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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Books Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Giants and dwarves
By Mohamed El-AssyoutiTwo of the earliest examples of documentary cinema in Egypt, according to Mohamed Abdel-Fattah, are the live footage recorded by two foreigners -- Aziz and Doris -- of Khedive Abbas Helmi II visiting the Mursi Abul-Abbas Mosque in Alexandria in 1907, and Victor Russo's cautionary film Khatar Al-Basq (The Danger of Spitting, 1923). The first Egyptian documentary was only made in 1927: Mohamed Karim's Hadiqat Al-Hayawan (The Zoo). His subsequent efforts included Al-Ta'awun (Cooperation, 1931), urging farmers to work together. National documentaries followed: Gamal Madkour's Mashrou' Al-Qirsh (The Piastre Project, 1932) and Niazi Mustafa's documentation of Mustafa Al-Nahas and Makram Ebeid's Wafd conference in Imbaba in 1934.
In 1954, Gamal Madkour was supervisor of the State Information Service (SIS) Film Department, which aspired to produce documentaries for all ministries and government bodies. Until today, however, this department has only produced films for itself; between 1954 and 1966 alone, it made 120 documentaries exalting the achievements of the 1956 Revolution and Nasser's activities. Since 1967, the SIS has produced only an average of three films a year, all of which are dated, in Abdel-Fattah's opinion, due to their direct, authoritative tone, as well as their overall intellectual and technical mediocrity.
As for the National Centre For Documentaries and Short Films (NCDSF), it produced a series of 60 films on the High Dam in the early 1960s, directed by Salah El-Tuhami, to inform the public about the progress of the national project.
Mohsen Weifi attributes the establishment of several private documentary production companies in 1968 to administrative confusion in the NCDSF. Most of the new companies adopted Pharaonic names: Ahmed Fouad Darwish's company was named Pharaoh, Said Shimi, Ahmed Rashed and Ahmed Metwalli named theirs Nefertari, and Atun was chosen by Nehad Bahgat. The search for an authentic Egyptian identity, an urgent and persistent question after the 1967 defeat, was evident here. Ancient Egyptian civilization and its relation to the present became the main focus of all these companies, among which Alif (owned by Shadi Abdel-Salam and Salah Mar'i) made perhaps the most distinguished contribution.
Top to bottom:
Hashem El-Nahas' Al-Nil Arzaq (The Nile Is Fortune, 1972); Taghrid El-Asfouri's Arzaq (Fortune, 1996); Attiyat El-Abnoudi during the shooting of Hadith Al-Ghorfa (Chamber Talks, 1990) and her 1971 landmark debut Hossan Al-Tin (Mud Horse)
Abdel-Qader and Hassan El-Tilmissani's company, Ikhwan Al-Tilmissani, sought to include both Coptic and Islamic civilizations in their search for the meaning of Egyptian identity. Furthermore, the brothers' company -- whose documentaries writer Salah Hafez sometimes authored and narrated -- was the only one to insist on its Arab identity, even when the country's general policy and the Camp David Peace Treaty brought about a cold spell in relations with Egypt's neighbours.
Some documentaries made by these companies connected racial discrimination in both South Africa and Israel with American imperialism in Vietnam, like Sami El-Salamoni's Cowboy, Ahmed Fouad Darwish's Carnival, and Nehad Bahgat's Laa (No). "Because the same teams worked on several documentaries in each company, the different styles could be detected," concludes Weifi.
After its somewhat haphazard beginnings, the once-promising but never fulfilled plans of the documentary movement became symptomatic of the entire local film industry. "The many Egyptian non-narrative films that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s were wrongly considered documentaries, only because they were short", says Mohamed El-Qalyoubi.
Madkour Thabet agrees: "The grave misconception that all short films are documentaries became widespread because almost all Egyptian documentaries are short, the majority not exceeding 30 minutes."
Suffice it to say that Attiyat El-Abnoudi's ambitious 16mm debut Hossan Al-Tin (Mud Horse, 1971) and Hashem El-Nahas's Al-Nil Arzaq (The Nile Is Fortune, 1972), which began the most influential documentary movement in Egypt, were respectively 12 and 10 minutes long. The budget was extremely low, which is still the case today with the students of the Higher Institute for Film and with all documentarists in general. Despite the scarcity of decent documentaries produced -- only one or two a year -- the average 15-minute duration is executed on a very tight shooting/printing economy: a ratio of 2.5 to 1.
El-Nahas's American contemporary, Frederick Wiseman, made feature documentaries of 100 minutes on average, with a generous ratio of 40 to 1. These figures indicate that a local documentarist, whenever given the unlikely chance to make an artistic documentary, has to manage under production conditions 16 times tighter to produce a documentary 10 times shorter than his or her Western counterpart. Tahani Rashed's Arba' Nisaa Min Misr (Four Women of Egypt) cost $450,000, which is 10 times the budget of El-Abnoudi's Ayam Al-Dimoqratiya (Days of Democracy), although both are of similar length and were shot on video at the same time.
Since 1980, the ENFC has been the only major local producer of artistic documentaries besides short fiction and animated films shot on film. Essam Zakariya discovered that the ENFC's budget for copying and restoring old films as well as producing new ones consists of an average of LE1 million a year. This explains why only an average of nine short films, including fiction, animated films and documentaries, have been produced every year since 1985, and why they generally suffer from such poor production quality. Zakariya points out that "the ENFC owns only one camera and one Maviola [editing machine]; both are very old and remain out of order for years at a time. In most of the productions, equipment is hired from private companies, as the Ministry of Culture refuses to purchase new equipment."
El-Abnoudi had presented a detailed proposal to the ENFC for a project entitled Wasf Misr (The Description of Egypt), in which 50 documentarists were to shoot different places in Egypt for five years; the resulting material was to be edited into a documentary form. Madkour Thabet's response was: "There is no budget for El-Abnoudi's colossal project, which could cost LE20 million a year. Furthermore, this project, which was originally planned for a non-governmental organisation, is nothing exceptional: all it does is impose a unified perspective upon all the different documentaries normally produced by the ENFC and the SIS, which all describe Egypt in one way or another. For instance, Essam Hishmat's Hamada Qalb Al-Assad (Hamada Lion Heart) about a circus child, and Al-Qawala, about the musical instrument of the same name, both present different aspects of Egyptian life."
El-Abnoudi, who believes she has a social cause, has had only one film produced by the ENFC, and has had to seek funding elsewhere for the sponsorship of 20 documentaries. "I make my documentaries on Egypt and I would be happy to have local sponsors, but they are hard to find. My primary market is local and there is no establishment or agency in Egypt to sponsor documentaries," she laments, adding that she refuses to direct promotional films.
In contrast, Ahmed Fouad Darwish, who directed four films for the ENFC, and about 60 through his own company, says: "I made the Visual Encyclopaedia of Pharaonic Civilisation in 26 films, besides many industrial documentaries, in order to sponsor my own artistic documentaries. I try to twist the material, however, diminishing the promotional aspect as much as possible. Advertising agencies make documentaries for promotional purposes worth LE100 million every year; we, as documentarists, should have a share of this."
El-Abnoudi retorts: "The majority of documentaries are either promotional or naively humanist. They are made with no consciousness of the role of the documentary as art, as a tool to enlighten and to preserve heritage and history. Documentaries are the only chance we have of showing real Egyptian people on screen."
Taghrid El-Asfouri, who has made 11 documentaries -- four on film and seven on video -- since her graduation from the Higher Institute of Film in 1989, has turned down several offers from governmental associations because the approach they wanted did not suit her. She complains that many documentaries, including most of hers, are rejected by the censors, who disqualify them for TV broadcasting because they deal with issues like female circumcision, pollution, child labour, education, theft, or neglect of monuments in a straightforward manner. "One step toward solving these problems is opening our eyes and discussing them," she comments.
El-Asfouri adds that television prefers "to reassure the public; when CNN shows female circumcision or terrorism in Egypt, all hell breaks loose because Egypt's reputation is tarnished, whereas had we taken the initiative, faced our problems courageously and tried to solve them responsibly, others would not have been able to claim that they broke through the Great Wall of China and got a scoop."
In response, Ahmed Metwalli presents television as "an information medium, both serving the purpose and representing the opinion of the government; presumably, the Ministry of Culture should serve our own cause and help us present our own opinions. Inevitably, within the coming 10 years, private independent TV stations will be established, and then maybe a channel will represent us."
After all has been said, however, films become films only when they reach an audience. El-Asfouri says sadly: "Our documentaries sit on the shelves and are seen only once or twice by a specialised audience. So why spend all this money and effort on a few documentaries a year that neither reach an audience nor make any profit? We need freedom, facilities and screening conditions; in other words, we need the whole industry to be reborn."
