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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Books Interview Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Youssef Francis:
The alter ego
Will the real Youssef please stand up?Profile by Nadia Abou El-Magd
He fell in love with colors, so he paints. He fell in love with letters, so he writes books. He loves life, so he writes screenplays and directs movies. Where to begin the interview" From the end, he replied without hesitation. The end turned out to be his latest movie, Habibati Man Takun, or Who Is My Beloved?" It is a very emotional, romantic movie, about two men who fall in love with the same woman. It probes the question of what we can or should sacrifice in love. Can a man sacrifice so much that he is willing to give up the woman he loves, if she finds her happiness with some one else? That is the question." It is not a new one, but Francis believes he has a new answer. "The woman, who is suffering from a rare disease, won't remember either of them. Yet the 'emotional conflict' will not end painfully for any of them. We have to learn to love and lose with grace, we have to go back to chivalry, to the sentiments associated with knighthood."
Main picture: the artist reclining in his studio; above, Francis with Presidential Adviser Osama El-Baz (l) and renowned writer Mohamed Hassanein Heikal
The film, written and directed by Francis, took the gold at the Sixth Cairo Radio and Television Festival in August. It also won the LE10,000 prize awarded to the best director of a movie addressing human values at the Sixteenth Alexandria Cinema Festival in September. Before leaving to Alexandria, Francis told me: "I chose to begin from the end, because that takes you back to the past, the real beginning."
The beginning, therefore, is a good place to go from here, and this is what he does, weaving the tale in his soft, sleepy voice as he sits beside his favorite lamp in his chaotic studio in Zamalek. "I was born drawing. Drawing is what I liked most as a child. I used to spread paper out on the floor and start drawing. I didn't cry or anything." He was three or four when this obsession took hold. "The paper, crayons, trees, cats, dogs and horses: these were my friends, my society."
This was the environment in which Francis was raised in his aunt's household. In a twist worthy of his most melodramatic plot twists, at the age of 14, he discovered that, contrary to what he had always believed, his aunt was not his mother. He rescued a "sweet girl" being harassed by some boys on the train, then walked her home, only to have the stunning truth revealed to him: she was none other than his half-sister. Young Francis then discovered that his real mother had died while giving birth to him. "Still, I kept loving my aunt as if she were my mother. I was never able to stop. Nor have I ever been able even to glance at my mother's pictures -- not even today," he admits in voice charged with emotion. He is 66, and the pain has diminished not a jot. "All I know about my mother is that she used to play piano, so I fell in love with the piano and the first love of my life was a piano instructor."
Is that why the women in his paintings are always so sad? "I don't know, but as far as I am concerned only sad women are real. Laughing women do not attract me." If women did not exist, then, would there be any need for art? "No, because Eve was created out of Adam's need for her," he replies promptly. "Eve, for Adam, is life itself."
"He writes like a ballet dancer, paints like a poet and speaks like a philosopher," says eminent Akhbar Al-Youm writer Ahmed Ragab in the forward to Francis's book Paris, Through the Back Door. "His papers identify him as Youssef Francis; his friends call him Joe; I call him the Lord of Bulaq, because he is quintessentially noble in his manners, his dealings with people, and his love life too." Francis is a Gemini, but a simple split personality is not enough for him. "I have four personalities, each of which is faithful to something:" this is one of his first startling confessions at the beginning of our conversation. "You can't divide love," he continues, "and I'm always trying to fulfill my dreams. Sometimes I do so on a blank sheet of paper, at other times by writing a book, or making a film." One of the many individuals jostling for space inside this unassuming man is an artist; another a director, the third a writer and the last "Joe, the man." It is not easy to know which is the real Youssef Francis; certainly, he neither knows nor cares to choose. What he does know is that "directing a movie is like conducting an orchestra, while in painting it is you, and the subject, and the statement."
The one thing he wanted very badly to do was poetry. He failed." Poetry is the father of all the arts. Great pain produces poems, but my pain did not." Francis has a dozen books with titles like Love Sometimes, Love Always; Voyages of Love and Insanity; and Answers We Fear." I like people to read my paintings," he says suddenly. "I draw with my heart, not with my eye or my hand, and I like people to feel that." Drawing for him is a moment of choice: you choose what you are going to draw, but life is full of heroes, and the artist's task is to choose the hero who gives off a special energy, he believes. The titles of his works could well be wrenched from an artist's greatest moments of perplexity: Blood Wedding, After the Storm, Invitation, The Coffin, Life's Fading, Out of Paradise, Will He Return?
Francis started writing screenplays as early as 1965, but only tried his hand at directing in 1974. Every new endeavour is a "voyage of friendship" to him. His films engage social issues more explicitly than do his paintings. In the early 1980s, The Addict tackled the problem of drug addiction. Then there was Wild Flowers, which addressed the problem faced by young emigrants; and in My Friend, How Much Are You Worth? he followed the frustrations associated with the return to the homeland. One of his best-known films, however, is A Bird from the East, about the renowned late man of letters, Tawfiq Al-Hakim. It recounts Hakim's years as a student in Paris in the 1920s, and his return to Egypt. Departures and returns are a recurrent theme, then -- perhaps because, according to Francis, "the bird from the East must return to the East." He was intent upon finishing the film during Hakim's lifetime, which he did.
His favorite colours are the white, "the bread of colours," black, "like night, which reveals the beauty of the other colours," and gold, "which is, like silver, a rich colour." In his studio, a Venetian sunset hangs on the wall. "I adore Venice, I wouldn't mind drowning there," he says off-handedly. "It is a city that really appreciates the violin; it deserves that one die in and for it."
In another corner is a large painting of a young woman wearing white, standing beside a horse. "This is my daughter, my greatest achievement," he says proudly. Somehow this strikes a dissonant note, coming as it does from someone who can hardly be identified as a family man. His wife is Saudi Arabian, a journalist; "we cherish each other's space and privacy," he says abruptly. All he will add is: "People change every five years, and the marriage contract should be renewable every five years." Abandoning this topic, then, we move on to horses, a recurrent theme in his paintings. "I've always wanted to ride, because I was raised among horses and I love them passionately. Horses are very noble creatures, and in my paintings they are symbols of valour, speed and freedom."
"I dreamt of peace for all children: white for hope and green for the future... But they tore out the heart that dreamt of tomorrow, and tainted the white with blood. Now only black remains in my heart"Youssef Francis's most recent work, created especially for the Weekly, was inspired by the massacres in Jerusalem
In the middle of the cluttered room is another enormous portrait: a woman typical of Francis's sad, idealised angels, with perfect bodies barely clad in revealing little nothings. "The most difficult thing in a portrait is the spark in the eyes. You can't learn it, you have to feel it. It is the last element in the portrait, and it has to be there even if the eyes are closed." Beautiful eyes, according to him, don't necessarily remain so after fifteen minutes of trying to paint them. "The most beautiful eyes are the most truthful," he says eventually.
There is another painting, too, in muted tones of gray and white, which he calls The Intellectual. " I feel I haven't finished it yet," he exclaims with poorly disguised impatience, "yet my friends all tell me it is complete."
So will this portraitist extraordinaire allow others to capture him on canvas? The best rendition of him is by his mentor, the renowned artist Bikar, who painted him 20 years after they had first met, while Francis was telling him about a problem.
Francis graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts and began work as an artist at Rose El-Youssef a year after graduating in 1958. His avant-garde sensibilities inspired him to set up installations long before the concept was in vogue; he once used 500 candles to illuminate one of his exhibitions, as well as old watches and broken glass "to express life, love and time." At another event, prominent writer Mohamed Hassanein Heikal found his attention drawn to a charred tree trunk adorned only with two buttons in it. The trunk was all that remained of a tree from the garden of Francis's aunt, which burned while he was abroad. The two blue buttons were from a coat of hers; she used to measure him against them.
Heikal, editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram at the time, brought Francis and his tree to the newspaper in 1964. The scorched tree is the first thing that meets you in his office on the fifth floor of the old building.
As if all his other alter egos were not enough, he goes to the movies -- some more than once -- with a pencil and notebook, and jots down his favourite phrases. Among the words of wisdom he has compiled, one strikes me: "Destiny is a beautiful woman who comes to you unexpectedly." Where did he read this sentence? "I didn't read it anywhere, I just invented it," he says with a big smile. He also particularly likes "Who said that women are selfish? They just love themselves." Another of his favourite sentences -- perhaps the most revealing -- is a line pronounced by Jean-Paul Belmondo: "The best surprise is to wake up and find myself still there."
photos: Randa Shaath
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