Youssef Chahine, 1926 - 2008.

Youssef Chahine, one of Egypt's most lauded movie directors whose films over nearly five decades often went on Fellini-esque flights of fancy and tackled social ills and Islamic fundamentalism, died Sunday in Cairo. He was 82 years old. His death comes about four weeks after he fell into a coma following a brain hemorrhage....

Chahine grew up speaking French and English better than Arabic, and many of his films were French co-productions, bringing criticism by some at home that he was not Arab - or Egyptian - enough. But his early films became classics of social realism, giving gritty depictions of the lowest in Egyptian society. In his 1958 Cairo Station, Chahine himself starred as Qenawi, a mentally retarded newspaper seller at Cairo's main railroad station, who becomes obsessed with a woman selling lemonade.

Updated through 7/30.

The Land in 1969, seen by some as his greatest film, told an epic story of peasant farmers and landowners struggling over land in the Nile Delta.

In his Alexandria Trilogy - Alexandria, Why?, An Egyptian Story, and Alexandria Again and Forever - Chahine turned autobiographical, recounting his childhood in his hometown, his love of Hollywood and his ambiguous feeling toward the United States, which he was drawn to but also saw as an overweening power.

Lee Keath, the AP.

See also: The site, Arab Media and Wikipedia.

Updates, 7/28: "Egyptian screen stars were among around 1,500 mourners who gathered at a Cairo church on Monday to bid farewell to Arab cinema's most celebrated director, Youssef Chahine, who died on Sunday aged 82," reports the AFP. "Hundreds of celebrities and officials were crammed into the Roman Catholic Church of the Resurrection, with hundreds more gathered outside as the controversial director's coffin was carried in, draped in the Egyptian flag."

"Chahine, notable for his large, thick-framed glasses, an impish face and elfin stature, was a warm, humorous man," recalls Sheila Whitaker in the Guardian:

His influences - Julien Duvivier's The Great Waltz, Busby Berkeley and Gene Kelly (to whom he dedicated Al-Yawm Al-Sadis, The Sixth Day, 1986) - plus his more Mediterranean than Muslim Alexandrian background and often non-linear filmmaking probably made him something of an outsider in the Arab world, while his adherence to Egyptian and Arab national, social and political concerns perhaps militated against wide acceptance in the west.

But his substantial achievements and courage are undeniable, and although his later films were, perhaps, less imaginative and innovative than in earlier days, notably in his use of song and dance, he ranks in any world pantheon.

"Mr Chahine, who directed his first feature film, Baba Amin, in 1950, was an eclectic and exuberant storyteller who could move easily across a range of styles and genres," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "In 28 movies - the last, Chaos, was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2007 - he shifted deftly from urban realism to florid melodrama, from historical allegory to musical comedy, from social criticism to autobiography. Whether his subject was the domestic struggles of poor and middle-class Cairenes, his own youth in Alexandria, the building of the Aswan Dam or the life of the medieval philosopher Averroes, Mr Chahine's films reflected his cosmopolitan, humanistic sensibility, as well as his deep interest in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history and society."

"He took on imperialism and fundamentalism alike, celebrated the liberty of body and soul, and offered himself warts and all as an emblem of his nation," blogs Nick Bradshaw for the Guardian. "Egypt's modern history is etched in his life's work."

"Jo, as he was known to almost everyone who crossed his path, was a warm, delightful individual and an endlessly inventive filmmaker, whose unpredictable mixture of styles and tones remains one of the best arguments I know for an anti-theoretical, 'impure' cinema," writes Dave Kehr.

Update, 7/29: "It's true he strove to dramatize the Arab condition; pushed back against the government's Islamist leanings; criticized President Hosni Mubarak; and founded, more or less, Egypt's film industry," blogs the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "But he was also born of a Greek mother and a Lebanese father in British-occupied Alexandria (the family spoke four languages), so in many ways his art was determined to try to look past those nationalistic boundaries to locate and illuminate the joy, ache, comedy, and cruelty of being alive."

Update, 7/30: "He was both a nationalist and an internationalist," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "He loved Hollywood movies - as a young man he went to Los Angeles, studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse - and he learned as much from their robust pace as he did from the gritty humanism of Italian neo-realist films and the romantic sweep of Indian cinema in its postwar Golden Age. He was both an art-house auteur and a director of popular hits, at least in the Arab crescent. He made political points, often different ones in different movies, but his didacticism was typically overwhelmed by his irrepressible urge to entertain."

Posted by dwhudson at July 27, 2008 5:52 AM