|
The notes below were
issued by Channel Four television to accompany a
season of Arab films shown on British TV in the late
1980s. See also:
Introduction
WITHIN
the Arab world, the Egyptian cinema has always dominated the
screen with its prolific production of mass audience films on the
same lines as those of Hollywood. By 1917 there were 80 cinemas in
Egypt and by 1925 an impulse of ‘national capitalism’ led to
the Misr Bank’s involvement. The first ‘Egyptian’ film is
considered to be Leila, by Stephan Rosti (1927). It is a
story of love, misuse, betrayal and downfall and was the first in
a long line of melodramas. Its star, Aziza Amir, became one of the
Arab world’s successful women producers of whom Assia Dagher is
probably the best known.
But Egypt’s cinema really took
off with the introduction of sound during the 1930s. The radio had
already made Egyptian singing stars famous throughout the Arab
world and powerful record companies like Odeon and Baidaphone
"encouraged the singers they had under contract to appear in
films which they co-produced" (Abbas Fadhil Ibrahim). Unused
to Egyptian Arabic, the public in other countries (where often
slightly different dialects are spoken) went to the cinema to see
their favorite stars singing - ’Umm Kalthoum, Mohamed Abd el
Wahab, Leila Mourad reigned supreme to the end of the 1940s.
Abd el Wahab was also a great
composer of Arab music and successfully brought to the cinema the
rhythms and tempos of jazz and Latin American dance, to lighten
the traditional recitative form this music (with its overture,
slow rhythm and duration of up to 20 minutes.) was successful and
very popular in live performance, but made the films somewhat
static - particularly those of ’Umm Kalthoum, one of its
greatest exponents. Other popular singing stars include Chadia
(who made 72 films), Abdelhalim Hafez, Farid el Atrache and his
sister, Asmahan, whose promisingly great career was curtailed by
her death in a car crash.
|
|
|
Madiha
Yousri, Faten Hamama and Farid el Atrache in Henry
Barakat's The Immortal Song (1959)
|
During the 1930s, the Misr Bank
further financed production by sending technicians abroad for
training and setting up the Misr Studio in 1935. Production
increased from six films in 1933 to 17 in 1936. Other studios were
installed, artists’ salaries rose as in Hollywood and to the
musical/comedy genres were added farces and the melodrama,
consisting of seduction, implied rape, adultery, murder and
suicide. The "first lady of the screen" was Faten
Hamama, who played roles of the orphan/Cinderella type (A Happy
Day, Mohamed Karim, 1940; The Immortal Song, Henry
Baraket, 1959), later incarnating the difficult conditions of
women (The Sin, 1964; No Condolences For Women,
1979; The Night Of Fatma’s Arrest, 1984). In 1953 Hamama
starred with an unknown Syrian-Lebanese Christian, Michel
Chalroub, in Youssef Chahine’s Raging Sky. Becoming a
Muslim, he changed his name to Omar Sharif and they married,
starring together in Chahine’s The Black Waters (1956),
then in Night Without Sleep (1958) and River Of Love
(1960): "With him there appeared for the first time in the
Egyptian cinema the erotic hero ... with magnetic eyes and
tantalising voice" (Abbas Fadhil Ibrahim).
Amongst the directors of the early
Egyptian period were Niazi Mustapha, whose career began with a
hugely successful comedy (Salama’s Doing OK, 1937) and
who became noted for action films, (many of which starred Farid
Chawqi) and Fatine Abdel Wahab, notably for comedies. But Salah
Abou Seif has probably been the most prolific and worked with all
the stars and in all the genres. Youssef Chahine calls him
"the most Egyptian film-maker of all". Both he and
Mustapha made films in the late 40s based on tales about the famed
pre-Islamic poet and hero, Antar, son of a chief and a black
slave, and his love for Abla. In 1952 Abou Seif made a film which
for the first time showed a poor urban neighbourhood. Hassan
The Foreman was based on an idea by its star, Chawqi. He was
also one of the directors to work with Naguib Mahfouz - one of
Egypt’s most important writers. They adapted Zola’s Therese
Raquin (Your Day Will Come, 1951) and Mahfouz’s A
Beginning And An End (Dead Amongst The Living, 1960,
with Chawqi, Sanaa Gamil and Omar Charif). In 1970 he made The
Dawn Of Islam, successful throughout the Arab world, but a
later film made in Iraq (El Qadisiyya, 1981) was a major
disappointment.
The possibility of a truly more
realist cinema, indicated in Kamal Selim’s landmark film, Determination
(1940), did not emerge until the Free Officers’ Revolt of
1952 led by Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, on whose leadership the
Arab world’s frustrations and hopes focussed for several years.
Hitherto peaceful coexistence in
Palestine between the majority Arab population (Muslim and
Christian) and the existing (Sephardic) Jewish inhabitants of the
country was severely shattered in 1948. The establishment of the
State of Israel wiped Palestine off the map and displaced and
dispossessed approximately 780,000 Arabs.
THE LOSS
of Palestine was felt
throughout the Arab world, still experiencing European colonialism
in many countries; Nasser represented the possibility of a
nationalist Arab unity. In 1956 he nationalised the Suez Canal,
which provoked an attack by Britain, France and Israel and led to
the second Arab-Israeli war. (Among other films about this was
Ahmed Badrakhan’s God Is With Us, Egypt, 1956.) Some Arab
countries became independent (of France or Britain) during the
late 1950s, but Algeria’s war of independence, won in 1962, was
the most significant. "Nasserism for a time dgured as one of
the models of political transformation … once it had obtained
its independence, Algiers tended to play a role similar to that of
Cairo, guaranteed by the exemplary character of its own struggle,
the boldness of its project and the global vision of its
message" (Jacques Berque). But the ‘Six-Day War’, the
third Arab-Israeli war, was an enormous military and psychological
defeat, leaving Israel from 1967 in possession of Jerusalem, the
West Bank and the Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert.
In that year the Organisation of
Palestinian Cinema was set up, principally to document the
struggle. In this period there was a wealth of cultural
expression: in particular the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, Samih el
Qasim, the Syrian, Adonis, or the songs of Cheikh Imam (Egypt) and
Fairuz. Tewfiq Saleh’s The
Cheated (1971) and Borhane
Alaouie’s Kafr Kassem (1974), both essentially Syrian
productions, came out of this experience. The Cheated was
based on the novel by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, Men
under the Sun, about three Palestinians trying to cross into
Kuwait to find work and freedom - in an empty petrol lorry.
(Kanafani was killed by a car bomb in Beirut, 1972). Kafr
Kassem was based on an actual event in 1956, when 49 villagers
returning home from the fields were shot dead because a curfew of
which they were unaware had suddenly been imposed by Israeli
officers. Slim Riad’s Sanaoud (Algeria, 1972) also
treated the Palestinian issue.
If 1967 had shaken "the
enthusiasm and barely-acquired confidence of intellectuals in the
Arab world ... an even more fearsome shock awaited the new Arab
cinema: Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 ... After the
invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which led to the Sabra and Chatila
massacre, the Arab no longer knew who he was" (Ferid
Boughedir, Camera Arabe).
A few days after the invasion, the
Christian Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi shot himself in "despair
at seeing Israeli troops at the doors of Beirut, while Arab
governments watched silent and indifferent" (Khalil A
Sulaiman). Five years later, seeing Muslim Arabs surrounding the
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and "condeming to a slow
death children, mothers and old people for the simple fact of
their Palestinian identity", the Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben
Jalloun, winner of the 1987 French Prix Goncourt for Literature,
asked "What culture will be born of these ruins ... in which
the Arab conscience has been entangled? ... From these scorched
landscapes ... these hands raised to the sky, these muted cries of
dehydrated children, we are left with images, or rather
photographic documents which tour the world by satellite and are
deposited on television screens where all the time wars are
paraded one after another without distinction."
For many filmmakers explanations
can only begin to be found by looking again at the past: "We
must face our memory, judge it, unveil it. Change comes from
knowledge. We don’t dare see ourselves in the mirror, we look
for someone else, we’re not proud of what we are … Our history
is bound by memory and prohibition. We must unveil what we keep
hidden in order prehaps to know who we are" (Nouri Bouzid).
Yet it is also necessary to 'unveil’ the image created by the
West:
"Muslims and Arabs are
essentially covered, discussed, apprehended, either as oil
suppliers or as potential terrorists. Very little of the detail,
the human density, the passion of Arab-Muslim life has entered the
awareness of even those people whose profession is to report the
Islamic world. What we have instead is a limited series of crude,
essentialised caricatures" (Edward W. Said).
See also:
|
