Unpredictable and Precarious yet Expected: Chihab El Khachab’s Making Film in Egypt
CLAIRE COOLEY
A photo of the Metro cinema in downtown Cairo, (Photo/Claire Cooley).
In Egypt, filmmakers have had to manage an array of hurdles related to film production during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As in other media industries around the world, film and television production came to an indefinite pause as governments tried to slow the deadly virus in the early months of 2020. A year after the beginning of the pandemic in January 2021, an article in al-‘Arabī al-jadīd noted several cases in which filmmakers in Egypt had pushed forward with filmmaking despite the ongoing uncertainties. In one case, the filmmakers of the upcoming film Laylat al-‘eid decided to continue with filmmaking despite the fact that one of their main stars, the actress Yousra, was in quarantine after having contracted the virus. In order to adjust the film’s production process to the unforeseen development of the Egyptian actress Yousra’s illness, the production schedule was ostensibly changed such that the scenes without the famous star would be shot while she recovered. In an interview several months later in April 2021, Yousra talked about her role in Laylat al-‘eid and mentioned that she would begin work on the film once she was finished shooting the television series Harb ahliyya in which she also played a starring role. Although mentioned casually in TV appearances and interviews, the star’s shifting availability and other uncertain aspects of the production process have presumably affected how those working behind-the-scenes have had to anticipate the future of both projects.
Two Egyptians wearing surgical masks pass by a movie theater locked down to stem the spread of the coronavirus in downtown Cairo, Egypt. (Photo/Hamada Elrasam).
COVID-19 descended upon filmmakers during an already difficult climate for film production in Egypt. While its effects have been significant, the pandemic does not represent the only challenge that filmmakers in Egypt have faced over the past decade. The 2011 January 25 Revolution dealt a financial blow to the filmmaking industry in Egypt, the so-called Hollywood on the Nile and arguably the most impactful media center in the Middle East in the 20th century. Despite these financial losses, filmmakers had comparatively more freedom of expression in the years between January 2011 and the military coup in July 2013. Films that were created at the time present unprecedented critiques of the security forces and other elements that pushed Egyptians to take to the streets in January 2011. Yet the media climate has changed since 2013 with the increasing encroachment of the state into production.
The circumstances surrounding Tarik Saleh’s thriller and independent film The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) help to illustrate politics surrounding filmmaking in post-2013 Egypt. The film takes place in pre-2011 Egypt and engages with the entrenched corruption in the security apparatus and other networks of power that led to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011. The film was shot in Morocco after its filmmakers were unable to secure a permit to film it in Egypt. The filmmakers’ inability to receive a permit from authorities foreshadowed the film’s fate in Egypt. Despite plans made by alternative film theaters in Egypt to screen The Nile Hilton Incident, censorship authorities prevented the film’s exhibition. Yet, online distribution ultimately allowed viewers in Egypt and other places around the world to access the film. It is currently available on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and several other streaming services. In this context, the move towards online streaming platforms that had increasingly started with the revolution has been important for independent filmmakers.
Censorship of films such as The Nile Hilton Incident is part of a growing trend. In the years since the violent coup in 2013, President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi and his military regime have increased their control over the Egyptian media landscape through the acquisition of various media outlets. Rather than profit off these outlets, security agencies appear to seek complete control over the media in ways reminiscent of the pre-satellite, state-controlled television era in Egypt. In addition to intervening in the content of TV series and ensuring positive representations of the police and military, intelligence agencies have blacklisted certain media personnel and dictated that the number of series that air during Ramadan should be reduced from the historic number of over 30 to around 18. Regionally, these developments meant that Egypt will be surpassed in production by industries in Lebanon, Syria, and Kuwait. Locally, this affects the 2 million Egyptians who work in the Egyptian television industry. While interviews with stars and news coverage on their goings-about previously revolved around storylines and upcoming projects, their inability to find work, and the recent low quality of TV shows in the absence of competition has dominated conversations about media production in Egypt. Despite these issues with employment, stars who have close ties with production company executives (abnaa’ al-sharika) and are not members of the Egyptian actors syndicate have continuously received starring roles in TV series. In addition to unemployment, actors’ salaries are at a historic low, a problem that proves difficult to negotiate given the state’s monopoly over production through Egyptian Media Group. While film production in Egypt has also been entrenched in these dynamics, it has been largely absent over the past year due to the pandemic.
How do media producers in Egypt manage these unknowns and politics in the complex production and distribution process? Chihab El Khachab considers this question with focus on film production in his new and exciting Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry. The book is based on eighteen months of fieldwork that he conducted between 2013 and 2015 in Cairo, Egypt. During this time, El Khachab observed and participated in the making of Ahmad Abdalla’s 2014 film Decór from start to finish. His analysis is also informed by the preparations and shooting days of other New Century Film productions that he witnessed, as well as his work as an assistant to the director of Al Batrik Art Production’s Ward masmum (Poisonous Roses, 2018). Drawing on these experiences, El Khachab considers the behind-the-scenes and nitty-gritty processes that culminate in a final film product, and the ways in which the makers of film attempt to manage glitches, delays, narrative shifts and other imponderable developments that can occur while working to towards an expected future: the final film product. Over six chapters, entitled Industry, Process, Reserves, Coordination, Visualization, and Enchantment, El Khachab analyzes the ways in which makers of film manage the unknown yet expected future of the filmmaking process.
El Khachab’s theoretical framework is novel in its temporal focus within the sphere of Egyptian filmmaking and it departs in several ways from common conversations in the fields that he engages. When El Khachab was conducting his fieldwork, discussions of the future of filmmaking in Egypt were often framed by the January 2011 Revolution and the existential threat it was thought to have posed to the industry. Yet El Khachab disagrees with this focus on the revolution, noting that potential investors in Egyptian cinema were concerned with economic uncertainty several years before 2011. With regards to media anthropology and studies of production in film, El Khachab’s study of the unknown yet expected futures in the Egyptian film industry is different from other ethnographies of media production. As El Khachab explains, these ethnographies are written in the extended present, “where workers simply ‘work’ without acknowledging that their activity always involves anticipation.”[i] The studies that do consider uncertainty, meanwhile, do not adequately grasp what El Khachab observed of film workers’ apprehension of the future in Egypt, as they moved through the production process with a “strong weight of expectation” for certain futures.[ii] As such, El Khachab proposes what he calls ‘imponderability’ to capture what he means by “unpredictable yet expected” outcomes. He writes, “while an uncertain future is unknowable and unpredictable, an imponderable future is expected even though all the courses of action leading to it cannot be weighed in the present.”[iii] To give a concrete example, consider the process of writing an academic article. The future of an academic article is imponderable as you expect to finish, edit, and submit it to a journal. Yet as you begin to write it, you cannot be sure what the next stages in the process will look like. As part of breaking the process into smaller tasks, you may switch paragraphs around through the computer’s copy/paste function, delete sentences, write notes on a scratch pad, modify some of ideas, and/or incorporate edits from an editor. But you expect to eventually have a finished and publishable draft.
As part of working towards the completion of a large, sociotechnical project such as a film, filmmakers break the process down into a series of contingent tasks that they themselves both complete and assign to others. El Khachab focuses predominately on three themes to explain in more depth this intercession between the present and the future in film production, a process he calls foremediation. These concepts include labor hierarchy, operational sequence, and reserves. It is through labor hierarchy that El Khachab understands the relationships between all of those who are involved filmmaking process. In this, he focuses not just on the “artistic work” of workers who are in the upper echelons of film work such as stars, directors, and cinematographers, but the “efforts and thoughts of workers who are not hierarchically dominant in the industry,” such as carpenters, sound technicians, and drivers.[i] Labor hierarchies are essential to the mediation of the unknown yet expected future in that they shape “assumptions about who is responsible for dealing with specific imponderable outcomes.”[ii] Operational sequences, meanwhile, inform film workers from various positions within the labor hierarchy how and when to do deal with tasks such as writing a script, scouting a location, building a set, and writing a budget. Each of these operations, in turn, leads to subsequent ones. Significant to Al Khachab’s study, these operational sequences are complex processes that involve not just human film workers, but technological objects as well.
Sociotechnical activities and technological devices are crucial to “explaining how unpredictable outcomes are mediated in complex sociotechnical processes.”[i] El Khachab’s focus on nonhumans in technical processes harkens to fields such as Actor Network Theory (ANT), yet he avoids ANT language since it does not take into account power relations between humans and nonhumans in the networks of which they are a part of. As such, El Khachab builds on Heidegger’s concept of ‘reserve.’ In writing about technology, Heidegger identifies two moments to understand a device. The first is the device as an object, an “autonomous entity whose physical stuff accounts for its whole existence.”[ii] The second moment is the device as a reserve, “an entity dependent on a parallel world of reserves to exist as such.”[iii] Thinking about filmmaking, we can consider how the variety of human and nonhuman actors on a set are objects and reserves. The film camera-object is comprised of screws, aluminum, shutter, and it is programmed with certain software. At times, a film camera is a device sitting immobile on set during a break or between takes. At others, the cameraperson summons it as a video-taking device. The concept of reserves is not limited to nonhumans. As a film camera-reserve, it is a device that summons the cameraperson’s attention to filming a scene. In sum, “the use of technological devices in filmmaking is better described as a mutual summoning among reserves.”[iv] El Khachab’s theoretical framework thus requires consideration not just of cameras, microphones, and the other ‘star’ cinema technologies in the filmmaking process, but also more ‘mundane’ and far infrequently considered devices in media studies such as mobile phones, laptops, paper, and pencils.
El Khachab’s theoretical framework is crucial in its emphasis on the relational dynamics between humans and nonhumans in the filmmaking process. With regards to technology, such an insight brings needed attention to the devices that often go unnoticed in studies of film, such as laptops, notebooks, and even tea kettles. In today’s monopolistic film environment controlled by the state, who has the means to do multiple camera shots, hire extras, and film a multi-star TV show? In terms of labor, it emphasizes the work of stars in equal ways as the work of drivers and set builders while highlighting the hierarchies in which they operate. But might we use El Khachab’s theoretical focus on humans and nonhumans to understand the political stakes of media production, such as the dynamics of funding and regulation that I mentioned in my brief sketch of the film and TV landscape in Egypt at the beginning of this essay?
United Printing and Publishing and Information Technology Co., which has increasingly created a monopoly over media production in Egypt, has recently hired producers working for other production companies to create content under their supervision and according to their terms. This move to incorporate these companies under United’s umbrella was partly in response to complaints about the several years-long crisis that has been characterized by lack of funds, unemployment, and state encroachment. How does a media worker in this environment mediate the expected yet unknown future? This past year, United attempted to enforce these policies with Lebanese producer Sadeq al-Sabah in exchange for producing and exhibiting his work in Egypt. Yet al-Sabah refused United’s conditions, so he was refused entry at the Cairo Airport, was deported to Lebanon, and restrictions were placed on his work in Egypt. For producers like al-Sabah, mediating the future of TV production is heavily influenced by the political dimensions of funding.
In addition, consideration of funding and regulation requires that we expand our focus beyond Egypt, a point I discuss in the next section. Although to varying degrees over the years, Gulf investors have been an important source of capital for Egyptian productions. This relationship similarly shapes the unexpected futures of film and TV production for media workers.
Through the concept of reserves, El Khachab avoids the revolution-dystopia continuum that studies of new media employ in evaluating emergent technologies – especially in Western scholarship vis-à-vis the Middle East. Finally, El Khachab is attuned to the labor hierarchies that partly inform how the complicated film process unfolds. As such, he brings focus not just to film workers like actors and directors, but to carpenters, drivers, cleaners, and others whose work is not often considered in film scholarship. Although he does not mention it outright, the precariousness of one’s work is an implicit component of one’s position in the labor hierarchy and the ways in which anticipation of the future weighs on a film worker.
Precarious Work and National Frameworks
Does the type of film work that one engages in impact understandings of, and feelings about, the future? Why was El Khachab interested in the future and filmmaking to begin with? These were several questions that an attendee asked El Khachab at a recent book talk. El Khachab answered that this focus on the future grew from the fact that work in all spheres of employment in late capitalist societies is overwhelmingly precarious (‘ala kaff ‘afrīt). El Khachab also explained how those working in the Egyptian film industry had different understandings/expectations (tasawwurāt) for the future, specifically with regards to the tasks they perform and when they perform them. For lighting technicians (gaffers), the filmmaking process and its temporal contours are defined by film shooting days. To make money, a lighting team wants to have as many days of shooting as possible, even if their work is spread across several different film and TV projects. A film director, meanwhile, envisions the future of the filmmaking process and the tasks they have to perform over a much longer period of time. One can employ El Khachab’s logic to think about how conceptions of the future among drivers employed by a film company may be influenced by factors such as Cairo’s notorious traffic, and by an employment contract that may be based on a more temporary timeline and uncertain basis than that of, say, a film’s major star.
El Khachab’s study becomes even more powerful when I think of his temporal framework of unknown futures in terms of precarity and the precariat. At several points in the book, El Khachab mentions how vacations taken by stars contributed to long pauses in the shooting of Decór. Other film workers were not afforded the same degree of flexibility in the filmmaking process, and even those workers in the artistic and more hierarchically powerful positions had little say in the shooting schedule. These cases, as well as the situation with Yousra’s availability that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, hint at the ways in which the unknown future impinges differently on a famous star versus a worker whose position within the film labor hierarchy is largely defined by precarity. In recent years, film and media scholars such as Kay Dickinson have explored precarity and film labor in the context of the ways in which producers of big budget films take advantage of a global division of labor through offshoring. El Khachab focuses on Cairo and filmmaking in Egypt in general, but how might we use his framework to think of Egypt and the unknown future in filmmaking as part of the larger media landscape in the Middle East?
For a range of reasons, cinemas outside of Anglo-American contexts have been historically studied, marketed, and categorized according to national frameworks. As I have discussed in my research on the emergence of film industries in the Middle East and South Asia in the early to mid-20th century, the national as a primary lens for film analysis limits how we may understand a film’s production, distribution, regulation, and reception. Certainly, there are local factors that mediate the filmmaking process in contemporary Egypt, such as Cairo’s notorious traffic, the industry logics embedded in its history, the specificities of its class system, and other components of the national networks of which it is a part. Yet as I mentioned in describing the post-2013 filmmaking atmosphere in Egypt, the film industry in Cairo is also entangled in transregional networks. For instance, the January 2021 article about film production in Egypt mentions that several scenes of the new film al-Shanta were shot in Dubai. Although Dubai factors heavily into the narrative of al-Shanta, other filmmakers have shot their films in the UAE solely for logistical, financial, and technological purposes. How does the transnational scope of this film factor into how its filmmakers mediate the future?
Poster for the 2021 film al-Shanta (“The Suitcase”) that was shot partially in Dubai
In its focus on labor hierarchies, operational sequences, and reserves, El Khachab’s framework requires consideration of the outsourcing of film production to places like the United Arab Emirates. Starting in the last decades of the 20th century, the UAE and other places in the Gulf have increasingly become powerful players in film and media production. The UAE does not have a so-called ‘national’ film industry to speak of, but instead, it presents itself to film producers all over the world as a prime location for film production by offering lower labor costs, few regulations, and high-tech infrastructure. The smooth functioning of film production in the UAE is partly facilitated by a component of its local labor structure, the notorious kafala (sponsorship) system. In an essay on labor, logistics, and filmmaking in the UAE, Kay Dickinson discusses the temporal situation of a worker under the kafala system:
With a conservatively estimated 89 percent of Dubai’s workforce believed to be nonnationals, the allowances for keeping people around for only the duration of a project are the extent of how work is configured contractually. As almost all employees are visitors or guests – even when they are employed for decades by one sponsor – an acutely precarious relationship to work is enshrined.
As Dickinson suggests, the kafala system and its temporal structure of short-term contracts factor into a film worker’s orientation towards the unknown future. The process of mediating a film’s future invariably involves not just anticipation for these workers, but also feelings of permanent temporariness: their place in a particular workforce is contingent on their sponsor and it is ultimately impermanent as the system does not provide a path to citizenship. It also affects workers differently depending on their place in the labor and social hierarchy. Many workers of the UAE’s labor force come from South Asia and their experiences in film in the UAE likely diverges from those of Egyptian filmmakers working in Egypt. In my current work, I am examining how the migrant workers from South Asia who are tasked with building the cables, towers, buildings, and other mundane aspects of the infrastructure that undergirds film production in the UAE manage the material and psychological effects of precarity, such as racism, xenophobia, and homesickness. The experiences of migrant laborers from South Asia in the Gulf likely contrast with those of other film workers from South Asia at the other end of the labor hierarchy and spectrum of precarity, such as Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan who owns a villa in Dubai. A study of film production in the UAE requires reconsideration not just of national but also regional borders in the study of film and media.
For reasons such as the scholarly-activist potential of its theoretical framework, Making Film in Egypt is an important contribution to Middle East film and media studies and media anthropology. El Khachab’s focus on labor hierarchies and film production as a sociotechnical activity brings much needed attention to technologies and film workers that are not often subjects of scholarly study. The book’s focus on unknown futures and precarity in the filmmaking process is useful not just in the national cinema context in which El Khachab locates his study, but also in a regional context where local labor laws and regulations impinge on workers in different material and psychological ways.
Claire Cooley is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. Her work focuses on Middle East-South Asia film histories through questions of sound, infrastructure, and labor.
-Prepared with the editorial assistance of Nishat Akhtar
Endnotes
[1] Chihab El Khachab, Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry (Cairo, New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2021), 16.
[2] Ibid, 17.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 11.
[5] Ibid, 53.
[6] Ibid, 13.
[7] Ibid, 14.
[8] Ibid.