In this paper, I argue that one of the most important ways of understanding the First World War in Egypt is through the so-called ‘silent’ films taken of the laborers who joined the war. With the representation of Egyptian workers and the Egyptian Labour Corps (ELC) as my focus, I offer a theoretical and methodological framework that aims to broaden scholarly understandings of the war, the transnational nature of filmmaking, and the development of cinematic idioms that transcend purely nationalist imaginaries. Broadly speaking, we need more scholarly research on multimedia portrayals of the First World War in Egypt. While a number of photographs, paintings, and artwork of the ELC exist, I examine film because of its widespread use between 1915 and 1918. Specifically, I look at one black and white 1917 film, “An Egyptian Labour Contingent,” created by the War Office Cinema Committee and the Topical Film Company. With a focus on this film, I aim to fill some of the research gaps about Egyptian cinema during this period and how film technology helped to create new visual/aural vocabularies of the war. I likewise address what film can teach us about representations of Egyptian laborers by shifting the focus away from the politicians and military commanders who directed the war effort. To make sense of the experience of the laborers who served, I consider the ways in which colonial film depicted their lives and what effect these depictions had on official understandings of their wartime contributions. From a visual/aural perspective, “An Egyptian Labour Contingent” represented a significant shift from older uses of cinema that attempted to document the land of Ancient Egypt and its inhabitants. Recognizing the differences between prewar and wartime representations of Egypt, I draw on colonial film as a medium that not only comprises dialectic elements, but also one that can help us to reframe historical and historiographical questions related to the production, consumption, and distribution of images featuring subaltern Egyptians.

This essay mines the ambiguous divide between Egyptian and Egyptianized in discourses of the cinema, against those of the nation. The operative divide is one having to do with what I describe as nationalist credentials of cinema practitioners, institutions, and films. Some nationalist credentials could be and were pursued by such practitioners, such as in acquiring Egyptian citizenship, making “patriotic” movies, offering cinema programs in Arabic, or associating with highly credentialed nationalists. Other credentials, such as fluency in Arabic and, of course, origin—ethnic, religious, and national—were less attainable. Relying on popular press, cinema magazines, and government papers, I undertake an historical analysis of national identity, in a nation state barely formed, and still not entirely independent of its occupier Great Britain. Considering that fewer than thirty feature films had been produced domestically by the end of 1934, all were deemed nationalist by reviewers and critics of the day, in that they at minimum signified and participated in the modernization effort that the nation was undertaking, so as to catch up to the industrialized nations of the world. Yet, what was not missed on nationalist observers was the relatively high participation by non-Egyptians and Egyptianized in the making of these early Egyptian films. More lopsided than production was exhibition, in that a proportionally high number of cinemas were owned and run by Egyptianized and non-Egyptians, especially in the case of the relatively opulent first run cinemas. With the backgrounds—ethnic, religious, geographic—of cinema practitioners under scrutiny, particularly the powerful among them, Egyptianness of such practitioners itself was assessed for the sake of credentialing their cinematic work. Referencing GDP, literacy, and urbanism in Egypt of the modern era, I propose three problems of the reification of nationalism in modernity according to influential theorizing by Elie Kedouri, Earnest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson. Further, I dispute the nationalist credentials of “Egypt for the Egyptians,” the operative modern nationalist slogan, as I argue that Egyptianness was an elusive identity for many cinema practitioners living and born in Egypt, even following the actuation of the Citizenship Law of 1929, because of its ambiguity and its political currency.

Togo Mizrahi (1901-1986), an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, was one of the pioneers of the Egyptian film industry. He founded a studio and a production company in 1929, and became a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals. Between 1930 and 1946, Togo Mizrahi directed thirty full-length feature films in Arabic, and four Greek-language films. In his day, Togo Mizrahi was viewed by his peers and by critics as a consummate professional who contributed to the drive to establish a cinema industry in Egypt. In the midst of the Egyptian anti-colonial struggle, the development of a local cinema industry was embraced as a source of national pride for filmmakers, critics, and audiences alike. Togo Mizrahi, I argue, saw himself as engaged in this collective effort. His contemporaries heralded his contributions to building a national film industry. But, later critics dismissed Mizrahi’s contributions to the development of Egyptian cinema. From their perspective Togo Mizrahi had three strikes against him: he was a capitalist; he was a foreigner; and he was Jew. Drawing upon archival research in contemporaneous journals and newspapers, I demonstrate Togo Mizrahi’s contributions to the nationalist project of establishing Egyptian cinema as both a local art form and a vital domestic industry. I argue that Togo Mizrahi’s films articulate both a pluralist nationalism and an Arabophone, locally situated cosmopolitanism. The title of this talk comes from a scene in Mizrahi’s 1937 film al-cIzz Bahdala [Mistreated by Affluence] that explores these idioms. The film follows the friendship of Chalom, a Jew, and 'Abdu, a Muslim, who start out impoverished and rapidly climb the socio-economic ladder together, only to return to their modest circumstances after a fall. When Chalom graduates from hawking lottery tickets on the streets to renting a store front, he hangs a bilingual sign in Arabic and French. In Arabic, the sign reads “Chalom, for the sale and redemption of lottery tickets.” The broken French—mimicking the common signs for currency exchange in the port city—reads “Chalom, agent of exchange.” The notion of exchange—from cultural exchange to exchange of identities—is a key element of what I identify as a Levantine cinematic idiom evident in Togo Mizrahi’s films. My analyses of Mizrahi’s films tease out the relationship between the notion of exchange, pluralist nationalism, and locally situated cosmopolitanism.

Long before Habermas admitted the persistence of religion in the public sphere and the possibility of a ‘post-secular’ stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning, pioneer Egyptian filmmakers used the screen to construct a secular public sphere that is not anti-religion—one which accentuates the crucial difference between religion as a faith and a body of legal knowledge that has the “vital semantic potentials” to be translated into secular idioms and in a “universally accessible language.” This paper examines metaphors representing Islam in Egyptian postwar (1945-1952) films that engaged with discourses of Islam and modernity in the context of colonization and war. By using tools of screenwriting, this paper analyzes three patterns of depicting metaphors representing Islam: marginalization, ridicule, and appropriation. I trace these patterns in everyday life practices of film characters succumbing to competing for colonialist, nationalist or Islamist projects of modernity. In doing so, these early films, I argue that, did not only present a fairly early recognition of how religion has not shrunken away under the pressures of modernization. Rather, they stand out as an exemplar of Islamic popular culture in which the public use of reason continued, despite shrinking physical public sphere caused by the harsh realities of colonization and war. More importantly, these film show how their filmmakers stressed that the task of decoding the ethical intuitions of religious traditions, which could be incorporated into a ‘post-secular’ stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning in challenging the forces of global capitalism, falls not only to experts and religious citizens but also to all citizens—both religious and secular—engaged in the public use of reason.