Post-Colonial Egypt Through the Lens of Youssef Chahine
Words by Hoor El Shafei
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"I have to stress one thing: that I am deeply rooted in my people, I keep to my own. It is a feeling I have always had and will preserve. You must have national roots” (Chahine, in Armes 1981)
Egyptian film holds a unique place within the cinema of the Arab world, not least because it broke through language barriers by familiarizing other Arab countries with the Egyptian dialect. Among the directors who forged the success of the Egyptian film industry is Youssef Chahine — known for his remarkably distinct style of filmmaking that makes any work of his recognizable even without the credits. Grappling with themes such as democracy, feminism, Islamic fundamentalism, and the clash of classes, Chahine expressed his passion for the Arab national project that influenced his life and cinema through his unique approaches to these themes and stylistic choices in his films. Through his filmmaking style and thematic focus, Youssef Chahine's Cairo Station emerges as a quintessential masterpiece that encapsulates his dedication to the Arab national project, blending neorealism with modernist sensibilities to explore democracy, feminism, class struggles, and the socio-political dynamics of post-colonial Egypt.
Egyptian Cinema Under Nasser
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Cinema in the 1950s in Egypt – referred to as the “Golden Age” – continued until the early 1960s during the ruling period of Gamal Abdel Nasser who became president of Egypt in 1954. During this period, Egyptian cinema experienced such a massive growth that there was often difficulty sourcing enough actors and technicians to service the vast output of films (Khouri 2010, 11). Abdel Nasser had a particular interest in the film sector and claimed it as a national industry to express nationalist ideologies. His regime rejected Western domination and demanded a revival of national Arab culture, arguing that Arab nationalism does not adapt to international ideology (Buskirk 2015, 5). Therefore, the Arab national project concept emerged in the 1950s and significantly shaped Chahine’s body of work. Malek Khouri discusses the Arab national project and further supports the idea that this cinema has explored the utopias of progress that displaced the colonial legacy since Nasser’s 1952 revolution (Khouri 2010, 230). Chahine, among other directors, contributed to the development of a politically conscious cinema. He stresses that his upbringing in Alexandria greatly influenced his perspective on filmmaking (Gordon 2010, 231). It is argued that the films produced during the revolution were marked by political naiveté, illusionism, and revolutionary romanticism, although some did explore the new alternatives created by the revolution. This realist trend in cinema is demonstrated in the films of Youssef Chahine especially. The changing political culture in Egypt and the Arab world in the late 1970s caused Chahine’s cinema to recognize and restore marginalized social elements within Arab national identity.
Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station
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Cairo Station which Chahine directed in 1958 and is widely known as his signature piece, was initially misunderstood, but later reconsidered as one of the greatest Egyptian films ever made. The film portrays life in Egypt’s bustling capital at a crucial moment in the nation’s post-colonial history. Chahine defied studio and film standards by casting himself as Kinawi, a troubled and sexually unsatisfied, disabled newspaper seller, set against the harsh realities of life in the station where employees must fight for their livelihood and rights. Chahine's portrayal was so convincing that he was denied the best actor award at the Berlin Film Festival, assuming he was a real disabled person playing himself. He created a film like no other, weaving stories of various characters throughout the film, thus introducing themes pertinent to his national project. The film isolates a condition and then extrapolates it to have relevance for audiences anywhere and at any moment – elevating it above provinciality. Chahine’s multicultural vision in the film embraces a variety of Egyptian types: shaykhs, hipsters, feminist activists, employees, Western-dressed young men, and gallabiyah-clad peasants (Gordon 2010, 228). The film’s structure follows the three unities of time, place, and action and never strays from its central message, enshrined in the protagonist’s tragic fate. Chahine's precise execution of complex scenes using elaborate camera movements, combined with fast rhythm and pace, keeps the audience engaged until the very end.
The director’s earlier films of the 1950s and 1960s underscored the critical role of social and political commitment over creativity and individual expression. However, elements in these films heralded his role as an Arab political activist with a genuinely creative vision capable of responding to the concerns of his society (Khouri 2010, 216). The population of Cairo Station represents all social classes, from the desperately poor to the comfortably rich, from the noble to the abject. Analogies can be found between Cairo Station and the work of the Italian neorealists, showing sympathy for the poor and oppressed and linking personal problems to social conditions. The film was initially rejected by those whose problems it presented, and Chahine was attacked in certain film circles for having shown aspects of reality that gave foreign audiences a wrong impression of the Arab world. Cairo Station depicts the lives of ordinary people surviving uneventful and sordid days. Though its neorealist set positions the film stylistically in the 1950s – as a portrait of troubled male psychology – Cairo Station feels almost modern. The filmic portrayals of social themes drawn from Egyptian life were usually shot on location, unlike the studio-shot offerings of pre-revolutionary cinema. Although neorealism emphasized the de-dramatization of events, Cairo Station heightened the tension, pushing the film towards a more melodramatic genre while bringing in some Hitchcockian inspiration.
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via Cinema Escapist
via Cinema Escapist
One of the themes Chahine confidently explores is the representation of different types of women passing through Cairo Station. On one hand, there is Hanuma, a voluptuous young woman selling sodas at the station, and on the other, we see a protest of young women fighting against marriage. A particularly interesting shot is a close up of Hanuma’s face with a book titled “I am free” held by a woman next to her, highlighting Hanuma’s lack of freedom. Hanuma who’s from the more traditional sector of society, faces violence from her partner when she briefly tries to step into modernity. Chahine, who has spent his career devising inventive ways to get around Egyptian censorship, includes a sex scene in Cairo Station where the lovers are entirely off-screen. Another type of female character is a teenage girl saying goodbye to her boyfriend traveling to Europe, highlighting a clear divide between their social backgrounds. Kinawi watches their love play, creating a contrast between the girl’s struggle and Kinawi’s loneliness. The film ends with an image of the young girl standing on a railway track after her lover leaves, with her future uncertain.
Rooted in female representation is another theme of social awakening that permeates the film. Chahine introduces the concept of democracy and politics through the example of the police harassing young women selling soda, suggesting they should be left alone to earn a living. Another prominent subplot is led by Abu Serih, a tall, strong porter trying to organize a labor union against a corrupt mafia controlling the workers. Tying it back to Nasserism, Abu Serih is a real Nasser-era icon, a working-class hero dreaming of replacing the porters’ corrupt chief with a state-sanctioned union representative – another theme of Chahine’s national project.
And another topic Cairo Station explores briefly but explicitly is religious difference. Chahine never included any reference to race or ethnicity. However, religious diversity and its impact on Arab cultural discourse allowed him to challenge traditional conceptions of Arab identity (Khouri 2010, 120). The film juxtaposes images of modern, progressive society with traditional, conservative sectors, reflecting religious differences and their significance in Chahine’s cinema. As an example, the portrayal of a group of young men and women dancing on the train (noting that the male musical characters are played by members of Egypt’s first recognized indigenous rock band called Mike and the Skyrockets) versus a couple of Islamic fundamentalists invoking God’s name to protect them from the devil.
The Skyrockets via Egy.com
Chahine’s unusual conclusion to Cairo Station reflects his ambivalence toward city life. Kinawi and Hanuma paired again in the last scene, reiterating the complexities of their connection and the underlying tensions. Kinawi takes Hanuma prisoner, but with the fatherly Madbouli’s persuasion, Kinawi lets himself be disarmed and put in a straitjacket. The train station serves as a witness to these tales, with Chahine feeding the audience subjects he revisits in later films, such as Islamic extremism, women's rights, and labor conditions, expanding socialist themes of the Nasser era.
Understanding Chahine's films requires a deep reading of his inspired aesthetic decisions. His lifelong infatuation with Shakespeare's “Hamlet” often reflected in his filmmaking, particularly in Kinawi’s character. Khouri discusses that Hamlet's denial of Claudius' right to rule is mirrored by Chahine's rebellion against harsh and corrupt power. This reflexive tendency illustrates Chahine’s commitment to the thematic preoccupations of his films, embodying the Arab world's potential for a politically active cinema. Chahine's work emphasized the fundamental link between cultural politics and aesthetic innovation (Khouri 2010, 222).
Known for his stylistic approach, Chahine precisely executed complex and long scenes using elaborate camera movements, resulting in an ongoing process of locating and erasing thematic dispositions and character variations. The film’s fast rhythm and editing pace kept the audience on edge, limiting the opportunity to digest scenes before moving on to the next. Chahine's work always questioned his country's politics and culture, portraying characters who believed they were entitled to women while assuming it was always the women’s responsibility for any unwelcome male attention. Like Chahine's more extensive oeuvre that’s rich in unusual subtext, Cairo Station demonstrates the importance of classic cinema, showing that films do not have to be innovative to be relevant. As Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz famously said of Chahine's writing, Youssef Chahine does not pursue the unusual for uniqueness. The close proximity of Chahine’s cinema to Egyptian reality makes his work socially committed, addressing problems facing Arab society (Khouri 2010, 227). This was evident in his cinema's persistent inclusion of subjects relating to Egyptian and Arab events and struggles, and his political comments which frequently complimented and often exceeded the bluntness of his cinematic messages. In agreement with a point made in “Broken Heart of the City,” which states that the rarest of achievements for a director is a film whose story, cinematography, and social commentary cooperate in perfect unison, and this is indeed what happened with Chahine (Gordon 2012, 220).
Cairo Station marks a key triumph for a group of young filmmakers working within loosened censorial parameters of a state transitioning to socialism. The film is positioned somewhere between a forward-looking present and a more conservative past. Violence is scarce though surprisingly bloody when it comes, but the film’s eroticism is most remarkable given its age. Within a similar framework and dialectic, Chahine finds himself interacting with the politics of each of the historical periods depicted in his films. His Cairo Station stands as a seminal work that embodies the thematic and stylistic signatures of the Arab national project, making it a pivotal film in the annals of Egyptian cinema (Khouri 2010, 218).
One would argue that Chahine is the only Egyptian director who is loudly addressed as part of a film canon, but at what judgment? What makes Chahine’s films stand out from other Egyptian directors in the film canon? Canons are often controversial because they can be seen as elitist, sexist, racist, outdated, and politically incorrect (Casey Benyahia and Mortimer 2012, 28). In an interview with Chahine, he defensively answered accusations of elitism, clarifying that this claim represented a denunciation of what he considered to be central to his artistic project and his contribution to the politics of social justice and political change in Egypt and the Arab world (Khouri 2010, 224). In addition, Chahine’s masterful bending of genre conventions and auteurship in his films – specifically Cairo Station – further proves canon discourses. Though Chahine’s films received national and global acknowledgment and praise, it is also arguable that he struggled to connect with his audience at times because of the ambiguity in his films. The audience's reaction changed with time, especially after the picture was highly received internationally. It swung back around, and people began to recognize the film's worth. This reversal of attitude taught Chahine a critical lesson: trust one's creative instincts, for in time, what now seems ambiguous will become ostensible.
Sources & References
Armes, Roy. 1981. “YOUSSEF CHAHINE AND EGYPTIAN CINEMA.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 14: 12–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44111785.
Buskirk, Wesley D. “Egyptian Film and Feminism: Egypt’s View of Women Through Cinema.” Cinesthesia 4, no. 2 (2015): 1–14.
https://doi.org/https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
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Casey Benyahia, Sarah, and Mortimer, Claire. 2012. Doing Film Studies. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Accessed April 8, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Chahine, Youssef, director. 1958. Cairo Station. Gabriel Talhami. 77 minutes. https://www.netflix.com/watch/70124714
Fawal, Ibrahim. 2001. Youssef Chahine. London: British Film Institute.
Gordon, Joel. 2012. “Broken Heart of the City: Youssef Chahine’s Bab al-Hadid (Cairo Station).” Journal for Cultural Research 16, no. 3: 217-237.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2012.647670
Khouri, Malek. 2010. The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahine’s Cinema. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.
Shohat, Ella. 2017. “Egypt: Cinema and Revolution.” In On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat, 225–37. Pluto Press.
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pv89db.21.
"Manifesto of New Cinema in Egypt: New Cinema Group, Egypt, 1968." Black Camera 13, no. 1 (2021): 13-18. muse.jhu.edu/article/839596.
