CHANGES IN EGYPTIAN SOCIETY AS SEEN TRHOUGH EGYPTIAN FILMS

Lecture by YOUSRY MANSOUR
With screening of scenes from various Egyptian Movies

Organised by Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

Date: Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Time: 04:00 pm - 06:00 pm
Venue: Conference Room
Middle East Institute
National University of Singapore
Bukit Timah Campus

Egypt has undergone immense changes over the last fifty years, and in the last three decades alone, the country’s social and political profile has changed beyond all recognition. Today, Egypt has 26 political parties and over 500 licensed newspapers, when thirty years ago, it had only three parties and less than twenty licensed newspapers. With over 70 million people, Egypt is the largest Arab country; it is correct to say that there is one Egyptian among every four Arabs in the world.

In the early twentieth century, the Egyptian Entrepreneurs realized their ambitions in establishing a strong, independent national cinema industry in Egypt. It was partly because of Egypt’s head start in the cinema industry, it led to the distribution of Egyptian films all over the Arab region and Middle East. With its films being watched in every Arab town and city, the Egyptians confirmed their lead not only in the region’s culture and the way Arabic language should be spoken, but also in its politics.

The topics which the films usually deal with are diverse and reflect the increased and deeper contact of the filmmaker with life. A filmmaker is an author who looks deeply into his world, cultivating a sense of reflection that are expressed on the screen, and his tools are not only limited to a pen, but a camera, a film, lights, sound, visual effects and actors. In principle, a filmmaker is an author who recreates the world as he knows it. The Egyptian cinema is no different, or at least in many of its films, it shows Egyptian society struggling with its challenges.
The Egyptian Cinema denotes the protracted development of an indigenous film practice; it informs and is informed by complex cultural continuities, interruptions and transformations. Furthermore, Egyptian Cinema explores variety of social and political trends that are of major relevance to different Arab and Muslim societies. And despite its recent difficulties continues to be among the most popular indigenous cinemas in the world today.
As the world grapples to come to grips with Arab and Muslim cultures in a number of ways, the study of Egyptian cinema stands as an effective tool for understanding and assessing issues of great impact on one of the Arab World's most intense country of political and ideological apprehensions.
This study maps out key thematic elements mainly informed by current social, political and cultural developments that have taken place over the last two decades in the "Middle East," it is equally augmented by persistent ideological and intellectual anxieties that have dominated the Arab world since the early 1800s.
Through this study, we will also attempt to explore the historical contexts within which these thematic elements have been emerging. Naturally, the bibliographic nature of this endeavor calls for temporal and regional breadth, but, as a result, it also risks leading to exclusions and makes it difficult to engage each film or theme in detail. Nevertheless, allowing for such breadth is unavoidable for appreciating the coherency and significance of a general body of film which was initially sporadic in its focus yet has recently become identifiable as part of a dynamic movement within the Egyptian cinema.
Equally as important and given the near absent familiarity of many non-Arab readers with Egyptian cinema in general--let alone with specific time-frames of its development--an overview of the subject facilitates further reading and research on this complex area of investigation. I have avoided extremely specialized Film Studies terminology and methods of analysis and have chosen an approach, which would be useful and accessible for both film and cultural studies scholars as well as social sciences, political and humanities researchers.
In this study, we will look into some of these themes that have been reflected through the Egyptian films in recent years. These themes are:

Ü Religion
Ü Homosexuality
Ü Corruption
In the first section, I provide a general historical framework for the study of Egyptian Cinema. This section contextualizes the emergence of this cinema as part of a modernist continuum within the struggle for Egyptian national self-determination. However, I begin with a brief overview of the themes associated with the notion of modernity as approached by Arab intellectuals as far back as the mid to late 1800s during what is referred to as the period of Renaissance (an-Nahda). I also lay out the general context within which the Egyptian Cinema incorporates various modernist themes and stylistic strategies and how they, on the one hand, complement propositions initiated during an-Nahda period, while on the other, provide a basis for contemporary rejuvenation of the struggle for national self-determination.
The remaining sections deal separately with these various themes, focusing on how Egyptian films tackle the rise of populist religious fundamentalism, issues of the recent phenomena od living in slums areas around the Egyptian capital and other big cities, the notions of viollence practiced within the society by the authorities as well as by its people, trends of corruption and homosexual liberation. Finally, the last section (before the conclusion) demonstrates how the New Egyptian Cinema increasingly articulates modernist plot structures and texts; it explores this cinema's employment of self-reflexive strategies in the construction of cinematic narratives.
This presentation aims to be an introduction for many of the political and cultural issues raging in Egyptian society today.

Many works that cover these issues are either focused on one specific issue or extremely specialized, or they are too vague and lack up-to-date details. There are for example; studies of Egyptian cinema, academic and journalistic works on Egypt’s politics and a number of general anthropological and sociological works.

Here, I hope to put a bit of politics into culture and the culture into politics, in an attempt to present Egypt as the Egyptians see it.



Yousry E. Mansour
Researcher, Writer and Filmmaker
Singapore
Cell phone: +6592740273
Email: yousrysg@gmail.com