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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 July 2000 Issue No. 490 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 July 2000 Issue No. 490
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Focus International Economy Opinion Interview Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Greetings, Monsieur Cineclub
By Mustafa Darwish
That Gannet Al-Shayatin, "Fallen Angels' Paradise" should have gleaned the lion's share of awards in the sixth round of the national festival for Egyptian cinema comes as a surprise to many. The question at stake: does the film really qualify for seven awards? The best film, best filmmaker, best leading, best photography, best soundtrack and best editing awards alone can all but exhaust any festival's award-giving power; and with the exception of best lead actress (given to Sawsan Badr for Al-Abwab Al-Moghlaqa, "Closed Doors") and the best script (given to Ashraf Mohamed for Oula Thanawi, "High School"), the aforementioned six comprise by far the most significant batch of awards in the present festival. Does the film deserve it?
Establishing a cineclub in Cairo was a dream that tantalised the hearts and minds of film lovers through the 1940s. At that time, while the revolution was still an unknown country, the art of filmmaking had neither clubs nor seminars in which its intricacies could be elaborated, commented on or criticised in any serious way. The one exception to this rule was an Armenian Dominican monk who held a film seminar every Friday at noon. The Metro Cinema, in which the seminar was held, was the only movie theatre that had air-conditioning at that time.
Father Zehrab was so deeply in love with cinematic images and their makers that he was compared to a bee skirting the atmosphere in constant search of flowers. And to his flowers, films, he paid incredible attention. He followed their news in newsletters, newspapers and magazines; he pursued the life and work of their makers, reading every word of praise or censure that had been written about them; and he never missed one of the few brief and unceremonious screenings of films that passed Cairo, if only by accident. Each week he showed us a film that was worth watching, preceded by a talk that was neither speech nor lecture but invariably illuminated what we were about to see. And he ended each session with a review of the latest films being shown in movie theatres, in an attempt to prevent us from falling into the trap of watching bad films that would not have benefited us in any way. Because he spoke a language other than our own -- French, to be precise -- we would sometimes wonder, after the seminar ended, why it was that we did not have a seminar like his, in which somebody as expert as he would deliver a talk in our own language.
Years later, after the expulsion of the king and (shortly afterwards) the declaration of the republic, our dream seemed to come true when the Ministry of Culture allowed me to hold a seminar called "The Chosen Film," supervised by Yehia Haqqi, an author well-known for his Lantern (Qandil Umm Hashim remains Haqqi's most famous work). And where, I wondered, would such a seminar be held -- in the Abdeen Palace gardens, of all places. The film that was chosen to open the programme was the Soviet filmmaker Serge Youtkevitch's Othello, chosen because it had won the best filmmaker award at Cannes (1956). But on the opening night, a number of errors, some of which were grave, unexpectedly turned the dream into a nightmare. When the lights went out, it wasn't Othello's face that appeared but a tremendous black haze through which we could make out only a few indistinct figures while burnished subtitles, in Arabic and French, hovered beneath their feet. Owing to such a stumbling beginning, I predicted -- rightly -- that the seminar would not last; and before too long the Abdeen gates were again shut in the face of ordinary people, and the seminar stopped.
Of that fateful night, a bitter experience whichever way you look at it, the Lantern bearer wrote: "I abandoned my seat in an excess of embarrassment, and began to cruise around Midan Abdeen, alone, hour after hour; my feet were not tired, my soul was." The funny thing is that the only critique he wrote of the seminar mentioned nothing of the disorganisation or the fact that the film was faultily screened. Haqqi, who was then a young man almost delirious with [nationalist] enthusiasm, simply said: "How could you show a film that presents the morals of the Arabs in this horrible way? Do you not know that Othello is an Arab?" His censure did not in the least anger me. In fact I got up to kiss him; at least he conceded that the film really was shown, and that he had managed to see and form an opinion of it.
Top left and above: posters for American History X and Vertigo, classics that have delighted members of cineclubs, an effective vehicle for critical viewing and discussion. Left: the front cover of the leaflet distributed to the audience of the 1968 Cineclub's opening show
Years after the disappearance of "The Chosen Film" seminar, the Ministry of Culture, with a fervent heart and a mind set on its goal, once again envisioned a cinematic renaissance with cineclubs to be founded not only in Cairo but in as many of the governorate capitals as possible. Early in 1968, as a result, the Ewart Memorial Hall cineclub opened its programme with Ingmar Bergman's Persona. In the pre-screening talk, the board of the cineclub explained that the dominance of commercial and industrial considerations over cinema's fates had turned what could have become an invincible information-spreading vehicle into a mirror that distorts reality, falsifying society's real tendencies and desires. The flowering, all over the world, of solidarity unions that took the form of cineclubs was felt to be the film lover's defence against such peril; by offering their members an opportunity for critical viewing, cineclubs could consolidate the power of cinema as an artistic and cultural vehicle. Fully cognizant of such power, the Ministry was determined to spread awareness of film as a cultural vehicle, and planned to establish cineclubs throughout the United Arab Republic (as Egypt was then known).Unlike Othello, in Persona the faces of the film's two protagonists (Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann) were clear and beaming on the screen. There was a problem with sound, which as it later transpired could have been easily fixed. Compared to the fatal errors that were to occur, it is trivial.
After the fourth film, Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying, the censors began to intervene, banning such films as Claude Autan-Lara's Devil in the Flesh (it is, they claimed, a pacifist film, with possible demoralising effects on the war with Israel) and Night and Fog by the director of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais (it antagonises General Franco's government, which is currently our political ally). Films like Loves of a Blonde, the masterpiece of Czech filmmaker Milos Foreman (whose Oscar-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus earned him international renown) were also banned. Why? Loves of a Blonde is an artistically inferior film, the censors claimed. But whatever their real reasons, the board was dissolved within four months of the opening night. Expelled from the Ministry of Culture, homeless and destitute, beset by a tendency to adopt abortive ideas and consequently stumble in the dark -- which tendency would be its eventual undoing -- the club's demise dragged on for nearly 25 years. In the light of the fact that it took the ancient Egyptian civilisation 500 years to fully, finally collapse, the club's painfully slow downfall is not surprising.
As the 21st century reared its head, the Ministry of Culture again thought of bringing the tradition of the cineclub back to life, its enthusiasm channelled through the film committee of the Supreme Council for Culture, the multaqa (club) envisaged being an offshoot of the committee. The films, procured as video cassettes, would be screened in one of the halls of the Council on Mondays 17 January-26 June. Each of the 24 screenings was subject to discussion and debate; none were chosen haphazardly or without the unanimous approval of the committee members. The first three months' films -- from the animation feature, The Prince of Egypt (depicting Moses' struggle with Pharaoh) to The People vs. Larry Flint (about the tragedy of one of the greatest porn publishers in the land of Uncle Sam) -- were biographical films dealing with the life and work of important personalities. The only exceptions were The Clockwork Orange and Vertigo, screened as a celebrations of, respectively, the first anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's untimely death (1999) and Alfred Hitchcock's 100th birth anniversary (1899). And, faithful to the model provided by Father Zehrab, each screening was accompanied by a talk, a session for discussion and criticism, as well as a brochure with comprehensive information on the chosen films and on its maker's works.
All went well until the screening of Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover, the film version of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel of the same title about her early life in Indochina and her loss of virginity. As the appointed hour drew closer, the programme supervisor [the present author] was asked to replace The Lover with some other film, and from then on the programme was occasionally modified, particularly after the issue over Haydar Haydar's A Banquet for Seaweed, at the very best a mere storm in a tea cup. The programme closed with Ziyad Doueiri's West Beirut (which depicts the Lebanese civil war through the experiences of two teenage boys who witness events that are more absurd than anything else) and Tony Kaye's American History X (which tells the story of two brothers in California who adopt the tenets of neo-Nazism, only to confront the tragic, horrifying consequences of their deeds).
All in all, and except for the occasional replacement (disappointing as it inevitably must be), the multaqa's films remained free of censorship for nearly three months, and continued despite the storm of the Banquet, ending with two rare masterpieces. All through the first half of 2000, fruitful dialogues on excellent films were taking place, and this is reason enough for one to adopt a positive and hopeful outlook; a desperate hope is better, after all, than helpless and useless despair.
