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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 Ethereal agency
By Mohamed El-AssyoutiThe word documentary has two possible translations in Arabic: watha'iqi and tasgili. The latter is in use locally, while the former is prevalent in most of the Arab world. The attitude towards this discrepancy between the two terms differs from one specialist to another. For Tubala, documentary material, whether it is news, live sports, or features, is all watha'iqi -- a broader conception, which implies the documentation of real events as they take place.
Samir Farid suggests that watha'iqi be applied to those documentaries that depend on previously filmed footage, that was not shot for the documentarist's own purposes but is nevertheless the basic material from which the documentary is made. One instance is a recent film that uses footage of the Spanish Civil War from old documentaries and newsreels. In other words, Farid regards only compiled work as watha'iqi, and all documentaries shot by their makers as tasgili.
The idealist-observationalist conception of the documentary that prevailed between 1950 and 1970 influences Madkour Thabet's narrower definition, including only those films where the filmmaker interferes in the environment he or she films only through camera angle and editing choices. Any directing of the mise-en-scène and the actions that affect its composition would disqualify the film as a documentary.
Nevertheless, a substantial percentage of documentaries, especially in the past 30 years, used reenactment of actual events with professional performers; many documentarists following in Flaherty's footsteps also had their subjects perform tasks from their heritage that they themselves never undertook.
Accepting a tendency to consider Flaherty not quite a genuine documentarist, on the other hand, Mohamed El-Qalyoubi seems to be aligned with Thabet's contention. He does not consider the October 1973 films by Nabil El-Beh and Khalil Shawki, or Shadi Abdel-Salam's Goyoush Al-Shams (Armies of the Sun) as documentaries simply because they feature reenactments of battle scenes; but how else could the battles be documented on film, if they were never shot? On the other hand, El-Qalyoubi considers the classical voice-over documentaries of Salah El-Tuhami and Saad Nadim as documentary proper.
While the voice-over commentary's authority was rejected in documentary movements a decade after World War II, its successor, absolute observationalism, was only a brief moment in the evolution of documentary film. Abdel-Moneim Osman, a documentarist from the 1970s, commented at one seminar that "when the camera is noticed in a place, the behaviour of the people in their natural environment changes -- as if they saw the devil himself."
Consequently, how can a film where the crowds stare at the camera all the time, as in Sami El-Salamoni's Ramadan documentary, compare with one where it is invisible, as in Hashem El-Nahas's major works, or with one where the camera's presence is known but ignored by subjects asked to pretend they are behaving "naturally", as in most documentaries -- for instance, those by Fouad El-Tuhami, Ali El-Ghazouli, or Taghrid El-Asfouri. This question of the camera's interference elsewhere induced observationalists to adhere to a variety of self-reflexive, self-conscious and self-referential attitudes.
El-Qalyoubi quotes the Russian theorist Lyadir Beshva, categorising documentaries according to subject matter either as phenomenon, event, portrait, or information-based. "This classification of non-fiction is necessary to create a balance in any production plan so that a category neither dominates nor disappears altogether".
