A shorthand guide to Youssef Chahine's films with extracts from 30 years of interviews with the great Egyptian filmmaker, by Samir Farid FATHER AMIN (1950): This film, Chahine's directorial debut after his return from the USA, is important in so far as it announces Chahine's arrival on the cinematic scene. The film takes place during the Muslim month of Ramadan, and Hussein Riyad plays the lead role of Father Amin. Part of the film apparently takes place in the afterlife following the death of Father Amin, though it is later shown that Father Amin is not dead but is only susceptible to nightmares. Some of Chahine's favourite techniques and stylistic motifs can be discerned in this first film that he would later develop, including the use of a fast- rolling camera coupled with short shots and the insertion of musical set-pieces between the film's main acts: Chahine was always fascinated by Hollywood musicals. In Father Amin Chahine twice departed from the dominant norms of the time, once by daring to fantasise about life after death, and once by casting the elderly Riyad -- a great actor who up to that point had always appeared in challenging supporting roles -- in the lead role. About his beginnings as a director Chahine said in an interview that "I wanted to direct films at any price, and I had to bow to some of the norms of the time. Thus, I made four films between 1950 and 1953, starting with Father Amin in 1950. I wanted to begin my career with Son of the Nile, but I was told production cost would be very high, so I began with a less costly production." SON OF THE NILE (1951): Chahine's most memorable film from his early period, Son of the Nile is the story of a simple farmer (played by Shoukri Sarhan) who is lured away from his wife and family by the promise of life in the capital only to discover the cruelty of life in Cairo. His unsophisticated country ways lead him to fall into the hands of rogues who exploit his naivety in order to involve him in illicit dealings. Adapted from an American film on the same subject, Son of the Nile, though still within the bounds of commercial cinema, showcases Chahine's technical skills. It was considered accomplished enough to be selected for the official competition at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, though it did not win an award. Of the film Chahine said that "the most important thing I achieved in Son of the Nile was the realistic depiction of life in the country. 90 per cent of the shooting took place on location outside the studio. I also presented Shoukri Sarhan as the face of the authentic Egyptian peasant. The film was a success by commercial standards: production costs were LE 13,000, while the film took LE 70,000 at the box office." THE BLAZING SUN (1954): Despite The Blazing Sun being Chahine's seventh film, many critics consider the film to be Chahine's first to have an overtly political content, as did the director himself. Chahine introduced Omar Sharif to Egyptian audiences for the first time in the film, Sharif playing the educated son of a small tenant farmer in Upper Egypt who is in love with the daughter of the landlord who owns most of the province's land. When the peasants eventually rise up against the landlord, the landlord's daughter sides with her lover against her father, who has meanwhile implicated Sharif's father in a murder of which he is innocent. Though not guilty, he is later convicted of the murder and hanged. Of The Blazing Sun, Chahine said that "no doubt the film was influenced by the climate following the 1952 Revolution. Until then I didn't care much about politics, and I was no exception in this regard to most of the Egyptian filmmakers of the time who worked in isolation from what was going on in society. The only difference between me and the rest was my knowledge of international cinema. The Blazing Sun was the first film I made that took an overt political stance, being a stand against feudalism, though at that time it was only an instinctive position and one that sought just to praise the victim and indict the oppressor. However, in the film I also insisted on departing from the norms of the time that said that an innocent victim should be saved at the last moment. Instead, I let him die for a crime he did not commit. I succeeded in creating a climax for the film that made the audience leave the auditorium feeling insecure and uneasy. This was something I learned to do deliberately in later films." CAIRO: CENTRAL STATION (1958): Central Station, a jewel in the history of Arab cinema, is perhaps the single most influential film in that cinema's history. Representing a radical break with any Arab film that preceded it, the film was revolutionary at the time in both its form and its content. It tells the story of a disabled and sexually obsessed newspaper vendor in Cairo's central railway station who is in love with a pretty soft-drinks vendor in the same station. Through this story it explores the lives of dispossessed people who must eke out a living for themselves to survive against the odds. Chahine himself played the lead role of the lame newspaper vendor Qenawi, and he was cast opposite Hend Rustum, who played the object of his character's sexual fantasies. So powerful was Chahine's acting in the role that his performance almost won him the best actor's award at the Berlin Film Festival. Perhaps it would have done so, had not some members of the jury believed that Chahine was himself lame. About Central Station, Chahine commented that "in the film I wanted to discuss social reality through a personal prism. The film failed miserably on first release: on the opening night one member of the audience came up to me afterwards and spat in my face. You cannot imagine how it feels when you walk into an empty auditorium in which a film of yours is being shown. I exerted efforts to make this film the like of which I had never made for any of my previous films. My disappointment at its failure was such that for a while I returned to commercial cinema." SALADIN AND THE GREAT CRUSADES (1963): Chahine inherited this film from director Ezz Eddin Zulfucar, who had died shortly before beginning work on what was an historical epic about the 12th- century sultan who defeated the crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem. The film was intended to be an allegory of the Arab-Israeli struggle and to advance Nasser's policy of pan-Arabism. The state put a large budget at Chahine's disposal, as well as the use of soldiers from the army to act as extras in the battle scenes. Shahine said that he was aware of the propaganda dimension of the film: "My own sympathies were with pan-Arabism," he said, "which I still believe in. But my main reason for accepting Saladin was to prove that it was possible to make an epic film and to stage the kind of battles seen in Hollywood films on a small budget. True, the budget for the film reached 100,000 Egyptian pounds, but this was still a small amount compared to the costs of international historical films. I also discovered the power of widescreen colour production through making the film, and after making it I never again worked in black and white." DAWN OF A NEW DAY (1964): This was the last film Chahine made in Egypt before he left to spend two years working in Lebanon in self-imposed exile. Chahine left Egypt temporarily for various reasons, including financial, and in Dawn of a New Day he returned to acting, casting himself as a member of the bourgeoisie who is disenchanted with the Nasser regime and its 1961 nationalisations of private enterprise. In Dawn of a New Day, Chahine commented, "I wanted to deal with the new Egypt that was in the making following the 'Socialist Decrees' and the old one that was trying to subvert this socialist orientation. I played the role of a member of the bourgeoisie bent on subverting the Nasserist experiment for the same reasons that I took the role of the newspaper vendor Qenawi in Central Station : the characters were so intimate to my way of thinking that I felt nobody could do them like I could. I went to Lebanon following the making of the film for the reasons expressed by the characters in the film who represent the new Egypt: disappointment at how the socialism we had longed for was turning out at the hands of the bureaucrats, making it into something stifling. I was fed up, and I decided to leave in the hope of getting a breath of fresh air. The time I spent in Lebanon, however, was a period of anxiety and a waste of energy. When the June 1967 defeat struck I became convinced that I had to return to Egypt and face reality, however harsh it might be. I was born anew after the 1967 defeat." THE LAND (1969): Another landmark in Chahine's career, The Land is one of four groundbreaking Egyptian films produced in the aftermath of the 1967 military defeat, which caused the Egyptian regime to adopt a more tolerant view of culture and to allow a wider margin of expression to the opposition. The other three films were The Night of Counting the Years by Shadi Abdel-Salam, Some Fear by Hussein Kamal, and My Wife and the Dog by Said Marzouk. Chahine's The Land is based on a socialist-realist novel of the same name by novelist Abdel-Rahman el-Sharqawi, who also cooperated with Chahine on the script of the film. Set in colonial Egypt, the film recounts the struggle between a community of peasants and the feudal owner of their land who wants to confiscate the land in order to construct a road leading to his palace. Chahine reached new heights in his use of a realist style in this film, infusing the whole with beautiful shots of peasant farmers picking cotton, or of coming out en masse to defend themselves against the soldiers brought in by their feudal landlord to quell their protests. Of his use of realism in the film, Chahine said that "I have long stopped worrying about what is realist and what is not. Mohamed Abu Soweilim [the main character in The Land ] falling down at the end of the film while being dragged to his death by soldiers on horseback is a realist enough gesture, but for him to plough the land with his bleeding fingers as he dies is not. When I thought about this, I realised that it didn't bother me whether the two gestures were realist or not. I just went ahead and filmed them." THE SPARROW (1972): More than any of Chahine's previous films, The Sparrow had a sharp oppositional edge, investigating the reasons behind the 1967 defeat and naming and shaming those who had caused it. As a result, it was not surprising that the film's certificate for general release was delayed until towards the end of 1973 and that the film was only released following the October 1973 War. About The Sparrow Chahine said that "I had a contract with the state-owned film production company to produce the film, but then the company was dissolved in October 1971 and I had to find another source of finance. I formed my own company and sought help from Algeria to finance the film. When it was banned I was very depressed, but fortunately it was not banned for long: the experience taught me that even if a film is banned for a while, eventually it will be released. In the case of The Sparrow, the fact that the film was only released after the October War rather muted its message, since it was a response to the 1967 defeat." ALEXANDRIA... WHY ? (1978): The first of four autobiographical films Chahine produced between 1978 and 2004, Alexandria...Why? is set in the Alexandria of the 1940s in which Chahine grew up, and it ends with the ending of the Second World War and the young Chahine boarding a ship for the US in order to go to study drama at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. The film was followed, though not immediately, by the other three parts of what has become known as Chahine's "Quartet": An Egyptian Story (1982), Alexandria Again and Forever (1990) and Alexandria... New York (2004). Chahine won his first international prize for Alexandria...Why? when the film received the jury award at the Berlin Film Festival. Concerning his desire to make autobiographical films, Chahine said that "I wanted to testify, to tell the truth about myself and my time. This is a film about youthful dreams, about the thirst for knowledge, and about a burning desire to prove oneself. But it's also a film about my early life, told from the viewpoint of a 50-year old man. There is thus a dialectical relation at work in the film between the young man I was in the 1940s and the older man who made the film more than 30 years later, as well as between the Alexandria of the colonial past and the Alexandria of today. Rather than being the truth about my life, the film is more the beginning of a process of settling accounts with life. Although the film is autobiographical, I would rather that the series of films of which it is a part of not confined to the straightjacket of "autobiographical film". Most films contain something of the life of the artist who created them, and any film, however impersonal, reflects the time of its creation and the mood of its maker while shooting." ADIEU BONAPARTE (1985): Adieu Bonaparte is Chahine's second historical epic, and it is set in Egypt during the 1798 Napoleonic campaign in the country, with Patrice Chéreau playing the role of Napoleon and Michel Piccoli playing General Louis Cafarelli du Falga. While the film deals with the resistance of the Egyptians to the French invaders, it also examines more than one way in which that resistance can be expressed. The two main characters in the film are two brothers, each of whom has a different attitude towards the problem of how to deal with the occupiers, one brother insisting on armed resistance and refusing to enter into dialogue with the French, and the other arguing for the importance of gaining knowledge from the occupiers and interacting with them. He therefore befriends General Cafarelli and learns something of the new science brought by the French. In an interview with the late Radwan el-Kashef published immediately following the release of Adieu Bonaparte, Chahine said that "I am in favour of both choices [of entering into dialogue and of armed resistance]. They are not mutually exclusive. In cases where dialogue is no longer possible, we have to resort to arms, but if there is a possibility of dialogue, I prefer it over violence. What I am completely against is the failure to prepare oneself for battle and instead to indulge in empty, nationalistic and religious sloganeering. My choice of Cafarelli as the person to engage in dialogue with was also not by accident: Cafarelli was an intellectual who had called for social justice and who had clashed strongly with Napoleon. The climax of this clash takes place at Acre when Napoleon talks about glory and immortality, and Cafarelli counters that Napoleon is interested only in his place in history and the use he can make of others to achieve his ends." DESTINY (1997): Chahine came into conflict with Islamists in 1994 following the release of his historical film The Emigrant, which retells the life of Joseph, as Islam forbids the representation of Joseph in visual terms, since he is a prophet and therefore holy. The Emigrant was temporarily banned in Egypt when an Islamist lawyer filed a lawsuit demanding the banning of the film pending a court decision. Though Chahine won the case, the threats he received prompted him to make a film dealing with the threats religious fundamentalism poses to any civilisation. Set in Andalusia during the 12th century, this film, Destiny, deals with the life of the Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and is a plea for tolerance and dialogue, as well as a scathing attack on religious zealots. Though the film was entered in competition at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, the award given to Chahine at that year's festival was for his lifetime achievement rather than for Destiny. THIS IS CHAOS (2007): Chahine's last film was co-directed by Khaled Youssef, as Chahine's failing health prevented him from making the greater part of the film. Yet because of the film's sensitive subject matter of police brutality in contemporary Egypt, it was a laudable act of Chahine's in insisting that his name appear on the film in addition to that of Youssef, since this gave the film, and its main director, some measure of protection. This is Chaos was the last film by Chahine to be shown at international festivals, and it was screened last year at the Venice Film Festival.
