Mohammad Malas - The Dream: A Diary of the Film

THE DREAM

A DIARY OF THE FILM

Mohammad Malas

Introduced and annotated by

Samirah Alkassim

The American University in Cairo Press
Cairo New York

This electronic edition published in 2016 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com

Copyright 2016 by Mohammad Malas
First published in Arabic in 1991 as Al-Hulm by Dar al-Arab
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Protected under the Berne Convention

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 799 7
eISBN 9781 61797 769 5

Version 1

Contents

Introduction
Samirah Alkassim

Film Curator
The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center

I first met Mohammad Malas in 2003 when I was teaching film at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and invited him to be a Distinguished Visiting Professor in my department and he accepted. We planned a series of events, including sessions with students, a retrospective of his films, and a roundtable discussion with Egyptian film critics and filmmakers, such as Samir Farid and Raafat al-Mihi among others. This was in the weeks leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and all of Cairo was on alert, including the universities. In anticipation of massive demonstrations and state reprisals, Malas decided to postpone the visit. When he came a year later, in March 2004, we screened nearly all of his films on three successive days at the Falaki campus of what was then the AUCs location in the heart of Cairo. The auditorium was packed fullof faculty, filmmakers, film critics, media professionals, academics, artists, and some students. It was particularly moving to watch his films in the city of Cairo, with its history and leadership of anti-imperialist struggles and pan-Arab movements of the twentieth century. I know that, for Malas, this was acutely meaningful, especially as this was an audience that truly appreciated his work. They understood where he was coming from, and to them his work was representative of Syrias great intellectual heritage. Of all the films, it was the screening of al-Manam (The Dream) that affected me the mostI recall the emotionally charged atmosphere in the room after the screening. I felt as if the film had touched a deep nerve among the people in the audience, across generations, who like me, were still reeling from the turmoil recently unleashed in Iraq. It must be remembered that the invasion of Iraq incited the largest mass gathering of protestors in Cairo since the days of Abdel Nasserand Malass presence in Cairo reminded us of this. Before he left, being the generous person that he is, Malas gave me copies of some of his books, one of which was al-Manam:mufakkiratfilm, published in 1991 by Dar al-Adab in Beirut. Sonia Farid translated the book into English in 2005, and after editing and annotating the translation, Im pleased to present TheDream:ADiaryoftheFilm.

But first, a few words to introduce Mohammad Malas. In truth I have only met him on two occasions over the course of ten years, yet I feel a strong kinship with him, as if I have known him a long time. He is a master of cinema, and it is a pleasure to write about someone whose work I feel I understand, cinematically and personally. Objectively speaking, he is one of the leading film auteurs of the Arab world, whose art films have gained global distinction since the 1980s. In both documentary and fiction film, his signature is the poetic and personal treatment of what might be regarded as ordinary or marginal characters (particularly women and children) as they struggle with social and institutionalized forms of oppression. Like other Syrian directors, Malass output has deepened despite the severe and inconsistent muzzling of artists and intellectuals in his country. His semi-autobiographical feature films, Ahlamal-madina (Dreams of the City, 1984), and al-Layl (The Night, 1992), placed him squarely on the map of world film directors. The first two installations of a life-long trilogy, Dreams of the City and The Night are filmic odes to childhood loss (of the father and of the homelandMalass childhood village of Quneitra was seized by Israeli forces in the 1967 war and the Golan was subsequently annexed by Israel). This theme of loss is prevalent in all his films, and provides a structural element in both this book and the documentary al-Manam (The Dream, 1987). Malass more recent feature films, Babal-maqam (Passion, 2005) and SullamilaDimashq (Ladder to Damascus, 2013), as well as all of his documentary films, are equally distinctive.

Malas was born in 1945, and in his lifetime Syria assumed a central role in Arab nationalism and Cold War politics in the Middle East, bound by a sentiment of pan-Arab unity even though the roots of such sentiment stretched far beyond the twentieth century. Like many of his generation, he studied filmmaking at the Moscow Film Institute (VGIK) during 196874, where he learned a language of cinema that he developed into a vernacular entirely his own. His work, along with that of other important filmmakers, such as Omar Amiralay (who collaborated on the production of The Dream), indirectly critiques the abuse of Syrias national narrativeits legacy of successfully expelling French colonialism, fighting Zionism, and embracing a secular nationalism. For readers unfamiliar with modern Syria, it is the abuse of Syrias national achievements by a deadly security state apparatus to justify its hegemony that filmmakers and artists like Malas contest, as has been discussed by Cook and Wedeen, among others. This nationalist narrative began to unravel in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, which inspired and brought hope to the youth of Syria, however brutal the Syrians regimes retaliation, and despite the evolution of the Syrian uprising into a civil war. True to form, Malas would address this unraveling in his 2013 film, Ladder to Damascus. Not enough can be said about the devastation of a people and a country that has spiraled into a drama of overlapping proxy wars and new enemies unimaginable fifteen years ago.

It is not truly comparable to the Lebanese civil war although the analogy is always close. It makes more sense to regard the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as the root of the manufactured sectarian conflict that has overtaken Syria. However, there is still something instructive in reflecting on the Lebanese civil war, that other very complicated and bloody conflict that began in 1975 and ended in 1990 and resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and tens of thousands missing. It was a very confusing war, with many factions, parties, and shifting allegiances. It was not just a war between Muslims and Christians, between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese, or between leftists and right-wing parties. Aptly described by late Lebanese filmmaker Randa Chahal Sabbagh as a series of heedless wars in the title and subject of her 1995 documentary NosGuerres