Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Gasour's First Poster

Lipstick [ahmar shafayef] (1946) - (Naguib Al Riyhani) directed by Walli Eddine Sameh

This rare Egyptian poster is very important historically because it was the first one designed by Egypt's legendary poster designer Hassan Mazhar Gasour, whose studio and printing business domitnated the world of Egyptian film posters for over 30 years. Gasour was the only poster designer ever to receive the equivalent of an Egyptian academy award for poster design. The poster is a stone lithograph measuring 24.25" x 35".

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Egyptian Stage Fright Poster

Egyptian Three-piece Poster

This is a Warner Brothers poster printed in Egypt for the 1950 Hitchock film Stage Fright. It is printed in three pieces and measures 79.5" x 39.5". This is a common Egyptian size. The three sheets used to make the design are each roughly the standard 27" x 39" size for an Egyptian one-sheet. It was printed by Raghaeb printers, an old company that was active in Egypt mostly in the 1940s. It is signed by the artist Wahib Fahmy, who made the designs for many Egyptian posters for foreign films. Fahmy sometimes did original designs but for foreign films he usually relied almost entirely on elements of the design used in some poster issued by the film's foreign studio, and that is what he did for this poster. The Arabic title translation at the top is "Crime on the Stage" with the name Hitchcock in the red script.

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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Natalie Wood's Egyptian Presence

On 10 September 1957 Natalie Wood appeared on the back cover of the Egyptian arts and entertainment journal Al-Kawakeb. In 1957 she had not yet appeared in All the Fine Young Cannibals, Splendor in the Grass or West Side Story. The woman on the front cover is Zubaidah Tharwat, a musician and actress who later appeared with Omar Sharif in the 1961 Henry Barakat Egyptian classic There is a Man in Our House [fi baitina ragol]



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