“I haven’t the right to make films that people don’t understand or do not admit.”
“I’m deeply rooted in my own people. I keep to my own. It’s a feeling I’ve always had and will preserve. You must have national roots.”
Born: 25 January 1926, Alexandria, Egypt.
Died: 27 July 2008, Cairo, Egypt.
Directing career: 1950-2007.
Traits: Populist social realism; themes of Egyptian identity and history, deeply rooted in portraits of Egyptian political and social life; a desire to blend the mainstream genres of Arab cinema with more formally daring art cinema influences; an iconoclastic, often controversy-rousing, tendency to break taboos in his films.
Collaborators: Omar Sharif (actor), Faten Hamama (actress), Yahia Chahine (actor, Youssef’s brother), Khaled Youssef (screenwriter), Mahmoud el-Meliguy (actor), Farid Shawqy (actor), Mohsen Nasr (cinematographer).
Films reviewed:
The Blazing Sun (1954)
The Land (1969)
The Sparrow (1972)
1954
The Blazing Sun
Youssef Chahine’s 1954 classic The Blazing Sun (or, by its original Arabic title, ‘Conflict in the Valley’) seems on the face of it like a prestige Egyptian studio melodrama. The kind of tragic romance narrative that was the staple of the Egyptian film industry, only more beautifully photographed than most (on location in the Egyptian countryside and amid the ancient temples of Luxor) and with an impressive cast of stars (the star-crossed lovers are played by iconic actress Faten Hamama and her future husband the great Omar Sharif in his screen debut) and wonderful character actors (Zaki Rostom and Farid Shawqy as a villainous Pasha and his even more wicked nephew respectively). But there is plenty more to the story than that.
Chahine was an artist, an intellectual, a man who had the pulse of his beloved nation, and a great storyteller. So let me flesh out the context of The Blazing Sun by telling a story here. It begins in 1952. Well, it actually begins much earlier but every story has to start somewhere so let us start there. The King of Egypt, King Farouk, a rotund playboy who was politically incompetent and corrupt, has just been ousted by a coup, a revolution set in motion by a group of military leaders known as the ‘Free Officers’. This is a huge moment. The Egyptian monarchy had never succeeded in shaking off the stranglehold of British colonial power over the country. After decades and centuries of British occupation, of French imperialistic invasions, of Ottoman rule, of popular protests and demonstrations which came to too little, here at last came the symbolic foundation of an independent Egypt, a republic ready to stand on its own two feet.
The Free Officers sought to change things, to redistribute the wealth which had been so unjustly distributed ever since Ottoman days, to provide free education for all and modernise the country. They spoke of Arab nationalism, a much-needed boon for Egyptians and Arabs everywhere after the crushing defeat of the 1st Arab-Israeli War just a few years earlier in 1948. Among the Free Officers, one in particular became the natural leader and the President of the new Egyptian republic, a tall charismatic Colonel who had fought in 1948. His name was Gamal Abdel-Nasser. It is difficult to underestimate the optimism and idealistic pride he injected into the Arab people in those days. By 1954, for artists like Youssef Chahine, Nasser represented hope for change and reform, a better, prouder and fairer Egypt.
It is thanks to this context that The Blazing Sun is not quite like any melodrama made before. The film shows how Chahine was responding to these big changes, and becoming more implicated in social affairs. Omar Sharif’s character, Ahmed, is the son of a worker, a loyal employee on a sugar plantation owned by a Pasha, a rich landowner. Ahmed is lower-class, but he has just returned from studying agricultural engineering in college in Cairo. Ahmed brings with him new techniques that help to improve the crops of the impoverished farmers who live around the Pasha’s land. Already we have hope in progress, in modernity, in education. Hope in the lot of the poor rural peasants improving. In social mobility. Cue Faten Hamama’s character, the beautiful and kind-hearted daughter of that rich and powerful Pasha, who despite the class barriers loves Ahmed. This cross-class romance is not something that could even have been screened before the 1952 revolution.
But then, something the Pasha cannot abide happens. The sugar-buying companies deem that the best sugar crop that year is not the Pasha’s, but the local farmers’, thanks to Ahmed’s advice, and it is they who will receive the highest price for their crops. The Pasha’s own crops have to settle for a lower price. Greedy and willing to do anything to maintain his privilege, the Pasha is in many ways a hark back to King Farouk. Here, though, he is emboldened by his scheming nephew Riad, who is willing to act out his worst machinations of deliberately flooding the peasants’ crops, framing Ahmed’s father, and even committing murder. And so Chahine with this film opened a new era in his career, making not just another generic melodrama but one that is also commenting on the issues of the day.
The film was made post-revolution, but its story takes place pre-revolution (in 1951 as the courtroom scenes reveal). This serves to be both optimistic about the new era but also to warn against complacency. The Blazing Sun shows that positive change, meritocracy and even conciliation of the classes are all possible, but for them to be enabled will take some effort, some social reforms, some land & wealth redistribution. Why? Because the Pasha and his ilk will do whatever it takes to keep their power. “We must always remain the masters,” he admits in a telling speech late on in the film, when he confesses to his shocked daughter, “I did it all for you, so that my wealth can stay in your hands and even increase”. Clearly, Chahine is hoping that Nasser’s then-new regime will provide the necessary reform, making the Pasha and the exploitative corruption of his elite a thing of the past. Chahine’s hopes, as you probably well know, would later turn out to have been too idealistic and would morph into disillusionment. But that is another story, for another Chahine film. (July 2023)
1969
The Land
Egypt and Egyptians have a sacred relation to water, especially that of the Nile, and to earth, provider of the crops that has sustained this land for thousands of years. With his 1969 film The Land Youssef Chahine, patron saint of Egyptian cinema, makes a stirring film about that sacred bond and the dangers that threaten it, perhaps having already abolished it.
It is set in the Egypt of the 1930s. A village of farmers and peasants on the Nile delta, whose land is in the hands of a select elite few (here represented by their corrupt power-hungry mayor and the arrogant local governor, Mahmoud Bey, an aristocratic remnant of the Ottoman days who plans to build a railroad over the villagers’ homes and farms), have their allocated days of irrigation cut down from 10 to 5 days, when even 10 days of watering their crops had barely been enough to eke out subsistence. The overwhelming majority of Egyptians at this time were peasants like this representative community of villagers, but theirs is a way of life being strangled by those in power. Finally, the more determined among them, notably the effective village elder Abu Suelem and the young warrior-like Abdel Hadi, take it upon themselves to fight back against oppression and defend their rights and their land, in any way they can, even if (as the chorus of the song book-ending the movie warns us) it will have to be watered with blood.
This period of Egyptian history was one where politically a single issue towered over all others: gaining full independence and autonomy from the British, who had been a colonial presence in Egypt since 1882. Urban intellectuals, students and workers alike all engaged in an active political life, typically involving protests and demonstrations, against both the British and the monarchy, another leftover from the days of Ottoman rule. The nationalist Wafd party, whose primary political raison-d’etre was to seek independence (something they actually failed in but that is another story and another Chahine film), was the heartbeat of the nation in the 1930s.
This led to the neglect of internal social matters, such as the sad but unsurprising truth that the large majority of the land was in the hands of a tiny minority of elites, mainly those once in favour with the Ottoman rulers who offered land as private property to their relatives and acolytes in the 19th century. The inequality only worsened during the inter-war economic depression and the landowners got richer while the landless got poorer. Despite the active political life of urban Egyptians, not even the supposedly progressive Wafd party ever pushed for any kind of land reform, or policies to narrow the economic gap — despite the Egyptian economy being heavily dependent on the export of cotton which the peasants provided. The rural peasants and farmers, the community we see in Chahine’s film, were left high and dry, condemned to poverty, and marginalised from the political life of the nation, which had other dice to throw.
The film deftly illustrates this marginalisation in one scene. The village teacher, a bookish, slightly cowardly and naive fellow known as Mohammed Effendi, believes he can convince the authorities to revoke the decree cutting the days of irrigation down to 5. He makes the long trip to Cairo in order to plea his case, and as it happens he will only get betrayed and used as a pawn by the wily Mahmoud Bey. But the scenes of his brief interlude to the heart of Cairo, where he is a fish out of water amid the street protests against the British protectorate, highlight how forgotten the cause of the peasants was. The chaotic political hotbed of the time left no room for them. Mohammed Effendi comes to Cairo, witnesses and is shaken by a protest he doesn’t fully comprehend, and then leaves again, inept and totally impotent in helping his village’s cause. The villagers are simply left out of this critical period of Egyptian history and Chahine shows that, not just by the way they are exploited, but furthermore in the irony that Abu Suelem, alongside other village elders, previously fought the British in the 1919 revolution. Now they are neglected, oppressed, and relegated to fighting a losing battle against capital and progress, industrialisation and greed, fighting armed cavalry police with their antiquated farming tools.
Chahine was a bard of Egypt and Egyptian culture. The sacred bond the peasants felt to the land is one he himself feels to those peasants. This is in many ways a eulogy to that way of life, the traditional communities that once shaped and formed Egypt, produced its food and its main export, before being cast aside in the name of supposed better plans. Chahine gives us a portrait of an entire community, a collective chorus with many different voices and characters. In the rebellion attempt, this group at least come together, unify and make a stand, even if the death knell is sounding for them and their way of life.
All this is tinged with Chahine’s unpretentious and often melodramatic style. He was an artist of and for the people, his formative years coming in the era of the golden age of classical Egyptian melodramas, and he remained a professional filmmaker determined to reach his audience. Hence the acting and emotions in his film are not exactly on the side of more rarefied art-house offerings. All the better for it, Chahine’s poem to the bygone peasantry and the land comes through loud and clear, and both Egyptian and World cinema are richer with him and his work in it. (April 2017)
1972
The Sparrow (Youssef Chahine, 1972)
Amid his melodramas, autobiographical films, and allegorical-historical epics, Youssef Chahine’s The Sparrow stands out as a film trying something quite unique: to comment almost directly on very recent history. Made in 1972, it is a film looking back, and grappling with, the events around the Six Day War of 1967. This was a war in which the combined Arab forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan slumped to a crushing military defeat to Israel in just six days. This cataclysmic humiliation was an era-defining moment. And yet, nobody in Egypt had seen it coming. Egyptians had taken it for granted that they would overpower Israel, small and surrounded. Five years on, they still could barely comprehend it. Five years is hardly enough to gauge the lasting legacy of this event’s reverberations, nor it is much of a vantage point to fully grasp the big picture of how and why it happened. Chahine was taking on a challenge that fiction cinema at that time had rarely attempted.
Films in the ‘present tense’
Even looking at 21st century cinematic attempts to dramatise big events in the process of being historicised, events still being digested by historians and commentators, what we find is a mixed bag. The Social Network (2010), David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s character study of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is one that has aged relatively well, just as its subject has grown in dominance and controversy (in some ways the film is prophetic about Big Data and its control over our lives). But you also have biopics of questionable necessity about Steve Jobs (two of them no less), the Wikileaks saga (Assange played by Benedict Cumberbatch), or the Brexit campaign (Dominic Cummings played by Benedict Cumberbatch). You have Oliver Stone’s cliché-ridden Snowden biopic (better to watch Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour with all the immediacy of history actually happening, exactly what fiction cinema’s past tense cannot offer!). These films do little to better understand the events they fictionalise. They mostly rely on audiences getting a kick out of seeing famous people and their lives re-enacted onscreen (see my article on the appeal of biopics), without distilling the context into a clearer picture. What good is the past if we are not learning lessons from it? Even Michael Winterbottom’s This England, a panoramic fly-on-the-wall re-living of the Covid lockdown and the British government’s handling of it, with its six-hour runtime, only seems to repeat what the UK lived through rather than crystallise some wider conclusions from the historical tea leaves.
An Egyptian panorama
Chahine is more ambitious than those examples, perhaps biting more than he can chew in just one feature film, but using his uncanny radar for capturing the zeitgeist in Egypt and drawing on the research and interviews he carried out around the country. He understood that a conventional narrative would not work for his ambitions here, and The Sparrow hence constitutes a major step in his artistic evolution. Crucially, Chahine does not show any of the war itself. His film is set while the war is happening but focuses on civilian life. He goes for an ensemble narrative, taking in a wide range of different characters, each from a different sphere of Egyptian life, each representing a different issue in Egyptian society. He weaves them together, makes all his characters intersect, gives all of their sub-plots screentime, but quite deliberately leaves some of these sub-plots suspended, leading nowhere, because the bigger point is what happens after six days when defeat is announced. This suspended the whole of national life, and formed a scar in the Egyptian psyche.
The mysterious Abu Khadr…
While in the background the TV propaganda tells the nation that Egypt is handily winning the war (it was not), Chahine plays expertly with narrative focus. Just like we do not see any of the war, we also do not see the central character, around whom all the others revolve. This is a man called Abu Khadr, a wealthy and nefarious gangster who has been exploiting a small town’s factory. It was supposed to bring in thousands of jobs but was never finished and now Abu Khadr is dismantling its expensive machinery for personal profit. We never see this Abu Khadr in the film, partly again because the point of the film is bigger than one criminal, but also because the criminality goes way beyond one man. The trail of corruption leads through every level of society, all the way to the top of the political system. Abu Khadr comes to stand in for all the ills of Egypt and they spread out like a web as wide-ranging as the panoramic narrative of The Sparrow itself.
Youssef, the truth-seeking journalist
So Abu Khadr is a narrative device, a way to make the movie feel like an investigative conspiracy thriller, but really for Chahine just a pretext to fit in his many characters and draw lessons from them. We are introduced to a journalist (his name is Youssef which probably gives a clue that he is the character Chahine most identifies with), reporting on Abu Khadr’s shady dealings and following criminal trails that lead to rich industrialists and politicians. His steadfast commitment to digging up the truth and sharing it with the public (“even if I have to plaster it on the walls myself” as he says at one point) represents a struggle for democracy and free press in Egypt which still goes on now post-Arab Spring ‘revolutions’ and its legacies. How can a country win a war, how can a country make its people proud, Chahine is asking, when it cannot even tell its people the truth?
Raouf, policeman and lover
Then there is Raouf, a police officer whose brother has just gone to fight in the war (the film’s fragmented flashforwards will show us at one point that the brother is killed in the fighting), and who is charged with hunting down Abu Khadr. But Chahine is less interested in showing Raouf’s police duties than in his budding romance with a modern young woman, Fatima, or in filming his body with a sensual, homo-erotic gaze. Here Chahine is moving beyond merely implicating the whole of Egypt’s elites in widespread corruption, to also diagnose the cultural ills he perceives. A nation where young people cannot be free to love is not the promised modernity he was hoping for two decades earlier when Nasser got into power.
Sheikh Ahmed, traditional masculinity in crisis
Cultural critique is also the heart of the portrayal of Sheikh Ahmed’s character, the third man in search of Abu Khadr, this time for reasons of personal vendetta. Sheikh Ahmed’s brother was killed on the orders of Abu Khadr, and he has turned into a vengeance-obsessed emotional wreck ever since. When he goes on a nocturnal mission to find and kill Abu Khadr armed with just his sword and his guts, the wife of Sheikh Ahmed hands him in to the police (Raouf being the local inspector) because, as she puts it, she would rather see him alive in prison than killed by Abu Khadr’s men. Ahmed only sees this as a blow to his male pride: outwitted and denounced by a woman, what ignominy. Stubborn ideas of masculinity are also to blame in Chahine’s far-reaching auto-criticism of Egyptian society.
Egyptian youth, the ‘sparrows’
To provide a dash of comic relief, there is also a young village boy, the type of cheeky rapscallion who often recurs in Chahine’s films. He is determined to hitch a ride by himself from his village all the way to Cairo, and tries to sneak into Raouf’s jeep, only to be caught and lied to by the adults several times. Yet the boy is far too resourceful to ever be fully outfoxed. In many ways, he is the ‘sparrow’ of the title, the representative of the untarnished potential and future of Egypt, who has only been lied to and let down again and again by those higher up. This works on many levels, for what is the reason this lad is so desperate to get to Cairo in the first place? His friend is gravely injured and he has been told that dust from the grounds of the holy Al Azhar mosque in the capital are sure to cure him… Can the rural peasants making up so much of Egypt’s population move forward with traditions and superstitious ideas instead of modern medicine? Can this young ‘sparrow’, even for all his energy and wit, move forward without education?
Bahiyya, ‘Mother Egypt’ herself
Finally, there is the most symbolic character of all, Bahiyya, the mother of Fatima. A character full of life, of smiles, liked by every other character in the film. Her presence onscreen is always accompanied by folk songs comparing Bahiyya to the Motherland itself. No mistaking here: for Chahine the character of Bahiyya is the very spirit of Egypt. This is only reinforced in the film’s iconic ending. The Sparrow was banned in Egypt, perhaps superficially for the remarkable Freudian sex scene between Raouf and Fatima, but more likely for its negative diagnosis of problems within every aspect of Egyptian society. Yet, this iconic final sequence has such a legacy that any Arab cinephile would know it even today. After the TV announcement announcing the defeat, which comes as a total shock to everyone watching, followed immediately by Nasser’s resignation from political life, Bahiyya viscerally rejects the announcement, her entire body taken over by an impulse, a populist impulse to run into the streets, to resist, to shout, to refuse defeat, to promise to keep fighting. Eventually, crowds follow her, and she reminds us of the Liberty leading the People in Delacroix’s painting, but it is tragically all in vain, all is already lost, the war, the territories to Israel, the idealism & pride brought by Nasser’s rule, the hopes of Pan-Arab strength and unity… It too is all lost. Not even the strength and purity of Bahiyya’s spirit can resuscitate any of it. Bahiyya has been betrayed and Chahine has given us a two-hour treatise up to that point, outlining just some of the reasons why.
Past and present rhymes
The media’s filtered propagandistic announcements over the first 5 days, claiming that the war is being won, completely blindsided the populace. Once the realisation of defeat hits them so suddenly, and after such a brief resistance, in a way this speaks to a precursor of fake news, the lack of democracy, of free press, of truth. It is impossible to re-watch The Sparrow today, with not 5 years distance but more than 50, and not think ruefully of how the same histories rhyme with each other. Impossible to not think of the Arab Spring or the 2013 Egyptian protests, of the same battles for democracy, or of a documentary like The Square (2013) the makers of which no doubt had absorbed Chahine’s The Sparrow and its lessons when telling their story of a more recent popular betrayal. The fights go on, but as Chahine was already teaching us half a century ago, the corrupt elites are not only lying to the people if they think they can go on forever like this, they are lying to themselves. (August 2023)
Cinescope 
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