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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Dawoud Abdel-Sayed does not mince his words; and the admixture of confidence and humility go well with his propensity for metaphor.
An enjoyable honesty
By Youssef Rakha
Director Dawoud Abdel-Sayed
acknowledging his Silver Pyramid award for
Ard Al-Khawf (Land of Fear)
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Debate Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters "It's a shield," is how he describes the three prizes -- best script, special jury award and the Culture Development Fund's award for best Egyptian production -- he received this week for his most recent film, Ard Al-Khawf (Land of Fear), described on Monday by Palestinian film critic Ibrahim Al-Aris as "the festival's greatest surprise and its only genuine pleasure." "You wear a shield when you go to war. There is no private joy in a prize, unless the award is a financial one. Some time ago, perhaps, there was joy in being honoured. Now I find my reward in the people who see the film, it's the only thing I can see. But it's a shield. You don't enter into battles because you want to; the battles are forced on you. So sometimes some awards are shields that protect you from the bullets or arrows which are hurled at you."
Arrows have already been hurled at Ard Al-Khawf. The film is weighed down by philosophy, some said; its symbolism is either too direct, for example relating to the characters' names, or too complex to be appreciated immediately. The soundtrack, others added, is an idiosyncratic, over-elaborate jumble which soon becomes little more than a stylish distraction. Yet Al-Aris is not alone in seeing Ard Al-Khawf as an example of how Egyptian cinema can transcend itself, "saying more than 'perhaps' to the next 10 years".
Abdel-Sayed, for his part, though he does not cite his own work as an example, talks of Egyptian films by relatively new or young filmmakers -- Yousri Nassrallah, Ossama Fawzi and Atif Hatata -- in which "certain things, new and significant developments are achieved". Art movies may not be as digestible as their commercial counterparts but it is in the former, Abdel-Sayed explains, that the most remarkable work has been done. He means remarkable not only in the technical or aesthetic sense, but in the sense of pure enjoyment. Though a professed trail-blazer, Abdel-Sayed is aware of the dangers inherent in any desire for change, and capable of articulating a forceful self-defence.
"The point is that this is the soundtrack I chose. If you want to criticise it that's you're right, but this is what I have to offer and if I didn't think it suitable I wouldn't have used it, so on the second count I'm afraid I have nothing to say. As for the first count, what does symbolism mean? There are levels of interpretation. There may be a symbolic level, but there is also an ordinary one, and it's up to you to read the film the way you want. If you don't like the symbolic reading, an alternative, straightforward reading is still possible. In fact it's the natural thing. The thing about symbolism is that it can be bad symbolism, and I don't believe that's the case, because there is a story to follow that isn't naive in that way. Otherwise I don't see how evoking symbolism is in any way relevant... This is a new kind of film. Every film for me is an attempt to run away from all my previous films. To make another kind of film. But in terms of my thinking, the process by which it develops is of course much slower and it doesn't change as much. But one does want to transcend oneself and the current crisis of the cinema, which, incidentally, is not new...
"I feel that the crisis essentially concerns the commercial cinema, that they have nothing new to present and have not progressed beyond a certain point in history, even within the commercial framework. The American commercial cinema transcends itself even as it remains commercial. It has vitality. The Egyptian is sluggish and not sufficiently vital. So all we have left is art cinema, the one we've been talking about, which suffers the same crisis. But the magnitude of its achievement is larger, because it is always searching and isn't as lazy. But still one thing worries me -- of course this is a personal viewpoint -- and that is the difference between the desire to rebel against prevalent, established trends and the act of simply making something strange or fantastical. There is a very thin line separating the two, and sometimes you just don't perceive it."
It is the commercial producers' failure to understand the reciprocal relation existing between artistic and commercial cinema (Abdel-Sayed likens it to the relation between the explorer and the coloniser) that allows the crisis to take its toll. Without the artist-explorer's efforts, Abdel-Sayed elaborates, the producer-coloniser will soon run out of ideas, techniques, means to genuine enjoyment. "In the end it is in the benefit of the commercial cinema to support the artistic cinema, I think." But this is not the only concern that might spoil Abdel-Sayed's pleasure in receiving the prize.
The festival itself, he believes, succumbs to the temptation of appearances. "They want it to look glamorous and grand, but in trying to do so they're really ultimately missing what it should be about." Instead of building the kind of festival that facilitates distribution, one that filmmakers and actors are happy to attend, they pay money to stars well past their heyday; they favour quantity of screenings over the quality of the film; they lack an appropriate, Egyptian and context-specific curatorial perspective: all these, Abdel-Sayed points out, are symptoms of the glamour syndrome, part of the cinematic malaise that makes his own life so difficult. Yet how hard is it to enjoy being honoured, after all?
In fact, Abdel-Sayed suggests, there is little enjoyment in his career as a whole. Even best-film awards, it seems, can hardly remedy the situation. At least they are not what Abdel-Sayed keeps going for. "A long time ago I saw cinema as my cause," he explains. "Maybe. The purpose is to involve and give pleasure to the people who watch, not critics or festival juries. To satisfy myself and then the people who watch. But it is a job like any other, and except for rare moments I don't enjoy it any more than a carpenter or builder enjoys his daily labour. It's only a cause in the sense that one has to be honest. There must be that honesty there, one's honest view of the world. And enjoyment. To make people enjoy it. Honesty and enjoyment are what leads to good."
