A few weeks ago, Al Ahram’s esteemed critic Nader Adly published a series of articles about the celebration of the centennial of Egyptian cinema. On June 20, more publications featured articles marking the anniversary, but the Ministry of Culture did not issue any statements or plan any major celebration.
Last Monday, the Center of Socialist Studies organized a small event to commemorate the occasion, which ultimately evolved into a contentious discussion about the validity of the entire event.
The evening started with a screening of three films by the first Egyptian movie director Mohammed Bayoumi, whose films had been missing for more than 50 years. Most film professionals were not familiar with his body of work. By the late 1980s, Mohamed Kamel El-Qalyoubi, the famous film historian and filmmaker stumbled upon Bayoumi s name in old film journals and ragged text books. For two years, El-Qalyoubi and two assistants moved to Alexandria in a quest to unearth any information about Bayoumi from the four million people who might have had some kind of connection to him.
In 1989, El-Qalyoubi found his granddaughter who, had stored loads of film stocks by her grandfather in the attic. After a few years of heavy restoration, which was still incapable of hiding the detrimental effects of time, Bayoumi s films were screened in the mid-nineties.
In 1995, his first feature narrative, Barsoum Yabhas an Wazeefa (Barsoum Looks for a Job), was chosen as the opening film in a celebration held in Paris commemorating the centennial of cinema.
Technically, the style of filmmaking is quite elementary in comparison to the foreign silent films of that era. The camera is static and each scene is shot from one fixed angle. Panning (horizontal movement of the camera) is introduced, to a small extent, in Barsoum.
Like the early films of the Lumiere brothers and Edison, the fascinating aspect of Bayoumi s films lies in the details behind the documented life of that era.
Amoun Film magazine contains intriguing glimpses and small annotations about Egyptian life circa the late 1920s. The public reception marking the return of Saad Zaghloul from exile, for example, does not show a single woman among the hundreds of men waiting to greet the patriotic leader. Footage of the funerals of the Ottoman and English Pashas were accompanied by words mourning the loss of figures described in history books as crooks and traitors. The reception held for El Nahas Pasha s homecoming signals the sense of nationalism prevalent at the time.
Bayoumi s 1923 first short feature follows Barsoum (Abdel-Hamid), an unemployed Coptic Christian, and Sheikh Metwalli (Bishara Wakim), his Muslim friend, as they roam the streets of Cairo looking for a job, battling hunger and poverty. Despite its heavy subject, the film is with approached with slapstick, Chaplinesque attitude. Still, it manages to subtly highlight the post 1919 compassion and national unity between Muslims and Christians.
Although Laylat El-Omr (The Night of a Lifetime) is less successful, it is historically significant because it shows that Amina Mohamed, the female star of the film, was in fact the first Egyptian actress (theater siren Aziza Ameer was always thought to have been Egypt s first female screen actor). Furthermore, the film presents the first use of silhouetted images in Egyptian cinema.
El-Qalyoubi, critic Safaa El-Leithi, and other film scholars argue that the true birth of Egyptian cinema took place in 1923 with Bayoumi’s short, non-fiction features. The Khedive s Visit to the Aboul Abbas Mosque, the proclaimed 1907 first film shot in Egypt, was actually produced and filmed by Aziz and Dorris, Ottoman and Italian businessmen who owned a successful chain of stores in Alexandria. The subsequent, pre-Bayoumi films were created by an Italian production company that soon went out of business.
These first films were the product of colonialism, El-Qalyoub said. Besides, no one has watched ‘The Khedive s Visit’ and those other films. I doubt that they even exist.
Through his extensive studies, El-Qalyoubi discovered that a large part of Egypt s film history is fabricated. Conflicts between some critics and stars, lack of scientific documentations and corrupt bureaucracy are some of the reasons that led to the distortion of the country s cinematic history.
We have no sense of memory and we re big liars, El-Qalyoubi added. We re too untruthful that when the actual truth is revealed, we don t know whether to believe it or not.
El-Qalyoubi reckons that the 100th anniversary fuzz is simply an egotistical attempt by Egyptian intellectuals to prove that Egypt possesses a cinematic history as old as the US, France, Italy and other major players in the industry. According to the Oxford History of World Cinema, even if Egyptian cinema dates back to 1907, it is still behind the US, Europe and Asia, where film production began in 1902.
El-Qalyoubi concluded his speech by describing working in Egyptian film history frustrating, difficult and disgusting. After several lawsuits and complaints filed against him for trying to empirically rectify these falsehoods, El-Qalyoubi decided to abandon this field until further notice.
