Egypt through the looking-glass

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1995 by Magda Wassef

Egyptians have been film fans ever since 1896 when the first Lumiere shorts were shown in Alexandria, only a year after their projection in Paris. By the turn of the century there were several cinemas in Cairo and Alexandria, mainly showing American and European films.

The first entirely Egyptian film was The Civil Servant (1922), a short feature directed by Mohamed Baoumi. In spite of the prevailing climate of misogyny, however, the real pioneers of Egyptian cinema were women such as Aziza Emir, Assia Dagher and a few others. The tenacious Aziza Emir was both producer and leading lady of Egypt's first full-length feature, Leila (1927), which was a smash hit and launched the Egyptian motion-picture industry. Notable among the dozen or so films made in the late 1920s was Mohamed Karim's Zeinab (1929), an adaptation of Mohamed Hussein Heikal's novel, the first in Arab literature

Early musicals Egyptian talkies of the early 1930s were strongly influenced by popular love songs. Mohamed Karim's The White Rose (1933), starring the great singer Mohamed Abdel Wahab, entranced a vast public both in Egypt and abroad. It made the name of the Egyptian cinema and introduced it to a new genre, the musical. Every film-maker had his own singing star. Mohamed Karim, for example, directed all Mohamed Abdel Wahab's films, and Ahmed Badrakhan directed five of the seven films starring the famous woman singer Umm Kulthum. Kamal Selim's Determination (1939) signalled a move away from these light-hearted productions. By showing the life of Cairo slum dwellers, Selim brought a new, more realistic atmosphere to Egyptian cinema.

Escapist films During the Second World War packaged Hollywood-inspired musical comedies were all the rage. Films, studios and cinemas proliferated. The actress-singer Leila Mourad became Egypt's Mary Pickford in Egypt's Sweetheart, a role recreated by Togo Mizrahi in Leila (1942), the first in a series made over a ten-year period. Singer Farid El Atrash and dancer Samia Gamal were a famous double act.

Following in the footsteps of Kamal Selim, Ahmed Kamel Morsi (The District Attorney) and Kamel El Telmessani (The Black Market) set out to deal with contemporary problems. Both these films were shot in 1943, but neither was shown until 1946 because of a tacit form of censorship. In 1947 a censorship code - along the lines of the Hays Code in the United States - was officially introduced. Many subjects became taboo, and as a result specific references to real-life situations tended to disappear. Puritanism and conservatism were the pretext for this.

The revolutionary ferment of the 1940s was stifled by increasingly repressive measures that affected all aspects of cultural life. Only musicals, comedies and melodramas were given free rein.

Years of paradox New archetypes emerged after the Nasserite revolution in 1952. Patriotic films such as Rodda Kalbi's Give Me Back My Heart celebrated the revolution and railed against the old social values.

Yet a few talented film-makers continued to explore a realist vein. Among them were Salah Abu Saif, who took the side of the most underprivileged, especially women, in The Leech (1956) and I Am Free (1959); Henri Barakat, director of the classic Song of the Curlew (1959); Atef Salem, one of whose best-known works is We Students (1959); and Kamal El Sheikh, who made Life or Death in 1954. Youssef Chahine showed an instinctive concern for contemporary problems in films like The Nile's Son (1951) and Cairo Station (1958).

But important though they were, these films were only a drop in the ocean of Egyptian cinema. With an average output of sixty movies a year, the industry continued to satisfy the escapist desires of the mass public and meet producers' and distributors' demands for profitability. A change of course only came at the beginning of the 1960s.

A cinema revolution After 1961 the state exercised almost complete control over the cinema. The size of the private sector was considerably reduced. For the first time film-makers were free from the restrictions imposed by the external market that had previously held sway.

Ideology began to infiltrate into scripts and lead them into unexplored territory. One favourite theme was the world of the peasantry, which featured in Tewfik Salah's pioneering The Heroes' Struggle (1962), Salah Abu Saif's The Second Wife (1967) and Youssef Chahine's The Earth (1969). Yet most of these films only attracted a limited public, compared with that of films which gave comic treatment to serious subjects such as the population explosion and the equality of the sexes.

Kamal El Sheikh (The Thief and the Dogs, 1962) and Salah Abu Saif (Cairo 30, 1969) were among a number of film-makers who were sympathetic to the social insights of Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1988) and adapted several of his works to the screen. But the ideals and structures of Nasserism collapsed with defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967.

Rejection and renewal The tension was relaxed by success in the war of 1973. Nasserite protectionism was replaced by the economic liberalism of Anwar El Sadat. The State Broadcasting Authority, hitherto responsible for production and distribution, was dismantled, and there was a return to the law of the market-place. Shadi Abdel Salam, who had directed The Mummy in 1968 in exceptional conditions, tried for fifteen years to make Akhenaton, but in vain.