Born in 1926, son of a Syrian lawyer and a Christian family in Alexandria, Egypt, Chahine attended the prestigious Victoria College. He dreamed of the cinema and theatre, watched Hollywood musicals, and in 1946 left to study drama in California. Chahine's early films in Egypt included Raging Sky (1953), begun while Farouk was still King and dealing with a peasant farmer's challenge to a feudal landlord. But the first truly indicative film of his style and preoccupations was Cairo Central Station (Bab al-Hadid), in 1958.
Chahine himself plays the central character, Kenaoui, a simple-minded man, beneficently employed as a newspaper-seller. He cuts pictures of women from magazines for the station hut he lives in, but a living focus of his sexual frustrations is Hanouma (played by the popular actress Hind Rostom), who sells lemonade and is engaged to Abou Serib (Farid Chawqi), porter and trade union organiser. With unthinking but affectionate playfulness Hanouma exacerbates Kenaoui's frustration and adds to his confusion which leads to tragic death. Egyptian audiences, used to simpler melodramas, were disturbed and rejected the film. It was not seen again for some 20 years.
In 1963 Chahine made Saladin (original title: El Nasser - defender/deliverer - Salah ed-Dine), an epic, three-hour film in CinemaScope named after the 12th Century Sultan who, as the film begins, is preparing to liberate Jerusalem from its Christian Crusader occupiers. It was scripted by Naguib Mahfouz and the poet and progressive writer, Abderrahman Cherkaoui, and a parallel between Saladin and President Nasser is easily drawn. Saladin is shown as an educated and peaceable man - at one point he is asked to give clandestine medical help to Richard (the Lion Heart), shot by an arrow, and later he tells him: "Religion is God's and the Earth is for all ... I guarantee to all Christians in Jerusalem the same rights as are enjoyed by Muslims."
A novel by Cherkaoui, serialised in 1952, formed the basis of The Earth (1968), noted particularly for its image of the peasant farmer - "eternal 'damned of the earth'" - which broke with "the ridiculous image the cinema had (hitherto) given him" (Khaled Osman). There followed a further collaboration with Mahfouz on The Choice (1970), ostensibly a murder investigation story involving twin brothers, but with the underlying theme of intellectual schizophrenia. In 1976 he made The Return Of The Prodigal Son, a "musical tragedy", but four years earlier had made one of his greatest films, The Sparrow (1972), both co-productions with Algeria. A journalist and a young police officer meet while investigating incidents of corruption. They and other people of the left pass through Bahiyya's house, whose name represents the idea of the mother country and is invoked in Cheikh Imam's song at the end of the film. After Nasser's announcement of the defeat in the war and his subsequent resignation, Bahiyya runs into the street, followed by a growing crowd, shouting "No! we must fight. We won't accept defeat!"
In Alexandria, Why? (1978), Yehia, a young Victoria College student, is obsessed with Hollywod and dreams of making cinema. It is 1942, the Germans are about to enter Alexandria, thought preferable to the presence of the British. Yehia's cousin is gay and 'buys' drunken British soldiers. Jewish friends are forced to leave and decide to settle in Palestine. In An Egyptian Story (1982) Yehia is a flim-maker, going to London (as Chahine had earlier) for open-heart surgery. He has a brief affair with a taxi driver. As a result of the operation, he reviews his life: moments of Chahine's own films are replayed against their autobiographical and social historical context. Memory is very important to Chahine's most recent work -whether of the "city of my childhood, Alexandria, between the two world wars tolerant, secular, open to Muslims, Christians and Jews" or of a more distant past: such as evoked in Adieu Bonaparte (1985), based on the cultural aspect of Bonaparte's expedition into Egypt (1798). "Out of this marvellous confrontation there was a rebirth of Egyptian consciousness, of its past ... which belongs to humanity."
<http://www.al-bab.com/media/cinema/film2.htm> *****
***** Echoes of Old Hollywood
Destiny Directed by Youssef Chahine Written by Chahine and Khaled Youssef With Nour el-Cherif, Laila Eloui, Mahmoud Hemeida, Safia el-Emary, Mohamed Mounir, Khaled el-Nabaoui, Abdallah Mahmoud, and Ahmed Fouad-Selim. Rating * * * A Must-See
The Adopted Son Directed by Aktan Abdikalikov Written by Abdikalikov, Avtandil Adikulov, and Marat Sarulu With Mirlan Abdikalikov, Albina Imasmeva, Adir Abilkassimov, Bakit Zilkieciev, and Mirlan Cinkozoev. Rating * * * A Must-See
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
A part from their exoticism, Youssef Chahine's Destiny and Aktan Abdikalikov's The Adopted Son don't have much in common. Destiny is the 35th film by Chahine, a 73-year-old writer, director, and sometime actor who's generally agreed to be the major figure in the history of Egyptian cinema. His subject here is Averroes (1126-1198), a dissident Spanish-Arab philosopher best known for his commentaries on Aristotle, and his film resembles a Hollywood period spectacular--exuberant, packed with action, and positively overflowing with energy. The Adopted Son is both the first independent feature ever made in Kyrgyzstan--a former Soviet republic in central Asia--and the first feature of 42-year-old writer-director Abdikalikov, who cast his own teenage son in the title role. It's shot mainly in an exquisitely modulated black and white, though it periodically shifts to color, always with great dramatic effect. Its central focus is childhood and nature in a contemporary rural village, and its main event is the boy's discovery about halfway through that he was adopted through an ancient local tradition in which parents of a large family offer a male baby to a childless couple after he's been weaned.
By American standards, The Adopted Son (1998) qualifies as an art film as does Destiny (1997). Chahine's colorful epic calls to mind certain MGM movies of the 50s, but that apparently counts for nothing given that it comes from Egypt--the only plausible reason it's showing at the Music Box rather than McClurg Court. Similarly, one could argue that the only reason The Adopted Son is playing at Facets Multimedia and not at the Music Box is that it comes from Kyrgyzstan--anything from a country that difficult to spell must be esoteric. That it's from the former Soviet Union only compounds the confusion, since we no longer know how to label the various people who live there. (Incidentally, both movies are French coproductions, a reflection of how much more open France's film culture is to the aesthetics of MGM movies of the 50s and to contemporary art movies from the far-flung corners of the world.) . . .
One entry point . . . might be Chahine's personality. I've seen him at several festivals in recent years, and he's as charismatic and outrageous as Samuel Fuller was. A short, wiry firecracker, he also makes no bones about being bisexual; the third movie in his autobiographical trilogy, Alexandria Always and Forever (1989), is comically frank about his sexual attraction to one of his young male leads and features the two of them doing an amorous tap dance on a studio set. Destiny is clearly an act of courage in the face of Islamic fundamentalism, and one of its acts of defiance is to view women and men as equally desirable.
Another such act is viewing genre boundaries with an equal amount of liberalism. Chahine was asked in an interview, "Is it fair to say that Destiny is a musical?" He replied, "In a single day, I expect to cry, laugh, dance, sing. I may even be locked up in jail. A film should contain all those things. What matters is style and pace. One of the things I found most painful is when fundamentalists say they want to stop artists singing and dancing. That's serious. It is extremely serious....The streets of Cairo are full of laughter. People have [become] too serious in the West. Though there's plenty to be serious about. I think you're in a worse mess than we are. People are all mixed up about the difference between civilization and technology. In the Arab world, people are exceptionally civilized. They possess nothing, but what they've got they'll give you with pleasure." . . .
I've seen seven of Chahine's films and sampled a couple of others--most of them at a complete retrospective held in Locarno in 1996 (perceptively written about by Dave Kehr in Film Comment). But I haven't seen the immediate predecessor of Destiny, The Emigrant (1994), a story of the biblical Joseph that was banned in Egypt under pressure from fundamentalists after an estimated 900,000 people saw it (the stated reason was that it was illegal to represent a prophet in a film). One of the key inspirations for Destiny--which ends with all of Averroes's books in Andalusia being burned by the caliph as a concession to fundamentalist groups--was clearly Chahine's own experience. If I'm not mistaken, the books we see burning in the final sequence are modern volumes rather than medieval manuscripts, which is part of the movie's point. (Averroes's writings survived because some of his followers copied them and sent the copies to Egypt--the medieval equivalent of copying films on video today, perhaps the major way the film legacy of the late 20th century is being preserved.)
That Averroes was a humanist whose ideas went on to influence Western as well as Islamic thought and that two of his followers were sons of the caliph are also part of Chahine's inspiration: the film's closing motto is "Ideas have wings. No one can stop their flight," and Chahine has expressly stated that his movie is addressed to everyone, not simply to Egyptians or Islamic fundamentalists. "Yes, this film is a drama, it's a western, it's [Alexandre] Dumas [whom he read prior to shooting], whatever, but it's also a call to resistance."
Chahine grew up speaking four languages, and as a teenager, after the end of World War II, he came to America to study theater directing at the Pasadena Playhouse, an experience recounted in his Why Alexandria? (1978). So universality is not merely part of his aim but part of his cultural baggage. He makes the visual style of Destiny universal not just through being familiar with the tropes of both Hollywood and Egyptian cinema (the latter of which he helped to invent), but also through his gift for pageantry that favors inclusiveness over stylistic rigor. The generous impulse that makes the movie resemble at separate times a musical, a comedy, a western, a biopic, a biblical epic, a medieval legend, and a Dumas adventure story also results in beautifully lit, framed, and composed shots and sequences that coexist with ones that are more hastily and casually put together. It's an overflowing smorgasbord of a movie, and one reason its echoes of old Hollywood are so appealing is that new Hollywood probably couldn't come up with such an intoxicating mixture if it tried--industry wisdom would undoubtedly deem such a project naive and outdated. . . .
<http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1999/0499/04029.html> *****
***** _Youssef Chahine_ Ibrahim Fawal
"a small book for a big subject -- serving simultaneously as autobiography, filmography, and cultural reading of the director's work ... The result is enthusiastic, readable and extremely portable" Film Comment
"an exceptionally important addition to the still narrow range of critical literature in English on the subject of African and/or Middle Eastern cinema" Jury Panel of the BKFS Prize in Middle Eastern Studies 2002
Paperback: £14.99
A film-maker of truly international renown and the recipient of the Cannes Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award, Youssef Chahine is the director of one of the most diverse and prestigious bodies of work of any living director. Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1926, the cosmopolitan Chahine has embodied the preoccupations of his native Egypt in a career (still continuing) which has ranged from social realism to autobiographical fantasy, from historical epics to musicals and has spanned over 50 years from 1950 to the present day.
In writing this book, Ibrahim Fawal draws upon his unique qualifications as an Arab-American whose native language is Arabic, and as a film practitioner and educator. His discussion of the frequently controversial film-maker illuminates Chahine's work in the context of modern Egyptian culture and its tumultuous post-war history showing how such films as Cairo Station (1958) , The Earth (1969) and The Sparrow (1973) dramatised the dilemmas of ordinary Egyptians. He also demonstrates how Chahine's intensely personal autobiographical trilogy Alexandria...Why?(1978), An Egyptian Story (1985) and Alexandria Again and Forever (1989) spoke to the concerns of the broader Egyptian intelligentsia amongst whom he has earned the reputation of being the 'poet and thinker' of modern Arab cinema.
In the final analysis, the author argues that Chahine's work stands comparison with directors such as Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa and Sembene but also emphatically draws strength from its links with one of the most vibrant popular cinemas of the world and from the roots and traditions of popular Arabic culture.
Ibrahim Fawal is an author whose novel, On the Hills of God, won the prestigious 1998 PEN-Oakland Award for Excellence in Literature. He holds an M.A. in Film from UCLA and a D.Phil from Oxford University.
240 pages, Illustrated Published December 2001 Paperback ISBN: 0851708587
See other books in the BFI World Directors category
<http://www.bfi.org.uk/bookvid/books/catalogue/details.php?bookid=186> ***** -- Yoshie
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