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.

The camera pans across the rooftops in a popular district of Alexandria. The image cuts to chickens feeding on one of the rooftops, then fades to the interior of the adjacent one-room apartment. An alarm clock rings, waking Chalom, a seller of lottery tickets. He quiets the alarm, leans over, and wakens his bedmate, `Abdu, a butcher’s assistant. Thus opens al-`Izz Bahdala [Mistreated By Affluence (1937)], a film written, directed, and produced by Togo Mizrahi (1901-1986), an Alexandrian Jew with Italian nationality. This image of a Jew and a Muslim in bed together functions as a point of departure for this talk’s analysis of the construction of coexistence in Togo Mizrahi’s films produced in his studio in Alexandria. Studio Mizrahi was the single most productive studio in Egypt from 1929 until 1946, turning out many popular and successful Egyptian films; all but three of the thirty-six films produced at the studio were directed by Togo Mizrahi. In this talk I focus particularly on the Arabic sound films Mizrahi wrote, produced, and directed in Alexandria between 1934 and 1939, prior to the opening of his Cairo studio. My analysis centers on these films’ portrayal of Alexandria as a cosmopolitan space. I explore the interplay between the films’ construction and representation public spaces and private spaces, and also unpack the underpinning gender and sexuality discourses of same-sex couples sharing a bed. This trope of “in bed together” is sometimes underplayed, like in Mistreated by Affluence, and other times played as a gag, as in al-Duktur Farhat [Doctor Farhat (1935)]. The distinct queering of the private space, specifically the bed, in these films, I argue carries over into their construction of fluid communal, civic, and national identities. In other words, I approach the phrase “in bed together” as not just a metaphor of coexistence, but as a key to unlocking the films’ projection of notions of sameness and difference, self and other, in 1930s Alexandria.

It has often been argued that the advance of print capitalism in Egypt accelerated the emergence of an educated Egyptian middle class, which came to be known as the effendis, and whose influence on Egyptian society reached its peak in the interwar period. Scholarship on the effendis seems to present a consensus that they functioned as agents and negotiators of modernity, i.e. as intermediaries between uneducated Egyptians and modern progressive social values. Egyptian cinema of the interwar period and up until 1952 engaged with this idea in a complex manner and occasionally presented a counter-narrative. This counter narrative could be traced in the genre of romantic-comedy in which the effendi is caricatured as a stagnate regressive person whose world view and everyday life practices are constrained by his adherence to, and his blind imitation of, modern European social practices, as well as by his idolization of governmental careers. This satirical depiction is often achieved by means of a constructed juxtaposition between the character of effendi and that of an uneducated ibn al-balad (al-ghayr muta`llim) whose actions and principles are depicted, ironically, as far more progressive than those of the ‘modern’ effendi. One of Egypt’s most famous comedians, who specialized in playing the role of the uneducated progressive ibn al-balad, was the French-educated actor, ‘Abd al-Fatt?? al-Qa?r? (1905-1965). This paper will capitalize on the work of Sawsan al-Misiri (Ibn al-Bald: a concept of Egyptian Identity) to analyze the metaphors used in constructing al-Qasri’s most notorious – and popular – comic film characters. It will focus on the uneducated progressive ibn al-balad as played by al-Qa?r? in the following celebrated movies: Ma‘lish Y? Zahr (What Bad Luck, 1950), Laylat al-?inah (The Wedding Night, 1951), Al-Ust?dhah F??imah (Fatima the Attorney, 1952), and Bayit al-Natt?sh (The Swindler’s House, 1952). All of these films appeared at a propitious moment, at the tail end of Egypt’s ‘liberal’ era and the onset of the Nasserist revolution.