Al-Ard (1969)

Youssef Chahine’s adaptation of Marxist writer `Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s 1953 novel, set in the 1930s, is an epic chronicle of life in a rural Egyptian village. The main plot concerns the unsuccessful attempts of the villagers to retain their access to water. Told that they can only irrigate their land a few days a month, several of the villagers are arrested for overwatering. Although the outside threat originally seems to unite the villagers, divisions resurface, and one of them is bought off by the local bey, representative of the ruling class in general. Portrayed as a narcis­sistic, European-featured aesthete alienated from the land beneath his feet, the aristocrat has no compulsion against destroying the life of the poor peasants, or fellahs. Eventually, his decision to build a road through the fields to his house leads to confiscation of several villagers’ land, including that of the films’ central presence, Abu Swaylim (Chahine regular, Mahmoud el-Milligi). Troops are brought in to enforce the unjust law, but Abu Swaylim develops a relationship with their leader, Captain Abdullah, a sympathetic character whose class position aligns him with the villagers rather than his superiors. Nevertheless, other authorities arrive, and the film concludes as Abu Swayulim is dragged, dying, from his land, his fingers clinging to the precious, life-giving earth.

Imagery of water pervades The Earth, reflecting the faces of numer­ous characters, while the removal of dignity attached to cultivating the land is symbolized by the shaving of Abu Swaylim’s moustache (a Middle Eastern marker of masculinity) while he is imprisoned, The Earth is one of relatively few Egyptian films to address rural poverty in detail. It was made under the auspices of the public sector, during the administration of Gamal Abdel Nasser, with its critique set at an unspecified point in the past, under the constitutional mon­archy. However, Nasserist land reforms had not changed conditions substantially, and a more contemporary application advocating fur­ther socialist-oriented reforms was viewed by many in Egypt as both possible and necessary. By extension, The Earth has been interpreted as a plea for Arab control of the Middle East, and thus a metaphor for the loss of territory to Israel in the 1967 Defeat. (Indeed Al-Ard, the film’s Arabic title, was also the name of a pan-Arabist Palestinian organization advocating Palestinian liberation prior to the formation of the PLO.) It screened at the Cannes Film Festival and substan­tially advanced Chahine’s international reputation.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1969, Genre – Drama, Country – Egypt, Language – Arabic, Producer –N/A, Director – Youssef Chahine, Music Director – N/A, Cast - Hamdy Ahmed, Yehia Chahine, Ezzat El Alaili, Tewfik El Dekn, Mahmoud El-Meliguy, Salah El-Saadany, Ali El Scherif , Nagwa Ibrahim

A scene from Doaa al-Karawan (1959)

Adapted from a novella of the same title by Taha Husayn, The Nightingale’s Prayer tells the story of two poor orphaned sisters from the countryside. The first, sent to work as a servant, is seduced and raped by her master, an affluent young engineer, and subsequently killed by her uncle in an attempt to clear the family’s reputation. Her sister, performed by Fatin Hamama, finds refuge in a middle-class family where she is helped to acquire a certain education. Yet she does not find peace of mind and is haunted by the idea of avenging her sister’s death. She thus seeks employment by the same man and attempts to make him fall in love with her in order to be able to punish him. As time passes, ambiguous emotional ties start to link master and servant, oscillating between moral prohibition and deep desire. Eventually, they reach a dramatic climax: he dies in her arms, shot by a bullet intended for her.

The Nightingale’s Prayer includes many of the recurrent motifs and con­stellations of melodrama, such as class difference, rape, the merciless father-figure, and punished desire. It also offers some of the irrational and emotional narrative twists so typical of the genre, for instance the surprising change of the engineer from notorious womanizer to devoted lover. More­over, both the desire of the heroine and the viewer’s expectations are violently thwarted by the killing of the engineer at the very moment when he and his beautiful servant are united in his first sincere embrace. Tragedy and looming moral danger (seduction) are conveyed not only by the plot construction but also by the set design, which creates a cold, dim impression.

In particular, the engineer’s house is scarcely lit, equipped only with a few sharp-edged pieces of furniture. Its windows are shaped by small wooden frames that keep out the daylight and render the atmosphere gloomy and claustrophobic. Even exterior shots depict an unpopulated rural setting, dominated by sharply contrasted low-key lighting, isolating the human figures from their background, and heightening the sense of gloom that emanates from this doomed cross-class liaison.

Doubtless the film language in The Nightingale’s Prayer achieves, along with its plot, typical melodramatic emotionality, yet what has turned it into a modernist-oriented text—apart from its literary source—is first, its denunci­ation of a ‘premodern’ habit, the crime of honor and therefore the killing of girls who by losing their virginity were considered to have dishonored their families, and second, its preoccupation with one of the pillars of modernist thinking, namely education. It is through her education that the heroine becomes more of a match for the engineer, and it is also one of the sources of the power with which she resists his seduction. Nonetheless, the motif of irreconcilable class difference is still pivotal, due to the extreme poverty of the heroine’s peasant family as oppose to the bourgeois prosperity and indulgent lifestyle of the engineer – Viola Shafik

Cast and Production Credits

Year - 1959, Genre – Drama, Country - Egypt, Language - Arabic, Director – Henri Barakat, Cast – Fatin Hamama, Ahmad Mazhar, Amina Rizk, Zahrat El-Ola