Post Revolution Films Essay

From the Page to the Screen: Women in Three Post-Revolution Films
Here I discuss three films from between 1963 and 1965, each centered around a woman: Hassan al-Imam’s Midaq Alley (1963), Hussam al-Din Mostafa’s film Al-Nathara al-Sawdaa (Black Shades, 1963) and Henry Barakat’s Al-Haram (The Sin, 1965). Each of these films were based off novels written between 1947 and 1959. The films were made by men from men’s stories — like most films at that time — at the height of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s project for a new society built by working people. In each film a female protagonist, played by a remarkably expressive actor, is the driving force for reconciling modernization, and Egypt’s gradual inclusion in the world economy through colonialism and two world wars, with traditional social structures and norms. The filmmakers behind the three films see these changes as inevitable and not antithetical to progress or justice, but they take place over the bodies of women. The concepts of honor, integrity and agency are bound up

Hamida’s life and decisions drive the story, but Mahfouz balances this by alternating her narration with that of other alley inhabitants. Yet he is unforgiving toward his female protagonists. Vicious, heartless, calculating, temperamental, roaring like a lion (in Arabic “lioness” is a ruder alternative to “shrew”), physically disgusted by children and the idea of motherhood, Hamida’s aspirational gluttony symbolizes the ambitions of traditional people forced into a modernized economy and society with the British occupation. She is offset by her acquiescent, indolent and backwards neighbors, including her love interest Abbas al-Helw, whose humble, good-natured and conservative traditionalism is at odds with her desire to advance and break away from the “alley of