25 - 31 October 2001
Issue No.557
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 - 31 October 2001 Issue No.557 |
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Shubra, The Greek
Last week Mohamed El-Assyouti set out to see an Algerian film. And then he went to Greece
Sunday: Oops! I hate it when it happens. Missing opening credits is an unforgivable sin. Just because every other venue in the festival started screenings 45 minutes late doesn't mean that the Opera small hall will follow suit.
The 25th Cairo International Film Festival awarded the Golden Pyramid to the Belgium film Paulin et Paulette by Lieven Debrauwer. The Silver Pyramid went to Romanian film Everyday God Kisses Us on the Mouth by Sinisa Dragin, who also won the Best Director Award. Best Actress went to the Iranian Niki Karimi for her role in The Hidden Half by Tahminah Milani, who won a special jury award. Best Actor went to the Dutch Paul Freeman for his role in Morlang by Tjebbo Penning, who received the Best Director of a Debut Film prize. Best Script went to Oscar winner Cameron Crowe (Jerry McGuire) for Almost Famous, which he also directed. The Best Arabic Film Prize, valued at LE100,000, and presented by the Cultural Development Fund, was given to Inas El-Deghidi's Muzakirat Murahiqa (Adolescent Girl's Memoirs).
The awards were distributed by Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, the festival's president Hussein Fahmi and director Abbas Kairostami, head of this year's jury, at Saturday's closing ceremony
And where am I, in any case? If this little Greek community is in Algeria, why isn't anyone speaking a word of Arabic or French? Why do they all dance as if they were extras in Zorba the Greek? Quarter of an hour passed, and still entertained the hope that I was watching the Algerian film I had intended to watch.
But instead of, say rai, came the sombreness of rembetiko songs, Greek melodies the origins of which -- they were sung by and for the most impoverished, underprivileged and marginalised of the urban population -- are similar to the blues. The palette -- hardly a frame lacked red or blue -- the low-key lighting, the wide-angle lenses... everything so intensely sad.
The general mood of this film -- it turned out, incidentally, to be Rembetiko (1983) -- recalled Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre (1989), but without the Felliniesque and painterly influences or the gore, and Emir Kusturica's Underground (1995), though without any humour, unless we're talking black bile. Unexpectedly, though, I found myself remembering Hassan El- Imam -- the most audience-considerate of Egyptian directors and the one who brought Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo trilogy to the screen. Imam's penultimate film, 'Asr Al-Hobb (Age of Love) also based on a Naguib Mahfouz work, is very much like Rembetiko. Though a much smaller scale production, it was made around the same time.
Later, during an audience conference, director Costas Ferris reminisced in good Arabic about his childhood in Shubra, and the popularity of shaabi songs there among the marginalised, as "in poor quarters of cities all over the world." He recalled his liking for Egyptian musicals with Farid El-Atrash, for the melodrama of Salah Abu Seif and Hassan El-Imam, and his belated discovery that of all the influences on Rembetiko it is El-Imam that he thinks most prominent.
Rembetiko revolves around a group of musicians during the first half of the last century, who sing in either a joint where the customers smoke hash or at the slightly more up-market Babbis's night club.
Ferris sees a connection between rembetiko and Arabic music in the early 20th century. "Like Sayed Darwish it used the three polyphonic Western notes and the Eastern monophonic note. It resembles, too, Abdel-Wahab's Levantine- Arabic music, with much less Occidental influence than Farid El-Atrash and Asmahan," he asserts.
In 1936 rembetiko was effectively banned in Greece. In 1957 Ferris was among 15 rembetiko- lovers whose research helped to fuel a revival. "The West-loving government of Greece wanted people to forget Byzantine and Oriental cultural heritage."
Ferris has an upcoming project set in early twentieth century Cairo, a Greek-Czech-German- French co-production.
Monday: George Katakouzlinos's Absence (1987) is another sad period film, this time about a bourgeois family. Three daughters, abandoned in their desolate house when their mother felt she was being suffocated, are finally free to make their own choices following the death of their repressive father. The eldest daughter, who has a terminally ill son, perpetuates the father's role while the middle one leaves after falling in love with an elderly, impotent general who takes her to a brothel where he watches her making love to a male-prostitute.
The sombre mood of Absence, its slow pace, its use of fades to green and yellow, and especially the finale in which the eldest sister dies from a mysterious haemorrhage recalls Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1973), in which the alienated wife's anguish leads her to genital self- mutilation.
Tuesday: Unfortunately I missed Christoforos Christofis' Wandering (1979, which is all, apparently, about a murdered poet from Alexandria.
If all Greek films are so tragic then I'll no longer doubt that they're are the ones who destroyed Aristotle's dissertations on comedy. The next two films made me dismiss this unfair thought.
Wednesday: The Love of Ulysses (1984) by Vassilis Vafeas is a sort of an absurdist comedy. Middle-aged Ulysses is fired. His wife and two children are out of town on vacation so he takes the opportunity to follow a girl, the embodiment of his lost youth. Strangers welcome him everywhere: a lesbian couple to their flat, strangers onto a private boat, young people onto a beach. In an empty street circus players seem to perform exclusively for him. In a night club, the belly dancer dances for him. He is, though, finally made unwelcome, and by the girl he has been following. And then he wakes up.
The oneiric mood here is much less poignant than in Fellini and Bunuel. And the waking up is a reversal, the banality of which the reappearance of the dream objects of desire in Ulysses's real world cannot dispel.
Thursday: Loafing and Camouflage (1987) by Nicolas Perakis is an outrageous account of the transformation of Greece from monarchy to dictatorship in 1967. The film set mostly in a military TV station. Newsreels and propaganda films are what the cinematographer working there films, but also football games, a music video for the general's niece, and summer fashion shows.
A husband and father of two, he is short of money, so with his crew members bringing their girlfriends, they all use the army facilities to make porno films. During a private screening for the generals military material is interrupted with shots of a woman in lingerie holding a cucumber. Besides references to some pro-Nasserist group in Greece, there is some very-Egyptian-sounding music.
Intending to concentrate on North African films I ended up watching a retrospective of Egyptian- born Greek filmmakers cinema. Every cloud has a silver lining.
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