Week 50/2023

This week’s selection relates to the kind of films the critic Frieda Grafe once called neorealist “dissenters or latecomers” and their sensitivity to landscape. Youssef Chahine shot Cairo Station (1958) entirely on location at the train station. Its main square, with the giant statue of Ramses II still standing, becomes a microcosm for Nasserist Egypt in flux in the wake of the Suez crisis.

As part of its Classics Restored cycle this month, co-organizer of the former screening CINEA also tours with Bandits of Orgosolo (1961). Vittorio De Seta set his story of a wrongly accused shepherd-on-the-run in the Sardinian countryside and the surrounding harsh granite mountains of Barbagia, a dry, desolate and silent landscape. Writing on Bandits of Orgosolo in Cahiers du cinema, the French critic Jean-André Fieschi stressed that “neo-realism is not a school but a tendency, a force that is still active in cinema; we need it as much today, if only as a stimulus, as at the moment of its official recognition.”

Although Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) is showing at De Cinema in Antwerp this Thursday as an ideal companion piece, we cannot but select the evening that Cinema Nova and LABO BXL dedicate to the worldwide network of 67 artist-run film labs that they’ve initiated. With her expanded cinema performance Pulsos subterráneos, Elena Pardo seeks to understand the struggle against corporate mining in the Mexican regions of Zacatecas and Oaxaca. With the love and attention similar to her fellow filmmakers Chahine or De Seta, she does so through the stories told by its inhabitants and the experiences evoked by its landscapes.

Bab el hadid
Cairo Station
Youssef Chahine, 1958
Bab el hadid , Youssef Chahine, 1958, 77’

A newspaper salesman at the train station in Cairo develops an unhealthy obsession with a woman who sells refreshments.

EN

“This is Cairo Station, the heart of the capital. Every minute one train departs and every minute another one arrives. Thousands of people meet and bid farewell. People from North and South, natives and foreigners, people with and without jobs.”

Opening voice-over

 

“Shot on location in Cairo’s Central Station, this great film was booed at its Egyptian premiere, including by Chahine’s own family members. Playing the poor, sexually obsessed beggar of Cairo himself, Chahine severely disrupted Egyptian cinema’s tradition of sugary love stories and melodramas. Over time, the film has become a major classic of Arab cinema, the embodiment of a nascent Egyptian neorealist style. The truth is that Bab al-hadid offers a brilliant combination of genres, from documentary (the inner life of the station is posited as a microcosm of Egyptian society torn between modernity and tradition), to social realism (the porters’ strike) and the cop thriller. Youssef Chahine loved to say that it was television that made this film: the elites of Egyptian cinema may have hated it, but ordinary Egyptians loved it.”

Tewfik Hakem1

  • 1Tewfik Hakem, “Bab al-hadid,” Il Cinema Ritrovato, 23 June 2019. Tewfik Hakem is the author of Youssef Chahine, le révolutionnaire tranquille (Capricci, 2018).

FR

« Youssef Chahine est notre dernier interlocuteur du monde arabe. »

Serge Daney1

 

« Le sujet ? Je l’ai pris d’un fait-divers. Et j’ai su tout de suite que je voulais, que j’avais besoin de l’interpréter, que je serais le personnage principal. Kennawi me représentait, psychologiquement, à 90%. Il subissait les mêmes répressions qu’alors je subissais, et il m’était aussi difficile d’en admettre la nécessité que de m’en débarrasser… Bab el-Hadid est un de mes meilleurs films. J’aime qu’il dise beaucoup de choses sans didactisme. Quand il est sorti, la surprise a été si forte que je me suis fait cracher au visage, partout ! Or, il est répond à un besoin très profond. Je crois que, sans qu’un film soit conçu à partir de données politiques réfléchies, le seul fait qu’un people se voie vivre peut conduire à une oeuvre forte. Je me moque que Bab el-Hadid appartienne à une lignée, à une tradition – l’histoire du cinema ne m’intéresse pas, elle n’est pas mon affaire, comme on dit. Je sais que ce film m’appartient, à moi; qu’il me représente. Je ne sais pas si je commence quelque chose ou non, si j’ouvre des portes ou non. Je fais un film. »

Youssef Chahine2

 

« A sa façon, Youssef Chahine contient à lui seul tout le cinéma. A peine sorti d’Alexandrie et de la Californie où il apprend les dures lois du spectacle, celui qui va devenir le plus grand cinéaste arabe fait irruption à la fin des années quarante, une époque où son système de studios permet au cinéma égyptien d’être un des plus vivants au monde. Virtuose du cinéma de genre où il fait sans cesse passer des beautés incongrues et des propositions hétérodoxes – comédies, film d’aventures, mélodrames, comédies musicales et autres épopées – il sera pourtant, dès son deuxième film, Le fils du Nil, tenté par le néo-réalisme. Ce penchant trouvera sa ligne de plus grande pente avec Gare centrale qui marque le point d’orgue de la première partie de sa carrière. [...] Le cinéma de Chahine est un cinéma de la contradiction et de la division, là où on attend trop souvent des certitudes et des frontières bien établies. Là est sa grandeur et sa puissance vitale. »

Thierry Jousse3

  • 1Quoted in Tewfik Hakem, Il Cinema Ritrovato Catalogue (Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2019), 141.
  • 2Youssef Chahine, “Propos à Claude Michel Cluny”, In: Jean-Louis Bory & Claude-Michel Cluny (eds.), Dossiers du cinema: Films III (Tournai: Casterman, 1975, 107.
  • 3Thierry Jousse, “Intégrale Youssef Chahine,” Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, October 1996.
screening
De Koer, Ghent
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Banditi a Orgosolo
Bandits of Orgosolo
Vittorio de Seta, 1961
Banditi a Orgosolo , Vittorio de Seta, 1961, 95’

A rough-hewn study of survival in the highlands of Sardinia. Shepherd Michele (Michele Cossu, a nonprofessional and native of the region) ekes out a meager living with his brother until bandits arrive on the island and kill a policeman. Mistaken for a member of their gang and accused of murder, Michele must flee to the mountains where he’s driven to dire acts.

EN

“I vividly remember seeing Banditi at the New York Film Festival in the early 1960s. It was one of the most unusual and extraordinary films I had ever seen. [...] I remember being impressed by the style of the film. Neorealism had been taken to another level, where the director’s participation in his narrative was so total that the line between form and content was obliterated and the events dictated the form. De Seta’s sense of rhythm, his use of the camera, his extraordinary ability to merge his characters to their environment was a complete revelation. It was as if De Seta were an anthropologist who spoke with the voice of a poet.”

Martin Scorsese1

 

“De Seta spent nearly two years among the Sardinian peasants who play the roles, and he communicates their impassive suspiciousness toward authority; this is one of the rare films in which hard, taciturn people reveal themselves to us, and they do it without sentimentality.”

Pauline Kael2

  • 1Martin Scorsese, “Banditi a Orgosolo: Film Notes,” Il Cinema Ritrovato, 23 June 2023.
  • 2Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 50.

NL

“De mooiste ontdekking vond ik evenwel in de sectie Ritrovati e restaurati, met name het adembenemend mooie Banditi a Orgosolo (1961), de eerste narratieve langspeelfilm van Vittorio De Seta. 

[De film] speelt zich af in de bergen van Barbagia, een droog, woest en verstild landschap waar zwijgzame herders eigen archaïsche wetten naleven in een cultuur die los wil staan van de moderne wereld. In deze film weet De Seta een nieuwe dimensie te verlenen aan het neorealisme, dat altijd al focuste op hoe personages zich in hun omgeving situeren.

Zijn documentaire oog voor de atmosferische transformaties, wisselende lichtomstandigheden en ondoorgrondelijke dieren in het landschap wordt volop gecombineerd met het dramatische potentieel van het bergachtige landschap in meesterlijke shotcomposities die de personages op verschillende manieren tegen de grillige horizon plaatsen.

Voorts weet De Seta zijn landschappen de tragische kracht en symbolische geladenheid te verlenen van de klassieke Amerikaanse westerns, met het Sardijnse binnenland als een last frontier, waarbij magistrale long shots van eindeloze horizonten en diepe kloven worden afgewisseld met intrigerende close-ups van het gelaat van de zwijgzame protagonist (Michele Cossu), dat dezelfde ruigheid, zwijgzaamheid en gravitas uitstraalt als het Sardijnse berglandschap.”

Steven Jacobs1

screening
De Cinema, Antwerp
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
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