Suleiman’s autobiographical trilogy, whereas I only include one from Youssef Chahine’s autobiographical quartet. The reason for this is that I think highly of all the films in Suleiman’s trilogy and find that they interrelate in interesting and complex ways, whereas in Chahine’s quartet, it is really only Alexandria … Why? that inspires me. Only four women directors, accounting for five out of the twenty-eight films, are featured here. This may surprise readers, especially given that my other main area of research and teaching expertise is Arabic women’s writing. On this front, I have two explanations. First, the historic dimension of the coverage would skew the content towards male directors, for the simple reason that women did not emerge as directors of Arabic-language films on a conspicuous scale until the late twentieth century. There are many exceptions to this rule, such as the pioneering women of early Egyptian cinema, but their films are not readily available to screen. Second, although we have come to credit directors as the principal artists behind the creation of motion pictures, many films are in fact best understood as collectively authored, and when one digs a little deeper, one finds that the male directors in my selection have many female co-authors. The Open Door may have been directed by a man, but it is an adaptation of a novel by a woman, Latifa al-Zayyat, who co-wrote the screenplay. A man directed Omar Gatlato, but it was a woman, none other than Moufida Tlatli, who edited its highly celebrated circular structure. Maryam Touzani, a respected Moroccan director, may not be represented in this book by the films considered hers, but she did cowrite her husband Nabil Ayouch’s Casablanca Beats. There is no doubt in my mind that Touzani’s input is detectable, even if I cannot tell whether it is specifically her ideas that have generated any particular moment or scene. Similarly, Ethiopian filmmaker Maji-Da Abdi worked as a producer and costume designer on Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness, and as such she no doubt deserves some authorial credit for the many beautiful shots featuring fabric in the film. People may also find my apparent privileging of Egyptian cinema problematic. Egyptian films account for more than a third of the analytical chapters; I open the book with Egypt and I treat it as a cinematic region unto

xviii  Preface itself. I defend this decision unapologetically, for my focus on Egypt is in no way disproportionate if one wants to explore the history of Arabic-language cinema as well as its ‘popular’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘commercial’ dimensions. The state of affairs has changed dramatically over the past two decades, and some of the mechanisms behind these changes elude me, so I discuss them less definitively. I would say, however, that upon my initial viewing of Ayten Amin’s Souad, the most recent film to be included in the Egyptian section, it struck me much more as a transnational film than as an Egyptian one. Egypt is no longer the commercial cinematic powerhouse that it once was. Other locations in the Arab world are emerging as centres of quality filmmaking, creating a transnational environment which has helped to elevate production values, and which has blurred the boundaries of national cinematic traditions. Nevertheless, Egyptian cinema’s historic significance and its continuing influence on filmmaking practices, if only on an intertextual basis, should not be underestimated. Let me conclude my preface with another important disclaimer: there are whole countries missing, namely Libya, Jordan and several countries of the Gulf region. While it is probably fair to say that these countries have had less cinematic output, for the most part, than the countries that are represented here, this does not mean that they are not worth exploring. I would therefore encourage my readers to also venture beyond the bounds of this book and look for new experiences of Arab world cinemas.

PART 1

Egypt

Preface  1

Egypt: Regional Essay  3

Egypt: Regional Essay

In Egypt, the first cinematic projection takes place in November 1896. From the beginning, the cinema takes part in the formation of a cultural field, a field in gestation due to the fluctuations of occidental modernity. It does not alter a well-established tradition. Rather it adds to the mix of modern cultural products invading the country and constructing a cultural space along the contemporary western model. The cinema arrives barely thirty years after the press, barely twenty years after the theatre, before the first productions of modern figurative art, and at almost exactly the same moment as the diffusion of the printed book outside the domain of scholarship. Walid El Khachab1

INTRODUCTION

My students often think of cinema as a ‘western’ art form. They believe that national cinematic traditions established themselves in Europe and in Hollywood and that the rest of the world, including the Arab world, developed their industries later and in either an imitative or reactive fashion. This is a somewhat distorted view, at least in the case of Egypt. Filmmaking technology arrives in Egypt in the late nineteenth century – almost as soon as it becomes available anywhere – and, in the early twentieth century, people living in Egypt take it upon themselves to make films. They are pioneers. They may or may not be aware of pioneering filmmaking elsewhere; nevertheless, they are forging something new. At first many of the cinematic pioneers, be they directors, players, producers or cinematographers, are members of foreign communities – Italian, French, Greek and German – but with the introduction of sound technology, all that changes. With the i­ntroduction of sound in the 1930s, Egyptian audiences want to hear the Egyptian dialect and Walid El Khachab, ‘Caméra arabica: Cinéma des premiers temps et modernité en Égypte’, Sociétés & Représentations 9 (April 2000): 218. Translation mine.

 1

4  Egypt Arabic music. With sound, an audiocentric culture, a culture that privileges sound over vision, the oral over the written, knows how to orient itself, how to make its mark. Indeed, as Walter Armbrust has stated, ‘Music has always been in the mainstream of debates about cultural authenticity in the face of colonialism’.2 A demand for productions with local credentials, be they nationalist (watani) or pan-Arabist (qawmi), sees a rise in indigenous filmmaking. This nascent Egyptian film industry, sometimes dubbed ‘Hollywood on the Nile’, should not be thought of as a replica but as a paradigm-generating force, which, while not totally cut off from other cinematic traditions, including other traditions from the so-called ‘Global South’,3 has its own distinct characteristics. Egyptian cinema does not follow western cinema; rather, it develops in tandem with western cinema. What may seem ‘European’ in early Egyptian movies was not necessarily borrowed from European cinema but rather from the Egyptian theatre which was a cultural import of the nineteenth century. In other words, Egyptian cinema drew on Egyptian theatre, and the Egyptian theatre was a western import. THE PIONEERING/SILENT ERA

The first film screening in Egypt took place in a café in the financial district of Alexandria on 5 November 1896.4 This was a screening using the Lumière Brothers’ machine called the cinematograph, which was a camera, developer and projector all in one. This first Egyptian screening came less than a year after the cinematograph made its worldwide debut at the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895. By 1897, there was a dedicated space for these screenings – a first movie theatre – called the Cinématographe Lumière on the Cairo Station Road in Alexandria.5 In July 1903, the Cairo-based Arabic-language monthly al-Muqtataf, a cultural and scientific review, features an article by a certain Nashid Effendi Farid describing the cinematograph for his readers by way of analogy: Walter Armbrust, ‘Audiovisual Media and History of the Arab Middle East’, in Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer and Y. Hakan Erdem (eds), Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2006), 288.  3 For a fascinating discussion of cinematic cross-fertilisation and sound cultures in Egypt, Iran and India, see Claire Sloane Cooley, ‘Sonic Stardom: Gender, Nation, and Sound Media Technologies in al-Hind, 1900s-1960s’ (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, August 2019).  4 Another screening that occurred at about this time was at the Schneider Baths in Cairo. See Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1988), 10.  5 See the Alex Cinema website of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, accessed 5 June 2023, https:// www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/historical/beginnings.html.  2

Egypt: Regional Essay  5 Recall that when children light a match and spin it around quickly it appears as a continuous circle. The reason for this is that the first image is imprinted on the eye at all positions along its path, and the match reaches the end of the circle before it fades from the eye. The circle thus appears as a whole.6

The cinematograph, he explains, works on this principle. The film takes impressions of a series of discrete images and then when it plays them back, they appear continuous and connected. He then describes an imaginary film recording the actions of a man who is eating and explains how the technology creates an illusion of seamless movement through a succession of images capturing particular points in time. From this description, we get the sense that the technology is both ­universal – the man could be eating anywhere in the world – and objective: the camera documents the movement that occurs before it in an objective and neutral fashion. For Nashid Effendi Farid, the notion of an ‘Egyptian film’ would be like that of an ‘Egyptian x-ray’. He describes the process scientifically and technologically without reference to a ‘director’ or a ‘filmmaker’. The sense of wonder and marvel arises from the technology and does not involve ‘art’ or ‘culture’. There is no person behind the camera, there is only the camera itself. At the time that the technology was introduced, what was in front of the camera – rather than who was behind it – was seen as being linked to culture, either domestic or foreign. In the early years of cinema in Egypt, the medium was successful, and by 1908, there were eleven cinema houses in Egypt: five in Cairo, three in Alexandria and one each in Port Said, Assiout and Mansura.7 Despite the success of the imported technology, Galal El Charkawi writes: ‘It was not long, however, before the public grew tired of always seeing these imported films which presented foreign scenes without any connexion between them and all unfamiliar to the Egyptian people.’8 It is true that the Lumière Brothers, as part of their mission to ‘bring the world to the world’,9 sent agents all over the globe to document exotic locations on film. One such cinematographer, Alexander Promio, visited Egypt and made films there as early as 1897. His film entitled Les Pyramides (vue Générale) depicts a procession of people and camels passing in front of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. The exquisite still life of the monuments ­occupying Nashid Effendi Farid, ‘Cimenatograph [sic]’, trans. Michael Allan and Mohamed Talaat, Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 2 (2008): 187.  7 Galal El Charkawi, ‘Report: The Present Situation and Trends of the Arab Cinema’, translated from the French. UNESCO, 31 January 1963, 3, accessed 5 June 2023, https:// unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000184952_eng.  8 Ibid., 3.  9 See Michael Allan, ‘Deserted Histories: The Lumière Brothers, the Pyramids and Early Film Form’, Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 2 (2008), 159.  6

6  Egypt the ­background and middle ground is animated by a curved line of movement in the foreground.10 Egyptian director Youssef Chahine is said to have been inspired by this short film and what struck him as its cutting-edge modernity.11 Nevertheless, despite these occasional pieces by foreign filmmakers, it seems that films with local Egyptian content were relatively hard to come by before the 1910s. According to El Charkawi, a certain Monsieur de Lagarne imported a camera and cinematographer from abroad to address this gap. Beginning in 1912, several films commissioned by de Lagarne were screened. Their topics were: the square in front of the Cairo Opera House; tourists riding camels near the pyramids; the return of the Khedive of Egypt in the streets of Alexandria; the congregation leaving St Catherine’s Church; and passengers at the Sidi Gaber station.12 By the late 1910s, foreign residents of Alexandria had started to think about producing narrative films.13 In 1917, a group of Italians led by a photographer named Umberto Dores set up the Italo-Egyptian Cinematographic Company.14 In 1918, they screened three films directed by an Italian called Osato: (1) The Bedouin’s Honour (Sharaf al-badawi), (2) Fatal Flowers (al-Zuhur al-qatila), and (3) Towards the Abyss (Nahwa al-hawia).15 According to El Charkawi, these three short films were ‘not at all successful’. He explains: ‘The inconsistent subjects, the disconnected sequences, the French sub-titles and non-Egyptian actors all contributed to the failure.’16 The lack of local Egyptian input also got the firm into trouble with the religious authorities, as the film Fatal Flowers featured ‘garbled’ phrases from the Quran and was consequently banned from screening.17 The company then went bankrupt.18 The first ‘more or less Egyptian’ short film, according to Galal El Charkawi, was a certain Madame Loretta (1918), which featured local Egyptian actors but was directed by someone named Larrici.19 Then, in the early 1920s, the first Egyptian director, Muhammad Bayumi (1894–1963), becomes active. According to El Charkawi: Les Pyramides (vue Générale) (accessed 1 June 2023) may be seen here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=vc08nxGHVQA. 11 Allan, ‘Deserted Histories’, 160. See also 169n. 12 El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 3. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Ibid., 3. 16 Ibid., 3. 17 Ibid., 3. Viola Shafik reports that the Quranic verses appeared ‘upside down’. See Arab Cinema, 11. 18 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, 11. 19 El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 3. 10

Egypt: Regional Essay  7 A young Egyptian, Mohamed BAOUMI, returned from Germany with several cameras and a certain knowledge of film work and shot THE CIVIL SERVANT (El Pash’Kateb) for Amin ATALLA, actor and head of a theatrical company which had already given a stage performance of this play.20

This film, about a wayward official, came out in 1922, and was thirty minutes long.21 A subsequent film, which was entitled Barsum Looks for a Job (Barsum yabhath ʿan wazifa, 1923) and directed by Bayumi himself, is said to be ‘the first narrative film [film riwaʾi] shot and directed by an Egyptian’.22 As it is only fifteen minutes long, it cannot be considered a ‘feature film’, but it is ground-breaking in that it tells a story which is fictional (rather than merely recording a scene from ‘real’ life). In it a Muslim played by comic Lebanese actor Bishara Wakim teams up with a Coptic Christian to find employment. Both characters are impoverished. The Copt is identifiable through the pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that appear on his bedroom wall. Above these icons one finds the sketch of a flag featuring a crescent together with a cross, which Viola Shafik describes as the ‘ultimate sign of national unity’ used during the 1919 Revolution.23 Throughout the silent period of the 1920s and early 1930s, numerous production companies sprang up in Alexandria and Cairo, and a great rivalry was established between the two cities as cinematic hubs. At this time there was a great diversity of filmmakers who launched their careers. They consisted of Egyptians, other Arabs, and ethnic foreigners resident in Egypt on European passports. Most notably they also included several pioneering women, such as ʿAziza Amir (1901–52), Bahija Hafiz (1908–83), Amina Muhammad (1908–85), and Fatima Rushdi (1908–96).24 Whilst some women’s careers continued to thrive after the coming of sound, it was during the silent era that women were most active as directors and producers. This remained true until approximately the 1980s and 90s, when women across the Arab world started to break into the industry in these roles.

El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 4. For the year of the film’s release, see Shafik, Arab Cinema, 28. For its topic and length, see El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 4. 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivHn7V66cp8, accessed 16 July 2021. 23 Viola Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 44. 24 Rebecca Hillauer details the contributions of these women and others in ‘Pioneers of Arab Silent Film’, in Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 27–32. Readers may furthermore be interested in Marianne Khoury’s 2002 documentary Women Who Loved Cinema (ʿAshiqat al-sinima). See also Raphael Cormack, Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021), especially chap. 10, ‘Isis Films’, 243–63. 20 21

8  Egypt During the silent era, melodramas and comedies proved to be popular. A sub-genre of the former was the so-called ‘bedouin romance’. The ChileanPalestinian Lama Brothers, director Ibrahim and actor Badr, were associated with films of this type. One such film was their Kiss in the Desert (Qubla fi al-Sahraʾ, 1928). Another film mentioned in the history books, which is often described as the first Egyptian feature-length film because it was produced by a native Egyptian – the aforementioned ʿAziza Amir – rather than a foreigner, is Layla (1927). El Charkawi summarises the plot of the film as follows: A young village girl, Laila, gives herself to her betrothed, the handsome Bedouin interpreter Ahmed, who falls in love with an American woman whom he follows to the United States. Laila is abandoned and finds she is pregnant. An unsuccessful suitor reveals her secret. The whole village turns against her and drives her ignominiously forth.   The second part of the film is set in Cairo where she has sought refuge and the film ends with an account of all the melodramatic miseries she undergoes.25

A review of the film in the daily al-Ahram makes clear that this film, despite its foreign directorial provenance, was received as Egyptian through and through. ‘Silent acting has finally been born in Egypt’, writes the reviewer. ‘In the Egyptian sky a shining star has arisen, a star which seems to serve Egypt and the people of Egypt’, continues the reviewer, before stating that the film stands as ‘pure Egyptian, national cinema’.26 However, although Layla was produced by an Egyptian woman, it was directed by foreign men.27 Another landmark in early ‘Egyptian’ film is therefore the 1930 adaptation of Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s novel Zaynab, which was directed by Muhammad Karim.28 If Muhammad Bayumi was the first Egyptian director of shorts, Muhammad Karim was the first El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 5. Raphael Cormack, who believes that ‘any account of the plot is partially guesswork’ (Midnight in Cairo, 252), due to the film’s editing history and the fact that no print of it survives, gives a slightly different synopsis, where he identifies the character of the American woman as the ‘daughter of a Brazilian Egyptologist’ (ibid., 252). 26 Kay Dickinson, ‘“I have one Daughter and That is Egyptian Cinema”: ʿAziza Amir amid the Histories and Geographies of National Allegory’, Camera Obscura 64, no. 22.1 (2007): 137. Dickinson cites Ahmad al-Hadri, Tarikh al-sinima fi Misr (Cairo: Nadi al-Sinima, 1989), 219, as her source. 27 The directing history of this film is complex, but it appears to have been directed mainly by the Austrian-Italian Stéphane Rosti (whose name is rendered with various spellings) and the Turk Widad ʿUrfi. 28 Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Film Making (London: Zed Books, 1991), 29. On this point Malkmus and Armes cite the Egyptian film critic Samir Farid, ‘Les six générations du cinema Egyptien’, Écran, 15 May 1973. 25

Egypt: Regional Essay  9 Egyptian director of ­ feature-length movies. Zaynab was similarly about the seduction of a peasant girl. A QUESTION OF FIRSTS

The discussion of ‘firsts’ in Egyptian cinema is complicated by categories of filmmaking29 and fraught with what can be seen as nationalist tendencies to exclude films produced and directed by foreign residents of Egypt from consideration. Magdy Mounir El-Shammaa gives an insightful overview of the debates between scholars who link Egyptian-ness to indigenous identity and those who would embrace a more cosmopolitan perspective.30 Whilst I am not in a position to weigh in on questions of who deserves the label of Egyptian, I tend to side with the inclusivists – I would never question the status of a figure like the Jewish Italian film director Togo Mizrahi within the Egyptian film industry.31 Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that foreign residents of Egypt, or more specifically those with European passports, had distinct judicial and financial advantages over local Egyptians, due to the treaties known as the Capitulations, which were not abolished (in Egypt) until 1937.32 The Capitulations allowed European citizens to reside in Egypt under European laws, and they also guaranteed advantageous custom rates. Presumably, in this early pioneering period of Egyptian cinema, it would have been easier and cheaper for a foreigner to make a film than it would have been for a native.33 The gradual Egyptianisation of the industry was no doubt aided by the establishment of the Misr Theatre and Cinema Company in 1925. This was founded by the entrepreneur Talʿat Harb as a subsidiary of the Bank of Egypt, which he also founded. According to El Charkawi, the company initially focused on theatrical activities but became more and more involved with cinema by stages. He writes: I am thinking here of the distinctions between ‘shorts’ and ‘feature-length’ films as well as those between documentary or newsreel footage and fictional narrative. 30 See the section entitled ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism and Egyptian Film History’ in his book The National Imaginarium: The History of Egyptian Filmmaking (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2021), 18–22. 31 Incidentally, Mizrahi is the subject of a recent monograph by Deborah A. Starr. See her Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). 32 They were gradually phased out over a period of twelve years, so their abolition was not complete until 1949. 33 The Capitulations were originally negotiated by the Ottoman Empire to encourage citizens of Christian European states to settle in Ottoman lands and thereby fortify trade relations. By the nineteenth century, however, due to the shifting geo-politics, the capitulations became ‘instruments of imperialist exploitation’. See ‘Capitulations’, in John L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 29

10  Egypt To begin with, the company applied itself to building a laboratory in a room on the roof of the Misr printing works. Shortly afterwards, it purchased the ­laboratory of Mohamed BAOUMI, whom it sent to Europe to purchase the apparatus and equipment which the laboratory lacked. In the end, this laboratory comprised workshops for the developing, printing and drying of film.34

One of the company’s early successes was the aforementioned Zaynab, which premiered in April 1930.35 THE INTRODUCTION OF SOUND

In the early 1930s, Egyptian filmmakers had to travel to Europe, and Paris in particular,36 to avail themselves of sound technology. The earliest sound feature film is said to be The Elite (Awlad al-dhawat, 1932), which was directed by Muhammad Karim. In the same year the first musical was also released. Entitled Song of the Heart (Unshudat al-fuʾad, 1932), it featured an array of talent, including: Zakariya Ahmad (composer), Nadra (singer), and George Abyad, Dawlat Abyad and ʿAbd al-Rahman Rushdi (actors). It was directed by Mario Volpi and shot at the Éclair Studio in Paris. El Charkawi dubs it a ‘semi-failure’ which he attributes to the slow pace set by the performances of Arabic song.37 Certain features of song at that time seemed incompatible with cinema, namely the relationship between the singer and the band (takht), the formal qualities of repetition, ornamentation and response, and the long duration of the songs. Despite the genre of the Egyptian musical’s disappointing beginnings, it did not take musicians and filmmakers long to adapt musical traditions to the new medium of the cinema, and with The White Rose (1933), directed by Muhammad Karim, it becomes firmly entrenched. The White Rose, the subject of Chapter 1.1, was a vehicle for the composer and singer Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab, who adapted some of his musical practices to suit the new medium. The first film produced by Studio Misr, an offshoot of the Misr Theatre and Cinema Company, which was founded in 1934–5 as a fully equipped and technologically up-to-date studio, was the musical Widad (1935–6) featuring Umm Kulthum and directed by Fritz Kramp. This was one of the first sound films produced entirely on Egyptian soil. As an aside, it is worth mentioning the fact that the availability of sound technology in the country attracted the Greek cinema industry to Egypt. 36 37 34 35

El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 7. Ibid., 7. El Shammaa, The National Imaginarium, 25. El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 8.

Egypt: Regional Essay  11 For a period of three years from 1937 to 1939, or what is known in Greek film history as the Egyptian Triennium,38 Egyptian-Italian directors Togo Mizrahi and Alvise Orfanelli released several Greek-language films, drawing on Greek acting troupes who toured the country to perform for the sizeable Greek-speaking community. Some of these films were adaptations of films that had previously been made in Arabic, and some were bespoke.39 Perhaps the most successful Greek film from this period was Togo (or ‘Tongo’) Mizrahi’s The Refugee (I Prosfigopoula, 1938), starring the Greek singer Sophia Vembo. With this musical melodrama, Mizrahi impressed the critics with his effective narrative sequencing, editing and mise-en-scène.40 THE GOLDEN AGE

Here, I am using the term ‘Golden Age’ in its broadest possible sense to describe the ‘heyday’ of Egyptian cinema – that period in which it dominated Arab audio-visual culture. It begins in the mid-1930s and lasts through the end of the 1950s.41 It consists of the ‘classics’ which we look back on with nostalgia. It captures a spirit that is socially liberal if politically and fiscally conservative. At times it is ‘decadent’, full of kisses42 and belly-dancing. Popular genres such as musicals, melodramas and comedies do not remain distinct from one another but often morph into one. It can be serious, but its primary intention is to entertain. As we can see in Table Ia,43 by the end of the 1930s, the Arabic-language film industry becomes entrenched in Egypt, such that the number of films being produced there far outstrips the rest of the Arab world combined. From the mid-1940s, one also witnesses a stabilisation of film production in Egypt such that, according to Samir Farid, Egypt produced an annual Vrasidas Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012), 31. One such film that had previously been made in Arabic was Doctor Epameinondas (1937), originally called Doctor Farahat. See the Alex Cinema site of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. https://www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/films/Greek.html), accessed 5 June 2023, as well as El Shammaa, National Imaginarium, 26. 40 Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema, 31–2. 41 Here I am following Chihab El Khachab, Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2021), 31, who describes the industry during the period as ‘consolidated’. 42 See Marlé Hammond, ‘The Kiss in Egyptian Film Language of the 1940s’, in Frédéric Lagrange and Claire Savina (eds), Les Mots du désir: La langue de l’érotisme arabe et sa traduction (Marseilles: Diacritiques Éditions, 2020). 43 Information for the table comes from ‘List of full-length Arabic films’, in Georges Sadoul (ed.), The Cinema in the Arab Countries (Beirut: Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television, 1966), 271–86. 38 39

12  Egypt Table 1a  Film production in the Arab World, 1933–40 Season 1933–4 1934–5 1935–6 1936–7 1937–8 1938–9 1939–40 Total

Number of films made in Egypt 7 6 12 16 16 9 15 81

Number of films made elsewhere 1 (Morocco) 0 1 (Lebanon) 0 0 3 (2 Syria, 1 Tunisia) 0 5

average of fifty films a year from 1945 to 1994.44 Farid breaks down what we are calling the ‘Golden Age’ into four sub-periods. First, from 1936 to 1944, there is the ‘Artistic Golden Age’ during which there is crucial experimentation in genres and technique. Kamal Salim’s Determination (al-ʿAzima, 1939), the subject of Chapter 1.2, stands out in this regard as a film applauded for its realism – and especially for its ground-breaking portrayal of the ibn al-balad on screen. The figure of the ibn al-balad, or ‘son-of-the-country’, is a working-class hero of humble rural origins. The second sub-period that Farid identifies is the ‘Financial Golden Age’ (1945–52), in which the star system becomes unshakable and the plots formulaic. Yusuf Wahbi’s Love and Revenge (Gharam wa-intiqam, 1944), discussed in Chapter 1.3, is emblematic of this period. Third, in the ‘Post-July Revolution’ years (1952–6), Farid notes that censorship is relaxed and there is a turn towards realism. Finally, in the ‘Second Golden Age’ (1956–62), films explore sensitive topics such as sexuality and religion with a great deal of freedom. Perhaps Salah Abu Sayf’s 1956 film, A Woman’s Youth (Shabab imraʾa), best represents the high-­quality output of this era. THE IMPACT OF THE 1952 REVOLUTION AND STATE SECTOR CINEMA

Following the 1952 Revolution, and under the leadership of President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–70), socialist themes begin to predominate, either explicitly or allegorically, and, for this reason, the period is associated with the rise of ‘social realism’. The word ‘realism’ captures the films’ propensity to represent class structures and socio-economic injustices in all their complexity, but in most cases, it is awkwardly applicable when it comes to style and form, as films 44

Samir Farid, ‘Periodization of Egyptian Cinema’, in Alia Arasoughly (ed.), Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 9.

Egypt: Regional Essay  13 remain melodramatic in many respects. In terms of infrastructure, the impact of the revolution on Egyptian cinema was not immediate but rather somewhat delayed. The state established an Institute for the Support of Cinema in 1957, then, in 1963, this organisation was transformed into the General Egyptian Institute for Cinema, whose goals were not merely the ‘support’ of the cinema but its production, financing and distribution.45 This institute was dissolved in 1971, and there is much debate about its legacy. Some feel that the quality of filmmaking deteriorated during this period, whilst others think it was an important experiment in establishing a state-funded ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ cinema.46 The state did not pursue a monopoly over the cinema but rather operated alongside the private sector. Of the roughly 430 Egyptian films released between 1963 and 1972, about 141 were produced by the state sector.47 This era of cinema is associated with (1) an ideology of liberation underpinned by socialism, (2) a propensity for realism, or a concern with the representation of societal ills and forms of injustice and (3) adaptions of Egyptian literary works. According to Samir Farid: The public sector bought literary works and assigned directors to them […] The public sector produced several films each for the major directors, but production quantity did not mean production quality. This lack of quality is because these films did not express the private world of their directors; for instance, there was little relationship between the private world of a director like Henri Barakat and the problem of women in [The Open Door] […].48

Speaking of The Open Door (al-Bab al-maftuh, 1963), the topic of Chapter 1.5, it is worth mentioning that this period after the 1952 Revolution is associated with a spate of feminist films, including the Henri Barakat film, which was adapted for cinema in part by Latifa al-Zayyat, the author of the novel on which it was based, as well as films adapted from the male author Ihsan ʿAbd al-Quddus’s novels. The latter include I Don’t Sleep (La anam) and I am Free (Ana hurra), movies which were released in 1957 and 1959, respectively, and which were both directed by Salah Abu Sayf.49

May Telmissany, ‘Sinima al-dawla sinima badila: qiraʾa fi tajribat al-qitaʿ al-ʿamm al-sinimaʾi fi Misr’, Alif 15 (1995), 70. 46 Samir Farid is of the former camp, May Telmissany of the latter. For more on this debate, see El Shammaa, The National Imaginarium, 36–7. 47 Telmissany, ‘Sinima al-dawla’, 82n. She gets her figures from an article by Ali Abu Shadi published in Fann 134 (24 August 1992). 48 Farid, ‘Periodization’, 12. The Open Door does not appear to have been a public sector film in the proper sense of the term, but it may have received state support. It was distributed by Dollar Film. 49 These feminist films are discussed by both Joel Gordon in his Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago: Middle East Documentation 45

14  Egypt Another development after the revolution was that the government founded the Higher Institute for Cinema in Cairo in 1959. According to Kay Dickinson, in its early years, the Institute trained cohorts of thirty to fifty students. She describes its setup as follows: The Institute housed a range of facilities, from a laboratory and editing suites to classrooms and a well-stocked library of literature pertaining to all the arts. Sustained effort had been expended to translate critical texts into Arabic and foreign experts were invited to contribute to the curriculum.50

IMPACT OF THE 1967 DEFEAT

Samir Farid’s periodisation of Egyptian Cinema includes the period of 1968 to 1973. This period is framed by the so called ‘Six Day War’ of June 1967, which was a humiliating defeat by Israel of much of the Arab World,51 and the October 1973 War, which was a nominal victory for Egypt over Israel.52 According to Farid, the impact of the 1967 Defeat was twofold. On the one hand, it served as a wake-up call that resulted in a sense of urgency affecting form and content. He writes: While cinema in Europe and the United States was undergoing a revival (nouvelle vague in France; free cinema in Britain; new cinema in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, India, Japan, and Brazil; underground cinema in New York), Egyptian Cinema was drowning in ‘purposeful’ and ‘serious’ films.53

Second, a group of young filmmakers called the New Cinema Group (Jamaʿat al-Sinima al-Jadida), took the opportunity to make certain demands of the state sector, such as pressuring the state into producing films by Higher Institute for Cinema graduates and other young filmmakers.54 The New Cinema Group published a manifesto in 1968, which Kay Dickinson has now made available in English translation. Reading through this manifesto, certain things stand out as significant. First, the New Cinema Group conceived of its membership as youthful. The preamble to the manifesto uses

Center, 2002) and Viola Shafik in her Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007). 50 Kay Dickinson, Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Cham: Springer International, 2018), 40. 51 It was during this war that Israel originally occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. 52 During this conflict Egypt was able to temporarily retake much of the Sinai Peninsula, resulting in negotiations that led to a peace treaty and the return of the whole of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. 53 Farid, ‘Periodization’, 13. 54 Farid, ‘Periodization’, 13.

Egypt: Regional Essay  15 the word ‘young’ no less than five times to describe the people who they see as being at the forefront of changing cinema for the better. (It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the school was also dubbed ‘shabab cinema’.)55 Second, the group of young filmmakers see the current state of the cinema as beset by conventions that leave little room for experimentation. ‘Conservative filmmakers’, they write, ‘insist on addressing the same topics to which Egyptian cinema has cleaved for twenty years, the unvarying artistic forms that have now become outdated, even laughable.’56 When addressing the state of the field on a technical level, they speak of some of the conventions stifling the cinematic art. They write: For ease, the director works according to the ‘limited number of rules’, asking the conventional screenwriter to ‘divide up’ the subject matter so that 90% of the events take place in closed rooms, which set designers can construct as a sequence of sets. Their film thereby duplicates the same angles, compositions and dramatic situations brought to life in their previous works. Similarly, anyone who watches an Egyptian film notices their cinematographers’ insistence on flooding scenes with dazzling light, to the point where we behold a labourer or a peasant’s home illuminated as if it were a grand casino.57

The sense of seriousness and purpose that pervades much of the post 1967 ­cinematic output, especially those films supported, funded and distributed by the state sector, does not necessarily extend to the whole of the industry. Indeed, there still seems to be an appetite for the superficially titillating among film audiences. Indeed, Hussein Kamal’s 1969 musical film My Father is Up a Tree (Abi fawq al-shajara), featuring ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz, was a huge box office success, at least in part because of its ‘supposed one hundred kisses’.58 As mentioned above Samir Farid sees the 1967 Defeat as a turning point in Egyptian cinematic history. According to him, the event led to two developments: (1) the predominance of ‘serious’ films and (2) the emergence of avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, who receive state support even if they don’t enter the mainstream.59 After the October 1973 War, the national mood lifts somewhat, although the political landscape becomes more divisive – the sense of unity created by the revolution is threatened by President Anwar Sadat’s encroachments on ­socialism and his introduction of the ‘Open Door’ Policy (al-infitah). Guy Hennebelle, ‘Arab Cinema’, MERIP Reports 52 (November 1976): 5. Dickinson, Arab Film and Video Manifestos, 29. 57 Ibid., 31. 58 Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema, 199. See also Arab Cinema, 42. On the film’s popularity, see Arab Cinema, 105. 59 Perhaps Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam’s The Mummy (al-Mumiyaʾ, 1969), discussed later in this volume, is the best example of this type of film. 55 56

16  Egypt Sadat ruled from 1970 until his assassination in 1981. According to Farid, three types of films typify this post-1973 War period: (1) films about the October War, (2) films critical of Nasser’s socialist regime (aflam marakiz al-quwwa) and (3) political thrillers influenced by European (and especially Italian) cinema.60 ON NEW CINEMA AND NEW REALISM

The term ‘New Cinema’ is applied to Arabic Cinema in general and not just Egyptian Cinema. It is associated with the non-commercial ‘art’ cinema and the rise of the anti-hero that arose following the 1967 Defeat. Armbrust observes a parallel phenomenon in commercial Egyptian cinema – the demise of the middle-class hero. He also sees an anti-modernist trend; whereas the classic Egyptian cinema champions an image of modernity that was based on the twinning of (western) technique with cultural authenticity, films from the 1970s onward reflect a disbelief in such an image of modernity and its middle-class proponents. He argues that the middle class is simply absent in many films and that the ideal of modernity is replaced by a void.61 One may add, perhaps, that it is not only the middle-class hero who has vanished, but also, I would argue, the working-class counterpart of the ibn al-balad. The lower classes do replace the middle classes on Egyptian screens, but they are not for the most part the romanticised ‘sons and daughters of the country’ that we found in earlier films. Rather they have been replaced by the ghalaba – a collective noun referring to the marginalised, defeated, oppressed, precariously employed and sometimes criminalised underbelly of society. By the late 1970s, Egyptian studios were in a state of decay, so many filmmakers shot on location (primarily in Cairo). This on-location shooting, combined with a focus on the ‘subaltern’ marginalised urban lower classes, led to a ‘school’ of directing known as ‘New Realism’ that came to the fore in the 1980s. Muhammad Khan, Khayri Bishara, Da’ud ‘Abd al-Sayyid and ‘Atif al-Tayyib are some of the directors associated with this trend. This is an artistic, political, and commercial cinema, though not all the ‘New Realist’ films were commercial successes. They generally offer a harsh social critique targeting economic exploitation in general and Sadat’s ‘Open Door’ policy in particular. Apart from these political and stylistic trends, El Shammaa notes three characteristic developments of Egyptian cinema in the 1970s: (1) colour Farid, ‘Periodization’, 14–15. Walter Armbrust, ‘New Cinema, Commercial Cinema, and the Modernist Tradition in Egypt’, Alif 15 (1995): 81–129. See especially from page 102 on.

60 61

Egypt: Regional Essay  17 filmmaking finally takes hold after it premiered in 1949 with the film Father is a Bridegroom (Baba ʿaris), (2) comedy becomes the most popular genre, outperforming melodramas and musicals, and (3) ‘leading ladies no longer defined Egyptian cinema as they had since the 1940s’.62 With regard to this last point, El Shammaa informs us that from the 1970s onward it was the leading men – actors such as ʿAdil Imam and Ahmad Zaki – who ensured box office success. Perhaps this phenomenon could be associated with the rise of the anti-hero and the demise of both the middle class and the ibn al-balad on screen. Perhaps also it could be related to a trend for female celebrities to withdraw from the public limelight as social mores grew more conservative. For, as Viola Shafik writes, ‘From the late 1980s until 1994, as many as twenty-one actresses and at least two actors had decided to retreat from show business for religious reasons.’63 CONTEMPORARY TRENDS

Due to the changing media landscape within Egypt and abroad, getting a handle on more recent Egyptian film history can be difficult.64 There are two technological developments that have had big impacts – namely the development of satellite television in the 1980s and 90s and digitisation in the 2000s and beyond. Film production dropped in the late twentieth century, leading many observers to conclude that Egyptian cinema industry was in a state of decline. Andrew Hammond, for example, states: From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, the Egyptian-led Arab cinema was in decline […] Egyptian cinema found a new niche in the 1980s with the so-called contract films, made with little expense at the behest of wealthy Saudi entrepreneurs, featuring formulaic, bawdy humor for video distribution to Gulf Arab audiences. But the general trend over the period was a drop in production while television culture took off, driven by video ownership in the 1980s and the satellite boom in the 1990s. In the mid-1980s, Egypt was still making some sixty films a year, but by the late 1990s production had dropped to around twenty a year.65 The National Imaginarium, 108. Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema, 198. 64 For an insightful discussion of the media landscape in Egypt leading up to and following the 2011 Revolution, see Walter Armbrust’s Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019). The book does not discuss cinema, per se, but it does delve into television and screen cultures. Readers seeking an up-to-date account of developments specific to cinema since the 2011 Revolution may wish to consult Ahmed Ghazal, Egyptian Cinema and the 2011 Revolution: Film Production and Representing Dissent (London: I. B. Tauris, 2021). 65 Andrew Hammond, Popular Culture in the Arab World: Arts, Politics, and the Media (Cairo/ New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 139. 62 63

18  Egypt According to El Shammaa, a major factor in the decline of the industry was the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. This is particularly noticeable in export trends. While Egyptian film exports were already in decline in the 1970s, there was a steep drop after 1979.66 This decline was observable even though the treaty meant, in theory, that Egypt had a new export market, namely Israel, with its sizeable native Palestinian and Jewish Arab immigrant populations.67 Certainly, there has been a shift away from Egypt as the epicentre of Arabic film. Improving technologies have made the means of film production more accessible, enabling would-be filmmakers from around the Arab world to practice their craft. Support networks for filmmakers from other countries have expanded, both at the state and the transnational level. The Gulf countries have invested an incredible amount in their media infrastructures and activities, as Kay Dickinson has highlighted in her book Arab Cinema Travels.68 In his recent monograph Egyptian Cinema and the 2011 Revolution: Film Production and Representing Dissent, Ahmed Ghazal notes several contemporary currents, two of which I cite here. First, cinematic productions face increased competition from television, which is more profitable.69 Ghazal writes that since the revolution, ‘Egyptian film productions have been mainly limited to low-budget popular films released in the high seasons of ʿ id al-Fitr and ʿid al-Adha’.70 ‘These films’, he continues, ‘depend on a fixed formula of belly dancer, popular song and mediocre comedy and action scenes.’71 Another trend he identifies is an upsurge in independent filmmaking. This was encouraged by a spirit of freedom, the relatively low cost of digital cameras, and the sharing of videos on social media platforms that ‘blurred the distinction between professional and amateur filmmaking’.72 Nevertheless, the Egyptian industry, however much competition it faces, remains very much alive, as is evidenced by Chihab El Khachab’s 2021 ethnography Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation El Shammaa, The National Imaginarium, 141. In fact, the soft power of Egyptian cinema was already operating in Israel well before the 1979 agreement, as Arabic-language movies were shown on Israeli state television on Friday evenings throughout the decade prior to that. For more on this phenomenon see Eyal Sagui Bizawe’s documentary Arab Movie (2015). 68 See Kay Dickinson, ‘“Travel and Profit From it”: Dubai’s Forays into Film’, chap. 4, Arab Cinema Travels (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2016), 119–62. 69 Ghazal, Egyptian Cinema and the 2011 Revolution, 9. 70 Ibid., 9. 71 Ibid., 9. 72 Ibid., 9–10. He mentions a certain Muhammad Hifzi as one of the film producers ­supporting independent productions (9). 66 67

Egypt: Regional Essay  19 Shape the Industry.73 One of the many fascinating aspects of this book is the way that it shows how, despite all the changes to its environment and context, many structural mechanisms of the traditional Egyptian industry persist. This is particularly noticeable in the role that networking plays: in some ways it is an art which is seen to be passed down from master to apprentice or even parent to child – many of those active within the industry come from families who have been in the industry for decades. There are also traditional divisions of labour that are observed along class and gender lines.74 A NOTE ON CENSORSHIP IN EGYPTIAN FILM HISTORY

In her discussion of film censorship in the Arab world, Viola Shafik identifies three ‘taboo areas’ – religion, politics and sex.75 Many of the cases highlighted in cinematic histories have involved films which were banned for reasons relating to the first two categories, namely religion or politics. Some Islamic societies, it is often suggested, had a current of aversion to visual representations of the human figure as potentially idolatrous;76 hence the moving image was initially greeted with a kind of visceral mistrust in some quarters. Ultimately human forms on screen were tolerated in most places, although a rather strict taboo developed regarding the onscreen representation of the Prophet Muhammad.77 The theological objections to cinema78 were perhaps exacerbated by the fact that in Egypt, at least, a large percentage of participants in the cinema industry were non-Muslim resident foreigners who were sometimes seen as not demonstrating proper respect toward or knowledge of the religion. One ubiquitously cited example of a terrible gaffe committed

(Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2021). For example, women in the industry tend to be from wealthy backgrounds, and they tend to be funnelled into certain roles such as those of costume supervisor, stylist and editor. Ibid., 56. 75 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, 34. 76 Although this current is often associated with iconoclasm or aversion to representation of the human form (especially in the context of worship), Terry Allen suggests that a more apt term for characteristic attitudes toward figural representation in Islamic art is an-­ iconism or a relative indifference to such images. See Terry Allen, ‘Aniconism and Figural Representation in Islamic Art’, Five Essays on Islamic Art (Sebastopol, CA: Solipsist Press, 1988), 17–37. 77 A controversy erupted in 1926 when it was learned that Widad ʿUrfi intended to direct a film about Muhammad with Yusuf Wahbi playing the role of the Prophet himself. Al-Ahram Weekly has republished some of the correspondence about this in the contemporary press, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/531/chrncls.htm (accessed 23 June 2014). 78 A fascinating discussion of the cinematic form and its compatibility with principles of representation in classical Islamic discourse may be found in Salah Stetie, ‘Islam and the Image’, in Georges Sadoul (ed.), The Cinema in the Arab Countries (Beirut, 1966), 13–22. 73 74

20  Egypt by one such filmmaker involved the film Fatal Flowers,79 a film directed by Ozato for an Italian production company which famously included shots of Quranic verses turned upside down. Politically-motivated censorship is also frequently discussed, and a case which is often cited is Mario Volpi and Bahija Hafiz’s Layla, Daughter of the Desert (Layla Bint al-Sahraʾ, 1937), an historical drama about a pre-Islamic Arab maiden kidnapped by a Persian and nearly forced to marry King Chosroes. The film, which was ultimately re-edited and rereleased under a different title, was withdrawn from circulation because it was thought to have offended the Persian ruling family at a time when Reza Shah was engaged to the Egyptian princess Nazli.80 Another historical drama whose release was delayed due to what was seen as its allegorical allusions to injustice under the monarchy was Fritz Kramp’s Lashin (1938).81 There is a sense in which these films were deemed as problematic for either religious or political reasons because they threatened the social order, offending communities, classes, or strata. Yet there was another brand of censorship which was quite pervasive, emanating from multiple quarters, and this was concerned more with human sexuality, and the impact that motion pictures could have on the individual’s psychology and social, sexual and reproductive behaviour. This kind of censorship comes to fruition in the ‘Hays Code’ implemented by Hollywood studios in the 1930s, which was adopted ‘almost verbatim’ in pre-­Revolutionary Egypt.82 It tends to involve cuts rather than bans and sometimes passes unnoticed by general audiences, and, especially as it is unconnected with ­socio-political developments, may not figure centrally in cinematic histories.83 In Arabic, the title of this film occurs variously as al-Zuhur al-Qatila (Jalal al-Sharqawi, Risala fi tarikh al-sinima al-‘arabiyya [Cairo: al-Sharika al-Misriyya li-l-Tiba‘a wa-l-nashr, 1970], 17) and al-Azhar al-Mumita (Alex Cinema [http://www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/ industry/Censorship.html], accessed 5 June 2023). 80 For more on this film and its history with censorship, see Marlé Hammond, The Tale of al-Barraq Son of Rawhan and Layla the Chaste: A Bilingual Edition and Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 30–1. See also Marlé Hammond, ‘“If Only al-Barraq Could See”: Violence and Voyeurism in an Early Modern Reformulation of the pre-Islamic Call to Arms’, in Hugh Kennedy (ed.), Warfare and Poetry in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 215–17 and 235n. 81 Viola Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema, 271. 82 Farid, ‘Periodization’, 9. This reference was initially gleaned from Malek Khouri, The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahine’s Cinema (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 13. 83 Jacob Landau speaks of two films which were banned for moralistic reasons in the 1950s: the first was a sketch entitled The Neighbour’s Daughter (Bint al-jiran) which was disallowed due to its ‘lewd’ language and its setting in a girl’s bedroom, and the second a documentary on Sudan which was withdrawn from movie theatres due to its images of ‘naked tribesmen’. See Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), 165. 79

Egypt: Regional Essay  21 Apart from the occasional expurgation of a kiss, one does not associate melodrama with censorship, and it may be that melodramas faced less direct interference from various authorities than other genres. Indeed, according to Andrew Flibbert, the Egyptian Ministry of Education which, along with the Ministry of the Interior, was responsible for film censorship, ‘saw the popular melodramas and musical films of the period as performing a quasieducational function by adhering to a conservative set of presentational norms that were agreed upon by consensus and were only occasionally articulated explicitly’.84 However, because melodrama revolves around relationships between the sexes and operates on its explicit treatments of moral dilemmas and the extremities of virtue and vice, its aesthetic and structural integrity have a lot to lose from the meddling of the censors who may wish to suppress direct allusions to sexual behaviour. Moreover, even if the censorious codes and conventions did not ‘target’ melodrama, they certainly helped shape it. Indeed, as Thomas Elsaesser has suggested in the context of Hollywood cinema, melodrama flourished in such an atmosphere: The fact that commercial necessities, political censorship and the various morality codes restricted directors in what they could tackle as a subject has entailed a different awareness of what constituted a worthwhile subject, a change in orientation from which sophisticated melodrama benefited perhaps most. Not only did they provide a defined thematic parameter, but they encouraged a conscious use of style as meaning, which is a mark of what I would consider to be the very condition of a modernist sensibility working in popular culture.85

A book on censorship and the Egyptian cinema by Mahmud ʿAli reproduces a telling case file on Ibrahim Lama’s film The Lost Treasure (al-Kanz alMafqud, 1938). According to the plot summary provided by the censor, it is a tale of seduction, murder, unexpected fortune and revenge, fraught with mistaken identity, imprisonment, insanity and troubled kinship relations.86 The censor who reviewed the film, a certain Zaynab Fawwaz, under the auspices of the Film Censorship Division of the Ministry of the Interior, ordered several cuts, including the elimination of dialogue (‘women to me are like neckties’ and ‘for you I have given up the purest and most cherished thing a virgin possesses’), the removal of certain shots (of a prisoner cutting his chains to escape and of a madman surrounded by ‘dirty’ ­children and Andrew Flibbert, ‘State and Cinema in Pre-Revolutionary Egypt, 1927–52’, in Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni (eds), Re-Envisioning Egypt, 1919–1952 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 457. 85 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 175. 86 Mahmud Qasim identifies it as an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas, père’s Count of Monte Cristo. See al-Iqtibas fi al-sinima al-misriyya (Cairo: Nahdat Misr, 1990), second appendix. 84

22  Egypt drinking from a jug) as well as the expurgation of an entire love song on the grounds that the sentiment expressed in it was age-inappropriate for the twelve-year-old who was singing it.87 Such cuts undermine the expressive intention of melodramatic narrative: if explicit references to the seducer/ villain’s status as a Lothario and to the seduced/victim’s lost virginity are excised, the contrasts between good and evil are muted, and the principle of ‘total articulation’ dampened. Ibrahim Lama, in an effort to maintain the structural integrity of the film, appealed against one of the cuts, specifically the elimination of the song, but to no avail. In a letter to the director of the cinematic censorship department of the ministry of the interior dated 27 October 1938, he writes: We agree to all the cuts she made except the one concerning the normal song sung by a girl who is twelve years old; rather we find no reason to cut it especially since its lyrics are not detrimental to public morals [ghayr mukhill bi-ladab al-ʿamma] and since its removal would harm the subject of the film.88

Later in the century, we find similar censorship laws and practices in effect in Egypt. Viola Shafik cites a 1976 law which prohibits criticism of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Much in keeping with the Hays Code and the moral schemata of mainstream melodrama, immoral actions are to be ‘punished’. Sexual titillation is not allowed nor is the favourable representation of alcohol and drug consumption, nor the use of obscene speech.89 Censorship continues into the twenty-first century. I Love Cinema (Bahibb al-sima, 2004), the subject of Chapter 1.9, a film depicting the Coptic Orthodox community, managed to get the censors’ approval while it was still a script, but it was put on trial for ‘contempt of religion’ after its release.90 If the overthrow of Husni Mubarak in 2011 ushered in a new era of relaxation in the censorship laws, especially on the political front with the thriving of satire,91 this era was ultimately short-lived and ended with the 2013 coup against President Mohamed Morsi. Under Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, freedom of expression has regressed. According to British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent Mahmud Ali, al-Sinima wa-l-raqaba fi Misr: 1896–1952 (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma liqusur al-Thaqafa, 2004), 147–9. The case file is also available in English translation on the Alex Cinema website, http://www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/industry/Censorship.html (accessed 5 June 2023). 88 Ibid., 149. 89 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, 34. Shafik references a summary of the law that she published in German. See 220n. 90 Samia Mehrez, ‘The New Kid on the Block: Bahibb Issima and the Emergence of the Coptic Community in the Egyptian Public Sphere’, chap. 10, Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 194. 91 See, for example, Sara Taksler’s 2016 documentary Tickling Giants about the Egyptian ­television satirist Bassem Youssef. 87

Egypt: Regional Essay  23 Joseph Fahim, ‘censorship has tightened to an extent unwitnessed since the heyday of the Gamal Abdel-Nasser reign in the 1950s and 1960s’.92 Readers interested in the current state of censorship legislation may wish to consult Article 19’s report entitled ‘Egypt: 2018 Law on the Organisation of Press, Media and the Supreme Council of Media’.93 One notes a certain trend in Egyptian cinematic history, whereby the governing regime allows for the criticism of the previous regime such that political films produced in the 1950s and 60s, under Nasser (d. 1970), tend to criticise British colonialism and the monarchy, political films produced in the 70s, under Anwar Sadat (d. 1981), tend to criticise the Nasser regime and its treatment of political dissidents, and political films produced in the 80s, under Mubarak (ousted 2011), tend to criticise the Sadat regime, and especially the ‘Open Door’ policy. In the later Mubarak era, in the 1990s and beyond, there is some room for critique of the current state of affairs, but there is a sense in which these critiques fall short of a call to action. For example, the 1992 film, Terrorism and Kebab (al-Irhab wa-l-kabab), represents a scathing satirical indictment of state bureaucracy. In what has the potential to be a highly subversive act, victims of that bureaucracy – an array of ordinary Egyptians led by a middle-class male protagonist played by superstar ʿAdil Imam – take control of the Mugammaʿ, a Kafkaesque seat of government officialdom in downtown Cairo. However, when the group of rebels is asked what their demands are, they can come up with nothing other an order of takeaway food. What kind of criticism is allowed in the cinema under the regime of el-Sisi remains to be seen, but one would imagine that a certain amount of criticism of Mubarak himself is allowed.

Joseph Fahim, ‘How the Arab Spring Changed Cinema’, 14 January 2021, https://www. bbc.com/culture/article/20210113-how-the-arab-spring-changed-cinema (accessed 5 June 2023). 93 https://www.article19.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Egypt-Law-analysis-Final-Nov-​ 2018.pdf (accessed 5 June 2023). 92

28 December 1895 Grand Café, Paris

1899 Eden Theatre La Ciotat, France

1895 L’Arroseur arose France

1906 The Story of the Kelly Gang, Australia

1927 The Jazz Singer, USA

1927 Warner Brothers, USA

1935 Becky Sharp, USA

First cinematograph screening

First movie theatre

First fiction film

First feature-length fiction film

First sound film

First fully equipped sound studio

First feature-length technicolour film

Table 1b  Cinematic firsts

First Egyptian colour film

First fully equipped sound studio in Egypt

First Egyptian sound films

First feature-length fiction films made in Egypt

First ‘more or less Egyptian’ short

First movie theatre in Egypt

First cinematograph screening in Egypt

1949 Father is a Bridegroom

1934 Studio Misr

1932 The Elite Song of the Heart

1927 Layla Kiss in the Desert

1918 Madame Loretta (Larrici)

1897 Cinématographe Lumière Alexandria

5 November 1896 Café Zawani, Tousson Bourse, Alexandria

Chapter 1.1

The White Rose, Muhammad Karim  25

The White Rose (al-Warda al-baydaʾ, 1933)

The White Rose, directed by Muhammad Karim and starring the musician and singer Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab, was one of the first Egyptian sound films. It was also the first of seven musicals the pair would work on together.1 Although The White Rose strikes the contemporary viewer as somewhat slow-paced, it was well-received in its day and was reportedly more successful than the first Egyptian musical, Mario Volpi’s Song of the Heart (Unshudat al-fuʾad, 1932), at least in part because of ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s musical innovations. There are three things the viewer needs to know about The White Rose at the outset: (1) it is a melodrama, with stark oppositions between good and bad and a propensity for the characters to reveal and articulate their aims and intentions; (2) it was shot, for the most part, at Tobis Studios in Paris, as the technology of synchronised sound had not yet arrived in Egypt; and (3) it is a pioneering musical, and therefore a good springboard for a discussion of sound in Egyptian cinema. Let us deal with each of these three features in turn. First, its melodramatic aspects are more than apparent in the plot and characterisation. A young clerk, Muhammad Galal Effendi, who is a university graduate fallen on hard times financially in the wake of his father’s death, becomes enamoured with his wealthy employer’s daughter, Ragaʾ. She falls in love with him, too, but the young woman’s evil and greedy stepmother conspires to thwart their union and have Ragaʾ instead married off to her dissolute brother, Shafiq Bey, thereby ensuring that her husband’s riches will be inherited by her own family. Virtually everything about the stepmother – her tone of voice, her relatively revealing attire, her smoking The others are Tears of Love (Dumuʿ al-hubb, 1935), Long Live Love (Yahya al-hubb, 1937), Happy Day (Yawm saʿid, 1939), Love is Forbidden (Mamnuʿ al-hubb, 1942), Bullet in the Heart (Rasasa fi al-qalb, 1944), and I’m no Angel (Lastu mallakan, 1946).

1

26  Egypt of cigarettes – signals to the audience that she is a ‘baddie’. Similarly, Shafiq is shown to be of questionable moral character: he smokes, he drinks, he sleeps in his day clothes, and he flirts with a woman on a neighbouring balcony. Conversely, everything about Galal Effendi and Ragaʾ put them in a virtuous light, making their unconsummated love story all the more tragic. The fact that the film is shot in Paris creates an interesting tension in the mise-en-scène, or in the way that the film is staged and the way that the characters and props appear within the camera frame. Although the setting is the household of an opulent, aristocratic and therefore unsurprisingly westernised family, there is still a desire to represent the environment as an authentically Egyptian one. This, I would argue, is handled in two ways. First, there are exterior sequences, presumably shot in Egypt, that display life in the Egyptian countryside. Second, in the interior shots, some of the artwork placed on the walls is meant to evoke an Egyptian aesthetic. Before we turn to our third topic for conversation, music, let us consider how the melodramatic characterisation and the mise-en-scène work in tandem to project a heroic and quintessentially Egyptian identity for our protagonist. At the climax of the film, in what I call the ‘trial’ scene, Shafiq Bey informs Ragaʾ’s father that he has caught Galal Effendi kissing her in the grounds of the family’s country estate. In front of Ragaʾ’s father and stepmother, Shafiq rails against Galal Effendi while the latter waits patiently to hear his fate. As Shafiq hypocritically levels these accusations of impropriety, his back is to the camera, and he blocks the spectator’s view of a wall-hanging, namely an Islamic appliqué which reads ‘I put my trust in God’ (tawakkaltu ʿala Allah). Galal Effendi, on the other hand, stands in front of another pious wall-hanging in a way that harmonises with the sacred words on the wall behind him (Quran 24:35): ‘God is the light of the Heavens and the Earth’ (Allah nur al-samawat wa-l-ard). In Figure 1.1.1, one can see how beautifully Galal’s face is aligned with the holy words: his nose follows the trajectory of the lam in the definite article of Allah and the arc of his eyebrow lines up with the nun in nur or ‘light’.2 Likewise, the crisp angles of his collar and necktie nicely correspond to the geometrical patterns in the appliqué’s frame. This merging of Galal’s presence with devotional words associates Galal with Arabic and Islam, two foundations of Egyptian identity. For a brief discussion of this scene and the symbolic meaning of Figure 1.1.1 in the context of a survey of representations of kissing in Egyptian cinema, see Marlé Hammond, ‘The Kiss in Egyptian Film Language of the 1940s’, in Frédéric Lagrange and Claire Savina (eds), Les Mots du désir: La langue de l’érotisme arabe et sa traduction (Marseilles: Diacritiques, 2020), 130 and 146.

2

The White Rose, Muhammad Karim  27

Figure 1.1.1  Muhammad Galal Effendi positioned before Islamic calligraphy

In this way, the filmmakers characterise Shafiq as ‘bad’ (hypocritical, selfserving and obscuring our view of the divine) and Galal as ‘good’ (honest, selfless and in harmony with the divine). The wall-hangings, then, are made to support the film’s melodramatic characterisation at the same time that they reinforce its Arabic and Islamic setting. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, let us consider the role of music in the film. Sound in cinema includes any noise appearing in the film from the spoken word, to sound effects to music, but it is on this last aspect of sound in cinema, music, that we will concentrate our attention here. Discussions of film sound need to begin by distinguishing between two types, diegetic and non-diegetic. Diegetic sound is any sound that occurs within the story plane, such that the characters in the film hear the sound along with the spectators. Non-diegetic sound, on the other hand, occurs outside the story plane – it is not heard by the characters but only by the spectators. Diegetic sounds, such as dialogue between characters, or a record which is shown to be playing on a phonograph, move the plot forward, while non-diegetic sounds, such as music in the score which is not heard by the characters, is generally meant to add emotional impact to whatever is happening on screen. In early Egyptian cinema, one often discerns a difference between the way that Arabic music and western music are used in the soundtrack: Arabic music tends to be diegetic. It is not simply there to play on the spectator’s emotions but is part of the fabric of the story. Meanwhile the music that occurs outside the story plane to

28  Egypt create moods of suspense, or grief, for example, tends to be western. This is an overgeneralisation, but there is, I think, some truth in it, at least when it comes to this particular film. In order to hear the discrepancy between the ways in which Arabic music and western music are deployed one needs to understand some basic differences between the two traditions. Table 1.1.1 provides a very basic comparison: One of the easiest differences to hear is that Arabic music has twice as many notes in a scale than does western music. As there are more notes in Arabic music, it can sound out of tune to the western-trained ear. Another major difference occurs in musical texture. Whereas in western art music is often polyphonic – meaning that different voices carry multiple lines of melody simultaneously, Arabic is usually either (1) monophonic – that is with one line of melody, (2) homophonic – a single line of melody accompanied by a drone, or (3) heterophonic – when there is one basic line of melody but where different voices elaborate on that melody with different ornamentation. The third major difference is that western music follows set rhythms whereas Arabic music follows rhythmic modes. Having said that – that is having laid out the basic differences between the two types of musical composition – we have to bear in mind that Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab was an innovator who was influenced by western music, and who made it his life’s work to help usher Arabic music into the modern era by synthesising traditional Arabic music with certain western techniques. If we had to sum up ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s merging of the two traditions, we would note the following: • He keeps the microtonal system. • He expands the takht (or band) into an ‘orchestra’ through the adoption of western instruments that can play microtones (such as string instruments). • He experiments with western rhythms. In The White Rose, for example, we find the rhythm of the rumba in his song ‘His Eyes Taught Love’ (Gafnuhu ʿallam al-hawa). • He keeps (or rather limits himself) to monophony, as the more complex texture of heterophony, dependent upon improvisation, was not seen Table 1.1.1  Western music versus Arabic music Western music

Arabic music

• Tonal • Harmonic/polyphonic •  Set rhythms

• Microtonal • Monophonic/homophonic/heterophonic •  Rhythmic modes

The White Rose, Muhammad Karim  29 as appropriate for the cinema (or for that matter short phonograph recordings). Music features so prominently in this film that one can discern a second plotline built upon it. Galal Effendi is a musician with a beautiful voice and, after he loses his job as a consequence of kissing Raga, he channels all his energy into composing and performing music. When he returns to his apartment in Cairo, he gazes upon the portraits of Sayyid Darwish and other early modernisers of Arabic music that are decorating his walls. As the camera pauses on the portraits of the musicians, recordings of their voices are heard. The spectator is meant to understand that Galal Effendi sees himself as part of this legacy and has found a new sense of purpose.3 Thus, at the end of the film, when Galal Effendi sings a melancholic love song as he watches Ragaʾ’s marriage to Shafiq from behind the mansion’s gates, we see that whilst the love story comes to a tragic conclusion, the career trajectory of the male ­protagonist has been firmly and triumphantly established. When one looks at the diegetic status of various musical numbers throughout the film, interesting patterns emerge. First, whilst both Arabic and western music occur in the diegetic plane, the non-diegetic music is almost always western.4 There is also a curious category of what I would call partially diegetic music. In wholly diegetic music, Muhammad ʿAbd alWahhab and his instrumentalists appear in the frame as performers. Thus, both the vocalist and the instrumentalists are accounted for in the story plane. For example, at one point, Ragaʾ visits Galal in his apartment in Cairo, where he is holding a rehearsal, and he invites her in to hear him and his fellow musicians play. There are many other points in the film, however, when ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s voice is accounted for in the story plane, but the instrumentalists are not. This I would call partially diegetic. There is also Walter Armbrust likens this scene in which ‘Abd al-Wahhab, as a musician, authenticates himself by association with his musical forbearers, to an isnad, or a narrative chain of transmission that authenticates verbal reports such as hadith as true or sound. See his description and analysis of the scene in Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 111. 4 Passages from western classical music punctuate the soundtrack of the latter half of the film. For example, about halfway through the film, establishing shots of the Egyptian countryside are accompanied by Camille Saint Saëns’s ‘Carnival of the Animals’. About ten minutes afterwards, as the villainous Shafiq Bey is about to interrupt a romantic interlude between Galal Effendi and Ragaʾ, we hear the overture of Franz von Suppé’s ‘Dichter und Bauer’ (Poet and Peasant). Later, Shafiq flirts with a woman on a neighbouring balcony to a tune from Manuel de Falla ‘El Amor Brujo’. To give a final example, Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture features in the soundtrack as Galal walks contemplatively along the Corniche in Alexandria. I thank Daniel Gidron for his assistance in ­identifying the music. 3

30  Egypt an extraordinary sequence when we hear the afore-mentioned Arabic song ‘His Eyes Taught Love’. It first appears as if the music is non-diegetic – we hear the music, instrumentalists as well as ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s voice, as we see typical visions of the Egyptian countryside, most notably a group of women carrying jars of water on their heads, outside the country estate of Ragaʾ’s father. Then, Ragaʾ, looking for Galal Effendi, goes inside, and as the camera follows her movements the song is interrupted, as if the song is inside the story plane and cannot be heard indoors. When Ragaʾ goes outside again, the song resumes, and it is not long before Ragaʾ finds her beloved Galal singing on a garden path. These three components of the film – melodrama, mise-en-scène and music – mutually reinforce each other. One can say that the music heightens the emotional impact of the melodrama. Meanwhile, melodrama provides a premise for the songs of longing, desire and grief. Finally, the mise-en-scène reflects the melodramatic impulse by casting the characters in binary good and bad lights. It also guides our understanding of the diegetic status of the music. When the music manifests itself visually within the camera frame and its depiction of the story world, we know that the music is either wholly or at least partially diegetic. Questions to Consider • How are the songs in the film staged? • Do you notice any differences between diegetic and non-diegetic music? • When do you hear western music? Take note of the circumstances, what role the music plays in the scene, and whether the music is diegetic or non-diegetic. • Apart from the language and music in the film, how would we know that it is set in Egypt? What are the visual cues? Further Reading Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–62. Read chap. 1, ‘The Gifted Musician’, 11–62 and chap. 3, ‘Classic, Clunker, National Narrative’, 94–115. David Bordwell and Kirstin Thompson, ‘Sound in the Cinema’, chap. 9 in Film Art: An Introduction, 7th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 347–88. Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, ‘Sound’, chap. 7 in Arab and African Film Making (Zed Books: London, 1991), 129–47.

Chapter 1.2

The White Rose, Muhammad Karim  31

Determination (al-ʿAzima, 1939)1

Kamal Salim’s 1939 film Determination stood out among virtually all the Egyptian movies of its day by virtue of its realism. ‘For the first time’, writes critic Galal El Charkawi, ‘an Egyptian film-maker dealt realistically with a social problem drawn from real life and conditions in Egypt’.2 As a tale of an educated young man with humble origins whose marital happiness is threatened by precarious employment, it at first glance seems to break the melodramatic mould and venture into the as-yet-uncharted territory of Egyptian realism. But what exactly do we mean by realism? And how is it expressed, technically, in film language? Here, I would argue that Determination, far from being devoid of all melodrama, partakes in many conventions of the genre and that its realism is in a sense limited to its detailed representation of class hierarchies. In particular, we notice that the script is melodramatic, whilst the mise-en-scène is, for the most part, realist. Two definitions of melodrama inform this discussion. First, there is what we might call the pedestrian or intuitive meaning – its street sense. Ali Abu Shadi sums this up admirably: Melodrama is a form more than a genre. It differs from tragedy, comedy, and farce in its emotional intensity, calamitous events, and one-dimensional characters. The plots are marked by sudden movement between highly exaggerated situations in which coincidence plays a major role. The characters do not change or grow morally or emotionally, and the lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated … 3

Ranked #63 in Ziad Abdullah (ed.), Cinema of Passion: Dubai International Film Festival’s 100 Greatest Arab Films List, trans. Joseph Fahim (Dubai International Film Festival, 2013).  2 El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 14.  3 Ali Abu Shadi, ‘Genres in Egyptian Cinema’, in Alia Arasoughly (ed.), Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 85.  1

32  Egypt Determination, we will find, displays some of these qualities. The primary villain is one-dimensional, even if the protagonists have some depth. Some key developments in the plot rest on coincidence. Good and evil are pitted against one another. In these ways, Determination stands as a melodramatic film. Yet there is another definition of melodrama, one which has been proposed and theorised by Peter Brooks, and this definition relates to a mode of expression which is extremely explicit. He writes: Melodrama […] is an expressionistic form. Its characters repeatedly say their moral and emotional states and conditions, their intentions and their motives, their badness and their goodness. The play typically seeks total articulation of the moral problems with which it is dealing; it is indeed about making the terms of these problems clear and stark. Melodrama appears as a medium in which repression has been pierced to allow thorough articulation, to make available the expression of pure moral and psychological integers.4

This theoretical definition of melodrama as a mode of exaggerated articulation applies in large measure to many of the film’s most pivotal scenes. In one, the young protagonist, Muhammad, attends a party at the home of an aristocratic friend. A ‘toff’ in the room eyes Muhammad and says to another, conspiratorially, ‘Let’s mock him’. Then, drawing attention to his lower social status, they suggest that he wants to become a shoemaker. Thus, the fact that the characters are insulting him and the reasons behind their insults are all made explicit to the film’s spectators. However, the most melodramatic aspect of the scene comes in the form of a lecture Muhammad delivers in response to the disparagement: I’m sorry to see such manners. If you had any empathy, you would mind the feelings of others, but unfortunately you live in this world with no conscience. You may get pleasure from sarcasm and from making fun of people, but you are only degrading yourselves. Others struggle earnestly, while you are slaves to your desires. I wonder what your families did to make you such a stain on them.5

Another melodramatic exchange occurs between Muhammad and his wife, Fatima (played by Fatima Rushdi), after she discovers that he has lost his white-collar job and has been secretly working behind a counter in a department store, where he is forced to wear a uniform that represents a drop in his social status. MUHAMMAD: Why have you changed so? Have you forgotten your love for me? Is it not you, Fatima, who is speaking to me? Is that not your voice to which I have become accustomed? Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1976/1995), 56.  5 This monologue begins circa 35:40.  4

Determination, Kamal Salim  33 FATIMA: And you’re not the Muhammad who would never hide anything from me. MUHAMMAD: Sorry, Fatima, soon you’ll know everything. FATIMA: I don’t want to know. Divorce me. I don’t want to be with you. My mother was right – I can’t possibly be shut up in the same room with you. MUHAMMAD: Your mother’s doing wrong by you, Fatima, and your words wound my dignity. If I didn’t cherish you, I wouldn’t tolerate this. FATIMA: You tolerate it because you there is nothing you can say. Aren’t you ashamed? MUHAMMAD: Ashamed of what? Have I committed a crime? There’s no shame in earning a living, Fatima. FATIMA: Divorce me. Don’t waste your energy. I said divorce me. MUHAMMAD: Now I see the truth which unfortunately was hidden from me before. Your first love was apparently not for me, and your hatred now is caused by this suit that I have on. If I wanted I could force you to come back home and live with me, but now I don’t want you any longer. Go, you are free [divorced].6

Overlaid on the melodrama is an intricate and detailed representation of class hierarchies. As Galal El Charkawi states: ‘The official in his suit and tarboosh (the Effendi) is compared with the tradesman or craftsman in his galabia, the official and his fixed, regular salary with the independent worker and his uncertain earnings’.7 In order to describe these hierarchies in an Egyptian context, we need to define a few social categories and their terms. Roughly three classes are represented: 1. The rich and aristocratic, landowning classes (represented by the character of ʿAdli and his father Nabih Bey). 2. The Effendis, or the educated, ‘rising’ middle class (represented by Muhammad). The signature of the effendi is his red felt cylindrical cap – his tarbush or fez. 3. The ibn al-balad (‘Son of the country’) or bint al-balad (‘daughter of the country’), or the largely uneducated working class, or lower middle class, often of rural origins (represented by the tradespeople who inhabit Muhammad’s popular neighbourhood). Character development in the film takes place against this backdrop of social class. As Walter Armbrust has argued, the film is not so much a realist portrayal of life in Egyptian popular quarters, but rather a valorisation of the journey toward middle-class modernity through the vehicle of education.8 This exchange begins at approximately 1:20:30. El Charkawi, ‘Report’, 14.  8 Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture, 94–115.  6  7

34  Egypt

Figure 1.2.1  Fatima as a bint al-balad (RT 15:55)

Figure 1.2.2  Fatima as a middleclass housewife (RT 1:17:59)

This trajectory towards the middle class may be observed not only in the characters of Muhammad, whose education lifts him and his wife out of the lower classes, and Fatima, whose costume reflects the evolution of her social and economic status (see Figures 1.2.1 and 1.2.2), but also the aristocratic ʿAdli, who only redeems himself as a character by meeting Muhammad in the metaphorical middle. As his character develops, ʿAdli casts aside the aristocratic hunting outfits he dons early in the movie for the suit and fez he wears to work, such that he and Muhammad are dressed alike. ʿAdli also comes down off his pedestal and proves himself to be morally upstanding when, at the end of the film and for the first time, he crosses into Muhammad’s neighbourhood bearing gifts for the family. At the film’s end, Muhammad and Fatima find themselves reunited as husband and wife. They stand on a balcony overlooking the neighbourhood’s central square. ʿAdli stands behind and between them, laughing cheerfully. When he draws the curtain in front of himself, thereby leaving the lovebirds alone, he sanctifies their kiss. The film concludes with images of marital bliss and socio-economic harmony. Finally, any discussion of the representation of social class in Determination must mention the setting, for the importance of the popular quarter (hara) in which most of the scenes are set cannot be overemphasised. Indeed, the film was originally meant to be entitled ‘Ibn al-hara’ (Son of the popular quarter), but director Kamal Salim worried this would put off more affluent spectators.9 Whilst we normally associate realist cinema with on-location shooting, the neighbourhood in Determination was an elaborately constructed set built at the Egyptian Studio (Studio Misr). In the film’s first shot, darkness fades out to reveal a close-up shot of a streetlamp whose light soon May Telmissany, al-Hara fi al-sinima al-Misriyya: 1939–2001, trans. Raniya Fathi (Cairo: al-Markaz al-Qawmi li-l-Tarjama, 2012), 34.

 9

Determination, Kamal Salim  35 extinguishes as it is overtaken by daylight. As the call to prayer is heard, the camera tilts down from the streetlamp, which is on the corner of a building, and settles on a street sign labelled ‘Darb Maatouk’ (darb maʿtuq or ‘emancipated alley’). The camera continues to tilt down and then pans to the left as a man holding prayer beads emerges through a doorway and makes his way to the mosque. More men emerge from different directions. A sequence of shots introduces us to the neighbourhood and its activities: we are shown pedestrians, donkeys and carriages, we meet the butcher, the baker and the undertaker, we witness milk deliveries and street merchants, as the neighbourhood comes to life. Finally, the camera tilts back up to the level of the first storey where we see Fatima, hanging laundry and watering plants on her balcony. Soon Muhammad appears at an open window across the way, and they exchange pleasantries. Note the parallelisms between Figures 1.2.3, the shot of Muhammad in his window at the opening of the film, and 1.2.4, the shot of Muhammad and Fatima, the reunited couple, and their friend ʿAdli, at the film’s end. They depict different windows, as the distinct building surfaces reveal, and yet the spaces are highly reminiscent of one another, most notably with the positioning of the lace curtains and the four potted plants on the window ledges. In this way the closing sequence of the film denotes progress, the purposeful coming together of sexes and of social classes, at the same time that it harks back to the beginning of the film, providing a sense of closure and aesthetic unity. Questions to Consider • How does the realism in this film manifest itself thematically and ­technically? Focus on sound, mise-en-scène and editing.

Figure 1.2.3  Muhammad greets Fatima from his window (RT 4:56)

Figure 1.2.4  Muhammad, Fatima and ʿAdli enjoying antics on the street below (RT 1:46:32)

36  Egypt • Do you agree with Galal El Charkawi’s pronouncement that the film is free of melodrama? Do you find any melodramatic elements? What are they? • In this chapter it is suggested that the script is melodramatic whilst the mise-en-scène is realist. Do you agree? Are there ways in which the script is realist and the mise-en-scène melodramatic? Further Reading Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–62. Read chap. 3, ‘Classic, Clunker, National Narrative’, 94–115. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1976/1995). Read ‘The Aesthetics of Astonishment’, 24–55. Sawsan El-Messiri, Ibn al-Balad: A Concept of Egyptian Identity (Leiden: Brill, 1978).10

I am grateful to my student Salma Khamis Shaaban for introducing me to this book.

10

Chapter 1.3

Love and Revenge, Yusuf Wahbi  37

Love and Revenge (Gharam wa-intiqam, 1944)

Love and Revenge, or, more literally, ‘Passion and Revenge’, was directed by Yusuf Wahbi (1898–1982), who had a background in the theatre before setting his sights on the cinema, and who also plays the male protagonist in the film. Love and Revenge continues in the melodramatic tradition and, in fact, revels in its excesses, to the extent that, in the Arab world, the film and its title have become emblematic of all that is ‘over-the-top’.1 As with The White Rose and Determination, the moral dilemmas and social tensions revolve around relations between the sexes and marriage, more particularly, but in this third film, a crime of passion enters in to the mix. Moreover, the real-life circumstances surrounding the tragic death in a car accident of the female lead, the Syrian diva Asmahan, during the film’s production, would seem to have life imitating art. The frame story, which was apparently concocted to accommodate the death of Asmahan during the film’s shooting, establishes the melodramatic mood perfectly; in the opening sequence, Gamal, a music professor who has gone mad since the death of his beloved Suhayr, plays a tune named after her from an insane asylum. His bulging eyes, the images of his beloved singer and musical notations scrawled on the wall, and the maudlin tune coming from his violin all emphasise his exaggerated heartbreak (Figure 1.3.1). The main action then unfolds in a flashback. The flashback leads us first to the throngs outside a theatre clambering to get into a Suhayr Sultan concert. Once indoors, we are exposed to a theatrical tableau: stage, orchestra pit and audience. As men (and, incidentally, women) dressed in tuxedoes lead their female partners in a waltz which inaugurates the song ‘Nights in Vienna’ (Layali al-uns),2 we would I thank Nada Elzeer for alerting me to its significance in popular culture. The sheet music for this song may be found in Sherifa Zuhur, Asmahan’s Secrets (London: Saqi, 2001), 198–200.

1 2

38  Egypt

Figure 1.3.1  A crazed Gamal plays the violin (RT 4:13)

Figure 1.3.2  Suhayr Sultan on stage (RT 7:29)

be forgiven for forgetting that we are meant to be in Cairo, but soon after Asmahan appears on stage, she launches into a melody that is distinctively microtonal, although her attire and the stage setting remain highly European (Figure 1.3.2). Melodrama aside, Love and Revenge differs substantially from The White Rose and Determination in the identities it seeks to project. It invests itself less in local, Egyptian culture and more in a pan-Arab cultural unity. In fact, during an onscreen trip to Lebanon, the protagonists attend a gathering where a pan-Arab political poem is delivered passionately by the Lebanese actor and star of the Egyptian cinema Bishara Wakim. It includes the f­ ollowing lines: Upon my word, I see your hearts full of loyalty   Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, with sons of the Nile Related from old times In fact, cousins With good will, we shall be   A pan-Arab unit3

Although the speech is delivered in a comical tone, the applause with which it is met by the diegetic audience seems wholehearted and enthusiastic. One could say that the scene anticipates the founding of the Arab League in 1945, the year after the film was released. Later, a celebrity headshot of Suhayr Sultan [Asmahan] with a small Quran hanging from it (Figure 1.3.3) may easily be connected to the panArab themes. Asmahan was Syrian by birth, raised in Egypt, and a Druze Trans. Albert Rashid, ‘Gharam and Intikam’, Box # 1317, Casefile # 50448, New York State Archives Motion Picture Scripts Collection.

3

Love and Revenge, Yusuf Wahbi  39

Figure 1.3.3  Suhayr Sultan headshot with Quran (RT 1:29:39)

(a member of a minority Islamic sect); hence she represents multiple identities brought together under the rubric of Islam. Arab nationalism always included non-Muslims communities under its umbrella but also saw Islamic religious culture as one of its unifying factors. To the extent that the film represents Egyptian nationalism, it does so by way of a song in praise of the monarchy. It features in the plot as a musical collaboration between Suhayr Sultan and Gamal Hamdi, the character played by Yusuf Wahbi who is a professor of western music. The song, entitled ‘I am the daughter of the Nile’ (Ana bint al-nil), is meant to represent how the Muhammad Ali Dynasty has ushered in Egyptian modernity, and its ultimate stanza lauds King Farouk, specifically. This scene was expurgated from the film, no doubt in the wake of the 1952 Revolution. Thanks to the availability of the unredacted script at the New York State Archives, we can consider the lyrics to the song and its narrative introduction. Suhayr approaches Gamal about composing the music for a song she has been invited to contribute by a royal female patron, for a party she is holding. Suhayr suggests a theme of Pharaonic Egypt, but Gamal does not think this is original enough. He states:

40  Egypt For two years I have wanted to compose a tune to picture modern Egypt. I can only think of one man, the founder of her modern glory, the God-sent hero who transformed Egypt to a kingdom, the brave soldier who gave Egypt the kings who spent their lives in her service, Muhammad Ali, the grandfather of the Great Faruq.4

The next words to appear in the script are the lyrics to the song, which begin with the words of the title: ‘I am the daughter of the Nile’. They then praise the key figures of the dynasty, starting with the nineteenth-century figures Muhammad Ali and Ismail before moving on to the more contemporary kings Fuad, who died in 1936, and Farouk, who was monarch at the time the film was made. The song ends with the following verses in praise of King Farouk: Then sat on my throne a loyal king   He cured my wounds and helped the poor and weary And nourished my soul with what he gave Of youth and glorious kingship Greet with me the coming spring of my life Greet with me Faruq of the High Spirit Long live his blessings for all that he does for benevolence and charity Oh you the best king of the time The ally of victory … may you live long for the Nile Valley and accept its love All of it loyal to the throne And lead us all higher and higher   A reason for the crown5

On top of the pan-Arabism and cow-towing to the Egyptian monarchy, one also gets the sense that the film has a certain ‘western’ orientation. Indeed, as mentioned previously, Gamal Hamdi is a professor of western music. It also feels, especially with respect to its mise-en-scène, more familiar to the spectator who is fluent in Hollywood film language. It would seem to mimic western cinematic traditions in a way that The White Rose and Determination do not. Particularly interesting in this regard is the film’s depiction of race. This is achieved through the character of a young black servant called Mulabbas, a name which means ‘sugar candy’. While this character, who is identified as Nubian in the script, does not appear in that many scenes, he is an explicit object of Suhayr Sultan’s affection, and he also turns out to be a key witness in the investigation of the crime of passion. The romanticisation of the mistress–servant relationship, the apparent happiness with which he Ibid. Note that I have edited the translation somewhat. Ibid. Note that I have edited the translation.

4 5

Love and Revenge, Yusuf Wahbi  41

Figure 1.3.4  Mulabbas speaks to Suhayr over the telephone (RT 18:45)

Figure 1.3.5  Graphic matches between the characters, notably the head towel and the turban, provide a visual representation of their bond (RT 18:49)

undertakes his role as a child labourer, and the juxtaposition of his blackness with her whiteness, would seem to uphold and justify racist and colourist hierarchies familiar in Hollywood cinema.6 The first encounter between Suhayr and Mulabbas depicted in the film occurs on the telephone (Figures 1.3.4 and 1.3.5). Despite their physical separation, the interaction is intimate. This is conveyed in the warmth of Suhayr’s voice and the fact that she is dressed in a bathrobe, having bathed in her dressing room after a performance. The cross-cutting exhibits striking graphic matches: their respective figures occupy approximately the same space within the frame, the telephone cords are positioned similarly, and, most notably, the white towel wrapped around Suhayr’s head resembles Mulabbas’s turban. A little later, as Suhayr returns to her villa, he runs out to greet her and she puts her arm around him as they enter the building together. They then sit on a sofa, and she makes small talk with him as she pinches and caresses his cheeks. She says that she will give him ‘candy’, using the French word bonbons, but he reacts with alarm as he hears ‘bomb’ (bumba). Mulabbas, whose own name means ‘candy’, thus provides comic relief at the same time that he serves as an outlet for the female protagonist’s affection, thereby ­portraying her as a woman with healthy maternal instincts. Given the film’s pan-Arab themes, one wonders to what extent Mulabbas is included in the collectivity to which the other characters belong and to For more on racism in the early Egyptian film industry, see Ifdal Elsaket, ‘Jungle Films in Egypt: Race, Anti-Blackness, and Empire’, Arab Studies Journal 25, no. 2 (2017): 8–32.

6

42  Egypt what extent he is ‘othered’. Interestingly, the Arab nationalist speech delivered by the Lebanese poet, refers to ‘Sons of the Nile’, rather than Egyptians. The use of this term could be seen as embracing black Africans, Nubians and Sudanese.7 Yet it has to be said that Mulabbas, whilst he is an object of ­affection and affinity, is highly patronised.8 Questions to Consider • Are there any discernible patterns in the use of diegetic and non-diegetic music? Where are the boundaries between ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ music accentuated? Where are they collapsed? How are the songs integrated into the structure of the film? • When are the characters melodramatic, or explicit about their desires and intentions? What moral dilemmas do they articulate? • What elements of the film seem to be imitating western cinema and culture, and what elements seem to be original or specific to Egyptian or Arab culture? • How does the film project local, regional and international identities? Compare the song in praise of the Muhammad Ali dynasty to the scene in The White Rose where Galal Effendi contemplates the portraits of his musical forefathers. Further Reading Diana Abbani, ‘Asmahan’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 165–89. Philip Mansel, ‘The Riddle of Asmahan’, Grand Street 9, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 76–93. Natalie Smolenski, ‘Modes of Self-Representation Among Female Arab Singers and Dancers’, McGill Journal of Middle East Studies 9, no. 3 (2007): 49–80. Sherifa Zuhur, ‘Passion and Revenge’, Asmahan’s Secrets (London: Saqi, 2001), 143–65. Viola Shafik, ‘The Nubians: Servicemen of the Nation’, ‘The Other’, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 64–78.

Nubia, the seat of celebrated ancient civilisations, is situated in southern [Upper] Egypt and Sudan. 8 One may wish to compare the relationship of Suhayr and Mulabbas to that of the on-screen personae of Shirley Temple and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, who starred in four feature films together in the 1930s. There, white privilege is accorded to a female child, while a black male adult plays the role of the contented servant. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2006), especially the photographs on page 49. 7

Chapter 1.4

Love and Revenge, Yusuf Wahbi  43

Struggle on the Nile (Siraʿ fi al-Nil, 1959)

Struggle on the Nile, directed by ʿAtif Salim (1927–2002), is the first post1952-Revolution Egyptian film that we have discussed. According to Egyptian film critic and scholar Samir Farid, the revolution ushered in a period of relaxed censorship and an increased attention to realism (1952–6). This was followed by an era (1956–62) during which Egyptian filmmakers ‘explored the subjects of the individual, sexuality, and religion with the same freedom’ as did their counterparts in Europe and North America.1 Struggle on the Nile would seem to partake in the trend allowing for sexually explicit content if not in the trend for realism.2 Salim, who was born in Kordofan, Sudan, first worked as an assistant to directors Ahmad Galal and Ahmad Badrakhan before directing his own films. He was celebrated for his thrillers and for his adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Khan al-Khalili. Like the first three Egyptian films we have explored, Struggle on the Nile partakes in the melodramatic mode in the sense that the characters incessantly articulate their emotions, motivations and intentions. And yet, there is also a level of indirect or allegorical meaning which is left unsaid in the script, even if it is somewhat obvious through the mise-en-scène. This allegorical meaning relates primarily to two subjects: (1) sexuality and (2) modernisation. Regarding the first topic, sexuality, it is notable that the film establishes a desirous gaze in which the spectator is made complicit, and hence it evokes relationships outside the diegetic plane or story world. Regarding the second topic, modernisation, it is fairly clear that the mission of Muhassab – played here by the internationally celebrated actor Omar Sharif (1932–2015) – to replace the family schooner with a barge alludes to larger issues of communal economy and governance. Samir Farid, ‘Periodization of Egyptian Cinema’, in Alia Arasoughly (ed.), Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 6–11. 2 The film does not present a complex analysis of social class. However, one could argue that the film partakes in ‘sexual realism’ in the sense that hierarchies of gendered power relations are explored. 1

44  Egypt When one studies the profiles of the protagonists, one finds that they can be broken down into binary pairs – one of womanhood and one of manhood. The opposition between the virtuous, innocent, and rural Ward, fiancée of Muhassab, and the seductive, deceitful, urban Narguiss, the voluptuous belly-dancer played by Hind Rustam, is obvious and familiar. The angel/whore dichotomy as it is often called in feminist criticism seems to be an almost universal cross-cultural trope and it is certainly not unique to Egyptian cinema. Nevertheless, it deserves some explicit treatment. Ward’s loose black clothing leaves her modestly shapeless, while Narguiss’s revealing form-fitting dresses accentuate her curves; Ward moves hesitantly, Narguiss gyrates her torso; Ward averts her gaze, Narguiss directs hers at her objects of desire. That the two form a dichotomous pairing is confirmed by the symbolism of their names: Ward means ‘rose’, Narguiss ‘narcissus’. Hence, they are both named after flowers. They are not just any two flowers, however, but rather those mentioned in a famous ‘dispute poem’ by Ibn al-Rumi (d. 896) where he declares his preference for the narcissus.3 In my view, the opposition in this film that is just as forcefully made and that is more interesting and perhaps more culturally specific4 is the opposition between Mujahid (Rushdi Abaza), the fully-fledged virile, moustachioed male, and Muhassab, the beardless youth. Here, too, we find symbolic significance to the character’s name: mujahid is a Form III active participle meaning ‘fighter’, whilst muhassab is a Form II passive participle meaning something to the effect of ‘honoured’ or ‘valued’. From the beginning the muscular and authoritative Mujahid is positioned as the object of [women’s and perhaps the spectators’] desire, while Muhassab is portrayed as a child – naive, innocent and even effeminate,5 but not particularly desirable (despite the fact that he is played by the screen heartthrob Omar Sharif). At the opening of the film, Mujahid wins a round of tahtib, which is a form of martial arts involving battling with sticks. A female tourist then asks to take A passage from this poem may be found in Geert Jan van Gelder, Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology (New York/London: New York University Press, 2013), 282. 4 I do not mean here that the mustachioed male/beardless youth opposition is specific to Egyptian culture, far from it, but rather that it is less universal and hence potentially unfamiliar to readers of this book. For more on the nature of this opposition, I refer you to scholarship on Iran, namely Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 5 This is suggested by the fact that Muhassab’s mother had one of his ears pierced as a baby and that the earring stays in his ear until just before he embarks on the journey to buy a barge in Cairo. 3

Struggle on the Nile, ʿAtif Salim  45

Figure 1.4.1  Female tourist photographs Mujahid (RT 4:48)

his picture (Figure 1.4.1) before posing with him in another. With this scene, the film establishes a gendered gaze of desire. It also situates the woman as the desirer and the man as the desiree. Whilst most gazes of desire in the film objectify the female body and, more specifically, the voluptuous curves of Narguiss, in one key scene Mujahid is clearly represented as the object of her lustful gaze as well. From the depths of the hold (Figure 1.4.2), Narguiss ogles Mujahid’s bare torso and arms, as he uses his strength to free the boat from the mud of the bank into which  the  schooner has crashed (Figure 1.4.3). It would seem that topless shots of Rushdi Abaza are not that unusual, as Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard write: ‘With slick-backed hair and a trimmed moustache, Abaza’s suave appearance could easily become dishevelled and – shirt off – raunchy during the course of a film.’6 Compare their mature, sexually-charged dynamic with the innocent encounter of Muhassab and his beloved Ward in the Upper Egyptian countryside. That they are meant to represent the ‘authentic’ virtuous Egypt is confirmed by the mise-en-scène: first the couple are situated in alignment with Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard, ‘Abaza, Rushdi (1927–1980 [1982?])’, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (Lanham/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 41.

6

46  Egypt

Figure 1.4.2  Emerging from the hold, Narguiss gazes desirously at Mujahid (RT 54:41)

Figure 1.4.3  A muscular Mujahid, as seen by Narguiss (RT 54:43)

Figure 1.4.4  Ward and Muhassab positioned before Pharaonic statues (RT 11:58)

Figure 1.4.5  Ward and Muhassab stand before an iconic water-wheel (13:35)

a pair of Pharaonic statues (Figure 1.4.4), and later they are pictured astride and beside a water buffalo-driven water-wheel or saqiya (Figure 1.4.5). Their gently flirtatious spinning as they sit atop the water wheel contrasts sharply with a scene much later in the film where Mujahid and Narguiss sit back to back in the brush by the side of the river. The camera pans around them as Mujahid is overcome with a desire to both kill Narguiss and embrace her. At the same time that the film offers up these heteronormative oppositions between child and adult, virtue and vice, and licit and illicit desire, the plot may be seen to unfold as an allegory of economic development and modernisation. That the ‘purse’ or ‘wallet’ (mihfaza) containing the money Muhasab’s father and his fellow villagers have raised for the purchase of the barge has symbolic dimensions becomes clear when the spectator finally gets a good view of it. When a jar in which the purse has been hidden is smashed, both the emblem

Struggle on the Nile, ʿAtif Salim  47 of the crescent cradling the three stars and the phrase (al-hukuma al-misriyya) or ‘Egyptian Government’ are clearly displayed (RT 1:57:34). This could be seen as a reference to the 1952 Revolution – the ‘smashing’ of the old regime. Indeed, when Muhassab and Mujahid return to their village on the new barge at the end of the film, the post-revolutionary Egyptian flag is hoisted. One wonders how the two levels of symbolism, that pertaining to the relations between the sexes and that relating to economic development, come together, if they do. By naming the schooner ‘Bride of the Nile’ (ʿarus al-nil), the filmmakers are linking the boat and its passengers to Egypt as a whole (RT 53:05). The scene where the boat crashes into the embankment is telling in this regard. Just before it happens, Narguiss is dancing for the male passengers who, distracted by her movements and the music, lose control of the rudder. Telling, too, are the repeated calls for Narguiss, first as the sole female passenger, then as Muhassab’s new wife, to go down to the hold or the ‘cellar’ and confine herself there. The film, in addition to employing the angel/ whore dichotomy, would also seem to be commenting more generally on the ­subjugation of women without taking a particularly liberatory stance on it. Questions to Consider • Pay attention to the film editing – the way the shots relate to one another. Note, in particular, how the ‘gaze of desire’ is constructed. How does the camera establish that one character is looking at another? • Think allegory. How does the film convey that it refers not only to the characters on the boat but to Egypt as a whole, or to Egypt as an idea? How important is the allegorical dimension to the fabric of the film as whole? • Note constructions of sexuality (both feminine and masculine) in the film. How do they relate to and contrast with each other? • What is the function of the non-verbal character? How does he mediate or disrupt constructions of the gaze, notions of sexuality and symbolic meanings? Further Reading Joel Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2002). Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 6th edition (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 837–48. Angus Fletcher, ‘Introduction’, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1964), 1–23.

48  Egypt 1.5 Chapter

The Open Door (al-Bab al-maftuh, 1963)

Viola Shafik calls Henri Barakat’s The Open Door ‘one of the most acknowledged “feminist” movies’.1 It was adapted from Latifa al-Zayyat’s celebrated novel of the same name, and the author herself worked on the screenplay. One can consider it as part of a feminist trend in Egyptian cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s.2 The novel, and the film, were both ground-breaking for their frank treatment of sexuality. In the introduction to her translation of the novel, Marilyn Booth writes: Like Egyptian men, Egyptian women had been writing and publishing fiction since before the turn of the twentieth century. But to confront issues of personal freedom and sexuality in the context of received social expectations and the constraints of political inertia, economic travail, and class – and to do so as a woman writing about female experience – was new and shocking, no less so than the bold step of describing the physicality of male and female adolescent and post-adolescent sexual awakening, as al-Zayyat does in this novel.3

Although the post-revolutionary socialist ideas that predominated in intellectual circles in Egypt strongly supported the education and professionalisation of women, and although they upheld the image of a young woman as a full participant in national life (especially the national struggle) as an ideal, the kind of scathing indictment of sexual repression one finds in The Open Door is somewhat unusual in mainstream cinema. In terms of film form, one finds an interesting dichotomy: whereas the former brand of f­eminism Viola Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 129. 2 Compare The Open Door to three films adapted from fiction by the male author Ihsan ʿAbd al-Quddus: Sleepless (La anam, 1957), The Closed Path (al-Tariq al-masdud, 1958) and I Am Free (Ana hurra, 1959) – all directed by Salah Abu Sayf. 3 Marilyn Booth, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), x. 1

The Open Door, Henri Barakat  49 promoting full access for women to public life is articulated explicitly in the script through the dialogue of the main characters, the latter strain, one which exposes the dangers of repressed sexuality, is for the most part only ‘hinted at’ through a combination of symbolic mise-en-scène, interior ­monologues and psychologising point of view structures. Layla, the heroine of the film played by Fatin Hamama, is courted by three men: (1) her cousin and neighbour ʿIsam, (2) her university professor Fuʾad and (3) her brother’s revolutionary comrade Husayn, all against the backdrop of mid-twentieth century Egyptian history. Through her relationships to these characters, Layla experiences a sexual awakening, stifling and re-awakening. Following an initial credit sequence focused on a ringing school-bell, a montage of protest footage and men and women mobilising for revolutionary struggle opens the film. Layla is then depicted as leading a protest at her girls’ school. She returns home to be beaten by her father, before having a romantic encounter with her first cousin and neighbour. Throughout the rest of the film, events conditioning her maturation as a sexual being are linked to events in Egyptian history until she is finally liberated both politically and sexually at the end of the film, when she abandons Professor of Philosophy Fuʾad, to whom she is engaged, and runs off with a revolutionary fighter to support the struggle against imperialist intervention during the Suez Crisis. Al-Zayyat’s screenplay would thereby seem to allegorise the nation through the character of Layla, who can only be free when political and sexual liberation occur in tandem. The film is conventional in that it would appear to link woman’s sexuality with the fate of the nation, yet it is also highly subversive in its suggestion that repressive sexual mores are holding the country back. These repressive mores are depicted as coming from within the self: it is Layla’s fear of the potential infidelity of Husayn which prevents her from pursuing her relationship with Husayn when she should. This fear of infidelity is depicted as an unhealthy obsession, and Layla needs to overcome that problem in order to liberate herself sexually and politically. Like Determination, The Open Door may be said to be a mix of melodrama and realism. As far as melodrama is concerned, both films engage in explicit articulation of moral dilemmas, but the two films’ respective brands of realism are quite different. Realism in Determination is a function of its setting in a popular quarter and its representations of class hierarchies in all their details. The Open Door, to the contrary is very much focused on the middle class.4 Realism there instead stems in part from depth of The exception to this is the character of the maid-servant with whom ʿIsam has a sexual liaison.

4

50  Egypt

Figure 1.5.1  Layla gazes at the maid cleaning spilt coffee from the carpet (RT 37:24)

Figure 1.5.2  The camera zooms in on the cleaning action (RT 37:27)

c­ haracterisation: the representation, often implicit, of characters’ inner minds. In the Open Door, we find that point of view shots, close-ups, interior monologues, flashbacks and daydreaming sequences are all used to convey Layla’s frame of mind. In one pivotal sequence, Layla has knocked on ʿIsam’s bedroom door, seeking reconciliation with him after she had rejected his attempt to forcibly seduce her. ʿIsam only opens his door a crack, as if he is hiding something, and when Layla pushes the door open she sees the maid cleaning a coffee stain off the carpet (Figure 1.5.1). When the camera zooms in on what Layla sees (Figure 1.5.2), the spectator understands that Layla finds added significance in this event. She soon finds out that the two have a sexual relationship. A flashback to this view of the maid cleaning the spilt coffee from the carpet later in the film confirms that this experience of unfaithfulness prevents her from allowing herself to fall in love again.5 The trauma Layla experiences due to her cousin’s infidelity takes place against the backdrop of ‘Black Saturday’, 26 January 1952, when antiBritish rioters set many businesses ablaze. Layla, her brother Mahmud, her brother’s comrade Husayn, and her cousins all find themselves on the roof of their apartment building, gazing at the smoke billowing from the fires. That the filmmakers are linking female sexual rites of passage with political turmoil is confirmed by the mise-en-scène. A distraught and disillusioned Layla, who has just learned of her boyfriend’s dalliances with another woman, looks at the burning cityscape. Her black hair and cardigan make her nearly indistinguishable from the smoke (Figure 1.5.3). It is curious and, perhaps, telling that ʿIsam’s infidelity upsets Layla much more than his unwanted sexual advances, which are staged as an attempted rape.

5

The Open Door, Henri Barakat  51

Figure 1.5.3  Layla pictured against the smoke of the ‘Black Saturday’ fires (RT 41:32)

Figure 1.5.4  Gamila’s head and torso align with smoke and cityscape (RT 42:19)

Likewise, the figure of Gamila, who is in her bridal attire as she is due to marry a rich, older man she does not love, is incorporated into the burning cityscape. Note the rather exact alignment of her hair with the smoke, her upper body with the view of the city buildings, and her lower body with the roof wall. (Figure 1.5.4). Critics find that the feminist message of the film is somewhat diluted by its ending, which sees Layla rescued from a potentially disastrous marriage to Professor Fuʾad by her decision to travel to Port Said with Husayn to join the struggle against the tripartite aggression and to tend to its casualties. Husayn, in other words, plays the role of her knight in shining armour. In defence of the film, I would like to point out that just moments before she finds herself in the arms of her love interest, she is helped onto the train by three anonymous men extending their hands (Figure 1.5.5). This emphasises Layla’s passing over into public life, into a world where she can interact with men in non-sexual and non-familial contexts for the sake of the nation. Questions to Consider • How is what is left unsaid expressed through cinematic techniques? How do the filmmakers use these techniques to discuss issues related to sex and sexuality? • How does the film link national liberation with sexual liberation? • What cinematic techniques do the filmmakers employ to represent what the protagonist Layla is thinking and feeling? Note particular instances of point of view structures, interior monologues and day-dreaming sequences.

52  Egypt

Figure 1.5.5  Men offer Layla helping hands as she boards the train to Port Said (RT 1:42:25)

Further Reading Viola Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2007). Read ‘Feminism and Femininity’, 119–96. Ghada Helmy, ‘The Plight of Women in Literary Text and Filmic Adaptation’, Alif 15 (1995): 178–201. Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

Chapter 1.6

Love and Revenge, Yusuf Wahbi  53

Night of Counting the Years/The Mummy (Yawm an tuhsa al-sinin/al-Mumiyaʾ, 1969)1

The Mummy […] severed all ties with melodrama, choosing to project a new aesthetic of fluidity and smoothness, as it were, that would immerse the spectator in the depths of history. And it was with The Mummy that Arabic cinema forayed into a truly cinematic idiom, leaving behind all traces of the inherited oral tradition. Movement in the film seems to be from the near past toward the distant past, in opposition to the classical chronological sequence, so that even the present, in its abstraction (the stark set), seems historically remote. Nouri Bouzid2

Although he directed only one feature film, Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam (1930– 86) is considered one of the greatest Egyptian filmmakers. In fact, in 2013, his first and only feature, Night of Counting the Years or The Mummy, was voted the best film of all time by the critics and filmmakers surveyed for the Dubai International Film Festival’s 100 Greatest Arab Films List. An Alexandrian of Upper Egyptian background, ʿAbd al-Salam was educated at Victoria College, where he learned to write in English. Apparently, at the beginning of his career, at least, he wrote his scripts in English and had them translated into Arabic.3 He studied architecture, and his early cinematic career was in set design and costumes. He contributed to many Egyptian films in these capacities. ʿAbd al-Salam also worked on the Italian television series called Mankind’s Fight for Survival, directed by Roberto Rossellini. ʿAbd al-Salam clearly had a special interest in Egypt’s Pharaonic past, as is evident in The Mummy as well his celebrated short film The Eloquent Peasant (al-Fallah al-fasih, 1970). In 1968, Shadi Abdel Salam was appointed the head of the Department of Experimental Film, which was part of the Public Ranked #1 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Nouri Bouzid, ‘New Realism in Arab Cinema: The Defeat-Conscious Cinema’, trans. Shereen el Ezabi, Alif 15 (1995): 244.  3 http://www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/cinematographers/Shadi_Abdel_Salam.html (acce­ ssed 6 June 2023).  1  2

54  Egypt Documentary Film Centre. Under his direction, the image became allimportant for the documentary filmmakers, and they produced films that did not comment on the images displayed, rather the image itself ‘was ­supposed to carry the crucial information’.4 As the most famous Egyptian ‘art film’, The Mummy departs radically from mainstream cinema. This departure may have been motivated in part by a wish to shake things up in the wake of the June 1967 Defeat – for the screenplay was composed shortly after that conflict. First and foremost, one notes that the script is written in literary Arabic, rather than colloquial Egyptian. Second, the film is cryptic; it does not partake in melodramatic conventions that render meanings explicit and accessible. The mise-en-scène, cinematography, acting and sound all to some extent disorient the spectator. It is as if ʿAbd-al-Salam draws on an ancient, mysterious film language rather than the melodramatic mode and conventions of continuity editing with which we have become familiar. The film is based on a true incident. In 1881, on the eve of the British occupation of Egypt, some Cairo-based scholars of the Antiquities Service discovered that a family in Dayr al-Bahri near Luxor (aka Thebes) were robbing an ancient Pharaonic tomb and secretly living off its treasures. The film’s fictionalised account portrays Wanis, son and heir of the newly deceased leader of the tribe, here called the Hurabat, torn between the loyalty he feels to his parents and his community and the shame that overcomes him after he finds out that the tribe are pilfering the resting places of the dead. After his father’s death, Wanis and his brother are led by their uncles to the tombs hidden within a mountain. There, the uncles cut into a mummy’s throat to extract a medallion from around its neck (RT 18:18). The violent image of the stabbing, and the look of horror on Wanis’s face when he sees it, convey the emotional intensity of his dilemma, which provides the basis for the suspense. One point of similarity between this film and more mainstream Egyptian movies, such as Struggle on the Nile and The Open Door, is perhaps its allegorical treatment of Egyptian nationhood. Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam himself offers us insight into the allegorical meaning of the film: It is the story of two Egypts confronting each other, one which is coming to an end, and another which is beginning to impose itself […] The first, an anachronistic Egypt, still alive, jostles with scientific progress coming from the devouring city, Cairo. Although the inhabitants of these two Egypts resemble each other and speak the same language in the film [literary Arabic], the archaeologists with their fezzes and steamboats, come from a totally ­different world, while the Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1988), 51.

 4

Night of Counting the Years, Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam  55

Figure 1.6.1  Wanis descending staircase into family home (RT 20:24) others have nothing but their batons and the raiding of ­incomprehensible tombs for their subsistence.5

ʿAbd al-Salam evokes a Pharaonic cinematic aesthetic in a number of ways. First and foremost are the mummies and their adornments. Then there are the ancient monuments that serve as a background for some of the action, particularly Wanis’s encounter with the so-called ‘Stranger’. But there are also ways in which the cinematography and mise-en-scène mimic the ­materiality – the lines, colours and textures – of ancient Egyptian art. The focus on the image as a conveyor of meaning itself echoes the hieroglyphic writing system where pictures function as words, and narratives are fixed through iconic symbols.6 In one pivotal scene, Wanis appears in a stairwell which is back-lit. I recall reading an analysis of this sequence commenting on the way that the light framing his body makes him seem like an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life.7 As he descends the staircase, his arms Translation from the French is mine. The interview, which originally appeared in Le Progrès Egyptien (25 May 1972), is cited in Yves Thoraval, Regards sur le cinéma égyptien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), 80–1.  6 An iconic symbol, or an icon, graphically resembles what it represents, unlike arbitrary symbols such as the letters of the Roman alphabet.  7 Sadly, I cannot locate the source.  5

56  Egypt

Figure 1.6.2  An atypical representation of prostitutes (RT 32:31)

Figure 1.6.3  An aerial view of Wanis lying flat at the water’s edge (RT 1:05:55)

assume a number of positions. In Figure 1.6.1, each arm is out and touching the wall, but at another moment both arms hang down by his sides, and at another only one of his arms extends to the wall. One wonders if the various poses he strikes are meant to evoke different hieroglyphic meanings. There are, furthermore, a lot of high-contrast shots, with, for example, navy blue shapes against a pale blue background, such as we see in Figure 1.6.2, in which two female figures walk away from the camera, entirely obscured by their wind-swept garments. This is perhaps ʿAbd al-Salam at his most cryptic: what is the message or meaning conveyed here? Is it a commentary on the veil and Islamic dress? If so, how is the commentary mediated by the fact that the figures, Murad’s cousins, act as prostitutes? In any case, the silhouettes serve to evoke the brush strokes of writing. The filmmaker’s palette, too, with its pale pinks, sandy hues, blacks and dark blues is reminiscent of the papyrus. We also have shots (Figure 1.6.3), where a shallow depth of field creates the texture of a bas-relief sculpture. Despite its canonical status as the Egyptian art film par excellence, The Night of Counting the Years is met with much ambivalence. Youssef Rakha, in his musings on the film in his work of creative nonfiction entitled Barra and Zaman, speaks of the film’s ‘flaws’. He lists four, in particular. First, he mentions the dialogue, which was written by Alaa El Deeb. Not only is it written in the ‘unnatural’ register of Modern Standard Arabic, but it is ‘stilted’ in its delivery.8 Second, he finds an uncomfortable tension between what may be thought of as a melodramatic outpouring of grief and an otherwise understated aesthetic. He writes, ‘On the one hand a measured, muted Youssef Rakha, Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 31.

 8

Night of Counting the Years, Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam  57 stillness holds down the audiovisual experience. On the other hand, rather than appropriately controlled emotion, the characters’ grief comes across as rhetorical and theatrical.’9 Third, uncharacteristically for the melodramatic mode, one cannot discern the characters’ motives and intentions.10 Finally, Rakha finds it improbable that Wanis and his generation would find the tradition of tomb-raiding as so problematic. These flaws aside, Rakha admits he ‘never felt the need to judge’ the film, and that it is ‘universally ­acknowledged to be the greatest masterpiece of Egyptian cinema’.11 Questions to Consider • How does the director imbue The Night of Counting the Years with a Pharaonic aesthetic, and what does the Pharaonic aesthetic itself signify? • The monument, the relief, the relic, and the hieroglyph would seem to be the foundations of ʿAbd al-Salam’s aesthetic. How are they shot? How are other elements shot as if they were themselves images from those ancient arts? • In what way is Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam linking Egyptian national identity to ancient Egyptian culture? • How would you compare this kind of link to that established in Struggle on the Nile? • Where does Islam fit into the aesthetic, or does it not? Further Reading Nouri Bouzid, ‘New Realism in Arab Cinema: The Defeat-Conscious Cinema’, Alif 15 (1995): 242–50. Elliott Colla, ‘Shadi Abd al-Salam’s al-Mumiyaʾ: Ambivalence and the Egyptian NationState’, in Ali Ahmida (ed.), Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 109–46. Iman Hamam, ‘AL-MOMIA/ The Mummy’, in Gönül Dönmez-Colin (ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East (London: Wallflower, 2007), 31–39. Jalal Toufic (ed.), ‘The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy): A Screenplay by Shadi ‘Abd al-Salam’, Discourse 21, no. 1 (1999): 88–126. Youssef Rakha, Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Ibid., 32. Ibid., 38. 11 Ibid., 12.  9 10

58  Egypt 1.7 Chapter

Alexandria, Why? (Iskandariyya layh?, 1978)1

Youssef Chahine (1926–2008) was an extremely prolific film director who was internationally acclaimed. In 1997, he earned a lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival. Among his most successful films are Son of the Nile (Ibn al-Nil, 1951), Cairo Station (Bab al-hadid, 1958), Jamila, the Algerian (Jamila al-Jaza’iriyya, 1958), The Earth (al-Ard, 1968), The Émigré (al-Muhajir, 1994) and Destiny (al-Masir, 1997). He is also famous for his autobiographical quartet, consisting of: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Alexandria, Why? (Iskandariyya layh?, 1978). An Egyptian Story (Hadduta Misriyya, 1982). Alexandria Again and Forever (Iskandariyya kaman wa-kaman, 1989). Alexandria … New York (Iskandariyya … New York, 2004).

In my view, Alexandria, Why?, which is set in Alexandria against the backdrop of the Second World War, represents a departure from Chahine’s earlier work. While his films always displayed an impressive degree of cinematic artistry, they for the most part adhered to the thematic and stylistic conventions of mainstream commercial Egyptian cinema. Alexandria, Why? does not have the artistic status of Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam’s Night of Counting the Years, but in terms of content Chahine’s film breaks several taboos, and in terms of form it exemplifies what may be seen as Chahine’s ‘signature’ style as an auteur who imprints himself upon his film in recognisable ways. Viola Shafik defines ‘auteurism’ in Arab cinema as: ‘the radical striving for personal expression, be it on an aesthetic or formal level, or with regard to content’.2 Ranked #15 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1988), 185.

1 2

Alexandria, Why?, Youssef Chahine  59 Samir Farid identifies Alexandria, Why? as ‘the first autobiographical film in Egyptian cinema’.3 This is because one of the subplots features a character based on Chahine himself: the young Yahya, a student at the British-run English-language school Victoria College, dreams of becoming an actor and of travelling to study the craft in America, whilst his father wants him to be an engineer. Yahya, a Christian of Levantine descent, has a cosmopolitan friendship group including Muslims, Christians and Jews. The non-­autobiographical subplots spin off from this friendship group. David, a Jewish character, has an older sister, Sarah, whose left-wing politics lead her to fall in love with a revolutionary Muslim, Ibrahim. Meanwhile a Muslim friend called Muhsin has an aristocratic uncle, ʿAdil, who likes to kidnap and murder officers in the British army. The film was the first Egyptian movie in decades to cast Jewish characters in a sympathetic light. As Samir Farid states, ‘This film … was a major cinematic breakthrough, for it focused on a Christian family in a predominantly Muslim society and showed the Egyptian Jew as a patriotic Egyptian […].’4 The film also delves bravely into homoerotic themes, as we shall see in the subplot involving ʿAdil. Moreover, the casting of a dark-skinned actor, the celebrated Ahmad Zaki, as the romantic male lead in the subplot of Ibrahim and Sarah, demonstrates that by the late 1970s, filmmakers had begun to tackle the problems of racism and colourism that were entrenched in earlier Egyptian films like Love and Revenge. In terms of form and style, one of the most remarkable characteristics of the film is its intertextuality. It teems with cinematic, theatrical and musical references through which Chahine creates meaningful patterns reflecting on the era in which he came of age. In her study of Chahine’s Quartet, Deborah Starr points out that the rival cinematic samplings at the opening of the film parallel the political conflicts of the Western powers in the Second World War and contrast with the cosmopolitan paradise that was wartime Alexandria, now threatened by ‘parochial nationalisms’ arriving from Europe. In particular, she discusses the alternation in the opening credit sequence between black and white shots from the acclaimed German filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935, Figure 1.7.1) and colour shots from Charles Walters’s Hollywood musical Easy to Love (1953, Figure 1.7.2), featuring synchronised swimmer Esther Williams.5 The latter shots form graphic matches with those of Alexandria’s coast. The world of news and nightmarish patriotism is thus associated with Samir Farid, ‘Periodization of Egyptian Cinema’, in Alia Arasoughly (ed.), Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 15. 4 Samir Farid, ‘Periodization’, 15. 5 Deborah Starr, ‘Why New York? Youssef Chahine’, chap. 5 of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2009), 80–1. 3

60  Egypt

Figure 1.7.1  A shot from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (RT 01:58)

Figure 1.7.2  A shot from Charles Walters’ Easy to Love (RT 2:09)

monochrome Europe, whilst Hollywood’s swimming pools and Alexandria’s seaside, with their blue hues and vivid colours,6 are linked to a world of fun and fantasy. The soundtrack, too, is full of references, containing innumerable songs evocative of the era. It also, no doubt controversially, features Smetana’s ‘The Moldau’, which has the same tune as the Israeli national anthem. In the intricate web of allusions he constructs, Chahine forgets neither his country’s cinematic tradition, nor his own personal history as a filmmaker. In one scene, as an ethnically Italian man is arrested in his popular neighbourhood (RT 55:21), a poster for the film Layla (1942) may be seen on a building at the right. This film was directed by Togo Mizrahi, a native Alexandrian of Italian Jewish descent, and starred Layla Murad (a Jewish actress who converted to Islam), and its poster thus enhances the atmosphere of cosmopolitanism. Later in the film, when the protagonist Yahya screens some of his attempts at movie-making for his friends, we see a clip from a film Chahine made in his youth. The clip features the director himself, although it is supposed to be his fictionalised self, Yahya. Apart from the rich referencing that dominates aspects of the film’s style, one also finds that Chahine has a penchant for gags. In one scene from Yahya’s subplot, we find an ill-prepared student reciting Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ monologue not from memory but rather from its transliteration into Arabic script on a chalkboard, thereby prompting him to read with a thick Egyptian accent (RT 35:25). Meanwhile, a homoerotic twist in another subplot develops when ʿAdil falls in love with the British infantryman named Tommy whom he had intended to murder. The soldier is from the ‘Middlesex’ regiment and thus has that word blazoned on each shoulder. There are many shots of Tommy where the word appears prominently in the One of the vivid colours in the sequence is the font colour, a rich red that matches Esther Williams’s swimsuit almost exactly.

6

Alexandria, Why?, Youssef Chahine  61

Figure 1.7.3  Tommy with his ‘Middlesex’ arm label (RT 59:50)

frame, such as in Figure 1.7.3. It seems to me that with this prop, Chahine is making a pun on the compound nature of the place name to make innuendos about sexual and gender fluidity. As Chahine started to diverge from mainstream cinema, he found it difficult to find producers who would give him the freedom to pursue his projects in the way that he desired, so he founded his own private company, Misr International, to help finance his projects, sometimes drawing on funds from foreign co-producers.7 Nevertheless, many traits of popular or mainstream cinema persisted in his corpus, such as his reliance on and perpetuation of the star system and a penchant for melodramatic acting.8 Table 1.7.1 distinguishes between the ‘independent’ or ‘arthouse’ and ‘mainstream’ aspects of his work: Questions to Consider • How would you describe Chahine’s signature style? There is a certain kind of theatrical humour (based on gags with props and other elements of mise-en-scène) that are quite characteristic. Try to spot some. • What kind of textures result from his unique blend of cinematic, theatrical and musical references? How do they affect meaning? • How does Chahine situate cosmopolitan identities with respect to Egyptian nationality? How does Chahine depict a diverse set of characters who cohere as a community? What is the biggest threat to the community? https://www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/cinematographers/Youssef_Chahine.html (acces­ sed 6 June 2023). 8 Chahine tends to mix established stars, such as Yusuf Wahbi (the director and star of Love and Revenge), who plays the Jewish patriarch in Alexandria, Why?, with relative unknowns, such as Ahmad Zaki, who later became a mega-star. Perhaps the foremost example of melodramatic acting occurs when the young Yahya, an as-yet-untrained aspiring actor, performs a scene from Hamlet. 7

62  Egypt Table 1.7.1  Chahine’s arthouse and mainstream styles Independent

Mainstream

•  Autobiographical nature •  ‘Auteur’ style (signature mise-en-scène) • Intense referentiality (cinematic, musical, literary) •  Challenging socio-political content •  Independent financing

•  Casting (employs ‘stars’) •  Acting (empathetic, melodramatic) •  Script (employs colloquial language) • Formal and generic hybridity (mixes drama, comedy, thriller, etc.)

Further Reading Deborah Starr, ‘Why New York? Youssef Chahine’, chap. 5 of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2009), 75–104. Malek Khouri, The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahine’s Cinema (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2010). Joseph Massad, ‘Art and Politics in the Cinema of Youssef Chahine’, Journal of Palestine Studies 2 (Winter 1999): 77–93. Youssef Chahine, Alexandrie pourquoi? (Paris: L’Avant Scène Cinema, 1985). Screenplay translated into French (very useful for identifying references). Viola Shafik, ‘Youssef Chahine: Devouring Mimicries or Juggling with Self and Other (Egypt)’ in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 98–120.

Chapter 1.8Dreams of Hind and Camilia, Muhammad Khan 

63

Dreams of Hind and Camilia (Ahlam Hind wa-Kamiliyya, 1989)1

Dreams of Hind and Camilia, directed by Muhammad Khan (1942–2016), stands as a prime example of the cinematic school in Egyptian cinema known as ‘New Realism’ that emerged in the 1980s. Khayri Bishara, Daʾud ʿAbd al-Sayyid and ʿAtif al-Tayyib are some other directors associated with this trend. This kind of realism differs from the kind we saw in Determination in several significant respects. First, on-location shooting documents realities of different urban environments; this documentation has aural as well as visual aspects as the soundscape of Cairo is captured in many scenes of the film in quite a naturalistic fashion. Second, the film focuses on the underclass, the ghalaba (sing. ghalban), rather than the working-class figures of the ibn and bint al-balad. Third, the film criticises government policies, particularly the economic policy of the infitah (‘opening up’) in a hard-hitting fashion. Fourth, the extent of human suffering portrayed far exceeds that in Determination. Whereas the latter film represents the hardship of unemployment and indebtedness, Dreams of Hind and Camilia additionally depicts criminality, violence, domestic abuse, and rape. Like Determination, this film, too, may be said to partake in the melodramatic genre, but it does not conform to the melodramatic mode as defined by Peter Brooks – that is, it does not necessarily openly articulate the moral dilemmas with which it engages. Rather, the melodramatic factor relates to the series of extreme or excessively precarious situations in which the protagonists find themselves. As the film focuses on female characters whose problems and conflicts remain unresolved, Laura Mulvey’s notion of ‘woman-centred’ melodrama is applicable here and will be discussed below. The early stages of Muhammad Khan’s career saw him based in three different countries and gaining experience as a scholar in addition to a filmmaker. In the early 1960s, he studied at the London School of Film Technique. Ranked #59 (tied) in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion.

1

64  Egypt A few years later he found himself working in Lebanon as an assistant director. By the late 1960s he had returned to the United Kingdom, where he authored a book, An Introduction to the Egyptian Cinema (London: Informatics, 1969). In 1971, he published Outline of Czechoslovakian Cinema, a volume of essays he had edited. He later returned to Egypt where he directed more than twenty feature films. As mentioned above, the film engages in a hard-edged critique of official state economic policies, particularly the one known as the infitah or ‘opening up’ that was initiated by President Anwar Sadat in the wake the October 1973 War with Israel, where Egypt was seen as victorious and which led to the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. The infitah marks a shift away from socialism and towards capitalism and is also associated specifically with US economic and foreign policy interests. This policy of ‘opening up’ Egypt to a capitalist economy and foreign investment is represented in Dreams of Hind and Camilia by the frequency with which banknotes, including US dollars, change hands. It is also captured through a form of inverse ‘product placement’, where brand names appear prominently in the mise-en-scène not as advertisements for those brands but rather as signs of those brands’ intrusion into the Egyptian economy as a form of western economic imperialism. For example, a ‘Thomas Cook’ shop front features prominent in one scene as the characters stroll by it. The reference could be said to represent the foreign domination of the tourism industry. Elsewhere we see that the van that Eid drives is labelled ‘Dallas Language School’. In 1989, the place name ‘Dallas’ was heavily associated with the American prime time soap opera by the same name that ran from 1978 to 1991; hence the reference evokes US cultural and media domination. A third visual reference that occurs at a car mechanic’s shop displays the German automobile m ­ anufacturing company Opel (Figure 1.8.1). Dreams of Hind and Camilia sees the actors Ahmad Zaki (Eid) and Nagla Fathy (Camilia), who played Ibrahim and Sarah in Alexandria, Why?, reunited, yet in this film they do not feature as a couple. Rather Eid plays the love interest of Camilia’s friend Hind. Nevertheless, both Eid and Camilia form a romantic/parental triangle with Hind. Towards the end of the film, before Eid is imprisoned, he asks Camilia to look after Hind (played by Aida Riyadh) and Eid and Hind’s daughter Ahlam (meaning ‘dreams’) during his absence. Thus, the male protagonist withdraws himself from the family unit and leaves an allfemale trio to subsist on their own. Whereas in Alexandria, Why? Ahmad Zaki plays a worker and political activist and Nagla Fathy an affluent left-wing sympathiser, here they both play characters from the underclass. Eid is part of the criminal underworld, whereas Camilia and Hind are precariously employed as servants and street-vendors. Their status as subaltern ghalaba is perhaps most

Dreams of Hind and Camilia, Muhammad Khan  65

Figure 1.8.1  The German Opel brand featuring prominently in a shot of the mechanics workshop (RT 1:28:32)

powerfully expressed when Hind takes her daughter Ahlam to visit her father in prison. Shot and counter-shot represent the characters’ gazes as they look through not one, but two layers of bars. The focused images of the characters’ faces are obscured behind a thick unfocused lattice in the foreground and the first layer of prison bars in the middle ground (Figures 1.8.2 and 1.8.3). The lighting in these remarkable shots adds a further layer of meaning. Eid’s face appears more distinctly, and it is obscured by light-coloured bars, whereas the faces of Hind and Ahlam are barely discernible behind the thick black bars in the foreground. Mother and daughter appear to be even more trapped and more enclosed than their imprisoned husband and father, as if, despite their innocence, and despite their apparent freedom, their femininity adds a further layer of subalternity to that experienced by the convict Eid.

Figure 1.8.2  Eid pictured behind bars as Hind and Ahlam visit him in prison (RT 1:31:39)

Figure 1.8.3  Hind and Ahlam barely discernible from Eid’s point-of-view (RT 1:31:42)

66  Egypt

Figure 1.8.4  Hind, Camilia and Ahlam as a happy family unit (RT 1:34:33)

This bleak representation of female realities may be tied to the theme of melodrama and the status of the film as what Laura Mulvey calls a ‘womancentred melodrama’. According to Mulvey, there is one kind of melodrama, such as The White Rose or Determination – we might say – that ‘examines tensions in the family, and between sex[es] and generations’ with a kind of neutral or alternating point of view, and there is another kind, such as Dreams of Hind and Camilia, where the point of view is dominated by the female protagonist. One of the major structural differences between the two types, Mulvey argues, is that, in the former, ideological tensions and conflicts are resolved, whereas in the latter, they remain unresolved. At the end of Determination, for example, we have complete harmony between the sexes and the social classes. In such a film, conflict resolution provides a sense of satisfaction for the spectator. In a film like Dreams of Hind and Camilia, on the other hand, there is no such happy ending, at least not one that can be interpreted in a realist vein. In a case like this, Mulvey argues, pleasure for the spectator derives not from the resolution of contradictions and conflicts but rather from identification with the protagonists.2 This leads us to a discussion of the ending, where a peculiar type of ambiguity prevails. By this point in the film, Hind and Camilia form a relatively happy household with Hind’s daughter Ahlam (see Figure 1.8.4). Then they discover a stash of Eid’s hidden cash. Euphoric at their new-found riches, they decide to splash out and take a trip to Alexandria. Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987), 75–9.

2

Dreams of Hind and Camilia, Muhammad Khan  67 They hail a cab. At this point the film features an extreme close-up of Camilia’s neck (RT 1:38:26) taken through the cab window from the point of view of her driver who ogles her no-doubt newly-purchased gold necklace. We then intuit that the taxi driver is a predator and realise the women and their daughter are about to be his prey. Soon, another man joins the taxi in the passenger seat and gives the women and the girl cartons of juice to sip out of with straws. It is understood that the juice is drugged. The taxi comes to a halt, and we have an external close-up shot of its headlights. Then there is a cut to sunlight, and the image of Camilia’s body appears on the beach. Whilst the viewer tries to ascertain whether or not her body is lifeless, Camilia gets up and starts running and screaming that they have been robbed. She finds Hind, and then the two of them frantically search for Ahlam. Eventually they find her by the water’s edge, and the film closes with a shot of the three of them walking into the sea. Many people find this to be a hopeful, optimistic ending. They have been stripped of their material possessions, but they will start a new life together. However, there is a much more sinister and depressing interpretation, which is that the scene on the beach is a fantasy sequence in which the three of them pass from this life into the next after they have, in fact, been murdered. Such a horrendous ending will have been foreshadowed by a scene eleven minutes into the film when Hind and Camilia discuss a newspaper headline about the fact that there is a serial killer on the loose in al-Matariyya – al-Matariyya being a neighbourhood of Cairo. This was a reference to a real serial killer who started to terrorise Cairo in March 1985 and who was known to prey on the poor and downtrodden.3 This place name recurs just as the women and their daughter are about to enter the taxi. Camilia mistakenly asks the driver to take them to alMatariyya (which is also a city in the north of Egypt), then Hind corrects her and says Alexandria.4 Questions to Consider • How are Cairo’s spaces and locations shot? How is the soundscape captured? • Much of the film is shot in the salubrious district of Zamalek. How are the underclasses framed within that space? When the camera ventures into poor neighbourhoods are those characters framed differently? https://www.aljarida.com/articles/1461253861857891000/ (accessed 6 June 2023). I thank my student Emilia Astrom for noticing this detail about the placename linking the two scenes.

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68  Egypt • How could one relate the plot of the film to what Laura Mulvey has to say about woman-centred melodramas. Are conflicts left unresolved? How does it compare to Barakat’s the The Open Door in this regard? • How would you compare the realism in Dreams of Hind and Camilia with that in Determination? Further Reading Walter Armbrust, ‘New Cinema, Commercial Cinema and the Modernist Tradition in Egypt’, Alif 15 (1995): 81–129. Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute 1987), 75–9. Amany Ali Shawky, ‘Egypt’s Cinematic Gems: Hend and Camillia’s Dreams’, Mada Masr, 4 April 2015, https://www.madamasr.com/en/2015/04/04/feature/culture/ egypts-cinematic-gems-hend-and-camellias-dreams/.

Chapter 1.9Dreams of Hind and Camilia, Muhammad Khan 

69

I Love Cinema (Bahibb al-sima, 2004)1

I Love Cinema, directed by Osama Fawzi (1961[?]–2019), a Copt who converted to Islam, is the second film we have discussed to narrate Egyptian experience from a Christian perspective.2 This film differs from Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Why?, however, by its portrayal of a Coptic family as an ‘average’ Egyptian family, rather than one immersed in a cosmopolitan environment. Its representation of the Copts was very controversial and deemed offensive by some in the Coptic community, and as such it was taken to court for ‘contempt of religion’. Grievances against the film, according to Samia Mehrez, included (1) the portrayal of an ‘unrepresentative’ intermarriage between Coptic Orthodox father and Protestant mother; (2) the portrayal of Copts as fanatics; (3) the misrepresentation of chastity in Coptic marriages; and (4) the violation of the sanctity of holy places in certain scenes.3 The Copts are an indigenous Christian Community whose presence in Egypt predates the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the mid-seventh century ce. In fact, the word ‘Copt’ is ultimately derived from the ancient Greek word for Egypt. According to Minority Rights Group International, they make up approximately 6–9 per cent of the Egyptian population, with some estimates ranging between 10 and 20 per cent.4 In early Egyptian cinema – that is movies that predate the 1952 Revolution – Copts, like other minorities, Ranked #53 (tied) in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Note that two other people who worked on the film have the surname ‘Fawzi’. One is Hani Guirgis Fawzi, who is the producer and brother of director Osama Fawzi. The other is Hani Fawzi (no relation), the screenwriter, who is a Protestant who grew up in Shubra, where the film is set.  3 Samia Mehrez, ‘The New Kid on the Block: Bahibb Issima and the Emergence of the Coptic Community in the Egyptian Public Sphere’, chap. 10 in Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 203–4.  4 https://minorityrights.org/minorities/copts/ (accessed 6 June 2023).  1  2

70  Egypt were portrayed stereotypically for laughs.5 However, there was a sense in which Copts, more than other minorities, were seen as part and parcel of the Muslim-majority whole. In fact, the representation of Copts in Egyptian cinema dates back to 1923 and the short silent film Barsum Looks for a Job directed by Muhammad Bayumi, who is often considered to be the first indigenously ‘Egyptian’ filmmaker in the Egyptian film industry. This film, while drawing on stereotypes for comic effect, sees Christian and Muslim united in the pursuit of finding employment. Viola Shafik writes: Barsum, the poor Copt, has no bed, just a heap of straw, and gets up to dress himself in Fez and European suit but without any shirt underneath, while his friend, dressed as a shaykh, is introduced as a crook who steals someone else’s bread to satisfy his hunger.6

This intermeshing of Coptic and Muslim experience reflects attitudes ­prevalent in the wider society. Shafik explains: Due to the ideas that became set at that time, the rhetoric of national unity has preferred to perceive Copts as one element in a coherent national block rather than a minority. It has denied any cultural differences between Muslims and Christians, considering as general the behavior and customs common to all Egyptians, and claiming that Copts cannot be distinguished from their Muslim compatriots whether on the ethnic, geographic, or linguistic level.7

That the protagonists of I Love Cinema are ‘average’ Egyptians is in part cemented by the setting of the film in the neighbourhood of Shubra. Shubra is a district that is known for is its status as a ‘popular’ (i.e. primarily ­working-class and poor) neighbourhood; Max Rodenbeck calls it, ‘Cairo’s Bronx or East End’.8 Since it evolved as an extension to the Coptic section of Azbakiyya, it also has a higher density of Copts than other neighbourhoods.9 The representation of the characters’ daily lives also gives the impression of a unified Egyptian Christian/Muslim reality. Even in its portrayal of the father ʿAdli’s stern brand of Coptic orthodoxy one can find parallels with Islamic fundamentalism.10 There is also a sense in which the setting of the film against the backdrop of the June 1967 Defeat and the symbolic linkage Viola Shafik, ‘The Copts: Agents or Victims of National Unity?’, ‘The Other’, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 42. See also, Mehrez, ‘The New Kid on the Block’, 191.  6 Viola Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema, 44–5.  7 Ibid., 45.  8 Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious (London: Picador, 1998), 233.  9 Asef Bayat, ‘Cairo Cosmopolitan: Living Together Through Communal Divide, Almost’, in Shail Mayaram (ed.), The Other Global City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 195. 10 This was particularly striking in the scene where the father forbids singing at his son Naʿim’s birthday party.

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Dreams of Hind and I Love Camilia, Cinema, Muhammad Osama Fawzi  Khan  71 between ʿAdli as patriarch of the family and Gamal Abdel Nasser as president of the country – a symbolism which will be explored in more detail below – binds Coptic experiences of Egyptian history and socio-political realities to Muslim ones. However, there is one major cultural and theological difference between Christians and Muslims that the movie repeatedly highlights, and that is Christian iconography versus Islamic aniconism. Simply put, whereas in most Christian cultures, there is a predilection for representing human figures, and indeed, holy figures such Jesus Christ and various saints, in contexts of worship, such representation is an anathema in Islam. While depictions of the human form have occurred across the centuries in Islamic art at many junctures and in many locations, they tend not to appear in religious situations or settings. From that perspective, this film may be slightly provocative because it is full of Christian iconography, and even represents Christians praying toward images of saints. It also links ideas of religious worship to appreciation of the cinema and compares movie stars to objects of veneration. Both religious iconography and cinematic iconography are furthermore tied into nationalist iconography and the cult of personality surrounding Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose portrait appears on the walls of the parents’ workplaces, and whose famous resignation speech in the wake of the 1967 Defeat coincides with ʿAdli’s ­redemption and death. At the opening of the film, as the adult narrator Naʿim introduces us to his childhood and the members of family, we find two key figures ensconced in prayer. In one shot (RT 3:48), the grandmother recites blessings for her relatives from bed as a large portrait of the Virgin Mary looms on the wall over and behind her head. A little later (RT 11:26), in another room, perhaps one which is designated for prayer, Naʿim’s father ʿAdli kneels on floor, directing his body toward a portrait of Christ. In the case of each of these dimly lit frames, the faces of worshipper and worshipped are illuminated by an identifiable light source. These two portraits of Mary and Jesus feature ­prominently in the mise-en-scène throughout the rest of the film. The symbolic link between the film-lover and the religious supplicant is first established early in the film. During the credit sequence, Naʿim is seated in a chair in his flat when he gazes into his viewfinder looking at images of movie posters. A few minutes later he ascends a dimly lit stairwell, again looking at images in his viewfinder. This time, however, when the spectator sees the image Naʿim sees in the viewfinder, it is not an image from a movie but rather from the Sistine Chapel, more specifically Michelangelo’s fresco ‘The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Planets’ (RT 13:51). It features God holding out his arms in decisive acts. When Naʿim sees this image, he cries out, as if in pain, and falls down the stairs.

72  Egypt The staging of Naʿim’s gaze through the viewfinder as he climbs the stairs confirms a kind of dialogue with the divine. Before we see the Michelangelo fresco, we are shown the source of light, which is the opening to the sky at the top of the stairwell. This stance of Naʿim gazing up toward the sky and encountering the divine is repeated later in the film, for example in Figure 1.9.1, where he addresses God with the phrase ya rabb (O Lord) and asks if he may please visit the cinema without facing the hellfire, as his father had told him was the destiny of cinema-goers in a previous scene. Later in the film, Naʿim has a much angrier exchange with the divine. Naʿim, standing on a balcony during a rainstorm tells God that he is ‘fed up’, and God responds with lightning bolts and thunderous claps. The personification of God in the Michelangelo painting and the deification of nature here certainly exceed the boundaries of permissible representation from an Islamic theological viewpoint. Cinema-going and religious worship are again equated when Naʿim visits the cinema with his aunt and her boyfriend to see Hilmi Rafla’s 1967 film Female Idol (Maʿbudat al-jamahir). If the passive participle of the verb ‘to worship’ (maʿbuda) appearing on the marquee is not enough to confirm the link (Figure 1.9.2), a fantasy sequence occurring once they are inside the cinema would see the usher as the gatekeeper of paradise, and the actors in the films as angels, complete with haloes around their heads. Into this analogy between the iconography of the cinema and the iconography of religion comes the iconography of the state, and, in particular, the figure of Gamal Abdel Nasser. As mentioned above, Nasser’s

Figure 1.9.1  Naʿim pleads with God to let him go to the cinema (RT 41:40)

Dreams of Hind and I Love Camilia, Cinema, Muhammad Osama Fawzi  Khan  73

Figure 1.9.2  The film Female Idol appearing on a cinema marquee (RT 1:05:45)

Figure 1.9.3  Portrait of Nasser appears behind Niʿma as she addresses her student body (RT 20:45, detail)

portrait appears – sometimes in full and sometimes partially obscured – in several scenes. Consider Figure 1.9.3: Naʿim’s mother, Niʿma, who is the ­headmistress of a school, delivers her morning announcements to the students. Earlier in the scene, as she leads the students in chants of long live the Egyptian Republic, his portrait is not visible, but in this shot, where she is  responding to a plumbing crisis, it appears very prominently in the frame. More significantly, one of Nasser’s famous speeches occurs in the

74  Egypt

Figure 1.9.4  A portrait of the deceased ʿAdli hangs prominently on the wall (RT 1:35:52)

soundtrack during the film’s denouement. At this point in the film, ʿAdli has shed his identity as a stern and authoritarian patriarch and has embraced a love for life and for his family. He gives his son a bicycle ride on the beach during a sunset, as Nasser talks about how he is resigning in the wake of military defeat and will join the masses as any other citizen. As ʿAdli pedals, we see that the exercise is straining his heart. Then, while Nasser’s speech is still playing, we cut to the family apartment building in Shubra. Niʿma will soon find ʿAdli, prostrate before the portrait of Jesus, dead. The (temporary) resignation of Nasser and the death of the once-overly authoritarian family patriarch do not make life easier for the children, however, because, at the end of the film, Niʿma addresses the children with what used to be her husband’s strict moralising fury. Figure 1.9.4 demonstrates that ʿAdli’s portrait now hangs on the wall in lieu of that of Jesus, or perhaps in lieu of that of Nasser. The portrait has a ray of light beaming on ʿAdli’s face in a manner reminiscent of the religious icons discussed above, and yet his suit and tie put him in the apparel of Nasser. At the end of the film, as Niʿma presides over the family dinner table, we have a shot that contains a portrait of the Virgin Mary in the background on the left and a portrait of ʿAdli in the centre on the right (RT 1:37:59). Perhaps this is meant to signify that, in the patriarch’s absence, the m ­ atriarch will perpetuate the regime.

I Love Cinema, Osama Fawzi  75 Questions to Consider • Who and/or what have the status of an icon in the film? What kind of hold does the icon have over the characters in the film? What hold does it have over the spectator? • How does the film serve as an allegorical commentary on a particular moment in modern Egyptian political history? What is the role of the Christian community in that moment? • Do you find the film realist? If so, where does that realism lie in terms of form and content? Further Reading Samia Mehrez, ‘The New Kid on the Block: Bahibb Issima and the Emergence of the Coptic Community in the Egyptian Public Sphere’, chap. 10 in Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 188–207. Viola Shafik, ‘The Copts: Agents or Victims of National Unity?’ and ‘A Muted Community or Religious Hetero-glossia?’, ‘The Other’, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 41–51 and 56–64. Terry Allen, ‘Aniconism and Figural Representation in Islamic Art’, Five Essays on Islamic Art (Sebastopol, CA: Solipsist Press, 1988), 17–37.

76  Egypt 1.10 Chapter

Souad (Suʿad, 2021)1

The film Souad, a piece of vérité cinema which director Ayten Amin ­dedicates to several of her New Realist forerunners – Muhammad Khan among them – explores the hidden but devastating psychological impact of screentime and social media on a young woman from Zagazig, a large city in the Nile Delta. About forty minutes into the film, the eponymous protagonist quite suddenly and almost without warning or foreshadowing, jumps to her death from the balcony of her family’s flat. Whilst the film has often been cast in a kind of universalist light as a commentary on problems facing young women living in a ‘conservative’ and ‘traditional’ society who are meant to display modesty but who succumb to a kind of virtual peer pressure to curate images of themselves and engage in intimacies online, it also represents this dilemma through Egyptian cinematic and literary tropes that address sexual segregation and the ways men and women navigate urban spaces – outdoors and indoors, public and private – with respect to each other. The first shot after the credit sequence (Figure 1.10.1) centres on a mobile phone, held up by its owner’s right hand. The mise-en-scène, with its windowpane to the left, occupied passenger seat to the front, and edge of another passenger seat to the right, situates the mobile owner on public transport, namely a minibus, focusing our attention on the cramped personal space of the film’s protagonist, whom we come to know as Souad. The surface of the phone reflects her face as she gazes into it, using the camera app to check out her appearance and adjust the way her hijab conceals and/or reveals her hairline. It is a private act of modesty and/or vanity set in her personal domain in this crowded vehicle. The appearance of her left hand within the camera Different production dates for the film are found, perhaps because the Covid pandemic delayed its release. It was released in the United Kingdom in 2021. Apparently, it did not play in Egyptian theatres until January 2023. See Soha Hesham, ‘Filmmaker Ayten Amin’s second feature discusses a very delicate matter’, Ahram Online, 10 January 2023, accessed 6 June 2023, https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/484059.aspx.

1

Souad, Ayten Amin  77

Figure 1.10.1  Souad’s face first appears as it is captured in her mobile phone (RT 01:19)

frame provides an eerie sense of symmetry: her face is ‘cradled’ by both her hands, yet her left hand is trapped within the phone’s camera frame while the right hand appears in the ‘real’ world. Souad’s self-­evaluating reflection is private and inward-looking, despite its setting on a crowded minibus, yet the potential for its public broadcast in the ‘virtual’ world is highlighted by the presence of the ‘record video’ button at the bottom of the phone’s camera frame, which serves perhaps as the true focal point of the shot. There is, furthermore, a meta-cinematic symmetry in the fact that this film, often described as verité because it is shot entirely or at least almost entirely with a hand-held camera, begins by recording a hand-held mobile phone camera reflecting back at the viewer not only the protagonist’s face but also the (implied) positioning of the filmmaker’s camera. This opening image splits our experience of Souad’s narrative into two diegetic levels, or two story-telling planes. This kind of narrative doubling may account for the film’s lack of predictability, from Souad’s shock suicide, to the sense of relief and optimism that emanates from the second half of the film when Souad’s little sister Rabab travels to Alexandria to meet up with social media influencer Ahmed, whose romantic exchanges with Souad Rabab has found on her deceased sister’s phone. This split between the film Souad’s ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ story planes makes it hard for the viewer to locate Souad’s character psychologically. When we see Souad cry, standing or sitting on the room before us, it would seem to be in response to her virtual life and more specifically to the inattention

78  Egypt she perceives to be coming from her virtual boyfriend Ahmed, who has talked her into sharing images of herself and who now hardly engages with her. Conversely, when she smiles and laughs, it would seem to be drawn from real-life interactions with other young women and girls in her immediate surroundings, in her bedroom or on her family’s balcony. In one scene which takes place at night she chats with Ahmed, displaying sentiments of affection and chastisement. Her room is dark, and her face, appearing at once angelic and content, is illuminated only by the blue light of her mobile phone (Figure 1.10.2). Here it is her virtual life that brings her happiness, while her physical space consists entirely of darkness. She speaks through a headset, as we hear only her voice, but at her end the conversation leads into an erotic interlude best described as phone sex. Shortly thereafter comes a scene set in the bathroom. Souad poses in front of the toilet (Figure 1.10.3) taking a series of selfies as she sobs under her breath. Upon an initial viewing, the spectator may attribute this behaviour to her feeling ashamed about the phone sex and her feeling fearful that Ahmed will abandon her again. The phone in this instance is registering her emotions in an expressive form, as appropriate for today’s society as writing in a diary would have been in times gone by. However, upon a repeat viewing, when the spectator knows that Souad is suicidal, the bathroom setting and the continuous clicks of the selfies as Souad lowers the camera, documenting herself from various angles before sitting on the toilet and placing the phone on her lap, the phone takes on much more sinister dimensions, and I believe Amin here represents the device as an instrument of self-harm. It is perhaps this universalist message that overuse of social media harms people’s mental health, coupled with what could be perceived as a voyeuristic gaze into the private lives of Arab and Muslim women, who, ‘unveiled’, are perceived as exotic due to their cliched adherence to strict modesty codes, which have made this film such a success on what might be called the international arthouse or festival circuit. It has very high production values and lists celebrated German film director Wim Wenders as one of its many

Figure 1.10.2  Souad’s face illuminated by blue light (RT 26:31)

Figure 1.10.3  Souad taking a selfie in the bathroom (RT 28:32)

Souad, Ayten Amin  79 co-producers. It secured funding from French, German and Arab sources, as well as from Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival and perhaps represents a new brand of ‘independent’ Egyptian filmmaking, ultimately destined for a foreign market, and perhaps catering to ‘western’ tastes and expectations. Nevertheless, as I articulated in the opening paragraph in this chapter, the film inserts itself into the mainstream Egyptian cinematic tradition through its referencing of common tropes defining the ways heroes and heroines navigate space in fiction and film, thereby presenting a brilliant commentary on the impact of physical segregation and isolation on young urban women in particular. In the first half of the film, the part which is set in Zagazig, it is the balcony of Souad’s family’s apartment that serves as the locus for much of this commentary. For, along with such spaces as the stairwell and the roof, the balcony in modern Arabic literature and film often functions as a kind of liminal space, at once public and private, outdoors and domestic, where the normally segregated sexes may interact. It serves therefore as a site of flirtation and courtship, between a young woman gazing down from her balcony and the young man gazing up from the street below, or of star-crossed lovers gazing at each other from their respective balconies, or sometimes windows, opposite one another. This trope appears frequently in representations of the traditional mores commonly attributed to the working and lower middle classes, and is associated in particular – whether on the balcony or the roof – with airing laundry, a chore which would justify a young (read unmarried) woman’s presence in this public-facing space. In Souad, Amin skilfully manipulates this trope. It is as if she is suggesting that in contemporary Egyptian urban spaces, all flirtation and all courtship have moved online, and for Souad – and, by extension, the demographic to which she belongs – physical segregation has intensified to the extent that contact in the real world, however fleeting or minimal, becomes almost impossible. In Figure 1.10.4, we have a still from a point of view structure in which the camera is aligned with Souad’s gaze. Whilst she is on the balcony to hang the laundry, and as she wears a red headscarf as is appropriate when potentially in public view, she gazes down upon the street below, watching her neighbours as they load or unload cartons and furnishings from their car. They are small and distant and do not return her gaze. Moreover, the laundry lines and their clothes pins obstruct her view, forming a barrier between her and the objects of her gaze. Quite significantly, her mobile phone is positioned atop the balcony wall as she listens to Ahmed’s disembodied voice making pronouncements about the superiority of the suburbs over the city. The scene emphasises that the potential for any sort of amorous engagement

80  Egypt

Figure 1.10.4  Souad gazes at the street below as she airs laundry from the balcony (RT 19:24)

Figure 1.10.5  Rabab gazes at Souad after she has jumped to her death (RT 42:37)

is virtual and therefore illusory. That we are to understand this scene on the balcony as a representation of thwarted courtship is then confirmed by a brief conversation Souad has with her mother, which, whilst somewhat cryptic, suggests that the neighbours she was watching were the family of a potential suitor who had decided to marry someone else. Figure 1.10.5 displays the traumatic and unanticipated moment, some twenty minutes later, when Rabab stands at the edge of the balcony gazing down at her sister, now off-screen, whose body must lie in the street below. The sound effects in this sequence are exquisite and painful, and they situate the spectator inside Rabab’s head, as the sonic foreground features an echoing silence, while plaintive screaming and traffic noise are heard in the distance. Amin thus transforms the balcony from a site of potential union and courtship to a site of utter isolation and irretrievable loss. Rabab then inherits her sister’s position as the film’s central protagonist. After scenes of intense mourning – scenes during which the wailing that had initially been a distant echo from the street below now occupies the sonic foreground of the family flat, a space which has become crowded with women clad in black and desperately seeking consolation, Rabab starts exploring the content of Souad’s phone. When it becomes clear that Rabab is traveling to Alexandria to meet her sister’s virtual lover Ahmed, the spectator is braced for further trauma, specifically the possibility that this older man may sexually exploit her. Yet this part of the film comes as a kind of exquisite relief, calming the audience’s nerves as Rabab manages to do what her sister had not: meet Ahmed in the real world. (It is twice mentioned in the script that on one occasion Ahmed had travelled to Zagazig to meet Souad on her university campus, but that she felt too timid or ashamed to face him in person.) Rabab, as she moves around the upscale neighbourhoods in Alexandria, a city whose inhabitants have opportunities to commune with nature due to its location on the Mediterranean Sea, cuts a very different figure than

Souad, Ayten Amin  81 Souad. Her hair is uncovered, pulled back in a long plait. She dons ‘boyish’ or at least ‘gender-neutral’ dungarees, and she carries her sister’s handbag on her back, like a rucksack, rather than under her arm, as Souad had done in an earlier scene. The spectators, together with Ahmed, are unsure how old she is. Rabab tells him she is sixteen, but we are not sure if she is telling the truth, as she seems to want to reassure him that she is not as young as he thinks. We know that she has recently taken exams, but we are not quite sure which exams those were. At one point she tells Ahmed she plans to start wearing the hijab soon, at another she experiences unexplained abdominal pain, making the viewer suspect that she is already menstruating. The ambiguity surrounding her age helps us to interpret her tour of Alexandria and its spaces in the company of a man as realistic and plausible, despite the fact that it was an impossibility for Souad. When Rabab enters Ahmed’s world, she gets a glimpse of what life must be like for an upper-class woman, free to converse with a member of the opposite sex in public, free to get to know him, gradually, free to bond and form a friendship, romantic or otherwise. When she first arrives in the city, Ahmed takes her to an indoor café, where she is the only female customer, and no one bats an eyelash at her presence. As they make their initial attempts at conversation, each of their mobile phones as well as Ahmed’s wallet are displayed clearly on the table that separates them (RT 57:20). From that point, there is a notable disengagement with online virtual spaces and an enjoyment of fresh air and open vistas. A later shot (RT 1:02:04) showing Ahmed and Rabab chatting on a bench along the Corniche, with a railing separating them from the water, evokes a comparison with the Zagazig balcony: Ahmed’s voice here is not disembodied, Rabab is not leaning over the railing. They sit safely side by side – there is no risk of either plunging to his or her death. The next time they find themselves in a café, this time an open-air one that caters to a mixed clientele, the protagonists’ phones have disappeared from the table (RT 1:12:09). The film ends on an optimistic note: Rabab, much like Souad at the opening of the film, sits in a window seat of a bus as she heads back to Zagazig. She does not evaluate her image in the camera of her phone but rather gazes out the window. Whereas Souad spent the early minutes of the film lying to her fellow (female) passengers about her marriage prospects, Rabab here is silent and seemingly content, perhaps revelling in the success of her courageous act of mourning, having established an emotive bond with her sister’s online companion.

82  Egypt Questions to Consider • Which is worse for the protagonists’ mental health, social media or sexual segregation? How does Souad express its position/s through film technique? • Are any positive social and/or psychological impacts of virtual relationships represented in the film? How so? • To what extent does the film offer a socio-economic analysis of Egyptian society? How is this reflected in the characterisation and mise-en-scène? • How would you compare the realism of Souad with that of Dreams of Hind and Camilia in stylistic or technical terms? Further Reading S. Jyrkiäinen, ‘Online Presentation of Gendered Selves among Young Women in Egypt’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 9, no. 2 (2016): 182–98, doi:10.1163/18739865-00902005 Dalia Said Mostafa, ‘Cinematic Representations of the Changing Gender Relations in Today’s Cairo’, Arab Studies Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2009): 1–19. Rowida Magdy Al-Gebeily, ‘On the Balcony, Beyond “Balconeering”; Perception of Cairene Women, Behind The Curtains’, Masters diss. (American University in Cairo, 2023). AUC Knowledge Fountain, https://fount.aucegypt.edu/etds/1985.

PART 2

North Africa: Regional Essay  83

North Africa: The Maghrib and Beyond

 

North Africa: Regional Essay

The Arabic cinema of the countries of the Maghrib – Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and to a lesser extent Mauritania – is the cinema most concerned with form and film aesthetics, not merely out of formalistic concern, or because of conscious awareness of European cinema and particularly the French new wave, but also because its quest for narrative codes capable of expressing a constantly shifting reality and an elusive and complex identity led it to sire a new language. Sabry Hafez1 In 1897, in Tunisia, two young fans of technology, Albert Samama Chikly and the photographer Soler, organized the first film projections, beginning with public screenings and then continuing within private circles. As well as overseeing these screenings, Samama Chikly owned copies of the movies he projected. He was thus a pivotal figure in the development of film in North Africa. Ouissal Mejri2

INTRODUCTION

This regional essay begins with a discussion of cinema of the Maghrib, and, in particular Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, all colonised (for the most part) by the French, all having Mediterranean coastline, and all identifying to some degree, as Arab, even as they encompass non-Arab ethnicities. Towards the end of the essay, I turn to Mauritania and Sudan, countries which are both members of the Arab League, but some of whose inhabitants orient themselves toward and identify more with sub-Saharan Africa than they do with the Arab world. In this sense, they defy the Arab North African/Black sub-Saharan African divide. Sabry Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Alif 15 (1995): 39.  2 Ouissal Mejri, ‘The Birth of North African Cinema’, in Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds), Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema (London/New York: Routledge, 2014), 24.  1

86  North Africa If the history of cinema in Egypt begins with the Lumière Brothers on the one hand, and with ʿAziza Amir’s film Layla (1927) on the other, in the case of North African cinema outside Egypt one finds that these two categories of firsts, namely the arrival of the technology in a country and the production of indigenous films, are collapsed into one figure: Tunisian Albert Samama Chikly (1872–1934). In 1897, he was involved with the screening of the Lumière Brothers, and he soon became adept with the camera itself. In 1909, he organised a balloon race and made a short film of it: it consisted of aerial views of Tunis, Hammam-Lif and Grombalia.3 In 1910, he shot footage from the inside of a submarine.4 He went on to make two narrative films with his daughter, Haydée. The first, a fictional short entitled Zohra (1922), tells the story of a young French female shipwrecked on the Tunisian coast and rescued by a Bedouin family. Not only did Haydée act in the film, but she also served as its screenwriter.5 Later father and daughter teamed up again to make a longer fictional film,6 Aïn-el-Ghezal (1924), also called The Girl from Carthage (La Fille de Carthage). For this film, Haydée not only played the leading role and acted as screenwriter, but she also served as the film’s editor.7 The film is a tragic love tale: a young girl’s father attempts to force his daughter to marry a rich but unpleasant farmer against her will. She decides to flee with her beloved, who is a young muezzin and teacher in a Quranic school. Their escape ends badly for them.8 These silent films had French intertitles, but they were otherwise entirely Tunisian. It is quite striking how The Girl from Carthage equates women’s liberation – or at least the heroine’s rescue – with Islam. Taleb, the protagonist’s beloved, is a muezzin and a Quranic schoolteacher and thereby conspicuously pious. He is the Romeo figure. Meanwhile the villain is, as far as we know, entirely unspiritual. The film in this way seems unfazed by discourses suggesting the Islamic religion suppresses women. It is worth mentioning that the Chiklys were a Jewish family and yet they represent a pro-Muslim perspective, or at least a perspective that portrays Islam in a positive light. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 24.  5 Ibid., 24. See also Ouissal Mejri, ‘Haydée Chikly’, in Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal and Monica Dall’Asta (eds), Women Film Pioneers Project (New York: Columbia University Libraries, 2016), accessed 15 September 2021, https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/haydee-chikly/.  6 Roy Armes describes is as ‘feature-length’, African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 25.  7 Armes, African Filmmaking, 25.  8 Part of the film is available to view online, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:A%C3%AFn_el_Ghazal_ou_La_Fille_de_Carthage._Drame_de_la_vie_arabe.webm (accessed 15 September 2021).  3  4

North Africa: Regional Essay  87 In an early sequence of The Girl from Carthage, we have just been told it is time for the Maghrib prayer, when a circular frame focuses in on a minaret. Soon the female protagonist Aïn-el-Ghezal is seen on a roof, whilst Taleb overlooks her from a minaret. This is the context in which their love story is introduced. They are not close enough to interact, but they are in each other’s presence as a circular camera frame expands outward from a close-up of the minaret. A later close-up of Aïn-el-Ghezal represents her quintessentially (if non-specifically) as a Tunisian young woman, dressed in traditional garb and bearing a water jug. The dress, according to Ouissal Mejri, with all its intricacies, ‘indicates her Tunisian origin in general, and not necessarily her specific region’.9 It is interesting to note that it is the same dress Haydée wore in Zohra,10 where she was presumably playing a French girl dressed by Bedouin. After these promising and some might say glorious beginnings, indigenous North African filmmaking outside Egypt came abruptly to a halt and would not resume in any country in the region until after independence was achieved. As Roy Armes writes, ‘Apart from the work of Chikly, all North African film production activity in the period before independence was financed by foreign capital, used foreign players, and was destined for foreign markets’.11 Hence, due to French colonialism, indigenous filmmaking was non-existent in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco for some thirty years. In the 1950s, that begins to change. Tunisia and Morocco gain their independence from France in 1956, and in 1957, five years before Algeria would finally win its independence, the National Liberation Front (FLN) founded its filmmaking unit, the Groupe Farid. Despite or perhaps due to its prolonged struggle against the French, in the 1960s it is Algerian cinema that makes the biggest splash internationally. For that reason, we will begin with Algeria. ALGERIA Its birth in the battlefield left its lasting mark on its structure and vision for many years after independence. It became a militant cinema, a cinema with a cause and an educative mission, brimming with metaphors of change, rebirth and the forces of nature. It equates revolution and change with the sweeping winds that cleanse and refresh or the glowing fire that purifies and forges new reality. Sabry Hafez12 Mejri, ‘Birth’, 27. Ibid., 27. 11 Roy Armes, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 6. 12 Sabry Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Alif 15 (1995): 55.  9 10

88  North Africa French rule over Algeria (1830–1962) was particularly culturally oppressive. The French considered Algeria a département or administrative unit of the home country. More than a million settlers lived there alongside 9 million Algerians.13 The Arabic language was radically suppressed, having been ‘categorized as foreign by the colonial authorities’.14 Figures vary considerably, but during the war for independence Algerians sustained heavy casualties, with hundreds of thousands killed or disappeared.15 Given this situation, it should not surprise us that prior to 1962, all filmmaking in Algeria was either (1) foreign or (2) underground. As mentioned above, in 1957, the FLN set up a production unit called the Groupe Farid.16 The group was founded by the French activist René Vautier (b. 1928), who directed a film called Algérie en flammes (Algeria in Flames, 1959).17 It was a militant group – it set up a film school, and four of its students died in battle.18 The group nurtured many pioneers of the post-independence Algerian cinema, such as Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, director of the epic Chronicle of the Years of Embers (1975), subject of Chapter 2.1. Post-independence, the government set up a number of organisations whose remit related to filmmaking. First, there was the Centre National du Cinéma Algérien (CNCA), which produced three feature films between 1965 and 1966. Second, there was the Office des Actualités Algériennes (OAA), which was initially a newsreel company, but which, under the directorship of Lakhdar-Hamina, made two feature films in 1966 and 1967. Third, there was the Radiodiffusion télévision algérienne (RTA), the Algerian television organisation. Fourth and, finally, there was one private company, Casbah Films, which was founded by Yacef Saadi and operated between 1965 and 1967. It specialised in foreign co-productions such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966).19 In 1967, the government set up the Office National du Commerce et de l’Industrie Cinématographiques (ONCIC). From its founding until 1984, it employed filmmakers on salaries and produced nearly every Algerian film that was made.20 Merzak Allouache, the director of Omar Gatlato and Bab el-Oued City, the subjects of Chapters 2.2 and 2.3, reflects on the ONCIC’s impact: Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), xi. 14 Ibid., 54. 15 Ibid., 335–8. 16 Armes, Postcolonial Images, 15. 17 Ibid., 15. 18 Ibid., 15. 19 Ibid., 15–16. 20 Ibid., 16. 13

North Africa: Regional Essay  89 Film makers functioned as civil servants. I worked in this way, and my first film was produced under this system. At one level, this system of state film production protected film makers from harsh market realities. But on the other hand it posed the problem of state censorship and self-censure. It also meant that even if a film maker were unable to produce a film, or could only make one film every five years because of lack of funds, he would still receive a salary. There was inevitably a lot of corruption and a lot of bureaucratic waste.21

Investment in the film industry by the state, coupled with the extensive infrastructure that was the legacy of colonialism, helped nurture Algerian filmmaking during this period. Sabry Hafez writes: ‘The French assumption that Algeria was a département de la France had a positive impact on the infrastructure necessary for film production and distribution which independent Algerian cinema inherited.’22 He continues: ‘By the time of independence, Algeria had most of the rudiments for a thriving film industry, including the largest number of cinemas, 350, in a single country in the whole of the Arab world, including Egypt with only 250.’23 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given its birth in the Groupe Farid, post-­ independence Algerian cinema is a militant cinema.24 Its militancy was not insular but rather seen as part and parcel of the struggle against colonialism worldwide. Indeed, in December 1973, the ONCIC co-hosted the ‘Third World Filmmakers Meeting’ in Algiers. Delegates to this convention included filmmakers from all over Africa and Latin America, as well as, to some extent, Europe. One of the committees was dedicated to the ‘People’s Cinema’, which explored – in the committee’s own words – the ‘role of cinema and filmmakers in the third world against imperialism and neocolonialism’.25 The resolutions of the committee go on to describe in some detail what this struggle entails: The role of cinema in this process consists of manufacturing films reflecting the objective conditions in which the struggling peoples are developing, that is, films which bring about disalienation of the colonized peoples at the same time that they contribute sound and objective information for the people of the entire world, including the oppressed classes of the colonizing countries, and place the struggle of their people back in the general context of the struggle of the countries and people of the third world. This requires from the militant filmmaker a dialectical analysis of the sociohistoric phenomenon of colonization.26 23 24 25

Ibid., 16. Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities’, 45. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 55. Kay Dickinson, Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Cham: Springer Nature, 2018), 57. 26 Ibid., 61. 21 22

90  North Africa Another committee at the Third World Filmmakers Meeting dealt with issues of production and co-production. This committee was chaired by none other than Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, and it also included Med Hondo of Mauritania.27 On a thematic level, throughout the post-independence period of the 1960s and 1970s, one often finds a binary opposition between hero and villain, with characters such as the mujahid or freedom fighter, the peasant and the intellectual in the former category and the French soldier or Algerian collaborator in the second.28 Such themes characterise early post-independence output and are represented in this volume in the discussion of Chronicle of the Years of Embers in Chapter 2.1. However, all that changes with films such as Merzak Allouache’s Omar Gatlato, subject of Chapter 2.2, and the emergence of the anti-hero that characterises Arabic-language cinemas in the wake of the 1967 Defeat. Further challenges to Algerian cinema’s foundational myths in heroic masculinity arise in the 1990s with the onset of the so-called ‘Black Decade’ and the heightened tensions and violent encounters between Islamists and secularists.29 When Merzak Allouache revisits the topic of Algerian youth and masculinity in Bab el-Oued City (1994), we find that it takes not one character to represent the typical Algerian youth but rather two, and the conflict between them is more ominous than comical. According to Roy Armes, the violence of the 1990s ‘drove many Algerian directors into exile in France and Italy. As a result, co-productions not involving the state sector made their appearance for the first time, with films shot in Algeria but funded from Europe’.30 In fact, the filmmaking situation in Algeria had deteriorated as far back as 1984, when the ONCIC was dissolved. ‘From the mid-1980s’, Armes writes, ‘Algerian cinema underwent a series of bewildering bureaucratic reorganisations which had a very negative effect on the level and quality of production.’31 In 1997, the government shut down the organisations that had replaced the ONCIC, ‘effectively leaving Algeria without any film production structures’.32 As a result, film output between 1997 and 2002 was zero.33 In 2004, a new organisation called the National Centre for Cinematography Ibid., 63. Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities’, 55. 29 The violence developed gradually after the army cancelled elections that the political party known as the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) were poised to win. See Michael Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 172–4. 30 Armes, African Filmmaking, 40. 31 Ibid., 40. 32 Ibid., 40. 33 Ibid., 40. 27 28

North Africa: Regional Essay  91 and Audio-visual Media (CNCA) was founded, but its resources are limited, and most films rely to some extent on European funding. TUNISIA

After independence, there was minimal film production. Between the mid-1960s and 2000, the average annual output of films was less than two.34 Nevertheless, film culture in Tunisia maintains a high profile, in part because of the biannual Carthage Film Festival for Arab and African films set up in 1966. The Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC) alternates with an African film festival (FESPACO) held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Furthermore, Tunisian films are known in the Arab world for their relatively frank sexual content. The country is also recognised for the high proportion of women amongst its directors. Somewhat akin to Algerian cinema, in the years following independence, filmmakers turned their attention to the struggle against colonialism. Indeed, the first post-Chikly Tunisian feature film was The Dawn (1966), a film directed by Omar Khlifi, which was the first in a trilogy about the ­nationalist struggle.35 Cinema was not an immediate priority for the fledgling state,36 and it was not until the 1960s that the government started to develop cinematic support networks. During that decade, President Habib Bourguiba set up the Établissement de la Radio Télévision Tunisienne (ERTT, Tunisian Radio and Television Institution) as well as the Société Anonyme Tunisienne de Production et d’Expansion Cinématographique (SATPEC, Non-profit Tunisian Cinematic Production and Expansion Society). According to Florence Martin, the cinema has also been seen as an opportunity for the country to attract tourists. ‘In a nation where tourism is a major economic priority’, she writes, ‘the Ministry of Tourism has a vested interest in cinema’s potential as an advertising agent in promoting the image of Tunisia abroad.’37 In this regard, I recall having observed in a visit to Paris late in the year 2000 that the underground stations were plastered with posters for Moufida Tlatli’s Season of Men, the subject of Chapter 2.5, promoting the island of Djerba where the film is set and perhaps the rest of the Tunisian coast as the perfect seaside destination. Despite the relative strength of cinematic culture in Tunisia, funding is limited, and co-productions, especially with France, are the norm. Armes, Postcolonial Images, 32. Florence Martin, ‘Tunisia’, chap. 12 in Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (eds), The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 217. 36 Martin, ‘Tunisia,’ 214. 37 Ibid., 215. 34 35

92  North Africa If Tunisia, due to its relatively small size and beautiful landscapes, is considered the ‘Switzerland of North Africa’,38 then one might think of Tunisian films as the ‘French films of the Arab World’, meaning that they are known for their adult content. As Rebecca Hillauer observes: Many subjects which are taboo in other Arab cinemas are frankly depicted by Tunisian filmmakers and screened in movie houses: male homosexuality (in Man of Ashes, 1986), sex tourism and corruption (in Bezness, 1992), political repression and torture by the police (in The Golden Hooves, 1988), female nudity (in Halfaouine, 1990, A Summer in La Goulette, 1995), or surgical ‘restoration’ of the hymen (Fatma, 2002).39

This relatively liberal approach to sexuality, corruption and repression does not extend to all topics. Most notably, before the Arab Spring ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, representations of Islamists were not allowed.40 Other types of criticism were also disallowed. Indeed, Selma Baccar’s classic fictionalised documentary Fatma 75 (1978) was not screened in Tunisia until 2006.41 In the film a young university student named Fatma interviews female luminaries from Tunisian history. The government claimed that they banned the film for its explicit representation of a sex education lesson. According to Stefanie Van de Peer, however, ‘it is more likely that the politicized voice-over and non-verbal communication, dominated by irony and an indirect critique of propagandistic policies, was the cause of the ban’.42 Robert Lang, in his book New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance, points out that despite appearances, from the end of Bourguiba’s presidency and throughout the reign of Ben Ali, was ‘the most repressive state in the Maghreb’.43 He therefore finds that the films released during this era, more specifically from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s that offered social critiques were politically subversive: Against these considerable odds, a generation of Tunisia’s filmmakers emerged in the mid-1980s to make films that are to a greater or lesser degree Rebecca Hillauer, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 359. 39 Ibid., 361. 40 Ibid., 361. 41 Stefanie Van de Peer, ‘Forgotten Women, Lost Histories: Selma Baccar’s Fatma 75 (1978) and Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978)’, in Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds), Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema (London/New York: Routledge, 2014), 65. 42 Ibid., 65. 43 Robert Lang, New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), ix. 38

North Africa: Regional Essay  93 allegories of resistance to the increasingly illiberal trends marking their society and which explore what it means, and how, to be Tunisian in the contemporary world.44

This trend began, according to Lang, with the release of Nouri Bouzid’s Man of Ashes (Rih al-sadd, 1986). These films differed from previous films in that they did not attribute society’s ills to forces outside society but rather to forces within society. They were, furthermore, ‘characterized by a certain intimacy and psychological realism of character development’.45 In this film, the protagonist, Hachemi, a figure who is haunted by his memories of child sexual abuse, disappoints his family when he is reluctant to marry. Given that Lang uses this phrase ‘New Tunisian Cinema’ and situates Nouri Bouzid as its founder, it is important to acknowledge that Bouzid himself has conceptualised a trend of what he sees as ‘New Realism’ in Arab cinema – a movement which he sees as pan-Arab rather than national and which emerges in the wake of the 1967 Defeat. He contrasts ‘New Realism’ with what he calls ‘Melodramatic Realism’. He defines the latter as ‘a tradition that used realism to convey melodrama’, making it ‘a wavering sort of realism, replete with melodramatic elements’.46 He associates melodramatic realism with pre-1960s Egyptian cinema, yet sees that its influence lingers, as directors struggle to break free from established conventions. A key element of New Realism, according to Bouzid, is the way that the director situates himself or herself with respect to the cinematic project. The director is no longer above or outside the film, but rather, like an auteur, within it. He writes: The director’s view from the inside, as it were, began to emerge; he was in the middle of things, no longer up there in an ivory tower. The film’s structure and mode of narration, moreover, began to possess an internal dynamic, which, in turn, was based upon a certain visual concept, instead of being merely a series of sentences and scenes strung together.47

The director’s personal involvement in the film lends it psychological complexity, whereby characters are no longer flat. Certain myths perpetuated by classical cinema, such as ‘the constantly victorious and honourable Arab hero’, have been abandoned, while stereotypes of strong men and weak women recede.48 Ibid., x. Ibid., xii. 46 Nouri Bouzid, ‘New Realism in Arab Cinema: The Defeat-Conscious Cinema’, Alif 15 (1995): 246. 47 Ibid., 248. 48 Ibid., 249. 44 45

94  North Africa This evolution in the characterisation of women on screen was matched by increasing representations of women behind the camera. For, despite its small size, and perhaps because of its fairly progressive personal status laws, Tunisia boasts a fair number of women directors. In addition to the aforementioned Baccar, who directed the feature film Habiba Msika/La danse du feu (1994), there are several others worthy of mention, most notably Moufida Tlatli (1947–2021), a woman who made a career as a film editor before eventually switching to directing. Her films Silences of the Palace (1994) and Season of Men (2000) are featured in Chapters 2.4 and 2.5 of this volume. For a time she was appointed Minister of Culture in the provisional government that formed after the ousting of President Ben Ali. Another successful woman filmmaker, who rose to fame with Red Satin (2002), a story about a belly-dancing mother who seduces her daughter’s boyfriend, starring Hiam Abbas, is Raja Amari. Other notable women directors are Nadia El Fani, Sophie Ferchiou, Kalthoum Bornaz and Nejia Ben Mabrouk.49 MOROCCO

As in Tunisia, indigenous film production in Morocco got off to a slow start: the first Moroccan feature film came out in 1968, twelve years after independence was achieved.50 Since Morocco had stopped film imports from Egypt in the early 1960s due to Egypt’s support for Algeria in its border war with Morocco, there was an unsatiated thirst for Egyptian movies. In an attempt to quench it, the first few films that were made in the late 1960s were all ‘clear imitations of Egyptian melodrama’.51 They were also created specifically so that Morocco would have films to show at a festival in Tangiers in 1968 and another in Rabat in 1969.52 The real breakthrough film, ‘which many take as the film that marks the birth of the Moroccan national cinema’,53 was Hamid Bennani’s Weshma (1970). Weshma, according to Roy Armes, ‘is the bleak tale of a boy who is adopted by a man to whom he cannot relate and who drifts into petty crime, only to die meaninglessly in a motorbike accident’.54 During the remainder of the 1970s, a number of talented filmmakers came to Rebecca Hillauer profiles all seven of these women directors in her Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers. 50 Armes, African Filmmaking, 41. 51 Kevin Dwyer, Beyond Casablanca: M. A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 73. On the boycott of Egyptian imports, see 72. 52 Ibid., 73. 53 Ibid., 75. 54 Armes, African Filmmaking, 115. 49

North Africa: Regional Essay  95 the fore, including Moumen Smihi, Ahmed Bouanani and Mustafa Derkaoui, but it was not until the 1980s that Moroccan cinema really took off. Before venturing into a discussion of cinematic developments after 1980, it is worth mentioning one pioneering film which is sometimes identified as the first fictional film made in Morocco, namely Muhammad Ousfour’s The Accursed Son (al-Ibn al-ʿaq, 1958). This film, which is available to watch on YouTube,55 runs at about thirty-six minutes and is extremely rudimentary on a technical level for its day. For example, it does not have synchronised sound, but rather is made as a silent film with a narrative voiceover. Dwyer describes Ousfour and his setup: Ousfour, an actor who had performed in many European-produced films made in Morocco during the colonial period, had taught himself a number of basic filming and laboratory techniques and, with little more than spit, polish, and glue and working out of his own garage, completed this film and a number of shorts, as well as another full-length film in 1970 […] Ousfour’s films were, understandably, technically amateur and had little direct effect on later Moroccan filmmaking. However, his indirect effect was substantial since several Moroccan filmmakers, among them Ahmed Bouanani and Muhammad Reggab, were introduced to films in Ousfour’s garage.56

The Accursed Son tells the story of boy who has a rough time growing up and who turns into a young man who enjoys drinking and gambling before morphing into a jealous murderer. The film ends with the protagonist’s execution, as he has been sentenced to death for his crimes. It would seem that Ousfour is making some kind of allegorical commentary on the role of religion in society. This I assert for two reasons: first, because Ousfour opens his film with a shot of a minaret accompanied by a call to prayer and second, because a string of prayer beads makes a pronounced appearance at the protagonist’s execution. In the latter sequence there is a clear graphic association between the loop of the prayer beads and that of the noose as well as between the items’ respective shadows, leaving no doubt that the filmmaker is making some sort of symbolic equation. At the heart of Moroccan film-making activity and its historical narrative is the Centre cinématographique marocain (CCM). Founded in 1944, when Morocco was still ruled by the French, in its early days it produced ‘news programs, educational documentaries, and what might be called “propaganda documentaries” that rationalized and attempted to reinforce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejuuKnBcXFE (accessed 4 March 2023). Dwyer, Beyond Casablanca, 377n. On the latter point, Dwyer cites Ahmed Araib and Eric de Hullessen, Il étais une fois … le cinema au Maroc! (Rabat: EDH, 1999), 26.

55 56

96  North Africa colonial rule’.57 In the years following independence, the CCM continued to support documentaries but veered away from the propagandistic. Among the notable documentaries produced by the CCM are 6–12 (1968) by Ahmed Bouanani, Abdelmajid R’chich and Mohamed Abderrahmane Tazi and Trances (Transes, 1981),58 a film about the musical group Nass el Ghiwane by Ahmed El Maanouni which has been restored by Martin Scorsese as part of his World Cinema Project. The CCM also supported fictional feature films, such as the three Egyptian-style melodramas released in the late 1960s, all of which were produced or co-produced by the CCM.59 But many feature filmmakers had to pursue private funding. Weshma, for example, was ­produced by the short-lived production company Sigma 3.60 In the 1980s, the government introduced maintenance funds which stimulated film production. The funding scheme was modified and enhanced at several junctures over the years, and, as a result, in the early 2000s, Morocco was producing six or seven films a year.61 Some of these films attracted large audiences locally: Mohamed Abderrahmane Tazi’s Looking for my Wife’s Husband (al-Bahth ʿan zawj imraʾati, 1993) and Saïd Naciri’s Crooks (alBandiyya, 2004) achieved great box office results.62 Kevin Dwyer cites an interesting CCM statistic: in 2004, Moroccan films earned 13.5 per cent of box office revenue even though they accounted for only 3.5 per cent of films screened.63 This boom in production was accompanied on a thematic level by greater openness in terms of topics that could be addressed. According to Valérie K. Orlando, since 1999 there has been a wave of Moroccan ‘social realist’ films retrospectively documenting the abuses of the ‘Years of Lead’ and taking advantage of the less repressive atmosphere to critique social or political ills that were formerly ‘off-limits’.64 The so-called ‘Years of Lead’ (les années de plomb) is a term used by Moroccan political dissidents to characterise repression that occurred under the reign of King Hassan II (1961–99), which Kevin Dwyer, ‘Family Resemblance: An Anthropologist Looks at Moroccan Documentary’, in Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard (eds), Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer Nature, 2020), 237. 58 Ibid., 237. 59 Dwyer, Beyond Casablanca, 73. 60 Ibid., 73. 61 Armes, African Filmmaking, 42. 62 Ibid., 42. 63 Kevin Dwyer, ‘Moroccan Cinema and the Promotion of Culture’, Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 278. 64 Valérie K. Orlando, ‘Prison, Torture, and Testimony: Retelling the Memories of the Lead Years’, chap. 4 in Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), 101–21. 57

North Africa: Regional Essay  97 was associated with human rights abuses such as torture and disappearances. Start and end dates vary, but there seems to be a clean break with the accession of Mohammed VI in 1999. Faouzi Bensaidi’s A Thousand Months, for example, the subject of Chapter 2.7, touches on topics such as political imprisonment and police beatings. Moreover, the CCM is quite keen to claim films by Moroccans residing abroad or MREs (Marocains résidant à l’étranger) as Moroccan even when they have been financed entirely by foreign sources; they are also eager to contribute to the financing of MRE films.65 As a result, there exists a certain seamlessness between indigenous filmmaking and diasporic filmmaking, and there is a large group of Moroccan filmmakers – the aforementioned Faouzi Bensaidi among them – whom Will Higbee dubs cinéastes de passage and ‘whose presence on either side of the Mediterranean is dictated by the rhythms of production and promotion of their films as well as the political, economic and creative conditions surrounding each new project’.66 Inclusivity also characterises the linguistic front. Although most Moroccan films are shot in Arabic, many have a high French content (which seems to have box office appeal with urban elites). The CCM is also involved in funding Berber-language films, and a number of Berber feature films have been made in recent years. As Orlando writes: ‘The Moroccan filmmaker, more often than not, has the choice of making his or her film in Arabic, Berber, or French; and this language choice becomes a defining hurdle in terms of marketing, distribution abroad, and audience reception.’67 The CCM has also earmarked funds for documentaries about Hassani and Sahraoui culture.68 WESTERN SAHARA

Unlike the remainder of the countries covered in this section, Western Sahara, which is now occupied by Morocco, was colonised by the Spanish and not the French. Whilst Western Sahara has had little cinematic output, filmic culture there, or, more properly speaking in the refugee camps in Algeria, has been explored in some detail by Chris Lippard, who discusses FiSahara, a human rights-themed film festival held in the Dakhla camp in

Valérie K. Orlando, ‘Issues, Contexts, and “Culture Wars”: Marocains Résidants à l’étranger (MREs) versus Filmmakers at Home’, chap. 2 in Screening Morocco, 37–70. 66 Will Higbee, ‘Moroccan Diasporic Cinema: The “Rooted Transnationalism” of the Cinéastes de passage’, Transnational Screens 10, no. 2 (2019): 81. 67 Orlando, Screening Morocco, xii. 68 Dwyer, ‘Family Resemblance’, 243. 65

98  North Africa the Algerian Sahara.69 He also analyses Waiting for Happiness, the subject of Chapter 2.6, by the Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, as a film which, being set just over the border in Nouadhibou, partakes in Sahrawi discourses and identities. MAURITANIA

Mauritania has not had a cinematic industry as such, but it is famous for producing two auteurs: Med Hondo (1936–2019) and Abderrahmane Sissako (b. 1961). Hondo, who produced such classics as Soleil O (1970) and Sarraounia (1986), is generally situated within African or pan-African cinema as opposed to ‘North African’ or ‘Arab’ cinemas. Sissako, too, is a sub-Saharan African filmmaker, particularly as he was raised in Mali, and it is really only his film Waiting for Happiness (2002) which can be considered ‘Arab’ for the simple reason that its largely unscripted dialogue is primarily in Hassaniya, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Mauritania and Western Sahara. His other films, perhaps with the exception of Timbuktu (2014), have little directly to do with the Arab world, though the cameo appearance of Elia Suleiman in Sissako’s Bamako, suggests a certain affinity. SUDAN

In the prologue to his interview with Gadalla Gubara (1920–2008), a pioneering Sudanese filmmaker, which was undertaken at the 1995 Pan-African Festival of Film and Television in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike describes Sudanese cinema as ‘one of the least developed in Africa’ and ‘rarely discussed’.70 Indeed, although my interest in world cinema, and in Arabic-language cinema in particular, dates back to about 1990, my introduction to the topic of Sudanese film came only last year, when I watched Suhaib Gasmelbari’s remarkable 2019 documentary Talking About Trees on the British Film Institute’s streaming service. This is a moving film that explores both the accomplishments and the thwarted ambitions of four elderly Sudanese filmmakers based in Omdurman, who have formed an association called the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) which aims to foster a cinematic revival by refurbishing an abandoned movie theatre, aptly named ‘Revolution Cinema’, and organising screenings there. Chris Lippard, ‘Mobilities of Cinematic Identity in the Western Sahara’, in Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard (eds), Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer Nature, 2020), 147–200. 70 Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 41. 69

North Africa: Regional Essay  99 The documentary contains precious clips from the SFG members’ past productions. These include Ibrahim Shaddad’s Hunting Party (1964, RT: circa minute 8), Suliman Ibrahim’s (aka Suleiman El Nour) graduation film entitled Africa, Jungle, Drum and Revolution (1978, RT: circa minute 1:28), and Eltayeb Mahdi’s The Station (1988, RT: circa minute 18:00). In this way, spectators get a fleeting but powerful introduction to Sudanese cinema’s past, in the decades before the government that came to power in the 1989 coup effectively put a stop to the country’s filmmaking activity. Clips from Shaddad’s film Rat, a film representing torture whose production was ongoing in 2015, when the events portrayed in the documentary conclude, suggest that a cinema of opposition and defiance is emerging. Another revealing glimpse into Sudanese film history may be found in a website dedicating to digitally archiving the collected works of the poet, writer, artist, and filmmaker Hussein Shariffe (1934–2005).71 The website features his biography, some of his poetry, many photographs (including some of his artwork) and information about his seven films which seem to have spanned several genres, including documentaries, essay films and at least one fictional film. His 1979 short, Tigers are Better Looking, is an adaptation of a short story by Jean Rhys. Shariffe spent much of his career outside Sudan, in both the United Kingdom and Egypt, and at the time of his death he was working on a film called Of Dust and Rubies: Letters from Abroad.72 Returning to the interview conducted by Ukadike cited at the opening of this section, Gadalla Gubara suggests that Sudan is firmly rooted in the history of African cinema, and he asserts that he was ‘the first black African to handle the camera’.73 As the interview unfolds, it becomes clear that he feels that Sudanese cinema has been neglected and underdeveloped because of the French influence on pan-African film organisations and the support and investment in Francophone African cinema, especially West African cinema, while Anglophone African countries have in comparison been underfunded and under-resourced – or at least had been when Gubara formulated these opinions.74 Gubara’s breakthrough film was Song of Khartoum (1950), which was apparently the first colour film made by a black African.75 https://www.shariffe.org/ (accessed 8 March 2023). An exploration of Shariffe’s corpus, a discussion of the first issue of Twenty-One, a literary magazine he founded in 1964, and an overview of the archival project surrounding his oeuvre may be found in Erica Carter and Lawrence Kent, ‘An Infinity of Tactics: Hussein Shariffe’s Archive in Motion’, L’Atalante: Revista de estudios cinematográficos 34 (2022): 115–36. 73 Ibid., 41. 74 Ibid. See, especially 43–4. 75 Ibid., 42. 71 72

100  North Africa He later made the documentary Independence (1957) and a feature film called Tajoog (1984). It is a little odd that he does not reflect on the relationship of Sudanese cinema to the Egyptian film industry or lack thereof.76 After all, the two countries share a border and a history of British colonialism. Under the Ottomans, Sudan was part of the khedivate of Egypt. Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, Sudanese colloquial is very close to Egyptian colloquial, and it is the Egyptian dialect that has dominated the Arabic broadcast media since the arrival of the radio, the phonograph and the movie theatre in the region. For these reasons, when I decided to add a chapter on Hajooj Kuka’s aKasha to this volume, I considered expanding the regional essay in Part I to ‘Egypt and Sudan’. However, ultimately, I decided to include it in the North Africa section, to de-emphasise the coherence of the ‘Maghrib’ and to think of this new category as Arabophone Africa, acknowledging that Egypt is, of course, African, but singling it out due to the unique status of its industry. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I would like to revisit the words of Sabry Hafez cited at the outset of this chapter. There, Hafez suggests that Maghribi cinema is a coherent subset of Arabic cinema. It is the Arab cinema which is ‘most concerned’ with form and aesthetics. It is highly aware of European and especially French traditions and is always negotiating between them and their native traditions, Arab or otherwise. For this reason, Hafez describes North African cinema as ‘two-toned’. He writes: Unlike the cinema of Egypt and the Levant which was able to assimilate Western cinematic influence and filter it into a cultural dynamism operating outside what Geoffrey Hartman calls their ‘textual milieu’, the cinema of the Maghrib countries was unable to avoid working in a dual milieu and a double cultural tradition. This double heritage resulted in a two-toned cinema, at the same time, reacting to and interacting with, the Arabic cultural heritage (including its modern culture and filmic tradition), and with the European, particularly French, culture and cinematic attainments.77

In other words, argues Hafez, whilst Egypt and the Levantine countries are able to forge their own canons and conventions somewhat independently of the western influences they absorb, the North African countries He neglects to situate Sudan with respect to Egyptian cinema, but he does suggest the current government shared a certain outlook with other Arab countries regarding media policies, especially the permissibility or impermissibility of satellite dishes. See, especially, 54. 77 Sabry Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Alif 15 (1995): 41. 76

North Africa: Regional Essay  101 cannot or do not. I am not sure that I entirely agree that the countries of the Levant differ from those of North Africa in this respect; however, it must be acknowledged that the common colonial history of the latter unites them in way that the countries of the Levant, having been divided up between France and Britain initially and further colonised by Israel, are not. In other words, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco all inhabit the same ‘textual milieu’ – one dictated largely by France – whereas the countries of the Levant, having been colonised by Britain as well as France and, more recently, Israel, have varying milieus in which they operate. There is, therefore, a certain unity that characterises the cinema of North Africa, or the Maghrib at least.

102  North2.1 Chapter Africa

Chronicle of the Years of Embers (Waqaʾiʿ sinin al-jamr, 1975)1

Chronicle of the Years of Embers, directed by Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina (b. 1934), stands as the great epic of the Algerian war for liberation which took place between 1954 and 1962. Produced by ONCIC (L’Office national pour le commerce et l’industrie cinématographique), and dominating its resources for years, the film captures, on a grand scale, the suffering and bravery of the Algerian people in the years leading up to the beginning of the Algerian Revolution on 1 November 1954, whose twentieth anniversary the film was meant to commemorate. Despite its status as a nationalist film, par excellence, the producers drew on some foreign talent, such as Frenchman Philippe Arthuys, who composed the music, and the Greek actor Jorgo Voyagis, who played Ahmed, the main protagonist. The director himself starred in the film as the prophetic madman Miloud, and he co-authored the screenplay with Tawfiq Fares as well as acclaimed Algerian novelist Rachid Boujedra. A measure of the film’s success on an international level is that it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976. The plot of the film is divided into seven sections, each introduced with a title, as follows: 1. The Years of Ashes (9:00:00): In this segment, which is set in the 1940s, drought plagues the countryside, forcing the peasant protagonist, Ahmed, to relocate with his family to a city, where he hopes to find work. There, he encounters Miloud, a madman or a wise fool. 2. The Year of the Cart (1:04:08): When typhoid takes hold in the city, the French settlers are evacuated, and the natives quarantined. Ahmed loses his wife and children, except for one son. Ahmed is forcibly conscripted by the Vichy government and sent to fight in Europe, an interlude which is represented through a montage sequence. The section ends on 8 May Ranked #3 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion.

1

Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina  103

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

1945, marked by peace celebrations in Europe and massacres back home in Algeria. The Years of Embers (1:44:29): Ahmed works as a blacksmith in the city. Larbi, a revolutionary intellectual and former political prisoner, arrives in town. He convinces people of the need for armed resistance against French colonial occupation. The Year of the Assault (2:11:10): Characters are divided as to whether or not they should participate in elections called by the French. A large rally is convened. Larbi is shot in the head. French cavalry charge crowd. ‘Ahmed is transformed into an expert rider and swordsman.’2 The Years of Fire (2:35:17): Ahmed and his fellow fighters head for the mountains. Miloud looks after Ahmed’s son. 1 November 1954 (2:43:09): Ahmed and his comrades are betrayed and attacked. Ahmed is shot and killed. 11 November 1954 (2:48:30): Miloud dies. Ahmed’s son runs through the Algerian landscape.

In his article entitled ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Sabry Hafez shows how Algerian cinema evolved from militant roots. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one finds in early post-revolutionary cinema a kind of binary opposition between the hero, who is the mujahid or freedom fighter, and the villain, the French settler or Algerian collaborator.3 Such an opposition undoubtedly plays out in Chronicle of the Years of Embers. However, if we examine the ‘freedom fighter’ side of the polarity, we find that it is a complex construction. In fact, the film features what we might call a triumvirate of heroic masculinities in (1) Ahmed, the peasant turned guerrilla fighter, (2) Larbi, the militant intellectual and (3) Miloud, the prophetic madman. Ahmed is the central protagonist, and there is a sense in which he represents the Algerian people, who are mobilised to fight for independence. This kind of monumentalisation of the peasant is, according to Viola Shafik, common in Algerian cinema, and Ahmed epitomises this trend. She writes: Even Ahmad’s physiognomy corresponds to his scarcely individual character. His internal stirrings are only reactions to external events. He has no negative attributes. The majestic cinemascope close-ups of his face, shot from a fish eye’s Roy Armes, ‘History as Myth: Chronicle of the Years of Embers’, Postcolonial Images (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 101. 3 Sabry Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Alif 15 (1995), 41. 2

104  North Africa

Figure 2.1.1  Close-up of Ahmad (RT 05:55) perspective, undercut with the cracked arid soil on which he gazes during the opening scenes of the film, invoke his archaic closeness to the earth.4

An example of the shots of Ahmed’s face that Shafik describes may be found in Figure 2.1.1. This is the first shot in the film where one gets a sense of what he looks like. As the film progresses, we see more and more manifestations of Ahmed’s strength, and the role of the other two male protagonists, namely Miloud the seer and Larbi the intellectual, is to motivate Ahmed to harness that strength for the cause of liberation. Miloud, in contrast to Ahmed, is a slight, bearded and balding figure in the clothes of an ascetic. That he has a gift with words is evident from the way he speaks in rhyme. When we are first introduced to Miloud, Ahmed calls him crazy (mahbul), and Miloud replies, ‘Yes, I am crazy, but at least I know where I live’ (RT 36:18). As the local madman, Miloud speaks his mind about the injustices of French occupation, and the authorities let him get away with it until quite late in the film, when he is punished for speaking out. In his discussion of the stock character of the ‘wise fool’ in medieval Islamic cultures, Michael W. Dols writes, ‘Even today, in the modern Arab cinema, the wise fool plays a significant role, for he is the only one who is free to narrate social injustice and governmental oppression’.5 Indeed, Miloud is the perfect example of this. What Miloud offers in the way of spirituality and Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo/New York, American University in Cairo Press, 1988), 176. It is ironic, perhaps, that he is played by a Greek actor. 5 Michael W. Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12. 4

Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina  105

Figure 2.1.2  Ahmad on a lunch break with his son (RT 44:12)

Figure 2.1.3  Camera zooms in on Ahmad’s strong arms (RT 44:32)

prophecy, Ahmed matches in strength, as the camera emphasises through its attention to Ahmed’s forearms in Figures 2.1.2 and 2.1.3. Here Ahmed is at a quarry where he has found employment, taking a lunchbreak with his son. The zooming in on the forearms anticipates or foreshadows the act of resistance in which Ahmed is about to engage. When the French foreman becomes abusive, initially scolding Ahmed for taking a break, Ahmed responds by pushing the foreman to the ground. Ahmed’s brute strength and Miloud’s vision are each complemented by Larbi’s intellect in what we may call a triumvirate of masculinities. If Miloud’s job is to speak truth to power, and Ahmed’s job is to take physical action, Larbi’s job is to lead Ahmed to take directed action as part of an armed opposition to French colonialism. Soon after Larbi’s first appearance on screen – about two thirds of the way through the film – he sits in a café, reading the newspaper through his spectacles (RT 1:58:10). His demeanour and his attire seem strange at first to the locals, and they wonder why he keeps entering the police station. Once he explains that he is a parolee and is required to check in with the police, they grow to trust him and accept his leadership. Unlike Ahmed, Larbi does not actually use a weapon in the film – although he does handle one – but that he is brave and strong is understood by his ability to withstand the violence and torture of the police. In Figure 2.1.4, Ahmed holds Larbi up after he has just been released from detention and what must have been a severe beating, in an image which represents one type of masculine hero nurturing another. By the end of the film, all three of these ‘freedom fighters’ the intellectual mujahid, the physical mujahid and the spiritual mujahid die: Larbi is assassinated at a rally, Ahmed is struck down in battle and Miloud simply lies down on the grass and passes away. In Figure 2.1.5, Miloud’s body becomes enveloped by the earth as he lies down on the grass to die. The sun sets behind him, his silhouette substituting for that of the mountainous landscape. We soon cut to the final

106  North Africa

Figure 2.1.4  Ahmad holds Larbi, who has been beaten by police (RT 2:05:18)

Figure 2.1.5  As Miloud dies, his profile merges with the landscape (RT 2:55:08)

sequence – an image of Ahmed’s son running against the backdrop of mountains and a bright blue sky. The three men have given their lives to the cause of Algeria, so that the people may now run free. In terms of style, Sabry Hafez has described Maghribi cinema – or the cinema of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia – as ‘two-toned’ especially in terms of its ambiguous relationship to the colonising power. The film, on the one hand, represents a rejection of France, and, on the other hand, borrows from France in terms of its aesthetic forms and speaks to, and in a sense addresses,

Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina  107 a French audience. For me, the best example of this phenomenon occurs in the soundtrack during the opening credit sequence. The non-diegetic music composed by Philippe Arthuys, a sequence of harmonious tones used to create emotional tension in the spectator, may be heard in contradistinction to a diegetic musical procession dominated by wind instruments. The non-diegetic sound lets us know how we are meant to feel, but there is a sense in which the diegetic sound is meant to describe, document and define Algerian culture for the outsider. Indeed, there is an ethnographic impulse throughout the film that overlays its epic qualities. Questions to Consider • How do Ahmed, Miloud and Larbi each play distinct roles as a labourer, as a seer, and as an intellectual respectively? How do they work together? How are tensions between them resolved? How does their character development reflect the revolutionary content of the film? • What transformations does Ahmed undergo before becoming a freedom fighter? What do they signify? • Do you think that Sabry Hafez’s assertion that Maghribi cinema is ‘twotoned’ applies to this film? Does one find two distinct layers of cultural influences and paradigms? What are some examples of this phenomenon? Further Reading Mouny Berrah, ‘Algerian Cinema and National Identity’, in Alia Arasoughly (ed.), Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 63–83. Roy Armes, ‘History as Myth: Chronicle of the Years of Embers’, Postcolonial Images (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 96–104. Sabry Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Alif 15 (1995): 39–80. Kamal Salhi, ‘Visualising Postcolonial Cultural Politics in Algeria: From State Cinema to Cinéma d’auteur’, Journal of North African Studies 13, no. 4 (2008): 441–54.

Chapter 2.2

Omar Gatlato (1976)1

The denaturalisation of the mythic masculine begins in the first scene of Omar Gatlato where Omar states ‘I am a man’ and then throughout the film, his identification with the mythic Algerian, Arabo-Muslim man is falsified, revealed as artificial, ideological and static. Andrea Khalil2

Before delving into a discussion of this chapter’s film, let us consider and explain its title. In the English version of the title, ‘Gatlato’ reads as a surname, but actually it is meant as a nickname built on a verbal phrase from colloquial Algerian Arabic. Hence the French version of the film is entitled ‘Omar ellele-tu’ or ‘Omar it-kills-him’, the ‘it’ being manhood. Were the phrase to be transliterated from Modern Standard Arabic, it would read ‘ʿUmar qatalathu al-rujula’. (The version of the Arabic title in the opening sequence, however, differs slightly, presumably reflecting colloquial ­ orthography.) Director Merzak Allouache explains the phrase: [This] refers to a specifically Mediterranean concept, which is to be found in Algiers: this form of machismo, this expression of virility. Here in Algiers we sometimes say that some people are so much a prisoner of this concept that it kills them. And ‘Gatlato’ means ‘it kills him’. What kills the hero, what s­ uffocates him, is virility.3

Although Omar Gatlato was released just one year after Chronicle of the Years of Embers, it could not have a more different take on Algerian manhood. This stems in part from the fact that it is a social satire and not a dramatic epic about the country’s war for liberation. But it also goes back to the primary target of the satire, which is precisely the kind of stifling and o ­ ppressive Ranked #29 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Andrea Khalil, ‘The Myth of Masculinity in the Films of Merzak Allouache’, Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 330.  3 Roy Armes, Omar Gatlato (Trowbridge: Flick Books, 1998), 8.  1  2

Omar Gatlato, Merzak Allouache  109 c­ onstruct of masculinity held up as an ideal by postrevolutionary officialdom. As Sabry Hafez writes, ‘Omar represents a complete break with all that has gone before in Algerian cinema. The linear logic of the narrative is replaced by the logic of recollection and distancing […] There is no mythologising of the character of Omar … His machismo is a sickness […]’4 Allouache has apparently denied that his film represents a complete cinematic break.5 Indeed, the truth of such an assertion can only be substantiated with reference to the country’s previous corpus of films as a whole – a task which is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, given the stark contrast between Omar Gatlato and Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Sabry Hafez could be forgiven for understanding Allouache’s film as groundbreakingly subversive. In his book dedicated to the career of Merzak Allouache, Nabil Boudraa talks of how popular this film was and how it was received as a refreshing change. This was in part due to its irreverent attitude towards the state-dominated cinema whose stories from the war of liberation had begun to get tiresome for the younger generations, but it was also because of the kind of language employed in the film: One of the main reasons for the success of Omar Gatlato is the use of Darja, the dialect which most Algerians use in their daily life. At a time when the Algerian people were accustomed to watching films made in classical Arabic,6 Merzak Allouache’s film was shot almost exclusively in this popular idiom, which guaranteed viewers’ feeling of immediacy to the film. One particularly comic scene shows young men in a movie theatre interrupt a play in classical Arabic and ask the organisers to skip this prelude and start the long-awaited concert by the popular singer Abdelkader Choua.7

Merzak Allouache (b. 1944), who trained in both Algeria and France, resists the veneration of the mujahid generation and portrays it instead as bureaucratic. ‘Macho’ Omar, who hails from the younger generation who came of age after liberation, has a desk job – he works in a government department overseeing the importation and exportation of gold and jewellery. In one of the most humorously satirical scenes in the film, Omar and his colleagues stage a raid on people selling jewellery on the black market. They accost the Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities’, 69. Armes, Omar Gatlato, 18.  6 It would be wrong to suggest that Chronicle of the Years of Embers is delivered in classical Arabic, and yet there are many scenes in that film where high registers of Arabic are used, such as when characters are listening to radio broadcasts and reciting poetry, or when Miloud speaks in rhymed prose.  7 Nabil Boudraa, ‘From Cinema Mujahid to Cinema Jdid: Omar Gatlato and the New Algerian Cinema’, chap. 1 in Algeria on Screen: Society, Politics, and Culture in the Films of Merzak Allouache (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020), 26.  4  5

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Figure 2.2.1  Omar manhandles an elderly, veiled black-market trader (RT 22:53)

Figure 2.2.2  Omar’s friends and colleagues hide behind the newspaper (RT 1:10:20)

illegal traders to the sound of drum rolls. The twist is that the targets of their raid are all middle-aged women dressed in traditional white garb with face veils. In Figure 2.2.1, Omar manhandles one of these women, who is pleading with him to give her jewellery back. This ironic take on the macho stance of Algerian youth instantiates itself throughout the film. In another example, Omar’s colleagues cower, giggling, behind a newspaper (Figure 2.2.2). That this action has symbolic significance is confirmed in the mise-en-scène, as the title of the government daily, al-Mujahid, appears in the centre of the frame. Apart from the impact of sexual segregation on young men, which may be seen as the main theme, the film is also noteworthy for its cinematography, its style of narration and its circularity or cyclicality. In terms of technique, Allouache employs (1) relatively long takes –that is many shots have a long duration, (2) still, as opposed to mobile frames, (3) hand-held cameras and (4) high-key lighting (although some scenes are fairly darkly lit). If Omar Gatlato were a piece of prose fiction, we would describe it as having first-­person narration with an auto-diegetic narrator – meaning the main ­protagonist is the one narrating the story. Armes notes three main outlets for Omar’s narration, namely (1) ‘direct address’ – when Omar looks at the camera and addresses his comments directly to the spectator, (2) ‘voice-over’ – when Omar’s voice is superimposed on the image as he describes his family, his neighbourhood, or his place of work, and (3) ‘inner monologue’ – when Omar articulates his feelings and emotions within the story plane, as happens in the scene where he and his friend get drunk. Armes identifies a shift between Omar as ‘omniscient’ narrator ‘naming, describing and predicting people and events’ and Omar as an ‘obsessively listening’ character who utters ‘self-reflective’ monologues.8 Armes, Omar Gatlato, 14.

 8

Omar Gatlato, Merzak Allouache  111

Figure 2.2.3  Omar combs hair whilst speaking to Salma in a phonebooth (RT 1:12:28)

Figure 2.2.4  Omar combs hair as he waits with Mo for Salma to emerge from her office (RT 1:23:35)

Perhaps what Armes is getting at here is that Omar moves in and out of the story plane; when he is outside the story plane he is all-knowing hence omniscient (not to be confused with third-person narration), and when he is inside the story-plane he is vulnerable. The structure of the plot, as Armes points out, is both ‘chronological’ and ‘circular’.9 Set over nine days,10 events are presented in order, but the rhythm of the daily routine is marked by returns. The most obvious and striking instance of one of these returns involves a shot from the film’s opening (RT 1:00) that recurs at the film’s end (RT 1:29:32). In both scenes, Omar, with a noticeable hole in his sock, puts on his boots to get ready for work. However, it is clear that these two separate events were filmed simultaneously – that is they were only staged once. This can be observed by the exact replication of cigarettes in the ashtray to the left of the frame. It is worth pausing to reflect here that this ‘return’ to a previous shot, and indeed the relationship of any shot with any other, is a function of editing and that therefore some credit should be given to the editor, who is none other than Moufida Tlatli, the director of two films we will analyse later in Part 2 of this book. The film, through its editing and mise-en-scène, repeatedly draws attention to Omar’s vanity. Superficially, he is quite conceited, but as the plot unfolds, we understand that he is also rather insecure. This comes across particularly forcefully in his interactions with Salma. Salma is a young woman with whom he has become enamoured because he has heard her voice on his cassette tape. He gets her phone number from a friend and arranges to meet her outside her office, but in the end, he does not have the courage to go through with it. In both these interactions, when he calls her from a phone booth and when Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16.

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112  North Africa he gazes at her outside her office from across the street, he takes out his comb and styles his hair, emphasising his desire to appear handsome (Figures 2.2.3 and 2.2.4). In this way, Allouache evokes the depths of his sexual frustration. Questions to Consider • How does Omar Gatlato poke fun at the image of the mujahid? What aspects of film technique are involved? • When and how may Omar be described as ‘macho’? • Note instances of direct address and voice-over, two techniques which are associated with documentaries. What is the effect of using such techniques? • Note how Omar moves in and out of the story plane. Which scenes ­featured Omar as ‘narrated’ rather than ‘narrating’ and why? Further Reading Sabry Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Alif 15 (1995): 39–80. Roy Armes, ‘A Fragile Masculinity: Omar Gatlato’, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 105–13. Roy Armes, Omar Gatlato (Trowbridge: Flick Books, 1998). Nabil Boudraa, ‘From Cinema Mujahid to Cinema Jdid: Omar Gatlato and the New Algerian Cinema’, chap. 1 in Algeria on Screen: Society, Politics, and Culture in the Films of Merzak Allouache (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020), 15–34. Will Higbee, ‘Merzak Allouache: (Self-)Censorship, Social Critique, and the Limits of Political Engagement in Contemporary Algerian Cinema (Algeria),’ in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 188–212.

Chapter 2.3

Bab el-Oued City, Merzak Allouache  113

Bab el-Oued City (Bab al-wad siti, 1994)1

When it came to making Bab el-Oued City it’s really a film that I made in fear. It’s a film that I made in the heart of violence … It’s a crazy film because when I wrote it I wrote a story that spoke of violence but I didn’t know that when I would film I would be in the middle of violence. I thought that we would still be at the level of the violence of intolerance. Merzak Allouache2

In his 1994 film Bab el-Oued City, Merzak Allouache returns to the popular quarter of Algiers where Omar Gatlato was set and revisits the themes of youthful masculinity, but one finds that the context in which this masculinity plays out has changed drastically. Whereas, in the 1970s, Omar lives in the shadow of the venerated and bureaucratised freedom-fighting mujahid, associated with the post-revolutionary ruling political party of the National Liberation Front (FLN), in the 1990s the spectre of manhood confronting young people has less to do with secular institutions and more to do with the rise of political Islam or Islamism. In the late 1980s, after decades of one-party rule by the FLN, there were mass protests demanding free and fair elections. The government eventually yielded to popular demands, and, in December 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the first round of elections. The military then stepped in and cancelled the elections, and a brutal armed conflict broke out between the military and several armed groups, such as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), resulting in many deaths. During this conflict, the armed groups sometimes targeted civilians for abduction and assassination (for their political views or activities, or for their lifestyle choices or identities – journalists, foreigners, homosexuals among them), and there were human rights atrocities committed by the security Ranked #94 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Andrea Khalil, ‘Interview with Merzak Allouache’, Journal of North African Studies 10.2 (2005): 151–2.

1 2

114  North Africa forces as well. For this reason, people sometimes refer to the 1990s in Algeria as the ‘Black Decade’. It is against this backdrop of intense cultural war that Bab el-Oued City was shot and produced. Unlike Omar Gatlato, there are two male protagonists, one called Boualem, who may be loosely identified as an advocate of personal liberty, and one called Said, who is the leader of an Islamist gang that police morality in the neighbourhood. At the outset of the film, Boualem, who cannot sleep because of the amplification of a preacher’s sermon through a loudspeaker on his building’s roof, goes up and forcefully disconnects the loudspeaker. A close-up of the loudspeaker and the wire attached to it accentuate the sense of intrusion that Boualem feels. This act, the taking down of the mosque loudspeaker sets the tone of the film, as it antagonises Said and his gang. Andrea Khalil notes that the film situates the two kinds of masculinity that they represent into conflict. She remarks that Said is the ‘hegemonic, or in the vocabulary of Deleuze, the “molar” male who serves as a representation of the Islamic myth of masculinity’, whereas Boualem is ‘associated with flight from ideological determination, personal justice and the visual element of water’.3 Khalil seems to think that Said’s characterisation as ‘the most faithful adherent to a corrupt and intolerant Islam’4 makes him the villain of the movie. She thereby sees Allouache as aligning himself, problematically, with the side of the state in the armed conflict. She explains that ‘in its wholesale rejection of Islam … the film is allied with an official discourse’ and that the film reflects a ‘tacit compliance with the cultural politics of the State’.5 In my opinion, this is somewhat unfair; what the film rejects is a certain rigid interpretation of Islamic doctrine, not Islam itself. As Merzak Allouache himself states, in an interview with Khalil, his portrayal of Muslims is not limited to Said and his gang: When I present Algerians, I present Algerian characters who are normal and sympathetic, which means they are Muslims. They don’t have it written across their forehead that they’re Muslims, but I present normal people who speak normally and like to laugh. For that is how you present a society that is not ‘black’, violent and serious, which is also presenting Islam. I do not know what that means moderate Islam.6

‘The Myth of Masculinity in the films of Merzak Allouache’, Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 338. 4 Ibid, 338. 5 Ibid., 340. 6 Andrea Khalil, ‘Interview with Merzak Allouache’, Journal of North African Studies 10, no. 2 (2005): 154. 3

Bab el-Oued City, Merzak Allouache  115

Figure 2.3.1  Said applies to kohl to his eyes (RT 06:13)

Indeed, there is a way of reading Said as a tragic character with a vulnerable side. Moreover, we can read the combined representations of Boualem and Said as a tragic personality split harking back to Omar’s machismo. Whereas Boualem inherits Omar’s predilection for music and interaction with the opposite sex – his infatuation with the voice of Salma – Said inherits his fear and revulsion. The comparison between Said and Omar is made early on in the film, I would suggest, when Said first appears on screen. He is looking into the mirror, applying kohl to his eyes (Figure 2.3.1). His primary concern, this would suggest, is how attractive he looks. Like Omar with his fashion boots and comb, Said is vain. Although Nabil Boudraa links the practice of men applying kohl to their eyes with Islamist militancy, situating Said as an associate of Algerians who had returned from Afghanistan having fought alongside the Taliban against the Soviet invasion and picked up this custom of male grooming,7 it still evokes a young man who cares first and foremost about his appearance. In my view, this vanity bespeaks a certain vulnerability. Said’s bullying behaviours can be seen to be motivated by insecurity, in much the same way that insecurity motivates Omar when he roughs up the middle-aged and elderly female jewellery sellers. Moreover, the way Said is positioned Nabil Boudra, ‘The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism and the Subsequent Whirlwind of Violence’, chap. 2 in Algeria on Screen: Society, Politics, and Culture in the Films of Merzak Allouache (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020), 41.

7

116  North Africa with respect to the larger Algerian civil war, a position which is defined by his interactions with two mysterious men driving through the streets in a luxurious vehicle, shows him to be a figure manipulated by more powerful and sinister forces. Indeed, the film is punctuated by shots of long duration taken from the back seat of the vehicle, showing the driver and the passenger in silhouette, and accompanied by silence, apart from the eerie hum of the car’s engine (Figure 2.3.2). Moreover, Said’s disappearance at the end of the film, probably at the hands of these mysterious characters, implies that he is a victim of the conflict. In one last effort to rebut Khalil’s assertion that the film represents a ‘wholesale rejection’ of Islam, I would like to refer to a specific shot that occurs towards the end of the film. In Figure 2.3.3, the neighbourhood Islamists are on the roof of Boualem’s apartment building about to install a loudspeaker for the local mosque to replace the one that was ripped off by Boualem at the beginning of the film. A striking visual comparison is made between the loudspeaker, as circular form of technology, and the massive satellite dish that dominates the space. The ‘threat’ or the ‘nuisance’ imposed by the loudspeaker, and by extension Islam and/or Islamism, is miniscule compared to that of the satellite dish, which must in some sense represent the forces of mostly ‘secular’ globalisation and perhaps the cultural hold of France.

Figure 2.3.2  One of a series of shots taken from inside a car with mysteriously threatening characters (RT circa 30:00)

Bab el-Oued City, Merzak Allouache  117

Figure 2.3.3  A satellite dish dominates the roof of a building where Said and his gang are installing a loudspeaker (RT 1:18:31)

Before concluding this chapter, I would like to mention the soundtrack and the prevalence of Rai music therein. Rai music, a fusion of urban Algerian folk and various forms of international pop, originated in early twentieth century Oran, flourished in the 1970s and 1980s with electronic keyboard and cassette culture, and achieved international success in the 1990s. It is closely associated with Algerian youth culture and may represent a foil to Said’s Islamism. Questions to Consider • Who is the ‘hero’ of the film? If we say that there are two, Boualem and Said, are they weighted equally in terms of screen time, character development, and identification? • If Said represents the ‘fundamentalist’ tendency, what tendency does Boualem represent? • Note the subplot that features an elderly blind French woman being given a tour of the city by a middle-aged man. She is presumably a former settler on a literal nostalgia trip. Wherever the man takes her, he describes the surroundings, emphasising that they are exactly how she remembers them, namely beautiful. What is the function of the blind French woman and her escort? • Does Bab el-Oued City, like Omar Gatlato, consist of a cyclical narrative? If so, how?

118  North Africa Further Reading Sabry Hafez, ‘Shifting Identities in Maghribi Cinema: The Algerian Paradigm’, Alif 15 (1995): 39–80. Andrea Khalil, ‘Interview with Merzak Allouache’, Journal of North African Studies 10, no. 2 (2005): 143–56. Andrea Khalil, ‘The Myth of Masculinity in the films of Merzak Allouache’, Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 329–45. Nabil Boudraa, ‘The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism and the Subsequent Whirlwind of Violence’, chap. 2 in Algeria on Screen: Society, Politics, and Culture in the Films of Merzak Allouache (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020), 35–70. Marc Schade-Poulsen, Men and Popular Music in Algeria: The Social Significance of Raï (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). Will Higbee, ‘Merzak Allouache: (Self-)Censorship, Social Critique, and the Limits of Political Engagement in Contemporary Algerian Cinema (Algeria)’, in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 188–212.

Chapter 2.4

Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli  119

Silences of the Palace (Samt al-qusur, 1994)1

Silences of the Palace may be considered the magnum opus of prominent Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli (1947–2021), who graduated from a film school in France in 1968 before embarking on a successful career as a film editor throughout the Arab world. Among the films she edited are Merzak Alloache’s Omar Gatlato (Algeria, 1976), the subject of Chapter 2.2 of this section, as well as Farida Benlyazid’s Door to the Sky (Morocco, 1989) and Michel Khleifi’s Canticle of the Stones (Palestine, 1990). She also edited films directed by fellow Tunisians including Nacer Khemir’s Wanderers of the Desert (1986) and Ferid Boughedir’s Halfaouine (1990). She then tried her hand at directing, making three feature films: Silences of the Palace (1994), The Season of Men (2000) and Nadia and Sarra (2003). In 2011, she was appointed Tunisian Minister of Culture in the transitional government. Roy Armes states that ‘there are two keys to an understanding how Silences of the Palace works’ and that they are melodrama and spatial organisation.2 To these I would add temporal organisation. The melodramatic aspect comes from an excess of emotion, particularly the sadness and despair borne of victimisation. The spatial organisation creates a series of binary oppositions between the ‘haves’, who inhabit the upstairs, and the ‘havenots’, who are based in the downstairs of the palace, notably its kitchen. See Table 2.4.1. Whilst there is a degree of interpenetration between ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’, and whilst there are also outside spaces where the two worlds interact, the divisions are fairly strict. As for the temporal organisation, the film has two diegetic planes: in the frame story, which is set in the 1960s, the adult version of the protagonist Alia visits the abandoned palace Ranked #5 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Note that the original Arabic title translates as ‘silence’(singular) of the ‘palaces’ (plural). 2 Armes, Postcolonial Images, 162. 1

120  North Africa Table 2.4.1  Spatial division in Silences of the Palace Upstairs

Downstairs

Masters Men (and their wives) Europeanised Rest and relaxation

Servants Women Native Labour

where she grew up and experiences a series of flashbacks to her adolescence in the 1950s, when she comes of age, when her mother agonises over her daughter’s coming of age, and when Tunisia gains its independence from France. Cycles of life are also evoked in that whilst in the frame story Alia is pregnant with a baby she plans to name after her mother Khedija, in the flashbacks to the main storyline Khedija gives birth to Alia and then towards the end of the film has an induced miscarriage and dies. See Table 2.4.2. Given that Moufida Tlatli began her career as a film editor, it is worth noting the editorial principles that inform Silences of the Palace. Like Omar Gatlato, we find that the film has a circular or cyclical structure in that the film keeps returning to previous shots. Shots are sometimes nearly identical to previous shots, and yet key differences in the staging and context create meaningful developments in the plot. In Figures 2.4.1 and 2.4.2, for example, we see the same shot of a person peering through a window. The first shot is of Khedija, Alia’s mother, watching her daughter play the oud. The second is of Si Ali, who again is watching Alia play the oud – but this time she is also singing. The repetition of this shot thus relates to the storyline in two significant ways. First, the way that Si Ali takes the place of Khedija, Alia’s mother, is perhaps the strongest visual indicator that Si Ali is, in fact, Alia’s father, which is the unspoken truth of the palace. Second, the fact that Alia is singing during the recurrence of the shot and that the person watching her is a man reinforces the development of Alia as an entertainer and the anxieties Khedija feels about Alia entertaining for the beys upstairs and falling into the trap of sexual servitude. As the music that Alia performs becomes more beautiful, the protective gaze of her mother is replaced by the still Table 2.4.2  Temporal framework of Silences of the Palace 1950s

1960s

Alia’s birth and adolescence Tunisia on brink of 1956 independence Cultural past Khedija’s miscarriage and death

Alia’s adulthood Post-independence Tunisia Cultural future Alia’s pregnancy

Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli  121

Figure 2.4.1  Khedija watches Alia play the oud through a window (RT 27:36)

Figure 2.4.2  Si Ali watches Alia play the oud and sing through the same window (RT 46:10)

affectionate but potentially predatory gaze of her unacknowledged father. Indeed, this pattern of repetition and degradation has been identified as a compositional principle of the film.3 Another, more complex example of this pattern of repetition and degradation may be found in a trio of interrelated shots that occur later in the film. In the first, Figure 2.4.3, we see a distressed Alia lying in bed as her mother is being raped by Si Beshir in an adjacent room. In the second, Figure 2.4.4, which occurs in the same scene, Alia has an out-of-body experience and runs toward the palace gate, emitting a silent scream. Note the similarities of the two shots. In each, Alia’s face appears in the centre of a dark, shadowy frame. In each her face is constricted, by her hands in the first and by the bars in the second. In both her hands appear at the side of her face, although they are clutching at the bars in the second. If, in the first shot, she is internalising her anguish, controlling it, suppressing it, in the second shot she is letting it out in a scream that we see but we do not hear. Now consider Figure 2.4.5 and note how it relates to the two previous shots. Like 2.4.3, it is an overhead shot of a person lying on a bed with the sheets clearly visible behind her. Also like 2.4.3, the person’s eyes are closed. However, like 2.4.4, the person in 2.4.5 is visibly screaming with her mouth wide open. The visual similarities in the mise-en-scène are also connected through the plot. As Khedija screams, she is dying as well as miscarrying the pregnancy resulting from the rape that is occurring offscreen in Figures 2.4.3 and 2.4.4. Whilst Khedija’s face in Figure 2.4.5 returns to these earlier shots of Alia’s face, it also represents a return to an earlier shot of her own face, and the scream that Khedija lets out when she is giving birth to Alia (RT 15:03). In this final case it is the Jacqueline Nacache, ‘Les Silences du palais: un film de Moufida TLATLI’, Lycéens au cinéma (Paris: CNC/BIFI, n.d.)

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122  North Africa

Figure 2.4.3  Closeup of Alia’s face as she hears her mother’s rape (RT 1:03:46)

Figure 2.4.4  Alia screams silently at the mansion’s gate (RT 1:04:02)

Figure 2.4.5  Khedija screams as she dies from an induced miscarriage (RT 1:56:32)

e­ xpression on the face of the actress, as well as the parallels in the plot of giving birth/­miscarrying, that link the stills from the two scenes. No discussion of the film would be complete without reference to its music. Tunisian composer Anouar Brahem (b. 1957) was responsible for the soundtrack of the film, which had a successful international release on compact disc.4 It features a combination of mainstream popular songs, such as two originally sung by Umm Kulthum, folkloric ballads and anthems, and classical Andalusi Arabic music. One of the Umm Kulthum songs, namely ‘Ghanni li Shwayya Shwayya’, or ‘Sing to me Little by Little’, was composed by Zakariya Ahmad for the 1945 Egyptian film Sallama, directed by Togo Mizrahi, in which Umm Kulthum plays an enslaved singer from the Umayyad Era. Alia sings this song during the concert at the end of Silences of the Palace before she interrupts it to sing a nationalist ballad instead. As she abandons her singing slave-girl identity to promote national liberation, the audience consisting of the beys and their wives file out of the room. All of this takes place against the backdrop of Tunisian independence and Khedija’s miscarriage and death. Questions to Consider • • • •

How does the film’s narrative construct time? How does the film’s narrative construct space? Notice the editing, or the relationship of one shot to another. Notice patterns of repetition and degradation. For example, each time Khedija descends the staircase, her situation is worse than the time before. Look out for this and other instances of the pattern.

The Silences of the Palace: A Film by Moufida Tlatli (Caroline Records/Virgin France S.A./ MAT films, 1994).

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Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli  123 Further Reading Roy Armes, ‘A New Future Begins: Silences of the Palace’, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 159–68. Robert Lang, ‘The Colonizer and the Colonized: Silences of the Palace’, chap. 5 in New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 123–56. Jacqueline Nacache, ‘Les Silences du palais: un film de Moufida TLATLI’, Lycéens au cinema (Paris: CNC/BIFI, n.d.) Lindsey Moore, ‘Melancholia in the Maghreb’, chap. 3 in Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (London: Routledge, 2008), 77–100.

124  North2.5 Chapter Africa

Season of Men (Mawsim al-rijal, 2000)

If Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace (1994) calls for the dismantling of the patriarchy by exposing all its abuses of power, particularly as they relate to the subjugation of women, her subsequent film, Season of Men (2000), does the same to the matriarchy. Whereas Silences of the Palace highlights the dangers of the predatory male gaze, Season of Men provides a blistering analysis of the complicity of women in the functioning of the patriarchy, in what might be termed the matriarchy holding up the patriarchy. Whilst Tunisia is known for its enshrinement of women’s rights through its liberal personal status code – to the extent that, according to Emma Murphy, ‘Tunisia has one of the most progressive legal codes in the developing world as far as women’s rights are concerned, providing equality of the sexes in nearly all spheres’1 – Tlatli is determined to demonstrate that society is nowhere near as progressive as the law. Throughout her drama, which is set on the island of Djerba, and which focuses on households of women whose husbands abandon them to go work in Tunis for most of the year, returning for one month dubbed ‘the season of men’, Tlatli makes references to the various rights that are in theory available to women but which, in their actual lives, they are unable to maintain or access. Masculine privilege, or the preference for boys over girls, also serves as a central theme. Aicha, the lead protagonist, is unhappy being separated from her husband most of the year, but he makes her giving birth to a son a precondition for her joining him in Tunis. The right to work, the right to education, the right to divorce, and reproductive rights are all addressed in the plot and script (Table 2.5.1). One finds that what gets in the way of the women accessing these freedoms, is not primarily men, but rather other women. The matriarch, the protagonist Aicha’s See Emma Murphy, ‘Women in Tunisia: A Survey of Achievements and Challenges’, Journal of North African Studies 1, no. 2 (1996): 138.

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Season of Men, Moufida Tlatli  125 Table 2.5.1  Undermining of women’s rights in Season of Men Right to education

After Mariam is assaulted on the way home from school one afternoon, the matriarch, Mariam’s grandmother, tries to stop her from pursuing her education

Right to work

There are repeated references to the obstacles put in the way of Aicha’s career as a carpet weaver. Her husband will not let her be involved in the selling of the carpets, and her mother-in-law, the matriarch undermines their production

Right to divorce

Several characters are trapped in unhappy or failed marriages

Reproductive rights

When Aicha has declared that she is happy with her two daughters, and when her mother asks Aicha if she is taking any steps to prevent another pregnancy, Aicha says, ‘Stop’

mother-in-law, wants to prevent Aicha from working as a carpet-weaver, and in one scene she goes so far as to cut up Aicha’s loom (Figure 2.5.1). Whilst the character of the mother-in-law, or the husband’s mother, is excessively powerful in the community, and, as such, interferes with many rights, the female protagonists are also shown to interfere with their own rights. At one point in the film (RT circa 59:00), Aicha converses with her mother and sister-in-law. Aicha tells her mother she is happy with her two daughters and does not wish to keep trying for a boy. Her mother asks her if she is doing anything to prevent a pregnancy. Aicha is horrified that her mother would even ask and tells her to ‘stop’. Meanwhile her sister-in-law stands up and

Figure 2.5.1  Mother-in-law sabotages Aicha’s loom (RT 1:09:18)

126  North Africa moves away from the table as if the topic makes her uncomfortable. Although Aicha declares that she does not want any more children, she is unwilling to take advantage of contraceptives, which is her reproductive right. In this way Season of Men challenges and deconstructs the man/woman and oppressor/ oppressed binaries we find in Silences of the Palace. Whilst the film highlights the ways in which women undermine other women and themselves, men do not get off scot-free. In one scene it is intimated that the elderly patriarch who lives in the household with the women has sexually abused at least one of his granddaughters. Moreover, there is another scene with an attempted sexual assault. As Mariam and Emna, Aicha’s adolescent daughters, walk home from school, they explore some ruins and get separated. A young man comes up and tries to attack Mariam, but another young man comes to her rescue and chases him away. Whilst this assault is traumatic for Mariam, what happens to her at the hands of her grandmother in its wake is shown to be more brutal and upsetting than the assault itself. Mariam is forced to undergo a virginity check. As her grandmother holds her down and an adult female servant examines her between her legs, Mariam screams and cries. This is an especially severe condemnation of women’s complicity in patriarchy. Each assault involves a trio. In the case of the first assault, we have a female victim, a male perpetrator, and another male who foils the perpetrator. In the second assault, we have a female victim, whilst two other women conspire in their perpetration of what Mariam perceives of as an attack. (See Figures 2.5.2 and 2.5.3.) Despite the representation of sexual assault and the implicit allusion to molestation, the sense of touch is depicted as a positive force, and the desire to be touched is portrayed almost as a right. Aicha’s sister-in-law Zeineb, who is starved of touch after having been abandoned by her husband who

Figure 2.5.2  A young man attempts to assault Mariam (RT 1:04:19)

Figure 2.5.3  Mariam’s grandmother and a servant subject her to a virginity check (RT 1:06:22)

Season of Men, Moufida Tlatli  127 travelled to France after their wedding day and never came back, has several scenes where she longs for human affection. Allowing herself to be touched, first by a doctor and later by a love interest, enables her to find some peace. There is also a scene where Zeineb massages Aicha’s neck and asks Aicha if she ‘remembers’. The spectator is not told what there is to remember, but given the sensual encounter between the two women, there is a suggestion of homoeroticism here. Whilst it is true that Zeinab is the most touch-deprived, all the women of Aicha’s generation are shown to be sexually frustrated due to the absence of their husbands most of the year. Sexual frustration is not limited to one character, in other words, but is all-pervasive. We see this also with Aicha. For example, when she takes her daughters to their teacher’s house for some after-school lessons, she finds herself occupying her time in his living quarters and tidying his bed. That she feels some sort of attraction for the teacher becomes apparent, when she looks into the mirror and touches her face (RT 1:21:25). Like Silences of the Palace, events in Season of Men unfold in two timeframes. In the frame story, which would appear to be contemporary with the film’s making but which offers no overt clues as to the time setting, Aicha, her two grown daughters, Mariam and Emna, and her young son leave Tunis for the house in Djerba as Aicha wants to relocate back there with her son. Her son, whose birth was her husband’s precondition for Aicha to move from Djerba to Tunis to begin with, has autism, and Aicha believes he will be happier in Djerba. On Djerba, they discover that he has a gift for carpetweaving and that the activity settles him. While they are there, each of the two daughters comes to terms with their relationships with men. Mariam is in a happy marriage in the sense that she has a kind, loving husband, but she suffers from migraines and sexual anxieties that prevent her from enjoying him. Meanwhile, Emna, who is played by Hind Sabry – the same actress who plays the young Alia in Silences of the Palace – is a violinist having an affair with her older, married conductor. Their dilemmas and their anxieties are shown, through flashbacks, to be the logical consequences of their ­childhood in the Djerban matriarchy. Questions to Consider • Listen for references to women’s rights in the script. How does the film demonstrate that they are there in theory but not in practice? • How are rights’ violations staged? The matriarch cutting up the loom in Figure 2.5.1 is an obvious reference to the violation of Aicha’s right to work. Can you find other examples where the theme is explored visually?

128  North Africa • How does the film evoke the sense of touch? What do we as spectators see and hear when touching happens in the film? What are some of the objects of touch? Further Reading Nouri Gana, ‘Bourguiba’s Sons: Melancholy Manhood in Modern Tunisian Cinema’, Journal of North African Studies 15, no. 1 (2010): 105–26. Emma C. Murphy, ‘Women in Tunisia: A Survey of Achievements and Challenges’, Journal of North African Studies 1, no. 2 (1996): 138–56. Rebecca Hillauer, ‘Tlatli, Moufida (1947–)’, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 401–13.

Chapter 2.6Waiting for Happiness, Abderrahmane Sissako 

129

Waiting for Happiness (Heremakono, 2002)1

Nouadhibou is a transfer point […] It is home to the world’s largest ship graveyard; serves as the port for the export of iron ore […]; and, in recent years, has become a departure point for immigrants seeking to reach the Canary Islands. It lies on the Eastern Coast of the Cabo Blanco peninsular or Ras Nouadhibou which is divided between Mauritania and Western Sahara. However, unlike the rest of Western Saharan territory, the sliver of land on the western side of the peninsular is administered neither by Polisario nor Morocco but by Mauritania, while the now abandoned Sahrawi town of La Guera, cut off from the rest of Moroccan-occupied coastal Western Sahara by the wall and accompanying minefield, is deserted. Chris Lippard2

Of all the films discussed in this volume, Waiting for Happiness is one of only two films featured in this book that overtly challenge the North Africa/subSaharan Africa divide and that situate Arabic-speaking ethnic groups with respect to black African identities. The film is set in Nouadhibou, a city in Mauritania, a country which belongs to the Arab League and which counts a sizeable population of Arab-Berbers among its ethnic groups. The main language spoken in the film is Hassaniyya, a dialect of Arabic. More importantly, perhaps, its director, Abderrahmane Sissako, is Mauritanian on his mother’s side. In all these ways it counts as an Arab film and, indeed, it was received as such by film critics in the Arab world, who voted it among the top 100 Arab films of all time. And yet the title of the film, Heremakono, which means ‘Waiting for Happiness’,3 is a word in Bambara, not Arabic, and it Ranked #87 (tied) in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Chris Lippard, ‘Mobilities of Cinematic Identity in the Western Sahara’, in Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard (eds), Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer Nature, 2020), 182.  3 Thérèse de Raedt, ‘The Beach as Liminal Site in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono,’ in Sophie Fuggle and Nicholas Gledhill (eds), La Ligne d’écume: Encountering the French Beach (London: Pavement, 2016), 196.  1  2

130  North Africa refers to a placename in Mali,4 not Mauritania. There is also a sense in which the director, through the autobiographical character Abdallah, expresses his estrangement from the local community, or at least that part of the local community, which is situated as his family, and identifies more with outsiders, even as the portrayal of his community is an affectionate one. Most emblematic of this is the fact that he does not speak Hassaniyya. Waiting for Happiness, which was largely unscripted and employed nonprofessional actors, does not have much of a plot. Instead, what one finds is a series of interconnected character-based scenarios with back-stories and future stories which mostly revolve around travel and migration. One strand of the plot is autobiographical and is centred on Abdallah, a young man who has come to be with his mother while he renews his passport on his way elsewhere. Abdallah’s situation parallels one that director Abderrahmane Sissako had experienced as a young man. Having been born in Mauritania in 1961, Sissako was raised in Mali, but he spent time in Nouadhibou with his mother in 1980 before heading to Moscow to study film. From this autobiographical premise, Sissako builds a fictional character. Indeed, in some ways Abdallah’s character is the most fictional in the film, as he is not named after the actor who plays him. As Thérèse de Raedt observes: It is worth noting that unlike the other characters in the film, Abdallah did not keep his name (i.e. Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed) but instead became Abdallah but not Abderrahmane, like the director. This detail might indicate that the director sought to create a fictional figure, who resembles him.5

One of the ‘true’ or ‘autobiographical’ elements in Abdallah’s story would seem to be that, during Sissako’s time in Nouadhibou, he shared a room with his mother that featured a low window and that he spent a lot of time gazing through this window. Such a window makes for an integral part of the film set. As Sissako himself stated in an interview: ‘this window is the fundamental element of my film. It is the place where I reconnected with my mother, it is the place where my imagination took off, it is from there that I became a filmmaker’.6 This window frames much of what Abdallah sees, as he does not like to leave his room, where the window serves as the only source of light. Through it he watches the feet of passers-by, It is mentioned in the script as a place near the hometown of Mickaël, the Malian trying to emigrate to Europe.  5 Thérèse de Raedt, ‘The Beach as Liminal Site in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono’, 195, note 10.  6 Osange Silou, ‘Abderrahmane Sissako: Filmer n’est pas un bonheur’, in Cinémas africains: une oasis dans le desert?, CinémAction 106 (2003): 92, as cited in Thérèse de Raedt, ‘The Beach as Liminal Site in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono’, 198. Translation from the French by de Raedt.  4

Waiting for Happiness, Abderrahmane Sissako  131

Figure 2.6.1  The low window that serves as Abdallah’s screen onto the outside world (RT 11:33)

Figure 2.6.2  Television set serving as window onto France (RT 24:36)

e­ specially those of the clients of Nana, who works as a prostitute. Abdallah comes to recognise her clients by their shoes, which they leave outside her door. That this window serves as a screen within a screen is emphasised when we watch a television being pulled along the street by a donkey cart (Figure 2.6.1). The juxtaposition of ancient and modern technologies encapsulates Abdallah’s experience as a visitor and voyeur in Nouadhibou. The window serves as a site where Mauritanian culture plays out before Abdallah’s eyes. Later on in the film, when Abdallah goes to visit a relative (whom we as spectators never see), he finds himself sitting in a parlour when a television serves as a kind of window onto France. In Figure 2.6.2, we see the beginning of a French gameshow resembling Channel 4’s ‘Countdown’. It is interesting to note that whereas the television in the first still is framed by a window, here in this sitting room the television is framed by fabric, as it is situated on a tablecloth and is topped by another piece of fabric. Here, too, we are faced with a kind of juxtaposition of modern European technology and traditional craft. Like the low window, fabric plays a meaningful role in the mise-en-scène and comes to define certain spaces, making them colourful and sometimes obscuring the camera’s vision. Much of the action takes place beneath or behind pieces of cloth that flutter in the wind. In one hilarious shot, we see Abdallah dressed in a snazzy outfit tailored from the same fabric as the curtains in a relative’s sitting room (Figure 2.6.3). The artificiality of his immersion into the local background embarrasses him. Even in his ultimate conformity, he sticks out like a sore thumb.7 Although the film offers an affectionate portrayal of the community in Nouadhibou, it also alludes to the local society’s racial and ethnic Maji-Da Abdi, an Ethiopian filmmaker who worked as a producer and costume designer on the film, probably deserves a lot of credit for the function of fabric in the film.

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132  North Africa

Figure 2.6.3  Abdallah finds himself in a peculiar position (RT 40:43)

i­nequalities. It is not my intention here to describe or explain Mauritania’s complex ethnic make-up and caste system, suffice it to say that although slavery has been abolished in the country, forms of modern slavery exploiting Black Moor and Afro-Mauritanian communities persist.8 Sissako does not present ethnicities in any kind of systematic way, and he certainly does not inform his viewer which character comes from what group, but there are subtle hints that Abdallah belongs to a privileged minority but that he feels alienated from that minority and identifies more with the exploited majority. This comes through especially in his relationship with Nana, the prostitute. She, like Abdallah, is a French-speaker, and one of the few locals with whom Abdallah engages in conversation. She is black, but many of her clients are not. That Nana is the victim not only of sexual exploitation but of racism is further reinforced by her back story, which is of a love affair with a white Frenchman. A flashback sequence in which Nana travels to Paris to inform him of their daughter’s death – to which the man seems indifferent – represents him via his feet, thereby equating him with her clients. Running parallel to the story of Abdallah is the story of Mickaël. Mickaël, like Sissako’s father, and like Sissako, comes from Mali. Like Abdallah, he Human Rights Watch has reported on this as recently as 2020. See their World Report 2021: Events of 2020, 449, accessed 6 June 2023, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ media_2021/01/2021_hrw_world_report.pdf.

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Waiting for Happiness, Abderrahmane Sissako  133

Figure 2.6.4  Police carry Mickaël on stretcher (RT 48:09)

Figure 2.6.5  Officer gazes at photo of Mickaël with friend posing in front of image of Eiffel Tower (RT 49:43)

is stopping over in Nouadhibou on his way to Europe. Unlike Abdallah, he does not have the papers to get there legally and he attempts a sea crossing, only for his body to later wash ashore. Mickaël’s story is tragic and brutal and is meant to show the inherent injustice in the fact that some people have a right to travel and some people do not. Chris Lippard states that ‘Sissako is careful not to aestheticize Michael’s death’.9 I disagree. To me, Mickaël’s death is the most meaningful and politically charged moment in the film, and this can only be emphasised and highlighted through aesthetically informed choices. Whilst the first shot we see of Mickaël’s corpse is not particularly beautiful, subsequent shots are. When we first see Mickaël’s body (RT 47:12), we see the legs of policemen around him and the sound of a camera clicking. This sound of the camera is reminiscent of an earlier scene in which Mickaël and his friend get their picture taken against the backdrop of a poster of the Eiffel Tower. Police later discover that photo and gaze at it over the corpse (Figure 2.6.5). Mickaël’s dream and his reality are thus captured in one shot. Meanwhile there are other shots of the policemen carrying the body on the stretcher against the beautiful setting of the beach (Figure 2.6.4). Another shot shows Mickaël’s corpse being lifted onto a jeep is taken from behind a sheer curtain (RT 50:35). This is the point of view of Makan, Mickaël’s friend, who has announced that he does not wish to identify the body. In an interview included as a special feature on the DVD, Sissako expounds at some length about the meaning of Mickaël’s death: [09:21] It’s really the rejection of the other, the closure of a rich and powerful world. A world which becomes increasingly proud and closes itself to the other. Chris Lippard, ‘Mobilities of Cinematic Identity in the Western Sahara’, 183. Note that the spelling of Mickaël’s name, which is to be found in the credits, did not match the subtitles, where it is rendered ‘Michael’.

 9

134  North Africa For me that is the symbol of the body washed ashore. You close yourself against the one who is weak. And when this person comes from the South, you forget that the story of humanity is made up of encounters. No humanity has created itself alone. It’s all been about travels and encounters. It’s like denying a whole population the desire to travel. The desire to travel is the nature of man. And not just in economic terms. Man needs to be able to leave and travel if he so desires. That’s the reality of the world today. It is entirely unjust. […] A young Englishman or a young Frenchman can take a plane and travel to Zanzibar or Burkina Faso. But the other way around it’s not possible.10 [10:50]

Questions to Consider • Note the function of the low window as a screen within a screen. What appears through the window? How does it serve as a mediator of Abdallah’s experiences? • Note the use of fabric in the mise-en-scène. Sometimes it, too, serves as a screen. • Consider the theme of travel and migration. Where have the characters been? Where are they going? • How do the narrative threads intersect? What, if anything, links Mickaël to Abdallah? • How central is the young boy Khatra to the narrative? Whose perspective dominates – his or Abdallah’s? Note the use of point of view constructions. Further Reading Roy Armes, ‘Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania)’, in African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 191–200. Rachel Gabara, ‘Abderrahmane Sissako: Second and Third Cinema in the First Person’, in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 320–33. Michael Gott, ‘The Slow Road to Europe: The Politics and Aesthetics of Stalled Mobility in Hermakono [sic] and Morgen’, in Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 299–311. Thérèse de Raedt, ‘The Beach as Liminal Site in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono,’ in Sophie Fuggle and Nicholas Gledhill (eds), La Ligne d’écume: Encountering the French Beach (London: Pavement, 2016), 193–215. Lindiwe Dovey, ‘Subjects of Exile: Alienation in Francophone West African Cinema’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 12, no. 1 (2009): 55–75.

Interview with Abderrahmane Sissako, Waiting for Happiness, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, DVD, Artificial Eye, 2002. Running time 9:21–10:50.

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Chapter 2.7

A Thousand Months, Faouzi Bensaidi  135

A Thousand Months (Alf shahr, 2003)1

In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy We sent it down on the Night of Glory. What will explain to you what that Night of Glory is? The Night of Glory is better than a thousand months; on that night the angels and the Spirit descend again and again with their Lord’s ­permission on every task; [there is] peace that night until the break of dawn. - Quran 972

Faouzi Bensaidi, the director of A Thousand Months, was born 1967. He studied acting in Rabat and then drama and filmmaking in Paris, where he is still sometimes based. His directing career began with critical acclaim: A Thousand Months, which was his first feature film, won an award in the ‘Un certain regard’ section at the Cannes Film Festival. He has also worked as an actor in a number of successful films, including Mektoub (Nabil Ayouch, 1997), Braids (Jillali Ferhati, 1999) and The Wind Horse (Daoud Aoulad Syad 2001) as well as his own films. Since A Thousand Months, he has gone on to direct three other feature films: WWW: What a Wonderful World (2006), Death for Sale (2011) and Volubilis (2017). Roy Armes has described several aspects of Bensaidi’s style in A Thousand Months that help to create what the filmmaker calls a ‘powerless gaze’.3 First, he often uses very long shots in which the focus of activity occurs in the extreme distance; hence the spectator must work very hard to make out what is happening. Second, takes are lengthy and the camera is often fixed. Bensaidi does not necessarily follow his characters through space but rather lets them move in and out of shots. Indeed, the rhythm of the film is less a matter of the relation of one shot to the next and more a function of Ranked #64 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), The Qur’an, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 429. 3 Roy Armes, ‘Faouzi Bensaidi’, in African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 183–90. See, especially, 184–6. 1 2

136  North Africa how people, things and sources of light move in and out of the frame. Third, many key events occur offscreen; they are not shown at all, and the spectator must infer that they have happened. Finally, the polyphonic nature of the narrative, or its inclusion of multiple plotlines featuring many protagonists’ stories, confuses the spectator, as Bensaidi leaves few clues as to which of the things that appear onscreen are crucial to the narrative and which are not. One thing which is relatively clear and straightforward is the setting. Events unfold in a village in the Atlas Mountains during Ramadan of 1981. This setting of the film in spiritual time, a time which is cyclical, returning every year, is referenced in the film’s title. For Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Destiny or the Night of Glory, a night in Ramadan – specifically the night on which the Quran was first revealed to Muhammad – is ‘better than a thousand months’ (Quran 97:3). This Sura of the Quran is also quoted in the script by the grandfather of Mehdi, the young protagonist. Thus, we are situated at a specific moment of the Islamic calendar, on the one hand, and in historical secular time, the Christian year of 1981 on the other. The precise significance of 1981 is unknown to me; however, given the themes of political dissidence, it is worth noting that the year falls within the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ (les années de plomb), which is a term designating the repression that occurred under the reign of King Hassan II (1961–99), associated with human rights abuses such as torture and disappearances. According to Valérie K. Orlando, after 1999 there was a wave of Moroccan ‘social realist’ films retrospectively documenting the abuses of the ‘Years of Lead’ and taking advantage of the less repressive atmosphere to critique social or political ills that were formerly ‘off-limits’.4 Indeed, given its references to political protests, political imprisonment and police beatings, A Thousand Months may be seen as part of this wave. Bensaidi frustrates the gaze of the spectator from the very beginning of the film, where we have a severely delayed point of view structure. If, as Edward Branigan explains, a point of view structure is typically distributed between two shots, with one shot (Shot A) establishing a ‘glance’ from a point in space and another shot (Shot B) revealing the object of that glance,5 at the opening of A Thousand Months, we have a succession of shots establishing multiple glances (shots A [Figure 2.7.1], B, C, D, and E) from similar points in space, followed by a glance-less shot (shot F) depicting the same point in space, followed by a shot (shot G) depicting a different point of space, before Valérie K. Orlando, ‘Prison, Torture, and Testimony: Retelling the Memories of the Lead Years’, chap. 4 in Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), 101–21. 5 Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), 103. 4

A Thousand Months, Faouzi Bensaidi  137 Table 2.7.1  Opening point of view structure in A Thousand Months Shot A (Figure 2.7.1) 0:47

Two women, standing on a hillside, stare up and to the right of the frame

Shot B 0:57

Three men on the same hillside gaze in a similar direction

Shot C 1:04

A young man dressed in a pullover and jacket, standing amidst other people on the hillside, gazes in the same direction

Shot D 1:10

A whole crowd stands on the hillside, staring at the same point. Far in the distance, a man at the top of the hill shouts, ‘I see it’ and gestures

Shot E 1:28

The young protagonist Mehdi and his mother, Amina, stand on the hillside looking at the object. A blind man stands behind them. Mehdi walks up the hill, carrying a chair. Amina closes her eyes

Shot F 1:46

Crowd, having turned around, walks up the hill. Amina and the blind man stand in their original positions, Amina with her eyes closed

Shot G 2:04

Crowd walks down the far side of the hill. Amina goes after Mehdi

Figure 2.7.1  Women on hill establish a gaze (Shot A, RT 0:47)

Figure 2.7.2  Blind man’s gaze guided to the moon (Shot H, RT 2:12)

we finally arrive at a shot (shot H [Figure 2.7.2]) portraying the object of the glances established in shots A–E. It must be said that not all point of view structures in the film are so disorienting. Indeed, there are several that convey the perspective of Mehdi in direct ways that facilitate the spectators’ identification with him.6 For example, in Figures 2.7.3 and 2.7.4, we are shown that Mehdi is looking at something – in other words, Bensaidi establishes a glance – then we are This part of my analysis is highly indebted to my former student Berit Schlumbohm, who in April 2007, submitted an essay on the ‘Innocent Gaze’ comparing treatments of the young male protagonists’ perspectives in Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness and Bensaidi’s A Thousand Months. The essay features screengrabs from this candy-wrapper scene.

6

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Figure 2.7.3  Mehdi and friend sit on rocky terrain, with Mehdi gazing up at candy wrapper (RT 1:22:50)

Figure 2.7.4  Mehdi’s view of candy wrapper against the sky revealed (RT 1:22:53)

Figure 2.7.5  View of Amina peering through candy wrapper (RT 1:27:11)

Figure 2.7.6  Spectator’s alignment with Amina’s point of view thwarted (RT 1:27:20)

shown what he sees – that is, the object of his glance. We are also told in the script that he feels like he can see France through the wrapper of a French candy. The significance of this is that he is thinking of his father, who he has been told has travelled to France when in reality he has been imprisoned. A few minutes later we find Mehdi’s mother, Amina, looking through the same candy wrapper, also towards the sun. But her point of view shot is thwarted when Mehdi interrupts her saying, ‘you can even see Dad’. The object of her glance never materialises. Instead, we see her change her glance, removing the object of her glance from its position, and putting on a despondent air. If, at times, Bensaidi impedes point of view structures, this contributes to the effect of the powerless gaze he aims to create. The same may be said of the long shots taken with still cameras that do not follow characters from place to place but rather capture characters as they move in and out of the frame. One such shot occurs about fourteen minutes into the film (RT 14:00–14:44). In it we are shown an alley between two houses and their rooftops. The house on the right is that of Mehdi, the house on the left that of Saadia, the young woman with whom three of the male protagonists are in love. At first, we see Mehdi and his friends playing football in the alley as four young women sunbathe on the roof on the left. Then, as an old woman approaches from around the corner at the left, Mehdi and his friends scatter. Simultaneously, the sunbathers get up and walk toward the front of the roof,

A Thousand Months, Faouzi Bensaidi  139 disappearing into the house whilst leaving articles of clothing behind. Then we see Mehdi place his chair outside Saadia’s door for the old woman to sit on. She sits down, places her bag of shopping on the ground and calls for Saadia and her sisters to attend to her. Two young women emerge from the door on the left and take the shopping inside. Thus, we witness daily activities and movements in the lives of our protagonists, but from a distant perspective that is narratologically neutral, in the sense that it does not provide a structure through which we watch events develop. We watch without being told what and why we are watching. What is the significance of the details in the imagery? What is the function of the shot in the story? Is it meant merely to characterise the narrow gap between Mehdi’s house and that of his neighbours? As we have indicated, the plot of the film has many threads. Perhaps the main thread is that of Mehdi, whose father is in prison for his political dissidence, whose mother works as a maid in the home of the qaid or chieftain, and whose grandfather is forced to sell off the family furniture to support the family. Another thread involves Houcine, a madman who is said to have killed his wife and whose fields are consequently never rained on. Then there is Malika, a rebellious make-up wearing teenager who dies in a taxi accident (for which she is blamed due to her distracting effect on the driver). We also have Saadiya, who is courted by both the schoolteacher and the broadcast engineer before she gets engaged to the new qaid. Finally, no discussion of the film would be complete without some reference to the symbolism and the function of the chair. Armes calls it one of the mysteries with which the film opens.7 Mehdi, who is the closest the film gets to a lead protagonist, carries the chair with him wherever he goes for much of the first half of the film. It turns out that it is the schoolteacher’s chair, and that he has charged Mehdi with its care. As such the chair serves a status symbol as well as a form of protection. In Figure 2.7.7, Mehdi holds the chair in front of him as he tells his mother and grandfather that he was attacked by a dog which chewed up his satchel. The chair thus serves as a barrier between his body and a potential threat, and there are several shots in the film that highlight this function. The chair also provides continuity between the narrative threads. The chair is a witness, for example, to Malika’s funeral. The chair provides a throne for the schoolteacher. The chair is sold off by Mehdi’s grandfather to buy new clothes for Mehdi for the Eid celebrations. The replacement of the chair is the subject of a visit of village officials to the home of Houcine. The chair reappears at Saadia’s wedding. In other words, 7

Armes, ‘Faouzi Bensaidi’, in African Filmmaking, 186. The other mystery relates to why everyone is looking at the sky.

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Figure 2.7.7  Mehdi stands against wall holding chair as a form of protection (RT 4:59)

the chair serves as symbol of status, of protection, of authority and of wealth, at the same time that it provides a leitmotif for the entire narrative. Questions to Consider • What are the signature elements of filmmaker’s style? • How would you characterise the editing? • Are the various characters treated equally by the camera? Do some have close-ups whilst others are shot only from a distance? • Why do some events take place off-screen? • How does the narrative structure reinforce the disorientation/­ powerlessness of the spectator? Further Reading Roy Armes, ‘Faouzi Bensaidi’, African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 183–90. Kevin Dwyer, ‘Moroccan Cinema and the Promotion of Culture’, Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 277–86. Valérie K. Orlando, ‘Prison, Torture, and Testimony: Retelling the Memories of the Lead Years’, chap. 4 in Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), 101–21. Higbee, Will, ‘Moroccan Diasporic Cinema: The “Rooted Transnationalism” of the Cinéastes de passage’, Transnational Screens 10, no. 2 (2019): 75–88.

Chapter 2.8

aKasha, Hajooj Kuka  141

aKasha (al-Kasha, 2018)

Unlike the other twenty-seven films analysed in Arab World Cinemas, Hajooj Kuka’s aKasha does not evoke an environment which would be identified as Arab. Instead, the film may be understood to partaking in a kind of oppositional dialogue with the idea of the Arab world, highlighting the humanity and struggles of a black African community trapped within the boundaries of a state whose governmental regime would seem to define its subjects in terms of Arabism and Islamism in a way that excludes many of the country’s inhabitants and violates their human rights.1 The film depicts life in a village in the Nuba Mountains, in a part of southern Sudan whose people ‘found themselves on the “wrong” side of the border’ when South Sudan gained independence from its northern neighbour in 2011.2 The term Afro-Arab, which is often used to celebrate sites of cross-­ fertilisation and overlap, does not really apply here, as Kuka, by creating a ‘purely African aesthetic’,3 represents a (non-Arab) black African community, one that is cohesive and harmonious, one that is religiously and ethnically pluralistic, and one that partakes in discourses surrounding global resistance movements. Although the script is almost entirely written in the Sudanese dialect of Arabic – a dialect which closely resembles Egyptian colloquial – Arabic is not the mother tongue of the characters (or the actors who play them). Rather, Arabic serves as their lingua franca, their first languages being local African languages. They speak Arabic in much the same way as residents of former British colonies may speak English. Hence this This regime arguably ended in April 2019, when its leader Omar al-Bashir was deposed ­following a wave of revolutionary protests. 2 See N. Frank Ukadike, ‘Beats of the Antonov: A Counternarrative of Endurance and Survival’, in Mette Hjort and Eva Jorholt (eds), African Cinema and Human Rights (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 219. 3 Kuka expressed this to me, in his own words in an as-yet-unpublished interview I undertook with him, via WhatsApp messages, in February 2023. 1

142  North Africa film asks difficult questions about the legacy of the Islamic conquests and the Arabisation of North Africa. When Kuka includes a shot featuring Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in an early scene depicting rebel soldiers sitting around a fire and drinking tea, he alludes perhaps to the parallels between these rebels’ struggle and anticolonial liberation movements. Kuka’s award-winning documentary Beats of the Antonov (2014) provides excellent geo-political contextualisation, explaining the violent conflict that forms the backdrop of aKasha and exploring some of the same themes, such as the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement, a movement which one of the documentary’s interviewees suggests never arrived in Sudan. The documentary also demonstrates the importance of music, dance and laughter as forms of resistance, in a way that causes one to reflect on some of Kuka’s aesthetic and generic choices in aKasha, especially the decision to refrain from ­representing violence. The story of aKasha, which represents a community engaged in armed conflict with the central government, unfolds during a brief respite from the fighting, a cease-fire caused by the rain as the rebel jeeps would anyway be stuck in the mud.4 The soldiers are granted leave and allowed to stay with friends and family. The chief protagonist, Adnan, visits his girlfriend, Lina, who grows angry at his affection for his AK-47 and ejects him from her home. The plot then centres on the attempt by Adnan and his friend Absi to retrieve the rifle, which Adnan has left at Lina’s place, before the ‘round-up’ (aKasha) of the rebel soldiers needed to return to the front. As director Hajooj Kuka has explained to me, while the film serves as a celebration of beauty and love, it also works as an allegory of the revolution, with each actor representing a different leadership role. Adnan, the playboy, is the ‘hero’ on the battlefield. Absi, on the other hand, who is a pacifist at heart, wants only to express himself through art. The local commander, Koko Blues, represents the intellectual, educated but somewhat disconnected, telling anecdotes that no one follows and jokes that no one gets. Lina, meanwhile, symbolises a ‘deeper version of the revolution’. Clear-headed, she knows what she wants, what she fights for, the sustenance her community needs. When I asked Kuka the significance of the fact that Lina, a woman, is the only character in the film to fire a shot, he expounded on each of these roles, stating that the shot fired by Lina ­represents a wake-up call.5 The film does not name the group to which the rebels belong, but the context implies that they are from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N), an organisation which is thanked in the credits. 5 Interview with Kuka. 4

aKasha, Hajooj Kuka  143

Figure 2.8.1  Lina admires Adnan’s beauty as he lies on her bed (RT 7:44)

Lina’s agency is established early in the film, in a romantic encounter with Adnan that occurs in her hut, where he lies on her bed, and she sits and stands over him. In Figure 2.8.1, we see Adnan as the object of her gaze, as she admires the beauty of his lips. Her arm, with its bracelet at the centre of the frame and her painted fingernails accentuating the focal point of her boyfriend’s face, seems to stand for beauty, affection, and power. Adnan’s rifle, which he has named ‘Nancy’, possibly – as Lina suspects – after one of his ex-girlfriends, also dons a bracelet, as is evidenced by a close-up of the weapon in the same scene. Angry about Nancy, Lina recoils and stands up, straight up, looking tall as her head reaches the top of the frame, while Adnan remains mostly prone on the bed, relegated to the bottom right-hand corner. Standing erect behind

Figure 2.8.2  Angered, Lina stands up, positioning herself symbolically with respect to ‘Nancy’ and the poster of Angela Davis (RT 8:34)

144  North Africa Lina, and parallel with her, though much lower to the ground, looking much less significant and almost frail in comparison, is Nancy, the AK-47. See Figure 2.8.2. Moreover, the posters featured on Lina’s wall have referential and symbolic meaning. Many would situate the diegetic space in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, creating a kind of timelessness within a modern age, absorbing influences from abroad, but not at the frenetic pace of the smartphone era. Amongst those pictured are the Beatles, whose faces reflect too much light to be discernible. Similarly, the face of a pin-up – presumably a Hollywood actress – is obscured by reflection but the spectator has no trouble gazing at her decolletage, situated halfway between Nancy and Lina. There are also two portraits of Sudanese singer and songwriter Mostafa Sid Ahmed (1953–96), known for the political import of his music. Most importantly, at the top of the wall, appears a picture of the African American activist and philosopher, Angela Davis (b. 1944), her head aligned with that of Lina, at the top of the frame and positioned between Lina and Nancy. Perhaps this intellectual figure, representing beauty and power inside and out, symbolises the connection between the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement and left-wing liberation struggles. Whilst aKasha clearly humanises the rebels it portrays, representing the armed struggle as a necessary step toward freedom, there are several nods to the virtues of grassroots, civilian resistance movements through, for example, Absi’s loveable passivism, or a statement by Lina to the affect that feeding a child is a more liberatory act than shooting a rifle. There was one shot, in particular, that intrigued me in this respect. In Figure 2.8.3, one of the moments of the film that captures the militaristic angle of the community’s struggle by depicting some men standing around a rebel jeep, another in

Figure 2.8.3  Rebel soldiers prepare to return to battle with Girifna painted on their jeep (RT 44:12)

aKasha, Hajooj Kuka  145 the driver’s seat, and still another in the back grasping the end of a weapon, an Arabic word is painted on the passenger door: a verb conjugated in the first-person plural meaning ‘we are fed up’. This word, transliterated from Modern Standard Arabic as qarafna, is the name of the non-violence resistance movement Girifna, which was founded in 2009, and which is found throughout Sudan, including the north. When I interviewed Kuka, I asked him specifically about this scene and whether he was deliberately signalling solidarity and kinship between the rebels and civilian activists, and his response was illuminating. First, he replied by stating that he is a member of Girifna, which he described as youth- and women-led. Then he informed me that he had not painted that word on the passenger door but that in fact the jeep had been supplied to him that way by the rebels. He added that the rebels label their jeeps with words for the various things that they are fighting for, such as ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’, as a way of identifying a particular vehicle and the team of soldiers associated with it.6 In other words, it was not Kuka who was creating this sense of solidarity and commonality but the rebels themselves. In any case, the result is the same. Questions to Consider • Many scenes in the film depict and/or reference grooming – both individual and collective. How does this motif relate to the ‘Black is Beautiful’ theme? How does it connect to the film’s revolutionary message? • How does humour function in the film? What scenes do you find funny and why? • How and why do the content and form of aKasha fit into the cinematic contexts of the Arab world? Further Viewing/Reading Hajooj Kuka and Steven Markovitz, Beats of the Antonov (2014). N. Frank Ukadike, ‘Beats of the Antonov: A Counternarrative of Endurance and Survival’, in Mette Hjort and Eva Jorholt (eds), African Cinema and Human Rights (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 219–36. Férid Boughedir, ‘The Pan-African Cinema Movement: Achievements, Misfortunes, and Failures’, Black Camera 12, no. 2 (2021): 236–56. Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Sudan: Colonialism, Independence, and Succession’, chap. 4, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 196–249. Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Ibid.

6

146  North2.9 Chapter Africa

Casablanca Beats (ʿAlli Sawtak, Haut et fort, 2021)

Casablanca Beats is a moving film by the revered and prolific Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch about an inspirational figure who coaches talented youth in the art of rapping as a means of empowering them socially, politically and economically, all the while employing harsh criticism and a ‘tough love’ approach. His students hail from the neighbourhood of Sidi Moumen, a district of Casablanca known for its poverty and religious radicalisation. The film, whilst fictional, takes the form of a so-called rockumentary, a genre for which there is at least one precedent in Moroccan cinema.1 Mark Kermode’s review of the film in The Guardian explains how the illusion works. First of all, the central protagonist, the teacher Anas, is played by real-life rap artist Anas Basbousi. Second, the actors cast as his pupils are drawn from an actual cultural centre which Ayouch helped establish. Moreover, Kermode adds, ‘the verité-style camerawork of Virginie Surdej and Amine Messadi creates “the illusion of a documentary” […] convincing us that what we see on screen is “real”’.2 Much of the script is devoted to crucial moral, political and philosophical debates, rather than narrative or make-believe, and the conflicts that arise from the characters’ backstories are plausible, if not entirely believable, such as the fact that Anas would appear to be homeless and living out of his car. In my view, the most empowering sequence in the film is not a song but rather an extended discussion (21:53–27:30) among the students and their teacher about the impact of censorship on their rap compositions. The conversation feels genuine and unscripted, as the actors voice their opinions I refer to Ahmed El Maanouni’s Transes (Trances, 1981), which has been re-released by Martin Scorcese as part of his World Cinema Project. 2 Mark Kermode, ‘Casablanca Beats Review: Morocco’s Vibrant School of Hip-Hop’, theguardian.com, 1 May 2022, accessed 6 June 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2022/may/01/casablanca-beats-haut-et-fort-review-moroccan-hip-hop-musical-nabil-​ ayouch-anas-basbousi. 1

Casablanca Beats, Nabil Ayouch  147 with varying degrees of heatedness and passion. They start by identifying religion as a no-go area. One person suggests that rapping about religion even in a positive light by way of praise rather than critique is sometimes considered problematic. At a certain point they drop the subject of religion, suggesting that political and societal issues can land you in just as much trouble, if not more. Imprisonment and disappearances are two of the consequences the students mention for people who cross the line. They keep asking themselves and each other what the limits of the sayable are, without actually articulating them, and without actually identifying any authorities who impose them. Their repeated refusals to name the specific red lines force the audience to conjure them up independently. It is quite difficult for an informed spectator not to think about some of these restrictions of free speech as they are applied in the country, such as sensitivities surrounding lèse-majesté (criticism of the head of state) or harming Moroccan territorial integrity (often a pretext for quelling peaceful Sahrawi dissent). In this pivotal scene, the film comes as close as it can to challenging censorship laws without actually violating any of them.3 It would be easy to interpret this film as one which advocates for secularism, albeit a brand of secularism which embraces Islamic currents in a kind of multi-cultural fashion. At various moments throughout the film, one hears the call to prayer and preaching in the background, as if the rappers must compete with the religiously observant for their niche in the city’s soundscape. More than one storyline pits a youth centre student against his or her family’s disapproval, which tends to be expressed on grounds of traditional Islamic values. There is also a fantasy sequence in which the mixed-sex group of rappers engage in a street battle of sorts with young male Islamists, a battle enacted entirely through a dance which Kermode likens to routine straight out of West Side Story.4 One could also imagine it in a Bollywood musical. Two stills positioning Anas with respect to an open space outside the arts centre – one drawn from an early scene in the film and the other drawn from the end – poignantly capture the ultimate success of the inspirational teacher’s mission. In the first still (Figure 2.9.1), Anas stands on the roof of the centre contemplating the street below, as crowds of men gather in the square A recent account which details the government’s crackdown on dissenting voices may be found in the Human Rights Watch report, ‘“They’ll Get You no Matter What”: Morocco’s Playbook to Crush Dissent’, 28 July 2022, accessed 21 February 2023, https://www.hrw. org/report/2022/07/28/theyll-get-you-no-matter-what/moroccos-playbook-crush-dissent. The report’s recommendations refer to the problematic articles of Morocco’s penal code. A theoretically engaged treatment of the subject may be found in Patrick S. Snyder, ‘Red Lines: Legitimation and Dissent in Contemporary Morocco’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, June 2022). 4 See his review of the film cited in note 2. 3

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Figure 2.9.1  The face of Anas is profiled as he stands on a roof overlooking a crowd of worshippers (RT 21:33)

Figure 2.9.2  View of Anas from the back as he looks up to his students gathered on the roof (RT 1:36:42)

below to pray. The camera alternately focuses on the figures of the praying men and Anas’s profile. The spectator cannot help but identify with Anas, as the close-up of his face looms large. As the worshippers declare ‘God is Great’ (Allahu akbar), a stern-faced Anas remains silent, but his head is bowed, and his eyes are lowered, just as theirs are. Conversely, the still from the end of the film (Figure 2.9.2) represents the back of Anas’s head as he stands at street level, looking up at the roof of the school where his students have gathered. They, too, form a crowd, although they are not as numerous, and unlike the worshippers they include women as well as men. Anas is again in the foreground, but he is smaller and has his back to the camera, so his face is no longer visible, as if he has transferred some of his power and authority to his pupils and assumed the position of a pedestrian spectator. It is quite important, when we consider the film’s message, that we take into account that some of the young rappers are avowedly observant Muslims, who choose to rap about their faith despite potential controversy, as it was suggested there could be in the conversation about the limits of free speech outlined above. That conversation, incidentally, occurs just after the still in Figure 2.9.1. The fact that its participants eventually conclude that restrictions on free speech have less to do with religion than is commonly assumed in some ways undermines the confrontational imagery of the close-up of a jaded (and presumably secular) Anas against the mass of worshippers in the background. The film has strong feminist impulses. Although the chief protagonist is a male, and although he has no female counterpart, his female pupils are outspoken and seem to occupy at least as much screentime as his male pupils. This may be, to some extent, an outcome of the casting, and the choice to feature young people pursuing an extracurricular education at the youth centre. It may also relate to the film’s documentary feel, and the way that much of the dialogue comes across as unscripted. Then again, it may reflect the d ­ eliberate choices of Nabil Ayouch and the filmmaking team. Here, it should be noted

Casablanca Beats, Nabil Ayouch  149

Figure 2.9.3  Female student dances amidst laundry airing on a roof (RT 48:23)

Figure 2.9.4  Dancing student climbs window grill towards the sky (RT 49:16)

that Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani, who directed the criticallyacclaimed Adam (2019) and Blue Caftan (2022), and who happens to be married to Ayouch, cowrote the screenplay of Casablanca Beats. In one particularly poetic sequence captured in the stills presented above (Figures 2.9.3 and 2.9.4), a character who identifies herself early in the film as primarily a dancer and who is new to the art of rap, performs a routine laden with symbolism of sexual liberation. The dance is staged on a roof where the principal props are satellite dishes and airing laundry. It begins with the dancer almost dangling from the steel wires linking the satellite dishes to the building, the wires seemingly cutting into her wrists as she walks beneath them. She later hangs from the laundry lines, interacting ambivalently with the women’s garments that hang there. She nestles into one item of clothing with affection before slipping her arms through the sleeves of an upsidedown shirt, completely obscuring her upper body and head. Ultimately, she climbs a window grill, lifting herself up over the wires as she is backlit by the sun breaking through a cloudy sky. She thereby breaks free from various traps: the trap of media representations of womanhood (often highly sexualised and often coming from abroad), the trap of domesticity (symbolised by her containment on the roof and association with the chore of airing laundry), and the trap of conservative patriarchal values (those which would hide her and silence her). Whilst choreographer Khalid Benghrib, who also plays the dance instructor, must be seen as the creator of this dance and the beautiful ways in which it conveys meaning, it is interesting to note that his identification as choreographer in the credits is immediately followed by Touzani’s labelling as ‘artistic consultant’. Finally, it should be mentioned that Anas Basbousi’s character introduces his students to the art of rap and hip-hop by way of lecturing about its historical roots in the music of the African American community and more ­specifically the New York City borough of the Bronx, which is explicitly

150  North Africa compared to Sidi Moumen. He situates his students’ need to express themselves as part of a movement of black empowerment and the fight against poverty, racism and humiliation, referring to both the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, and the success of the 2011 Tunisian Revolution, as recent triumphs of the movement. In this way, the film also stands as a celebration of pan-Africanism. Questions to Consider • In which scenes does this film reveal itself as work of fiction rather than a documentary? • How do the sounds and meanings of the young rappers interact with other noises in the soundtrack and to what effect? • How does the mise-en-scène reflect and mediate the opinions, philosophical outlooks and political stances that are expressed verbally in the script? Further Reading Kevin Dwyer, ‘Morocco: A National Cinema with Large Ambitions’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 325–48. Jonathan Smolin, ‘Nabil Ayouch: Transgression, Identity, and Difference (Morocco)’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 215–40. Zakia Salime, ‘Soundtracks of Citizenship: Social and Political Genealogies of Moroccan Hip Hop’, Journal of North African Studies (2022). DOI: 10.1080/136293​ 87.2022.2089125.

PART 3

The Eastern Arab World

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  153

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay

INTRODUCTION

Whilst the other regional essays in this volume convey a sense of uniformity (the essay on Egypt because it is centred on the cinematic output of a particular nation state and the essay on North Africa because it covers, on the one hand, three countries of the Maghrib – Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco – neighbouring countries with similar colonial histories and common cinematic threads, and, on the other hand, two countries – Mauritania and Sudan – countries on opposite sides of Africa that test the boundaries and limits of Arab culture with respect to sub-Saharan Africa as sites of cross-­ fertilisation and exclusion), this third essay attempts to bring together the divergent cinematic histories of the rest of the Arab world, namely the countries of the Levant, Mesopotamia and the Gulf. One cannot consider these countries pooled together as a distinct ‘sub-unit’ of the Arab cinematic world in the conventional sense. Rather, this essay serves as a catchall, patching together divergent traditions and trajectories to lend the volume a certain sense of comprehensiveness or wholeness. Toward this end, I present various discrete sections without attempting to make connections between them apart those that ensure a smooth rhetorical transition. PALESTINE

I begin with Palestine, which, despite occupation and dislocation, or perhaps partly because of them, has a vibrant and intriguing cinematic history. Cinema begins in Palestine, as it does elsewhere, with the Lumière Brothers and the agents they sent round the world with their cinematograph machines. While Palestine did not develop an early industry in the way that Egypt did, there were some filmmaking activities pioneered by local Arabs. Among these pioneers were the Lama Brothers – Ibrahim and Badr – who,

154  The Eastern Arab World while they were ensconced in the Egyptian film industry and had lived much of their early life in Chile, were Palestinian in origin. Their film Kiss in the Desert (Qubla fi al-Sahraʾ), which premiered in 1927, and which is sometimes cited as the first ‘Egyptian’ narrative fiction film, is the earliest motion picture to appear in the filmography compiled for Hamid Dabashi’s edited volume Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema.1 The Lama Brothers made melodramas and Bedouin films which were set in Egypt, for the most part, but they made one film in Bethlehem and gave it a Palestinian storyline, so it seems appropriate to highlight this film in their corpus, in particular, with reference to the cinema of Palestine. The Fugitive (al-Harib, 1936) was typically melodramatic, as expected of a film in the Lama Brothers’ corpus, but it was also highly politically charged: the film is set in the First World War and depicts the injustice of enforced military conscription under the Ottomans. The ‘fugitive’ of the title goes AWOL (absent without leave) from [the Ottoman] army when he is refused permission to visit his dying mother, and once he is on the run, he becomes a resistance fighter. The film is probably no longer extant, but luckily its script – in both Arabic and in English translation – is preserved in the New York State Archives. Writing in October 1936, six months after the start of the Arab Revolt, Egyptian film critic al-Sayyid Hasan Jumʿa praises the film for tackling a timely real-life problem: The choice of this subject matter came at a time in which it is appropriate to appear on the screen, given the recent events in Palestine which have attracted the attention of the whole world. America has taken the opportunity to make the world aware of the activities of its gangs and produced films about these gangs which were very successful when screened, and Condor Film has done something similar with their selection of the topic of the film The Fugitive … I am not commenting here on the value of the film from an artistic perspective, rather I am stating that the choice of subject matter in itself came in accordance with what we want from the world’s attention for Egyptian cinema and its highlighting of the subject.2

That resistance to the Ottoman army during the First World War at the time that the film was set was read allegorically as resistance to the British Mandate and perhaps to Zionism at the time that the film was made is indicated in the recollections of Fatima Rushdi, an Egyptian actress and one of the stars of the film. She remembers: Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/New York: Verso, 2006), 192.  2 Farida Marʿi (ed.), Kitabat al-Sayyid Hasan Jum‘a, vol. 3: 1935–1936 (Giza: Ministry of Culture/National Cinema Centre, 1998 [?]), 363, 26 October 1936.  1

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  155 At that time Ibrahim Lama approached me about starring in a sound film he was directing entitled The Fugitive, and I agreed. My role was that of a young Palestinian resistance member [fatat filastiniyya mukafiha], and Badr Lama played a fidaʾi fighting the British authorities who had a mandate over Palestine during that period. I sang in this film, in addition to acting, and the film was a brilliant success.3

The frame story of the film sees a newlywed Egyptian couple departing for their honeymoon in Palestine, where they get into car difficulties and find themselves taking refuge in the home of a man who recounts the main ­narrative. The script reads: People bidding the bride and groom farewell and wishing them a good honeymoon trip. CROWD: ‘Congratulations’ ‘Congratulations and Good Luck’ ‘May God preserve both of you all the way through.’ Driving through the highways of Palestine it shows signs of distances to towns by kilometres. A VOICE: ‘This is the road to Jerusalem, the Sacred City’ (a building shows and the voice continues –) ‘This is the Near Eastern Mosque, which has been mentioned in the Book of God. It is a model of Arabic architecture and they call “The first of the Two Norths” and the second to that in Mecca’ (another building) ‘This is also the great castle which King Solomon built to protect Jerusalem. People from all over the world visit it, and [de]spite the ages it is still as strong as it was since it had been built.’ After that the auto hits a flock of sheep and falls in the ditch. The couple cannot continue to drive …4

It is interesting to observe that in their overview of Jerusalem, the Lama Brothers, who were Christian, emphasise an Islamic monument over Christian ones in their zeroing in on the Masjid al-Aqsa. King Solomon, of course, is an important figure in all three Abrahamic faiths. As for Palestinian directors who are based in Palestine at this time, they include, most prominently, Ibrahim Hasan Serhan. He made short films some of whose titles suggest that they were documentaries or newsreels. They include: The Visit of King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz (Ziyarat al-malik ʿAbd al-Aziz’, 1935), Dreams Come True (Ahlam tahaqqaqat, 1939), Palestine Studio (Studiyu Filastin, 1945), Holiday Eve (Fi laylat al-ʿid, 1946), Cinematic Introduction Fatima Rushdi, Kifahi fi l-masrah wa-l-sinima (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1971), 153. New York State Film Script Archives Box 657, File 35799.

 3  4

156  The Eastern Arab World (Muqaddima sinimaʾiyya, 1946), and Ahmad Hilmi Basha (1946). From this period, we also have a film called Night Dream (Hilm layla, 1946) by a certain Salah al-Din Badr Khan.5 Also in the 1940s, it seems that a group of Palestinian and Egyptian filmmakers, working with Jewish/Zionist director Nathan Axelrod, produced a narrative feature film. Ella Shohat, in her interviews with Axelrod, gleaned the following information: Axelrod was then invited by an Arab from Jerusalem (on behalf of himself and his Egyptian partners) to direct a narrative film in Arabic entitled Oumniyati or My Wish. (Axelrod, who did not know Arabic, worked with an Armenian translator.) The script, which employed the typical plot of the social melodramas, accompanied by songs and dances then produced largely in Egypt, concerned wealthy parents who oppose their daughter’s marriage to a poor man, while urging her to marry a rich man of their choice. At the film’s happy ending, the poor man manages to earn enough money to be able to marry his beloved.6

Although the director was a Zionist,7 it seems that the film conveyed an anti-Zionist stance. Shohat continues: The film touched on some ‘delicate’ matters, since one scene, set along the HaYarkon River8 (Tel Aviv area), featured Palestinians singing ‘our beautiful country’, while another has a character, playing an important public figure, attend an Arab nationalist conference. Shot between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1947, the film was screened in several Arab countries but, given increasing Jewish-Arab tensions, never reached the screens of Palestine. Following the United Nations vote in favor of partition of Palestine, the producers, frightened by the bad publicity that might arise were it known that the film had been made by Zionists, took the negatives to Beirut.9

After the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, Palestinian cinema becomes a cinema of exile. Unsurprisingly, cinema remains dormant for a while and re-emerges in the 1960s after the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964. The PLO and its various factions were involved in cinematic production and produced films which were seen as part and parcel of revolutionary struggle. Not all the directors of these films were ethnically Palestinian, but they still loom large in what may be thought of as the cinema of Palestine. Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/New York: Verso, 2006), 184.  6 Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (London/ New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 14.  7 Ibid., 16.  8 Called ‘al-ʿAwja’ in Arabic.  9 Shohat, Israeli Cinema, 14.  5

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  157 Among the revolutionary classics produced during this period are Christian Ghazi’s A Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1971), produced by the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) and Qasim Hawal’s Return to Haifa (al-ʿAʾid ila Hayfa, 1982), an adaptation of a story by Ghassan Kanafani produced by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).10 The 1980s and 1990s see the emergence of a (largely European-financed) arthouse cinema. This begins with Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (al-­ Dhakira al-khasba, 1980), a lyrical documentary described by Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi as follows: The film tracks the lives of two women. Romiya Farah, an elderly Yefya woman, who preserves the Arab village tradition in food (baking bread in a tabun oven, preparing stuffed vegetables), farm chores (washing wool in a basin), conservative views (against the remarriage of her widowed daughter and against modern women’s attire, such as swimsuits), and, in the main, in her stubborn objection to receiving monetary compensation for her plot of land, which was expropriated by the Israelis. The second character, a young woman named Sahar Khalifa, embodies the new, modern era in her job (at a university), her vocation (writing), and her feminist views (she has divorced her husband and challenged conservative society by asserting her right to live in dignity as a spouseless woman).11

This film, according to the director himself, ‘turned the PLO’s militant cinema upside-down.’12 Khleifi’s international breakthrough film Wedding in Galilee (1987), followed in the 1990s by the films of Elia Suleiman, also from Nazareth, paved the way for other Palestinian filmmakers on the international festival circuit. Among the many Palestinian films which have achieved major international success are Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2006) and Omar (2013), Mai Masri’s 3000 Nights (2015), and Annemarie Jacir’s Wajib (2017).

Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi refer to this film as ‘the only fictional film produced by the Palestinian organisations’. See their Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 68. They identify the director as Iraqi (22) and include an analytical overview of the film (68–70). 11 Ibid., 75–6. Note that the second woman is none other than the renowned novelist Sahar Khalifeh. 12 Michel Khleifi, ‘From Reality to Fiction – From Poverty to Expression’, trans. Omar alQattan, in Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/ New York: Verso, 2006), 51. 10

158  The Eastern Arab World SYRIA

Syria, like Palestine, was part of the Ottoman empire when cinematic technology first arrived in the country. Thus it should not surprise us that the first people who brought a projector into the country and who ‘used it commercially in Aleppo in 1908’ were Turks.13 By 1912, a Damascene café owner was organising regular screenings.14 Then, in 1916, during the First World War, the Ottoman Turks opened a big movie theatre, naming it Janak Kala’a, ‘thus commemorating their victory over the British fleet in the Straits of the same name’.15 That theatre burned down, but others were soon to follow.16 Salah Dehni sets the scene: During this war period, the cinemas used to show mainly German films – Germany being the ally of Turkey – but they were not backward in abandoning them, after the Allied victory and the establishment of the Mandate,17 in favour of American or French films. There were played the serial films of Eddie Polo and Tom Mix, with the most famous stars of westerns and detective films. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and other comedy stars also had their films shown.18

The first Syrian film, The Innocent Accused (al-Mutahham al-Bariʾ), which was silent, came out in 1928, not long after the first ‘indigenous’ Egyptian film. Set in Damascus at the turn of the twentieth century, it was a gangland movie produced by Ayyub Badri, Ahmad Tello, and Muhammad Muradi, who additionally starred in the film, and directed by Rashid Jalal, who also wrote the script.19 Apparently, French censors interfered in the production, forcing the filmmakers to ‘reshoot most of the scenes, taking as an excuse the appearance of a Muslim girl in the role of the heroine’.20 The second and third Syrian films, Ismail Anzur’s Under the Skies of Damascus (Tahta samaʾ Dimashq, 1932) and Ayyub Badri’s Call of Duty (Nidaʾ al-wajib, 1936), were both silent films and could not compete with the sound films that were by then in circulation. The makers of Under the Skies of Damascus were particularly unfortunate in the sense that the Damascus Salah Dehni, ‘History of the Syrian Cinema 1918–1962’ in Georges Sadoul (ed.), The Cinema in the Arab Countries (Beirut: Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television, 1966), 98. 14 Ibid., 98. 15 Ibid., 98. 16 Ibid., 98. 17 The French Mandate in Syria lasted from 1918 until 1946. 18 Dehni, ‘History’, 99. 19 Diana Jabbour, ‘Syrian Cinema: Culture and Ideology’, in Alia Arasoughly (ed.), Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 40. 20 Dehni, ‘History of the Syrian Cinema’, 99. See also Jabbour, ‘Syrian Cinema’, 40. 13

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  159 release of the first Arabic-language talkie, Song of the Heart (1932), preceded the opening of their film by just a couple of months.21 Film critic Diana Jabbour, who describes Under the Skies of Damascus as a film about lovers who are nearly separated due to a misunderstanding, praises Anzur’s technique: ‘Anzur’s editing style is effective as he intercuts between the general action and close-ups of faces and hands to show the emotions of the characters’.22 The first sound film did not appear until 1947. This was Nazih Shahbandar’s Light and Darkness (Nur wa-Zalam). The film is no longer extant, but a few excerpts may be seen in a 1994 documentary about Shahbandar entitled Light and Shadows (Nur wa-Zilal), on which a number of prominent Syrian filmmakers collaborated.23 As Shahbandar relates in that documentary, the action in Light and Darkness revolves around a con artist and his scams.24 Two further films were made in Syria before the founding of the National Film Organisation in 1963. These were Ahmad ʿArfan’s A Passer-by (ʿAbir sabil, 1950) and Zuhayr al-Shawwa’s The Green Valley (al-Wadi al-Akhdar, 1960). The first was a financial failure, the latter a box office success.25 In November 1963, some eight months after the Baath Party came to power, the National Film Organization (NFO) was inaugurated. The NFO, which had been envisioned under the union with Egypt (1958–61), but which had not then managed to get off the ground,26 brought some stability to the industry in the form of continuous state support for filmmaking activities. According to Diana Jabbour, NFO-produced films are informed by politics aspiring to improve the lot of the common people, and yet, somewhat paradoxically, they are seen as elitist due to their high aesthetic ­standards.27 Exceptions to this rule, that is, some NFO films that have had popular appeal, include (1) Nabil Malih’s The Leopard (al-Fahd, 1971); (2) Wadi Youssef’s The Trap (al-Misyada, 1980); (3) Abdul Latif Abdulhamid’s Nights of the Jackal (Layali ibn awa, 1990); and (4) Verbal Messages (Rasaʾil shafahiyya, 1991) by the same director.28 A private sector cinema has existed alongside the state sector in Syria. According to Jabbour, private sector films tend to be very low-budget and Jabbour, ‘Syrian Cinema’, 41. Ibid., 40–1. 23 This documentary, with English subtitles, may be viewed on YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9S9O2uuq6wU (accessed 1 December 2021). 24 Umar Amiralay, Muhammad Malas, Usama Muhammad et al., Nur wa-Zilal (Maram for Cinema & Television and Al Sayyar Art Productions, 1994), RT: 19:43. 25 Dehni, ‘History of the Syrian Cinema,’ 103. 26 Jabbour, ‘Syrian Cinema’, 42. 27 Ibid., 42. 28 Ibid., 42. 21 22

160  The Eastern Arab World highly formulaic.29 Indeed they have been so formulaic that audiences, despite the fact that they tend to be uneducated, find them to be completely predictable: ‘In private sector film screenings, the audience seemed more intelligent than the films and shouted out the next line or the next action at the screen, predicting the outcome of events.’30 The only figure to survive extensive experience in the private sector with his artistic integrity intact, suggests Jabbour, is the comedian Durayd Lahham (b. 1934).31 Speaking of Lahham’s collaboration with the comedian Nihad Qalʿi (1928–93), Rebecca Joubin writes: By 1965, Lahham and Qalʿi – described by Muhammad Mansur as the Arab world’s first comic duo – were not only prominent names in Syrian television, but they were also acting in an average of two films per year, many of which were produced in Greece. By the end of the 1970s they had acted in twenty-five films together, their last one being ʿIndama taghib al-zawjat (When the Wives are Away, 1978).32

Among the classic films Lahham directed and starred in is Borders (al-Hudud, 1984), which relays the story of a man without a passport who finds himself caught between two Arab countries called Gharbistan (Land of the West) and Sharqistan (Land of the East). According to Jabbour, ‘this simple incident strips bare the official Arab rhetoric of Arab unity and shows it to be nothing but political propaganda’.33 It may surprise readers that this kind of satirical take on official dogma would be allowed in an authoritarian state, but such criticism has not only been tolerated it has historically to some degree been cultivated, especially in the state sector. Indeed, according to Rasha Salti, this is a central paradox at the heart of Syrian cinema.34 Miriam Cooke has labelled the phenomenon ‘commissioned criticism’,35 while Lisa Wedeen speaks of it as tanfis or ‘letting out air’.36 This topic will be explored further in the chapter on

31 32

Ibid., 57–8. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 60. Rebecca Joubin, The Politics of Love: Sexuality, Gender, and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 63. 33 Jabbour, ‘Syrian Cinema’, 60. 34 Rasha Salti, ‘Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, in Rasha Salti (ed.), Insights into Syrian Cinema (New York: Rattapallax Press, 2006), 22. 35 Miriam Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 36 Lisa Wedeen, ‘Tolerated Parodies of Politics in Syrian Cinema’, in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 104. 29 30

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  161 The Extras, below. It is unclear to me whether, and how, this situation has changed since 2011 and the onset of the Syrian Civil War.37 LEBANON

Writing in 1996, Ibrahim al-Ariss notes: It is difficult to categorize Lebanon as one of the major film-producing countries in the world, although, judging by the number of films that have been shot in Lebanon, been about it, or are from it, from the late twenties, when the first film was made, up to now, it ranks second, after Egyptian cinema, in film output in the Arab world … Things are, however, a little more complicated, for the majority of films made from the late fifties to the early seventies were modelled on Egyptian films, were often made with Egyptian directors and stars, and spoke in Egyptian vernacular – films difficult to categorize in any way as Lebanese.38

Lebanese cinema, like its Egyptian counterpart, began in the foreign community. The first two Lebanese films, namely The Adventures of Elias Mabruk (Mughamarat Ilyas Mabruk, 1929) and The Adventures of Abu al-ʿAbd (Mughamarat Abu al-ʿAbd, 1931) were both made by a certain Gordano Bidotti (also spelled Jordano Pidutti), an Italian amateur.39 The third, entitled In the Ruins of Baalbek (Bayn hayakil Baʿalbak, 1934), was directed by another Italian, one Julio Di Luca.40 Whilst the films may have been Italian by pedigree, at least two of them were Lebanese by subject. The Adventures of Elias Mabruk told the tale of a Lebanese emigrant who returns from the Mahjar in America and reunites with his family.41 Meanwhile Di Luca’s film was adapted from a story by Lebanese writer Karam al-Bustani about a foreign tourist who falls in love with an Arab prince only to be rejected by his family.42 It would seem that In the Ruins of Baalbak (1934) was the first

Interested readers may wish to consult Charlotte Bank, ‘“There is no Syrian Cinema”: Syrian Cinema Since the Civil War’, a 2017 web exclusive from the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/ features/syrian-filmmaking-act-resistance (accessed 6 June 2023). 38 Ibrahim al-Ariss, ‘An Attempt at Reading the History of Cinema in Lebanon: From Cinema to Society and Vice Versa’, in Alia Arasoughly (ed.), Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 19. 39 Ibid., 22. See also Lucienne Khoury, ‘History of the Lebanese Cinema’, in Georges Sadoul (ed.), The Cinema in the Arab Countries (Beirut: Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television, 1966), 120. 40 Al-Ariss, ‘Reading the History’, 22. 41 Khoury, ‘History’, 120. 42 Al-Ariss, ‘Reading’, 22. 37

162  The Eastern Arab World sound film produced entirely in an Arab country, for earlier Egyptian sound films had been made partially in Paris.43 Another pioneering figure of Lebanese cinema was ʿAli al-ʿAris. He had spent time in Egypt and was deeply influenced by the Egyptian film industry.44 He made The Rose Seller (Bayyaʿat al-ward, 1943) and Kawkab, Princess of the Desert (Kawkab, Amirat al-sahraʾ, 1946). Curiously, neither film featured the Lebanese vernacular; the first was made in Egyptian colloquial, to ensure a vast audience, and the second in a Bedouin dialect, as the subject matter ‘necessitated’.45 Al-ʿAris’s directorial debut, released as it was during the Second World War, was not widely distributed. Then during the making of Princess of the Desert, al-ʿAris became ill, and an Egyptian editor was hired to finish the film in his absence. Al-ʿAris did not approve of what the editor had done, considering it a ‘mutilation’, and tried to postpone the film’s release.46 When he didn’t succeed, he printed thousands of flyers that read, ‘The director of this film asks you to boycott it,’ which were distributed in Beirut the day the film opened at Cinema Radio City. Of course, this had the opposite result, for it aroused people’s curiosity and they rushed to see the film, which grossed at least LL11,000 in one week, an astronomical sum for that time!47

A few studios were active in the 1950s. Lucienne Khoury mentions a certain George Qaʿi, who, in collaboration with al-Arz studio, made a couple of films in that period, namely Remorse (ʿIdhab damir, 1953) and Two Hearts and One Body (Qalban wa-jasad, 1957). The first is said to have been a dire failure due to its use of classical Arabic as the language of the film.48 The year 1957 also witnessed Lebanon’s first official entry at Cannes: Georges Nasr’s Where to? (Ila ayn), a film about ‘a Lebanese peasant who had emigrated to America and who had then returned to Lebanon as poor as he used to be before’.49 Given Where to?’s focus on the daily chores of the rural working classes, it would not surprise me if the film was cast as realist. Indeed, there are many shots of peasants toiling away – happily perhaps – a woman raises her hand See Khoury, ‘History’, 121, where she describes the film as the only one with Arabic dialogue. She also mentions the involvement of a sound engineer called Rossi. Meanwhile Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes refer to the movie as ‘the pioneering 1935 [sic] sound film’. See their Arab and African Film Making (London: Zed Books, 1991), 31. Al-Ariss presumes that the film was silent. See ‘Reading’, 22. 44 Ibrahim al-Ariss, the filmmaker’s son, states: ‘For Ali al-Ariss, the heritage of Lebanese cinema could be not other than the Egyptian film heritage’. See his ‘Reading’, 23. 45 Al-Ariss, ‘Reading’, 23. 46 Ibid., 23. 47 Ibid., 24. 48 Lucienne Khoury, ‘History’, 122–3. 49 Ibid., 123. The film may be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN06tz4w​ WcI (accessed 15 March 2023). 43

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  163 to her brow as she washes the floor (RT 16:19), for example, and other women prepare food for a feast (RT 32:02). Even the leisure activities, music and dance, are a product of physical exertion, as emphasised by the low angle of the camera when focused on a flautist (RT 33:20). During this early period, that is, from the 1940s through the 1960s, Lebanon often served as the setting of Egyptian films. Ibrahim al-Ariss ­mentions, by way of example, Bishara Wakim’s Summering in Lebanon (alIstiyaf fi Lubnan, 1947) and Husayn Fawzi’s Bride of Lebanon (ʿArus Lubnan, 1951),50 but there are many more Egyptian films that feature excursions to Lebanon, such as Yusuf Wahbi’s Love and Revenge (Gharam wa-intiqam, 1944) and Ahmad Badrakhan’s A Kiss in Lebanon (Qubla fi Lubnan, 1945). In such movies, Lebanon serves as a beautiful backdrop and a convenient set. One director who was very prolific in the 1960s and who, despite his Lebanese identity, took part in the so-called Egyptian cinematic ‘invasion’ of Lebanon, was Muhammad Salman.51 In this period, a certain style of movie making transferred its headquarters from Cairo to Beirut. Ibrahim al-Ariss writes: Salman may have been seeking to establish a Lebanese cinema, or he may have been laying the ground for the fact that Beirut would soon replace Cairo in producing a certain kind of film that was on the decline in Egypt because of ­conditions that were pushing toward more serious films.52

This kind of filmmaking involved the blurring of genres such as the musical, the comedy and the melodrama. As time went on, al-Ariss continues: The pitch of Salman’s productions became more frantic, mixing Egyptian with Lebanese with Bedouin with Beiruti accents, relying on singing stars such as Najah Salam, Sabah, Samira Tawfiq, and Wadi al-Safi, and combining melodrama with musicals, comedy with singing, which lost the films all identity whatsoever. This was exacerbated by the thinness and contrived nature of the plots, such as transplanting a Bedouin to Paris or Rome.53

This is not to say that all Lebanese films of the 1960s were copycats of the more frivolous side of the Egyptian film industry. Some film projects had a serious nature such as Yusuf Maluf’s The Broken Wings (al-Ajniha al-­ mutakassira, 1964), an adaptation of a poetic novel by Jibran Khalil Jibran. There was also Birth of the Prophet (Mawlid al-Rasul, 1960), made by the Egyptian director Ahmad al-Tukhi and featuring the actor Yusuf Wahbi. 52 53 50 51

Al-Ariss, ‘Reading’, 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27.

164  The Eastern Arab World The script of this film may be found in both the original Arabic and in English translation at the New York State Archives in Albany.54 In the early 1970s, before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1975, a number of young filmmakers who had trained abroad returned to Lebanon and directed films that started to grapple with the country’s social problems. One such film was Beirut, Oh Beirut (Bayrut ya Bayrut, 1975) by Maroun Baghdadi (1950–93). Al-Ariss credits Baghdadi with being the first to represent sectarian differences by identifying characters as either Christian or Muslim.55 Key shots picture Emile, one of the film’s protagonists, framed by Christian iconography. In one, he is collapsed in Muslim Hala’s arms, and the two of them are positioned before an icon of a saint (RT 37:57). In another, he converses with a monk in front of a portrait of the Virgin Mary (RT 41:17). With the onset of the Civil War in 1975, the cinema industry in Lebanon all but disintegrated, and it is only in recent years that it has begun to reemerge.56 According to Wissam Mouawad, between 2006 and 2011, Lebanon averaged eleven feature-length films a year, but in 2015, it produced thirtyone. Many of these films, however, are dependent on foreign – p ­ articularly French – funds and the international festival circuit.57 This has resulted in what Mouawad has termed the ‘postcard strategy’ whereby filmmakers sometimes package content to cater to the tastes and expectations of foreign audiences.58 IRAQ

The first film screening in Iraq took place in a café in Baghdad on 26 July 1909.59 Thereafter, and especially in the period following the First World War, silent films were imported and cinemas were built in Baghdad and other big cities in Iraq.60 Hakki Chebli writes: ‘When the state of Iraq was founded Mawlid al-Rasul (Birth of the Prophet), Casefile # 70843, Box # 2402. Al-Ariss, ‘Reading’, 31. 56 Wissam Mouawad, ‘Lebanese Cinema and the French Co-Production System: The Postcard Strategy’, in Terri Ginsberg and Shris Lippard (eds), Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer Nature, 2020), 72. 57 Ibid., 72. 58 Ibid., 83–4. 59 Lucia Sorbera, ‘History and Fiction in the New Iraqi Cinema’, in Jordi Tejel, Peter Sluglett, Riccardo Bocco, and Hamit Bozarslan (eds), Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2012), 425. 60 Hakki Chebli, ‘History of the Iraqi Cinema’, in Georges Sadoul (ed.), The Cinema in the Arab Countries (Beirut: Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television, 1966), 117. 54 55

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  165 in 1921/22, the number of motion-picture houses gradually increased and the showing of silent films multiplied until the talking pictures appeared, of foreign make.’61 Film production did not begin until the 1940s, and the first few films were Egyptian co-productions. In 1946, two films were released: Son of the East (Ibn al-sharq) by Egyptian director Niyazi Mustafa and CairoBaghdad (al-Qahira-Baghdad) by Egyptian director Ahmad Badrakhan. These were followed, according to Malkmus and Armes, ‘by a dozen or so “national” productions in the years up to the 1958 Revolution which finally broke British dominance’.62 They continue: Most of these films were made by small companies which vanished after producing just a single feature, and the Iraqi critic Shakir Nouri singles out only two of them – Abdel Jabar Wali’s Who is Responsible?/Man al-masʾul? (1956) and Kameran Hassani’s Said Effendi (1957) – for special mention.63

Who is Responsible? is a narrative of revenge spurred on by a middle-class man’s rape of a working-class woman.64 Said Effendi, on the other hand, is a literary adaptation about an aging Ottoman administrator ‘losing his privileges in a changing world’.65 The film depicted the urban lower and middle classes, employed a lot of amateur actors and was shot on location in the streets of old Baghdad; hence it is seen as capturing the city’s atmosphere at the time.66 In 1959, after the revolution, the state started getting involved in cinematic production. For the first ten years or so, they mainly produced documentaries, but eventually they started making narrative films.67 Prominent directors from the 1960s and 1970s include Qasim Hawal, Fuʾad al-Tihami and Faysal al-Yasiri. In the 1980s, after Saddam Hussein had come to power, the state sector started producing grand historical epics designed to evoke nationalist fervour in the face of the Iran–Iraq War. One such film was al-Qadisiyya (1981), which was directed by the eminent Egyptian director Salah Abu Sayf and which recounted the victory of the Arab Muslim armies over the forces of the Sassanid Empire at the Battle of al-Qadisiyya in 636 ce. Ibid., 117. Malkmus and Armes, Arab and African Film Making, 32. 63 Ibid., 32. Malkmus and Armes cite Shakir Nouri, A la recherche du cinéma irakien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 58. 64 Sorbera, ‘History and Fiction’, 426. 65 Ibid., 426. 66 See Kamal Latif Salim, ‘Qissat Saʿid Afandi’, Malahiq al-Mada, 6 May 2015, accessed 6 June 2023, https://almadasupplements.com/view.php?cat=12773. 67 ʿAbd al-Basit al-Jahani, al-Film al-riwaʾi al-Magharibi: al-dramiyya wa al-jamaliyya (London: e-Kutub, 2019), 35. 61 62

166  The Eastern Arab World The 1991 Gulf War, followed by more than a decade of economic ­sanctions and capped off by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, unsurprisingly reduced filmmaking activity to a minimum. When cinema re-emerges in the late 2000s, it often quite understandably engages in a poetics of trauma. Mohamed al-Daradji’s Son of Babylon (Ibn Babil, 2010), for example, tells the story of a young boy who sets out with his grandmother after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in search of his father. At first, they look for him in prisons, but ultimately, they go combing through the remains found in mass graves. Abbas Fahdel’s Dawn of the World (2008), analysed in Chapter 3.8, is similarly grim. Lucia Sorbera has called the period of post-2003 Iraqi filmmaking a cinematic renaissance, noting that comparisons are often made between this renaissance and Italian neo-realism, another artistic movement which emerged after the fall of a dictator.68 Whilst not wishing to overstate the validity of the comparison – the context of contemporary Iraq is quite different to that of Italy following the Second World War – she does find parallels: It may be that the neo-realist lesson learned by these directors is an attempt to render the atmosphere of the end of the regime and of the war through the dramas and problems of everyday life. From this point of view, there is a common thread running through the feature films and documentaries produced in Iraq since 2003: the compelling need to bear witness.69

THE GULF STATES

The Gulf States, or at least the wealthier countries among them, despite their differing cinematic contexts, have two things in common: (1) they have little to no cinematic history, producing few films until very recently and (2) they are emerging as important centres of film festivals, film funding, film distribution and film preservation. Noha Mellor, writing in 2011, notes that Arab cinema, when thought of on a pan-Arab rather than a national level, ‘has changed from industry (as it was in Egypt and Lebanon) to modelling modernity and progress (as it is now in the Gulf countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia)’.70 More recently, Suzi Mirgani has described a kind of filmmaking boom occurring in Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council states – one which is fuelled by neoliberal cities with their free trade zones and ‘mediascapes’ and supported by Sorbera, ‘History and Fiction’, 433. Ibid., 433. 70 Noha Mellor, ‘Arab Cinema’, in Noha Mellor, Mohamad Ayish, Nabil Dajani and Khalil Rinnawi (eds), Arab Media: Globalization and Emerging Media Industries (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 103. 68 69

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  167 educational infrastructure, with training in creative filmmaking now being offered at the New York Film Academy in Abu Dhabi, the Northwestern University in Qatar, and New York University in Abu Dhabi.71 Meanwhile, Kay Dickinson has drawn our attention to the influence of the very successful Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), founded in 2004, and its reach vis-à-vis professional filmmaking ventures. She writes: ‘DIFF is chock full of these initiatives: development workshops, seed funding, post-production support, schemes for pairing talent with investors, and experiments within distribution, all in consort with a diverse programme of films targeted at a general audience’.72 Thus, despite their relative lack of cinematic output, many countries in the Gulf play a disproportionately big role in propping up transnational Arab cinema. The case of Saudi Arabia is fascinating; for, despite the fact that cinema screenings were essentially banned there from some point in the 1980s until 2018,73 one could argue that the country, with its consumer base and media conglomerates, has had an enormous impact on Arab filmmaking and particularly the Egyptian film industry. Although public screenings were banned in the country, video technology meant people could view films in their private residences, and for a while in the 1980s there was an Egyptian ‘straight-to-video’ market targeting Saudi Arabia.74 This phenomenon had a conservative impact on cinematic expression. Viola Shafik writes: Gulf money coming into Egyptian cinema since the 1970s has brought with it a noticeable prudishness. Egyptian film makers and producers have gone to great lengths to satisfy particularly the extremely conservative censorship of Saudi Arabia. While Hussein Kamal’s My Father is up the Tree (Abi Fauq al-shadjara) drew crowds in 1969 because of its supposedly 100 kisses, today there is hardly a single kiss to be seen.75

Suzi Mirgani, ‘Making the Final Cut: Filmmaking and Complicating National Identity in Qatar and the GCC States’, in Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard (eds), Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 45–70. On the presence of film training academies, see page 49. 72 Kay Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2016), 121. 73 The start-date of the ban is hard to pinpoint. See Naomi Sakr, ‘Placing Political Economy in Relation to Cultural Studies: Reflections on the Case of Cinema in Saudi Arabia’, in Tarik Sabry (ed.), Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 221. 74 Andrew Hammond refers to these productions as ‘contract films’ and describes them as ‘featuring formulaic, bawdy humor’. See his Popular Culture in the Arab World!: Arts, Politics, and the Media (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 139. 75 Shafik, Arab Cinema, 42. 71

168  The Eastern Arab World Two Saudi-owned distribution companies are particularly dominant in the media landscape of the Arab world: the MBC Group, owned by Walid alIbrahim, and Rotana, owned by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.76 The latter, with its various channels – Rotana Music, Rotana Clip, Rotana Cinema and Rotana Zaman – plays a particularly important role in preserving Egypt’s cinematic heritage. As Noha Mellor writes: ‘they own an impressive archive of Egyptian films, thereby assuming the responsibility of preserving a v­ aluable cultural heritage, which should be the state responsibility’.77 While the Gulf States have not historically produced much in the way of cinematic content, one film stands out as an exception that disproves the rule, namely the Kuwaiti director Khalid al-Siddiq’s Bass ya bahr (loosely translated as ‘The Cruel Sea’, 1972). Miriam Cooke notes that the film challenges the myth of the romanticised pearl diver and of life before oil.78 Bass ya bahr experiments beautifully with visual fragmentation. Malkmus and Armes say the following: The struggle and defeat of all the hopes of a young pearl diver is a symphony of cacophonous images; décor is dismembered as much as bodies, and walls, floors, ceilings, hands and fingers all spin around and flash on and off the screen. This last effect is due to a very vibrant montage, as one fragment is set off against another, whilst any whole, stabilizing, reassuring context is withheld for as long as possible.79

This fragmentation is demonstrable in the shot-countershot structure characterising an interaction between the young male protagonist and his love interest early in the tenth minute of the film. Anxious about being spotted, the hero Musaʿid addresses his beloved Nura from a narrow alleyway, while she returns his conversation and gaze from behind a barred window. The spectator shares in the characters’ frustrated fragmented views, as one can barely discern their facial features due to shadows and the obstruction of the bars. In one shot, Nura’s hands, nose and brow are visible, but her eyes and mouth recede into the darkness (RT 9:35). Likewise, from her point of view, Musaʿid is unreachable, appearing small and distant even though he is in a tight, cramped space (RT 9:55).

Sakr, ‘Placing Political Economy’, 222. Mellor, ‘Arab Cinema’, 113. 78 See Miriam Cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 108–11. 79 Malkmus and Armes, Arab and African Filmmaking, 119–20. 76 77

The Eastern Arab World: Regional Essay  169 CONCLUSION

If Egypt as a country with an established film industry, and North Africa, as a region of countries with a shared colonial history, lend themselves to somewhat coherent historical narratives, the eastern Arab world, as I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, does not. Cinematic histories in the region are somewhat disparate and distinct. If one were to go looking for points of continuity one could no doubt find them on a thematic level, for the films in this section treat overlapping topics, from dislocation and exile, to life under authoritarian regimes, to sexual repression, to women’s liberation. But these themes of course resonate more broadly throughout the rest of the Arabic-speaking lands and, indeed, throughout the rest of the world. The films represented here are in many ways outward-facing, in dialogue with a number of global cinematic traditions. Even the most insular of the films, Nabil Maleh’s The Extras, with its claustrophobic exploration of Syrian society, in a way has foreign audiences in mind, targeting outsiders who have the freedom to expound on its critique of the Syrian state. Reading these films in conversation with cinema everywhere is at times very rewarding.

170  The Eastern Chapter 3.1 Arab World

The Dupes (al-Makhduʿun, 1972)1

Directed and adapted by an Egyptian, written by a Palestinian, and financed with Syrian money, The Duped must be considered a pan-Arab production par excellence. Viola Shafik2

The Dupes, directed by Egyptian Tewfik Saleh and produced by the Syrian state, is an adaptation of the celebrated novella by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani entitled Men in the Sun (1963). The novella, inspired by a real event,3 recounts an occasion of human trafficking that ends in tragedy, but it also works, allegorically, as an indictment of leadership and a call to revolutionary struggle; the ill-fated attempt of three generations of Palestinian men to cross from Iraq into Kuwait to find work is meant to provoke the reader to take action. The story is set in about 1958 (before the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation). The character who represents Palestinian leadership, Abu al-Khayzuran, is impotent and guileless, while the characters representing other Arab leaders (in the abstract) are greedy smugglers or corrupt bureaucrats. The Palestinian migrants, whose stories are fleshed out realistically, humanely and in detail in the first section of the novella, are allegorically transformed by their ‘smugglers’ into commodities, cheap labour for illegal export, and their lives become expendable. The film is a very close adaptation of the novella, and Saleh is for the most part careful to preserve Kanafani’s allegorical equations. There is an exception to this rule, however, as Saleh meaningfully changes the narrative’s ending. At the end of the novella, after Abu al-Khayzuran has gone through Ranked #10 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo/New York: American University in Cairo Press, 1988), 155. Shafik’s alternative translation of the title captures the original Arabic’s status as a plural passive participle. 3 Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 106. 1 2

The Dupes, Tewfik Saleh  171 a custom’s check at the Iraq-Kuwait border, he opens the empty water tank of his lorry to find the men he is smuggling lifeless. Later he asks why they did not rap on the sides of the tank. This original ending proved to be very controversial for its portrayal of Palestinians as utterly hapless and passive. The film, however, depicts the men knocking on the side of the tank, but shows the sounds of their knocks being drowned out by the humming of the border station’s air conditioners. The camera zooms in on the tank as the men’s raps are heard (RT 1:38:17), then there is a cut to the air conditioners (RT 1:38:30). Otherwise, Saleh remains faithful to the novella, where wordplay is used to establish the allegorical equations, or at least the main allegorical equation, which is that Abu al-Khayzuran represents Palestinian leadership. This connection is made through paronomasia: the words for ‘driver’ and ‘leader’ in written Arabic are the same: qaʾid. While the word for driver in spoken Arabic is different – sawwaq – Saleh makes sure to use qaʾid in the script on at least one occasion, thereby preserving the double meaning. In Figure 3.1.1, the character called Asʿad refers to Abu al-Khayzuran as ‘our driver’ using the word qaʾid; this gets translated in the subtitles as ‘chief’. In Figure 3.1.2, Abu al-Khayzuran rests his head on the steering wheel while the light and heat of the sun trigger a flashback to the day he learns his injuries have made him impotent. His powerlessness as a driver is thus captured by his being slumped over the wheel. There is also heightened symbolic significance to the place name Shatt al-ʿArab, or ‘the Arabs’ Coast, which is the setting for the first part of the novel and is also the subject of a flashback to a geography lesson. The name refers to the place on the border between Iraq and Iran where the rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates meet and flow into the Persian Gulf. Because the collective word for ‘Arabs’ forms part of this placename, it allows Kanafani

Figure 3.1.1  Abu al-Khayzuran as qaʾid – both ‘driver’ and ‘leader’ (RT 1:05:21)

Figure 3.1.2  Abu al-Khayzuran slumped over the driving wheel (RT 1:08:09)

172  The Eastern Arab World to set his story in a specific geographical location that refers to the broader Arab world. Saleh again remains faithful in his filmic adaptation, such that there is a close-up shot of the sign of the flea-bag hotel where the Palestinian migrants are staying in Basra called the Shatt al-ʿArab Hotel (Funduq Shatt al-ʿArab, RT 43:07). Whilst Saleh is faithful to the original text, the film medium allows for some innovative additional features. Most notably, Saleh draws on documentary footage in the characters’ flashbacks to 1948. This adds an element of realism that heightens the force of the allegory. As Nadia Yaqub points out, by intermixing documentary footage of refugees with shots of Arab leaders undertaking negotiations, Saleh politicises the narrative, highlighting that Arab leaders are implicated in the Palestinians’ plight. She writes: As Abu Qays recalls his experiences in 1948 and his move from Palestine to a refugee camp, documentary footage of the institutionalized relief – long tables of refugees eating communal meals, ration distributions, and the registration of identification cards in a ledger – comingle with acted scenes. Saleh politicizes the images by interspersing them with photographs of meetings among Arab and world leaders, a pointed reference to the negotiations and politicking about the Palestinian cause that have failed to ameliorate the Palestinian condition.4

Ghassan Kanafani, as spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and as the founder of its organ al-Hadaf, was an advocate of militancy.5 That is to say, he supported armed resistance. Indeed, the one positive role model in the novella and film, the schoolteacher Ustadh Salim, who is the figure who delivers the geography lesson on the Shatt al-ʿArab, is martyred in 1948 after he takes up arms against the Zionists. It is clear that Saleh shared Kanafani’s dedication to militancy. The film is meant to provoke the spectator into action, and indeed, into violent action, as the director himself writes: The end of the Dupes does not provoke pity, rather it is supposed to stir up anger and violence … You cannot change the mentality and psychology of a people by playing on their emotions to the point of provoking tears […] But committed art, or at least committed art as I understand it and as I believe anyone who loves this miserable Arab people must understand it, needs to provoke the spectator to feel anger before what he sees, to refuse what he sees.6 Ibid., 106–7. Ghassan Kanafani and his niece Lamis were killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972. It is believed that Israel was behind the assassination. 6 Tewfik Saleh, ‘Trois lettres’, trans. Richard Jacquemond, Alif 15 (1995): 240. Translation from the French my own. 4 5

The Dupes, Tewfik Saleh  173 Prior to directing The Dupes, Tewfik Saleh had established a reputation in Egypt as a social realist filmmaker. Among his films that earned him this reputation are Struggle of the Heroes (Siraʿ al-abtal, 1962), The Rebels (alMutamarridun, 1966) and Mister Bulti (al-Sayyid Bulti, 1967). According to Viola Shafik, whilst making his films in Egypt he often faced censorship and bureaucratic hurdles. Ultimately, in the early 1970s, ‘he was forced to search for producers abroad’.7 Questions to Consider • How does the film blend realism with allegory? • Are there techniques that you would associate with realism and others that you would associate with symbolism? What are some examples? • What are the most symbolic moments of the film? • Do you agree with the allegorical interpretation presented in this chapter? Is there room for other readings? Further Reading Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun, in Men in the Sun and Other Stories, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 1996), 9–56. Nadia Yaqub, ‘Palestine and the Rise of Alternative Arab Cinema’, chap. 3 in Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 84–118. Nadia Yaqub, ‘The Dupes: Three Generations Uprooted from Palestine and Betrayed’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 113–24. Bashir Abu-Manneh, ‘Ghassan Kanafani’s Revolutionary Ethics’, The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 71–95. Muhammad Siddiq, Man is a Cause: Political Consciousness and the Fiction of Ghassan Kanafani (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984). Read ‘Loss, Death, and Impotence: 1956–1965’, 3–21.

Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, 137.

7

174  The Eastern Chapter 3.2 Arab World

Wedding in Galilee (ʿUrs al-Jalil, 1987)1

If the Zionists’ project historically was to deny the existence of a Palestinian people, Wedding in Galilee’s thick description and documentation of Palestinian culture and agriculture provide a counternarrative. It forcefully posits that Palestinian Arabs are there on the ground, and that like the Israelis they are capable of making the desert bloom. Hamid Naficy2

Michel Khleifi, the director of Wedding in Galilee, was born in Nazareth in 1950. He emigrated to Belgium in the 1970s and began his career as a filmmaker directing documentaries for Belgian television. In 1980 he released his first feature-length documentary on a Palestinian subject. Fertile Memory (al-Dhakira al-khasba) is a lyrical exploration of the lives of two women that often blurs reality and fiction. In the words of the director, by focusing on the private lives of two women, ‘This film turned the PLO’s militant cinema upside-down’.3 Indeed, upending militant cinema seems to be one of the preoccupations of Wedding in Galilee, Khleifi’s first fictional feature, where themes of coexistence and demilitarisation predominate. Wedding in Galilee, which was funded by Belgium and France, intentionally blurs the setting as a way of unifying Palestinian experience. As the title suggests, it takes place in the Galilee region, inside Israel’s 1948 borders. It also depicts the Galilee as an area under military administration, which it was, until 1966. However, a portrait of Chaim Herzog, who was president of Israel in the 1980s when the film was made, hangs on the wall of the office of the military governor (RT 4:17). By representing the Galilee under Ranked #16 (tied) in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Hamid Naficy, ‘Chronotopes of Imagined Homeland’, chap. 5 in An Accented Cinema (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 167–8. 3 Michel Khleifi, ‘From Reality to Fiction – From Poverty to Expression’, trans. Omar alQattan, in Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/New York: Verso, 2006), 51. 1 2

Wedding in Galilee, Michel Khleifi  175 military occupation in the 1980s, Khleifi collapses the boundaries between Palestinians inside Israel and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Solidifying the equation is the fact that the film was shot on locations in the Galilee, Jerusalem and the West Bank, with four out of the nine weeks shot in the West Bank.4 The landscapes, in this sense, are merged. The premise of the film is that a mukhtar or headman of a village is given permission to hold his son’s wedding even though his village is under curfew on the condition that he invite the local Israeli military governor and his officers to the wedding. The mukhtar accepts the condition and invites them to the wedding, where they are treated as guests of honour. This makes many of the villagers angry, and it humiliates the groom to such an extent that he cannot consummate the marriage. Whilst some young men from the village pursue a militant strategy, conspiring to attack the Israeli guests, other villagers seek to tame the officers by welcoming them with their hospitality and seducing them through the beautifully rustic and sensuous scene they have created. At the movie’s end, the Israeli officers retreat from the village as the wedding comes to a conclusion. By this time, one female Israeli officer has been rather symbolically stripped of her uniform and dressed in a traditional Palestinian embroidered gown. As Hamid Naficy observes, Khleifi depicts Palestine as a timeless ‘agricultural idyll’ that has its roots deep in the past ‘before occupation and expulsion’5 and persists in the present. In this idyll, multiple generations of Palestinians, recollecting multiple occupiers,6 come together to prepare and celebrate a wedding feast. The mise-en-scène is exquisite: attention is paid to every last detail of the comfort, beauty and sensuousness of the surroundings, with close-ups of entrées and side dishes, silver trays, beautiful brass coffee pots, pot pourri, perfume, upholstery, garments, furnishings, and so forth. The shots document and describe the lavish surroundings in terms that reinforce existing stereotypes about the aesthetics of Middle Eastern living. Observe the reception room that has been prepared for the Mukhtar to make the announcement about the conditions of his son’s wedding to the village men. It is appointed just as one would expect. We are shown the room before anyone enters it to make sure we absorb the environment (Figure 3.2.1). Occasionally, the film engages in ethnographic shots. This happens, for example, when the Mukhtar commands his wife to ululate, and Hamid Naficy, ‘Table B2: Financial Profile of Wedding in Galilee’, in An Accented Cinema (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 294. 5 Hamid Naficy, ‘Chronotopes of Imagined Homeland’, 168. 6 One old man repeatedly evokes Ottoman Turkish and British rule over Palestine. 4

176  The Eastern Arab World

Figure 3.2.1  Interior of a room where guests are to be served coffee (RT 09:09)

Figure 3.2.2  Close-up of groom’s mother as she ululates (RT 06:11)

we have a close-up of her face (Figure 3.2.2) that shows us how to move our tongues should we wish to do the same. Similarly, the scenes where the bride and groom are bathed seem instructional and ritualistic. A number of orientalists tropes are operative here, but there is a self-aware purposefulness behind them, there is even sometimes a sense in which they are being subverted against the spectator. This subversiveness is also seen in the casting, where two of the Israelis are played by Palestinian actors: Makram Khoury plays the role of the Israeli military governor, and Juliano Mer-Khamis, who comes from a mixed Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli background, is cast as the handsome Israeli soldier with whom Sumaya, the daughter of the Mukhtar, flirts – she tells him, in another symbolic defrocking, that he will have to take off his uniform if he wishes to dance. Naficy notes that the village space may be subdivided into ‘masculine’ militarised exteriors and ‘feminine’ interiors.7 The example of the masculine exterior he discusses is the minefield into which the beloved mare of the Mukhtar strays. In order to ensure the horse’s safe removal from the minefield, the Mukhtar needs the cooperation of the Israelis and their military technology. An Israeli soldier, examining a map of the minefield, instructs the Mukhtar as to how he may approach the horse and call it to him without him or the horse getting blown up. The operation to rescue the horse succeeds. Meanwhile, the female Israeli soldier is closeted away in the women’s quarters, where the women tend to her body (RT 50:12). Eventually she is undressed and redressed as a Palestinian civilian. In the meantime, the atmosphere set in the harem is dream-like, with women’s whispers and incantations audible in the soundtrack and close-up shots of women’s toiletries (1:04:17). A female figure appears and is captured in the mirror before vanishing. In both of these spaces, the minefield and the harem, there is a Hamid Naficy, ‘Chronotopes of Imagined Homeland’, 168.

7

Wedding in Galilee, Michel Khleifi  177 kind of demilitarisation occurring, and, as Naficy points out, ‘the film establishes a parallel between the saving of the mare and the transformation of the female soldier, both of which involved demilitarization as a result of cooperation of the opponents’.8 The parallel between the Israeli woman soldier, Tali, and the mare is established by means of a cut from Tali’s body (RT 1:05:13) to that of the horse in the minefield (RT 1:05:14). This is not the first cut of its kind: earlier in the film, there is a cut from the bride being bathed (RT 26:57) to the mare in its stable being brushed by the Mukhtar, who compares his horse to a ‘proud virgin’. The parallels and the call for demilitarisation are not only to be found in the minefield and the women’s quarters, but also in the marital bedroom, where the bride prevents the groom from stabbing his father with a knife. It is not only militarisation but the weight of the patriarchy that is oppressive. Questions to Consider • How does Khleifi depict Palestinian material culture? How is this material culture located with respect to the land? • Where does the film ‘teach us’ about Palestine? When do you get the sense that Khleifi is delving into the ethnographic to familiarise the ­spectators with that which they do not know? • Are the images, sounds and movements that Kheifi uses to portray Palestinians built on stereotypes? How so? Are there any moments that subvert such stereotypes? Further Reading Tim Kennedy, ‘Michel Khleifi: Filmmaker of Memory (Palestine)’, in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 52–74. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, ‘About Place and Time: The Cinema of Michel Khleifi’, chap. 3 in Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 74–100. Michel Khleifi, ‘From Reality to Fiction – From Poverty to Expression’, trans. Omar alQattan, in Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/ New York: Verso, 2006), 45–57. Hamid Naficy, ‘Chronotopes of Imagined Homeland’, chap. 5 in An Accented Cinema (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 152–87.

Naficy, ibid., 168–9.

8

178  The Eastern Chapter 3.3 Arab World

The Extras (al-Kumbars, 1993)1

The remarkable feat accomplished by Syrian filmmakers is how they have succeeded in carving out an independent, critical and often subversive cinema under the sponsorship of a vigorous state ruled by a single party actively invested in suppressing dissent and coercing an official dogma. This is a state-sponsored cinema at the furthest possible remove from a cinema of propaganda or a cinema that serves to anchor and disseminate the tenets of the state’s hegemony. Rasha Salti2

Nabil Maleh (b. 1936), director of The Extras, studied filmmaking in Prague where he graduated in 1964. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he made short, experimental films as well as longer films for television. He directed the first feature film produced by Syria’s National Film Organisation (NFO). The Leopard (al-Fahd, 1972), which Maleh adapted from a Haydar Haydar novel, was a great local and international success. Maleh has lived in the United States, Switzerland and Greece, and has worked on a number of international productions, but much of his career has been based in Syria where he has directed films and television programmes. Despite receiving Syrian state funding for many of his projects, Maleh situates himself as a dissident. As Christa Salamandra puts it: Maleh embodies the Syrian cinema paradox: despite receiving NFO financing, the filmmaker is often treated as a dissident, a distinction he bears with honor. State funding has enabled him to forgo foreign sources, permitting, he believes, a greater local authenticity. A militant independent, Maleh is proudly among the few Syrian filmmakers to avoid serving as NFO employees. Yet his films are perhaps the most widely viewed within Syria.3 Ranked #45 (tied) in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Rasha Salti, ‘Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, in Rasha Salti (ed.), Insights into Syrian Cinema (New York: Rattapallax, 2006), 22. 3 Christa Salamandra, ‘Nabil Maleh: Syria’s Leopard (Syria)’, in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 22. 1 2

The Extras, Nabil Maleh  179 The Extras, like other allegories, may be said to have two layers of meaning: the overt meaning, which plays out literally, and the hidden or true meaning, which is encoded. On a literal level, the film is about sexual repression: the protagonist Salem, played by Bassam Koussa, is desperate to spend some time alone with his widowed girlfriend Nada, played by Samar Sami. Salem’s friend Adel has given Salem the use of his flat for a two-hour window, from 6.00 to 8.00 pm one evening. Nada visits Salem in Adel’s flat, but the two of them are too paranoid about people discovering their rendezvous to enjoy themselves. That Salem is sexually obsessed is made manifest by the miseen-scène in the opening minutes of the film. First, we see Salem in his day job as a gas station attendant. He cleans the windows of a car after the driver has alighted. Salem is wiping the driver’s window when he catches a glimpse of a woman’s bare legs in the passenger seat (Figure 3.3.1). Salem stares and lingers over the window as he prolongs his lustful gaze. Second, we see Salem looking at pornography in his bedroom (RT 1:52) before being interrupted by his family. About twenty minutes into the film, when Salem finds himself alone in Adel’s flat, waiting for the arrival of Nada, he begins to have pornographic fantasies, such as one where he finds himself in bed with three scantily clad women uttering provocative murmurs and giggles (Figure 3.3.2). The reality for Salem and Nada proves to be much more subdued, with the most erotic moment being when Nada lets her hair down and Salem comments that he has never seen her hair before. Otherwise, they have a brief embrace in the kitchen and a cuddle under, rather than atop, the bed. But much of the action consists of Salem describing and re-enacting his work as an extra for the national theatre, and it is here that most of the allegorical encoding occurs. The vocabulary is political; Salem speaks of being cast as a citizen, a guard, a thief, a protestor and an informer. Often,

Figure 3.3.1  Salem gazes on the legs of a female passenger as he washes a car window (RT 1:36)

Figure 3.3.2  Salem experiences a pornographic fantasy (RT 22:30)

180  The Eastern Arab World there is reference to a ruler. People with power and authority exploit and abuse their ­underlings. Throughout this episode, bits of symbolically suggestive dialogue are exchanged. The dramatic episode begins for example, with Salem seemingly pretending to be asleep and then playing dead. When he e­ ventually reveals that he is just joking, Nada is understandably perturbed. SALEM: Every day I die seven times. NADA: What for? SALEM: It is the new play. Didn’t I tell you about it? I’m playing the role of a citizen. NADA: Being a citizen – is it a reason to die? SALEM: Oh no. But you see I’m very glad that I have now a role in which I have dialogue.

These symbolically laden exchanges continue for some time. That Salem introduces himself early on as acting the role of the ‘citizen’ in the ‘national theatre’, makes it clear that the plotline about sexual repression is in fact dealing with political repression. Other elements in the plot that occur outside the theatrical interlude, such as the cuddle under the broken bed, thereby take on political dimensions. When the characters liken the wires of the bedspring to prison bars, we see the characters of Nada and Salem not so much as lovers but as political prisoners (Figure 3.3.3). Nevertheless, the extreme close-up of the nearly bare skin of Nada’s hands (RT 1:24:27) reminds the spectator of the close-ups of thighs and other female body parts in Salem’s sexual fantasies and of the role of Salem’s hand in expressing his desire to touch women’s bodies. The allegorical encoding is thereby ­protected or hidden by the literal meanings and imagery. At the end of the film, as Nada and Salem are seen leaving the building, the camera tilts up to reveal a high-rise apartment block. It then pans over the horizon to reveal the Damascus skyline, suggesting that Salem and Nada’s drama is unfolding to countless others across the city and perhaps beyond. Indeed, apparently Maleh originally envisioned producing this film in Egypt and casting the megastars Nur al-Sharif and Yusra in the lead roles.4 Obviously, had the film been set in Egypt, the intended meaning of the allegory would not have been seen to be targeting the Baathist regime. Rather, it would have been understood either as a commentary about Egypt or a more universal exposition of the police state. Even if the allegory may be read as an indictment of authoritarian regimes everywhere, the claustrophobic feel of a film set almost entirely in an apart Christa Salamandra, ‘Nabil Maleh’, 26.

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The Extras, Nabil Maleh  181

Figure 3.3.3  Salem and Nada ‘caged’ under the wire frame of Adel’s bed (RT 1:22:30)

ment in a tower block in Damascus would suggest a p ­ articularly local ­resonance. This begs the question: why would the Syrian state support the making of a film that depicts its political structures in such ghastly terms? Scholars such Wedeen and Cooke have theorised this, the former as tanfis, or ‘letting out air’, and the latter as ‘commissioned criticism’. The concept behind tanfis is that it enables dissidents to express themselves artistically and thereby channels their oppositional energy into outlets that do not threaten the state.5 Commissioned criticism, on the other hand, ensures that the authorities have some element of control over the message, and, even if that message portrays them negatively, it can increase their power by reminding the audience of the price of dissidence.6 As Josef Gugler points out: Viewers of Maleh’s film do get to share in the anxious mood of those who live in fear or persecution by long pauses between movements and in the dialogue Lisa Wedeen, ‘Tolerated Parodies of Politics in Syrian Cinema’, in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 104. 6 See Miriam Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 5

182  The Eastern Arab World that express the restlessness of the characters, by close-ups that convey their emotions, and by the effective acting of Samar Sami and Bassam Koussa, who won the top acting awards for their portrayals of Nada and Salem at the Arab Cinema Biennial in Paris.7

The film may be said to intimidate at the same time that it criticises; perhaps this is why it was allowed to have a commercial release in Syria ‘unlike most of the films more or less explicitly critical of the regime’.8 Questions to Consider • How does the film employ dual signification? A large proportion of the dialogue may be interpreted as references to the police state. Where do these references occur? • What role do the fantasy sequences play? (Note that they are signalled by a soft focus and shifts in the soundtrack.) What links the pornographic fantasies with the paranoid fantasies? • How does the soundtrack create the tense atmosphere? Does the soundtrack bolster the allegorical equations set out by the theatrical content? Further Reading Christa Salamandra, ‘Nabil Maleh: Syria’s Leopard (Syria)’, in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 16–33. Lisa Wedeen, ‘Tolerated Parodies of Politics in Syrian Cinema’, in Joseph Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 104–12. Rasha Salti, ‘Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, in Rasha Salti (ed.), Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers (New York: Ratapallax Press, 2006), 21–44. Josef Gugler, ‘The Extras: Lovers Suffer the Twin Repressions of a Patriarchal Culture and a Police State’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 125–33.

Josef Gugler, ‘The Extras: Lovers Suffer the Twin Repressions of a Patriarchal Culture and a Police State’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 131. 8 Ibid., 131. 7

Chapter 3.4

The Extras, Nabil Maleh  183

Chronicle of a Disappearance (Sijill ikhtifaʾ, 1996)1

Chronicle of a Disappearance is the first feature film by self-taught film ­director Elia Suleiman and constitutes the first part of what has become known as his autobiographical trilogy, the second and third instalments of which are the topics of the next chapters. Suleiman was born and raised in Nazareth and began his filmmaking career in New York, where he made his first film, a documentary about orientalism in American screen cultures called Introduction to the End of an Argument (with Jayce Salloum, 1990), as well as what might be termed an ‘epistolary film’ entitled Homage by Assassination (1992).2 Suleiman is known for his static framing, long takes and minimalist narratives. He inscribes himself into the film by appearing as the main protagonist who does little and says less. In fact, ES, as Elia Suleiman’s onscreen persona is known, is a mute character whose power comes from silent observation. In addition to being mute, he is expressionless. Often, he stands semi-absent (i.e. with his back to the camera, at the edge of the frame, or unseen by other characters). The premise of Chronicle is that the filmmaker returns to Palestine to deliver a speech which in the end, for various reasons, he cannot deliver; thus, there is little dramatic action. What makes his films so enjoyable is their humour, which is choreographed like dance. Characters and props are staged to elicit laughter, even as the political realities behind various scenarios evoke anger or depression. The narrative is circular, punctuated by returns to previous narrative moments. Moreover, there is a lack of purposeful action. Events form part of everyday routines rather than chronological, historical time. Suleiman disorients the spectator in space through dislocations. If Khleifi merges distinct Palestinian experiences by blurring Ranked #47 (tied) in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Hamid Naficy, ‘Palestinian Exilic Cinema and Film Letters’, in Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/New York: Verso, 2006), 97–8.

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184  The Eastern Arab World the boundaries between the Galilee and the West Bank, Suleiman draws attention to their disparateness. The first part of Chronicle takes place in Nazareth, the home town of Elia Suleiman, as well as, of course, Jesus. Nazareth is in the Galilee. It is an Arab city whose residents are Israeli citizens, living as they do within the so-called ‘Green Line’, or Israel’s border as established by a 1949 armistice. The film’s early encounters are staged as documentary interviews, of which there are three: an interview with Elia Suleiman’s aunt, an interview with the writer and poet Taha Muhammad Ali (1931–2011), and an interview with a foreign priest. The content of the interviews is meandering, and there is no noticeable intervention on the part of the filmmaker. The camera just documents what the interviewees say. Later Elia Suleiman makes a trip to Jerusalem, or more specifically, Occupied East Jerusalem. There he is supposed to give a lecture whose Arabic title (al-damir al-mustatir taqdiruhu Filastin, 48:06) translates roughly as ‘The Implied Pronoun Referring Back to Palestine’,3 but the sound system in the hall is not working. There he also rents a flat. At a rental office, he encounters Adan, an East Jerusalemite who attempts to rent a flat from Israelis in West Jerusalem after the Palestinian real estate agent gives her a hard time for being a young woman seeking to live on her own. Adan, unlike ES, is not mute, and, in fact, takes matters into her own hands. Adan finds herself backstage at the Hakawati Theatre, in a room which is full of props associated with militant Palestinian activism, such as a swivel chair in the colours of the Palestinian flag, and a cigarette lighter in the shape of a hand grenade. From this base, she decides to wreak havoc. Using a walkie talkie, and speaking in flawless Hebrew, Adan initiates a security alert among Israeli police officers, whom she sends on a wild goose chase around a traffic circle. From Jerusalem ES visits Jericho. The significance of this is that the episode represents a scathing indictment of the Oslo Accords and the idea that the then newly established Palestinian National Authority, which at that time was located in Gaza and Jericho, could serve as the basis for a Palestinian state. In a vignette entitled ‘The Promised Land’, Suleiman’s car heads down a long desert road with a song about peace by Natacha Atlas playing on the soundtrack. ‘Let’s make peace, we are brothers’, she sings. Eventually the car comes to a fork in the road (RT 1:10:35): turn to the left to get to Gaza, to the right to get to Jericho. ES’s car turns right. We then cut Note that the title of the lecture corresponds with that of the reading by Elia Suleiman, ‘The Hidden Conscience of Estimated Palestine’, assigned for this chapter. Damir means both ‘conscience’ and ‘pronoun’. The reading, which consists of satirical musings on symbols of Palestinian nationality, may give us a sense of what the talk would have been about, had it been delivered.

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Chronicle of a Disappearance, Elia Suleiman  185 to a scene of a man swimming in the pool of a desolate resort with a large mural of Yasser Arafat in the background (Figure 3.4.1). Another shot then depicts ES having a drink in a large cafeteria, which is completely empty apart from him and his waiter. With this episode, Suleiman demonstrates the absurdity and vacuousness of the Oslo plan: Gaza and Jericho are in opposite directions, and Jericho is portrayed as a hollow seat of political authority: an empty resort where the image of Yasser Arafat looms large. One very meaningful return in the film occurs at its end, where it evokes the opening shot. In both the opening and closing scenes, ES’s father has fallen asleep sitting up, resting his head on his hand and breathing heavily. In the opening shot, the camera zooms in on his head and hand and pans around them, their shapes cutting different figures against the darkness. One such image (Figure 3.4.2) strikingly resembles of map of historic Palestine (including Israel and the Occupied Territories). It is perhaps with this opening image that Suleiman starts to play with national iconography, intimately linking his father to the land via the contours of a map. At the end of the film, ES’s father and mother have fallen asleep on the sofa, their heads resting on their hands, whilst watching television. The Israeli national anthem plays on the television, as it does at the end of every broadcasting day. While the anthem plays, an image of the Israeli flag waving in the wind appears on the screen. The Palestine evoked so intimately in the opening shot has been pushed out of the spectator’s consciousness by Israel. It is through such an image that Suleiman demonstrates the psychological impact of occupation – the occupying power with its hegemonic sounds and images gets inside the head. If the ending would seem at first to be defeatist,

Figure 3.4.1  Jericho resort with large mural of Yasser Arafat (RT 1:11:09)

186  The Eastern Arab World

Figure 3.4.2  Profile of ES’s father as he has fallen asleep resting head on hand (RT 01:16)

in that the film closes with this Zionist television broadcast, upon further consideration, we find a certain steadfastness that outlasts its sounds and images. When the television signal is disrupted and the sound of the anthem overtaken by white noise, over and above the white noise we are left with the sound of the father’s heavy breathing (RT 1:21:05). There then appears a dedication on the screen: ‘To my mother and father, the last homeland’. The parents’ Palestine thus persists beyond the confines of the broadcast. Questions to Consider • How is space configured? How does its representation evoke discontinuity reflecting the disparateness of Palestinian experiences? • What is the role of ES? Is he simply a witness or a participant in the action? What is the nature of his gaze? How does he compare with Adan? • Hebrew in Suleiman’s films is often mediated through technology – for example through the radio, an amplifier, a telephone or a walkie-talkie. What is the purpose or effect of this phenomenon? Further Reading Refqa Abu-Remaileh, ‘Elia Suleiman: Narrating Negative Space’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 77–97.

Chronicle of a Disappearance, Elia Suleiman  187 Haim Bresheeth, ‘Segell ikhtifa/Chronicle of a Disappearance’, in Gönül Dönmez-Colin (ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East (London: Wallflower, 2007), 169–78. Elia Suleiman, ‘The Hidden Conscience of Estimated Palestine’, in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (eds), Theorising National Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 202–5. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, ‘Between Exile and Homeland: The Films of Elia Suleiman’, chap. 7 in Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 171–89.

188  The Eastern Chapter 3.5 Arab World

Divine Intervention (Yadun ilahiyya, 2002)1

Divine Intervention revisits and replays many of the themes and tropes ­presented in Chronicle. Like Chronicle, it is an autobiographical return narrative: here the filmmaker or, to be more precise, his onscreen persona, ES, returns to Palestine, this time not to give a speech but rather to visit his dying father. Like Chronicle, it is set between three locations: Nazareth, Jerusalem and the West Bank. Also like Chronicle, the narrative is circular and lacks linear development. Despite these similarities, Divine Intervention represents a step, however hesitant or reluctant, towards conventional or mainstream filmmaking. This is because the narrative structure is tighter, there is more character development, and there is more action by way of greater attention to fantasy sequences. If the Nazareth section of Chronicle is composed partly of comic vignettes documenting the absurdity of everyday life and partly of the meandering ‘interview-like’ monologues, Divine Intervention ditches the interviews and makes its beautifully choreographed vignettes more interlocking, such that tensions unfold, and the spectator is granted insights into characters’ personalities. The character of the road-digger, who is identified for us by an Israeli police officer through a walkie-talkie, is first seen gathering bottles on his roof. We understand him, at this point, to be an eccentric collector. Later he is shown throwing the bottles at police officers, at which point we realise he is a rebel against the establishment. Still later, he stabs a football that lands on his roof and tosses the punctured remains back into the street, in which case he appears cruelly vindicative. Finally, we see him sabotaging his own work as a road-digger. Elsewhere we are introduced to a man whose habit is to toss his rubbish into his neighbour’s garden. We see him do this a few times until the neighbour tosses all the bags back onto his property. He confronts her with her rude action. She defends herself by saying that it was his rubbish to Ranked #7 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion.

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Divine Intervention, Elia Suleiman  189 begin with. Still, he explains, it was rude and vindicative to throw it all back at him. Would it not have been preferable and more neighbourly for her to try to speak to him about it first? Many of the vignettes feature ES’s father, both at home, where we have several scenes of him sitting at his kitchen table and opening his mail, and at work as a car mechanic. A few scenes establish that he is in debt and that the collectors are threatening to confiscate his property. All these scenes in Nazareth take place in ES’s absence. Finally, as ES’s father has just opened a letter – presumably from a debt collector – he stands up and keels over. This then leads to ES’s arrival. We see him driving a car and eating an apricot. When he is done eating, he throws the pit out the window and it blows up a tank at the side of the road. This is the film’s first fantastical bit of action, and it inaugurates the use of special effects. ‘Rarely in the history of cinema’, Hamid Dabashi writes about this moment, ‘has a cinematic will to resist and subvert power so joyously dismantled the entire machinery of a state apparatus … ’.2 From here, that is to say from this road trip of ES to his father in a hospital in Jerusalem, one could say that there are two narrative strands. One pertains to his father’s situation in the hospital. Here, one finds that the vignettestyle of plausible choreographed humour predominates; the other follows his encounters with his girlfriend from Ramallah whom he has to meet at a checkpoint, as she is not allowed to enter Jerusalem. The story plane involving the girlfriend, who is played by journalist Manal Khader, consists of handholding sessions in the confines of a car parked at a checkpoint punctuated by action-packed fantasy sequences, of which there are three. In the first, the girlfriend, who is donning high heels and sunglasses, saunters through the Al-Ram checkpoint as if it is a catwalk, staring down the Israeli soldiers and causing the checkpoint tower to collapse. In the second, ES, who is again parked at the Al-Ram checkpoint, releases a red balloon painted with the face of Yasser Arafat through the sunroof of his car. The balloon floats up and away over Jerusalem, touring all the holy sites, and it so distracts the checkpoint soldiers who keep the balloon in their sights (Figure 3.5.1) that ES is able to drive through to Jerusalem with his girlfriend in the passenger seat. The third fantasy sequence, which is set in the West Bank, takes place at a shooting range. The targets are kufiyya-clad cardboard cut-outs, one of which comes to life as a Palestinian Ninja fighter played by none other than Manal Khader. She fends off bullets and defends herself with all the powers and props of a superhero. The sequence is rife with biblical imagery recalling David and his use of a slingshot against Goliath and Jesus with his crown Hamid Dabashi, ‘In Praise of Frivolity: On the Cinema of Elia Suleiman’, in Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/New York: Verso, 2006, 135.

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190  The Eastern Arab World

Figure 3.5.1  Balloon with Yasser Arafat’s portrait tours the skies over Jerusalem (RT 56:23)

of thorns. Towards the end of the sequence, Manal Khader is armed with a shield in the shape of Palestine. She then uses it as a boomerang to take out an Israeli helicopter looming behind her. This fantastical action serves as the film’s denouement. This fantasy sequence is foreshadowed when ES is driving along the road to Ramallah and finds himself in a staring match with another driver.3 This other driver is visibly Jewish, as he is wearing a kippah, and he hoists the Israeli flag over his car. In the credits, he is identified as ‘the settler’. The two cars are stopped, and by the side of the road is a billboard advertising the shooting range where the ninja sequence will be set. The billboard features a kufiyya-wearing ‘terrorist’, whose eyes are recognisably those of Manal Khader (Figure 3.5.2). ES stares at her image, and the image stares back. ES then spots the driver to his left and tries to get his attention with music in order to provoke a staring match. As ES gazes into the settler’s car, we can see Manal Khader’s image in the distance, also gazing at the settler through ES’s car windows (Figure 3.5.3). When the settler stares back (RT 1:11:52), he is confronted by both ES and the image of the terrorist on the billboard. This scene may be said to merge the two narrative threads in that it choreographs the mundane, but it also sets up the fantasy action sequence to follow. My discussion of this sequence is heavily indebted to Refqa Abu-Remaileh, ‘Documenting Palestinian Presence: A Study of the Novels of Emile Habibi and the films of Elia Suleiman’ (DPhil diss., Oxford University, 2010), 237–8.

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Divine Intervention, Elia Suleiman  191

Figure 3.5.2  Close-up of a kufiyye-clad ‘terrorist’ on billboard advertising a shooting range (RT 1:10:57)

Figure 3.5.3  ES in his car, staring at the settler (RT 1:11:36)

Refqa Abu-Remaileh sums up this effect admirably: The editing of the contest, cutting back and forth between ES and the settler (and the figure on the billboard), builds up tension, creating a sense that ES is entrapped between two stereotypical figures, one ‘real’ and the other ‘imaginary’, with the imaginary coming to life in an unexpected fashion towards the end of the film.4

Meanwhile the storyline involving the father continues along its plausible but absurdist path. There are some exquisite shots of ES standing mute, observing his surroundings. In Figure 3.5.4, he gazes at an object off screen. The object is his father, whom we can see in the mirror over the sink next to which ES stands, but he is seen through a window. The shot thereby defines the space of an empty room. Between ES and the window, there is nothing, but through the window, ES’s father appears. In another hospital scene (RT circa 39:00) we watch one after the other of the father’s roommates get up and go out in the hallway to have a cigarette. In the shot that follows, a whole parade of patients, doctors and nurses taking drags on their cigarettes dance around each other in a cramped corridor. In one particularly comical twist, two bald men in pink robes, both with whiplash bandages around their necks, approach the camera with their shared IV pole before turning around and heading to the other end of the hallway. Another comic moment comes when the expressionless ES is seen crying (1:21:45). The premise is that he is crying because he is chopping onions, but we soon learn from a title slide (1:22:28) that his father has died. The grief one would feel from news of the death is diverted by the joke about the onion. The film then ends back in the parents’ flat in Nazareth with ES and his mother sitting in the kitchen staring at a pressure cooker. Ibid., 238.

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192  The Eastern Arab World

Figure 3.5.4  Cryptic positioning of ES and his gaze upon his father (RT 31:24)

Questions to Consider • Note the momentum that develops between nearly identical shots and scenes. When the camera returns to a character or a space, how are things choreographed differently in meaningful ways? • Note the treatment of Palestinian iconography. Are symbols of the nation being subverted or celebrated or both? Do the politics of Divine Intervention differ from that of Chronicle? • What do you make of the opening action sequence involving a man in a Santa Claus suit? How does that set a tone towards different kinds of icons? • How would you compare the soundtracks of Divine Intervention and Chronicle? Further Reading Refqa Abu-Remaileh, ‘Narratives in Conflict: Emile Habibi’s Al-Waqa’i‘ al-ghariba and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention’, in Dina Matar and Zahera Harb (eds), Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 85–108. Hamid Dabashi, ‘In Praise of Frivolity: On the Cinema of Elia Suleiman’, in Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London/New York: Verso, 2006), 131–60. Rasha Salti, ‘From Resistance and Bearing Witness to the Power of the Fantastical: Icons and Symbols in Palestinian Poetry and Cinema’, Third Text 24, no. 1 (2010): 39–52.

Chapter 3.6

The Extras, Nabil Maleh  193

The Time That Remains (al-Zaman al-baqi, 2009)1

As far as I was concerned, you couldn’t tell the story of what happened in Nazareth in 1948 in any other way. Fuad’s story had to be told using linearity. But I broke that linearity up with a lot of tableaux because I couldn’t just surrender to it completely. I wouldn’t ever, for example, just show soldiers robbing a house; so I made them dance it.2 Elia Suleiman

Of the three films in Elia Suleiman’s autobiographical trilogy, The Time That Remains comes closest to having a conventional, linear narrative. The spatial organisation found in his other films, where everything happens in the here and now but in the differentiated places of Nazareth, Jerusalem and the West Bank has been replaced by temporal organisation. Here there are four temporal frames which are presented – for the most part – in chronological order.3 The first quarter takes place in 1948, the second in 1970, the third in 1980 and the last in the present. In this sense chronology organises the material. Within each section, the degree to which one can establish a causal chain of events is variable, with the first section featuring the strongest conventional storyline and the present the most noneventful one. Each of the three historical sections contains a reference to a specific date and an associated event. In 1948, the date is 16 July – the day the mayor of Nazareth signed an agreement to surrender to Israeli military administration. In 1970, the day is 28 September, the death date of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1980, the date mentioned is Land Day, 30 March; more specifically it is said to be the fourth anniversary of the first Land Day in 1976. In the section that unfolds in the present, Ranked #21 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Nehad Khader, ‘Interview with Elia Suleiman: The Power of Ridicule’, Journal of Palestine Studies 44, no. 4 (2015): 22. 3 Strictly speaking the final quarter of the film serves as the ‘frame story’ and the film opens with a scene in the present. 1 2

194  The Eastern Arab World there is a Christmas tree decorating ES’s mother’s apartment, but we are otherwise not informed of a specific date. Elia Suleiman’s fictionalised father, here in the third film of the trilogy named as Fuad, makes for an ideal leading male. Played by Saleh Bakri, he is handsome, compassionate, strong, and fearless. As a gunmaker, he plays a crucial role in the Palestinian resistance. In 1948, we see him resisting Israeli occupation, rescuing an injured man, getting captured and identified by a collaborator, and then being thrown over a wall. As he acts, he also bears witness to atrocities around him. This happens through point of view structures that are both conventional, such as when he watches Israeli soldiers confiscating the valuables from a Palestinian house, and unconventional, such as when he observes his fellow prisoners in the olive grove even though he is blindfolded. In this first section of the film, Suleiman still creates tableaux about life’s absurd moments, even in the context of the Nakba, but not all these moments are played for laughs. To the contrary, sometimes irony is used to evoke horror, such as when a woman is shot dead for ululating and cheering on Zionist soldiers disguised as Arab Liberation Army fighters. In the 1970 section of the film, there is a bit less action and a bit more choreography of the absurd and the mundane, nevertheless Fuad still takes consequential actions. Sometimes these actions are part of a linear narrative framework. For example, when Fuad travels to Jerusalem to buy parts for his lathe workshop (transformed from the 1948 gun workshop), he rescues an Israeli soldier from the smouldering wreckage of an overturned jeep. But we also see his actions having consequences when they form part of the circular narrative with its comic refrains. For example, Fuad repeatedly saves the life of the neighbour who dowses himself with gasoline and threatens to ignite himself with a match. Also, Fuad’s repeated night-time fishing excursions see him arrested and accused of smuggling weapons. In 1980, Fuad’s health falters and he becomes less heroic in a traditional sense. Instead it is ES, named in the script as Elia, who enters linear history and chronological time. As a ten-year-old, Elia had already gotten in trouble with his teachers in 1970 for calling America imperialist, but now, in 1980, as a twenty-year-old, we learn that he has been denounced for his activism and that he has twentyfour hours to leave the country. We are not told exactly what he has done this time, but we are told that on a previous Land Day, he got into trouble with the authorities for tearing an Israeli flag. In the final, present day section of the film the narrative reverts to the choreography of mundane realities and daily routines. As Fuad has by now passed away, much of this section is focused on ES’s mother, who remains unnamed throughout the film. We observe her sitting on her balcony, watching television, eating ice cream, and getting her sugar-levels checked by

The Time That Remains, Elia Suleiman  195 a nurse. The one action that she takes occurs as she lies in a hospital bed. Clasping a photo of Fuad to her chest, she discontinues her oxygen. We are not shown the consequence of her action, but this is the final ‘event’ or ‘action’ of the film which is dedicated ‘to the memory of’ Elia Suleiman’s parents. In The Time That Remains, which is subtitled ‘Chronicle of a Present Absentee’, Suleiman depicts the Nakba, or the ‘catastrophe’ that befell the Palestinians in 1948 with the establishment of the state of Israel with everything from light-hearted irreverence to horrific dark humour. For example, in a scene depicting the surrender of Nazareth, a photographer and his camera separate the officials from the audience members present. As the historic agreement is signed, the audience’s view of the officials is eclipsed by that of the photographer’s posterior (RT 11:00). While this scene is played for laughs, others evoke an uncomfortable eeriness. This happens, for example, when Fuad and his cousin rescue an injured man by seeking refuge for him in an abandoned house. A view of the dining room with empty chairs but a table laden with food, indicates that the family had to vacate their home mid-meal (RT 20:05). A bit later, Fuad witnesses Israeli soldiers plundering a home of its personal possessions. One of the items they steal is a phonograph which they crank up, and it starts to play the Layla Murad song ‘Qalbi dalili’ (My heart is my guide). The soldiers’ movements then begin to be choreographed as a dance. At the most absurd moment, two soldiers fold a piece of stolen linen in time to the music (RT 24:12). In one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, Fuad is taken to an olive grove where other Palestinian prisoners are being held. He is blindfolded and threatened with murder. Suleiman creates a point of view structure through the blindfold. Fuad turns his head to the left, as if trying to see something, thereby establishing a glance (Figure 3.6.1), and then the camera cuts to a view of what he would see were he not blindfolded (Figure 3.6.2).

Figure 3.6.1  Fuad’s blindfolded gaze over prisoners in an olive grove (RT 28:19)

Figure 3.6.2  Fuad’s view of the prisoners in the olive grove (RT 28:21)

196  The Eastern Arab World

Figure 3.6.3  View of historic ‘Visit Palestine’ poster where the word ‘Palestine’ has been replaced (RT 0:41)

The stills of the prisoners in the olive grove are hauntingly beautiful, almost painterly, capturing simultaneously the beauty of the landscape and the horror of what has taken place there. Speaking of painterly descriptions of the landscape, I am reminded of the film’s opening shot: two identical vintage travel posters are seen from the interior of an airport taxi through its hatchback (Figure 3.6.3). The Hebrew phrase ERETZ ACHERET meaning ‘Other Land’ appears in transliteration at the bottoms of the posters, each of which is partially obscured by the walls of the taxi. The image on the airport posters comes from a poster originally designed by Mitchell Loeb in about 1947. That poster, commissioned by the Jewish Agency for Palestine in Jerusalem, read: ‘Visit PALESTINE. See ancient beauty revived.’4 This seemingly harmless, warm-coloured poster, orange and yellow against the drab airport walls, may look inviting enough, but it documents a violent erasure: that of the name Palestine which has been called by something else in Hebrew. Questions to Consider • How does Elia Suleiman’s signature narrative circularity interact with narrative linearity in this film? • At what moments are elements of humour used to express trauma? • To what extent does the fourth, contemporary section evoke Elia https://www.palestineposterproject.org/poster/see-ancient-beauty-revived-original (acc­ essed 22 March 2023).

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The Time That Remains, Elia Suleiman  197 Suleiman’s previous films? How and why does he divide Palestinian spaces in this section? Further Reading Tom Hill, ‘Staging the Sublimation of Cliché: Elia Suleiman’s Silences in The Time That Remains (2009)’, Jerusalem Quarterly 48 (2011): 78–90. Laura Junka-Aikio, ‘Articulation, National Unity and the Aesthetics of Living Against Occupation in Elia Suleiman’s Palestine Trilogy’, Journal for Cultural Research 17, no. 4 (2013): 398–413. Nehad Khader, ‘Interview with Elia Suleiman: The Power of Ridicule’, Journal of Palestine Studies 44, no. 4 (2015): 21–31. Stathis Gougouris, ‘Dream-Work of Dispossession: The Instance of Elia Suleiman’, Journal of Palestine Studies 44, no. 4 (2015): 32–47.

198  The Eastern Chapter 3.7 Arab World

Caramel (Sukkar banat, 2007)1

‘Chick flick’ is, of course, the epithet used to characterize – and dismiss – contemporary women’s pictures (romantic comedies and serious dramas that receive limited critical but much fan love). In contrast to the proto-feminism of the classical Hollywood women’s picture, the chick flick is a genre of production, and a ritual of consumption, often associated with the post-feminist presumption that the collective goals of feminism have been achieved, leaving the emancipated woman to address her narrowly individualized needs through heterosexual coupling and the commodity form. Patricia White2

Set in a hair salon, named after the burnt sugar that people sometimes use to wax their legs, and following the love lives of a set of beauticians, each of whom is more glamorous than the next, one would be forgiven for thinking that Nadine Labaki’s Caramel is obsessed with feminine desirability. Nevertheless, there is space for interpreting the film as an allegory of women’s liberation in the sense that it portrays women as unnecessarily trapped by standards of beauty. The allegorical dimension manifests itself most clearly in the hair salon’s sign. The salon is called ‘Si Belle’ (French for ‘so beautiful’), and yet, as Patricia White has observed, the sign is damaged, and the letter b has fallen such that the sign reads ‘Si elle’ or ‘If she’.3 It is as if, with the b in belle removed, we are left not with a feminine descriptor but rather with a feminine subject, for whom any predicate is possible. Whilst the film has a happy ending, the possibilities for the female protagonists remain limited, as they embrace the limits imposed upon them by p ­ atriarchal ­standards of beauty and notions of female desirability. Ranked #31 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Patricia White, ‘Global Flows of Women’s Cinema: Nadine Labaki and Female Authorship’, in Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner (eds), Media Authorship (New York: Routledge, 2013), 216. 3 Ibid., 219. 1 2

Caramel, Nadine Labaki  199 It is striking that whiteness in general, and seemingly Eurocentric ideals of beauty more particularly, loom large over the women in the salon, and they do so quite literally in the mise-en-scène, through an enormous photograph of a red-headed, blue-eyed model that decorates a central partition. This partition is situated close to the salon’s front door, so it is often noticeable as characters leave or enter. About twenty minutes into the film, a woman comes into the salon, hoping to have her hair washed. This is Siham, and she becomes the unspoken love interest of Rim, an employee at the salon who is a (closeted) lesbian. As Siham comes forward into the room, she stops when she is level with the partition, and she raises her left arm and puts her hand on the back of her head. Standing with excellent posture and with her right arm clutching her handbag, she looks very much as if she is striking a pose (Figure 3.7.1). We, as spectators, are being invited to compare beauties – brunette and ginger. Such a comparison between red and black hair later occurs in the script, when the red-headed Christine, who is the unknowing wife of the man with whom Layale, the salon’s owner, is having an affair, compliments Layale on her hair, whilst Layale is depilating Christine’s legs. CHRISTINE: Your hair is so beautiful. LAYALE: Thank you. CHRISTINE: I’ve always wanted to dye my hair black. LAYALE: Why don’t you? CHRISTINE: I’m thinking about it. But my husband likes me the way I am. I don’t want to upset him. He doesn’t like change. (RT 1:02:14–1:02:34)

At this suggestion that her husband prefers his wife’s hair to be red, Layale pulls on the wax with extra vigour, causing Christine some discomfort.

Figure 3.7.1  Siham enters the salon and stands in front of the very large portrait of the red-headed model (RT 22:53)

200  The Eastern Arab World The juxtaposition of Siham’s beauty with that of the red-headed model is, I think, not meant only to invite comparison but to raise awareness that the comparison is constantly made, that the women in the salon – the beauticians and their clients – and by extension, Lebanese women more generally, suffer under the arbitrariness of the comparison. Interestingly, later in the film, when Youssef, the police officer who has a crush on Layale, comes to the salon for a makeover of sorts, he, too, is positioned with respect to the partition. Unlike Siham, he never appears flush with the partition, but stays well back from it (RT 1:01:55). He then walks behind it and, by the time he stands still, the partition is barely visible, with just the edge of the red hair showing at the right side of the frame (RT 1:02:01). If we read the way he positions himself with regard to the partition allegorically, it would seem that Youssef, who serves as the male lead in this romantic comedy, is oblivious to or uninterested in the magnetic appeal of the red-headed model. To put it heteronormatively, the women of the salon impose these standards of beauty on themselves, and they do not necessarily relate to what men find attractive. Perhaps the character who is most entrapped by standards of beauty is Jamale, a menopausal model who is fighting aging to remain in work. Throughout the course of the film, we see her taping her eyes back and faking her period. There is also some suggestion in the script that she has undergone plastic surgery. There are some excruciatingly painful moments when Jamale undergoes a photo shoot at a casting agency. First, she holds her name plate upside down (RT 40:01). Later, the tape she has used on her eyes becomes visible (RT 43:44). As Luma Balaa has observed, the film draws parallels between the casting photos and mugshots.4 Thus, Jamale may be said to be imprisoned by her vanity and her need to be considered young and beautiful. Whilst the film depicts a non-sectarian Beirut where Christians and Muslims live in harmony, there is a sense in which Christianity as an identity predominates. Layale, the chief protagonist who is played by director Nadine Labaki, wears a cross around her neck, and there are scenes in her car where the spectator is treated not only to the cross around her neck, but also the cross hanging from her rear-view mirror (for example, RT 26:38). At one point in the film, there is a Christian procession touring the neighbourhood (RT 1:07:37), and it winds its way into the shop. Many characters are shown to be uttering prayers along with those in the procession. The only lead character who is positioned as Muslim is Nisrine, and her character Luma Balaa, ‘Framed: The Door Swings Both Ways in the Lebanese Movie Caramel’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 20, no. 7 (2019): 434.

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Caramel, Nadine Labaki  201

Figure 3.7.2  Siham gazes at Rim during a hair wash (RT 33:01)

Figure 3.7.3  Siham maintains her gaze during an electricity outage (RT 33:12)

is arguably subject to stereotypy (albeit with a degree of irony). Nisrine is engaged to be married, and we learn that she is not a virgin. In order to hide this fact from her fiancé, she undergoes hymen repair surgery, so that she will bleed when her marriage is consummated. That this storyline appeals to western audiences’ preconceived notions about the Arab world’s patriarchal preoccupation with virginity, and that this patriarchal preoccupation should be associated with a Muslim character in a film which features a majority of Christian characters are factors that may lead one to suspect Nadine Labaki of ‘neo-Orientalism’, especially given the film’s French funding.5 If some aspects of the film reinforce stereotypes, other aspects challenge them. One such challenging aspect is that of the homoerotic storyline, namely Rim’s infatuation with Siham. Rim’s lesbianism is important to the film because it establishes a gaze of desire that is marked as female. This gaze of desire may also be conceived as homosocial rather than homosexual: women want to look good for other women and not just for men. The homoeroticism is most pronounced in the recurring scenes where Rim washes Siham’s hair (Figure 3.7.2) where there is a ‘palpable eroticism’.6 In one such scene, there is an electricity outage and Rim and Siham are left in the dark (Figure 3.7.3). What is quite remarkable in the hair-washing scenes is See Wissam Mouawad, ‘Lebanese Cinema and the French Co-production System: The Postcard Strategy, in Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard (eds), Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 78–80, for a discussion of how Labaki’s second feature, Where Do We Go Now? (2011), which, like Caramel, received French financing, reinforces pre-conceived notions held by the French about Lebanese society. For a more general discussion of how European financing impacts upon films emanating from the region, see Randall Halle, ‘Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism’, in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 303–19. 6 Patricia White, ‘Global Flows of Women’s Cinema’, 224. White refers to the ‘well-worn trope of grooming as a stand-in for lesbian sex’. 5

202  The Eastern Arab World the close-up on Siham’s face and the emphasis on her return gaze. She is the object of desire and desirer at once. In sum, with its exposition and critique of the limitations of the standards of beauty and its celebration of those very same standards of beauty, the film constructs a number of contradictory gazes, at the levels of both character and spectator. As Luma Balaa puts it: Caramel suggests that female spectators, like the female characters in the film, occupy contradictory subject positions in which they identify with both male and female. They can identify with the male gaze and with the object of the male gaze. […] So, they can be both objects and consumers of the images of women as objects of male desires. The female spectator can identify with Layale and the active male gaze at her. […] Simultaneously, a woman can identify with the female gaze.7

Questions to Consider • Note constructions of the gaze. When are characters – female or male – presented as objects of a desirous gaze? And who is doing the desiring? • To what extent does the film uphold arbitrary constructs of beauty? How does it challenge or subvert them? • To what extent may the film be seen as a feminist allegory? What are some of the possibilities for liberation portrayed? Further Reading Patricia White, ‘Global Flows of Women’s Cinema: Nadine Labaki and Female Authorship’, in Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner (eds), Media Authorship (New York: Routledge, 2013), 212–28. Wissam Mouawad, ‘Lebanese Cinema and the French Co-production System: The Postcard Strategy’, in Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard (eds), Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 71–86. Luma Balaa, ‘Framed: The Door Swings Both Ways in the Lebanese Movie Caramel’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 20, no. 7 (2019): 430–47.

Luma Balaa, ‘Framed: The Door Swings Both Ways’, 443–4.

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Chapter 3.8

Dawn of the World, Abbas Fahdel  203

Dawn of the World (L’Aube du Monde/ Fajr al-ʿalam, 2008)

Dawn of the World does not fit easily within a national tradition of Arabiclanguage cinema. Like many other films profiled in this volume, it received European financing, but unlike those other films, it was not made in the country in which it was set. Its story unfolds in the marshlands of southern Iraq, among the tribes of the Maʿdan, but the film was made in Egypt with a mostly non-Iraqi cast. Nevertheless, because its director and writer, Abbas Fahdel, is an Iraqi exile, and because it portrays recent events in the country  from an Iraqi perspective, there is a strong sense in which we may discuss it as an Iraqi film. Fahdel was born in Babylon in 1959 and as a young man emigrated to France, where he earned a doctorate in film at the Sorbonne.1 In the early 2000s, he made two successful documentaries about return journeys to Iraq, one just before the 2003 Iraq War and one just after (Return to Babylon/ Retour à Babylone, 2002, and We, Iraqis/Nous, les Irakiens, 2004). Before making Dawn of the World, Fahdel had won a prize for its screenplay. The story of Dawn of the World takes place in a presumably imaginary village called Hufaidh. As mentioned above, the film was not shot on location in southern Iraq but rather on Lake Manzala near Port Said in Egypt,2 where set designers replicated the reed huts typical of the Maʿdan. The set is absolutely beautiful, but the content is grim, and this is clear from the outset. The film opens with a dawn shot over the marshes. Although beautiful colours are visible on the horizon, a mass of grey cloud blocks much of their light. While ominous music composed by German Jürgen Knieper plays, a half-dead tree appearing in the centre left of the screen falls down. Doom prevails in this natural setting and in the storyline, which is a tale of ill-fated and unconsummated love of the so-called ʿudhri variety. Roy Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 286. Ibid., 287–8.

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204  The Eastern Arab World

Figure 3.8.1  Zahra’s form is indeterminate as she lies on the ground with her arms in a loop (RT 2:05)

The ʿudhri love tale is an early Islamic narrative paradigm with its roots in the Umayyad era.3 Typically, the protagonists of this brand of love tale are first cousins and co-evals. They grow up together, falling in love as they come of age. Then the heroine is married off to an outsider. The love between the protagonists is never consummated, and the young hero pines away in verse for his beloved until he wastes away from lovesickness and dies. Sometimes the beloved then dies as well from grief. It is a tale of broken bonds, of pacts forsaken, of parents and tribal authorities letting the younger generation down. The love story in this film carries some of the hallmarks of this brand of tragic love story. Mastour and Zahra, the young couple at the centre of the narrative, are first cousins of the same age. We first meet them in 1983 as they gaze into a pocket mirror together, speaking of future marriage plans. Fast forward to 1990: they wed, but their love is unconsummated – not in this case because the beloved is married off to someone else, but rather because Zahra is not ready to engage in intercourse on her wedding night, and just as she is finally ready, Mastour is conscripted into the army. He never returns. Meanwhile, Riad, a Baghdadi conscript who is with Mastour when he dies and who makes a deathbed promise to marry Zahra for her protection, arrives in Hufaidh, falls in love with Zahra at first sight and asks For more on the ʿudhri love tale, see Stefan Leder, ‘The Udhri Narrative in Arabic Literature’, in Friederike Pannewick (ed.), Martyrdom in Literature: Visions of Death and Meaningful Suffering in Europe and the Middle East from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004), 162–89. See also Renate Jacobi, ‘The ʿUdhra: Love and Death in the Umayyad Period’, in the same volume, 137–48.

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Dawn of the World, Abbas Fahdel  205 for her hand. For most of the film, Zahra puts him off, so Riad’s love for her remains chaste as well. At the end of the film, there is some suggestion that they will be together, but it is by no means a happy ending, for the reasons outlined below. The first time Zahra appears on screen (Figure 3.8.1), we cannot tell if she is a child or an adult. She forms more of a corporeal presence than a living, animate figure. She lies on her back on a bed of straw, with the top of her head and her black hair facing us. Her arms are outstretched, forming a loop over her body. Her reddish dress contrasts with the green, brown and silver hues of the surrounding land and water. Her foreshortened figure with its circular shape makes her barely recognisable as a human. It is only when she sits up that we see she is a young girl. Mastour comes and sits next to her and their ʿudhri love bond is established in the script as she shares her pocket mirror with him (RT 2:32). As André Videau writes in a French review of the film, Mastour and his cousin ‘were raised together in a tender promiscuity’.4 Roy Armes, in his assessment of the film, states the following: In some ways the beauty of the setting in Dawn of the World overwhelms the villagers of Hufaidh, as they are reduced to largely immobile figures set against a resplendent backdrop, speaking slowly in composed tones, like characters on a stage. Dialogue is reduced to a minimum – partly, it seems, because most of the actors are not native Iraqi speakers. Because of the film’s formality, we lose the sense that these Marsh Arabs are poverty-stricken peasants, despised in Baghdad and persecuted by Saddam. Dawn of the World is also a film which shies away from the direct depiction of violence. The real circumstances of Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran and against his own people are never shown explicitly.5

He seems to find that the acting, which may be described as stilted, prevents the spectator from feeling the suffering of the villagers. He also suggests that the film avoids representing the horrors of war. On the second point, I disagree. It is true that most of the violence occurs offscreen, but the aftermath of violence, its grim reality is displayed in the film on numerous occasions. First, when Mastour and Riad are trying to find their way out of a minefield, we see corpses strewn across the desert (for example, RT 16:47). Later, after Mastour has been fatally injured by a mine and asks Riad to place his body in the river so that it may reach his family, we have the overhead shot ­representing this act (RT 23:00). Towards the end of the film, when Riad André Videau, ‘L’aube du monde: Film franco-irakien de Abbas Fahdel’, Hommes & Migrations 1279 (2009): 199. 5 Roy Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema, 288. 4

206  The Eastern Arab World returns to Hufaidh to find it decimated, the first sign of trouble is a corpse tied to a stake (RT 1:14:00). There are further horrific images, and these have consequences for the love story. After his return to Hufaidh, there is a scene where Riad uncovers the corpses of the village elders. His face comes into close proximity with theirs, and a fly swirling around the corpses lands on Riad’s face. A few moments later, Riad is having an intimate face to face conversation with Zahra, and yet the repulsion one feels from the previous scene carries over into this one. How can Riad possibly think about a romantic encounter in these circumstances? In this same conversation, Zahra indicates that she was raped. Violence and horror pervade the atmosphere, making a happy ending impossible. Questions to Consider • Does the stilted acting observed by Armes have a role to play in the spectator’s reception of the image? Does it serve a similar function as, for example, ominous music? • Is there a tension between the bleak narrative and the lavish set? In many ways the film documents a lost way of life, as Saddam Hussein had the marshlands drained in the 1990s. Does the film, in its effort to reconstruct this way of life, undermine its own intention to represent destruction? • Can this film be read as an indictment of the Saddam Hussein regime and its violations of human rights? Does the film also criticise the role of the US and its allies in the 1990 Gulf War? If so, how? Further Reading Mary P. Erickson, ‘Filmmaking in Iraq: A Rebirth’, in D. Baltruschat and M. Erickson (eds) Independent Filmmaking Around the Globe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 149–74. Lucia Sorbera, ‘History and Fiction in the New Iraqi Cinema’, in J. Tejel, P. Sluglett, R. Bocco and H. Bozarslan (eds), Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), 423–44. Roy Armes, ‘Iraq’, New Voices in Arab Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 281–97.

Chapter 3.9

Wadjda, Haifaa Al-Mansour  207

Wadjda (Wajda, 2012)1

The bicycle is a metaphor for freedom of movement that does not exist for women and girls in Saudi Arabia. Haifaa Al-Mansour2

As the first feature film to be shot entirely on location in Saudi Arabia, and as a Saudi film with a strong feminist message, Wadjda breaks a lot of ground. The film tells the tale of a young girl who is determined to purchase a green bicycle from a local toy shop so that she can race with her friend. Her mother and society at large are against it, so she must take action on her own. She saves money by weaving and selling friendship bracelets as well as other less noble means, such as acting as messenger between a young woman and her paramour and extorting money from both parties. She also enters a Quran competition for a chance at the prize money. In the end she obtains the bike – by means which I will not spoil here – and rides off down a neighbourhood street towards a major thoroughfare on the horizon (RT: 1:29:42). The symbolism is explicit. Along the way, that is to say whilst the main storyline unfolds, the film critiques a host of practices prevalent in the kingdom, including polygamy, child marriage, homophobia and the ill-treatment and disrespect of migrant workers. Despite drawing attention to these problems, the film still offers up an affectionate and optimistic portrayal of Saudi society. Perhaps for this reason, that is for its sympathetic and forward-looking stance, the film counts Rotana Studios, a company part-owned by the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, amongst its financial backers.

Ranked #44 in Abdullah, Cinema of Passion. Haifaa Al-Mansour, ‘Anatomy of a Saudi Female Filmmaker’, World Policy Journal 31, no. 1 (2014): 10.

1 2

208  The Eastern Arab World The mise-en-scène reads allegorically in much of the film. In an early sequence, for example, Wadjda stands outside her school glancing up at the sun. When we are shown what she sees (RT 2:28), we note that the sun appears from behind a fence atop a high wall, as if there is hope for the future but a tremendous obstacle in one’s path. Soon after, there is a scene in Wadjda’s bedroom with begins with a shot of her wall (RT 2:43). The word ‘danger’ is painted on it, and right by that word a bracelet and a banknote hang from a nail. The wiring for a makeshift antenna is also visible. It is as if the intersection of jewellery, money and music make for a volatile atmosphere. Moreover, in several scenes Wadjda wears a tee shirt stating, ‘I am a great catch!’. This happens when she is helping her mother in the kitchen by kneading dough. A close up of her hands (RT 20:47) draws attention to the word ‘catch’ on her shirt. The conversation also turns to marriage after Wadjda informs her mother that her teacher would like her to wear the full abaya to school. In another moment laden with symbolism, the mother then escorts Wadjda into her bedroom where she has her try on an abaya or cloak over the tee shirt. Growing up, becoming a woman, getting married all mean covering up and hiding oneself. A further scene where the mise-en-scène is allegorically charged is when Wadjda’s mother goes shopping for a dress to wear at her brother-in-law’s wedding. Wadjda’s mother is determined to look stunning at the occasion to frighten away any potential co-wives – as she knows that her motherin-law wants Wadjda’s father to take on another wife who will bear him a son. On the way to the shopping mall, as Wadjda and her mother sit in the back seat of the vehicle, we are struck by ten-year-old Wadjda’s freedom to have an uncovered face whilst her mother wears a face veil such that only her eyes are visible. Once they arrive at the mall, there is a scene where Wadjda’s mother gazes at a headless mannequin (Figure 3.9.1) donning a bright red dress. The whiteness of the mannequin, the bright colour of the dress and its plunging neckline contrast with the mother’s all-­encompassing and modest black garb. One gets the sense that the whiteness of the mannequin is also upholding a European standard of beauty, in much the same way that the photograph of the red-headed model dominates the atmosphere of the hair salon in Caramel. This idea that the mother is being held to a westernised standard is buttressed further, when the mother goes to the mall bathroom to try on the dress. There, we see a nearly life-sized European model advertising a product on the inside of the bathroom door (Figure 3.9.2). Parts of the model’s body, namely the legs, forearms and upper chest are blacked out, presumably because they would otherwise show bare skin. Once again, we see a female Arab film director commentating on the

Wadjda, Haifaa Al-Mansour  209

Figure 3.9.1  Wadjda’s mother gazes at a headless mannequin in a red dress at the mall (RT 31:15)

Figure 3.9.2  Wadjda’s mother tries on a red dress in the ladies’ room (RT 32:42)

­ hiteness of standards of beauty in her culture, but here it is overlaid with w a sense of shame. Whereas the model in the salon in Labaki’s Caramel represents beauty, the model in the bathroom may be said to represent both beauty and obscenity. There is also an irreverent streak in the film as it often pokes fun at religiosity. This can be seen, for example, in the parallelism between Wadjda’s father playing video games on the television set (RT 23:52) and Wadjda subsequently playing a Quranic video quiz in the same position (RT 1:05:54). That she is wearing a bicycle helmet makes her playing of the game more action-packed. Furthermore, the fact that she has purchased the quiz at a toy shop perhaps pokes fun at certain forms of religiosity. Having said that, it is also the case that religion is treated with respect and sincerity. The girls’ Quranic recitations in the contest are truly moving. There is also a sense in which the film harnesses Quranic verses to advocate its feminist message. There are two scenes in which Quran 30:21 is recited. This verse about marriage reads ‘Another of His signs is that He created spouses from among yourselves for you to live with in tranquillity: He ordained love and kindness between you.’3 I believe this verse celebrating marriage as a sign of God’s wonders is a subtle argument for a religious preference for monogamy over polygamy. This is because the word for ‘spouses’ (azwaj) emphasises coupling: a zawj is one of a pair. Moreover, in one scene the verse is incanted by Wadjda’s mother, whose husband is about to take a second wife. Another quotation from the Quran it is worth pausing to consider is 2:7–12, the verses Wadjda is asked to incant at the competition. The verses, which Wadjda recites with conviction, read as follows: M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), The Qur’an, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 258.

3

210  The Eastern Arab World God has sealed their hearts and their ears, and their eyes are covered. They will have great torment. Some people say ‘We believe in God and the Last Day’ when really they do not believe. They seek to deceive God and the believers but they only deceive themselves, though they do not realize it. There is a disease in their hearts, to which God has added more: agonizing torment awaits them for their persistent lying. When it is said to them, ‘Do not cause corruption in the land’, they say, ‘We are only putting things right’, but really they are causing corruption, though they do not realize it.4

It would seem to me that Al-Mansour, by focusing on a passage that alludes to the misinterpretation of religion, seeks to criticise such misinterpretation, from inside the faith. Indeed, Wadjda’s recitation makes for a spiritual moment, even if she has rather mundane motivations for excelling. The director has identified the Iranian film Offside (2006), directed by Jafar Panahi, as one of the films that most influenced her project.5 Indeed, Wadjda may be read in a kind of fascinating dialogue with Iranian cinema.6 Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have Islamic governments, both are regional powers, both have questionable records when it comes to women’s rights. And yet, whereas Iran has an established cinema industry which has been tremendously successful on the international festival circuit, Saudi Arabia has no cinematic history to speak of. Whereas Iran has produced a sizeable cohort of female directors in recent decades, Saudi Arabia has not. Finally, whereas Iran has complex censorship regulations and modesty codes to which Iranian filmmakers must adhere, Saudi Arabia does not seem to have detailed conventions regulating filmmaking technique in place. In some ways, Al-Mansour had much more freedom to represent women in a ‘realist’ fashion than her Iranian counterparts would. Most noticeably, Al-Mansour could depict women as unveiled in domestic or all-female settings whereas in Iran, all female actors must have their hair covered whenever they appear on screen – no matter the setting. At the same time that Al-Mansour enjoyed relative freedom as to what she was allowed to represent, restrictions on her movements as a director were rather severe. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), The Qur’an, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. 5 Haifaa Al-Mansour, ‘Anatomy of a Saudi Female Filmmaker’, World Policy Journal 31, no. 1 (2014): 12. 6 For an intriguing exploration of the parallels between Arab and Iranian cinemas, especially as they relate to the ways that filmmakers circumvent restrictions and conventions, see Shohini Chaudhuri, Crisis Cinema in the Middle East: Creativity and Constraint in Iran and the Arab World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). 4

Wadjda, Haifaa Al-Mansour  211 As she was not allowed to be seen in public with the men on her crew, she often had to direct the project from the back of a van, using a walkie-talkie to feed them instructions. Questions to Consider • How does Al-Mansour level her critique at Saudi society? Is it through the dialogue, the acting, the mise-en-scène, the editing, a combination thereof, or through some other aspect of film technique? • How does the film simultaneously offer up an affectionate portrayal of Saudi Arabia and its people? • Like many other films in this volume, Wadjda received a lot of foreign funding. Razor Film in Germany was particularly active in finding the necessary financing, and Germans worked alongside Saudis on the set. In your view, is the film’s local Saudi perspective in any way compromised by the director’s attempt to appeal to an international audience? Where do these compromises manifest themselves? Further Reading Haifaa Al-Mansour, ‘Anatomy of a Saudi Female Filmmaker’, World Policy Journal 31, no. 1 (2014): 10–15. Doris Hambuch, ‘Liberating Bicycles in Niki Caro’s Whale Rider and in Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda’, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 10, no. 2 (2019): 195–219. Shohini Chaudhuri, Crisis Cinema in the Middle East: Creativity and Constraint in Iran and the Arab World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). See chap. 2, ‘Child Protagonists’, 57–79. Abdulrahman Alghannam, ‘The Political Economy of Khaleeji Cinema: Historical Developments of Arab Gulf Film Industries’, in Anne Rajala, Daniel Lindblom and Matteo Stocchetti (eds), The Political Economy of Local Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020), 110–37.

 212  The Eastern Arab World

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Bibliography  223

Materials from the New York State Archives Motion Picture Scripts Collection

Birth of Prophet Mohamed, Peace be Upon Him (Mawlid al-Rasul), Box # 2402, Casefile # 70843. Gharam and Intikam (Gharam wa-intiqam/Love and Revenge), Box # 1317, Casefile # 50448. The Runner/The Runner Away/L’Evade (al-Harib), Box# 657, Casefile# 35799.

Index

6–12, 96 1952 Revolution (Egypt), 12, 43, 47 3000 Nights, 157 Abaza, Rushdi, 44–5 Abbas, Hiam, 94 ʿAbd al-Quddus, Ihsan, 13 ʿAbd al-Salam, Shadi, 53–7 ʿAbd al-Sayyid, Daʾud, 16, 63 ʿAbd al-Wahhab, Muhammad, 25, 28–30 Abdel Nasser, Gamal, 12, 16, 23, 71–4, 193 Abdulhamid, Abdul Latif, 159 Abu-Assad, Hany, 157 Abyad, Dawlat, 10 Abyad, George, 10 Abu Sayf, Salah, 12, 13, 165 Adam, 149 Africa, Jungle, Drum and Revolution, 99 Ahmad Hilmi Basha, 156 Ahmad, Zakariya, 10, 122 A Hundred Faces for a Single Day, 157 aKasha, 100, 141–5 al-ʿAris, ʿAli, 162 al-Bustani, Karam, 161 al-Daradji, Mohamed, 166 Alexandria Again and Forever, 58 Alexandria… New York, 58 Alexandria, Why?, 58–62, 69 Algérie en flammes, 88 Ali, Taha Muhammad, 184 al-Ibrahim, Walid, 168 Allouache, Merzak, 88, 90, 108–10, 113 allegory, 43, 46, 49, 54, 92–3, 95, 142, 154, 170–1, 179–80

Al-Mansour, Haifaa, 207, 210–11 al-Qadisiyya, 165 al-Safi, Wadi, 163 al-Sharif, Nur, 180 al-Shawwa, Zuhayr, 159 al-Siddiq, Khalid, 168 al-Tayyib, ʿAtif, 16, 63 al-Tihami, Fuʾad, 165 al-Tukhi, Ahmad, 163 al-Yasiri, Faysal, 165 al-Zayyat, Latifa, 13, 48–9 Amari, Raja, 94 Amin, Ayten, 76, 79 Amir, ʿAziza, 7–8, 86 An Egyptian Story, 58 Anzur, Ismail, 158 A Passer-by, 159 Arafat, Yasser, 185, 189–90 ʿArfan, Ahmad, 159 Arthuys, Philippe, 102, 107 Asmahan, 37–8 A Summer in La Goulette, 92 Atalla, Amin, 7 A Thousand Months, 97, 135–40 Atlas, Natacha, 184 auteurism, 58, 62, 93, 98 autobiography, 58–9, 62, 130, 183, 188, 193 A Woman’s Youth, 12 Ayouch, Nabil, 135, 146, 148 Axelrod, Nathan, 156 Bab el-Oued City, 88, 90, 113–18 Baccar, Selma, 92, 94

Index  225 Badrakhan, Ahmad, 43, 163, 165 Badri, Ayyub, 158 Badr Khan, Salah al-Din, 156 Baghdadi, Maroun, 164 Bakri, Saleh, 194 Bamako, 98 Barakat, Henri, 13, 48 Barsum Looks for a Job, 7, 70 Basbousi, Anas, 146–9 Bass ya bahr (also The Cruel Sea), 168 Battle of Algiers, 88 Bayumi, Muhammad (Mohamed Baoumi), 6–8, 10, 70 Beats of the Antonov, 142 Becky Sharp, 24 Bedouin films, 8, 154 Beirut, Oh Beirut, 164 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 92, 94 Benghrib, Khalid, 149 Benlyazid, Farida, 119 Ben Mabrouk, Nejia, 94 Bennani, Hamid, 94 Bensaidi, Faouzi, 97, 135–6, 138 Bezness, 92 Bidotti, Gordano (Jordano Pidutti), 161 bin Talal, Al-Waleed, 168, 207 bint al-balad, 33–4, 63; see also ibn al-balad Birth of the Prophet, 163 Bishara, Khayri, 16, 63 Black Decade, 90, 114 Black is Beautiful (movement), 142, 144 Black Saturday, 50 Blue Caftan, 149 Borders, 160 Bornaz, Kalthoum, 94 Bouanani, Ahmed, 95–6 Boughedir, Ferid, 119 Boujedra, Rachid, 102 Bourguiba, Habib, 91 Bouzid, Nouri, 93 Brahem, Anouar, 122 Braids, 135 Bride of Lebanon, 163 Bullet in the Heart, 25n Cairo-Baghdad, 165 Cairo Station, 58

Call of Duty, 158 Canticle of the Stones, 119 Capitulations, 9 Caramel, 198–202 Casablanca Beats, 146–50 censorship, 19–23, 43, 147, 158, 167, 173 Chahine, Youssef, 6, 58–62, 69 Chaplin, Charlie, 158 chick flick, 198 Chikly, Albert Samama, 85, 87, 91 Chikly, Haydée, 86–7 Choua, Abdelkader, 109 Chronicle of a Disappearance, 183–8, 192 Chronicle of the Years of Embers, 88, 102–9, 109n Cinematic Introduction, 155 cinematograph, 4–5 contract films, 17 Crooks, 96 Davis, Angela, 144 Dawn of the World, 166, 203–6 Death for Sale, 135 De Lagarne, Monsieur, 6 Derkaoui, Mustafa, 95 Destiny, 58 Determination, 12, 31–7, 40, 49, 63, 66, 68 Di Luca, Julio, 161 Divine Intervention, 188–92 Doctor Epameinondas, 11n Doctor Farahat, 11n documentary, 54, 92, 95–100, 142, 146, 148, 155, 157, 159, 165–6, 172, 174, 183–4, 203 Door to the Sky, 119 Dreams Come True, 155 Dreams of Hind and Camilia, 63–8, 82 Easy to Love, 59 El-Deeb, Alaa, 56–7 El-Fani, Nadia, 94 El Maanouni, Ahmed, 96, 146n El-Sissi, Abdel Fattah, 22 ES, 183–91, 194 Fahdel, Abbas, 166, 203 Fanon, Franz, 142 Farah, Romiya, 157

226  Index Fares, Tawfiq, 102 Farid, Nashid Effendi, 4–5 Farouk (also Faruq, King), 39 Fatal Flowers, 6, 20 Fatma, 92 Fatma 75, 92 Father is a Bridegroom, 17, 24 Fathy, Nagla, 64 Fawwaz, Zaynab, 21 Fawzi, Husayn, 163 Fawzi, Osama, 69 Female Idol, 72–3 Ferchiou, Sophie, 94 Ferhati, Jillali, 135 Fertile Memory, 157, 174 Fuad (King), 40 Galal, Ahmad, 43 Gasmelbari, Suhaib, 98 gaze, 43, 45–6, 76, 78–80, 120–1, 124, 143, 179, 201–2 powerless (Bensaidi), 135–8 see also point of view ghalaba (sing. ghalban), 63–4 Ghazi, Christian, 157 Groupe Farid, 87–9 Gubara, Gadalla, 98–9 Habiba Msika/La danse du feu, 94 Hafiz, ʿAbd al-Halim, 15 Hafiz, Bahija, 7, 20 Halfaouine, 92, 119 Hamama, Fatin, 49 Hamlet, 60, 61n Happy Day, 25n Harb, Talʿat, 9 Hassan II (King), 96, 136 Hassani, Kameran, 165 Hawal, Qasim, 157, 165 Haydar, Haydar, 178 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, 8 Hays Code, 20, 22 Herzog, Chaim, 174 Holiday Eve, 155 Homage by Assassination, 183 Hondo, Med, 90, 98 Hunting Party, 99 Hussein, Saddam, 165–6, 205–6

I am Free, 13 ‘I am the Daughter of the Nile’, 39–40 Ibrahim, Suliman (also Suleiman El Nour), 99 ibn al-balad, 12, 17, 33, 63; see also bint al-balad iconography, 71–4, 164 I Don’t Sleep (also Sleepless), 13 I Love Cinema, 22, 69–75 Imam, ʿAdil, 17, 23 I’m no Angel, 25n Independence, 100 Infitah (Open Door Policy), 15, 23, 63–4 intertextuality, 59 In the Ruins of Baʿalbek, 161 Introduction to the End of an Argument, 183 Ismail (Khedive), 40 Jacir, Annemarie, 157 Jalal, Rashid, 158 Jamila, the Algerian, 58 Jibran, Jibran Khalil, 163 June 1967 Defeat, 14–15, 54, 70–1, 90 Kamal, Hussein, 15 Kanafani, Ghassan, 157, 170–2 Karim, Muhammad, 8, 10, 25 Kawkab, Princess of the Desert, 162 Khader, Manal, 189–90 Khalifeh, Sahar (Sahar Khalifa), 157, 157n Khan al-Khalili, 43 Khan, Muhammad, 16, 63–4, 76 Khemir, Nacer, 119 Khleifi, Michel, 119, 157, 174–5, 177, 183 Khlifi, Omar, 91 Khoury, Makram, 176 Kiss in the Desert, 8, 24, 154 Knieper, Jürgen, 203 Koussa, Bassam, 179, 182 Kramp, Fritz, 10, 20 Kuka, Hajooj, 100, 141–2, 145 Labaki, Nadine, 198, 200–1 Lahham, Durayd, 160 Lakhdar-Hamina, Mohamed, 88, 102

Index  227 Lama Brothers, 8, 153–5 Ibrahim, 8, 21–2, 153, 155 Badr, 8, 153, 155 L’Arroseur arose, 24 Larrici, 6 Lashin, 20 Layla (1927), 8, 24, 86 Layla (1942), 60 Layla, Daughter of the Desert, 20 Les Pyramides (vue Générale), 5 Light and Darkness, 159 Light and Shadows, 159 Lloyd, Harold, 158 Loeb, Mitchell, 196 Long Live Love, 25n Looking for my Wife’s Husband, 96 Love and Revenge, 12, 37–42, 59, 163 Love is Forbidden, 25n Lumière Brothers, 4, 5, 153 Madame Loretta, 6, 24 Mahdi, Eltayeb, 99 Mahfouz, Naguib, 43 Malih, Nabil (also Nabil Maleh), 159, 178, 180–1 Maluf, Yusuf, 163 Mankind’s Fight for Survival, 53 Man of Ashes, 92–3 Masri, Mai, 157 Mektoub, 135 melodrama, 8, 11, 13, 21–2, 25, 27, 30–3, 37, 43, 49, 53–4, 56–7, 61–3, 66, 119, 154, 156, 163 woman-centred (Mulvey), 63, 66 Men in the Sun, 170 Mer-Khamis, Juliano, 176 Messadi, Amine, 146 Michelangelo, 71–2 mise-en-scène, 26, 30, 40–1, 43, 45, 49–50, 54–5, 76, 110–11, 121, 131, 175, 179, 199, 208 Misr Theatre and Cinema Company, 9–10 Mister Bulti, 173 Mix, Tom, 158 Mizrahi, Togo, 9, 11, 60, 122 Mohammed VI (King), 97 Morsi, Mohamed, 22

MREs (Marocains résidant à l’étranger), 97 Mubarak, Husni, 22–3 Muhammad Ali, 39, 40, 42 Muhammad, Amina, 7 Murad, Layla, 60, 195 Muradi, Muhammad, 158 music, 4, 10, 18, 22, 27–30, 37–40, 59–60, 102, 107, 109, 117, 120, 122, 195, 203 hiphop, 149 Rai, 117 rap, 146–9 musical films, 10–11, 15, 17, 25, 59, 163 Mustafa, Niyazi, 165 My Father is up a Tree, 15, 167 My Wish (Oumniyati), 156 Naciri, Saïd, 96 Nadia and Sarra, 119 Nadra, 10 Nakba, 195 Nasr, Georges, 162 Nass el Ghiwane, 96 New Cinema, 16 New Cinema Group (Egypt), 14–15 Night Dream, 156 Night of Counting the Years/ The Mummy, 53–8 ‘Nights in Vienna’, 37 Nights of the Jackal, 159 Obama, Barack, 150 October 1973 War, 15, 64 Of Dust and Rubies: Letters from Abroad, 99 Offside, 210 Omar, 157 Omar Gatlato, 88, 90, 108–15, 117, 119, 120 Orfanelli, Alvise, 11 Osato, 6 Ousfour, Muhammad, 95 Palestine Studio, 155 Panahi, Jafar, 210 Paradise Now, 157 point of view (POV) structures, 49–50, 65, 67, 71, 79, 136–8, 194–5; see also gaze

228  Index Polo, Eddie, 158 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 88 Postcard strategy (Mouawad), 164, 201n Promio, Alexander, 5 Qaʿi, George, 162 Qalʿi, Nihad, 160 Quran/Quranic, 6, 20, 26, 38, 86, 135–6, 207, 209–10 Rakha, Youssef, 56 Rafla, Hilmi, 72 Rat, 99 R’chich, Abdelmajid, 96 realism, 12, 31, 33–4, 43, 49, 63, 162, 172, 210 Italian neo-realism, 166 melodramatic, 93 new, 16, 63, 76, 93 social realism, 12, 96, 136 vérité, 76–7, 146 Red Satin, 94 Reggab, Muhammad, 95 Remorse, 162 Return to Babylon, 203 Return to Haifa, 157 Rhys, Jean, 99 Riefenstahl, Leni, 59 Riyadh, Aida, 64 rockumentary, 146 Rossellini, Roberto, 53 Rushdi, ʿAbd al-Rahman, 10 Rushdi, Fatima, 7, 32, 154–5 Rustam, Hind, 44 Saadi, Yacef, 88 Sabah, 163 Sabry, Hind, 127 Sadat, Anwar, 15, 16, 23 Said Effendi, 165 Salam, Najah, 163 Saleh, Tewfik, 170–3 Salim, ʿAtif, 43 Salim, Kamal, 12, 31, 34 Sallama, 122 Salloum, Jayce, 183 Salman, Muhammad, 163 Sami, Samar, 179, 182

Sarraounia, 98 Scorsese, Martin, 96 Season of Men, 91, 94, 119, 124–8 Sembène, Ousmane, 90 Serhan, Ibrahim Hasan, 155 Shaddad, Ibrahim, 99 Shahbandar, Nazih, 159 Shariffe, Hussein, 99 Sharif, Omar, 43 Sid Ahmed, Mostafa, 144 Silences of the Palace, 94, 119–23, 124, 126, 127 silent films, 4–9, 86, 158, 165 ‘Sing to me Little by Little’, 122 Sissako, Abderrahmane, 98, 129–30, 132–4, 137n Smetana, 60 Smihi, Moumen, 95 Soleil O, 98 Song of Khartoum, 99 Song of the Heart, 10, 24, 25, 159 Son of Babylon, 166 Son of the East, 165 Son of the Nile, 58 Souad, 76–82 sound diegetic/non-diegetic 27, 29–30, 107 technology, 3–4, 10–11, 24, 25, 158–9, 161–2 see also music Struggle of the Heroes, 173 Struggle on the Nile, 43–7, 54, 57 Studio Misr, 10, 24, 34 Sudanese Film Group, 98–9 Suleiman, Elia, 98, 157, 183–7, 193–7; see also ES Summering in Lebanon, 163 Surdej, Virginie, 146 Syad, Daoud Aoulad, 135 Tajoog, 100 Talking About Trees, 98 Tawfiq, Samira, 163 Tazi, Mohamed Abderrahmane, 96 Tears of Love, 25n Tello, Ahmad, 158 Terrorism and Kebab, 23 The Accursed Son, 95

Index  229 The Adventures of Abu al-ʿAbd, 161 The Adventures of Elias Mabruk, 161 The Beatles, 144 The Bedouin’s Honour, 6 The Broken Wings, 163 The Civil Servant, 7 The Closed Path, 48n ‘The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Planets’, 71 The Dawn, 91 The Dupes (also The Duped), 170–3 The Earth, 58 The Elite, 10, 24 The Eloquent Peasant, 53 The Émigré, 58 The Extras, 161, 169, 178–82 The Fugitive, 154 The Girl from Carthage (Aïn-el-Ghezal), 86–7 The Golden Hooves, 92 The Green Valley, 159 The Innocent Accused, 158 The Jazz Singer, 24 The Leopard, 159, 178 The Lost Treasure, 21 ‘The Moldau’, 60 The Neighbour’s Daughter, 20n The Open Door, 13, 48–52, 54, 68 The Rebels, 173 The Refugee, 11 The Rose Seller, 162 The Station, 99 The Story of the Kelly Gang, 24 The Time That Remains, 193–7 The Trap, 159 The Visit of King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, 155 The White Rose, 10, 25–30, 37, 40, 42, 66 The Wind Horse, 135 Tigers are Better Looking, 99 Timbuktu, 98 Tlatli, Moufida, 91, 94, 111, 119–20, 124 Touzani, Maryam, 149 Towards the Abyss, 6 Trances, 96

Triumph of the Will, 59 Two Hearts and One Body, 162 ʿudhri love tale, 203–5 Umm Kulthum, 10, 122 Under the Skies of Damascus, 158–9 Vautier, René, 88 Vembo, Sophia, 11 Verbal Messages, 159 Volpi, Mario, 10, 20, 25 Volubilis, 135 Voyagis, Jorgo, 102 Wadjda, 207–11 Wahbi, Yusuf, 12, 19n, 37, 39, 61n, 163 Waiting for Happiness (also Heremakono), 98, 129–34 Wajib, 157 Wakim, Bishara, 7, 38, 163 Wali, Abdel Jabar, 165 Walters, Charles, 59 Wanderers of the Desert, 119 Wedding in Galilee, 157, 174–7 We, Iraqis, 203 Wenders, Wim, 78 Weshma, 94, 96 West Side Story, 147 When the Wives are Away, 160 Where Do We Go Now?, 201n Where to?, 162 Who is Responsible?, 165 Widad, 10 Wretched of the Earth, 142 WWW: What a Wonderful World, 135 Years of Lead, 96–7, 136 Youssef, Wadi, 159 Yusra, 180 Zaki, Ahmad, 17, 59, 61n, 64 Zaynab, 8–9, 10 Zohra, 86–7