Abstract
In the decade after the revolution of 1952, Egyptian films often echoed the political ideals of the new regime—and the movie posters produced in conjunction with those films sometimes embodied officially articulated attitudes toward Western influence and Egyptian history. This article considers a range of discursive strategies in examples of surviving posters produced in the 1950s and early 1960s but concentrates primarily on the representation of women in relation to public space—and it argues, ultimately, that the posters formed part of a broad attempt to define a traditionally and uniquely Egyptian public domain, in opposition to Western influence, in modern Cairo.
In an engaging recent essay on the place of street art in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Lewis Sanders accented the role played by ephemeral imageries in the public’s reappropriation of the center of Cairo. Pointing to pavement stones that were carefully arranged into messages to the Mubarak regime (spelling out, for instance, the Arabic term for “Leave”) and then hurled that same evening at the regime’s troops and citing texts sprayed on walls that proclaimed the downfall of the regime, Sanders argued that such examples indicated a shift in the relationship between the Egyptian public and the city. “The protestors,” he concluded, “began to view their surroundings as properly theirs rather than as an extension of the government’s instruments used to monopolize Egyptian life and identity, and to homogenize their narrative” (Sanders, 2012, p. 143). Although ephemeral, then, the piles of stones and stenciled graffiti offered a means by which space might be meaningfully redefined and dominant narratives forcefully resisted.
So, at least, it was in 2011. But what of the symbolic antecedent of the 2011 uprising—that is, of the 1952 revolution that served as a touchstone throughout the early months of 2011? Long before the ouster of Mubarak, after all, Cairo witnessed an earlier period of upheaval, as a series of events sparked violence in the streets and the fall of a government. A condensed summary of those events might read like this: By late 1951, many Egyptians resented the British military presence at the Suez Canal—and chafed, too, at the perceived weakness of King Farouk, whose claim to be a pan-Arab leader had lost much of its legitimacy. As a result, police officers began to informally shelter fedayeen, or agents of the resistance, as they conducted sporadic raids against British facilities. When an attack in Ismailia killed several of their soldiers, the British followed the fedayeen to a police facility; after a terse standoff that resulted in the death of a negotiator, the British attacked the barracks on January 25, killing roughly 50 auxiliary policemen. News of the violence quickly reached Cairo, where crowds of Egyptians soon gathered in the streets, and—on January 26, or Black Saturday—burned and looted dozens of stores and establishments associated with the British presence or with Farouk. Martial law was imposed, and Farouk dismissed the Wafdist government, but faith in the king was now seriously undermined, and on July 23, a group of military officers deposed him in a coup. Shortly thereafter, they altered the city’s geography in an act of commemoration, changing the name of Cairo’s central plaza to Tahrir (i.e., “liberation”) Square. And January 25 came to occupy an important position in the Egyptian imagination: Indeed, it was on that day in 2011 that the Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz urged fellow Egyptians to join her in protest on Tahrir Square, effectively precipitating the fall of the Mubarak regime. The nomenclature and the symbolic calendar of Cairo were thus altered, with deep consequences, in 1952.
But Cairene urban space was arguably also redefined in 1952 by a range of acts of resistance, interventions, and ephemeral forms that, despite their basic fragility or insubstantiality, produced a newly inflected environment. After all, the riots of Black Saturday were widely seen by contemporary observers as a violent expression of popular opposition to the presence of Western institutions in the Egyptian capital. 1 Viewed through such a lens, the fires that burned in British-owned department stores or the shouts hurled at Noel Thomas (secretary of the Turf Club) seem motivated by a desire to resist European influence over the city’s form, history, and future. Similarly, when a large crowd pulsed through Cairo on July 24, 1952, a banner held aloft by the marchers pointedly read, “Get out of our Country!” (Gardner, 2011, p. 34). This sign, an antecedent of the stones arranged on Tahrir Square in 2011, implied—like those stones—that Cairo now belonged to a common majority and that the British military and extant regime had no place in a reshaped Egypt. Like the uprising of 2011, then, the revolution of 1952 was also partly declared in terms that were inarguably ephemeral but that nevertheless yielded consequential changes in the form and nature of contemporary political space.
In this essay, however, I want to concentrate on the decade that followed the 1952 coup and on a particular brand of ephemera—Egyptian movie posters—that seem to have played a role in the redefinition of Cairene space in the postrevolutionary era. As we shall see, this process relied in part on the perpetuation of the theme of resistance: Posters, that is, occasionally echoed the anti-Western rhetoric of the Free Officers and contributed to the creation of a political space that was sometimes conceptualized in essentially Egyptian terms. This manifestation of Egyptian essentialism, however, certainly did not always imply political progressiveness, and in fact the turn toward traditional motifs sometimes implied, as well, the disempowerment of large segments of the Egyptian population. In other words, if the revolutionary regime sought to cast itself as an active agent in the struggle against Western imperialism, it also perpetuated a number of utterly conventional practices and ideologies. Movie posters played a visible role in this process, as they repeatedly invoked, over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, an arguably monolithic view of Egypt and of Egyptian city space. They were, then, an element—a particularly visible element—in the extension of a general central control over the Egyptian street and the Egyptian people—a control that may have been phrased in terms of dynamic resistance but that was nevertheless wielded by a government that quelled all meaningful local resistance before finally collapsing in 2011.
The New Regime and the Cinema
At first glance, admittedly, it may seem unlikely that a promotional form associated with the cinema could have occupied a significant place in public discourse at a revolutionary moment in Egypt’s history. And yet a combination of factors meant that film was in fact commonly bound, by 1952, to larger discussions regarding independence, nationalism, and evolving social codes. At the time of the coup, Egypt’s cinemas were owned by a complex patchwork of foreign studios (MGM, for instance, owned the Cinema Metro, the largest in Cairo) and local concerns. Despite their various owners, though, most Egyptian cinemas—75% of them, in 1952—regularly screened imported feature films and thus offered an appealing symbolic target for those opposed to foreign influence (Flibbert, 2005, pp. 462-463). In 1951, the Socialist Party urged activists to awaken the ideologically unconscious patrons of cinemas. But such attacks were not always only rhetorical, and occasionally, the cinemas were the targets of literal, physical violence as well. In 1946, anti-British activists damaged the Cinema Miami in Cairo in a grenade attack, and on Black Saturday, the rioters burned a number of movie houses, including the Rialto and the Miami. Cinemas were, therefore, to paraphrase Robert Vitalis, elements in a disputed landscape of power (2000, p. 277).
So, too, were the movies screened in those cinemas—which often acquired complex local sociopolitical inflections. For instance, the first film shown at the Metro after the coup was Quo Vadis, a Hollywood import whose depiction of Nero was read by many Egyptian observers as a commentary on the fallen Farouk. Moreover, as Joel Gordon (2002) has observed, the Free Officers shared an interest in the cinema (pp. 41-42). (It is often noted that Anwar Sadat all but missed the coup because, uncertain of the planned date, he had gone to a cinema with his wife.) And while the new leadership did not immediately assume an active role in reshaping the local film industry, it soon began to impose tariffs and restrictions on imported films and encouraged local theaters to screen at least three locally produced films a year. A 1956 law then formalized that expectation and added that the minimum run for each of those local films had to be at least 3 weeks (Vitalis, 2000, pp. 269, 283). Finally, the government partially nationalized the industry in 1963. Thus, the Free Officers may not have openly invoked Lenin’s idea that “of all the arts for us the cinema is the most important,” but, in Gordon’s (2002) words, “They certainly saw the silver screen as a palette for depicting a new polity and society” (p. 42).
The movie posters that regularly colored Cairo’s cinema facades and lined its major avenues (Figure 1) can be seen in a comparable light. Although surviving examples of Egyptian posters from the 1950s are rare (due to their fragility, their brief commercial relevance, and their perceived status as ephemera), they were clearly a regular feature on the walls, hoardings, and billboards of the city. And although they nominally addressed potential moviegoers (and thus a relatively discrete socioeconomic stratum), their eminently public placement in fact affected a large and diverse audience—anyone who moved through the highly trafficked downtown of Cairo became a potential viewer or respondent. But if the posters were signs with a wide circulation (and thus a potentially unstable meaning), they were also objects with defined physical characteristics. Typically produced by local painters and printmakers who were contracted by a studio or distributor, the posters were most often reproduced on 24- by 36-inch sheets (although larger formats, including billboards, were also common) and issued in multiples of several thousand (Green, 2012). Moreover, they generally featured, in small hand, both the artist’s signature and the address of the sponsoring distributor—a pairing that points to the combination of factors that shaped the appearances of the posters. 2 For while the painters sometimes worked in an individual idiom, they were clearly subject to more abstract external pressures as well. After all, the posters were advertisements for a commercial product; furthermore, painters working in the wake of the revolution were expected to heed a revised censorship law passed in 1955 by the new government. And while that law was rather more permissive than the stark limits on artistic expression that had characterized Farouk’s reign, it still sought “to protect public morals, to preserve security, public order and the superior interests of the state” (Shafik, 2001, p. 34). In short, although the revolutionary government did not actively control the production of movies or movie posters until the 1960s, it exerted—much as it did in the sphere of music—a soft but substantial pressure, so that the posters were a visible extension of officially sanctioned ideologies. Placed in public spaces, the posters were never a transparent result of individual artistic choices or a pure expression of popular sentiment; rather, they were as much an attempt to shape that sentiment and to produce in the process a certain sort of space characterized by specific political inflections.
Rene Burri, view from the window of the Hotel Windsor, Cairo (1958).
Flags, Nationalism, and Essentialism
Consider, for instance, one of the posters for the 1953 film Daughter of the Nobility (Figure 2). The movie, directed and produced by Anwar Wagdi, was the last in a series of films that starred his wife, Layla Murad. And yet it differed markedly, as Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard (2010) observe, from its pre-1952 antecedents in its relatively open criticism of Egypt’s privileged landed class. In this sense, it was typical of a group of films produced in the immediate aftermath of the revolution: Like Youssef Chahine’s 1953 Struggle in the Valley, it reflected (and contributed to) a general sense that King Farouk’s policies had fostered the widespread exploitation of peasants. In contrast, the film implied, the new government might rectify such social injustice. Thus, it is hardly irrelevant that the film’s poster prominently features at its base the splashy red, white, and black of the Arab Liberation flag, which was widely flown after the 1952 coup. Flags bore, at that moment in Egypt’s history, a potent significance. Negotiations with the British involving a Suez military base centered in part on the flag that could be flown, and in late 1952, Mohamed Haykal, an Egyptian journalist, flew to Washington and reported that a U.S. general had shown him a map of the world dotted with pins and American flags that denoted overseas bases and asked, provocatively, “Don’t you think we could do with some buttons and flags in your part of the world?” (Haykal, 1987, p. 35). The poster’s design might be seen as a rebuttal to such a question. It shows Murad seemingly startled and apprehensive, a member of Egypt’s eclipsed aristocracy, who, clad in white gloves and a strapless ball gown and standing before an oil painting, seems to have embraced the traditional emblems of upper-class European culture—yet she is literally overrun by the colors of the revolutionary republic. When it first appeared in 1953, then, the poster thus evoked contemporary rhetoric and implied the confidence of the newly emerged Egyptian government. At the same time, it also participated in the symbolic reclamation of large portions of Cairo, which had long been divided into British and Egyptian zones. The poster was thus a generated intervention that disrupted the historically Western associations of certain Cairene cinemas and city streets and implicitly marked all of Cairo as Egyptian and Arab.
Poster for Daughter of the Nobility (1953).
Even so, the revolutionary government was initially receptive to Western aid, even as it repeatedly articulated the importance of a nationalist platform. By 1955, however, Gamal Nasser (who became president in 1954) tacked in a provocative new direction: An arms purchase from Czechoslovakia alarmed many Western observers and was among the factors that led the U.S. to temporarily freeze funding for the Aswan Dam project. Nasser, in turn, responded with rhetorical violence. “I look at Americans,” he announced in a speech in July of 1956, “and say: May you choke to death on your fury!” (Gardner, 2011, p. 66). Soon after, he abruptly nationalized the Suez Canal Company, marking the culmination of a transition from tacit cooperation with the West to open defiance. And, again, the film industry quickly followed suit. A short Egyptian film titled The Anglo-French Aggression Against Egypt, released in 1956, offered a slanted account of the Suez Crisis (and spurred the British government to respond with three films of its own), while Ibrahim Hilmy’s Kilometer 99, produced in the same year, used events involving a British gate on the road to Suez as a means of crafting an anti-Western, anti-imperialist message. Perhaps the best-known filmic example of the masculinist expression of political autonomy that characterized Egyptian foreign relations in the mid-1950s, though, is Port Said, a 1957 drama starring Farid Shawqi. Posters produced for the film varied in form, but they shared a palette rooted in the three basic colors of the Arab Liberation flag, and they consistently depicted Shawqi standing in an aggressive pose and firing an automatic weapon in the general direction of the viewer (Figure 3). The result was a concise visual counterpart to Nasser’s bold rhetoric: an image alluding to an Egypt that would actively resist external pressures.
Poster for Port Said (1957).
Beginning in 1955, then, Nasser’s foreign policy was often characterized by a defiant attitude and a public criticism of Western imperialism. In this sense, it was paralleled by a genre of Egyptian writing that frankly derided American culture and values. For instance, Sayyid Qutb’s The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values—an account of an Egyptian’s 2-year stint in Greeley, Colorado, that was first published in 1951—lambasted American attitudes toward work, religion, and sexuality and enjoyed a broad readership in Egypt throughout the 1950s. Nasser’s government was only too happy to reinforce such ideas and sometimes did so in clever ways: In 1955, for instance, the Ministry of Education paid for a screening of the controversial Hollywood film The Blackboard Jungle, which offered a dark portrayal of deviant American youth. The screening was described as an attempt to educate Egyptian teachers, but a larger message seems nonetheless clear: Modern America had lost control of its children and its educational system (Golub, 2012). In short, American culture was cast in a cautionary light, rather than posited as an exemplum. Or, as Ella Schochat once put it, “It was the reaction against the West that shaped the cultural, social and political structure of Nasser’s regime” (1983, p. 27).
But if Nasser and the Egyptian culture industry had begun to resist Western culture, what did they propose in its place? Often, their suggestion was one that was entirely common in the postcolonial world—and that Frantz Fanon (2004) describes in The Wretched of the Earth: This passionate quest for a national culture prior to the colonial era can be justified by the colonized intellectuals’ shared interest in stepping back and taking a hard look at the Western culture in which they risk becoming ensnared. (p. 148)
Resistance to colonialism, that is, often yielded an interest in precolonial traditions—and, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1989) observe in The Empire Writes Back, decolonization “sometimes becomes a search for an essential purity” (p. 41). In 1950s Egypt, this frequently meant an active interest in the region’s pharaonic past, Islamic heritage, and linguistic inheritance. Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim, for instance, pursued such themes in their writings in the 1950s, while Muhammad Husayn Haykal emphasized the pan-Islamic concept of divine unity and the refinement of the Arabic language. Specific inflections varied, then, but such efforts consistently aimed, in the view of Selma Botman (1991), at “the formation of a national culture, a culture aware of the West but not a replication of it” (p. 142).
Such a process was also visible in Egyptian film. Under the Free Officers, the local film industry produced a steady stream of works with traditional religious subject matters: The 1953 film Bilal: The Prophet’s Call to Prayer, for instance, focused on an important figure in Islam’s early history. Egyptian folklore represented another common wellspring, as did traditional music—indeed, Abdel Halim Hafez experienced consistent success in the 1950s with a series of films that featured well-known Egyptian love songs. But movie posters also played a role in this process. A poster for the 1958 historical epic Khalid ibn al-Walid (Figure 4), for instance, used a conservative Kufic rendition of the title, set in a cartouche, to evoke the protagonist’s place in a venerable Arab past. Interestingly, the poster also included fragments of English—including, again, the hero’s name in a script that forced Latin characters into more familiar Kufic forms. The result resembled what is sometimes called, in postcolonial scholarship, an interlanguage. As Ashcroft et al. (1989) argue, “The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that postcolonial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre and replacing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place” (p. 38). Here, in a process of creative appropriation and active modification, a poster acknowledged the possibility of an Anglophone readership but insisted on the importance of a historic and inherently Arabic frame. If the presence of English evoked the traditional center—of global political control, of international film production—the modification of the lettering pointed, at the same time, to the relevance of more local histories and traditions. Importantly, however, such an ideological use of text was hardly novel in Cairo. In a fascinating book on public inscriptions in medieval Fatimid Cairo, Irene Bierman (1998) observes that “alphabet and language have a complex relationship which is socially defined in time and place.” Furthermore, she claims, “the display of writing signs in different alphabets in the public space signals for all members of the society social practices which enable to public space to be the site for . . . a display of difference” (pp. xi-xii). Through the employment of dual alphabets in the poster for Khalid ibn al-Walid, public space was construed in terms of a basic distinction between a foreign, European system and a local linguistic tradition.
Poster for Khalid ibn al-Walid (1958).
The Female Body and Urban Space
The representation of women in post-1952 movie posters often played a role, too, in this active redefinition of space. Although some posters of the period showed only male figures, a number of those that did picture women did so in seemingly significant ways. For instance, dozens of posters produced between 1952 and 1968 showed women in openly provocative poses or various states of undress, revealing stretches of leg or bare shoulders. Such posters marked a change from the chaste aspect of parallel examples from the 1940s, which were usually characterized by a conventional decorum or restraint. Furthermore, that change was broadly linked, in Egyptian minds, to a practice of public display that was associatively Western—and that was thus often condemned by certain Egyptians as foreign and wholly inappropriate in postrevolutionary Cairo. Certainly, care is appropriate here, for in fact Cairo had long hosted a tradition of female exhibitionism in certain semiprivate spheres. In his essay “Homage to a Belly-Dancer,” for instance, Edward Said (2000) remembered seeing, as a 14-year-old, the infamous Cairene performer Tahia Carioca in 1950 and recalled her magnetism as that of the femme fatale. But developments such as the diffusion of images of pin-up girls during World War II, the introduction of Playboy in 1953, and a general turn toward eroticism in American advertising in the 1950s (Fields, 2007) all meant that global markets, including Cairo, were now swamped with a surfeit of publicly accessible images of the objectified and sexualized female body.
At the same time, changes to the architectural and social geographies of Cairo also combined to make women in the capital more visible. For example, Annabel Wharton has argued that the Nile Hilton, a huge structure that opened on Tahrir Square in 1959, facilitated the frank display of the bodies of hotel guests and thus contrasted with a local tradition of architecture that serves to conceal. “The open balconies of the Hilton on which viewers displayed themselves,” wrote Wharton (2001), “offered a manifest contrast to the shuttered compartments of old Cairo in which viewers hid themselves” (p. 47). Simultaneously, encouraged by Nasser’s dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood (in 1954) and by their newly won (in 1956) right to vote, Egyptian women of all classes began to work outside the home and regularly travel throughout the city (Shafik 2007). Certainly, many of these women were veiled, but many were not—and, as Sawsan al-Messiri (1978) observes, even some women who did cover their heads mastered a subtle art of display in which handkerchiefs and garments were allowed to fall so that they could be retied in an act of public exhibitionism.
Egyptian responses to the new ubiquity of the female body in public space were complex. Even as feminists celebrated the newly possible freedom of motion, conservative critics sometimes concentrated on what they saw as the creation of a space that was fraught with peril for, or that was debasing to, the male viewer. Fatima Mernissi (1975) is helpful here, as she has described the long-standing Arab notion that if a woman enters a traditionally male space, “she is upsetting the male’s order and his peace of mind. She is actually committing an act of aggression against him merely by being present where she should not be . . .” (p. 144). Where she should not be: In the years before 1952, most Cairene women had been largely restricted to their immediate neighborhoods, and those few who regularly moved about in the largely Western downtown were often assumed to be morally void participants in the sex trade that catered to foreign visitors and troops. But after 1952, Egyptian women were no longer contained in the same way, and they could intimidate commentators who saw them as a confusing conflation of home and city, or Egyptian virtue and Western decadence. Public urban space, in the process, was reconceived and was often seen as having been sexualized, or corrupted—and blame for such corruption was frequently pinned on Western values, or habits. In 1951, Qutb had complained in The America I Have Seen about what he saw as a base American tendency toward promiscuous display: The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it. She knows it lies in clothes: in bright colors that awaken primal sensations, and in designs that reveal the temptations of the body . . . (2000, p. 22)
By the mid-1950s, however, comparable criticisms were being applied to Cairene spaces and Cairene women. What Qutb had seen in Greeley, Colorado, could now be witnessed on the balconies of the Nile Hilton or the sidewalks of Talaat Harb Square—or, as Naguib Mahfouz’s 1956 novel Palace Walk suggests, in the posters that lined the exteriors of shops. In that novel, young Kemal finds himself riveted by such an image: He “stopped under its billboard combing his little eyes up and down the color poster which depicted a woman reclining on a divan, a cigarette between her crimson lips” (El-Shami, 1991, p. 56).
Kemal was struck by an advertisement for tobacco, but one can easily imagine him standing equally rapt before a movie poster. After all, an association between wanton female display and a corrupted (and corrupting) public space was common in Egyptian films of the time, and movie posters often followed suit. A poster for the 1955 film Girls of the Night, for instance, depicted a woman in a slit red dress standing beneath a streetlamp on a sidewalk, brandishing a cigarette and revealing her long leg while gazing out at the viewer: Here, prostitution is clearly construed in terms of display in an urban environment. At times, too, such posters could imply that such fallen girls were the victims of American influence. In a poster for the 1964 film The Abnormal Girl, the marginalized heroine slouches, her pelvis jutting forward, against a wall covered with, of all things, weathered promotional posters. Her pose, we understand, is rather like a poster: It is intentionally provocative and almost dares us to want to see more. But the girl is also revealing in that she wears jeans and a reddish leather jacket that neatly recall the outfit in which an insouciant James Dean had been pictured, in a poster for the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. In short, she wears clothes closely affiliated with American film and deviance and so associates herself with an utterly American mode of display. The logic of the poster (and of the related film) seems eminently clear: Her embrace of such a style is connected both to the unraveling of both personal virtue and the contamination of urban space. The visible and Americanized female body is positioned, in a word, as abnormal—and so normality, in contrast, would seem to consist of female modesty and withdrawal from the public sphere and of a general resistance to Western styles and examples.
The Abnormal Girl was not a huge success, but in fact one of the most celebrated of all postrevolutionary Egyptian films also points to a general nervousness about the place of women in an evolving public sphere—as well as to the importance of movie posters in the articulation of such fears. Cairo Station, or Bab al-Hadid, was issued in 1958; directed by Youssef Chahine, it focused on Qinawi, a cripple who sells newspapers at the Cairo train station. Qinawi fantasizes about marrying Hanouma, a sultry soft drink vendor who also works at the station and who flirts with potential customers even though she is engaged to a charismatic porter named Abu Sehri. Often dressed revealingly, Hanouma is repeatedly sexualized by Chahine’s camera—but she is far from the only sexualized female in the film. Indeed, Qinawi is obsessed with pin-up photographs of female models, which he clips from his newspapers and tacks to a closet wall. The raw violence with which he cuts the pictured women suggests that the unveiled female body has somehow driven Qinawi to rash actions.
But it is actually a poster advertising the 1953 Marilyn Monroe vehicle Niagara that is most closely associated, in Chahine’s film, with utter, deranged violence. Near the end of the film, totally frustrated by a series of rebuffs at the hands of his beloved and wildly jealous of Abu Sehri, Qinawi listens through a door as his two rivals chat playfully and amorously; furiously, he shatters a Coke bottle and resolves to kill Hanouma. Significantly, Chahine shoots the unraveling Qinawi against the backdrop of the poster, so that Monroe’s provocative pose—she reclines in a bikini—is juxtaposed with his dissolution (Figure 5). 3 A dense conflation of overtly sexual display, American influence, and the idea of the femme fatale (for Monroe’s character in Niagara attempts to murder her husband during their honeymoon), the poster thus offers a crisp summary of some of the themes that characterized overt condemnations of the increasingly public place of women in 1950s Cairo. And Qinawi’s insanity, by extension, is not due simply to unrequited love, or jealousy; rather, it is expedited and intensified by American imports. The Coke bottle is transformed from benign vessel into dangerous weapon, and Monroe’s body—utterly visible and completely accessible—becomes a symbol of Qinawi’s loveless life, pushing him toward violence.
Still from Cairo Station (1958).
In short, when Egyptian movie posters in the 1950s pictured women in public spaces, they tended to carry an admonitory tone: Such women were usually negative examples, and American modes of display were implicitly to be resisted. But posters often also offered positive examples of female behavior—and, when they did so, they frequently adopted a common motif: a woman framed by a window. In some cases, the effect was casual (in a poster for the 1951 film My Beloved’s Window, a woman and a man smile as they peer out of a window) or playfully moralizing (in a poster for the 1954 comedy The Neighbor’s Daughter, a man scrambles up a light pole to try to gain a better view of the woman in the window). In a few, it was lightly voyeuristic, as we are offered a partial view into a private interior. In each case, though, the posters suggest, through a variety of means, that the woman in the window is somehow admirable or desirable: Suitors may embarrass themselves by craning their necks, but the women are inevitably composed. Like the films that they promoted, which typically posited the home as a virtuous place (Shafik, 2007), the posters propose that women who stay within their walls will lead fulfilled lives. They are thus prescriptive in that they recommend the relative seclusion of women.
Importantly, such a theme was also common in Egyptian literature of the time. Indeed, the idea permeates Arab writing generally: Given the long regional tradition of haram, or seclusion, the sequestered, enframed, and desired female is a standard trope in love poetry of North Africa and the Middle East. But it was a particularly familiar one, it seems fair to argue, in mid-century Egypt, for Mahfouz, Cairo’s most celebrated novelist, returned to it again and again in his writings. In his 1947 novel Midaq Alley, for example, a love-struck barber named Abbas peers repeatedly at the window of the object of his affection, the beautiful Hamida. Typically, he is rewarded with little more than brief, partial views of her—but these glimpses come to form an important role in his love for her. Indeed, when Abbas prepares to leave the neighborhood for a stint in the army, it is the view of her in the window that he claims he will miss the most. “Every morning,” he tells her, “I’ll think of the beloved window from which I first glimpsed you combing your lovely hair. How I’ll long for that window . . .” (Mahfouz, 1947/1981, p. 92). The window, in short, has become the object of his desire; it is a metonym of the desired.
Ultimately, Mahfouz’s Hamida becomes a fallen woman—her fall signified by unescorted appearances in downtown Cairo and completed in sexual relationships with Westerners. Once again, the dissolution of an Egyptian woman is characterized in terms of her entry into public spaces and her affiliation with foreigners. But the most important point here is that the window, as an artistic symbol, points to an entire philosophy governing proper female behavior. In her Life Among the Poor in Cairo, based on her experiences in the city in 1969, the anthropologist Unni Wikan (1980) emphasizes that “people take part in the life of the streets from balconies and windows, as either actors or audience” (p. 19). Wikan, a Scandinavian ethnographer, was impressed by what she saw as a relative lack of privacy, but she was also observing the consequence of regional notions of propriety. After all, as Daniel Bates and Amal Rassam (2001) argue, “A virtuous [Middle Eastern] woman is usually referred to as mastura, chaste or covered, as if she were invisible to the outsider and the stranger” (p. 240). Movie posters were thus a single manifestation of a much larger system of belief.
Signs, Space, Hegemony
But posters did not only represent windows. They also resembled them—or, at least, offered an apt medium for the propagation of the motif. Placed on the walls of city streets, and roughly 2 feet by 3 feet tall, posters recalled windows in scale and placement. Moreover, the ephemerality of movie posters loosely evoked the fleeting appearances of women such as Hamida in their windows. The physical form of movie posters, then, could fortify their graphic content, and their celebration of the temporary glimpse only justified their own position as elements in a fleeting, protean urban sphere. At the same time, however, posters that depicted women in windows also involved a tension between the urge to glimpse the partly revealed subject and the sheer unreachability of that subject that was entirely appropriate to their function as advertisements. As images, the posters placed viewers on the outside of a tantalizing interior, and as ads, they offered a glimpse of a film that could be seen more fully only with the purchase of a ticket. The governing logic, then, was partly promotional, but it was cast in a visual language that was local and that upheld traditional sexual boundaries or public conventions. Or, we might say, such posters worked to contain, through their various framing devices (window, poster, or cinema), potentially problematic desires—the erotic gazes of voyeurs and the social ambitions of women who had begun to enter the public spheres. Rather like the veil in traditional Muslim Cairo, the posters facilitated female presence while also managing or framing it.
Another metaphor also comes to mind. In a 1991 article, Marita Sturken argued that the walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial acted as screens in two important ways: Namely, they concealed certain pasts while also acting as a ground on which individual memories could be projected. Similarly, one could reason that mid-century Egyptian movie posters acted as screens in multiple senses. For example, in advertising a film, they evoked the screened image, even as they also reiterated, in their form, the wall that stood between the viewer and the film—the cinema wall that necessitated the purchase of a ticket. Simultaneously, posters that featured images of women often alluded to a long-standing practice of seclusion, or screening, even as they also offered a ground onto which social ideals and fears could be projected. Egyptian movie houses, as the riots of Black Saturday showed, could be the object of public anger; similarly, movie posters could create conservative concern or nationalistic passion.
In that sense, they were both expressive of and constitutive of a larger ideology. Despite (or perhaps because of) their ephemerality, movie posters were able to propose answers to big questions about space. Who controls the street? What is woman’s place in the city? But in offering proposals, of course, movie posters often relied—like all signs—on abstraction. In the poster featured in Cairo Station, for instance, Marilyn Monroe’s body is converted into a raw sign (of female sexuality, of the appeal of the West, and of degeneracy). And, indeed, many Egyptian movie posters of the time did something similar, as they stripped the female form of agency and converted it into a symbol or expressive tool. These were not politically progressive or universally liberating icons. But neither were they inert. After all, as Henri Lefebvre (1991) writes, in The Production of Space, “When [signs] assume the properties of things, when they pass for things, they have the power to move us emotionally, to cause frustrations, to engender neuroses” (p. 134). And so Qinawi was unmoored by a movie poster. More importantly, though, such signs often move us in precise, calculated directions. Here, Lefebvre is emphatic: “Signs and figures . . . serve the purposes of the will to power. Written, they serve authority” (p. 134). Certainly, it is quite possible—indeed, it is virtually certain, although totally unverifiable—that different viewers responded, in 1950s Cairo, to movie posters in distinct ways: that reactions were shaped by the sex, by the educational background and religious affiliation, and by the socioeconomic status of the individual viewer. 4 Nevertheless, those posters also played a role in a common public conversation about the political inflection and appropriate usage of public urban space. Indeed, by repeatedly featuring themes and motifs that related to a broader public discourse, they ensured that they could be read by a wide range of viewers and, in the process, could offer tacit arguments or construct implicit positions.
Conclusion
It would be misleading to claim that movie posters were clear, direct iterations of the postrevolutionary government’s positions. They were not; rather, they were the outcome of a combination of forces that ranged from artistic to commercial and from cultural to geographic. Nevertheless, it is worth recalling Ella Schochat’s (1983) assertion, in an essay on Egyptian film after 1952, that “cinema became part of the initial stages of nation-building, whose ideology criticized colonial attitudes . . . the cinema, as a vehicle of the new ideology, had the role of producing solidarity and identity among the masses” (p. 27). Movie posters did something similar. For one thing, they sometimes featured images that suggested the importance of resistance toward the West and that literally marked the Egyptian city in the colors of the nation’s new flag. At the same time, they regularly drew on a specifically Egyptian set of assumptions and traditions to advance a view of public space that was rooted in a moral conservatism and sexual conformity. Even as the cinema thus aimed, in Schochat’s opinion, to provide the Egyptian people “with an interpretation of reality that claimed to transform them from traditional subjects to active citizens” (p. 27), movie posters contributed to the creation of an urban space in which those nominally active citizens were subject to restrictive expectations and jingoistic formulations. Postrevolutionary movie posters, like the 1952 revolution itself, frequently invoked resistance, both to Farouk’s legacy and to Western influence. But they also resembled the 1952 revolution in that they soon yielded a relatively monolithic and recognizably conventional ideology that did not, in fact, accommodate meaningful resistance from within. When the protestors of 2011 sought to reclaim a truly public space and to resist a homogenized narrative, then, they were fighting not only a regime but also a legacy that had assumed both durable and ephemeral forms.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.