Because it is bitter

Sherief El-Azma's and Hassan Khan's videos have bite. Nur Elmessiri finds energy
"Well-intentioned," as in William Blake's "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions," is the last thing brought to mind by Hassan Khan's and Sherief El-Azma's 14 recent videos (nine by Khan, five by El-Azma, ranging from one to 22 minutes in duration) screened at AUC last week. These young (late 20s/early 30s) film-makers tear things -- cityscapes, Cairo mostly, people, urbanites mostly, from middle class housewives to smarmy pop stars to sleazy tourist hustlers to their serious, arty selves -- to pieces, fearlessly cut the crap, take a sledge hammer and bang away at the thick skin of the dull-spirited universe in which they find themselves. A hard nut to crack, but -- disciplined, thoughtful -- they manage somehow, and in so doing they allow something by turns sad, frightening, pitiful, but at least alive (if only barely so) to emerge from between the cracks. No small achievement, given the "anaemic" state of culture these days -- to quote one spectator who stayed on for the stimulated (by the films) and stimulating question and answer session following the screening.
Deploying startling imagery, the films are sharp-edged, flaunt their seams, announce the fact that they are made things. But Khan's and El-Azma's avant-garde insouciance, the way they want to rip identity and narrative apart, is no arty posture. They are vigilantly on guard against the mechanisms by which "angry young men" can in post-modernity easily become the darling enfants terribles of some establishment or other. "We can," El-Azma says in the pamphlet accompanying the screening, "look at all these colours and shoes and cars and this culture clash as this big kitschy collage we put on some gallery wall, which I'm totally against." "How can I," he asks, "cancel this cocktail partiness [of the gallery scene] completely?"
Completely might be impossible, but their films are, in spite of their sophistication, too thoughtful, too angst-ridden, too troubled by insistent questioning to lounge comfortably at any party. Like Arthur Rimbaud, who took the spiritual life too seriously to rest in some merely facile parodic attack of what the bourgeoisie of his time called "religion" or "culture" and whose urgent vocation of blasphemy continues to resist neat packaging, these young, early 21st century urban visionaries have, one hopes, too much energy to settle down nicely in some cosy niche in the alternative-counter-culture art market.
The Eye Struck Me and the Lord of the Throne Saved Me: a four-minute film by Khan, formulaic talismanic Arabic words sloppily painted, letter by letter, on the back of some pick-up or on a wall, somewhere in Cairo. The camera breaks the sentence down, word by word, and then a voice-over tells an embryonic story of a mother and a child, hunger, an atavistic beast, the sun which consumes them. The camera's eye scans the faces of a midday downtown Cairo crowd, carnivalesque, grotesque faces of the pedestrian world, and then cuts, while the story continues, to a tomb in a Cairo cemetery, the midday sun beating down, without shadow: life stilled to impermeable stone, muted beyond anything as maudlin as hope or despair. In the space of four minutes, the viewer is taken from the mythic to the quotidian and then is left in a state of silent bewilderment similar to what the mystics used to call the state of non-understanding. This film, with its intellectually detached, agnostic gaze and voice, is no mere tricksy exercise in demystification, but rather a sensitive probing of the ordinaire.
"We try to take that," "the mundane" -- "the doctor in his lab, the kid listening to music," the talismanic words that spring up on Cairo's surfaces -- "and completely stab at it, to make it bleed." If it can be shown to bleed -- cruel though this stabbing, deconstructive approach to the thick-skinned surface that likes to call itself "the human project" might seem -- then, it follows, it is alive. Dead things do not bleed. El-Azma and Khan have enough respect for their subject matter (ourselves, themselves, others, the 100 faces and place names of Khan's 100 portraits, the world we are engaged in making) to wager it is alive.
Satellite dishes on rooftops everywhere, like so many dumb brain-washed creatures gazing blindly at the same nowhere towards which all satellite dishes on Cairo rooftops gaze. Indoors, a religious talk show about obedient wives on the TV screen and she, of Azma's Interview with a Housewife, tells the director/interviewer that the life she has -- preparing food for her family, keeping house -- is enough for her. The camera pans the small living room, chock-a- block with furniture yet screaming its tidy, respectable status. She shows us stuff, knick- knacks, ceramic figurines mostly, prized objects of the Egyptian middle-class home. "I put them out when he is here in the country, he so likes to look at them, these things we have collected on our travels." The voice is monotone, self-consciously suppressing the tender; the eyes, sad, as if to show anything else when a camera is pointed at you and you have been put inside a TV screen would be unseemly. A living room, a kitchen -- a life? Lest a smug, condescending attitude be adopted, our eyes are painfully prised open to the fact that this is not any old straw target cliché of a celluloid housewife, but rather, El-Azma tells us in his film: This is my mother/This is me.
Who is me? In Sometime/Somewhere Else, the screen is split horizontally in two. The top one, "age 15," shows me clean-shaven, serious, answering to an interviewer, politely discoursing on how if I were president of Egypt I would rebuild the economy with a focus on heavy industry; the lower one, "age 17," shows me with long hair and jeans, banging away at a heavy metal guitar, body moving to aggressively wordless, angry rhythms. And so Hassan Khan makes a film on two other Hassan Khans.
They hold it up, this identity thing, look at it and take it apart. Human? You want human? Here. Catch.
A battered wife speaks to the camera, opens her dulled heart, speaks her lobotomised mind. "Typical" tear-jerking victims do not elicit laughter. But in Khan's Stories About Men and Women, each of the three women interviewed is allowed the space and time necessary to bring a particular inflection to the word "victim." The viewer is not allowed the safely defined position of melodramatic empathy, is not allowed to ignore the complexity of all the social, cultural and class machinery that comprise the act of wife-beating or the specific circumstances that shape each victim's position. Distance, defamiliarisation, alienation, Brechtian or otherwise, go a long way in jolting us out of the uncritical consumer, passive spectator position we so easily slip into. Skins can become so thickened by ideology, that if, in piercing them in the hope that they might show signs of life, you risk provoking cruel, irreverent laughter, then so be it.
It is easier to laugh at pop singer Mustafa Amar and the young middle class fans of Azma's Donia/Amar than at battered wives or the self-proclaimed loser of a junkie of Khan's transitions. Still, though the least "experimental" of the films screened and hence more easily relatable to mainstream documentary, Donia/Amar moved quickly, kept the viewer on his critical toes: from studio, to street, to microbus, to Heliopolis, to video clip, the viewer was teased by (and not merely bombarded with) a wide range of images, of techniques of image-making, situations, positions with which to participate in the task at hand, namely, in Khan's words, to "look at" and "dissect" "this we are Egyptian thing."
A tourist map of Cairo in a little girl's hands, with all the landmarks -- Egyptian Museum, Pyramids, Cairo Tower -- indicated by toy-town icons. But the narrator of Azma's Order in Satellite City, having left the house with mom rolling vine leaves in the kitchen, tells us of the public bus that goes to the traditional, off-the- tourist track district of Sayeda Zeinab. The red bus pulls in at Bab Al-Louq instead, and then we are in a black and white movie, in an old-days establishment, the Huriya café-bar. This is Cairo. This is Rio. De Janeiro? the dreamy, young voice muses. No, Rio, the open-air Cairo cinema, in the middle of the day, empty except for a schoolgirl. The stuff of dreams, a city that gets under the skin, realer than what is not dreamt.
In the nightmare of Khan's Fuck this Film, the cityscape is an empty film set. Someone is running but getting nowhere. A film, a story about a camel in search of water is in the making -- or so the script goes. But what we are shown is an actor in his flat, frustrated with this foolish, quixotic enterprise, and then, with the director over a beer, ridiculing the concept, dismissing the camel, dismissing the film. Trendily self-reflexive and deconstructive of narrative, the film nonetheless makes moving sense. And, in spite of Khan's claim later on in the evening that as a film-maker he does not concern himself with such things as "the soul" or "the heart," at least one member of the audience -- grateful to have been granted by these films that rare kind of energy charge one gets when exposed to good art -- fondly remembered, as the taxi made its way through downtown Cairo's night streets, "The Heart" by Stephen Crane (1871-1900):
In the desert/ I saw a creature, naked, bestial,/ Who, squatting on the ground,/ Held his heart in his hands,/ And ate of it./ / I said, "Is it good, friend?"/ "It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;/ "But I like it/ Because it is bitter,/ And because it is my heart."
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