Al-Mumia' a.k.a. The Night of Counting the Years (1969)

Filum Film Club screens neglected cinema from across the globe in London. We like colour films made before 1997 and recorded in any language other than English. Filum Folio is a twice monthly newsletter. Curated and written by @akipicktures on Instagram.

• In this newsletter - after last night’s SELL-OUT screening of Al-Mumia’ at The Garden Cinema (thank you for coming):

  • The context and ideology of the film;

  • Why obsessive writer-director Shadi Abdel Salam never made another feature-length narrative film;

  • Links for further reading.

In perhaps the most memorable scene of Shadi Abdel Salam's 1969 film Al-Mumia', our protagonist, Wannis, is overcome with tears when his uncles unveil the family's dark source of wealth. Directing Wannis and his older brother to “be careful” and to “not ask any questions”, the uncles lead them down a shadowy mountain shaft. One uncle pries into the sealed tomb of an ancient pharaoh, then the other uses a knife to cut through the mummifying wrappings to reveal a shimmering golden Eye of Horus necklace. Wannis's brother condemns his uncles for plundering the sacred dead through the black market dealer, Ayoub. The unrepentant uncles rationalise their actions; one says those dead are “nothing but wood or dust from thousands of years ago”. The film's central question concerns what duty we have to the ancient past - or more narrowly, what links contemporary Egyptians to their ancient ancestors.

Wannis's immediate sorrow and disgust at this illegal trade speaks volumes about how writer-director Shadi Abdel Salam viewed Egyptian identity. While his script took inspiration from true events in 1881 when the Egyptian antiquities service caught the Abd el-Rassul clan looting the Royal Cache of Pharaonic tombs (catalogued TT320 by Egyptologists) from the Twenty-first Dynasty (1077 BC to 943 BC), the protagonist is fictional. Abdel Salam's mythical twist - Wannis's eventual decision to reveal to the Cairo men the entrance to 'the belly of the mountain' - is to explicitly promote an Egyptian identity inextricably linked to pharaonic heritage.

The film portrays Wannis as noble and trying to do the right thing. He does not exactly understand why he feels disgusted by the revelation, but he helps the westernised Cairo men who do understand the tombs' significance. Meanwhile, the tribesmen who steal and trade in artefacts act immorally and untrustworthily. The uncles order the murder of their nephew, Wannis's brother, and Murad, who helps sell the artefacts, runs a brothel and is pathetic and abominable. The film ends with urban suit-and-fez-wearing men leading the tombs to a boat for Cairo. A postscript reads “rise, for you will not perish. You have been called by your name. You have been resurrected”. The metaphor to a pharaonic Egyptian identity becomes clearer by an oft-quoted interview with Abdel Salam: "I think that the people of my country suffer from ignorance of our history, and I feel that it represents my mission to make them know some of it and let the others go on with the rest." To know one's name and history equates to having an identity for Abdel Salam. As such, when Wannis's mother tells his brother “I do not know your name”, she is leaving him to be murdered.

Opponents existed throughout the 20th century to a pharaonic Egyptian identity. Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the influential Muslim Brotherhood, typified a polar opposite when he said “we resist with all our strength, the programme that seeks to recreate ancient Egypt after God provided the teachings of Islam and honoured Egypt with glory beyond that of the ancient past”. In 1981, when a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad shot the president dead during a military parade, he shouted 'I have killed the Pharaoh.' Like other Abrahamic religions, the Islamic tradition views Pharaohs as having been pagan and decadent tyrants. Therefore, Egyptians, similar to other Arab countries, have multiple, sometimes competing, sources from which they derive identity.

What are we to make of French Egyptologist Gaston Maspeo opening the film and giving Kamal the archaologist his quest? In 1881, when the film takes place, Ottoman Khedives ruled Egypt under the control of an Anglo-French commission. A year later, the British would take over and rule the country as a colony while quashing a nationalist uprising. Culturally, ancient Egypt formed a regular motif in the western imagination of the Egypt they colonised. This reminds me of the colonial veneration of ancient civilizations in North Africa and West Asia highlighted by Edward Said in Orientalism and countless writers since. Speaking broadly, orientalists in the era of colonialism thought more highly of the ancient dead of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and other countries than the living Arabic and Islamic people they helped rule over. For archaeologists with colonial sympathies or instincts, bringing back ancient glories through western academic methods became their duty - under the protection of imperialist dominance, of course.

Prior to Al-Mumia', Abdel Salam made a name for himself in Egyptian cinema through his extensively researched period art and costume design. His knowledge of ancient Egypt in particular proved so renowned that foreign productions sought his skills. He worked on the infamous Hollywood bomb 'Cleopatra' (1963) starring Elizabeth Taylor but Abdel Salam did not enjoy the experience of working in the Hollywood machine. He had a better experience working for master Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, who encouraged Abdel Salam to make Al-Mumia' and personally lobbied the Egyptian culture minister for funding for the film while in the country.

It’s a tragedy that Abdel Salam never made another feature-length narrative film after Al-Mumia'. Despite twelve years of research and sketching, the Egyptian government refused to fund his ambitious film on the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaton. Foreign investors expressed interest, but Abdel Salam insisted the film had to be fully Egyptian. His dream project went unrealized when he died unexpectedly in 1986 at 56.

LINKS

Egyptian documentary (in Arabic) on the making and significance of the film.

Shadi Abdel Salam’s short narrative film ‘The Eloquent Peasant’ starring Ahmed Marei (Wannis).

In-depth analysis of the film by American history professor Justin Jacob - he informed much of my thoughts above.

Shadi Abdel Salam’s storyboard sketches for the film.