The Waters of Alexandria

From the November-December 1996 Issue

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Jane Campion’s Shining: Portrait of a Director By Kathleen Murphy

The Waters of Alexandria By Dave Kehr

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Another field ripe for exploration would be the Egyptian cinema, which, from its home base in Cairo, has supplied films for consumption by the Arab world since the Thirties. Once averaging an output of 80 or 90 features a year, serving as the base of a highly developed star system that held sway over the entire Middle East, the Egyptian cinema now sees its existence threatened both by increased American competition and by severe censorship from the region’s Muslim fundamentalist regimes. Seventy-six films were made in Egypt in 1993; only 25 in 1994.

Youssef Chahine has long enjoyed the reputation of Egypt’s leading filmmaker, primarily on the basis of a handful of movies—Central Station (’58), The Earth (’69), Alexandria, Why? (’78), and Farewell, Bonaparte (’85)—that won attention and prizes at European film festivals, seemingly at discretely apportioned ten-year intervals. But as revealed by the impeccably mounted, complete Chahine retrospective held this August at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, there is far more to Chahine’s career than a few prestige pictures equipped with the kind of clearly stated social themes that inevitably win the approval of foreign observers.

With his home-market movies restored, Chahine’s output totals 31 features and six short films, adding up to a body of work as full and satisfying as that of any Hollywood auteur and just as embroiled in the struggle with genre demands, commercial requirements, and imposing star personalities. Like many of his American studio counterparts, Chahine seemed to thrive on his interaction with the system, tackling an impossibly wide range of genre assignments and managing to impose his unmistakable signature on each one.

After his debut with the folk comedy Baba Amine (Papa Amine) in 1950, Chahine had torn his way through rural dramas (Ebn El-Nil/Son of the Nile, ’51; Serraa Fi El-Wadi/Sky of Hell, ’54), screwball comedies (El Mouhareg El Kebir/The  Big Buffoon, ’52; Nissae Bila Regal/Women without Men, ’53), costume pictures (Chiton El Sahara/Demon of the Desert, ’54), musicals (Wadaat Hobak/I Left Your Love, ’57; Enta Habibi/My Love Is You, ’57), film noir (Bab El-Hadid/Central Station; Hob Ela El-Abab/Yours Forever, ’59) and a political thriller (Gamila El Gazaeria/Djamila the Algerian, ’58) before the end of the decade. All of which left him free in the Sixties and Seventies to pursue the widescreen epic (El Nasser Salah Eddine/Saladin, ’63; Al Nass Wai Nil/People of the Nile, ’68), high-bourgeois melodrama (Ragol Fi Hayati/A Man in My Life, ’61; Fagr Yom Guedid/The Dawn of a New Day, ’64), Bergmanesque psychodrama (Al Ikhtiyar/The Choice, ’70), the social protest film (El Ard/The Earth; El Ousfour/The Sparrow, ’73) and initiate an autobiographical trilogy (Iskenderia Leih?/Alexandria, Why?; Haddouta Misriyya/Memory, (’82); Eskandarai Kaman We Kaman/Alexandria Now and Forever, ’89).

What registers first in this vast body of work (it includes twice as many titles as those mentioned above) is Chahine’s sheer love of his profession: this is a man who lives to lay out shots, to cut film, to huddle with actors. No single shot in his work seems to have received less than his complete attention; never is there a sense of compromise or hurry, of simply hacking through, even in the most unpromising of commercial assignments. And rare is the shot that doesn’t contain a distinct idea—an angle that illuminates a relationship, a gesture that opens a character, a camera movement that is complete and beautiful in itself. Even though the project may ultimately be trivial (as is certainly the case with something like the 1960 marriage farce Bein Edeik/In Your Arms), Chahine refuses to invest anything less than his full talent on the level of shot and sequence. Consequently, even the least of his films gives off a sense of physical pleasure and sensual engagement, like eating a wonderful meal or touching a fine piece of fabric.

You are never alone watching a Chahine film, but sharing his company with a third party—the phantom of whatever filmmaker he is invoking at the moment. Like the New Wave directors—but starting ten years before them and in a far more instinctive, casual way—Chahine continually draws on his experiences as a filmgoer, flipping through his mental file of references. There are entire films that seem based on the style of a particular director (according to Emmanuel Burdeau, writing in the special issue of Cahiers du Cinéma that served as the Locarno catalogue, the early, 1952 Saydet Al-Kitar/The Lady of the Train is modeled from beginning to end on Citizen Kane). More often, though, Chahine combines a number of different references within a single film, shifting from one style to another depending on the content of the scene.

Djamila the Algerian, for example, begins as if it were the Fourth Song about Lenin, summarizing the struggle of the Algerian people against their French colonizers in highly Vertovian tones— rapid montage, stirring music, grand visual abstractions. It then shifts into classical Hitchcockian suspense, as Chahine mounts a brilliant sequence in which a group of freedom fighters tries to smuggle a cache of arms out of the Casbah, past the eyes of the French patrols. Ideological abstractions give way to prickly, concrete details, in a scene that comes to depend literally on the precise calibration of camera angles and points of view—the conspirators communicate with each other by passing light and hand signals from window to window and street to street. For the climax, which finds the heroine, a young Algerian woman who has sacrificed everything for the cause, being tortured at the hands of the French, Chahine switches his point of reference to Dreyer, filming Djamila—her head shaved, her eyes upturned—in the transcendent closeups of The Passion of Joan of Arc.

In The Dawn of a New Day, Chahine leads off with a lengthy, largely plotless sequence set in the depths of night, at a charity ball that powerfully suggests the decadent society gatherings of Michelangelo Antonioni (the sad frolics of Cairo’s upper classes are witnessed by a chorus of orphans, the ostensible beneficiaries of the evening). With the introduction of a handsome young engineer as a potential lover/redeemer for the unhappily married, middle-aged heroine, Chahine strides into Douglas Sirk territory, and immediately begins using the whole Sirkian rhetoric of mirrors, frames-within-frames, and ominous color overlays (this, nearly ten years before any comparable critical assessment of Sirk’s style appeared in print). For the climax, involving a fatal rendezvous at the top of the Cairo Tower, Chahine makes a specific reference to Leo McCarey’s use of the Empire State Building in An Affair to Remember, but draws out the romantic suspense to an even more agonizing extreme.

These references never seem blandly, bluntly derivative in the way, say, Brian De Palma’s similar borrowings do, both because Chahine possesses the technical skill to evoke the styles he is seeking with accuracy and respect, and because (more in the manner of Scorsese), he actively reimagines his sources, using their spirit and sense to solve problems, rather than purloining their substance. There is also a charming sense in which Chahine, whose first ambitions were as an actor (he plays the principal roles in Central Station and Alexandria Now and Forever, and makes cameo appearances in several of his films), seems to enjoy playing at being his directorial heroes—an element of make-believe. He slips into a director’s style like an actor slipping into a character, inhabiting it from inside. (Chahine spent two years in California after the war, studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, where The Method was then in vogue.)

CHAHINE’S FILMS—even (and perhaps especially) his most autobiographical ones—are choral affairs, in which many voices and many characters are blended into grand, powerful, and not always perfectly orderly compositions. The shifting directorial styles are a way of adding voices to that chorus, as are Chahine’s sudden, sometimes astounding switches of genre.

I Left Your Love begins as a goofy service comedy, set in the hospital of an army camp (presumably, the Suez crisis is taking place somewhere just offscreen), and then becomes a gut-wrenching melodrama with the entrance of the wrenchingly soulful singing star Farid el-Atrache, as a young officer with only a few weeks to live. The 1976 film Awdet El-Ibn El-Dall/The Return of the Prodigal Son combines political allegory (Egypt as a dysfunctional provincial family, torn between one brother’s faded socialist ideals and another’s brutal business sense), with naively enthusiastic musical numbers performed by cheery high school students straight out of an MGM Mickey-and-Judy vehicle. Only a newcomer to Chahine could be completely astonished when the film ends with a machine-gun massacre of the entire family, itself set to music and weirdly upbeat in tone.

Chahine likes to construct his stories (a frequent collaborator is Naguilf Mahfouz, Egypt’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist) around a brief period of crisis, using dialogue (in the earlier films) or flashbacks (as his editing becomes more assured) to fill in the backgrounds of the characters. The film noir Hob Ela El Abab/Yours Forever uses dissolves to introduce extensive flashbacks from the hero and heroine, but by the time of Al Nass Wal Nil/People of the Nile and Al Ikhtiyar/The Choice a decade later, Chahine has achieved a seamlessly associative montage that moves back and forth through time without stylistic markers, mixing past and present in a surge of in voluntary memory. A late film like Haddouta Misriyya/Memory, clearly based on Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz with its flashbacks built around a heart operation, forgoes conventional plotting almost completely, in favor of a rush of imagery that combines traumatic recollection, dreamy fantasy, and paranoid speculation.

Central Station is said to be Chahine’s best-loved film in Egypt; shown in a magnificently restored version in Locarno’s outdoor arena, the Piazza Grande, it captivated a crowd of 5,000 festivalgoers. Yet the movie is an exceedingly strange blend of neorealist social protest, sentimental comedy, and horror—a little as if City Lights suddenly turned into a slasher film.

Chahine himself stars as Kenaoui, a little man with a serious limp who ekes out a living peddling newspapers in the Cairo train station. Kenaoui is obsessed with Hanouma (the pulchritudinous Hind Rostom), one of a band of girls who sell soft drinks out of ice-filled buckets. Though Hanouma is fond of Kenaoui, and teases him by indulging his fantasy of escaping to the countryside and raising a family, she is in love with the hulking Abu Serib (Farid Chawki), a porter who is struggling to start a union.

When Kenaoui accidentally spies the two of them making love, he decides to murder Hanouma and place her body in a trunk, inspired by an article in one of his newspapers about a mysterious killer of in her own right. Intensely jealous of his younger sibling, the older brother hatches a plot against him—perhaps colluding with the reactionary forces that oppose the younger brother’s political goals.

The two “brothers” can simply be childhood friends (as in Seraa Fi El-Mina/Dark Waters, the 1956 drama that seems the first work to codify Chahine’s themes), or, as in the tortured, claustrophobic El-Ikhtiyar/The Choice, they can be twins—but in every case, it is clear the brothers are aspects of a single personality, much as the figure of Kenaoui combines them both. (In the autobiographical Alexandria, Why?, it emerges that the hero feels responsible for the death by fire of an unseen older brother—a detail not mentioned in any official Chahine biography.) The introvert and the extrovert, the private, obsessive brooder versus the man of action and affection—these two characters are locked in a perpetual struggle, which can never produce a clear victor.

The introvert is often associated with Cairo—with its narrow streets and cramped dwellings—while the extrovert is associated with Alexandria, the seaport city where Chahine was born in 1926, and where he grew up in a family of a mixed European and Egyptian heritage, speaking, as he told a Cahiers interviewer, four languages at home, all of them badly. Alexandria remains the golden city of Chahine’s work, a cosmopolitan Utopia where Europe and Africa peacefully coexist, where Christians (Chahine’s family was Roman Catholic), Jews, and Muslims could once live together, providing a model for a now lost Middle Eastern harmony. The image of the port, open to the world, becomes an image of acceptance and synthesis.

It’s a short leap from the idealized Alexandria of the autobiographical trilogy to the city of Jerusalem as it appears at the end of the 1963 El-Nasser Salah Eddine/Saladin, Chahine’s epic about the Egyptian sultan who stood up to the Crusaders led by Richard the Lion-Hearted. Characteristically, Chahine’s Saladin (Ahmed Mazhar) is a figure of reconciliation and unification. (He is also obviously based on the real-life figure of Gamel Abdul Nasser, whose government closely supported the production.) Having defeated the European armies, Saladin refuses to chase the Christians from the holy city, and the film concludes with the delirious image of a storybook Jerusalem (a matte painting, not of the highest quality) slowly disappearing under a blanket of Dickensian snow, as a Christian hymn competes with a Muslim call to prayer on the soundtrack.

Where Alexandria itself doesn’t appear in Chahine’s work, it appears in its symbolic form, as water. Water is the source of fertility and progress, as in the rushing river waters of El-Naas Wa El-Nil/People of the Nile, Chahine’s 1968 epic on the building of the Aswan Dam (co-produced and extensively recut by the Soviets, though now restored to its original form); it is the image of political change, as in the irrigation project that rejuvenates the parched fields of the peasant farmers in El-Ard/The Earth. And it is also an image of highly charged human sexuality, providing the setting for the most sensual of Chahine’s physical encounters, such as the fight that becomes an embrace at the climax of Dark Waters; or the rushing streams that provide the context for the first meeting of the Soviet engineer and the Nubian worker in People of the Nile. Even in the resolutely land-locked Central Station, the one moment of real intimacy and tenderness between Kenaoui and Hanouma takes place under the spray of the station’s fountain.

That those aquatic couples are often male is one of the most remarkable aspects of Chahine’s work. From the early displacements of Dark Waters, where the male romance is played out in terms of physical conflict and competition for the same woman, Chahine becomes more and more explicit in his references, until the autobiographical trilogy achieves a complete candor.

In I Left Your Love, the arrival of the doomed officer seems to awaken the erotic interest of everyone in the hospital camp, as men and women both compete for his affections (it is one of the few times in which Chahine admits the dark, brooding figure can also be romantically attractive); by the time of People of the Nile, the nature of the relationship between the Russian engineer and the Nubian village boy is, if not spelled out, as unmistakable as the farewell caress they exchange when the Russian is called back home.

Alexandria, Why? features Chahine’s first overtly homosexual character—an aristocratic uncle who “buys” and seduces British soldiers (the time is the Second World War) to revenge himself on the colonial powers; Farewell, Bonaparte features a French general (Michel Piccoli) who takes a pair of Egyptian brothers under his wing, exercising a kind of sweet colonialism, mixing exploitation and affection. In Alexandria Now and Forever, the final chapter of Chahine’s autobiographical trilogy, the protagonist, now late in his life and played by Chahine himself, struggles to overcome the end of his love affair with the young actor who starred as the Chahine figure in Alexandria, Why? (The height of their relationship is represented by a wild fantasy-flashback sequence, in which Chahine and his lover perform a Gene Kelly-like dance number in the streets after winning a prize at the Berlin Film Festival.)

By the end of Alexandria Now and Forever, the Chahine character is in love again, though this time with a beautiful young woman. She’s also an actor—he’ll make her a star, too, thus filling the void left in both his personal and professional lives by the young man’s departure. Watching Chahine’s work, it is impossible not to be struck by his rapturous appreciation of human beauty of both sexes. Here is a continuum of desire to please the most fervid postmodernist.

One of his early discoveries was Omar Sharif, whom Chahine found sitting in a Cairo café and persuaded to audition for Sera Fi El-Wadi/Sky of Hell (’54); in Dark Waters, the last of their three films together, Sharif is photographed with an attentiveness that suggests the late Dietrich Sternberg films. Yet Chahine is certainly also speaking of himself when he films Kenaoui gaping like a Tex Avery wolf at the voluptuous Hanouma; the huge closeup of Kenaoui’s eyes clearly identifies the newsagent’s regard with that of Chahine’s camera—as director, actor, and audience all swoon at the dazzling spectacle of Hanouma drying herself off after a water fight with her co-workers (a long-censored shot restored to the version of the film shown in Locarno).

The equanimity with which Chahine crosses genders has its echo, of course, in his easy transitions between genres and styles. Here is an artist who makes the highest virtue of flexibility, of openness, of fluidity—of being as unfixable as water, his favorite element, and as various as Alexandria, his favorite city.