The Africa Institute
Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria Trilogy
The Africa Institute, 2020
In collaboration with Hind Mezaina, The Africa Institute is organizing a film program on Youssef Chahine’s semi-autobiographical Alexandria Trilogy. The Trilogy includes his films Iskindiria … Leh? / Alexandria … Why? (1978), Hadouta Masriya / An Egyptian Story (1982) and Iskendereya Kaman We Kaman / Alexandria Again and Forever (1989). The screening of the Alexandria Trilogy is an opportunity to examine Chahine’s filmmaking career during the 70’s and 80’s and to compare them to his earlier films, in the context of his personal history and the social and historical settings of the films and Egypt and the Arab region at the time.
January 25: Iskindereya..Leh? / Alexandria..Why? (1978)
Alexandria..Why? marked a radical, newly introspective turn in Chahine’s active career, a sharp departure from his Fifties musicals and melodramas and his later epics and political films.
The first of a semi-autobiographical tetralogy, entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Alexandria..Why? focuses on a precocious adolescent whose dreams and colorful attempts to become an actor unfold against the vivid backdrop of Alexandria during World War II.
A rich cast inspires Chahine’s young thespian hero with a wealth of dramatic sub-plots – at turns hilarious and touching – about wartime life. The autobiographical nature and nostalgic flavour of Alexandria..Why? make it one of Chahine’s most accessible works, a charming and entertaining film that also delivers a potently subversive and impassioned anti-war message. (Harvard Film Archive)
February 8: Hadouta Masriya / An Egyptian Story (1982)
The sequel to the autobiographically inspired Alexandria, Why? , An Egyptian Story covers the beginning of Chahine’s career up to his open-heart surgery in 1973. Chahine plays his alter ego Yehia, who gains international fame in Europe only to discover that, as in Egypt, film is as much commerce as it is art.
The section of the film dealing with Chahine’s heart attack and surgery contains two remarkable sequences. In one, Yehia travels to London for the surgery and becomes infatuated with a (male) British cab driver.
The other brings the film to a phantasmagoric climax as Yehia, on the operating table, imagines himself forced to justify his life and work before a tribunal in an eccentric sequence inspired by Chaplin, 8-1/2 and All That Jazz. (Harvard Film Archive)
February 15: Iskendereya Kaman We Kaman / Alexandria Again And Forever (1989)
The third installment in Chahine’s quartet of autobiographical films finds the director’s work stalled by a strike. During the interruption in filming, Chahine reminisces about a past relationship with one of his actors while finding himself gradually drawn to an actress.
The intimacy between director and performer is depicted symbolically, in a tender dance number clearly in homage to the Hollywood musical and set on a snow – covered street in Berlin during a film festival.
A masterful amalgam of realism and fantasy, Alexandria Again and Forever is Chahine’s paean to the power of imagination and the artist. (Harvard Film Archive)
