Abstract
This paper is framed by 2 popular film comedies produced over 50 years apart. Hasan, Marcos and Cohen (1954) is a classic adaptation of a stage comedy filmed in the turbulent first years after the 1952 Free Officers Revolution, but very much an ‘old regime’ film. The story features 3 unscrupulous merchants clearly identified as Muslim, Christian and Jew trapped in an ‘old world’ who are struggling to avoid coming to terms with the ‘new.’ Hasan and Marcos (2008) is a comedic outcry on behalf of national unity produced in a time of escalating Muslim-Coptic sectarian strife. The two leads portray Muslim and Christian clerics who trade religious identities in order to hide from extremists within their respective camps. The allusion to the original film is obvious, but what happened, in the interim, to Cohen, Egypt’s Jews or Egypt’s rich multiculturalism?
The broader concern is the way and extent which Egyptian cinema reflected the decline and destruction, for a multiplicity of reasons, of Egyptian ‘cosmopolitanism’ during the Nasser years (1952-70). I will trace the cinematic depiction of ‘foreign’ Egyptians (Jews, Greeks, Italians, Armenians, etc.), from the late 1940s through the late 1950s, when they literally vanish from the screen and discuss alternative readings and screenings of the subsequent nostalgia expressed both by the victims and, increasingly, by those who supposedly reaped the rewards of a more homogenous society.
My benchmark will be 1958, the year Youssef Chahine (later a major proponent of cosmopolitanism) depicted a culturally, although far from socially, homogenous capital city in his masterpiece, Cairo Station; and the year in which Hasan and Marika, the last variant on the tried-and-true Muslim- ‘foreign’ other genre comedy was produced. A throwback to an earlier era of filmmaking, It is, arguably, Egypt’s last truly multicultural film depicting a here and now. A resurgence of Coptic characters, often comedic, in the past decade, exemplified by the recent Hasan and Marcos, speak to a very different Egypt – other unfinished business – in a very different way.
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