The National Imaginarium by Ryan Gillespie

Author:Ryan Gillespie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Donation of organs, tissues, etc – Moral and ethical aspects, Bioethics, Medical ethics
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Chahine’s Cinematic Vision

Before the international success of his semi-autobiographic trilogy, al-Iskandariyya leh? (Alexandria why?, 1978), Hadduta misriya (An Egyptian story, 1982), and Iskandariyya kaman wa kaman (Alexandria again and forever, 1990), Youssef Chahine had an earlier run of important works less familiar to his international viewers. Written by some of the most acclaimed writers of the time, they are al-Ard (The land, 1969), based on a novel of the same name written by Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi; al-Ikhtiyar (The choice, 1970), an adaptation of a Naguib Mahfouz novel; and al-‘Usfur (The sparrow, 1972), written by Lutfi al-Khuli. These films were produced by the public sector, before the death of Nasser in 1970. With the death of Nasser, the halting of public-sector production with his films still in the pipeline, and the promulgation of stricter censorship laws, Chahine increasingly faced obstacles to making and screening his films in Egypt.

Permission to publicly screen The Sparrow in Egyptian theaters was delayed for over a year by the censorship office, on the pretext of state security and war preparation. It was financed as an Algerian co-production and was screened in Beirut a year before it was released in Cairo. When Chahine repeatedly turned to Algerian and other international financing for his later films, starting with his trilogy, he did so not because of the international dominance of commercial Hollywood productions, but because of the increasing strictures facing cinematic criticism of the political and social circumstances in Egypt during the 1970s. Chahine exemplifies the more contentious relationship that began to emerge in the post-populist Sadat state between independent-minded artists and state authority, in the form of either the public-sector bureaucracy or the censors.

Unlike Salah Abu Seif, whose biography enphasizes his start at Studio Misr, Youssef Chahine was initiated into the industry through its cosmopolitan commercial roots. He started his directing career as an apprentice to Henry Barakat, and five of his first eight films starred the 1950s screen idol Faten Hamama. The well-established Bahna Distribution Company distributed his earliest films, and the early cosmopolitan community that built the Egyptian filmmaking industry worked with him, including Abd al-Halim Nasr, Togo Mizrahi’s cameraman, and the Lebanese émigrés Mary Queeny and Assia Dagher, who produced them. It was Alvizi Orfanelli who operated the camera for Chahine’s early classic Bab al-Hadid (Cairo station, 1958), which won the Silver Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival that year.23

Jamila al-jaza’iriya (Jamila the Algerian, 1958), Chahine’s second film that year after Bab al-Hadid was funded by its star, Magda. It won plaudits from champions of anticolonial national liberation movements. Then, in the very public-sector production, he directed Saladin the Victorious. The film, based on a novel by Naguib Mahfouz, featured an extravagantly large cast, filmed in CinemaScope on color film, and was jointly produced with Assia Dagher. The film, which many took as an allegorical hagiography of Nasser himself, was already the seventeenth film since 1950 for the still young director. Throughout his career, as an artist and a social commentator, he never tired of holding up a mirror to the ugly face of reality.

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