CoMo No. 6: Egypt (October, 2022)

[sally]

[sally]

will try to resist spending the entire month just posting adorable screenshots of omar

will be reading feminist surrealism: love in the kingdom of oil - nawal el saadawi

will be watching: omar (no doubt); films without rape in them (not looking at you, henry barakat) and preferably some of the more contemporary stuff (recs please! films like kitkat, YES)


fave egyptian films from beforehand:
night of counting the years (1969)
the blazing sun/struggle in the valley (1954)
kitkat (1991)
cairo station (1958)
chased by the dogs (1962)
my wife and the dog (1971)
it is not enough for god to be with the poor (1978) (yes, lebanese director but about egyptian architect, and it is great)
in the last days of the city (2016)
adrift on the nile (1971)

endlessly here for him ejaculating over hind rostom

[sally]

the everyday ritual of solitude hatching monkeys - basim magdy (2014) #CoMoEgypt

ironic, depressed, hallucinating, i like will watch more

[sally]

haven't finished watching this yet (love above pyramid's plateau, 1986) but i can't help thinking their interior design is a function of such angst, totally mesmerised by its chaotic energy

[niminy-piminy]

+ LOVE ON THE PYRAMIDS PLATEAU (Atef E-Taieb) #CoMoEgypt





many thanks for the subtitles!
it would be nice if you start writing here again, kanafani...

[niminy-piminy]

Khaled Hafez - The A77A Project (On presidents and Superheroes) (2009) #CoMoEgypt
→ https://ubu.com/film/hafez_a77a.html

Basma Alsharif - We Began By Measuring Distance (2009) #CoMoEgypt
→ https://www.ubu.com/film/alsharif_distance.html

[sally]

the postman - hussein kamal (1968) #CoMoEgypt

i dunno, i'm sensing a theme

[niminy-piminy]

+ the postman - hussein kamal (1968) #CoMoEgypt

[niminy-piminy]

TELEMATCH SADAT (Wael Shawky, 2007) #CoMoEgypt

Telematch Sadat re-stages the 1981 military parade, assassination, and funeral of Egyptian President Anwar Al Sadat—the event which ushered in the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak—with a cast of Bedouin children. Donkeys and carts stand in for armored vehicles, while the desert substitutes for downtown Cairo.

In the mid-1970s, the game show Telematch began an eight-year run on West German public television. The show was based on a formula borrowed from other similar shows such as Intervilles in France and It’s a Knockout in the United Kingdom; the idea was to pit residents of two different towns against one another in contests that often involved outrageous costumes. At the end of each season, the winners of Telematch would advance to Jeux Sans Frontiers (Games Without Borders), a show created in the ’60s, allegedly at Charles de Gaulle’s request, to foster pan-European friendship. But the popularity of Telematch waned, and by the ’80s it was gone. The show’s producers dubbed the series into Arabic, Hindi, and Spanish, among other languages, and syndicated it around the globe, at which point it became an unexpected oddball hit in countries as far afield as India and Argentina.

In the long history of popular culture’s global reach, a show like Telematch will probably be just a footnote, but it directly informs the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s ongoing “Telematch” series, 2007–. Shawky fell in love with the show as a kid growing up in Saudi Arabia. His father had moved the family from Alexandria to Mecca, part of an early wave of emigration that, after the discovery of oil, brought countless doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers from the Levant to the Gulf. When that wave of emigration reversed—when those countless doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers returned home—something of Saudi Arabia (politically conservative, intensely religious) traveled, too, and seeped into the very fabric of Egyptian society, which was relatively liberal and decidedly secular at the time.

Shawky explores this and other examples of cultural exchange by using the Telematch setup as a kind of extended metaphor for the tensions that arise when different states, societies, or civilizations meet. In the video Telematch Sadat, 2007, he enlists a pack of children to reenact the assassination of Anwar Sadat, which occurred during a parade in Cairo in 1981, and to restage the late Egyptian president’s funeral procession and burial.

[niminy-piminy]

THE MANY COLORS OF THE SKY RADIATE FORGETFULNESS (Basim Magdy, 2014) #CoMoEgypt

Disembodied narrators lament over the fragility of memory. In the quiet life of the forest, stone monuments stare back at us as if to let us know they'll outlive us all. As the lush soundscape crackles and the images fade, we're lured into the depths of ecological time and come to terms with the inevitability of being forgotten.

In The Many colours of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness, the soft, seductive grain of super-16 conjures up a verdant ecosystem which appears to flit uncomfortably between utopian and dystopian fantasies. Hues of strident, kaleidoscopic colour permeate Magdy’s imagined world, the results of the artist’s experimentations with a ‘pickling’ technique in which the film is exposed to household chemicals. Also present is a dazzling kaleidoscopic spectrum of colours and blurred imagery – the effects of layering images on top another – as well as other deliberate and chance wear and tear on the film acquired through the production process. Together they evince the physicality of the medium and lend a sense of texture and tactility, as well as remind us of the medium’s obsolescence.

Like most of Magdy’s films, time and place is indeterminate, leaving us to project our own perceptions onto these and other deliberate gaps. The film opens with a bleached yellow screen, which flickers to red, before revealing a cropped visage of a monument. This image is supplanted by a volley of white text spilling out onto a black frame, as if written in real time, and relates a conversation about a devil throwing up waterfalls. What follows is a compendium of images interwoven with text: lizards, taxidermied bears, a hand stroking an animal skin, rich, verdant forests, and a monument to the war dead.

Magdy’s use of text in the film manifests as different threads of narrative which exist without beginning or end. Reappearing throughout, they link back and forth both, blurring the concept of time within the film, accumulating meaning as the film progresses – its effect not dissimilar to the way audio and visual appear at times to be operating almost asynchronically. The nonconcrete, shifting nature of narrative in Magdy’s film can be compared to memory itself, and its imprecise nature as a web of images and associations where nothing is graspable.

Frequently enigmatic, sometimes absurd, and at times poetic, Magdy’s text, has the impression of containing a deep meaning or conundrum, inveigling the viewer into the film. The indeterminate personality of his voiceless narrator suggests a collision of the wisdom of the old with the naive imagination of the very young, and demonstrates the many different ways in which Magdy plays ambiguity and confusion in his ode to obsolescence and memory.

https://vimeo.com/103874493

[sally]

dark waters - youssef chahine (1956) #CoMoEgypt

i could rhapsodize about this film in a few ways, notably the cinematography, however instead it turns out that i only took screenshots of this.....orgasm.....of a man, so, here's some disgusting leering pics i took, my god.







fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

[niminy-piminy]

+ DARK WATERS #CoMoEgypt

[niminy-piminy]

MY BLOOD, TEARS AND SMILE (Hussein Kamal, 1973) #CoMoEgypt

Regarded as one of the boldest films of the "liberal" 1970s, this award-winning classic is directed by the great Hussein Kamal and written by the controversial Ihsan Abdel Quoddous and featuring a superb cast. A color saturated melodrama and a profound analysis of seventies society and decadence.

or a feminist Bollywood film (sponsored by Mercedes & EgyptAir)





with a Godot waiting for dowry


with the occasional appearance of hippies

[sally]

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/ ... 3102325760

[rischka]

ok this looks fun i found one to watch too

[rischka]

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1581 ... 2wmOku6s6w

not bad but too long. i liked the art deco. can be found on youtube

[sally]

they're all too long! avg egyptian movie length is like 2 hours, very wearing

[sally]

there's loads of early travelogues for egypt, but i think i've seen most of them, and the british ones are slightly yuck

egypt & her defenders (1914)

[niminy-piminy]

FALLEN ANGELS PARADISE (Oussama Fawzi, 1999) #CoMoEgypt

[niminy-piminy]

WOMEN FETCHING WATER FROM THE NILE (Henry Short, 1897) #CoMoEgypt

https://youtu.be/B_WPZ00elSk

FISHERMEN AND BOAT AT PORT SAID (Henry Short, 1897) #CoMoEgypt

https://youtu.be/AP8SEk__mGs

[niminy-piminy]

HONAYN'S SHOE (Mohamed Ghazala, 2009) #CoMoEgypt

https://youtu.be/u4g5IuLF_C0

[Lencho of the Apes]

A Husband's Confession - F. Abdulwahhab, 1965

Completely unhinged. Tashlin vibe, exploiting the role sex kittens played in 50s/60s cinema while critiquing-sorta the gender ideology behind them by making the whole thing ridiculous. Almost MarxBro levels of absurdity, and star -- Fouad el Mohandes --as dialed in to physical comedy as Jerry Lewis or anyone else in the sound era. It took awhile to get rolling, but... God... it just builds and builds and builds. I'm pretty sure Rischka, Shin Shin, GregX would love it, not sure how it would mesh with other peoples' tastes. Wildest thing I've seen since whenever.

[rischka]

where can i find this crazy masterpiece

nm it's on the ytube

[rischka]

And it is pretty funny

edit: WOW u weren't kidding. it came completely unmoored and floated off into space. thx for the tip lencho

[niminy-piminy]

CABARET CRUSADES: THE PATH TO CAIRO (Wael Shawky, 2012) #CoMoEgypt

The second chapter of the trilogy, The Path to Cairo (2012), produced by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo for dOCUMENTA (13), recounts the events that happened between the first and the second Crusade, between 1099 and 1145, and is structured as a musical. In this case, Shawky collaborated with potters and Provençal santonnier makers to create the ceramic marionettes that comprise the cast, and with choirs of fishermen and children from Bahrein for the musical performances.

[niminy-piminy]

TIME LAUGHS BACK AT YOU LIKE A SUNKEN SHIP (Basim Magdy, 2012) #CoMoEgypt

https://vimeo.com/47488612