HOW DOES CAIRO STATION BALANCE THE

CONVENTIONS AND TECHNEQUES OF

YASMIN MOSTAFA (196104) – MENNATALLAH

Youssef Chahine's Cairo Station has untamed energy, immediacy, and precisely imagined set-

pieces that might serve as an excellent introduction to one of Egypt's most known and

controversial filmmakers. Between 1950 and 2007, Mr. Chahine (1926-2008) directed 36 feature

films, with Cairo Station (his 11th film and, according to some, 'Chahine the auteur's first film')

being regarded as his first important artistic breakthrough. Cairo Station stands out as a pinnacle

achievement in Youssef Chahine's career due to its diverse combination of tone and inspirations.

It was equal parts societal criticism in the Italian neorealism style, lighthearted comedy, and

psychosexual terror. Those opposed methods coexist to produce a fascinating experience.

However, the film was not well received by reviewers or moviegoers during its original release.

Mr. Joel Gordon, a film researcher, comments in his study (Broken Heart of the City) on the film

that Chahine's radical deviation from his melodramatic genre cliches led to the multiple walkouts

during the film's premiere showing (Cairo Station has niggling amount of melodrama). While

Egyptians were horrified by the film's harsh resolution and honest examination of psychosexual

behavior in the late 1950s, Western critics regarded it as a hybridized film-form at the time

(confirming neither to neo-realist standards nor melodrama). Of course, twenty years after its

first release, the picture was rediscovered and lauded. Cairo Station went on to receive

international recognition, and it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998, where Mr.

Chahine received the Life Achievement Award. Egypt's 1950s were one of the most tumultuous

decades in its history. It was the decade in which Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's President from

1956 until his death in September 1970, toppled the monarchy. During different crises and

structural changes, Cairo pulsed with activity (at the same time international crisis sparkled when

Mr. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company). Directors like Youssef Chahine were

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prepared to break out from the restrictions of national film in this shifting environment. The little

loosening of censorial standards during the revolutionary administration was supposed to have

encouraged filmmakers to take to the streets and document societal issues on film (although

Cairo Station was banned after the public demand). (Bradshaw, 2008, Scott, 2008, Latin, 2021)

Qinawi, the anti-hero of Youssef Chahine's international breakthrough, is introduced indirectly

into the primary plot. First, the 'lame' newspaper vendor at Cairo Central Station is depicted

through the mocking of others who are unaware of his hidden existence. Then his damaged limb

is seen, followed by his deformed eyes due to the thick glass. The connection between Qinawi as

a voyeur, 'cripple,' and social outcast is readily made. Qinawi comes in the film for the first time

in the scenes with the leg and eyeballs. The narrator, Madbouli (Hassan el Baroudi), an old

Muslim proprietor of a newspaper stand, recounts meeting Qinawi, lost at the station, a rural kid

astonished by the noisy metropolis, in the prologue, a quick montage establishing the

environment of Cairo Station. Qinawi appears to be cognitively as well as physically challenged.

Madbouli, a type of Good Samaritan character — Chahine was born into a Christian household,

and his art is rife with Christian imagery – provides Qinawi a job. While looking for an

employee, he comes upon his hovel, which is plastered wall to wall with pin-ups taken from

famous magazines. The narrator believes he has a better understanding of Qinawi's social

difficulty, which he labels as sexual inhibition. Despite Madbouli's sympathetic description,

Qinawi is portrayed as a deviant, someone so physically and spiritually ugly that he must be

humiliated, mauled, or ostracised. In his 1992 essay film Face of our Fear, handicapped

experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin criticized the legacy of Hollywood and European

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films that portrayed the physically disadvantaged as moral monsters. Within the universe of the

film, Qinawi is undoubtedly viewed as a monster but does the film itself share this viewpoint.

It's tempting to read Cairo Station against the grain, as Fassbinder did with Douglas Sirk's work,

and argue that the film prefers the lonely misfit Qinawi, with his sincere if obsessive and

inconvenient passion, to the so-called normal figures, such as the 'earthy' lovers whose sex-play

caters patriarchal violent behavior, the oligarchs who want to decimate the livelihood of the

illegal labor who flourish. It should not be forgotten that Chahine himself plays Qinawi - a later

big part as an actor would be as a version of himself in the autobiography An Egyptian Story

(1982). Qinawi represents the artist in the film, taking discovered artifacts, drawing on or cutting

them, producing photomontages, and arranging them on his walls. Later, Chahine would

frequently, if not always effectively, present himself as an outsider artist in Egyptian film.

Despite Qinawi's heterosexual gaze, his hated 'deviance' associates him with queer sexuality, and

his figure may be one-way Chahine addressed his homosexuality at this early period of his

career. Cairo Station was hailed upon its initial release and thereafter as a neo-realism

masterpiece, yet this is a gross understatement of Chahine's accomplishment. If it's neo-realism,

it's neo-realism coupled with the Marxist erotica of Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro, 1950, Giuseppe de

Santis) and Raj Kapoor's underclass fantasy. It owes a lot to Luis Bunuel, whose infamous neo-

realism parody Los Olvidados (1951), like many of his films, associated rebellious sexuality with

the handicap. What Chahine has in common with a neo-realist director like Rossellini (in works

like Voyage to Italy) is his sense of modern urban experience as sedimented, entrenched in

historical time. There is a constant dialectic between both the imperial glories of ancient Egypt –

literally, with the giant statue of a pharaoh from the outside station, and more ironically, with

allusions to ancient goddesses and funerary practices with the figure of the cat and the

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mummification of the murder victim – and the evident lowlife that constitutes the film's subject,

often introduced in huge close-ups that celebrate their ferocious, ungovernable, Cairo may not be

as diverse as Chahine's beloved Alexandria, but we are nevertheless urged to contrast post-

independence Egypt with the residual traces of Western colonization, ways of clothing and

behavior, age and class, technology, and tradition. The employees, whose battle for union

registration is a significant subplot in the film, maintain a hierarchy as sophisticated and

impenetrable as anything constructed by the pharaohs and their bureaucrats. Chahine combines

and collapses styles such as the musical, the commercial, the crime thriller, the romance, the

melodrama, and the horror cinema to release these diverse impulses. Madbouli makes Qinawi

appear to be alone in his sensual obsessions, yet Chahine is careful to portray Cairo as a libidinal

pressure cooker. Its central station is the most evocative of his films' transportation centers, with

trains arriving and leaving noisily and throngs gathering and dispersing. The pervasive tyranny

of the clock, the oppressive heat, and the theatrical adherence of the classical unities of time and

place all contribute to a tense environment that can only be relieved via violence. Qinawi is not

the only man in the world who ogles and harasses women, while the ladies express and exhibit

their wants with unusual freedom. Even though the film's significance was not immediately

recognized, Cairo Station will be studied as an early example of hybrid cinema. It rejects the

dream world of Egyptian studio films, which rely on musical numbers, closed sets, and movie

stars. It uses real-life settings and casts performers against type to create fully realized characters.

It depicts the railroad station as a microcosm of 1950s urban Arab life and takes an ethical stance

that promotes togetherness and solidarity. Its realism and metaphorical style match the

sensitivities of the Socialist Movement. Fatma (Ahmed Badrakhan, 1947), a typical melodrama

starring the legendary singer Umm Kulthum, will be briefly considered to demonstrate how

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Cairo Station breaks from yet preserves some of the components of commercial film.

Commentary on this classic Egyptian studio product aims to examine the developments that

transpired during this period and account for how critical realism impacted cinematic techniques

in the Middle East. (O’Donoghue et al., 2020, Kumar et al., 2018, Mezaina, 2018)

The movie "Bab Al-Hadid" was an artistic shift in his artistic path through an explosive love

triangle between three individuals who work and live in the city's crowded railway axis. Through

this wealthy world, Chahine presentes Cairo in the fifties from the perspective of the lower

working classes in the world of railways, like street vendors, and important glimpses of the

middle class. It was decided that Chahine would receive the "Best Actor" award from the "Berlin

Film Festival" for his role in this film, which is a vivid and advanced model of neo-realism in

cinema (Massoud, Arab Cinema and Sensibilities of The Socialist Transformation, 2009). The

editing of the Cairo station emphasis the connection between actors or the characters and their

surroundings, which can make the station be like a character. For instance, when Hanoma and

the other ladies using the same hose pipe that is applied for cooling the engine steam, to wash

their clothes, which establishes a connection between the equipments and the station’s residents.

But on the other hand, the moment when Hanoma rescues a young boy from being ran over by

the train, when the train suddenly stop causing the sound of the brakes, that emphasize the

danger presented by the machinery (Massoud, Arab Cinema and Sensibilities of The Socialist

Transformation, 2009). Abou Saria is a true Nasser-era exemplar, a working-class hero who

aspires to depose the corrupt chief of the porters and replace him with a government union

representative. Farid Shawqi, a new type action hero for a modern generation, plays the role in

another casting revolution (film, 19 feb, 2011). Abu Sri's fight for workers' rights has positioned

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him as a social and political agent of change. He represents a shift of power that tends to favor

the incorporation of the disillusioned by challenging the rich's control and corruption. He is an

empathetic and forceful leader who fights for equitable working conditions and initiates labour

force reforms by organising for a government official to pay him a visit. More notably, Abu Sri'

confronts Abu Gaber's authority, who forces employees to bribe him in transfer for jobs. If Abu

Gaber characterises aristocratic privilege and the monarchy's value system, Abu Sri's politics

ideologically line up him with the Free Officers Moves because his aim is 33 comparable: to

overthrow the previous order and facilitate a participation system of governance predicated on

unity and equal opportunities for all employees within the station (Massoud, Arab Cinema and

Sensibilities of The Socialist Transformation, 2009, p. 33). The film makes use of the station

setting to portray it as urban life of microcosm. The people who pass every minute in the station

with different ages, and classes, while the workers who reside there, form a type of society with

their own social hierarchy. Such as the police officer and the canteen owner they are at the top of

the triangle, but on the other hand the carriers and the illegal sellers are at the bottom. Also, the

vast grounds include an enormous hall with is a clock dominated when the travelers, workers,

and passengers congregate, and a garden with a pond that Qinawi tell hanuma about how he

thinks about their future as well as the travelers and the cargo (Massoud, Arab Cinema and

Sensibilities of The Socialist Transformation, 2009). The first shot of the station is helping to

establish the setting for the rest of the film. In the entirety of the railway station, as well as the

mise en scene which easily enable the viewers to recognize that the setting is being a film set,

yet, instead a real railway station, which is define of the neorealism film’s feature. In these

platforms there is number of people who are seen comes every day to take their next train stop.

The large number of people underscores the location’s status as that of being the heart of the city.

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The sound that was played were inextricably linked to the railway stations, such as the streaming

whistle as well as the sound of the train arriving and departing. In addition to this, combined with

the speed in which people walk in, it lends to the film’s sense of speed. The brisk sound that

trains do while departing and going, it gives the feeling that the events are happening quickly.

Due to the French film theorist and composer of experimental music Michel Chion in his theory

of value-added sound, which states that sound is used to enhance an image and leave an impact

on the mind of the viewer. After a while of hearing the narrator’s voice, the viewer is eventually

seen the narrator’s face. I this scene, what appears to be an ordinary street vender becomes

extremely significant. This would be the second feature of the film that indicates the neorealism.

In contrast to most Egyptian films of the time, in which practically every character was and

wealthy dressed extravagantly in this shot it portrays Egypt's working class. Madbouli, the

narrator, is neither handsome nor has a rich occupation. The viewer can see that he is a

hardworking person with little benefits just by looking at his appearance and the clothes he

wears. The narrator explains how he met Qinawi, a depressed young guy who he discovers

curdled up in a corner beside the railroad tracks. It's where the focus is placed upon the fact that

he is a "miserable" young man, and where viewers meet the film's main character. Qinawi is the

personification of disorder since he is insecure and unreliable. Qinawi is always aware of

everything and everyone, despite the fact that he rarely communicates with people. He wanders

around the station area, watching the passengers and the staff. Chahine offers a dismal

impression of what it's like to be a truly destitute citizen once more. This, combined with the

Madbouli's appearance, gives an impression of the social status portrayed in the film that appears

to be negative.The inner of this dilapidated shed is included in the mise en scene, emphasising

the severe life conditions that such street vendors face; which it can convey the sense of

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impoverishment (Danielakavi, August, 2014). But even though the film has been most frequently

analysed in order to show the relationship to Europe neorealism, youssef Chahine nevertheless

pays homage to Hollywood and fulfills his dream of playing a dramatic protagonist. This was a

part that almost no Egyptian male lead would try to take on. During Youssef Chahine's career,

critics and viewers have been baffled by the diverse influences in his directing

approach, characteristically  non linear, multidimensional, intellectual, and challenging, and

especially the mingling of genres in a single movie. His gloomy darkened photos and unsettling

atmosphere conjure up images of film “Noir”. Also, Youssef Chahine used the theme music of

the Lost Weekend (1945) from Billy’s Wilder’s film as an inspiration. The film noir element he

used such as: a viewpoint in which bad things happen without no apparent reason and chaos

rather than order, The climax, crucial action happens at nighttime in urban (typically

underground) settings. Also used the conviction in psychology as a discipline capable of

explaining human feelings is growing. A love story which is hopeless in a certain way and will

never work well. Inside the movie, which is filmed in black and white and there are strong

differences of light and dark which is an aspect of abstractions and stylization. Also, the lghting

was applied to cover in empty spaces within simple settings, Misrepresentations and misleading

perspectives “mirrors”. Deep focus which the objects in close proximity to the camera and the

further away seems to be equally clear. The usage of voiceovers, and the different form of music

usually an instrumental music and some traditional music mixed together (middle east in cinema

Cairo Station, 2019). Moreover, the film makes extensive utilization high-contrast lighting to

convey Qinawi's shifting mental processes. The lighting in the film becomes darker and more

irregular as the viewers fall deeper into Qinawi's impulsiveness. This utilization of lighting to

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demonstrate the psychology of flawed characters was common in film noir, but noir films had

fallen out of favor by the time Cairo Station was created (Niwamanya, 18, April, 2020).

In conclusion, Cairo Station sparked outrage among Egyptian audiences only on its release in

1958, as well as some international reviewers who desired a more trend-respecting piece.

Nonetheless, the film was resurrected in the 1970s when a new generation of international

filmgoers discovered it. After Cairo Station, Youssef Chahine directed more than thirty films, but

this prophetic 1958 classic is and always has been his most widespread seen and highly regarded

project, Youssef Chahine succeeds in displaying for the audience the contentious realism, the

major defining issues and social problems, and even a sensation of characters, in just a few

minutes.

(Niwamanya, April, 18,2020).

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References

O’Donoghue, D., Darragh O’Donoghue is an archivist at Tate, Danks, A., & Bamber, M. (2020,

October 18). Senses of cinema. Senses of Cinema. Retrieved January 3, 2022, from

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/cteq/cairo-station-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%A8-

%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%AF%E2%80%8E-1958/

Kumar, A., Kumar, T. A. (T. A., Aleem, A., & Pyne, S. (2018, September 26). Cairo station

[1958] – the struggles against sexual repression and social oppression. High On Films.

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repression/

Bradshaw, N. (2008, July 28). Youssef Chahine: An appreciation. The Guardian. Retrieved

January 3, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/jul/28/youssef.chahine

Scott, A. O. (2008, July 28). Youssef Chahine, Egyptian filmmaker, dies at 82. The New York

Times. Retrieved January 3, 2022, from

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Mezaina, H. (2018, August 25). For the love of Film (noir) - cairo station. The Culturist.

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Latin, L. (2021, August 23). Where to begin with Youssef Chahine. BFI. Retrieved January 3,

2022, from https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-youssef-chahine

Gordon, Joel. (2016). Three Tales of Obsession: Crosscutting Boundaries in Middle Eastern

Film. History Compass. 14. 49-58. 10.1111/hic3.12292.

Joel Gordon (2012) Broken Heart of the City: Youssef Chahine’s Bab al-Hadid (Cairo

Review: “Cairo Station” Offers A Startlingly Prophetic Look At Toxic Masculinity. (2020, April

18). Retrieved January 4, 2022, from Cinema Escapist website:

https://www.cinemaescapist.com/2020/04/review-cairo-station-egypt-movie/

Massoud, A. Y. (2009). Arab cinema and the sensibilities of the socialist transformation.

Curve.carleton.ca. https://curve.carleton.ca/b24a1c1a-f065-4a0e-bd49-5caa6c29714a

Cairo Station Sequence Analysis. (2014, June 8). Danielakavi.

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