Egyptian National Cinema

February 10, 2008

Today I got back from a weekend trip to Bjorklunden in Door County, Wisconsin, where Lawrence University has a retreat. It was the first annual Cairo Film Fest! It was no Sundance, but I am hoping that every year a subset of my Cairo class will be able to spend one weekend during the term watching films made in Egypt. By that I mean not just international films set in Egypt, but films made by Egyptians for Egyptians.

We saw the recently made Yacoubian Building (2006), but the other two films were from the early 60s, the tail end of the golden age of Egyptian cinema. I have a hard time calling these films "art".. they have an obvious popular appeal and engage in little if any questioning of the audience's assumptions. But that does not mean they have nothing important to say about Egyptian culture and society.

Contemporary international films are made for an international audience, mirroring the diverse sources of funding that appear in the opening credits of a film. A film that included scenes from Egypt could conceivably portray people and places in a realistic manner, but it would say little about the way Egyptians see and understand themselves. On the other hand the generic films of a national cinema manage to capture these internal values quite well. Repeated scenes and character types are tremendously insightful with respect to the self-definition of a society.

To some extent my line of thinking here mirrors my earlier thoughts about the importance of popularity in interpreting a work. We could say that national cinema is an institution (loosely defined) that allows for the development of a shorthand manner of representing a society. A single popular comic strip (like Peanuts) could yield insight into a society, but a succession of Sunday comic sections from a widely circulated newspaper would go even further in defining a range of moods and attitudes. A national film industry functions sort of like that Sunday comic section.. that is, it provides a context for understanding individual works. It is the water in which every work must swim.

The recent New York Review of Books has an article on the Polish film Katyn. Anne Applebaum explains the director Andrzej Wajda's view of national cinema:

...Wajda seems to be saying something rather different about the need for a national cinema. By making Katyn he wanted to create something that would get Poles to talk to one another, to reflect upon common experiences, to define common values, to admire similar virtues, to forge a civil society out of an anonymous crowd. Katyn is deliberately intended to inspire patriotism, in the most positive sense of the word.

Egyptian cinema does not rise to the level of a national cinema like that of Poland (various reasons for that). But in classic Egyptian cinema the geographical and political references are much more narrow than would be the case if these films had a real international audience. As is evident in the passage cited above, a national cinema is valuable for its ability to help create a civil society by means of a shared outlook on the world. That shared outlook is what we can get at by watching the repetitive scenes and characters that take shape in the inevitable genres that develop in the midst of large scale production of popular films. The elements that make films "popular" instead of "art" are often the most insightful when it comes to interpreting a social system.