Egypt's great director
The notes below were
issued by Channel Four television to accompany a
season of Arab films shown on British TV in the late
1980s.
YOUSSEF
CHAHINE, director of some 40 films, is probably the
most independent of Arab film-makers, producing what he thinks is
important, even at his own expense, and raising issues that
disturb.
Born in 1926, son of a Syrian lawyer and a Christian
family in Alexandria, Egypt, Chahine attended the prestigious
Victoria College. He dreamed of the cinema and theatre, watched
Hollywood musicals, and in 1946 left to study drama in California.
Chahine’s early films in Egypt
included Raging Sky (1953), begun while Farouk was still
King and dealing with a peasant farmer’s challenge to a feudal
landlord. But the first truly indicative film of his style and
preoccupations was Cairo Central Station (Bab al-Hadid), in
1958.
Chahine himself plays the central
character, Kenaoui, a simple-minded man, beneficently employed as
a newspaper-seller. He cuts pictures of women from magazines for
the station hut he lives in, but a living focus of his sexual
frustrations is Hanouma (played by the popular actress Hind
Rostom), who sells lemonade and is engaged to Abou Serib (Farid
Chawqi), porter and trade union organiser. With unthinking but
affectionate playfulness Hanouma exacerbates Kenaoui’s
frustration and adds to his confusion which leads to tragic death.
Egyptian audiences, used to simpler melodramas, were disturbed and
rejected the film. It was not seen again for some 20 years.
In 1963 Chahine made Saladin (original
title: El Nasser - defender/deliverer - Salah ed-Dine), an epic,
three-hour film in CinemaScope named after the 12th Century Sultan
who, as the film begins, is preparing to liberate Jerusalem from
its Christian Crusader occupiers. It was scripted by Naguib
Mahfouz and the poet and progressive writer, Abderrahman
Cherkaoui, and a parallel between Saladin and President Nasser is
easily drawn. Saladin is shown as an educated and peaceable man -
at one point he is asked to give clandestine medical help to
Richard (the Lion Heart), shot by an arrow, and later he tells
him: "Religion is God’s and the Earth is for all ... I
guarantee to all Christians in Jerusalem the same rights as are
enjoyed by Muslims."
A novel by Cherkaoui, serialised
in 1952, formed the basis of The Earth (1968), noted
particularly for its image of the peasant farmer - "eternal
‘damned of the earth’" - which broke with "the
ridiculous image the cinema had (hitherto) given him" (Khaled
Osman). There followed a further collaboration with Mahfouz on The
Choice (1970), ostensibly a murder investigation story
involving twin brothers, but with the underlying theme of
intellectual schizophrenia. In 1976 he made The Return Of The
Prodigal Son, a "musical tragedy", but four years
earlier had made one of his greatest films, The
Sparrow
(1972), both co-productions with Algeria. A journalist and a young
police officer meet while investigating incidents of corruption.
They and other people of the left pass through Bahiyya’s house,
whose name represents the idea of the mother country and is
invoked in Cheikh Imam’s song at the end of the film. After
Nasser’s announcement of the defeat in the war and his
subsequent resignation, Bahiyya runs into the street, followed by
a growing crowd, shouting "No! we must fight. We won’t
accept defeat!"
In
Alexandria,
Why? (1978),
Yehia, a young Victoria College student, is obsessed with Hollywod
and dreams of making cinema. It is 1942, the Germans are about to
enter Alexandria, thought preferable to the presence of the
British. Yehia’s cousin is gay and ‘buys’ drunken British
soldiers. Jewish friends are forced to leave and decide to settle
in Palestine. In An Egyptian Story (1982) Yehia is a
flim-maker, going to London (as Chahine had earlier) for
open-heart surgery. He has a brief affair with a taxi driver. As a
result of the operation, he reviews his life: moments of Chahine’s
own films are replayed against their autobiographical and social
historical context. Memory is very important to Chahine’s most
recent work —whether of the "city of my childhood,
Alexandria, between the two world wars tolerant, secular, open to
Muslims, Christians and Jews" or of a more distant past: such
as evoked in Adieu Bonaparte (1985), based on the cultural
aspect of Bonaparte’s expedition into Egypt (1798). "Out of
this marvellous confrontation there was a rebirth of Egyptian
consciousness, of its past ... which belongs to humanity."
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