This is a 27" x 39" Egyptian poster designed by Hassan Mazhar Gasour
and Mohammad Aziz to promote the 1965 Hassan El-Seify film Please Kill Me
based on a screenplay by Hassan Hamed and starring Fouad
El-Mohandes as Adel. Plot summary: Adel believes he is going to die
within weeks and decides to end it all quickly. When a thief [Hassan
Hamed] comes to his apartment to rob him he pays him 100 pounds to
kill him within 48 hours. Then Dr. Nabil [Abu Bakr Ezzat] assures him
he is healthy so he tries to avoid his hired killer, who follows him
everywhere.
Cast and crew: Hassan El-Seify, Hassan Mazhar Gasour, Mohammad
Aziz, Fouad El-Mohandes, Abdel Moneim Madbouly, Shouweikar, Abu Bakr
Ezzat, Abdel Salam Mohamed, Hassan Hamed, Soheir Magdy, Safa Magdy,
Salama Elias, Badr Nofal, Abdel Ghani El-Nagdi, Sayyed El Araby,
Monir Yassine, Galal El Masry, Eskandar Menassa, Hassan Atla, Abdel
Monem Basiony, Ahmed Abiya, Hussain Ismael, Mokhtar El Sayed, Mohsen
Hafez, Ezzat Al-Mashad, Ali Mohieddin, Nabila Abaza, Bahgat Amar,
Mostafa Hassan
This is a 27" x 39" Egyptian poster designed by Wahib Fahmy and
al-Khad for the 1983 Ahmed Fouad film The Cart Driver
AKA al-arbagy based on story, screeenplay and dialogue by Wahid
Hamed. Cinematography was by Ibrahim Saleh and the poster art was by
Wahib Fahmy and al-Khad. Plot Summary: The cart driver Sayed [Mahmoud
Yassine] lived with his wife Fakiha [Shouweikar] and his children. He
convinced the lottery ticket seller Shalabia [Maali Zayed] to sell him
one so he could try his luck. He won 1000 pounds and decided to spend
the money on an adventure. The people in the neighborhood were happy
for him with the exception of Sheikh Nazir who said he was just going
to waste the money in nightclubs. However this was too much money to
gamble, so he used it to make a deal with a corrupt manipulator, whose
betrayal he soon discovered when he lost the money. He told the
police, they caught the criminal; then the cart driver went back home
and continued living as before.
Cast and crew: Mahmoud Yassine, Younes Shalaby, Shouweikar, Maali
Zayed, Ahmed Fouad, Bahgat Kamar, Nabil Badr, Zizi Mustafa, Ibrahim
Saleh, Wahid Hamed, Samir Wahid, Farouk Youssef, Shawqy Shamekh,
Mohammad Abo Hashih, Abdel Aziz Esa, Zizi Mustafa
This film by Aly Badrakhan is on Ahmad Al-Hadari's 2007 list of
Egypt's 100 most important films. It is based on a story by Egyptian
Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz with screenplay and dialogue by Mamdouh
El Leithy. The story is about political persecution under Nasser
after the Egyptian defeat by the Israelis in 1967. It includes
depictions of sexual abuse of a type that had never been attempted in
Egyptian cinema. The poster was designed by Abdel Ghani and Hassan
Mazhar Gasour. Plot Summary: The film begins with a radio news report
of the Egyptian army's 6 October 1973 Suez crossing as Ismail
al-Sheikh [Nour El-Sherif] sits despondent in the Karnak Cafe while
everyone else is rejoicing. He goes to the hospital where Zeinab Diab
[Soad Hosny] is trying to get admitted for surgery. There is a
flashback to Ismail's days as a student in medical college with his
classmates Hamada Helmy [Mohammed Tawfik] and Zeinab. In those days
they were involved with student activities and debates about politics
and ideology. At the same time Ismail was in a romantic relationship
with Aranfala, [Shouweikar] the owner of the coffee shop. However one
night they were arrested and jailed. They were imprisoned for a time,
but after their release he courted Zeinab with the consent of her
parents. Then conditions changed. There were demonstrations and the
authorities began arresting young people. The intelligence service
under the direction of Khaled Safwan [Kamal Al-Shennawi] began using
savage torture methods looking for Muslim Brotherhood elements in the
population; Zeinab was even raped. Zeinab and Ismail were conscripted
for intelligence work and then wrote reports against their comrades.
Zeinab started the May movement for the release of Ismail and everyone
else who was in detention. Ismail returned to his commitment, put his
past behind him and returned to Zeinab.
Cast and crew: Soad Hosny, Kamal Al-Shennawi, Nour El-Sherif, Farid
Shawqi, Aly Badrakhan, Naguib Mahfouz, Younes Shalaby, Shouweikar,
Mohamed Sobhi, Taheya Cariocca, Imad Hamdi, Salah Zulfikar, Fayez
Halawa, Mohsen Nasr, Mamdouh El Leithy, Mohammed Tawfik, Naima Al
Soghayar, Aly El Cherif, Wahid Seif, Osama Abbas, Adly Kasseb
This is a 27" x 39" Egyptian one-sheet poster designed by Hassan
Mazhar Gasour for the 1990 Adel Sadeq film The Swindler and the
Dog [al-nesab wal-kalb] based on story screenplay and dialogue by
Fawzi Ali and Adel Sadeq and starring Sameer Ghanem as Samir. Plot
summary: This is a black comedy in which a gang of gold smugglers with
a pack of attack dogs is finally arrested after being tricked into a
round of internal fighting.
This is a 27" x 39" Egyptian poster designed by Gasour for the 1964
Ahmed Diaeddin black comedy An Abnormal Girl AKA fatat
shaza based on a story by Adly El-Mowalid and starring Showeikar
as the abnormal girl. Plot summary: The film depicts a picaresque
chain of events in which a girl [Showeikar] is modeling swimsuits and
then removed from the scene by her fiance [Ahmed Ramzy] because as a
model she attracts inappropriate attention from a group of men. They
then find themselves at a party at a villa where a physician [Youssef
Fakhreddine] attempts to enlist her services as a model for his
paintings, but this too is deemed inappropriate by her fiance, who
attempts to get the physician charged with lewd behavior with the help
of some compromising photos he has taken. The girl takes a job as a
cabaret waitress; while working there she learns her father [Mahmoud
El-Meliguy] is in prison. She goes to meet him when he is released,
but is surprised to find that his second wife is also there to meet
him. This is so traumatic for her that she attempts to kill herself
by jumping into the Nile, but is rescued by one of her father's men,
who takes her in a coma to her father's home. When she regains
consciousness she finds her father in the room with her and thinks he
is the one who has abducted her. She flees, breaks a leg while
falling off a balcony and is treated by the same painter/physician she
met at the party. She learns that this physician had not been guilty
of lewd intentions after all. However, when questioned and accused in
court the physician commits suicide. Her father attempts to take her
with him from the court but she refuses to go. She makes her way
through a maze of hallways at the courthouse and then disappears.
Cast and crew: Ahmed Diaeddin, Hassan Mazhar Gasour, Victor Antoun,
Rushdy Abaza, Ahmed Ramzy, Youssef Fakhreddine, Youssef Fakhr Eddine,
Shouweikar, Mahmoud El-Meliguy, Tewfik El Dekn, Adly El-Mowalid, Adel
Adham, Mimi Shakeeb, Madiha Kamel, Abdel Khalek Saleh, Fatheya
Chahine, Mohammed Abaza
Pictured is a US 27" x 41" one-sheet poster for the 1963 Wolf Rilla
film Cairo based on a novel by W.R. Burnett, screenplay by Joan
Scott and starring George Sanders as The Major. This film is a remake
of the 1950 John Huston film The Asphalt Jungle based on the
novel by W.R. Burnett. The woman pictured on the poster is the film's
principal dancer, Nahed Sabri. Plot summary: On a visit to Cairo fresh
out of a German prison, the Major tries to resurrect an old plan to
steal the jewels from the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Cairo Museum but
there are unexpected problems when he tries to abscond after the
robbery.
Cast and crew: Wolf Rilla, W. R. Burnett, George Sanders, Richard Johnson, Faten Hamama, John Meillon, Ahmed Mazhar, Eric Pohlmann, Walter Rilla, Kamal Al-Shennawi, Salah Nazmi, Shouweikar, Mona, Abdel Khalek Saleh, Said Abu Bakr, Salah Mansour, Mohamed El Sayed, Youssef Chaban, Ezzat El Alaili, Mohamed Abdel Rahman, Nahed Sabri, Aziza Hassan
Pictured is an Egyptian poster designed by Al-Khad to promote the 1982
123-minute Houssam El-Din Mustafa color film The Love District
[darb al-hawa] starring Youssra based on a story by Ismail Wali El
Deen with screenplay by Mostafa Moharram, dialogue by Sherif El
Menbawy and cinematography by Wahid Farid. Plot summary: Hosnia and
the pimp Saleh [Mahmoud Abdel Aziz] ran a house of prostitution called
the Hotel of Princesses in the Darb Tayyab neighborhood. Samiha
[Madiha Kamel] ended up there seeking refuge from the bad treatment of
her mother's husband, while Elham [Youssra] was driven there by
poverty. Men of all social levels frequented the hotel, such as Abdel
Aziz [Ahmed Zaki], the university professor of philosophy and his
friend Morad, Abdel Hafiz Basha, Abdel Aziz's uncle and a candidate
for parliament who attacked prostitution in campaign speeches, even
though it made him happy to hear the prostitutes insult him. It also
made him happy to be able to drop his guard with them. Saleh tried to
dominate Samiha but he was content with Hosnia, who loved him.
Cast and crew: Madiha Kamel, Youssra, Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, Ahmed Zaki, Faruq al-Ghayshawi, Hassan Abdeen, Houssam El-Din Mustafa, Ismail Wali El Deen, Mostafa Moharram, Sherif El Menbawy, Farouk Al-Fichawy, Shouweikar, Farouk Falawkas, Ibrahim Abdel Razaq, Salwa Khattab, Amal Ibrahim, Aziza Helmy
Pictured is an undated Egptian rerelease poster designed by Abdel
Rahman to promote the 1967 148-minute Essa Karama black-and-white
film That Man Is Driving Me Crazy [al-ragol da haganini]
starring Fouad El-Mohandes based on story, screenplay and dialogue by
Abdel Fatah al-Sayed with cinematography by Mostafa Hassan. Plot
summary: Attia [Fouad El-Mohandes] was a good man whose wife Amina
[Shouweikar] complained about his weak character and finally left him.
He did not know what happened to her or their daughter [Madiha
Salem]. After a few years Attia decided decided to look for work in
the cinema. He met a greedy producer [Mahmoud El-Meliguy] and learned
that he intended to use a wealthy woman to produce films for him
because he was bankrupt. Attia learned that this woman was none other
than his wife, who had been left a large amount of money from a man
she had been nursing. Attia tried to save his daughter, who thought he
had died, and his wife from the greedy producer. He hid his identity
from his daughter [Madiha Salem] hoping to prevent her from marrying
the producer's son [Samir Sabri], but then he had a change of heart
when the producer's son turned out to be different from his father;
the marriage eventually took place and Attia and Amina were also
reconciled again.
This is a 27" x 19.5" Egyptian poster made to promote the 1986 Youssef
Chahine film The Sixth Day [al-yom al-sades] starring the
Franco-Italian singer Dalida (Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti 1933-1987)
based on a novel by Andree Chedid with screenplay by Youssef Chahine
and cinematography by Mohsen Nasr. Plot summary: This film tells a
story set during the 1947 cholera epidemic in Cairo, when it was
believed that anyone infected with the disease would die within six
days. Sadiqa [Dalida] is a woman who leaves Cairo on a Nile vessel to
bury relatives. She has lost everyone in her family and her only
remaining hope is her grandson, but he is also afflicted with the
disease; when he dies she kills herself, even though she has a
young companion on her Nile voyage named Okka [Mohsen Mohieddin] who
has fallen in love with her despite the difference in their ages.
Cast and crew: Youssef Chahine, Hamdy Ahmed, Mohamed Mounir, Shouweikar, Dalida, Ahmed Handy, Ibrahim Maher, Mohsen Mohieddin, Mohsen Nasr, Salah El-Saadany, Zaki Abdel Wahab, Hamdy Ahmed, Ibrahim Maher, Andree Chedid, Hesham Abdel Hamid, Hassan El Adl, Youssef al-Ani, Mehget Abdel Rahman, Seif Eddine, Maher Salim, Khaled Al-Haggar, Ezzat Badreddine, Ihab Salem, Maher Essam, Mohamed Dardiri
Watch clip with English and French subtitles on YouTube
This is a 27" x 39" Egyptian poster designed by Morteda Anis to
promote the 1985 Ashraf Fahmy film Saad the Orphan [saad
al-yatim] starring Ahmed Zaki based on a story by Yousry Al-Gendy with
screenplay and dialogue by Abdel Hai Adib and cinematography by Mohsen
Nasr. Plot summary: Saad the Orphan [Ahmed Zaki] was in love with
Sabah [Naglaa Fathy], the daughter of a gang leader named Badran
[Mahmoud Moursy]. Another gang leader named al-Halbawy [Farid Shawqi]
also wanted to marry Sabah. This created a conflict for Sabah's
father Badran and a rivaly between al-Halbawy and Saad the Orphan,
although arrangements had been made for Saad the Orphan to marry
Sabah, since this was what Sabah wanted and her father Badran had
agreed to it. There was a fight on the wedding night between
al-Halbawy and Saad the Orphan where Saad the Orphan prevailed. Then
there was another fight the same night where Badran was killed after
Saad the Orphan learned that Badran, his father-in-law, had been the
killer of his father and mother.
Cast and crew: Farid Shawqi, Naglaa Fathy, Ahmed Zaki, Mahmoud Moursy, Tewfik El Dekn, Shouweikar, Karima Mokhtar, Ashraf Fahmy, Ahmed Bedir, Mohamed Wafik, Ahmed Ghanem, Zizi Mustafa, Mohsen Nasr, Ibrahim Abdel Razaq, Yousry Al-Gendy, Abdel Hai Adib
This is an Egyptian promotional poster by an unknown designer for
the 1966 Hassan El-Seify film Love's Lamentations [mabka
al-'oshaq] based on a story by Youssef El Sebai with dialogue and
screenplay by Mohamed Osman and cinematography by Kamal Korayem. Plot
summary: Engineer Shab (Rushdy Abaza) was living happily when his wife
died in an automobile accident, leaving him with a small daughter.
Because he was a petroleum engineer, he had to be away from home. He
fell in love with a maid (Soad Hosny) who was coming to the home.
He saw her beauty once when he came upon her washing her clothing in
the bathroom. He took her with him to his home in Switzerland where
he worked. One night he raped her. Then when she became pregnant he
demanded that she get an abortion, but a physician told him this would
endanger her life. This was a crisis for the engineer, and the maid
would not stop crying. The little girl saw how sad the maid was and
realized her father was the cause of the problem. She tried to kill
herself; this prompted the father to correct his mistake and marry
the maid.
Cast and crew: Soad Hosny, Rushdy Abaza, Youssef Chaban, Zahrat El-Ola, Hassan El-Seify, Youssef Chaban, Soheir El-Barouni, Youssef El Sebai, Mohamed Osman, Kamal Korayem, Kamal Karim, Shouweikar, Faiza Fouad, Baligh Habashi
Text of talk given in February about Egyptian film posters at the annual College Art Association Meeting in Los Angeles
It would surely be simplistic to say that the 1950s were a period of exceptionally dramatic upheaval in Egypt: so, too, were the 1860s, and the 1910s, and the 1940s – and so too, of course, is the present. Still, it’s clear that Egypt saw a number of significant sociopolitical developments in the 1950s – beginning, most obviously, with the revolution of 1952, during which the Free Officers forced the king into exile and established a socialist republic. The revolutionaries soon drafted a new constitution, enacted land reforms and labor laws, and gave women the right to vote – and they also began to affect the larger landscape of global politics. Consequently Cairo, in the years between 1952 and 1967, was one of the most closely observed cities in the world.
Rivoli Cinema burns 1952
Given the scale of these events, it may seem trivializing to claim that the cinema occupied an important place in Egyptian history at that time. And yet, a combination of foreign influence, popular enthusiasm, and official support meant that film, in mid-20th-century Egypt, was often bound to larger discussions regarding independence, nationalism and evolving moral codes. Indeed, these discussions could become violent, as in January of ‘52, when the Rivoli Cinema was burned by rioters demonstrating against the British military presence. But they could also assume a subtler form, in conversations regarding the sorts of films that were screened: in this vein, Robert Vitalis has argued that by ‘52 Cairo’s movie palaces “were constituent elements in a landscape of power.” And so, too, I would add, were the films shown after the revolution. Indeed, as Joel Gordon has argued, Naguib, Nasser, and the other Free Officers were raised “in a world of matinee idols,” and they shared a deep interest in the cinema. Consequently, films screened in Cairo often acquired complex political and social overtones, or inflections. For instance, the first film shown at the Cinema Metro after the July coup was Quo Vadis, whose treatment of a lavish, irresponsible Nero struck many observers as an allusion to the fallen King Farouk. Subsequently, the new government exerted considerable pressure on local studios and cinemas in censoring or encouraging particular projects, and by ‘63 the film industry was nationalized. Thus, the revolutionaries may not have openly cited Lenin’s idea that “of all the arts for us the cinema is the most important,” but, in Gordon’s words, “they certainly saw the silver screen as a palette for depicting a new polity and society.”
Film posters in Cairo
If cinemas and screened movies, though, played a role in Egyptian political discourse of the ‘50s and ‘60s, what of their even more visible cousins: movie posters? After all, Cairo’s cinema facades and boulevards were regularly dotted with posters advertising both imports and domestic releases. Produced by local painters and lithographers, movie posters were generally issued in several standard sizes and in multiples of several thousand. Of course, they competed for the viewer’s eye with hundreds of other placards and billboards, in a dense urban network of signs. And, of course, they were ephemeral, as they were usually covered or removed within a few weeks. But as we’ve already seen this morning, ephemerality, in a modern urban context, hardly implies insignificance; rather, as Baudelaire once wrote, even the briefly revealed beauty of a woman’s leg can leave a passerby on the street convulsed or delirious.
Certainly, one could approach the hundreds of surviving mid-century movie posters from a variety of angles; although they’re only ads, and sometimes rather coarse ads at that, they can also reveal a good deal about the larger social and political climate of the time. In this talk, I’ll limit myself to a particular strand of socio-political change in post-revolutionary Cairo: in the spirit of Baudelaire’s poem, I want to think about women in the city. More specifically, I’ll argue that movie posters from the period offer two distinct means of presenting the female form – and thus offer, as well, distinct modes of thinking about the place of women in the city. To be sure, the examples I’ll be considering are hardly entirely typical: after all, some posters of the period were completely aniconic, many focused solely on male figures, and a number of those that did picture women did so in generic and conventional ways. That said, two bands of imagery common in the ‘50s and ‘60s seem to relate meaningfully to larger attitudes about public space, Western influence, and Egyptian identity. In his 1974 history of posters, Max Gallo wrote that his aim was “to show through posters the evolution of society, of customs, of ideas.” Here I hope to do something similar, if on a more modest scale.
If you leaf through surviving examples of mid-century posters, you’ll come across a handful of images that show women in windows. Admittedly, in one example, a man shares the space; in most examples, though, only women fill the frame. Bound by sills and rectangular frames, they peer out at us from a clearly differentiated architectural space. The effect can be playful, or inviting, or even flatly voyeuristic, as we’re given a partial view into a private interior. And while it is possible to find occasional examples of a comparable motif in Hollywood posters of the time, the Egyptian use of the theme feels less inspired by foreign example than by local experience. For instance, in her Life Among the Poor in Cairo, based on her experiences in the city in 1969, the anthropologist Unni Wikan returned repeatedly to the fact that, as she put it, “people take part in the life of the streets from balconies and windows, as either actors or audience.” Relatedly, glimpses of a female body, through a screen or window, were a well-worn motif in Egyptian literature. Indeed, the idea permeates Arab writing generally: given the long regional tradition of haram, or seclusion, the sequestered, enframed, and often desired female is a standard trope. But it was a particularly familiar one, it’s fair to argue, in mid-century Egypt, for Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo’s most celebrated novelist, returned to it again and again in his writings. In his 1947 novel Midaq Alley, for example, the lovestruck barber Abbas peers repeatedly at the window of the object of his affection, the beautiful Hamida. Typically, he’s rewarded with little more than brief, partial views of her – but these glimpses come to form an important role in his love for her. Indeed, when he prepares to leave the neighborhood for a stint in the army, it’s the view of her in the window that he claims he will miss the most. “Every morning,” he tells her, “I’ll think of the beloved window from which I first glimpsed you combing your lovely hair. How I’ll long for that window…” The window, in short, has become the object of his desire – and, in the poster for the film, a condensed image of the story, generally.
Midaq Alley [zoqaq al-midaq] (1963) - (Shadia)
But posters like this didn’t only represent windows; in another sense, I think it can be said that they resembled them – or, at the least, offered an apt medium for the propagation of the motif. Pasted onto the walls of city streets, and usually around two feet wide and three feet tall, posters literally resembled windows, in their scale and placement. Moreover, the ephemerality of the movie posters broadly evoked the fleeting appearances of women such as Hamida, in their windows. And, finally, posters that depicted women in windows involved a tension (a tension between the urge to glimpse the partly revealed subject and the unreachability of that subject) that was entirely appropriate to print ads. That is, as images the posters placed viewers on the outside of a tantalizing interior, and as ads they offered a glimpse of a film that could be seen more fully only with the purchase of a ticket. The logic, then, was ultimately promotional, but it was cast in a visual language that was local, and that upheld traditional sexual boundaries, or public conventions.
At about the same time, though, a second motif, involving a very different sort of depiction of the female form, was becoming increasingly frequent in Cairene film posters. I’m thinking here of explicitly sexualizing images that depict women in various states of undress, revealing stretches of leg or bare shoulders. By the late 1950s, such posters were common – but they marked a real change from the chaste aspect of parallel examples from the 1940s. Compare, for instance, the posters for the 1941 film Layla, Girl from the Country and the 1959 film Layla, Girl from the Beach. Tasteful decorum yields to a more open and provocative display.
Layla, Girl from the Country (1941); Layla, Girl From the Beach (1959)
How to understand this second vein of imagery? In this case, I think, the background is more complicated. On the one hand, we might note that there was in fact a lively tradition of female exhibitionism in Cairo – at least, that is, in certain circles. Dancers, for example, often dressed in alluring ways. In his essay “Homage to a Belly Dancer,” for instance, Edward Said remembered seeing, as a 14-year-old, the famous Cairene performer Tahia Carioca in 1950, and recalled her allure as that of the femme fatale. Indeed, it was partly due to their habits of dress that dancers were often assumed to work as prostitutes – and contemporary images of streetwalkers, like this poster, often linked prostitution to wanton display. In fact, one could argue that here, too, there is a meaningful parallel between the movie posters and their subjects, for both involve the notion of deferred pleasure. Said, moreover, makes this a central theme of his essay, as he refers to the complex set of diaphanous veils worn by Carioca, and stresses the way in which his realization that his view of her couldn’t be consummated only intensified his excitement. Likewise, the streetwalker reveals, but doesn’t give – or, rather, gives for a price – much like, again, the movies, advertised by posters that showed flesh in a manner calculated to fuel certain viewers’ desire for more. Such an analogy, I admit, might seem like a stretch were it not for the fact that it appears, explicitly, in at least one movie poster of the time: in this poster, for the 1964 film The Abnormal Girl, the marginalized heroine proffers her body while she stands against movie posters that line the wall of an alley. Her pose, we understand, is like a poster: it exhorts us to see more.
Abnormal Girl [fatat shaza] (1964) - (Shouweikar)
Nile Hilton, 1959
The abnormal girl is also revealing, though, in that she wears Western garb – and so affiliates herself with a mode of display that was commonly linked, in Cairo, to American influence. In her book Building the Cold War, Annabel Wharton argued that the Nile Hilton, which opened in Cairo in 1959, embodied a foreign attitude towards the body on view. In her words, “the open balconies of the Hilton on which viewers displayed themselves offered a manifest contrast to the shuttered compartments of old Cairo in which viewers hid themselves.” That is, guests at the Hilton didn’t peer between shutters for views of one another; rather, they could ogle the beautiful bodies of the wealthy at the hotel swimming pool. Or, in fact, they could simply walk the streets of Cairo, where women were increasingly visible. Encouraged by Nasser’s gestures toward secularization and enabled by the pedestrian sidewalks of the largely European-designed downtown, Egyptian women of all classes began, in the 1950s, to work outside the home and to travel through the city as a matter of course. Certainly, many of these women were veiled, but many were not – and, as Sawsan al-Messiri noted in a 1969 thesis, even some women who did cover their heads mastered a subtle art of display in which handkerchiefs and garments were allowed to fall so that they could be retied in an act of public exhibitionism.
In short, a variety of circumstances meant that the female body was often on display in mid-century Cairo. But before we read this in terms of conventional objectification, it’s worth realizing that many Muslim observers saw such display as dangerous, or debasing, to the viewer. In a terrific article on the averted gaze in Iranian cinema, for instance, Hamid Naficy once referred to a common idea that “instead of controlling women through their gaze, men are lured and captured by the sight of women…” Similarly, the Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi has referred to the widespread notion that if a woman enters a traditionally male space, “she is upsetting the male’s order and his peace of mind. She is actually committing an act of aggression against him merely by being present where she should not be…” Where she should not be: in the years before ‘52, Cairene women had generally been restricted to their immediate neighborhoods, and those few who regularly moved about in the largely Western downtown were often assumed to be – like Hamida, in Midaq Alley – morally void participants in the sex trade that catered to foreign visitors and troops. But after ‘52, Egyptian women were no longer contained in the same way, and sometimes intimidated commentators who saw them as a nightmarish conflation of home and city, or Egyptian virtue and Western influence.
Cairo Station [bab al-hadid] (1958) - (directed by Youssef Chahine)
Interestingly, one of the most celebrated of all mid-century Egyptian films clearly points to the relevance of such claims. Cairo Station, or Bab al-Hadid, was issued in 1958; directed by Youssef Chahine, it focused on Qinawi, a cripple who sells newspapers at the Cairo train station. Qinawi fantasizes about marrying Hanouma, a sultry soft drink vendor who also works at the station and embodies the newly visible working woman – but who often flirts with potential customers even though she is engaged to a charismatic porter named Abu Sehri. Ultimately, the jealous Qinawi attempts to murder Hanouma, but fails in the task, and is finally apprehended.
Youssef Chahine as Qinawi and Hind Rostom as Hanouma in Cairo Station
Cairo Station still with Niagra poster
Often dressed revealingly, Hanouma is consistently sexualized by Chahine’s camera – but she is hardly the only sexualized female in the film. Meaningfully, Qinawi is also obsessed with pin-up photographs, which he clips from his newspapers and tacks to a closet wall; the frenzy and the violence with which he cuts them suggest that the unveiled female body has somehow driven him to rash actions. But there’s more: in several scenes, a poster for the 1953 Marilyn Monroe film Niagara, picturing Monroe reclining in a bikini, dominates the background. A dense conflation of overtly sexual display, American influence, and femme fatale (for Monroe’s character attempts to murder her husband during their honeymoon), the film offers a dark summary of some of the ideas that typified discussions of women in public in 1950s Cairo. Public female display is linked, repeatedly, to violence – and nowhere more obviously, perhaps, than in a tense section in which the image of Monroe is juxtaposed with Qinawi’s lust, jealousy, and instability.
It’s a powerful stretch: Monroe’s revealed legs echo Hanouma’s, suggesting a conflation of beloved and pictured film star, and the closeup of the bowing rail evokes both the sexual congress of Qinawi’s beloved and her fiancé, and the mounting pressure within Qinawi, who will ultimately crack, and try to kill her. Indeed, Qinawi is totally unhinged by the end of the sequence, and the reasons for his dissolution seem clear: they lie in the allure of Monroe and the Americanness of the Coke bottle that he wields as a weapon. Baudelaire may have felt fevered after glimpsing a woman’s leg in the city, but Qinawi is flatly deranged. A novel urban geography, in which old boundaries have dissolved, has created overwhelming pressures.
Given all of this, it is perhaps easier to understand why, in January of ‘52, the mob of anti-British rioters proceeded to the Rivoli – a cinema that regularly showed imported films – and burned it to the ground. While some Cairenes certainly enjoyed the foreign cinema, many others felt what Mernissi once called the “itchy ambivalence” of Arabs toward Westernization: a deep interest that was nonetheless tempered with suspicion. Indeed, that ambivalence also explains the conventional arc of many Egyptian films of the time: again and again, they introduce unabashedly Westernized characters who pepper their speech with Americanisms and adopt a newer, more open mode of display – only to be put in their place by the end of the film. Urban modernism is thus shown as superficially seductive, but as ultimately corrosive. And so, given that urban modernism generally carried a Western valence, mid-century Egyptian films offered in turn a conservative rejection of Westernization and a slew of related ideas: of feminism, for instance, and of open sexual display. Granted, they often used such subjects as a temporary means of titillation, but usually ended by celebrating instead, the baladi, or traditional girl from the country, as a truer icon of national identity. Or, as Hind Rassam Culhane once argued, “the theme of many Egyptian films is that the native sons and daughters of Egypt must struggle to preserve their identity… against the strong, almost tidal, pull of Western culture.” In this light, it’s worth knowing that Cairo Station – the setting of Chahine’s film – was also the site of a much-discussed moment in 1923, when Huda Shaarawi, an Egyptian feminist, returned from an international conference by provocatively taking off, as she stepped from the train, her veil. Thirty years later, the site of that radical gesture was cast as the backdrop for a poster of a scantily clad Marilyn Monroe that was implicitly associated with murder. A politically progressive act of unveiling was now reframed in violent, debasing terms. The city, and urban female space, were being redefined once more.
In the preface to Anwar Sadat’s 1957 memoir, Gamal Nasser wrote that “Egyptian affairs over the last twenty years are made difficult to understand by the complexity of events. But closer scrutiny reveals certain leading themes…” I’ll close by suggesting that movie posters were one field in which those themes are visible. Certainly, poster designers were aware of the potential power of the Westernized, sexualized female body. Indeed, so too were other Egyptians: in his 1956 novel Palace Walk, for instance, Mahfouz described a boy of about ten who (and I quote) “stopped under its billboard combing his little eyes up and down the color poster which depicted a woman reclining on a divan, a cigarette between her crimson lips…” But even as they depicted such subjects, posters also already implied that those subjects were corrupting, or foreign, or ephemeral – and would result, inevitably, in loss, or punishment. And, in the process, Egyptian posters worked to celebrate instead a series of local, traditional values, by citing the red, white and black of the Egyptian flag, or by placing virtuous heroines safely within the confines of a sturdy window frame – or by doing both, as in this version of the poster for The Neighbor’s Daughter. In short, such posters recognized the simultaneous allure and repugnance that many Egyptians felt for the West at the time – and they used that ambivalence as a means of promoting both the films and the larger nation for which they stood.
Love in August (1966) - (Fouad El-Mohandes) three-piece Egyptian poster
This 65x39" poster for a 1966 Hassan El-Seify film was designed by Wahib Fahmy and Abdel Aziz, printed by Al-Nasr printers of Cairo and distributed by the General Company for the Distribution and Marketing of Cinematic Films [sherket al-'am li-tawdi' wa-ard al-aflam al-sinemaia]. The actors in the painting are Fouad El-Mohandes holding the undersized umbrella, and Shouweikar whom he is attempting to shelter. The umbrella seems much too small for blocking either sun or rain, and seems also to symbolize the suitor's hopeless situation. I haven't seen the film but have read that the character Farid (El-Mohandes) is trying to fill the shoes of the late husband of Salwa (Shouweikar), who was killed in a traffic accident on their wedding night. Apparently he manages to do this because they eventually marry (the required happy ending for this type of Egyptian film).
