Land of Plenty 2004 directed by Wim Wenders, German poster
Mr. Wenders made this film in a 16-day period on a very low budget while he was in a period of limbo during the making of Don't Come Knocking. His skill expressing his emotions with such a powerful work on such short notice is remarkable. Like a lot of other people though, the thrust of his initial emotions was anger--not at the Muslims who attacked America, but at Americans for their "exaggerated patriotism."
However, there is a gaping hole in the very quick treatment of 911 in this film. That hole is the point of view of the attackers. What were the Muslim religious motivations for the 911 attack? Lana, as a complete outsider, simply reports the celebrating Palestinians with a poignant "they hate us." For a lot of self-loathing Americans, this might be enough, but I felt cheated.
In his DVD commentary Wenders notes his Christian sensibilities. For me, the sprit of Christian forgiveness, love for mankind and turning the other cheek has a lot more meaning if it can be convincingly expressed with a full awareness of the driving force behind an evil act. Wenders shows no awareness of that. The word Muslim is not used in the film, although the story is obviously about American hostility to Muslims and about a journey John Diehl's character Paul makes from initial hostility to greatly improved awareness catalyzed by his dealings with his well-traveled neice Lana (Michelle Williams) and the Pakistani Hassan (Shaun Toub).
A Wenders film that explores this material more thoughtfully--with the courage to use accurate language--would be welcome should Mr. Wenders ever find himself moved to go in that direction. I doubt if he would tell a story that would match my views, but it would be nice to see more directness and honesty from a man who is too great for this kind of timid innuendo.
Al-Saman wal-Kharif [The Quail and the Autumn] Egyptian film directed by Houssam El-Din Mustafa; the people depicted on the poster (artist unknown) are Mahmoud Moursy as Esa and Nadia Lutfi as Riri.
Cast: Adel Adham, Abdallan Gheith, Nadia Lutfi, Mahmoud Moursy, Ihsan El-Kalawy, Leila Sheir, Naima Wasfy, Mimi Shakeeb, Ehsan Sherif; cinematography Klelio, screenplay and dialogue Ahmad Abbas Salah.
This black-and-white film is based on a story by Naguib Mahfouz.
Plot summary: With the revolution hopes ended for Esa the tanner (Mahmoud Moursy), a political party youth who had promised himself to be a man of the future, especially since he had failed to adapt to it on a personal or a general level and his marriage to Salwa (Leila Sheir) had failed. Esa fled to Alexandria and while carousing in a nightclub there he met Riri (Nadia Lutfi), a girl of the night who came to love him almost immediately. However he dispensed with her when he discovered she was pregnant. Riri married an older man to give her daughter a name and protect herself from ruin. Esa returned after six years to confirm that the girl was his daughter and to try to persuade Riri to marry him, but she refused. In the end there was a reconciliation between them, just as there had been a reconciliation with the political system of the revolution, through one of his best friends who had stood on the side of the July revolution. According to film critic Sa'ad al-Din Tawfiq this is one of the top 100 Egyptian films.
This book is the result of over ten years of data collection, research, traveling and poster collecting. It is a collector’s field guide, a catalog and a work in progress that focuses on some of the most important memorabilia in the modern history of Egyptian film, the cinematic legacy of Naguib Mafhouz. Because of its meticulous listing and index of film studio personnel, this work can also serve as a graphic film studies outline for an essential phase of Egyptian cinematic realism.
Novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988 for literary fiction. By the time he got his prize all but six of the Egyptian films based on his work had already been produced and marketed, for Mahfouz had long been a recognized talent in his own land. His fiction is famously cinematic. He was one of the insiders in the Egyptian film industry and also a prolific writer of screenplays. Over 70 Egyptian films based on his novels, short stories and screenplays were produced in the period 1947 - 1992. Presented here are graphic images from promotional material for most of those films, their plot summaries and an indexed listing of studio personnel and promotional entities. In short, what we offer here is an executive summary of the long cinematic career of Naguib Mahfouz, with many of the classic commercial images that were used to promote the films.
These posters and graphic designs all come from an important but little documented period of art history in Egypt. It was a time when domestic and foreign films were being produced and exhibited in Egypt frequently and in large numbers, and posters and other promotional materials were made with primitive tools by a busy but highly talented pool of artists and technicians. The art on the posters is beautiful, but the visual beauty gives only a faint taste of the bustling environment from which they emerged.
Small print and design workshops in Cairo and Alexandria were kept busy day and night for many years meeting the promotional demands of the burgeoning Egyptian film industry. Zinc printing plates were etched by hand. These plates were expensive and had to be washed and reused, sometimes in their hundreds in the case of the production of color billboard posters, which required the preparation of 24 multi-colored images, each of which required at least three different plates for the color separations. The printed posters that survive were sometimes displayed in front of theaters alongside original paintings done for the same purpose that were never printed. The original unprinted paintings are almost all lost to posterity, as are unfortunately all known copies of many of the printed posters from Egypt’s golden era of cinema.
Many of the printed posters were done as labor intensive stone lithographs where the images were transferred to the paper directly from an etched stone on a small hand press. The paper sheets were fed into the these devices one at a time. In today’s world this kind of production would be prohibitively expensive, but in Cairo in the forties and fifties it was often the only method available to determined cadres of skilled but poorly paid workers. Yet the Egyptian film posters made so beautifully in this painstaking way, like most of the world’s other film posters, were made for one-time use and often discarded afterwards. The graphic images here are scarce remnants from a lost period of 20th century industrial art.
This chronological arrangement of Egyptian poster images gives visual milestones for several parallel lines of development, Mahfouz’s develpment as as a writer and professional film worker, the evolution of the modern Egyptian film along with the emergence of the Golden Era of Egyptian film and the evolution of the technology and art of the film poster in Egypt.
When Mahfouz wrote his first story for film in 1945 with Abdel Aziz Salam (the Adventures of Antar and Ablah), the most common Egyptian poster size was about 24× 35 inches, and the most common printing technique was stone lithography. Mahfouz’s fiction was still historical, nationalistic and patriotic, a thematic focus he would abandon later for contemporary social realism, thanks in part to the influence of that film’s director Salah Abouseif.
This was just before the beginning of what can be called the Gasour era in Egyptian film poster design, a period of over 40 years beginning in 1946 dominated by the great Egyptian cinema poster artist and printer Hassan Mazhar Gasour (1925-1992). When Gasour came onto the scene in Egypt posters were being produced by a handful of small art studios, but as the Egyptian film industry developed Gasour, with his own printing business and his prodigious skills as a painter, soon became the nation’s undisputed master in the field of poster production. In those years his studio also served as a working school for other developing poster artists and technicians.
Mr. Gasour’s daughter Hala maintains his printing business today, as she has been dong for the last 24 years; she continues to print Egyptian film posters, but she does not design them.
The early period of Mahfouz’s cinema career lasted until 1960 when his first novel to become a film production was released, Dead among the Living [bedaya wa nehaya]. In this first period, in his film work Mahfouz wrote mostly screenplays and collaborated frequently with director Salah Abouseif, who also directed Dead among the Living.
By the time Dead among the Living was released Egyptian film posters had become larger and were made with zinc plate lithograph or offset presses instead of stone lithography. Most posters at this point were now 27× 39 inches and the smaller 24× 35-inch size had fallen into disuse. The old artists and printers active in the 40s had largely faded from the scene and most posters were now printed either by one of the two Gasour shops or by Sayed Ali Ibrahim Al-Nasr, although there were many other active printers.
The next period in the Mahfouz filmography includes his famous 1,500-page work known as the Cairo Trilogy. The film titles based on it are Between Two Palaces (1964), Palace Walk (1967) (sometimes called Palace of Desire) and The Sugar Bowl (1973) (sometimes called Sugar Street). The trilogy is an extended narrative covering the affairs of three generations of a single Cairo family descended from the patriarch al-Sayed Ahmed Abdel Gawad. The family is depicted as being challenged constantly by its difficulty adapting to the rapid pace of social change. In this period films based on Mahfouz works were more often taken from his novels than his screenplays and were built around the dense detailing of the urban street for which Mahfouz is best known.
The final period of our Mahfouz cinemagraphic survey points to a miscellany of remakes and initial film treatments of earlier Mahfouz works, but it is also includes films based on works such as Adrift on the Nile in which Mahfouz’s political disenchantment echoes more loudly in his crowded social matrix than it had done in earlier films. Mahfouz was always acutely sensitive to politics but in some of his later work and the films based on it we can see his disappointment with certain political developments in Egypt such as the revolution and the 1967 war.
This was a three-part film, each part a different cast, different story, different director, each a story by the writer Ihsan Abdul-Qudus. There was a separate poster for each story. Each poster had the same title Girls and the Summer [al-banat wal-seif] with the secondary designations first story, second story, third story. The most notable of the three was the third story, which featured Abdel Halim Hafez, Zizi El-Badrawy and Soad Hosny. All three segments were photographed by cinematographer Wahid Farid.
Girls and the Summer First Story (Mariam Fakhr Eddine) directed by Ezzel Dine Zulficar
Girls and the Summer Second Story (Samira Ahmed) directed by Salah Abuseif
Girls and the Summer Third Story (Soad Hosny) directed by Fatin Abdel Wahab
This film was one of almost 40 by director Togo Mizrahi (1905-1986). It is considered one of his best and features the best acting performance in the long career of singer Om Kolsum (ca. 1900 - 1975). Cinematography was by Abdelhalim Nasr, distributed by Behna Films. Starring Om Kolsum, Yehia Chahine, Zouzou Nabil, Fouad Shafik, Abdel Waress Assar, Fakher Fakher and Stephan Rosti.
Salama (23.5" x 35.5") (1945) - (Om Kolsum) Egyptian blue stone litho film poster printed by Nasr printers.
Salama (23.5" x 35.5") Egyptian stone litho film poster, distributed by Behna films, printed by al-Fann Printers of Alexandria.
Salama Egyptian film program
Salama Egyptian lobby card (12" x 17.5")
Salama undated rerelease Egyptian film poster (27" x 39") art by Ahmed Fouad. This poster shows an iconic image of Om Kolsum as she was known to her fans in stage performances in later years; it is not taken from a scene in the film Salama.
Salama undated rerelease film poster (27" x 39") distributed by al-Qawmia films, printed by Arabic Cinema Printers
Stormy Night [leilet momtera] (1939) - (Laila Mourad) Egyptian one-sheet
This old poster (27" x 39") is in remarkably good shape for its age, printed with stone lithography in Alexandria by Dar al-Tabaa. This was Laila Mourad's second film and her first starring role, directed with story and screenplay by Togo Mizrahi, cinematography Abdelhalim Nasr. Starring Laila Mourad, Youssef Wahby, Taheyya Cariocca, Ferdoos Mohammed, Stephan Rosti and Mansi Fahmi
Determination [al-azima] (1939) - (Fatma Rouchdi) very rare Egyptian film poster 27" x 39" printed by Matabi Masr of Cairo
In the 1995 Cairo 100 Years of Egyptian Cinema Festival this film was ranked number one among the top 100 films. Directed by Kamal Selim, cinematography Very Varkash. Starring Fatma Rouchdi, Abd Al-Aziz Khalil, Zaki Rostom, Hussein Sedki, Anwar Wagdi, Abbas Fares, Marie Munib, Mokhtar Osman, Mokhtar Hussein, Hikmat Fahmi, Souraya Fakhry, Hassan Kamel.
In his 1969 book An Introduction to the Egyptian Cinema Egyptian director Mohamed Khan says of this film: "The story of Determination is only a skeleton to serve the film's other deeper aims. It takes place in a poor district in Cairo and concerns, among others, Mohamed, the local barber's son, who resists becoming a government official after finishing his secondary school. Mohamed hopes to better himself through a business deal with a rich man's son. This deal fails and while Mohamed is awaiting his government appointment he is threatened with the loss of his sweetheart to the local butcher. Eventually Mohamed succeeds in becoming a business man and marrying his girl. Determination is regarded as the first film of a school which was new to the Egyptian scene: the realistic school. For the first time an Egyptian film-maker dealt realistically with a social problem drawn from real life and conditions in Egypt. The deepest traditions of the Egyptian people reflect the respect and esteem accorded to officials, to the exclusion of other social classes such as tradesmen, craftsmen and independent workers. The official in his suit and Tarboosh (the Effendi) is compared with the tradesman or craftsman in his galabia, the official and his fixed regular salary and the independent worker and his uncertain earnings. This grave problem produced consequences which had a great influence on Egyptian society, especially during this period. If a young man were fortunate enough to obtain his secondary school certificate or university degree, his only hope of a stable income was to become a government employee. The result was that only foreigners went into trade or industry. The owners of the commercial or industrial companies in Egypt were Italians, Greeks, French, Swiss or British, and it was unusual to find a single Egyptian among them. Egyptian families of the middle class always chose an official to marry their daughters, however small his income might be, rejecting an independent worker even if his income was higher. Selim's film had a really overwhelming success, such as had never previously been known in the Egyptian cinema."
