Cinema and Music in Egypt

The Cinema

Is it not time for our patience to run out with this cinematic and musical crop that Egypt turns out? We have borne it these long years with reluctance, saying: "No matter — this is a newly introduced art in the Arab countries; perhaps experience will raise it to a fitting level, if only in some degree." But the question, as it has appeared to us, is not a question of experience: it is a question of deficiency in the power to create and to invent.

And so the cinema and its music have become a corrupter of taste and morals. And we call upon those responsible for the care of the people's taste and morals in every Arab country to fight this corruption, which is fast coming to stand at the head of the other corruptions in which Arab societies are floundering.

We speak in sincerity even toward Egypt herself — this country which we love and for which we wish every good. If she aspires to lead the Arab world in everything, even in music and song and the cinema, then let her take another course — by which I mean giving up any course whatsoever, for I do not reckon that Egypt, in this art, can lead in much or in little.

Perhaps it is only fair to grant Egypt her swollen production, the fruit of the wealth that has helped to bring forth a great number of literary and artistic heads. Every week a new film, and every hour a book or something resembling a book. And this swollen production will keep whatever success falls to it in the Arab countries, until the level of art and taste rises above what it now is. My proof of that is the kind of people who crowd in to attend the Egyptian films, and who go about repeating the songs of Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Umm Kulthum and other such clowns.

We counsel the masters of the cinema industry among the Egyptians to be faithful to the art of the cinema. If they were faithful in fact, they would resort to two things. The first of them: to turn to the Arabizing of the finest foreign films (doublage) — and there is no shame in this, for the nations that are lengths ahead of us in the race of artistic advancement have themselves turned from the making of films to the translating of what they select from the films of those other nations whose artistic and financial resources have allowed them to master this important modern industry.

We know full well that the Arabizing of foreign films will not bring the Egyptian cinema companies material profit in the measure that their cheap merchandise brings them — that merchandise which exploits the debased instincts of the rabble. But we assure them that they will gain in dignity and in honor enough to make good to them their loss in money.

Second — that they set about raising the level of the public instead of sinking down to it: let them strive to search out the gifted and cultivated who possess high morals, and when they find them, send them at their own expense to the institutes founded in the West expressly for the teaching of the cinematic art — direction, acting, scenario, and the rest. When these return to work in the field of the cinema, they will be able to give the Egyptian cinema a face other than this ugly face...

As for the side of music, the matter is graver and greater still. The music that the Egyptian musicians impose upon the tastes and the ears of the sons of the Arab world is too base for any pen to take it up in criticism. And how it pains me when I see us here in Lebanon, for example, borrowing Egyptian music and imitating it, instead of creating our own music, taking its rules from the living world music in the artistic heritage of the West.

Whoever claims that the music spread among the ignorant of the people, whether it be Egyptian or an imitation of it, is "Arab" music, is mistaken. For music, like art, does not go along with the nationalist mania that measures absolute values by its own yardstick. There is no Eastern music or Arab music or Western music: there is "music." And it is either good or it is bad. And I do not reckon the music in which the Egyptian musicians and their imitators traffic to be anything but bad — so bad that it blackens our faces before the civilized nations and peoples.

And one of the results of the badness of this music is that it has become, like the cinema, a danger — nay, a worse one — to taste and morals. It debases taste and corrupts morals. Proof enough of its corrupting of morals is the limp melody that goes with it, stirring base sensations and dragging the listener down into the pits of sick and evil thoughts, and the wanton dancing that accompanies it, with no aim but the arousing of lust and the awakening of the low animal instincts. The reader may take these words as an attack without logic in it. Perhaps he will excuse me when he knows to what a pitch of disgust and indignation I have been driven. And perhaps I shall resort to logic on another occasion.