(Image source: Tadrart.com)
The newspapers of the world are full of Youssef Chahine obituaries and testimonials (Ali Dilem's drawing in Algeria's Liberte is very touching), so I won't add to the confusion... or should I say "Fawda" (Chaos), the title of Chahine's last film. I have seen a couple of his films, though I cannot count myself a fan. Chahine's films tend to be unsubtle, a bit obvious, and not even the best that Egyptian cinema can offer - I much preferred Marwan Hamed's 2007 The Yacoubian Building, for its grasp of contemporary Egyptian society.
But Youssef Chahine is/was for much of the world Mr. Egyptian Cinema. And his Egypt - secular, outward-looking, cosmopolitan, multicultural - is under threat. The "Chaos" of his last film (I do want to see it, if only for that reason) reflects the transition from the usual chaotic, shambolic, overcrowded country at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa - but one legendary for its friendly, tolerant people, who have a special word for "contentment" - to a more deadly chaos born of religious intolerance and rule by a stultifying, corrupt government that hasn't changed in decades.
Thanks to an old friend who was my boss at the American Consulate in Alexandria (Chahine's home town, of which he was so proud he made several films in its honor) in the early eighties, I read a recent report in Bloomberg by Daniel Williams on Muslim-Christian strife, which conjured up worrying parallels with Lebanon.
Increasing violence between Egypt's Muslims and Coptic Christians is raising alarms that the sectarian hostility besetting Lebanon and Iraq may take root in the Middle East's most populous country. Egypt's reputation for a live-and-let-live ethos is under assault following recent murders of Copts in Cairo, street fighting in cities including Alexandria and a pitched battle between Muslims and Coptic monks at an ancient desert monastery. "The divisions are deepening,'' Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Democracy Review, said in a telephone interview. "There's a growing Islamization of Egypt, and the Copts respond by turning inward in a defensive stance. ''Muslims and Copts -- who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 78 million citizens and are the country's most-populous minority -- increasingly identify themselves primarily by religion," Mustafa said.
Youssef Chahine, in his own preachy way, dedicated many of his films to fighting this kind of intolerance. Son of a Christian Lebanese father and a Greek mother, he incarnated Alexandria's melting pot of Mediterranean peoples.
So if there is mourning over Youssef Chahine, it is in part over the kind of Egypt he represented, where Cairo was the Hollywood of the Middle East, and secular Arab nationalism - though its founder Gamal Adbel Nasser could sometimes be a thorn in the side of the West - is a matter of wistful nostalgia, compared to the contemporary dangers of obscurantism. Chahine's cinema, with touches of Bollywood, was closer to the Italian realism of the fifties and sixties, when the raw images of Italy's postwar urban reconstruction provided the backdrop for social-themed melodrama. Chahine's oeuvre (click the link to LeMonde's selection of film clips) covered contemporary themes, Arab history, and cinema itself. He matters, for all those reasons, and Egyptian and Arab film makers have big shoes to fill.