Here's my second post featuring a lesson with Fatema Shokr, of Alexandria. In this short-ish blog I'll update you on this visit and add some notes about Alexandria. The conversation with Fatema includes a discussion about actors and films.
Yahia Fakhrany, an Egyptian actor currently working on stage and screen. This video is Part 2 of a series of 4 Arabic language lessons.
While I am at the Cairo International Festival For Experimental Theatre, (CIFET). I am on a jury looking at 2-3 plays a day and awarding prizes. That's me on the red carpet, with colleagues from Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Poland, and Sweden, and the President of the Festival, Dr Gamal Yakout (4th from left).
My big face appeared on a huge screen introducing the Jury members. This is like Cannes or the Oscars. It's serious, it's glamorous, and possibly grandiose, but it's also a massive celebration of creativity and research.
There seems to be huge pleasure in the occasion, and in the opportunity to socialise. I need to know more about production processes and the experience of actors and the companies, but the impression I have is that they really value being here and presenting their work.
Here is Hussein Fahmy in Alexandria Again and Forever (إسكندرية كمان وكمان1989) by Youssef Chahine. He has a cartoon animation spinning round his head after he is run down by the vast hand of a Greek statue. That's not unlike how I feel now.
(See The Youssef Chahine Podcasts no 13. Alexandria Again and Forever by José Arroyo and Richard Layne for a brilliant discussion of the film, 20/7/20)
Youssef (Joe) Chahine's (1926-2008) films reveal so many personal aspects of his creative process and life as - eventually - an iconic Egyptian film maker, and help me think through my project of digging back into my own connection with Egypt, 35 years ago.
[If you haven't seen it, the classic film Cairo Station (1958 باب الØديد‎) is on Netflix. ]
Alexandria Again and Forever was made at the time I was living in Egypt. Shammel was our minder as volunteer teachers in El Mansoura Egypt in 1985. He regularly dropped into the flat I shared with three other English boys, and brought along his comically giggling friend Heesham. The two of them used to take us out for aimless night drives, escaping the heat with the windows down and music playing. There were regular visits from neighbours Reda and Nadir. They were inexhaustible tour guides, big brothers, effervescent friends. There were strangers' weddings, pupils birthdays, and chance encounters that led to more meals, more parties and spontaneous trips. I once vomited up a cream birthday cake as we stepped off a cramped microbus, with the silhouette of Cheops Pyramid looking down at me. We were constantly visiting people - to Port Said and Ismailia to see other volunteers, or to cosmopolitain Alexandria.
Now I am back I do recognise some of the interactions that Chahine portrays. I'm generalising, but I think I see a lot of playfulness and enjoyment of social performance, for a start.
Yesterday I presented my paper to the CIFET conference on Theatre and Technology, that accompanies the festival. The ceremony and formality accorded to academia here is so impressive. I felt under-dressed for a start - the Chair, Dr Ahmed Barakat - another Alexandrian (2nd from right) - was wearing an elegant 1920s collar and tie. Btw, that's Mr Essaeed Qabeel on my left (he's running the festival and kindly translated).
Dr Barakat flattered me with a generous introduction and I was presented with a beautiful certificates in a commemorative folder. The questions from delegates were astute, searching and even aggressive in a positive sense. As a person who loves to talk, I was in good company.
CIFET Panel: Technology in the Scenography of Today's Theatres in the World
Chahine portrays the behind-the-scenes world of film making in his Alexandria trilogy. And he negotiates his ambivalence with all of this through a self-reflexive comedy. His sense of comedy is surreal, almost Pythonesque, and constantly places him at the centre of a comic carnival.
Certificate Presentation 3/9/22
Chahine was interviewed at Cannes alongside Omar Sharif in the early 2000s. Many of his early films featured Omar Sharif, as well other like Farouk Showky, Mon Hatem, Faten Hamam who would become household names all over the Middle East.
Linvité. Youtube. Omar SHARIF & Youssef CHAHINE : "La rencontre historique des deux stars du monde arabe" [Accessed 4/9/22]
Sharif and Chahine talk about their education - they were both at the same private school in Alexandria, represented in Alexandria Why? (إسكندرية... ليه؟ (1978. Sharif talks about things he could have achieved, things he regrets, but says he is comfortable and dispassionate about his fame, regarding himself as a ordinary person, who was just there when a particular exotic Arab figure was called for - in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962). He says he looks on his own celebrity as if looking with curiosity through a window and onto the street at another person. Chahine on the other hand, in the persona of the character Yehia, is the troubled subject of his own work.
Carnivalesque and excessive, Alexandria Again and Forever is an admission of Chahine's own distortions in recycled memory. Chahine shares his obsession with his own history in the mode of creative excess. The film is campily ridiculous and the comedy is fragile - excessive, sugary, and outrageously self-involved. Like my blogs, I hope. I wish.
How are the strands in this blog connected? I'm not sure, but amidst the formalities of the conference and the pomp of the festival, there seems to be great respect for education and creativity. Chahine was certainly privileged - well educated and an internationally funded film-maker. And there is arguably a post colonial aspect to the academic conference. Today delegates have discussed the global aspects of digital performance technologies: the Middle East and its relationship with producers of technology in 'the West' or China; and post human performance and the cultural identity of an actor.
As a guest, I simply feel very lucky to be here and am renewed by this re-visit: by the passion I see invested in research by delegates and in creative processes by artists as well as their enterprises together.