ARABIC CINEMA

ARABIC CINEMA

The Arab cinemas are both the product and the expression of a long and unresolved struggle for the control of the image, for the power to define identity. That identity is clearly rooted in the crossroads of culture of the region, extending as it does between Europe and Black Africa, between the Atlantic and the Arabian Gulf, but also between the city and countryside and desert ... between a colonial past and a nominally independent present." - film critic Mariam Rosen.

THE ARABIC CINEMA WAS ORIGINATED IN EGYPIT.BY 1917 THERE ARE 80 CINEMAS IN EGYPIT. THIS WAS THE FIRST STEP OF ARABIC CINEMA.THEY BY 1925 BANK MISR CAME IN THIS FIELD.THE FIRST EGYPITAN FILIM IS CONSIDRED TO BE LEILA.BY STEPHEN ROSTI (1927).THIS IS A LOVE STORY.ITS STAR AZIZA AMIR BECAME SUCESSFUL ARAB WOMEN.

During the 1930s, the Misr Bank further financed production by sending technicians abroad for training and setting up the Misr Studio in 1935. Production increased from six films in 1933 to 17 in 1936. Other studios were installed, artists’ salaries rose as in Hollywood and to the musical/comedy genres were added farces and the melodrama, consisting of seduction, implied rape, adultery, murder and suicide. The "first lady of the screen" was Faten Hamama, who played roles of the orphan/Cinderella type (A Happy Day, Mohamed Karim, 1940; The Immortal Song, Henry Baraket, 1959), later incarnating the difficult conditions of women (The Sin, 1964; No Condolences For Women, 1979; The Night Of Fatma’s Arrest, 1984). In 1953 Hamama starred with an unknown Syrian-Lebanese Christian, Michel Chalroub, in Youssef Chahine’s Raging Sky. Becoming a Muslim, he changed his name to Omar Sharif and they married, starring together in Chahine’s The Black Waters (1956), then in Night Without Sleep (1958) and River Of Love (1960): "With him there appeared for the first time in the Egyptian cinema the erotic hero ... with magnetic eyes and tantalising voice" (Abbas Fadhil Ibrahim).

THE NEW ARABIC CINEMA

Along with Chahine, the filmmakers in Egypt most associated with this trend are Chadi Abdessalam, for only one feature, The Mummy (1969), and Tewfiq Salah, whose early formation also included Victoria College. Salah’s work is somewhat limited by the effects of censorship whims but includes, with The Cheated (1971), The Rebels (1969), set in a hospital and dealing with inegalitarian healthcare and authority without responsibility. The film was withheld for some time and only released with cuts.

The Lebanon, on the other hand, has had commercial studio facilities for years and several producers and cinema-owners of Lebanese origin operate throughout Africa and the Arab world. But the work of younger filmmakers has featured the war situation. Documentary-maker Jocelyn Saab has recently completed her first fiction: Sweet Adolescent Love. Mai Masri (Palestinian) and Jean Chamoun, on the other hand, have only made documentaries, of which Fleurs D’ajonc (Gorse flowers) is the most recent (1986). It shows women in the country, resisting, protecting, nurturing against all odds. Maroun Baghdadi has made both documentaries and the fiction The Little Wars in 1985; Borhane Alaouie has also made Beirut, The Encounter (1982) and a documentary on the Lebanese Shi’a. In 1980, the Algerian filmmaker, Farouk Belloufa, made Nah’la, in which a journalist goes to report on the situation and becomes involved in Beirut life (unlike Schlondorff’s hero for whom the city and people were just a backdrop).