[Marxism] Youssef Chahine

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   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."

<http://www.al-bab.com/media/cinema/film2.htm>   *****

*****   Echoes of Old Hollywood

Destiny
Directed by Youssef Chahine
Written by Chahine and Khaled Youssef
With Nour el-Cherif, Laila Eloui, Mahmoud Hemeida, Safia el-Emary,
Mohamed Mounir, Khaled el-Nabaoui, Abdallah Mahmoud, and Ahmed
Fouad-Selim.
Rating * * * A Must-See

The Adopted Son
Directed by Aktan Abdikalikov
Written by Abdikalikov, Avtandil Adikulov, and Marat Sarulu
With Mirlan Abdikalikov, Albina Imasmeva, Adir Abilkassimov, Bakit
Zilkieciev, and Mirlan Cinkozoev.
Rating * * * A Must-See

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

A part from their exoticism, Youssef Chahine's Destiny and Aktan
Abdikalikov's The Adopted Son don't have much in common. Destiny is
the 35th film by Chahine, a 73-year-old writer, director, and
sometime actor who's generally agreed to be the major figure in the
history of Egyptian cinema. His subject here is Averroes (1126-1198),
a dissident Spanish-Arab philosopher best known for his commentaries
on Aristotle, and his film resembles a Hollywood period
spectacular--exuberant, packed with action, and positively
overflowing with energy. The Adopted Son is both the first
independent feature ever made in Kyrgyzstan--a former Soviet republic
in central Asia--and the first feature of 42-year-old writer-director
Abdikalikov, who cast his own teenage son in the title role. It's
shot mainly in an exquisitely modulated black and white, though it
periodically shifts to color, always with great dramatic effect. Its
central focus is childhood and nature in a contemporary rural
village, and its main event is the boy's discovery about halfway
through that he was adopted through an ancient local tradition in
which parents of a large family offer a male baby to a childless
couple after he's been weaned.

By American standards, The Adopted Son (1998) qualifies as an art
film as does Destiny (1997). Chahine's colorful epic calls to mind
certain MGM movies of the 50s, but that apparently counts for nothing
given that it comes from Egypt--the only plausible reason it's
showing at the Music Box rather than McClurg Court. Similarly, one
could argue that the only reason The Adopted Son is playing at Facets
Multimedia and not at the Music Box is that it comes from
Kyrgyzstan--anything from a country that difficult to spell must be
esoteric. That it's from the former Soviet Union only compounds the
confusion, since we no longer know how to label the various people
who live there. (Incidentally, both movies are French coproductions,
a reflection of how much more open France's film culture is to the
aesthetics of MGM movies of the 50s and to contemporary art movies
from the far-flung corners of the world.) . . .

One entry point . . . might be Chahine's personality. I've seen him
at several festivals in recent years, and he's as charismatic and
outrageous as Samuel Fuller was. A short, wiry firecracker, he also
makes no bones about being bisexual; the third movie in his
autobiographical trilogy, Alexandria Always and Forever (1989), is
comically frank about his sexual attraction to one of his young male
leads and features the two of them doing an amorous tap dance on a
studio set. Destiny is clearly an act of courage in the face of
Islamic fundamentalism, and one of its acts of defiance is to view
women and men as equally desirable.

Another such act is viewing genre boundaries with an equal amount of
liberalism. Chahine was asked in an interview, "Is it fair to say
that Destiny is a musical?" He replied, "In a single day, I expect to
cry, laugh, dance, sing. I may even be locked up in jail. A film
should contain all those things. What matters is style and pace. One
of the things I found most painful is when fundamentalists say they
want to stop artists singing and dancing. That's serious. It is
extremely serious....The streets of Cairo are full of laughter.
People have [become] too serious in the West. Though there's plenty
to be serious about. I think you're in a worse mess than we are.
People are all mixed up about the difference between civilization and
technology. In the Arab world, people are exceptionally civilized.
They possess nothing, but what they've got they'll give you with
pleasure." . . .

I've seen seven of Chahine's films and sampled a couple of
others--most of them at a complete retrospective held in Locarno in
1996 (perceptively written about by Dave Kehr in Film Comment). But I
haven't seen the immediate predecessor of Destiny, The Emigrant
(1994), a story of the biblical Joseph that was banned in Egypt under
pressure from fundamentalists after an estimated 900,000 people saw
it (the stated reason was that it was illegal to represent a prophet
in a film). One of the key inspirations for Destiny--which ends with
all of Averroes's books in Andalusia being burned by the caliph as a
concession to fundamentalist groups--was clearly Chahine's own
experience. If I'm not mistaken, the books we see burning in the
final sequence are modern volumes rather than medieval manuscripts,
which is part of the movie's point. (Averroes's writings survived
because some of his followers copied them and sent the copies to
Egypt--the medieval equivalent of copying films on video today,
perhaps the major way the film legacy of the late 20th century is
being preserved.)

That Averroes was a humanist whose ideas went on to influence Western
as well as Islamic thought and that two of his followers were sons of
the caliph are also part of Chahine's inspiration: the film's closing
motto is "Ideas have wings. No one can stop their flight," and
Chahine has expressly stated that his movie is addressed to everyone,
not simply to Egyptians or Islamic fundamentalists. "Yes, this film
is a drama, it's a western, it's [Alexandre] Dumas [whom he read
prior to shooting], whatever, but it's also a call to resistance."

Chahine grew up speaking four languages, and as a teenager, after the
end of World War II, he came to America to study theater directing at
the Pasadena Playhouse, an experience recounted in his Why
Alexandria? (1978). So universality is not merely part of his aim but
part of his cultural baggage. He makes the visual style of Destiny
universal not just through being familiar with the tropes of both
Hollywood and Egyptian cinema (the latter of which he helped to
invent), but also through his gift for pageantry that favors
inclusiveness over stylistic rigor. The generous impulse that makes
the movie resemble at separate times a musical, a comedy, a western,
a biopic, a biblical epic, a medieval legend, and a Dumas adventure
story also results in beautifully lit, framed, and composed shots and
sequences that coexist with ones that are more hastily and casually
put together. It's an overflowing smorgasbord of a movie, and one
reason its echoes of old Hollywood are so appealing is that new
Hollywood probably couldn't come up with such an intoxicating mixture
if it tried--industry wisdom would undoubtedly deem such a project
naive and outdated. . . .

<http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1999/0499/04029.html>   *****

*****   _Youssef Chahine_
Ibrahim Fawal

"a small book for a big subject -- serving simultaneously as
autobiography, filmography, and cultural reading of the director's
work ... The result is enthusiastic, readable and extremely portable"
Film Comment

"an exceptionally important addition to the still narrow range of
critical literature in English on the subject of African and/or
Middle Eastern cinema" Jury Panel of the BKFS Prize in Middle Eastern
Studies 2002

Paperback: £14.99

A film-maker of truly international renown and the recipient of the
Cannes Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award, Youssef Chahine is
the director of one of the most diverse and prestigious bodies of
work of any living director. Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1926, the
cosmopolitan Chahine has embodied the preoccupations of his native
Egypt in a career (still continuing) which has ranged from social
realism to autobiographical fantasy, from historical epics to
musicals and has spanned over 50 years from 1950 to the present day.

In writing this book, Ibrahim Fawal draws upon his unique
qualifications as an Arab-American whose native language is Arabic,
and as a film practitioner and educator. His discussion of the
frequently controversial film-maker illuminates Chahine's work in the
context of modern Egyptian culture and its tumultuous post-war
history showing how such films as Cairo Station (1958) , The Earth
(1969) and The Sparrow (1973) dramatised the dilemmas of ordinary
Egyptians. He also demonstrates how Chahine's intensely personal
autobiographical trilogy Alexandria...Why?(1978), An Egyptian Story
(1985) and Alexandria Again and Forever (1989) spoke to the concerns
of the broader Egyptian intelligentsia amongst whom he has earned the
reputation of being the 'poet and thinker' of modern Arab cinema.

In the final analysis, the author argues that Chahine's work stands
comparison with directors such as Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa and
Sembene but also emphatically draws strength from its links with one
of the most vibrant popular cinemas of the world and from the roots
and traditions of popular Arabic culture.

Ibrahim Fawal is an author whose novel, On the Hills of God, won the
prestigious 1998 PEN-Oakland Award for Excellence in Literature. He
holds an M.A. in Film from UCLA and a D.Phil from Oxford University.

240 pages, Illustrated
Published December 2001
Paperback ISBN: 0851708587

See other books in the BFI World Directors category

<http://www.bfi.org.uk/bookvid/books/catalogue/details.php?bookid=186>    *****
--
Yoshie

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