The National Imaginarium

A History of Egyptian Filmmaking

Magdy Mounir El-Shammaa

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9789774169724
• eBook ISBN: 9781649030399
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

A cultural, social, and economic history of Egyptian cinema of the twentieth century

Spanning a century of Egyptian filmmaking, this work weaves together culture, history, politics, and economics to form a narrative of how Egyptian national identity came to be constructed and reconstructed over time on film. It goes beyond the films themselves to explore the processes of filmmaking—the artists that made it possible, the institutional networks, structures, and rules that bound them together, the changing social and political environment in which the films were produced, and the role of the state. In peeling back the curtain to reveal the complexities behind the screen, Magdy El-Shammaa shows cinema as at once both a reflection and a producer of larger cultural imaginings of the nation.

The National Imaginarium provides an in-depth description of the films discussed. It explores the construction of a populist consciousness that permeated and transcended class structures at mid-century in Egypt, and how this subsequently came undone in the face of the bewildering social, economic, and political transformations that the country underwent in the decades that followed. More than similar treatments of the topic, this book draws on theoretical ideas from outside the immediate discipline of Film Studies, including investigations into the materiality and colonial foundations of cosmopolitanism, the stakes and aesthetics of realism, policy shifts around women’s rights, transnational economic contexts, and the broader history of the country and region, including insightful snapshots of everyday life.

1

Early Egyptian Filmmaking: Reel vs. Real

Colonial Cosmopolitanism and Egyptian Film Histories

The Egyptian Company for Acting and Cinema was founded in 1925. It was the parent company of the famed Studio Misr, which was launched ten years later, in 1935. Most local historians take this as a major milestone for the development of Egyptian filmmaking. This studio was a subsidiary of the Bank Misr conglomerate of companies founded by Tal‘at Harb, one of the few pre-1952 nationalist icons still positively acclaimed by Egyptian nationalist historiography. A statue honoring him stands prominently in a downtown Cairo square named after him.¹

On the occasion of the second anniversary of the company’s founding, Tal‘at Harb addressed a crowd of dignitaries at a special two-evening celebration in Cairo’s famed (and since faded) Ezbekiya Gardens. In his speech he constructed his vision of Egypt as a nation and the object of his cinematic mission. He started off with the physical geography: the cities, villages, and the ancient ruins. He moved on to history and the Arab past, then the productive structures of the modern nation: the farms, the industries, and the role of trade. Next he discussed the infrastructure of the modern state: the public ministries of health, education, and transport. He ended with popular culture, the festivals and customs of the people. He included the latter in the mission of this newest company: to record and make history, to educate and elevate the masses.² The ultimate reason he gave for the creation of the Egyptian Company for Acting and Cinema was to Egyptianize this industry.

Egyptianization of industry is the hallmark of the entire Bank Misr enterprise. This goal of economic nationalism during the era of British colonialism won him the aforementioned accolades, stature, and statue. This high-minded nationalist ideal has long been deconstructed, and in reality Bank Misr and Tal‘at Harb did business with international and local foreign capitalists alike.³ Furthermore, in actuality, the founding of this company had little immediate impact on the local industry. It took ten years for Studio Misr to become operational, producing it first long feature a year later in 1936. Studio Misr, which garners much acclaim locally, was late to use sound; and for the most part, it produced advertisements not for the “modern Egyptian nation,” but for the Bank Misr group of companies.⁴ Yet the founding of Studio Misr is often presented by local historians as a major turning point for Egyptian filmmaking.⁵ This chapter examines this construction of Studio Misr versus the “foreign” filmmakers who animated the early period of Egyptian filmmaking. It also takes a look at the films produced and the construction of identity they projected: an ultimately failed project by “indigenous others” to construct a national identity that included themselves.

Ziad Fahmy has provided an incisive study of how local Egyptian nationalism became popular among the masses in the early twentieth century. His study provides the link between earlier intellectual histories and the emphasis on print media by looking at the local music industry and how changing technologies allowed for the emergence of songs that capitalized on, and in turn further popularized, nationalist constructions among a largely illiterate Egyptian public.⁶ In theory, Egyptian films were to do the same thing, presenting a video alternative to print nationalism, and marrying it later with audio to produce the complete audiovisual experience to popularize a distinct Egyptian national identity. The reason there is so much contestation about this early period, however, is precisely because the people who dominated film production were in the precarious position of being an “internal other” under threat of being excluded from the emerging nationalist consensus. What is produced during this early period, therefore, is a particular form of identity that sought to include those who envisioned and produced these works. This project, and these projections, were ultimately a historical failure, and these works and those who produced them have largely been discarded, forgotten, and dismissed, once more confirming Ernst Renan’s famous dictum that, “Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.”⁷

For a seventeen-year period, Togo Mizrahi (1905–86) was Egypt’s most prolific producer/director, rivaling the great Studio Misr in its heyday. Yet whereas Studio Misr and its founder, Tal‘at Harb, have secured a lofty place in Egyptian film historiography, Mizrahi had been until recently largely forgotten or dismissed. Mizrahi began his film career with the birth of Egyptian cinema, during the brief silent era. His first film, Cocaine (1930), was filmed in Alexandria, where he continued to work until 1938. According to Egyptian film history orthodoxy, it was the fourteenth Egyptian film made.⁸ After the introduction of sound it was re-released with a soundtrack in 1934. During these early years he made fourteen movies, easily edging out his closest competitor, Ibrahim Lama,⁹ who made ten. His breakneck-speed production totaled the output of a troika of fellow Italian-Egyptians: Estafan Rosti, who later garnered greater acclaim as a character actor, made four movies, as did Alvizi Orfanelli, and both of them were slightly edged out by Mario Volpi, who directed six.¹⁰

Throughout the early period of Egyptian filmmaking—from the 1920s to the 1950s—actors, producers, and directors from diverse backgrounds gave life to the new industry. This was the age of the Lama brothers, Badr and Ibrahim (Palestinian), Assia Dagher and Mary Queeny (Lebanese), Farid al-Atrash and Asmahan (Druze), Naguib al-Rihani (Coptic and Assyrian), Rushdi Abaza (Egyptian-Turkish and Italian), and many others, both great and small. Togo Mizrahi was not in fact the most prominent Jewish-Egyptian in the entertainment industry. The singer-actress he himself groomed and presented in five of his films, Layla Murad, easily eclipses him, as she eclipses all of her period’s stars. They were hardly the only two Jewish-Egyptians who made their mark in entertainment. Layla’s father, Zaki Murad, was a prominent musician in his own right. It was his role as a musical collaborator with the icon of Egyptian music at the time, Muhammad Abd al-Wahab, that resulted in Layla’s first movie role in one of his films. Dawud Hosni, a Karaite Jew (a non-rabbinical Jewish rite and community whose presence in Egypt is evidenced by the earliest Muslim Arab records after the conquest, from the mid-seventh century) was the most prominent Jewish musician who collaborated with Sayed Darwish and others of the first generation of the Egyptian “nationalist music revival”; others who made their mark included Ibrahim Sahlun and Zaki Surur. Layla Murad shared the stage with fellow Jewish-Egyptian actresses Victoria Cohen, Nigma Ibrahim, and Lilian Cohen (whose real-life role as King Faruq’s mistress might have made her more famous than any part she played on stage or silver screen). By the 1960s this earlier generation of musicians and moviemakers was largely forgotten or discounted.¹¹

One of the best examples of the contestation over whom to include in the historical record is to be found in the debate over the first Egyptian film. Nearly 150 films were made in Egypt from 1907 to 1930. They included both long and short films, dramatic and documentary. From 1907 to 1915 seventeen newsreels were produced, and in 1917 Alvizi Orfanelli filmed the first dramatic film for an Italian-Egyptian film company.¹² By the late twenties, the local industry sustained an annual production level of multiple silent features. Yet the standard Egyptian narratives of film history almost always cite either the 1927 release of the film Layla or the earlier 1924 release of In the Land of Tutankhamun as the beginning of filmmaking in Egypt. In fact, these features released in the 1920s do not mark the beginning, but rather the end of a period—the silent era.

For the most part, early Egyptian film historians and critics writing during the presidency of Gamal Abd al-Nasser (1956–70) have followed the history and memoir of a leading critic, writer, and producer of early Egyptian filmmaking, al-Sayyid Hassan Gum‘a, in his 1945 work, ‘Ashartu al-sinima ‘ishrin ‘aman.¹³ His judgment of Layla (produced by an Egyptian, ‘Aziza Amir) as the first “true” Egyptian film had to withstand only minor challenges. For the celebrated film critic Hassan Imam ‘Amr, Layla also merits this title, even though he considered the productions before the introduction of sound in 1932 as the works of amateurs and adventurers. He contends that there was no solid footing for the local industry in terms of financing or infrastructure, and thus the silent era relied on speculative financing and individual effort.¹⁴

For ‘Amr, Egyptian cinema did not reach maturity until 1938, in terms of its artistic quality or subject matter. He states that the real turning point in Egyptian cinema was the 1939 production by Studio Misr of Kamal Salim’s realist film, al-‘Azima (Determination). In fact, ‘Amr, writing in the postrevolutionary environment of 1959, argues that the paradigm of local and patriotic filmmaking was Studio Misr, founded by the nationalist icon Tal‘at Harb. The largest and best equipped of studios, this facility is lauded for its training of a new generation of local filmmakers, providing production facilities to others as well as producing its own big-budget productions.¹⁵

But this period quickly ended with the onset of the Second World War, which as far as Egyptian filmmaking was concerned—according to ‘Amr—was marked by profiteering, speculation, and spiraling inflation of wages and production costs. The importance of capital for funding the production cycle gave undue power to producers and distributors, and was the root problem for Egyptian filmmaking. For him, “the Arab film is not a film produced by foreign capital, it is rather a film whose art, production, and capital is provided by an Arab country.”¹⁶ By the 1940s and 1950s, as he argues, capital was provided mostly by “non-Arab foreigners.” These producers and distributors, he goes on, were interested only in the bottom line. As such, he writes, “they did not care if such profits came at the expense of the Arab peoples, their reputation, or their dignity . . . with the awakening of these people, this capital withdrew from Egyptian cinema, froze its assets or fled.”¹⁷

As for Egyptian capital, ‘Amr judges that little of it financed local filmmaking, and what little there was withdrew in search of easier profits in other sectors. In his opinion, this capital flight was a reason to participate in international film festivals so as to find new markets for Egyptian films, as well as to promote understanding between peoples. Equally important, this capital shortage required the active participation of the state so as to promote cinema’s mission to encourage a progressive social conscience.¹⁸

Eleven years later, another historian, Sa‘d al-Din Tawfiq, expressed a similar judgment of this early period. For him the “true beginning” of Egyptian filmmaking is the 1927 production of Layla, even though he holds that there was as yet no “Egyptian” film style, and that Ibrahim Lama’s Kiss in the Desert was screened six months earlier than Layla (Lama was of Palestinian origin). Before 1927, he argues, productions were short films that were amateurish, foreign-made, and aesthetically poor.¹⁹ For Tawfiq, the turning point was the 1925 creation of the Egyptian Company for Cinema and Acting, which ten years later produced “the greatest fruit in the field of Egyptian cinema: Studio Misr.”²⁰

The primacy of Layla as the first Egyptian feature-length movie is upheld in turn by Ilhami Hassan in his 1971 book, even though he documents filmmaking efforts that began at least ten years earlier.²¹ These productions, even those that used local theatrical talent for on-screen roles, are depicted as shorts made by foreign production companies and as such do not merit the credit for the beginnings of local film production.

Against these assessments, Samir Farid and Ali Shilsh, writing in the late 1970s and 1980s, have sought to reevaluate and reclaim the early history of Egyptian filmmaking from anticolonial nationalist historiography. For both authors, the debate over which was the first Egyptian movie was a spurious one. In the end, Samir Farid defended Kiss in the Desert as the first full-length Egyptian feature, only to be sharply rebuked a year later by Muhammad al-Sayyid Shusha, who argued that ‘Aziza Amir (the producer of Layla) deserves the title of founder of Egyptian cinema for multiple reasons.²² The first reason he cites is that Layla debuted in Cairo before Kiss in the Desert, which was released first in Alexandria. The second reason is that the producers of Kiss in the Desert, the Lama brothers, while Arab, were not Egyptian, and therefore “it is not becoming that the history of national cinema begin with a film produced by artists not one hundred percent Egyptian.” He goes on to write that

While it is true that in the first film (Layla) foreigners played a role, such as the author, director, actors, and cinematographer, but the rest of the artists and technicians were Egyptian, which makes [this film] deserving of the title of being the first film for a history of national cinema. While the Lama brothers did later become Egyptian nationals as a result of their residency, and left their prints on the history of Egyptian cinema . . . this does not allow them to be the founders of the national cinema.²³

These authors seem to be saying that nationalist pedigree—and not historical facts—should be the ultimate judge in securing this “title” of being first. Ali Shilsh argues forcefully against this dubious logic. For him, this spurious debate about the first film produced,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The National Imaginarium
• 1. Early Egyptian Filmmaking: Reel vs. Real
• 2. Realism, Modernism, and Populism in Revolutionary Times
• 3. Reading A Woman’s Youth: Gender, Patriarchy, and Modernism
• 4. The Revolution’s Children: Gender, Generation, and the “New” Patriarchy
• 5. Behind the Silver Screen: Market, Artist, and State in the Production of Culture
• 6. Pathos and Passions: The Twilight of Nasserism
• 7. 1970s Egyptian Cinema: Sadat’s Infitah on Screen
• 8. End-of-century Egyptian Cinema: Mubarak’s Egypt
• Epilogue: All That Is Old Is New Again . . .
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Films
• Index