29 July 2008
The Times

Youssef Chahine was one of the most celebrated film directors in the Arab world, widely acclaimed for his pioneering role in establishing the Egyptian film industry. Starting in 1950 he directed about 40 films over more than half a century.

Chahine began his latest film, Heya Fawda (2007, Chaos), only last year. A typical story of a man seeking to uphold the rights of the oppressed in the face of police corruption, the film had to be completed by his friend and fellow director, Khaled Youssef, because of his own failing health.

Chahine never shied away from controversy; a champion of the dispossessed, he was also a critic of Egypt’s authoritarian regime, of US foreign policy and of the intolerance of Muslim fundamentalism.

He won plaudits throughout his long career, and these were capped by the lifetime achievement award he received at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997. He was also credited with having discovered and launched the career of Omar Sharif, who shot to stardom in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).

Chahine was born in 1926 in Alexandria, then a vibrantly cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. His lawyer father was of Lebanese extraction and his mother was Greek. Five languages were spoken at home, although, Chahine would joke, none of them well. He went to a French monastery school and to the prestigious English-speaking Victoria College and studied briefly at the university in his home city.

As a teenager, he was already intoxicated by the cinema and theatre and adored Hollywood musicals. At the end of the Second World War he persuaded his parents to let him go to California to study drama, and he enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse in Los Angeles. He initially wanted to be an actor but, feeling that he would not be able to reach the level of the film stars he admired, he soon turned to directing.

Returning to Egypt with his diploma from Pasadena in 1948, Chahine began working as an assistant to the Italian film-maker Alvise Orfanelli, an influential figure in the development of Egyptian film-making who was based in Alexandria. Orfanelli helped Chahine to get started in the film business, introducing him to the Zeyad production company which hired him to make his first film, Baba Amin (Daddy Honest) in 1950 when he was only 24. The film, which related a villager’s dream of emigrating to the city in search of greater experience was beautifully shot and instantly displayed Chahine’s ability to handle experienced actors. The next year Ibn el Nil (Son of the Nile) brought him international recognition when it was submitted at the Venice Film Festival.

Chahine made three more films before casting an unknown Egyptian actor, Michel Shalhoub, who was to change his name to Omar Sharif, in Siraa Fil-Wadi (Struggle in the Valley, also known as The Blazing Sun) in 1953. Chahine’s own reputation as the Arab world’s most exciting film-maker was sealed four years later with the release of Bab el hadid (Cairo: Central Station), which soon came to be regarded as a milestone of realism in Egyptian cinema. Chahine took the lead role for himself of Qinawi, a sexually frustrated lowly newspaper vendor whose love of a female co-worker drives him to commit murder. Despite critical acclaim, Egyptian audiences, more used to melodramas, were disturbed by the film, and it was not shown again in Egypt for many years. The same year, 1958, Chahine’s Djamilah (Jamila, the Algerian) was a declaration of support for the Algerian revolution, midway through the savage war of independence from France.

Chahine’s next great venture was a three-hour epic made in 1963 — El Naser Salah el Dine (Saladin) — about the life of the 12th-century Muslim hero who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders. With a script by the novelist Naguib Mahfouz (obituary, August 31, 2006), the film portrayed Saladin as an educated, peaceable man, and the film’s success was certainly helped by the inevitable comparisons with the Egyptian ruler at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Seen in the region as a refutation of Western prejudices about Islam, Saladin, with its eight large-scale battle scenes, was also Chahine’s greatest technical accomplishment to date.

Like many Egyptian artists and intellectuals, Chahine was profoundly shocked by Egypt’s humiliating defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967. He attempted to analyse the cause of defeat in four consecutive films, culminating in al-Asfour (The Sparrow) in 1972, in which he pilloried the incompetence and corruption of the Egyptian elite.

Al-Asfour was initially banned by Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, but then honoured with the country’s highest cultural award. This official schizophrenia was typical of the attitude of the Egyptian authorities towards Chahine’s work: discomfort on the one hand, but recognition of his stature on the other.

A serious heart attack in the mid-1970s, when he was in his early fifties, forced Chahine to retreat from his arduous schedule. It also changed his direction as a film-maker: a more autobiographical and experimental style was evident in Iskanderiya . . . Lih? (Alexandria . . . Why?) released in 1978, which won the Silver Bear special jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival that year. Set in Chahine’s home city during the Second World War, the film depicts an Alexandria awaiting the arrival of Rommel to drive out the British.

The director’s technique of intercutting the action with newsreel footage and scenes from Hollywood musicals was audacious for Arab cinema. The film also gave rise to charges of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. As in one scene, a young Egyptian film-maker excitedly approaches the Statue of Liberty on board a ship, the camera pulls back to show the mighty symbol is, in fact, a slatternly actress with garish make-up, beckoning not the young man but a group of Hasidic Jews from Europe.

The film was the first of three semi-autobiographical works set in and relating the life of Alexandria, culminating in the the 2004 work Iskanderiya . . . New York. Chahine’s commitment to Egyptian identity and history was seen again in his 1985 spectacle Weda’an Bonapart (Adieu Bonaparte).

This Franco-Egyptian co-production portrays Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt through the eyes of an Egyptian family and was praised for its perceptive exploration of the relationship between colonised and coloniser. The French connection continued when Chahine was invited, in 1992, to stage a piece of his choice for the Comédie Française, and his adaptation of Camus’s Caligula was a huge success.

Chahine made three highly acclaimed films in the 1990s, al-Mohager (The Emigrant), al-Massir (Destiny) and El-Akhar (The Other).

The first of these, relating the biblical story of Joseph, son of Jacob, was denounced by Muslim fundamentalists as blasphemous, and they succeeded in having it banned. Chahine’s anger at being gagged by the fundamentalists, whom he called “a black wave coming from the Gulf”, was reflected in Destiny, released in 1997.

Set in Moorish Spain in the 12th century, a glorious era for Islam, it depicted the liberal reign of the Caliph al-Mansour being threatened by a fanatical religious sect bent on exploiting Islam for political purposes. The film had its premiere at Cannes, where Chahine received the ultimate accolade, his lifetime achievement award.

Although his frenetic pace of work slowed thereafter, Chahine took part in demonstrations by Egyptian farmers in 2001 in the face of government efforts to appropriate their land. Sympathy for the honest poor who tilled the soil had always been a strong theme in his work.

Chahine went into a coma after a brain haemorrhage in June and was flown to Paris for emergency treatment paid for by the Egyptian Government in acknowledgement of his role in the country’s cinema history.

Chahine is survived by his French wife, Colette. He had no children.

Youssef Chahine, film director, was born on January 25, 1926. He died on July 27, 2008, aged 82