Be Wary of Anniversaries: Inside the Archive, Out on the Street

An archive is my paradoxical point from which to insist upon the vitality of this history. Archives are deathly spaces for many, institutions that preferentially taxonomize and pinion the past for others, providing the opportunity for heroic salvage and resuscitation (almost conquistadorial in tone) for a select few. I’ll try in vain to avoid all of that.

Consider the following anecdote: I’m alone in a room in downtown Cairo in 2018, burrowing into unmarked cardboard boxes containing pamphlets, hand-typed policy drafts, and film promotional materials that will help enormously with an anthology I’m compiling.⁴ I entered in search of material to contextualize the New Cinema Group’s “Manifesto of New Cinema in Egypt,” issued in 1968. And, yes, the extensive collection of unsorted Cairo Ciné Club bulletins from that era that I encountered there has illuminated a film culture of organizing and collectivizing, reaching out and drawing in from contemporary anticapitalist and anticolonial struggles. The “Manifesto of New Cinema in Egypt” that evolved from this scene trains its gaze, as this genre does by convention, on the future. This future (now the more recent past) has all the while found some space in an adjoining room.

Next door turned out to be familiar: it was a former headquarters of Mosireen, an activist media collective that came to prominence in the 2011 moment that this dossier honors. Their “Revolution Triptych” is the primary document reissued in the final chapter of my anthology Arab Film and Video Manifestos.⁵ In that book’s time-line, these two manifestos are, as with revolutionary Arab film praxis, bridged by declarations from Algeria-based tri-continentalism and the Palestinian resistance of the early 1970s. To underscore this inheritance is not simply to replace one history with another, even if this version, which acknowledges local ancestry, appreciates a fuller sense of self-determination. Just as valuably, the history in which this essay involves itself reveals the dispersed yet deeply interconnected longevity of a battle against prevailing global inequalities. It reaches far beyond the trinketized high points and lip-service street names of the anniversary aesthetic.

That two adjacent rooms could link two groundswells of moving-image activism in this way is not coincidental, pointing instead to surviving intergenerational networks. The uncatalogued contents of these boxes had been handed over for safekeeping to the Cimatheque, a nonprofit “alternative film center” that rents this space. Certain members of Mosireen were also central to initiating the project.

The correspondence I highlight here has everything to do with the precarious conditions that prompted 2011’s uprisings and that still prevail globally, with the political means through which they were imposed, and with how the film community creatively counteracts them. The Cimateque’s fragile status remains reliant today on unpredictable external funding, which adds to the vulnerability of these documents, which appear to be formerly personal collections, preserved by just a handful of committed and underresourced individuals.⁶ The Cairo Ciné Club bulletins, for example, were themselves ephemera by design (originally created as handouts at screenings). In their very format, they embody some of the policy shifts that can be traced right up to today.

The Ciné Club was inaugurated at a particular crossroads within the history of state provision set in motion in 1952 by Egypt’s successful revolution, which deposed the British-backed King Farouk I. The postindependence government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser absorbed much of cinema, along with many other aspects of social, cultural, and economic life, into a nationalized public sphere—a consolidation that was typical of socialism in its postcolonial form. The state comprehensively oversaw cinema’s professional education, funding, workers’ rights, censorship, exhibition, and distribution while still allowing a parallel private sector to flourish. Through the mid–twentieth century, Egypt housed one of the world’s most successful and prolific film industries.

Egypt’s rapid and devastating defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, which swiftly culminated in Israel’s land grab of significant portions of territory owned or administered by Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, prompted a wide-scale questioning of leadership. The population expressed its dissatisfaction through worker and student demonstrations in February 1968, impassioned debates in the mass media, arrests and purges in the government, and a raft of top-down political measures that aimed to reappraise and reconstruct.

As a consequence, the state stepped back from its prior control over cinema to instead support initiatives like the Cairo Ciné Club, which sat “somewhere between civil society and the public sector,” according to Ahmed Refaat.⁷ As active participants of the club themselves, the New Cinema Group accordingly dedicated their manifesto to assessing where cinema would be positioned in relation to divestment and self-governance. The Ciné Club, as a particular configuration of independence, also contributed to these policies of withdrawal, as state support was rendered ephemeral in a move presaging the journey of these physically delicate, barely looked-after pamphlets into the present day. The Cimateque’s vulnerable position, dependent on a patchwork of short-term donorship and unreliable consumer revenues, marks a point further along on this time-line, when Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat, had signed off on a raft of denationalization actions that cut cinema loose in 1974 and after decades when Hosni Mubarak and the current premier, Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, vigorously espoused a neoliberal doctrine. Such is cinema’s reformulation, carried out amid political about-faces and strongarmed by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF, which, by forcing increased divestment from state welfarism, had sowed many of the seeds of the 2011 revolutions.

These physical rooms divulge a historical sustenance of tactics that both denounce and seek alternatives to these deliberately impoverishing measures. The Ciné Club bulletins bear witness to its eclectic, regularly third-worldist programming (as offered by the Cimateque as well) and are laden with interviews and treatises on the insurgent potential of cinema, frequently translated from other languages. In 1973, upon the invitation of socialist Algeria, Arab film workers joined with tricontinental internationals in a kind of cinematic follow-up to the Bandung Conference that culminated in the “Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers’ Meeting” manifesto of 1955. Among many other demands, this document calls upon the sector to “coordinate efforts for the production and distribution of third world films … establish and strengthen existing relations between third world filmmakers and cinema industries.”⁸ Such initiatives disprove the erroneously hegemonic and localizing historical accounts condemned by Philip Rizk and substantiate another: one of global struggle against equally global systemic violence.

The activities distinguishing this history are remarkably collective. While forcibly smaller in scale than what had been available in the era of nationalization, collectivity remained constant and experimental throughout the intervening years, up to 2011’s moving-image activism and after. An immediate response by the New Cinema Group to the state’s retreat from the film-production sector was to institute a cooperative mode of filmmaking that brought about two strong feature films: Ali Abdel-Khalek’s Ughniya ‘ala al-Mamar (A Song on the Passage, 1972) and Palestinian filmmaker Ghaleb Cha’ath’s Al-Zilal fi al-Janib al-Akhar (The Shadows on the Other Side, 1973).⁹

Several New Cinema Group representatives (deliberately unnamed) emphasized in an interview with Guy Hennebelle conducted at the 1972 Damascus Film Festival: “We feel the need to work collectively…. [O]ur action is taking place within the context of a much larger awakening of consciousness in Egyptian society. We believe ourselves to be answerable to the people.”¹⁰ The manifestos compiled within the aforementioned anthology are, without exception, group authored. The New Cinema Group in Egypt, the Palestine Cinema Group (which issued its own manifesto from its base in forced exile in Lebanon in 1972), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or PFLP (with a manifesto published sometime between 1974 and 1978, also in Lebanon) all prioritized a radical collectivity. They put this practice in motion from the very moments of these documents’ inception and, in general, carried it through in the films they made. The same was later true of Mosireen, who produced scores of videos throughout the 2010s under different configurations of participation and who refrain even from naming the individual authors who worked together on the “Revolution Triptych” text.¹¹ Not all revolutions are the result of mass, largely leaderless actions, but those taking place in 2011 were.

Labor historians have been quick to rebuff suggestions about the seeming “spontaneity” of the 2011 uprisings, instead locating much of the stimulus in prior decades of political organizing, including significant worker strikes.¹² Concurrent actions by grassroots coalitions like Kefaya (the Egyptian Movement for Change), in operation from the early 2000s, were equally notable. Arab cinema has in no way remained aloof from such activities, performing a persistent collectivity across a range of scales, from the local to the internationalist, through manifestos, filmmaking, programming, and more. In so doing, it frees anticapitalist and anticolonial activism from any heroic individual agency, enacting a refusal of singular exceptionality (such as reverence for the auteur) and of the hierarchical labor and economics woven into the very essence of commercial filmmaking. Contrary to this ethos, the following example, though it may seem to focus on just one film, epitomizes these radical experiments in broader insurgent collectivity, not as an abnormality but as a commonplace representative of enduring mass revolution. It also refuses the easy historical landmarking that cordons off 2011 as a deracinated event.

Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk’s Barra fi al-Shari‘ (Out on the Street, 2015) was one of many films to emerge from the 2011 revolutions. It is a dramatized exploration of a subject they had previously documented in shorter form as members of Mosireen: worker takeovers of privatized companies.¹³ In terms of topic, this just-over-an-hour film sustains Mosireen’s commitments to blue-collar-workplace injustice and revolt, and aims to struggle alongside, rather than represent from a distance, its on-screen protagonists. It does so by creating a space between the theatrical and the real, between process and finalized film. Volunteer workers gather to workshop a drama set in a factory that exposes everyday police corruption and violence, managerial bullying, the threat of cursory dismissal for minor infractions, and finally, the people’s repossession of this industrial facility. The film’s nonprofessional actors are mostly casualized workers who joined the crew from popular Cairene neighborhoods and whose own stories were incorporated into the script along with others that the filmmakers had previously documented or imagined.

Mosireen, it should be noted, had regularly initiated media-making workshops with communities, as its members were engaged in community-based activism before, during, and after 2011. However, as a more narrative project carried out with a salaried cast, Out on the Street ventures beyond the urgency of expression and documentation typical of Mosireen’s earlier oeuvres, which had comprised short videos, often conceived and uploaded to online channels within a matter of days. Metwaly points out that Out on the Street conferred greater space and time for her and Rizk’s ongoing revolutionary priorities, including, as will later become apparent, envisioning and preparing for a more just future through reciprocal learning.¹⁴ The diversity of the production team’s class composition sought to bridge, in the name of revolution, the economic divisions promulgated by Egypt’s neoliberal governance.¹⁵

As a means of stressing an active (and real and logical) lineage of anticolonial, anticapitalist filmmaking, I wish to highlight Out on the Street’s alliances with the Palestinian revolution. This is an aspect that has been shockingly and ideologically underrepresented in the English-language analysis of the 2011 uprisings, yet these movements have proven profoundly influential to Mosireen’s own activism, and well beyond. The film units of the Palestinian revolution, whose manifestos are mentioned above, were deeply committed to incorporating their communities into their output. The unit members themselves were fighters and refugees, like those they filmed, and those voices were sought at many more stages in the filmmaking process than is typical even in the most radical of cinematic processes. Everyday Palestinians became the subjects of and, on occasion, the (nonprofessional) actors in their works. Moreover, great lengths were taken to consult with the residents of both refugee and militia camps as these productions evolved past the principal-photography phase. When screened in such spaces, surveys were distributed to audience members, and films reformulated according to these viewers’ suggestions.¹⁶ Similarly, a first cut was immediately screened to Out on the Street’s actors for their approval. Rizk affirms how this “was a relationship that also extended past the making of the film because it was really important to us that it was something they were involved in.”¹⁷

The principles and outcomes shaping such an involvement are manifold: they enable democratic access to the means of representation and thereby are capable of overturning current biases in favor of fresher and more informed views. As is the case with group manifesto writing, these techniques can disassemble hierarchies as they propagate necessary negotiations between diverse groups. This approach disperses power, positioning film more squarely within the politics of horizontality that remains a hallmark of the leaderless uprisings of 2011.

Such social bonds can also be interpreted as a response to a drastically informalizing employment landscape, rife with layoffs and contractual insecurities. The rapacious and engulfing privatizations that have been experienced the world over have also, albeit in defensive fashion, proliferated as cross-border unities that emerge from sites where Out on the Streets has played. As Rizk observes:

Furthermore, like the actors, the more middle-class contributors were finding themselves in correspondingly casualized vocations (typified, also, by the financial instability of the Cimateque itself). Deprofessionalization and the threat of joblessness stand as both the film’s theme and its revolutionary method. As a team effort between variously casualized workers, this film complicates the idea of who the “amateur” actually is, both in actions of protest and in their representation.

In its composition, Out on the Street acknowledges both the restrictions and opportunities to be found in the 2011 revolutions’ genetics and their inextricability from prior histories of socialist-style industrialization. In the spirit of the film’s ethos of sharing and confounding the logics of ownership, there are two sequences that reference this past but that were not, in fact, shot by the Out on the Street team. At just past its halfway mark, the film introduces, by way of depicting its actors at a screening, a scene of a factory accident taken from the popular Egyptian fiction feature Al-Nazara al-Sawdaʾ (The Dark Glasses, Houssam El-Din Mustafa, 1963).

During a decade when Egyptian movies were copious and widely loved across the Middle East, this classic (not extraordinarily for those years) takes the viewer into spaces of mass production. Cinema at that time was assuming its role in emblemizing such industries, through which Gamal Abdel Nasser’s postindependence government aimed, not unsuccessfully, to achieve its goal of full employment.¹⁹ This footage, replete with a dollied tracking shot, contrasts sharply with the agile, hand-held, lower-budget camerawork of the film that frames it. Concurrent with showcasing the industrial facility, The Dark Glasses parades the capacities available to this once-buoyant and popular sector benefiting from state support: cinema. Its stylistic fluency marks the stability then operative for both creative and factory workers at that time, salaried and technologically provided for by industrialized systems.

One aspect of The Dark Glasses’ narrative arc is the factory’s adoption of European models of downsizing and labor cost cutting, with a happy ending enabled by the refusal of the male lead (Omar) to fire his factory-floor colleagues. Yet perhaps the more poignant footage shared by Out on the Street displays exactly what happens in the absence of such a scripted outcome, something that is much more common in the present day. The film opens with wary, hand-held cellphone filming, conspicuously divergent in aesthetics from The Dark Glasses, roaming a disused and evacuated factory that, in 2011, had been taken over by its staff. Later footage, however, scans the rubble of a destroyed factory described in voice-over commentary as “our story of complete destruction…. This is the tragedy we live with on a daily basis.”

By the time Out on the Street was being made, the building had been demolished by its buyers, cognizant that, as land, its real-estate potential bore more commercial value than any enterprise sustaining its employees’ livelihoods. Private ownership barred Metwaly and Rizk from filming the space, so this footage was shared with them by Essam Ali Allam, a former worker-occupier, later turned security guard. The perceptiveness, eloquence, and agency of these sequences indexes the momentum that brought Egypt’s 2011 uprisings to a head through collective actions within exactly these types of workplaces. It thereby provides a follow-up to the concatenation of strikes throughout the 2000s at El Mahalla El Kubra, in the Nile Delta, whose cotton-processing facilities have acted as a beacon of Egyptian economic self-sufficiency for over a century. The strikes, carried out by tens of thousands of textile workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company (still nationalized, thanks to such activism), protested the downsizing enforced upon workplaces like theirs across Egypt by the IMF Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Programs and the accelerating foreign and private ownership of formerly public assets.

In contrast to this direct viewpoint from a demoted employee of a former industrial facility, The Dark Glasses (not uncommonly in the purportedly revolutionary era) assimilated factory workers’ perspectives only up to a point. Mustafa, the machine operator whose accident is referenced in Out on the Street, serves as a two-dimensional symbol of abiding working-class integrity and as a barometer of the fluctuating morality of the movie’s more elite characters, their likability determined by how benevolently they treat this ever gracious and grateful man.²⁰ By incorporating diverse footage in dialectical juxtaposition, Out on the Street questions how revolutionary history is recounted and where its ownership lies. The technique and style of Essam Ali Allam’s sequences intervene in a manner similar to that of the declarative flourish of earlier manifestos, which transcended the boundaries of “acceptable” formal registers of delivery in order to assert a voice beyond that which was more typically and restrictively condoned.

The performative sequences shot specifically for Out on the Street propose new pathways that do not inevitably lead into ruins, with workers out on the street (in destitution or protest) divorced from guaranteed livelihoods. The dramatized main body of the film, which foregrounds workers as screenwriters, characters, and actors, builds toward the takeover of a privatized factory—the kind of action that abounded during the 2011 revolutions. It refuses, however, to render this narrative specific to any named facility or moment in time, as so doing would close down its message, as a glorifying and memorializing anniversary might. Instead, through measures that deny its diegesis a tidy temporality, Out on the Street composes scenes of its on-screen participants engaged in various acting exercises that at once demystify the process of production and, perhaps more importantly, embroil everyone involved (viewers included) in a more profound and forward-facing experience.

Out on the Street draws on a process that its makers have termed “enactment.” As workers, these collaborators draw on a reservoir of experience when they restage, as they do in the film, the realities of how police brutalize members of low-income communities and how managers intimidate and fire them. The filming becomes a means of analysis, deeply attuned and insightful, that was previously demoted to a peripheral perspective but that now speaks back to that history. As Sarah Rifky notes of this technique, furthering its political ramifications, “the private is made public again.”²¹ These “en-actors” are simultaneously untrained and thoroughly qualified, speaking as loudly to conditions under neoliberalism as to the limiting registers of traditional filmic expression. Enactment, though, enables more than these revelations of injustice, as Rizk explains; it is also a mode of training for the future:

Decades earlier, the Palestine Film Unit’s Bi-Ruh, bi-Dam (With Soul, with Blood, 1971) had deployed comparable techniques by casting children to dramatize colonial infractions and connecting their “playacting” with sequences depicting military training on guerrilla bases. The manifestos of the previous decades all declare a future that they rehearse through declarations, like the “Manifesto of the Palestinian Cinema Group” pledge to “make revolutionary films that will mobilize the masses for the revolution.”²³

Honoring Laroui’s earlier warnings about the eventual defanging of exceptionalized historical high points, it is vital to situate Out on the Street within the forward movement of these earlier decolonial and revolutionary tides. Philip Rizk, in relation to 2011 and its afterlife, confesses to the interplay between his filmmaking and its historic moment:

As Out on the Street draws to a close, the en-actors plot out the logistics of protecting and cooperatively running their factory. In the way that guerrilla drills can settle a militia’s movements into muscle memory, cinematic activities can also serve well as training for a more just future. The PFLP manifesto “The Cinema and the Revolution” frames this more militantly as “creating cadres able to use the camera side by side with the rifle in the battle for liberation.”²⁵ Evidently, history falls into line, too, when it repudiates its reification and when its fragile archives register (even if they cannot resist) willful destruction. The adage that history cautions populations to learn from their mistakes is better supplanted by a recognition of how its study can provide the skills, resources, and experience required to continue the fight.