Although not widely known, Mohamed Bayoumi was one of the great pioneers of Egyptian cinema. Born in Tanta in 1894, Bayoumi left Egypt in 1920 to study filmmaking in Berlin. When he returned in 1923, he created his own newsreel and proceeded to shoot a series of short films. In this paper, I examine one of Bayoumi’s earliest films and its depictions of Egypt. Specifically, I analyze Bayoumi’s comic Barsoum yabhath ‘an wazifa/Barsoum Looks for a Job and the ways in which it articulated his personal vision of the Egyptian nation four years after the 1919 revolution. Research on Bayoumi’s work is minimal at best. Although a handful of scholars have examined the cultural significance of contemporary Egyptian cinema, film theorists and historians largely ignore the silent era. Nationalist historians, for instance, dismiss silent film production because Egyptianized Europeans (mutamassirun) dominated cinematic output before the establishment of an indigenous film industry in the early 1930s. As a result, few scholars have seriously examined the centrality of silent film in producing foundational images of Egyptian nationalism. I therefore revisit Bayoumi’s pioneering work and ask why he created new imaginaries that both built upon and transcended older ideas of Egypt as an idea and a place. Barsum represents Bayoumi’s first stand-alone directorial effort and laid the foundation for many of the social themes that later filmmakers would address. I therefore focus on how he stages popular understandings of poverty, comedy, and relations between Copts and Muslims. Taken as a whole, Bayoumi’s work represents not only a shift in silent filmmaking, but also a break from decades of short documentaries that recorded ‘authentic’ social realities and landmarks. For these reasons, I situate Barsum within a framework that foregrounds its importance in early formulations of post-revolutionary nationalism.

This paper will discuss aspects of urban youth culture and youth subjectivity in 1940s Egypt. I will look at private photographs and diaries created by young men and women, and examine them as both visual narratives and material artefacts embedded in specific social contexts and relationships. These private albums and diaries were meant to remain hidden from social seniors; at most, they circulated in controlled contexts in small homosocial peer groups. They have strong class and generational aspects. In some ways the individualized practices of young middle-class Egyptians in mid-20th century Egypt bring to mind social media of the early 2000’s. This paper will look at such artefacts as spaces where nascent individualist subjectivities (among other distinctly modern forms of perceiving the self) were performed and cultivated without threatening the patriarchal social order as such. They illustrate how, in social practice, patriarchy and individualism construct each other. Secondly, the strongly generational aspect of such youth practices will be discussed within the context of the emergence of a specific peer identity—a distinctly modern youth culture heavily exploited by the media but by no means limited to it—that was often defined against the senior generation. This generational conflict that was slowly emerging through the Interwar period had crucial political dimensions and consequences.

Women producers, directors, and stars were surprisingly prominent in Egyptian cinema through the 1940s, until the 1952 revolution, like the French Revolution, dealt a blow to what it viewed as an effeminate ancien regime. Dismissed as apolitical, reactionary and poor imitations of Hollywood, women's melodrama was in fact a successful and poignantly political movie genre. In movies made by Assia, Asmahan, Leila Murad and Umm Kalthum, marriage and family became the arena for political debate about the future of Egyptian society. In a decade where the Muslim Brotherhood reached a peak of popularity by focusing politics on questions of domestic morality, it is no surprise that men found great interest in what superficially appeared to be women's movies. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the woman's melodrama was among the most popular movie genres in Egypt. A survey of films made in the first decade of Egyptian sound cinema (according to Mahmud Qasim's Dalil al-aflam), suggests that fully half of the movies featured female protagonists, and a clear majority were love stories and stories of marriage and/or remarriage. This paper uses three movies, Layla Murad's Laila, the Country Girl (1941); Asmahan's Love and Revenge (1944); and Umm Kalthum's Fatima (1947) to advance an argument that these musical melodramas refracted political issues much as the screwball comedies analyzed by Stanley Cavell did in the United States, and as French melodrama of the early 19th century did in Peter Brooks' classic study, The Melodramatic Imagination. In each of these films, the political debate implicit in the plots revolved around efforts to reconcile seeming opposites: tradition and modernity, East and West, poor and rich, female and male. In contrast to post-World War II backlash against women's move into the public arena in France and the United States, Egyptian women's melodramas remained fairly optimistic about the prospect of resolving conflicts. Indeed, the paper concludes that women's melodramas allegorically prefigured the 1952 revolution and the Nasserist vision of Egyptian modernity.

Chahine, Chaos, and Cinema – a Revolutionary Coda Yusuf Chahine, Egypt’s most well-known and decorated director died in 2008 at age 82. Chahine made 42 films spanning a six-decade career. His work runs the gamut from social realism to melodrama, musical comedy to operetta and grand historical spectacle. He resisted easy compartmentalization, often confounding critics and viewers by mixing genres and moods within single films. In his final film, Hiyya Fawda, which was completed by his protégé, Khalid Yusuf, he returned to a favorite theme, Egypt’s national predicament, dispensing with his recent propensity to couch his criticism in allegorical/historical garb. This paper reads Chahine’s final film as a coda to his career, situating Hiyya Fawda and highlighting several key themes – political corruption and state brutality, sexual longing and deviancy – that reference, sometimes directly, his earlier classic work. Hiyya Fawda is at the same time a film that complements a revival of powerful social-political drama that is being produced by younger filmmakers, including Khalid Yusuf. And so this paper will need to read Chahine’s final film as part of an ongoing cinematic project in an evolving industry. Above all, Chahine’s conceptualization of Egypt in chaos – dispensing allegory and parable for a story set in contemporary Cairo – marks him as a prescient observer and even now a bit of an oracle. Hiyya Fawda will hereafter be viewed through the lenses of the January 2011 upheaval that has rocked Egypt and the Arab world. Chahine could not have predicted the popular demonstrations, but he clearly imagined them and sought to explore their roots, realistically and symbolically. The ending of his final film may be typically sentimental, but it is certainly less unbelievable than when the filming ended and the filmmaker gave his last directions.