Obituary:
Homegrown Hitchcock
Kamal El-Sheikh (1919-2004)
By
Youssef Rakha
Filmmaker Kamal El-Sheikh (b.1919) died last Friday of a debilitating illness that set in three years ago, concluding a career that started in 1952 with the acclaimed Al-Manzil Raqam 13 (House No.13) and ended 35 years later with Qahir Al-Zaman (Time Conqueror, 1987).
El-Sheikh's involvement with the film industry began in 1942 when he worked as an editor at Studio Misr, having insisted on a career in cinema (a profession regarded as somewhat disreputable at that time) despite family pressures to enroll at a respectable college like law school. As a child and young man El-Sheikh had been obsessed with film, regularly saving up his allowance to attend the Friday matinée and report on it to fellow schoolboys the next day, sometimes illustrating his accounts with the names of the characters and rudimentary illustrations of their appearance on the blackboard. A failed teenage attempt at joining filmmaker Mohamed Karim as an actor (he was deemed too young) left him determined to be a director. It took serious efforts of persuation, a three-month wait and the intervention of minister Haidar Pasha and poet Khalil Mutran to arrange for El-Sheikh a meeting with Ahmed Salem, the director of Studio Misr. And the young man was justifiably frustrated on finding out that he would be sent straight to the film editing department -- before he had the chance to express his ambition to become a director.
El-Sheikh spent a year at the studio doing nothing in particular, a time he invested in reading about cinema (he had discovered the benefits of several bookshops, notably Maktabat Al-Nahda), before he began to cut and paste strips of film -- numbered according to somebody else's scheme. Eventually he took on the task of coming up with the scheme in question, beginning with Kamal Selim's Al-Azima (Determination). Having read a sizable number of books on the topic, El- Sheikh had experienced a bout of self confidence, deciding he was qualified to direct. Yet when he started editing professionally El- Sheikh discovered, once again, that he still had much to learn. The pattern would recur periodically over the next few years, when his knowledge of the medium had developed so much his "final touch" (mainly editing suggestions concerning sequencing and pace) became highly sought after by filmmakers. Critic Mustafa Darwish, for one commentator, sees the initial delay in his career as integral to El-Sheikh's extraordinary mastery of the language of film.
Ten years into his as yet uninterrupted editing career, El-Sheikh was finally commissioned to direct a full-length feature film. The script the producer in question offered him turned out to be a mawkish melodrama, however; yet it was a matter of days before a chance encounter with a news item in Al-Masri newspaper gave him the idea of Al- Manzil Raqam 13. By the time he started directing, El-Sheikh was so well-versed in film he was already a mature filmmaker. In the next 35 years he produced some 43 films, two of which, Miramar (1969) and Al-Lis wal-Kilab (The Thief and the Dogs, 1962), are among the most successful adaptations of Naguib Mahfouz's novels ever made. In hits like Al-Rajul Alladhi Faqad Dhilluh (1978), Ala Man Nutliq Al-Rusas (1975) and Al-Su'oud Ila Al-Hawiya (1978), El-Sheikh's outstanding ability to weave credible social drama into the thriller framework is evident. It is this, and the exquisite craftsmanship his work invariably displays, that earned El-Sheikh the accolade of the Arabs' Hitchcock -- a designation the filmmaker tended to reject.
El-Sheikh's legacy is one of perfectionism and calmness of spirit -- so much so that many have commented that his death, a low-key, almost perfectly quiet event, was but an echo and extension of his life. Although a silent worker, El-Sheikh was no mere technician. His films displayed a profound understanding of the issues they dealt with, a remarkable range of interests, from political commentary to science fiction and a capacity for socio-political critique that frequently made his work an object of censorship. Till the end of his life El-Sheikh remained proud of the fact that he criticised regimes while working under them, rather than when they were no longer in power. His approach also incorporated an interest in psychology -- and many of his characters are elaborately constructed models of psychological predicaments. Another aspect of El-Sheikh's legacy concerns his unfailing attention to detail and the tendency to abide by his stringent standards. In the end he produced relatively few films despite his reputation for energy and productivity. Long after he stopped making films, El-Sheikh -- the widely recognised, repeatedly awarded maker of some of Egyptian cinema's best-known classics -- remained an elegant and authoratative presence in film circles. His exemplary life story aside, it is his work that will endure as a landmark in the history of the medium.
