Mad about something

Mohamed El-Qalyoubi:
Mad about something
Battles and triumphs of the lone cavalier
Profile by Youssef Rakha
Now in their 50s, champions of the 1968 student movement may be a little lacklustre, a little isolated, a little out of fashion. But their tremendous capacity for situationist engagement has not receded. In a world that has consistently maimed and twisted the values closest to their hearts, they seek out an active and consistent role: one that, however much it departs from the socialist blueprints on which they modelled their lives, does not compromise their position. In the somewhat hackneyed expression of younger commentators, they are still "trying to do something." And however paradoxical their approach (despite their staunchly oppositional outlook, for example, many of them are employed in government institutions) sometimes they win their spurs.
Mohamed El-Qalyoubi -- director, critic and professor -- is one such champion. And in terms of his physical appearance, at least, he fits the bill exactly. Mustachioed, squat, jittery and intense: he buzzes nonchalantly about the Cinema Institute, fiddling with his mobile phone, never stopping to talk to anyone and making only the most occasional and perfunctory gestures of recognition. "He does not have an office," the photographer and I were told when we asked a passing acquaintance where to find him. The purely bureaucratic but indelibly painful process of obtaining an entry permit -- at the gate and in a first-floor office -- had already exhausted the two of us, and we stood around helplessly looking for guidance. Once the low- rank policeman who greeted us at the entrance departed, we were addressed by bureaucrat after bureaucrat, taken to office after office, until finally we were positioned in the directors' chamber adjacent to three unwelcoming teacher- filmmakers, still without our rightful copy of the permit.
"I have never been office-bound," El-Qalyoubi confirms as he briskly leads us to a brighter chamber, where a good photo could be more forthcoming. "When they told me to come and head the National Centre for Cinema" -- a position from which he has recently been relieved -- "my first instinct was to say no, because I am not used to offices and desks and cabinets. I like to move about as I please." Weeks ago, he announced his delight at being disencumbered of his administrative duties at the Centre: a happy development, he insisted, in that it freed up time for directing and teaching. He accepted the position, he seems to be saying, merely as a gesture of goodwill. "Many director friends of mine were associated with the Centre, and they thought it might be a good thing if it was headed by somebody who's involved in the ins and outs of filmmaking. So I was made to sit at a desk. I was tamed," El-Qalyoubi intones, having plopped himself on a chair, still fidgeting, "just like a wild horse." Yet his time at the Centre was far from idle.
"First we created an artistic department to which projects would be submitted," he explains, "and we would choose among these projects. This gave directors and producers an incentive to work. I was responsible for the films: narrative and experimental and animation films, shorts shot on 35mm film, on video and on regular cinematic tape. The Centre also functioned as an information clearinghouse, conducting exhibitions abroad and preserving the cinematic heritage. A lot of excellent work was done in that short period. We brought over creative Institute graduates to work with us; if you weren't creative you had no chance. We invited all the best filmmakers to participate: our slogan was 'Creators from all generations.' We didn't want any idle or unproductive people. And compared to the five films produced at the Centre in 1999," El- Qalyoubi concludes his monologue, "35 films were produced in 2000. Many of them were excellent; and six of these won awards at the National Festival for Cinema. It was unprecedented."
Of his time at the Centre, too, El-Qalyoubi remembers two of "the greatest [judicial] battles in the history of Egyptian cinema." One concerned the number of copies of foreign films to be procured by Egyptian distributors; the other -- more resounding -- related to the purchase of the original negatives of Egyptian films by multinationals and monopolies. In both cases, El- Qalyoubi insists, the very existence of the local industry was at stake. "I felt I had to enter these battles. People were talking about all these new venues being opened and the need for films to be screened there, but it was as if you were opening a supermarket to be stocked entirely with imported products: not enough production was going on to support these venues. And if these laws were actually passed, I thought, this would mean the end of Egyptian cinema. The issue went as far as the People's Assembly, and the law governing the number of copies of foreign films to be imported was finally revoked. Cinema is a strategic industry," El-Qalyoubi adds. "One cannot leave it unprotected. It comprises the audio- visual memory of the whole nation."
He is currently working on a feature film based on a number of stories by the contemporaneous writer Mohamed El-Bisati, having completed a 52-minute documentary on Rose El-Youssef, actress and founder of the celebrated press institution that continues to bear her name.
***
His role at the Centre aside, El- Qalyoubi's entire life seems to have been beset by just such battles. From the time of his birth in Shubra in 1943 -- to "a family within the upper echelons of the middle class" -- until he joined the ranks of the student movement, the process of discovering a vocation and acquiring a political orientation involved many and various struggles. As a secondary school student he fancied himself "a world-class playwright," making connections with the likes of director Nabil El-Alfi and, later, editor Abdel-Fattah El-Gamal. "Miraculously," he says, his first play was performed at the Mohamed Farid Theatre. The procedure, he remembers, was painfully complicated. "I had a baby face and didn't look old enough to be convincing, so whenever I submitted a piece of writing it wasn't taken seriously." At the gate of the Mohamed Farid Theatre, for example, "the bawwab was very gruff to me. But when he discovered I had written the play being performed inside, he let me in immediately. I found Nabil El-Alfi with [actress] Sanaa Gamil on the stage. He began to explain to me that, in order to be a successful playwright, one had to remain close to the stage." El-Qalyoubi was 17 and had only just enrolled in Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering. He had not made any career decisions at this point; engineering simply was "the most prestigious option."
As an engineering student, he took little interest in the subjects he studied. But he undertook many extracurricular activities, at various points working as assistant to theatre director Abdel- Moneim Madbouli, producing an opposition paper and founding an acting group. Once, he recalls, he failed a subject each semester and had to repeat the whole year: capitalising on the free time that thus became available, he took to going to the cinema, watching the same films over and over from morning to evening.
Summer internship programmes provided him with the opportunity to tour Europe, where he worked at any number of jobs, discovered the arts, and came in contact with "the greatest filmmakers in the world" for the first time. He visited museums, lounged in bars and figured in tempestuous love stories. In Germany, he worked backstage with an experimental theatre company, Das Klein Zeommer, acquiring a large suitcase of books. "I would base myself in Germany and work for a while, then I would travel until my money ran out, returning to Germany to take up another job." The experience brought him face to face with "the utterly horrible vicious circle of life in capitalist Europe," shifting the emphasis from existentialism -- the sine qua non of young intellectuals -- to Marxism. Love of the cinema had already taken root. "I joined a group of Italians and entered Italy without a visa, and before too long I was on a ship heading for Alexandria, with the intention to give up engineering and study cinema."
On his return he discovered that, in order to join the Cinema Institute, one had to have completed a university course -- a regulation that held fast for only two years. He took up his political cause with a vengeance, pursuing various battles until he graduated in the mid-1960s. The student movement aside, he embarked on his career as a film critic and fought in the October War in 1973. "At this time, Third World cinema was all the rage, and the milieu brimmed with revolutionary and anti-fascist ideas, to which Brecht and the French New Wave directors and others added their contributions." In 1976 his graduation project -- a silent critique of fascism conceived and executed in this context -- made it to the Ober Hausen Festival and won many awards: the end of one battle.
In the framework of Kuttab Al-Ghad (Writers of the Future), a group of writers that set out to attack novelist Youssef El-Siba'i's Ministry of Culture and its "frivolous and uncultured" practices, El-Qalyoubi joined the so-called "New Left" and, while filming his graduation project, was arrested, along with an impressive array of left-wing luminaries (Ahmed Fouad Negm, Salah Eissa, Ibrahim Mansour, Ezzeddin Naguib and many others). The charge: "the strangest indictment in the history of humanity" -- self- expression. Three months later he was released; and at the end of 1979, Camp David notwithstanding, he received a PhD grant to Moscow, stationing himself in what was by then a most unlikely cultural capital until 1986.
El-Qalyoubi remembers these years as "the most fertile period" of his life. It yielded both "important friendships" with Egyptian and Arab filmmakers and encounters with "some of the most important filmmakers and arts figures in the world." The period is documented in a collection of letters by himself and Said Eissa addressed to Samir Farid, Rasa'il Moscow (The Moscow Letters). While composing his "extremely difficult" thesis ("national transformation and its reflection in the construction and genesis of film in Egypt"), he worked on short films, collaborated with major directors and immersed himself in the arts, resuming his habit of touring Europe. "I read a lot, wrote a lot, moved a lot: everything was in excess. I developed a true relationship with the cinema, becoming aware of what was happening all over the world." On his return he was appointed professor at the Cinema Institute, the one post that he has kept through the years.
This latter battle won, El-Qalyoubi was finally in a position to launch his career as a filmmaker. "Many accused me of madness when I first raised the issue of reviewing the history of Egyptian cinema," he explains, "but I was almost certain that Egyptian films had been made long before the accepted dates." In a 1978 article and a 1985 lecture, El-Qalyoubi had contended that the first Egyptian to make films was the allegedly legendary Mohamed Bayoumi, and in 1987 he determined to prove his point. "Alexandria's population amounted to four million, and the information we had indicated that Mohamed Bayoumi was from Alexandria. Somebody there must know him, I thought. So I moved there and began my search." El-Qalyoubi eventually located Bayoumi's granddaughter, who promised to put him in contact with her mother. "I was thinking we would find journals or pictures -- any proof of his existence and maybe of the fact that he made films some 20 years before the accepted date." When he found Bayoumi's films in their rusty containers, stored in an abandoned corner of his daughter's house, therefore, "it was a historical moment, a magic moment, a moment of truth."
It took another string of battles to establish the existence of and restore the negatives, procure funding for a documentary to be made about them and complete "the first archaeological research project in Egyptian cinema." Two years of interminable hard work yielded Mohamed Bayoumi, El-Qalyoubi's epoch-making documentary and the winner of a gold medal at the Damascus Festival. In 1992 Thalatha Alal-Tariq (Three on the Road), his first full-length feature, was poorly received, its quality deemed too low for the Cairo Film Festival. The film had been beset by censorial troubles, and now El-Qalyoubi went through "the worst two months" of his life. An unexpected call from the Rotterdam Festival administration soon cheered him up, however, and in 1993 Thalatha Alal-Tariq made an astounding impression in the Netherlands. The film was finally released in Egypt, and contrary to all expectations lasted 23 weeks. In 1994 it won an award at the Biennale of Arab Cinema in Paris, and as El-Qalyoubi's reputation gained in prominence, it became possible to commence work on his second collaboration with actor Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz, Al-Bahr Biyedhak Leih (Why Does the Sea Laugh?). Completed quickly, it won the Naguib Mahfouz Award in the 1994 Cairo Film Festival. Triumphs were already accumulating, but El-Qalyoubi was not about to stop battling for dear life.
***
El-Qalyoubi's remarkable loquacity has kept us after the Institute's closing hour, and one wonders how all these narratives can be summarised or formulated. Only a precious few minutes are left to touch his teaching career and his private life. About the latter: "I have an ordinary married life: my current wife is a Russian literary critic who travels to and fro, my son has just completed his secondary education and wants to study Japanese at Cairo University. My life is divided among three apartments: one in Medinat Nasr, one on Pyramids Road (near the Cinema Institute) and one in Alexandria."
As for the former, "I like to teach, because it makes you feel like you're leading young people into unfamiliar places and confirms the idea of continuity from one generation to the next. But my idea has always been to create a rebellious artist. I never had a role model and I expect my students to be the same. Because it is only through transcending the past that we can achieve anything. It is this that I've consistently promoted."
As we leave the building, his eyes beam again. "Come," he commands, moving briskly ahead. "I want to show you something." At the gate the policeman who let us in is still there. Struggling to keep pace with El-Qalyoubi, we grunt our good- byes at him, and in the scorching sun walk on until we reach El-Qalyoubi's car. With childlike enthusiasm, he opens the boot, extracting a handful of large albums containing colour stills from the movie he has been working on. "I'll show you some good photography," he says.
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