Egyptian imaginaries of resistance: Cinematic remembrance of the Suez crisis

Current politics in Egypt has revived the idea of a strong connection between the army, the Egyptian people and its leaders. This imaginary was introduced by Egyptian cinema about the time of the 1952 revolution. In the early days of national independence, the Suez crisis of 1956 in particular holds the symbols and images needed to create the set of semantics supporting this imaginary. Based on theories on national and postcolonial imaginaries, I analyse two Egyptian films on the Suez crisis: Port Said from 1957 and Maliqat al-Bihar (Giants of the Sea) from 1960 including shorter references to other films from the period. By examining the postcolonial semantics of these films, I identify three elements that together retell the Egyptian nation. First, the Suez crisis is pictured as eliminating the colonial enemies due to the actions of strong leaders. Second, a pan-Arab alliance is installed. Third, enemies from within are disconnected from the true Egyptian assessed by loyalty to the nation. The result is a strong imaginary of the correlation between the army, people and in particular its leaders.

“I Have Ambition”: Muhammad Ramadan's Proletarian Masculinities in Postrevolution Egyptian Cinema

This article provides a close reading of two popular Egyptian action films, al-Almani (The German, 2012), the first blockbuster since the 25 January 2011 revolution, and Qalb al-Asad (Lion heart, 2013), both starring Muhammad Ramadan as a socially produced proletarian “thug” figure. Made for Egyptian audiences, the films privilege entertainment over aesthetics or politics. However, they express distinct messages about violence, morality, and revolution that are shaped by their moments of postrevolutionary release. They present the police state in salutary yet ambivalent terms. They offer a rupture with prerevolutionary cinema by staging the failure of proletarian masculinities and femininities that rely on middle-class respectability in relation to sex, marriage, and work. Even as each film expresses traces of revolutionary upheaval and even nostalgia, cynicism rather than hopefulness dominates, especially in al-Almani, which conveys to the middle and upper classes the specter of an ever-present threat of masculine frustration. The form and content of Qalb al-Asad, by comparison, offer the option of reconciling opposing elements—an Egyptian story line with a less repressive conclusion if one chooses a path between revolutionary resistance and accepting defeat.