Mohamed El-Assyouti reassesses the art and science of autobiography Youssef Chahine's fourth autobiographical film, Iskenderiya-New York (Alexandria-New York) finds filmmaker Yehya -- Chahine's stand-in in all his cinematic autobiographies, this time played by Mahmoud Hemeida -- in his mid-70s, a self-aware Arab dealing with the long-term consequences of his love affair with an American from Virginia, Ginger, which took place while he was attending drama school in Pasadina, California, as a young man in the 1940s. It was not until the 1970s, however, during a one-night reunion to coincide with the rapprochement of Egypt, Israel and the US that was to lead to Camp David, after decades of estrangement, that the affair yielded a son -- this far-fetched interpolation is a necessary, if somewhat forced plot device. A New York ballet dancer named Iskandar (the Arabic variant of Alexander), in post-11 September America the son refuses to acknowledge his Arab origins, and it is largely around this entanglement that the film revolves. Always an Alexandrine, Chahine has placed the city at the centre of his autobiographical project. In Iskenderiya Leih? (Alexandria, Why? 1979), the first such film and perhaps Chahine's best film ever, a young Yehya comes into his own against the backdrop of the Second World War, and Alexandria emerges as the cosmopolitan microcosm of the world at this point in history -- nouveau riche opportunists, young homegrown communists, pro-Nazi patriots, Egyptian Jews and British forces at war with the Germans. The next two episodes of Chahine's fictionalised life, Hadouta Masriya (An Egyptian Tale, 1982) and Iskenderiya Kaman wa Kaman (Alexandria Again and Again, 1990) -- the filmmaker himself starred in the latter -- were more psychological than historical, in a manner of speaking. They dealt with the director's inner life, his experiences and concerns, paying but scant attention to the historical events he witnessed. Once again, in Iskenderiya-New York, Chahine juxtaposes personal with national history, tackling the Arab world's position in relation to the US "war on terror" head on. By intertwining two plot lines -- Yehya and Ginger in the 1940s; Yehya and his son at present -- Chahine contrasts the romantic idealism of America in the past (Ginger) and its aggressive bellicosity at present (Iskandar), with Ginger evoking the musical superstar Ginger Rogers. Contrasts abound: the young Yehya and Iskandar top the bill of a series of duos that includes musicals vs "Stalone thuggery", Alexandria and New York ("New York itself would have desired to be like Alexandria in its compassion") and many more. By such less than subtle means, the film hammers in its message: that the US's attitude towards Arabs today constitutes a denial of the debt it owes to ancient civilisations, embodied by Chahine's birthplace. Proust, for one autobiographically oriented artist, observes the careers of Monet, Manet, Renoir and other artists, and remarks that when age gets the upper hand "a slackening of the creative ardour, idolatry of the forms which had inspired it, a tendency to take the line of least resistance" ultimately undermine the time-tested genius of the artist. Artists invest their last works with elements from their best ones, self-referentially trying to rescue them from the abyss of mediocrity; and Chahine seems to be no exception. Precedents in cinema include the last works of Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, who reiterate well-worn themes, centralising either themselves or their alter-egos -- surrogates for their real-life personas. While these last works are never on a par with the directors' best works, they can be seen as a kind of appendix to their oeuvre -- a tribute to, if never a continuation of, their former excellence. Hard-core fans relish these tributes, but detractors see them as an opportunity to discredit the work as a whole. Made a full 14 years after Chahine's last autobiographical film, it may well be Chahine's farewell gesture -- a hypothesis that finds support in the emphasis on the role of executive director and co- script writer Khaled Youssef in the credits. The longevity of Chahine's career, 55 years in cinema, may be due to a propitious ratio of perspiration to inspiration, but, more than any other factor, perhaps, it is adaptability that has carried him through. He directed action, romance, comedy, musicals, historical drama, commenting on the feudal system and the July 1952 Revolution in, among other films, Siraa fil Wadi (Conflict in the Valley), and likening the July Revolution's leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser to Saladin in the grand epic Al-Nasser Salah Al-Din, while films like Al-Ard (The Land), Al-Usfour (The Sparrow) and Awdat Al-Ibn Al-Dal (Return of the Prodigal Son) reflected disillusionment with Nasserist rhetoric after the 1967 defeat. He never delved into autobiography, in part to endorse the auteur status he had always vied for, until the 1970s. Coinciding with his growing reputation as an obscuranist, an elitist and a "never understood director", a Cannes award Chahine received for his lifetime's achievement in 1997 marked a shift in perspective, compromising artistic ambition in favour of building as wide an audience base as possible. Co-productions with Egyptian national television, his last three films reduce the theme of love -- a theme Chahine tackled with originality and depth in many different contexts -- to a Hollywood-style romantic subplot, and they are not as openly critical of the establishment as his best "political" offerings. Iskenderiya-New York displays all these by now familiar failings. Its relevance derives, rather, from its being the newest link in Chahine's autobiographical chain and his latest anti-American statement. On the first level, the film is worthy of respect in that it resumes a project unique in Egyptian cinema -- a filmmaker daring to turn his personal history and character traits into art without recourse to many masks; Yehya is an almost non-fiction embodiment of Chahine. (In three out of four cinematic autobiographies, including the present one, Chahine includes footage from earlier films he made to highlight climactic points in his development.) And despite affinities with both Ram (the Prophet Joseph) and Averroes, heroes of the later, unabashedly low-brow films Al-Muhagir (The Immigrant) and Al-Masir (Destiny), respectively, Chahine never quite overtakes his protagonists the way he does in his autobiographical films. Poetic licence, moreover, can only be seen as a positive aspect of what would otherwise turn into dire, and probably heavily censored documentary. It is in line with the auteur's drive to reinvent, rather than simply record his life, and it is one of the few things that work in Iskenderiya-New York. On the level of political statement, by contrast, the film seems frustratingly structureless, almost slapdash in its reductive and belligerent tendencies. The protagonist giving a speech to an audience in which to voice Chahine's political views is a recurrent device in his films, but here, as in Al-Akhar (The Other), it misfires, with stereotyping and spoonfeeding undermining the otherwise valid political point being made. Even worse is the direct symbolism: Ginger and Iskandar representing two versions of America, while Yehya represents the Arab world. This may be an artistically justified attempt at personalising the universal, but despite Chahine's status as the most established filmmaker in the Arab world, the connection he forges between his cinematic career and Egypt's post-independence struggle is rather hard to stomach. Members of the educated upper middle class are hardly the most obvious victims of US policy, and a star filmmaker's singular achievement does nothing to draw attention to the illiteracy and poverty to which the US intervention in the Middle East has contributed.
