Cairo Station & The Land
Youssef Chahine, 1958 & 1969
Misr International Films
L
ate in the 1960s, in the aftermath of egypt’s defeat in
the Six-Day War, Youssef Chahine took up a long-planned
project: an adaptation of a novel by Abd al-Rahman al-
Sharqawi about a group of farmers in the 1930s who resist the
routing of a road through the land on which they’ve staked their
lives. He had just finished a demoralizing and contentious Egyptian-
Soviet co-production, People and the Nile(1968); this next film,
The Land(1969), was a kind of showcase for his own expansive,
generous sensibility. Rather than concentrating on any one plot or
building to any one climax, he spun a vast web of episodes linked
by complicated lines of cause and effect: bursts of state-sanctioned
violence; imprisonments; tense negotiations; late betrayals by vil-
lagers with enough leverage to protect the land they have.
Chahine, who over nearly 60 years and 37 varied features
became Egypt’s most widely screened and debated filmmaker,
liked dispersing his attention across figures in marginal positions
instead of focusing on a single sensational subject. Writing in
these pages in 1996, Dave Kehr called his films “choral affairs, in
which many voices and many characters are blended into grand,
powerful, and not always orderly compositions.” Born in 1926 in
Alexandria to Christian parents with family roots in Lebanon,
Syria, and Greece, Chahine studied acting in the 1940s at the
Pasadena Playhouse. In his own Cairo Station(1958), he played a
disabled newspaper vendor who stalks a soft-drink peddler
named Hanouma (Hind Rostom) and attempts murder when she
turns down his marriage offer. But even that drama keeps getting
diverted by the daily struggles pulsing through the train station
that gives the movie its setting and title: Hanouma fleeing the
cops after selling drinks without a license; her boyfriend trying to
unionize his fellow workers; the leader of a women’s rights protest
fielding a question about “the condition of the rural wife.”
The train station was a fitting subject for Chahine, whose
work ran so widely between urban and rural settings, between
period epics and movies steeped in contemporary life (he said
he shot Central Stationbecause he “wanted to make a film in
the streets”). There were personal memory plays like his later
autobiographical quartet and ambitious surveys of Egypt’s social
and political transformations. He seemed driven by a need to
miss as little as possible. Every so often, the camera in Central
Station comes across a young couple stealing time together
before their looming separation. They sink into their private
tragedy and never notice what’s unfolding next to them. But the
film nonetheless ends with the young woman standing by the
train tracks, taking her turn in the spotlight.
July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 11
The train station was a fitting subject for Youssef Chahine, whose work ran so widely between urban and rural
settings, between period epics and movies steeped in contemporary life (he said he shot Central Stationbecause
he “wanted to make a film in the streets”).
Holiday of St.
Jorgen (Sound
version) Jakov
Protazanov, 1930/
1935, Austrian
Film Museum
The Horse Thief
Tian Zhuangzhuang,
1986, China Film
Archive, presented
at Cannes by Xi’An
Film Studio
The Hour of Liber-
ation Has Arrived
Heiny Srour, 1974,
Heiny Srour and the
Arane-Gulliver Lab-
oratories with the
CNC and the Ciné-
mathèque française
Plogoff, des pierres
contre des fusils
Nicole Le Garrec,
1980, Hiventy labora-
tory, Ciaofilm, CNC,
Région Bretagne,
and the Cinémath-
èque de Bretagne
Twin Peaks
Al Wong, 1977,
Pacific Film Archive
NEW AND
FORTHCOMING
RESTORATIONS
RESTORATION ROW/ By Max Nelson
Orchestral Work
Youssef Chahine brought the vast social history of Egypt to the screen
The Land Cairo Station