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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Special Books Profile Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Phantom fellas
By Mohamed El-AssioutyStripped of the usual commercial attractions -- superstar presence, songs, stand-up comedy, forced sexual innuendo and brow-beating speeches -- Gannat Al-Shayatin (Fallen Angels' Paradise) is probably the best planned production in Egyptian cinema for decades. Director Osama Fawzi and scriptwriter Mustafa Zekri believe that their work on two films now -- they earlier collaborated on Afarit Al-Asfalt (Asphalt Demons) -- testifies to a common spirit. In both its conception and execution, they think their later collaboration marks a progression from the earlier. "It is a challenge for us in this society and in this decaying film industry to make a film with death as theme, a corpse as protagonist and a minimum of decency in terms of aesthetic and production quality," they contend.
SOURCES: The protagonist's character is taken from an unfinished story of Zekri's, while the three tramps are from his novel Ma Ya'rifahu Amin (What Amin Knows). He then draws on Jorge Amado's novel The Man Who Died Twice to construct the main plot. Zekri's scriptwriting is precise and always mindful of the production shortcomings of the local film industry, while Osama's directing is highly conscientious in producing a defined, sharp, condensed and swift visual language.
THEME AND AESTHETIC APPROACH: Fawzi recalls that the film originated in their intention to tackle the idea of death as well as the hypocrisy and superficial respect and reverence associated with it.
Zekri holds that beauty is not in transcending the barrier between life and death, but in dwelling there for a while. "What I liked in Amado's novel is that he, unlike Schumacher [in Flatliners (1990)] but more like Bergman [in The Seventh Seal (1957), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Fanny and Alexander (1983)], dared to contemplatively pause there, refraining from proceeding beyond the threshold of death."
Though there have been many successful literary excursions into the afterlife, including Homer, Vergil, Dante and Chaucer, Amado discarded such license, an exclusion that qualified his novel as cinematic raw material since it avoids the awkwardness and clumsiness of visualising such unknown territory for the living. Zekri notes that pictures attempting to tackle any posthumous reality tend to be superficial and unimaginative, not only due to the production limitations that exist in most film industries, but also because of the irremediably enigmatic nature of the subject.
Zekri finds it easier to scriptwrite from scratch, since having a literary source restricts a great many fundamental decisions. As a consequence he was not overly faithful to the novel's plot, whose ending he finds too optimistic and idealistic. Gannat Al-Shayatin's protagonist is quite different from Amado's. Overlooking the novel's first chapters, Zekri chose to start from the minute the protagonist dies -- what comes before, he argues, would have been of minimal dramatic value for a film that seeks to establish and maintain an even dramatic level throughout, keeping the presence of death as a fact, physically embodied by the corpse, weighing on both characters and audience for the entire 80 minutes.
"I think this is an appropriate way to show how different people view, puzzle over and surrender to death. Cinematic time is very precious, I don't like to have a low point, a build-up and a peak," he adds.
Natural instinct rather than social specificity function as drives for the characters in both Afarit Al-Asfalt and Gannat Al-Shayatin. Instinct, and weaknesses associated with it, is a side of naturalism which Fawzi likes, but he explains that the clash between the bourgeoisie and tramps was never intended to be illustrative of a socio-economic perspective, it was not introduced for itself or as a primary concern of the film, but was a consequence of dramatising two different and mutually exclusive societies.
Zekri resorts to instinct as an inherent determinant of character, as opposed to those economically imposed, respecting the genetic determinism which is somehow related to fate, but rejecting photographic realism. He prefers the trans-real, the exaggerated and ironic, above any reductionist psychoanalytic or materialist reading of reality, a preference always foregrounded within his cinematic style.
For Zekri, what is so scary about death is the existence of another time. "There is a key -- something time-related and unknown -- that can solve every puzzle but which is lost to us. The essential artistic problem is time-related: you waste your life producing something that is time-bound and that will occupy an infinitesimally minute place in an eternal stretch of time. How futile!"
Zekri believes that it is precisely this quality of futility, and its reasons, that underpins the ambiguity of so many aspects of an art work the resolution of which is beyond the artist himself. The artist's dilemma is that he cannot express any transcendental meaning without resorting to tools that almost inevitably result in pigeon-holing within some established interpretative scheme.
Fawzi concedes that there is a degree of abstraction in the script that extended into the visual language of the film, yet due to the presence of many realistic elements, the film remains a far from abstract entity.
"My aesthetic approach, or style, emerges with each particular film," says Fawzi. According to each film's distinct characteristics, the conditions surrounding its production, and his own interaction with all these factors, a certain style emerges. He does not have a pre-determined approach, a method he intends to use throughout his career, because time and changing conditions continuously contribute to the eventual product. His starting point is a decent script and its subject matter and these constitute the major factors determining the style; otherwise he has no biases with regards to various techniques, forms and genres. A minimum of production standards should, of course, be available.
In Gannat Al-Shayatin Fawzi insisted on controlling all elements and details: an quiet nocturnal environment prevails, not a single human or animal external element is visible or audible at any point -- even in the street scenes -- unless it is already part of his established vision. He conjectures that "narrowing down the world of Gannat Al-Shayatin was necessary to handle this very particular tale, to have full artistic control, but still I occasionally introduced references to actual people and places to relate it to our ordinary reality. To highlight the particularity of Gannat Al-Shayatin's universe I needed to contrast it with our everyday world in a subtle way."
Hence, while an Egyptian audience will recognise many elements, particular to our own culture, the remark of Marco Müller, head of the Locarno Film Festival, where the film was screened in 1999, that it could originate from anywhere in the world, is far from invalid. The concentration of formal aspects certainly contributes to validating Müller's remarks.
EXECUTION: "If we had been given the liberty to shoot the entire film in a studio, I would not have hesitated a moment," asserts Fawzi.
Only 30 per cent of the shooting took place in Studio Galal, however. The rest of the footage involved exterior filming, with all its concomitant hazards.
Lacking the presence of a box-office superstar meant that the crew avoided a security force escort to exterior locations. The two month-delay to have the 6 October Bridge secured for a night shoot was in vain. Shooting had to be called off once because a street gang attacked the cast and crew, throwing bottles and stones to get them off their patch.
One major innovation of Gannat Al-Shayatin, one that several filmmakers have already begun to emulate, is Fawzi's close control of acting style, something Egyptian cinema has in the past been happy to leave to the actors' own resources. There were many rehearsals with lead actor Mahmoud Hemeida -- who played the role of Tabl, the corpse -- the aim being to project an inner radiance despite his character being silent, motionless and with closed eyes throughout the film. This required full body relaxation while simultaneously projecting a very energetic consciousness. "Even the slightest twitch would ruin a shot, so we would sometimes rehearse up to five hours before shooting," notes Fawzi. Additionally lights, make-up and Hemeida's insistence on physically removing his two front teeth contributed in giving Tabl's corpse the semblance of being a site where life and death co-exist.
To counter the under-acting of the corpse, the three tramps were required to overact. This was very calculated and controlled during the six-months of rehearsal workshops that both theatre director Mohamed Abdel-Hadi and Fawzi supervised. Thus emerged an acting style marked by a very deliberate and controlled level of exaggeration.
"We looked for particular features in the cast, which I did not see in mainstream actors who have a seeming addiction to turning in typical television performances," explains Fawzi. Out of the 37 candidates who auditioned for Hani Khalifa's casting, he selected Amr Waked, Sari El-Naggar and Salah Fahmi because they had a similar atypical style. It later turned out that they had worked together on Ahmed El-Attar's plays, which accounts for the harmony that existed between them. "However, in our rehearsals we developed their concentration and continuity skills, which is necessary for acting in film. I also had to define and fine tune the differences between the three tramp characters, adapting them to the cast," adds Fawzi.
PROFESSIONAL JEALOUSY: Because opportunities to make films are so scarce, colleagues spitefully criticise each other. An expensive pursuit of quality was one such criticism.
Zekri ripostes: "I never write a scene that cannot be executed within the production limits of an impoverished industry like ours; the script, however, can demand high aesthetic quality in terms of performance and execution -- which is affordable."
Fawzi elaborates: "We owe Gannat Al-Shayatin's high quality not so much to lack of stinginess in the production or to printing and mixing abroad, as to the intense work of many people with the aim of producing a decent sound and visual quality."
He regrets that Egyptian films have long been criticised at film festivals for boasting such a long history while at the same time being seemingly incapable of producing a minimum acceptable sound quality. Even though in the 1950's and 1960's we made films up to international standards, and today all of the new local movie theatres are equipped to play Dolby Digital Sound, yet almost all our films are still mixed in poor quality mono.
"To me it is incomprehensible after a century of cinema, and I refuse to work this way," insists Fawzi.
When Afarit Al-Asfalt won the Special Jury Award at Locarno Film Festival and was to be released in Europe, Fawzi spent six months re-mixing the entire sound track because otherwise movie-theatres would have rejected it. In Gannat Al-Shayatin however, he insisted on avoiding this drawback from the start. The production sought to get the best sound engineer in Egypt, who, said Fawzi "charged six times what any other sound engineer would require on account of the equipment that he was to hire. But because he got involved in another film at the same time, Khorshed used to come to the location tired."
Later Fawzi discovered that he used "the equipment he charged us for in the other film, while using lower quality equipment in Gannat Al-Shayatin."
At the sound mixing stage Fawzi discovered that 70 per cent of the recording was faulty. This was partially due to the fact that exterior sound recording is always problematic, and Galal Studio is not equipped with a sound stage -- noise from weddings, funerals and other celebrations was inevitably a permanent feature of the sound track recorded at the studio, which is located in a popular neighbourhood. This is "a scandalous travail 70 years after the introduction of sound in cinema, but since all our studios are used mainly for TV productions or low quality films no one ever bothered with this crucial problem in sound recording," he says.
Finally, he had to dub almost the entire sound track again before mixing it in Prague. Fawzi's insistence on having a Dolby sound track even though he had no European co-producer is another precedent that his film has set.
Accused of extensive reshooting, Fawzi insists "we only reshot one shot and one scene, because the latter's place was shifted into the finale, so many details in the truck and the actors' make-up in the already shot footage had to change for continuity. We spent only three days in the reshoot which, for a feature film shot in six weeks is perfectly legitimate."
"It is," he thinks, "a pity that they criticise me for that, and more of a pity that hundreds of films in this industry took only three days to shoot even though Fatma Rushdi burned the negatives of one of her films in the 1940's because she did not accept its quality."
Zekri wonders at these unfounded criticisms. "Cinema is team work, which is something that we have yet to learn in this society where the lack of film culture and education reflect on the industry. Making a film when only two or three people agree on questions concerning quality and the rest -- a result of rote work in a misinformed film industry -- is hardwork. Standards are perpetually down-graded. Consequently, technical quality, which is primitive compared to Western cinema, had to be carefully and persistently monitored and checked at all stages of the production. If this cost more money it was balanced because we had no superstar to devour 70 per cent of the budget. Hemeida, who is an established star, financed the film by spreading the budget over all the essential production elements."
A third precedent -- Gannat Al-Shayatin is the first film in decades in which the production money was spent entirely on the filmmaking process and not on superstar fees.
AUDIENCE RECEPTION: The kind of cinema Fawzi produces is all too often accused of being high-brow, elitist, too intellectual and uncommunicative with a mass audience of a Third World country.
Fawzi's response is that "for four years we exerted every effort to complete this film, which some people have appreciated. At the end of the day it is a matter of taste and palate training. Because of a long history of low quality films, the mass audience has much to catch up on. We try to communicate as best we can, and definitely a certain audience will accept it."
The eternal problem, in Fawzi's view, is the lack of a systematically organised film industry, with laws to protect and organise it which at the same time preserve its integrity and particularity. He believes that every good film has its audience, but that thousands of filmgoers have lost their faith in Egyptian cinema because of the wave of embarrassingly low quality films that were made over the past 30 years and unfortunately represent about 50 per cent -- 1500 films -- of total Egyptian film production.
Today, the prejudice that educated audiences have towards their own cinema is what brings them to movie theatres or what makes them turn on a movie channel: they ridicule the silliness of films whose filmmakers contemptuously underestimated their audience.
In intellectual circles a state of confusion prevails, especially with regards to cinema. "They are prejudiced against Egyptian films, and are pre-determined to condemn films even before seeing them, disagreeing with moral, aesthetic or intellectual agendas as a kind of knee-jerk reaction."
Everyone sees films according to their previous viewing experience, their culture in general is essential for recognising, appreciating, comparing and judging films, pints out Zekri.
"A film can either match a previously stored viewing experience or not, resulting in differing reactions. But even though our mass audience's viewing experience is limited we make films for others, not for ourselves," he contends.
Audience reception, he insists, should be taken into account only after the work is finished, only when every effort has been made to concretise an integrated aesthetic whole. If these attempts have been successful, then Zekri argues, "it will definitely attract a certain audience. Sometimes acceptance comes from the typical mass audience, other times not. Furthermore, many factors -- distribution, screening conditions, publicity and counter-propaganda -- play a role."
Though it was finished almost a year ago, Gannat Al-Shayatin was finally released in only nine movie-theatres this week, as opposed to the three other Egyptian films released for the Eid, which occupy some 120 venues.
Curiously, a young director and a cinematographer, who went to the first public screening of Gannat Al-Shayatin last Saturday at midnight, met with opposition from the ticket personnel, who stubbornly insisted that they were better off watching any of the other three films.
