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"I make my films first for
myself. Then for my family. Then for Alexandria. Then for Egypt. And if the
Arab world likes them, ahlan wa sahlan [welcome]. And if the foreign
audience likes them--they are doubly welcome." --YOUSSEF CHAHINE.
- Idyllic Childhood Marred by
Tragedy
 The
Alexandria where Chahine was born on January 25, 1926, was a vibrant and
cosmopolitan city at the time. His family background reflected this: his
attorney father was of Lebanese heritage, while his mother was Greek. At
home, as in the rest of Alexandria, some five languages were spoken, but the
director has often joked that as with other Alexandrines, the Chahine's
failed to master any of them very well. Both Alexandria and Egypt's other
main city, Cairo, would later feature prominently in his films. "The
introvert is often associated with Cairo," noted Film Comment, "with its
narrow streets and cramped dwellings - while the extrovert is associated
with Alexandria. . . . [which] remains the golden city of Chahine's work, a
cosmopolitan Utopia where Europe and Africa peacefully coexist, where
Christians (Chahine's family was Roman Catholic), Jews, and Muslims could
once live together, providing a model for a now lost Middle Eastern harmony.
The image of the port, open to the world, becomes an image of acceptance and
synthesis."
The Chahine's were a middle-class family, and Chahine was educated at
private schools, including the elite Victoria College, Alexandria's
English-language institute. He was fascinated by theater and the performing
arts at an early age, and even began to stage shows at home. Tragedy struck
when he was nine years old, however. "I had made a creche, with candles, and
the paper caught fire," he recalled in an interview with Joan Dupont of the
International Herald Tribune. "I lied and said my older brother had done it.
A week later, my brother was dead of pneumonia."
- Spent Two Years in Los Angeles
In his teens, Chahine spent a year at Alexandria University, and then
convinced his parents to let him travel to Hollywood in order to study
acting. He spent the years between 1946 and 1948 at the Pasadena Playhouse
outside Los Angeles, California. When he returned, he found apprentice work
with an Italian documentary filmmaker, Gianni Vernuccio, and found another
Italian mentor in Alvisi Orfanelli, an influential figure in Egypt's cinema
history. The film industry in Chahine's country had a successful and storied
past by the time he began working in it. Since the 1930s Cairo had been
known as the Hollywood of the Middle East, and its studios annually produced
scores of films that were seen in theaters throughout the Arab world. It was
this tradition that Chahine entered when he made his first film, Baba Amine
(Father Amine), in 1950. His next one, Ibn el Nil (The Nile's Son), he took
to the 1951 Venice Film Festival, where a sudden storm caused festival-goers
to flee to his showing in droves - some in their bathing suits still - and
the fortuitous timing served to launch his career in earnest.
Chahine made three more films before casting an unknown actor, O mar
Sharif, in 1953's Sera'a fil Wadi (Struggle in the Valley). In 1958, his
reputation as one of the Arab world's most exciting new filmmakers was
sealed with the release of Bab el Hadid (Central Station). He took the lead
role for himself, as Kennawi, a lowly newspaper vendor at the train station
whose love for Hanouma, a co-worker, drives him to murder. His stories, he
believed, were common to any place and time. "[I]nspiration," he told
Fargeon in the UNESCO Courier article, "that can be found by observing
people - with a sympathetic eye. If you love other people, every story is
interesting. Everybody has a magnificent story somewhere inside them. The
important thing is to know how to listen to the story and then to tell it."
Chahine's works sometimes cast a critical eye on contemporary Egyptian
society. In 1964's Fajr Yum Jadid (Dawn of a New Day), "Chahine leads off
with a lengthy, largely plotless sequence set in the depths of night, at a
charity ball that powerfully suggests the decadent society gatherings of
Michelangelo Antonioni," noted Kehr in Film Comment, while ". . . the sad
frolics of Cairo's upper classes are witnessed by a chorus of orphans, the
ostensible beneficiaries of the evening[.]" Though these and other films of
his had a wide audience in the Arab world, they were virtually unknown in
the West until a renowned French writer, Jean-Louis Bory, began organizing
Chahine screenings in Paris. "It was a way of paying tribute to the work
being done in a country like Egypt, whose cinema was usually regarded with
condescension rather than admiration," Chahine remembered about this era in
the interview with Fargeon for the UNESCO Courier. "Many people in Europe
thought that all we could do was make light comedies - with belly dancing
scenes, obviously - though some of us were working hard and making more
worthwhile films, often on shoestring budgets."
He entered into voluntary exile in Lebanon and went
on to create what has been termed one of the best musical comedies of the
Arab cinema, "Bayya'al-khawatim/The Ring Seller" (1965). He followed with
the Lebanese-Egyptian-Spanish co-production "Rimal al-dhahab/Sands of Gold"
(1967), a remake of the bullfighting film "Blood and Sand" (1922 and 1941).
Delays in filming and the eventual box-office failure of "Sands of Gold"
caused the director to return to his native land.
After the Six Day War in 1967, Chahine was
selected to helm the first Soviet-Egyptian co-production, "Al-Nas f'il-Nil/People
of the Nile/Men and the Nile" (1968-1972), about the building of the Aswan
dam. Neither government was pleased with the final results and the film
underwent extensive editing before finally being released theatrically in
1972. In the interim, Chahine directed "Al-Ard/The Land/The Earth" (1969),
an ambitious adaptation of a popular novel that tied together several of the
director's favorite themes. By focusing on rural society in the 1930s, he
was able to reflect the various competing interests for the land as well as
draw modern parallels to contemporary Arab society. (The film was banned by
the Sadat government.) Chahine continued to criticize those in power with
the allegorical "al-Ikhtiyar/The Choice" (1970) and the overtly political
"al-'Usfur/The Sparrow" (1973), The former dealt with a writer who murders
his twin and assumes his identity (symbolizing the split between the
intelligentsia and the rest of Egyptian society) while the latter interwove
personal stories against the backdrop of the 1967 Six Day War. (It too was
banned.)
- Began Autobiographical Series
In the mid-1970s, Chahine suffered a heart attack, which forced him to
retreat from what had been an arduous work schedule; he used the time to
reexamine his career. When he returned, it was with the first in his
acclaimed autobiographical trilogy, Iskindria . . . Leh? (Alexandria . . .
 Why?),
in 1978, which won the special jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival that
year. The film is set during World War II and what would have been his
sixteenth year, when Alexandria was still the province of British colonial
authorities. According to an essay in International Dictionary of Films and
Filmmakers, Chahine's "film is peopled with English soldiers and Egyptian
patriots, aristocrats, and struggling bourgeoises, the enthusiastic young
and their disillusioned or corrupt elders. . . . His technique of
intercutting the action with scenes from Hollywood musicals and newsreel
footage from the Imperial War Museum in London is as successful as it is
audacious, and the transitions of mood are brilliantly handled."
Some of the charges of anti-Americanism in Chahine's films stem from scenes
like one in Alexandria . . . Why?, in which a young Egyptian filmmaking
hopeful, excitedly nearing New York City harbor on board a ship, sees the
Statue of Liberty - but then the camera pulls back to reveal a
film-within-a-film, and the mighty symbol is actually a slatternly actress
costumed as the Statue, with garish makeup and a salacious grin. She is
beckoning not the young Egyptian man, but rather a group of Hasidic Jews
from Europe.
Chahine's autobiographical saga continued with Hadota Misreya (An Egyptian
Story) in 1982, which borrows heavily from Bob Fosse's All That Jazz in its
dreamlike flashback sequences set during the midst of a middle-aged
lothario's heart operation. This, too, won a Berlin Film Festival prize. In
between, The third and final installment in his trilogy was Iskindiriah
Kaman Oue Kaman (Alexandria Again and Forever), which was released in 1990.
Chahine had written the screenplays for his most outstanding works, and in
the early 1990s began delving into themes touching upon more inflammatory
topics in his writing. Al-Mohager (The Emigrant) from 1994 is one such film,
which he co-wrote with Rafiq As-Sabban. The project was loosely inspired by
the biblical story of the prophet Joseph, and was a hit in Egypt for several
weeks before a court ordered it pulled from theaters. "A fundamentalist
group sued me and managed to convince the court that the film was
blasphemous," Chahine told Fargeon, the UNESCO Courier journalist. "I had
spent two years working on it and was very upset by the court's decision,
which I considered unacceptable and repellent. The greatest humiliation for
an artist is to feel gagged. I don't make films to hide them away."
- Denounced the "Black Wave"
From this point, Chahine began to take on even more provocative themes, best
exemplified in 1997's Al-Massir (Destiny). The story is set in Moorish Spain
of the twelfth century, a glorious era for Islam, and features one of the
medieval world's most illustrious figures, the philosopher Averroës. A
translator of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's works - which helped
preserve them for posterity - Averroës formulated his own theories which
predate d
Europe's Enlightenment by several centuries. Chahine's film is set during
the liberal reign of Averroës' patron, the Moorish caliph Al Mansour, whose
rule is threatened by a fanatical religious sect bent on exploiting Islam
for political purposes. It was an obvious message to those like the
fundamentalist Egyptian group that sued him for depicting a prophet on
screen, and with the court that agreed with it. Chahine spoke of these
contemporary political realities in a 1996 U.S. News & World Report
interview with Alan Cooperman, calling the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in
the Arab world "a black wave coming from the gulf," he asserted. "The
Egyptian has always been a very religious person, but at the same time he's
a lover of life - of art and music and films and theater."
Destiny premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, which also marked the
occasion of a special Lifetime Achievement Award for Chahine from the
prestigious cinema event. He was in good company: on other Cannes
milestones, the directors Orson Welles and Luchino Visconti had been
similarly honored for their bodies of work. Back in Egypt, however, Chahine
continued to battle a determined faction of Islamic conservatives who
objected to certain themes and images in his films. The entire Egyptian film
industry felt the impact of this new cultural tide, with the number of films
released from Cairo studios drastically reduced during the 1990s. "All my
projects are high risk, and I fight like mad. I spend 80 percent of my time
on politics, 20 percent making movies," he told Dupont in the International
Herald Tribune interview. "Raising money is politics; every penny I make
goes back into cinema. I can't afford to stop. And the government is trying
to kill cinema by taxing us. They care only about television."
In a post-9/11 world, charges of anti-Americanism were once again raised
against Chahine's works. His 2004 film, Alexandria, New York, was another
semi-autobiographical exploration, featuring as its plot an esteemed
Egyptian director who travels to New York City for the first time in several
years. Honored with his first American retrospective, the director is
crushed to learn that the half-American son he never knew he had wants
nothing to do with him because of his ethnicity. The film's conclusion,
wrote Deborah Young in Variety, "is uncompromising and underlines the film's
earnest plea . . . for more love and tolerance in the world; more thinkers
and poets, fewer armies and warriors. Chahine's sincerity is touching as
well as uncomfortable, forcing viewers to see the world from another
language, sensibility and point of view."
At age
81, Chahine has finished his 45th film Heya Fawda, that is expected to be
released in Egypt early 2008. The film has been selected at Venice Film
Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. In June of 2008, Chahine
was in a coma due to suffering a
brain haemorrhage. Chahine remained in the coma for month, until he passed
on in July 2008. He will be missed.
- Theater and Controversy
In 1992
Jacques Lassalle approached him to stage a piece of his choice for
Comédie-Française: Chahine chose to adapt Albert Camus' Caligula, which
proved hugely successful. The same year he started writing The Emigrant
(1994), a story inspired by the Biblical character of Joseph, son of Jacob.
This had long been a dream-project and he finally got to shoot it in 1994.
This film created a controversy in Egypt between the enlightened wing and
the fundamentalists who opposed the depiction of religious characters in
films. In 1997, 46 years and 5 invitations later, his work was acknowledged
at the Cannes Film Festival with a lifetime achievement award on the
occasion of the 50th anniversary of the festival. He is also credited with
discovering Omar Sharif, whose first starring role was in Chahine's film The
Blazing Sun (1954). He also provided Nadia Lutfi with a very early role as a
murder victim in Bab al-Hadid (Cairo Station).
Controversy has followed many of his movies. The Sparrow attacks Egyptian
corruption and blamed it for the defeat in the Six Day War. Chahine's
autobiographical series makes frequent and explicit reference to
bisexuality. Cairo Station, albeit a classic of Egyptian cinema, also
shocked viewers both by the sympathy with which a "fallen woman" is depicted
and by the violence with which she's killed. The Immigrant had received
major heat from the Arab public and the censorship committee due to the
stories resemblance to the biblical tale of Joseph.
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