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The body of the Amabella is an iconic building in the history of Egyptian cinema.

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Standing just north of Abdul Samad Street in downtown Cairo, the building has hosted many production companies house many movie stars,

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attracted many cinephiles to its clubs and even featured in films like Hire, Elmont and Some Memoir.

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The majestic white building has its entrance in a smart,

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small dark alley behind a grand metal door, leading onto marble stairs in a huge, badly lit lobby.

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Sand and dirt accumulates on an unlit neon sign bearing the Arabic caption of a long gone production house.

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They had the Uplus company for film production.

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The feeling lights and the deteriorating interior cement the impression that this building was iconic in a bygone era, but is now falling into disuse.

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I'm filled with excitement and angst when I first enter the lobby on September 2nd, 2013.

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This was the very first time I would visit a production company.

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What I had envisioned for a whole year as the start of my field research not caring much about the story building.

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I go straight to the sixth floor where I have an appointment with the general manager of New Century Ahmedabad.

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Three middle aged men sit in the office to on waiting chairs and one behind a small desk in what looks like a very narrow vestibule.

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The man behind the desk stands up. Yes, sir! He asks.

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With the half upright, half suspicious tone characteristic of gatekeepers in Cairo, I'm here to meet Mr. Ahmed Badawi.

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What? Exclaims the man as he leans in. I had spoken to softly as usual.

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I have an appointment with Mr. Ahmed Badawi. The man walks behind his desk, opens a glass door,

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leading further into the office and asks me to sit down on a small leather couch next to the entrance.

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This room is bigger than the vestibule, yet it feels narrower because of the large desks covered in boxes, papers and computers behind the desks.

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A young woman in a dress shirt and a young hijab woman stare at me in silence while the reception man enters another narrow corridor.

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One or two minutes later, he comes back saying the toddler politely nudging me to come through.

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Welcome to Middle East Senator Bob Talk, The Oxford Podcast on new books about the Middle East.

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These are some of the books written by members of our community or the books that our community are talking about.

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My name is Walter Armbrister and I teach social anthropology of the Middle East, and I'd like to introduce tonight's speaker.

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My guest is Shehab al-Shaab. She came to Oxford in, I think it was 2010.

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It might have been 2011, 12th, 2012 2012.

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OK, so after I got back from Egypt, not the forum to do a DPhil or a Ph.D. in Oxford is an anthropology.

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He was supervised initially by Paul Gresh and when Paul, retired by Marcus Banks and myself after completing the DPhil in 2016 or 2017,

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I'm not sure she had won a ultra competitive junior research fellowship at Christ Church College, and he went from that to and also super competitive.

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British Academy Early Career Fellowship at Cambridge, which is where he is now.

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She has dissertation was an ethnography of film production in Egypt,

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which has now been converted into a book published by the American University in Cairo

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Press titled Making Film in Egypt How Labour Technology and Mediation Shape the Industry.

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And she had, first of all, I want to welcome you to book talk. Welcome back to the Middle East Centre community, at least virtually speaking.

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I feel like you've never really left, but I do still want to ask you how your Oxford experience prepared you for your research.

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In many ways, I think, well, in my first year at Oxford, I did quite a bit of reading in general,

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kind of visual anthropology and especially people who kind of work on film and anthropology and other parts of the world and Egypt specifically,

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there wasn't that much written. I mean, there was your work, essentially and maybe a few other people.

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But basically being an Oxford and being supervised by Marcus and Paul dressed, as you've mentioned,

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give me a kind of broader sense of the field of visual anthropology and what kinds of gaps there were

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in terms of studying film in different parts of the world as well as having a Middle East centre,

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I think was a big difference.

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Not just because of that, you know, the Middle East Centre seminar series and the people there, but also the graduate students that were there.

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I think I had a lot of connexions with some of the people who had ongoing work fieldwork, society in the region.

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And I think that helped quite a lot to gain a sense of the particular type

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of audience they would be going for if I'm going to do my research in Egypt.

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So that's before even fieldwork and post fieldwork. That was even more important.

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I think the particular community of scholars that gather around issues of visual anthropology in Middle East studies.

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I think Oxford was quite central in bridging those two interests together,

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not just in terms of resources, but also in terms of the people that were there. It was something about how you wrote this book.

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I mean, what made you want to write about the film industry in the first place?

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Media professionals, in my experience tend to be really tight knit group.

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I mean, it may not be easy to talk to in general, but work tends to be really specialised.

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So how did you go about transforming yourself from an outsider to somebody that filmmakers could talk to about their work?

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Yeah, that's a good question. Sometimes I'm not even sure how this happened in practise, but I think while the interest really comes from, you know,

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I always had an interest in film and, you know, watching movies and and trying to understand how they're made specifically.

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And I felt like after I went to university and did an anthropology course, I was like, Well, why don't we do an anthropology of how they make movies?

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And at the time, when I started having those ideas, there wasn't much in the way of a literature that's very ethnographic,

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but also on commercials and production reasons that partly have to do with what you describe.

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But it's quite a specialised field. That access is quite difficult.

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And I think what helped me a lot in this, specifically in the case of Egypt, were two things.

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I think one of them was luck in some ways that like I managed to meet people that were open

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enough to the idea of having an ethnographer hanging around there Saturday night all day.

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And because of the general informality of a lot of interactions in Cairo, I feel like this helped me out quite a lot once I had it.

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In the excerpt that I read at the very beginning of today was basically the first time I met one of the really important

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people from my fieldwork that then kind of connected me with one of the projects that I followed from beginning to end.

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And once that was done, once you're on the set, everyone is just kind of, you know, talking to you since you're around anyways.

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And I think the other thing that helps out quite a lot was that I came off as just like a young single man,

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which is what a lot of people in the industry are, you know, single Egyptian and specifically, right?

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Like, I didn't necessarily look like I was out of place in that sense.

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So most people, when I encounter them, they would assume that I was doing some kind of thing on set,

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and then I'd have to explain to them that I'm actually an ethnographer. And then what is ethnography?

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And why am I taking all these notes? And then they make all these jokes about me, you know, taking notes on set and stuff.

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But I think that part of that informality in my particular position and the way I came off, the filmmakers made it easier to interact.

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And I think the other thing is, I think I was a fairly quick study in the sense that like,

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I feel like I was quickly caught on to like what I could do, what I couldn't do, what when I could ask about things, how I could ask about them.

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And so I hope that I wasn't too annoying for people to, you know, be around too much.

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Your books about labour, but it's also about mediation. Mm-Hmm.

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And I'd like to ask you, how do labour and mediation go together? I mean, in everyday life, people talk about media or the media all the time,

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and I suspect it doesn't take much of a leap of imagination for most people to think of media as a business,

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but not necessarily as labour and mediation sounds like something has done between two people, between two entities to bring them together.

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And so I just want to ask, how did you conceive of making a relation between media and labour in your in your work?

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Well, so this is something that I came to from my experience in the in the industry, and I think later on after I came back from fieldwork,

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I realised that there was quite a bit of literature in something specifically in media studies

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that's called production studies that studies that specific relation between media and labour.

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But really, for me, it came from just hanging out with people on film sets and hearing them talk all the time about

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like their work and the next contract that they're going to get and how tired they were.

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Because, you know, shooting days are super longer, how difficult it is to, you know,

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negotiate certain things because there aren't very strong unions, for example, or things of the sort.

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So there was a lot of talk about labour and there was a lot of kind of embodied instances of,

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you know, labour in action in the process of the production of film. So that's how I came to conceive of this as a very central issue.

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And this is the first chapter that I actually wrote back when this book was a thesis.

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And I think in terms of thinking about mediation and the relationship to labour, like a lot of the literature and production studies,

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what I basically came to understand was that a lot of what the final product of media is and the kind of the thing that you end up seeing,

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whether it's like a movie or a TV series or a video clip or whatever, tends to erase quite a bit of the labour that's done behind the scenes.

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And when when you're there, well, it's being made, you just feel a very different texture of like all sorts of people working.

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There's quite kind of a large division of labour, lots of equipment, lots of stuff happening all the time.

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And so to conceive of the process that leads to the making of a finished kind of polished product as a series of,

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you know, mediations, in some ways, it's something that,

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you know, it's not just me who's doing a bit like a lot of other people who work on media,

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but this is something that really comes from that experience of like being there and,

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you know, thinking about it in that way which like, if you're sitting at home and just watching things on YouTube or, you know,

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watching this interview on a podcast on YouTube or something,

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then you don't necessarily get to understand the thickness and complexity of the division of labour that goes into it.

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Ethnography is supposed to be based on what anthropologists often described as participant observation.

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I mean, you're supposed to do stuff with people, you're not there with them or interview them.

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And so what did participant observation mean in this book?

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I mean, did you actually work in the film industry? Yeah, I think it it just, I mean, many different things to me and different projects.

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I think what so in one of the main projects I was in, I was much more of an observer than a participant.

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I was a participant in the sense that I like hang out around, but and closer than like someone who's outside of the set would be,

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for example, but not so close that I would be like involved in some direct decisions on the movie.

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But in the other movie that I worked in, which is called Poisonous Roses, I actually worked in that movie.

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I was like a contracted worker. I did some casting, I did some production, like scouting.

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I did some a little bit of things here and there to help out because it was a bit of a smaller production.

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And so in that case, the participation was much more direct,

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and that experience was really important for me in terms of putting into perspective a lot of the things that people had told me or that I'd seen,

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but hadn't like develop the feelings of as much as when I was working on that on that film.

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And so I think, like in a lot of participant observation, you know, it's it's a kind of clunky term,

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but it's I mean to different degrees, you're participating to different degrees, you're observing.

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But more importantly than that, I think it's you're doing something that's quite similar to what a lot of other people in that same world are doing.

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It's just you're doing it more systematically and taking notes about it and trying to make like a monograph out of it in the end and so on.

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But in some sense, like a lot of what I was doing, trying to learn how the industry was like was a little bit like other novices in the industry.

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So like in some of the projects that I worked on, you know, it was my first project, let's say, working on and then other people too.

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And a lot of what they did to try to learn what was going on and try to kind of get someone's attention to,

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you know, help them understand what's happening and so on is actually quite similar.

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I feel like the main difference is ultimately like the broader goal that you have.

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Let's say whether it's to integrate the industry or to, like, write a book about it, which was my goal.

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And I mentioned in the book that a lot of people didn't really believe me when I would say that I'm not,

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I'm not in it to become a director and I'm in it to write this book.

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And they were like, No, no, that's not true. You're going to learn all this experience and you're going to come and take our jobs and stuff.

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So, so yeah. And I think in some ways, the perception of that particular dynamic is inaccurate in a way like I could have,

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you know, ultimately decided to integrate the industry in some way.

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But yeah, I was after something a little bit different and odd from their perspective, I think.

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You talk in the book about artistic and executive forms of labour, and probably most people have some sense of the artistic side of a film.

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Or at least, you know, we conventionally assign the function of the author to the director,

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and I guess people attribute some degrees of artistry to actors and writers and the people who write the films, music and so forth.

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What do we gain from learning about the executive side of making a film? That's a good question, I think.

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Well. So the first thing is that you gain to understand how the people that make the decisions end up having them executed right?

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Because ultimately, like what I always find interesting about people talking about the director did this or the

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cinematographer decided that is that in that verb that they're using to decide to make and so on.

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There's like a lot of people that are involved in the making of it happening, right?

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So I think very basically, that's one of the things you get out of it. The other thing you get out of it, I think,

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is is a sense of all the different points at which some kind of unspoken decisions

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get taken based on the particular habits that executive workers have in certain,

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you know, domains, whether they're the production workers,

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whether they're, you know, the ones that execute the sets or the ones that, you know, execute the lighting and the camera movements and so on,

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they they do play a large role in some kind of unspoken, embodied ways in terms of how the films end up being made.

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But because they're treated both by the more higher end workers and by the academic literature,

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often as just kind of cogs in the machine that just like execute some decision that was already made in advance.

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And there's not not much thought given to the fact that they actually intervene in quite instrumental ways in, first of all,

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making it work, but also giving the movie a particular shape, which I didn't really kind of detail in much length in the book.

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But I mean, there's a lot of ways in which the particular way in which workers are trained in the industry,

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especially executive workers, influences the particular quality of the final product.

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And this is something that I've conveyed in bits and pieces,

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but that I think is quite important to know about like, you know, this aspect of the industry.

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And the other thing I would say about this whole artistic and executive dynamic that I think is

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quite important is to understand that the industry is a hierarchical space that it's not like,

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you know, everyone is having fun and collaborating and then making something at the end.

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But in order for a film to be made in the kind of industrial capitalist society like Cairo is, and you have to have some form of exploitation rate,

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which isn't a word I've used in the book, but this is basically what a lot of the relationships of labour in the industry are.

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And a lot of the labour complaints that some of the lower end or executive

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workers have have to do with that particular dynamic of exploitation so that,

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you know, by the end, you see a movie that looks glossy and nice and so on.

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But a lot of stuff had to go into it before you see it as it is.

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So, yeah, these are the things I think you can learn from. One of the things you write about is scouting locations for shooting scenes,

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which means not just finding a place that looks right for the for the scene, but coordinating all the stuff that has to happen to make the scene.

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We realised that briefly talk us through that process, I mean, when we watch a scene in a film, ideally it's supposed to look seamless.

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I mean, usually the goal is to make it look as natural as possible so that the person

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watching feels the sensation of looking at something real or even being in it.

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But what actually happens to produce that effect? And if you can just like, talk through one particularly memorable scene?

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Yes, sure. I mean one. So one of the movies that I followed that's called the and one of the apartments that they shot

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and the world of Mustafa Cinema had two of the characters and was an apartment in Garden City.

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So ultimately ended up being an apartment in Garden City for months. Before then, the production crew was going around Cairo,

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photographing different apartments and basically trying to coordinate with real estate agents.

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So there's a quite kind of interesting connexion between the production side of things and the real estate world of Cairo,

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where a lot of real estate agents actually have lists of apartments that are open for shooting.

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And then, you know, the production workers will go visit a bunch of them and take pictures,

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come back to the office and then decide which ones they'll show to the main crew, like the director and the cinematographer and the other directors.

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And that crew kind of based on these pictures, starts thinking, OK, maybe these two or three locations are fine.

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They go, look at it in person. And then once they find something that's good for them, they choose it.

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And this is a little bit what happened in the case of the apartment that ended up being in Garden City in that in that movie.

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And a lot of the reasons in that specific case that they gave for why they chose the apartment had to do with things that are quite a,

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you know, aesthetic in a way that have to do with like what the final film will look like.

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But part of what I try to explain in the book is is how in order for them to, you know,

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imagine that relationship between essentially the kind of scouting images that they have in the present and whatever will be in the future,

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they have to basically as kind of artistic crew members,

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abstract lot of the labour and time that it takes to actually come to some kind of narrowed down decision about a couple of apartments to to visit.

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And so part of the production of the feeling of seamlessness has to do with this way of shedding away,

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in a sense, all the stuff that has to go into kind of finding the right place.

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And once you do find the right place, you try and shed away again a lot of other stuff.

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So, for example, you know, the way they've rearranged the apartment in some ways in order for the camera to be able to circulate within it quite well.

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Part of the reason they chose that apartment was because it was quite large so they could do camera movements in some ways.

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They couldn't have in a smaller place. The other part of the other reason was because there were several layers within the apartment,

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which, you know, gave something nice in terms of the depth of the image and things like that.

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But in order for them to reach those decisions that they tried to explain,

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it takes quite a lot more than just kind of thinking that it will look realistic or it would be nice in the end and so on.

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So, you know, that's I think the the process in a way of how that happens.

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There's many, many steps. The final chapter is called enchantment.

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And I understood that we're supposed to be living in a more or less disenchanted world in many ways.

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Yeah, although the media certainly one of the things in our lives that exercise our imaginations in ways that,

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you know, can't be rationalised as described in a rational way.

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But I'm wondering if people making this film feel a sense of enchantment or do they

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just look at the film and remember all the stuff that they had to do to make,

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you know, to bring the film to life?

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I mean, you know, I suppose in a way, the people who work on that film are the ones who, you know, know what it what, what went into the sausage.

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I mean, yeah, to enjoy the sausage, knowing what went into it, I think it depends who you ask.

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I talk about this a little bit in the book.

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I mean, the way I use the term enchantment is really coming from a very specific, you know, thing from Alfred Gelb,

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who's an anthropologist of art who talks about enchantment as this particular thing that artists want to get out of their audiences.

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Basically, and what I try to explain a little bit in that chapter is basically how the the Egyptian film crews

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try to produce that sense of seamlessness in the film as a way of enchanting their audiences.

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But in terms of how they feel towards their own product in a way,

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I think it depends a lot on who you're asking within the hierarchy of film production.

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I've met loads of workers that don't even want to watch their own movies.

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I've met loads of workers that work in movies that they don't enjoy as a genre kind of,

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you know, it just happens to be, you know, movies that they they find work in.

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I met a lot of workers, which they also wrote about that think of cinema as somewhat of a kind of morally appropriate thing, right?

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Like, there's a lot of workers who work,

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especially in the kind of more executive side of things that don't necessarily think of cinema as like necessarily a great thing as you know,

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directors can projectors. Screenwriters and so on and from the viewpoint of directors, the screenwriters or the more higher end workers,

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it also depends on what the particular product is and what they,

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you know, their kind of sense of how it managed to happen and I guess changes over time as well and decisive with,

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you know, the movies that I followed the the the corner was made in 2014 and with time,

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the more I hear back about like people reminiscing about what that movie was like and how it was like.

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I think what a lot of the workers that worked in that movie retained from it was actually how

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nice of of a set it was as an experience to just be there and people were nice to each other.

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There wasn't major drama. There wasn't, you know, people insulting each other on set.

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You know, they worked fairly reasonable hours as far as that's possible in Egypt. And so that's a lot of what they remember.

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But then, you know, in terms of the movie itself, that's not necessarily what's on the mind the filmmaker is.

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So I don't know. I think, yeah, it really depends who you're asking within the crew.

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It's not always the things that people retain from the making a film isn't what we think it is.

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OK, well, so I'll take that as saying that some people would rather have steak than then sausage.

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Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for an excellent conversation on a great book.

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I've been speaking with author Shehab L. Kushayb about his book making film in Egypt, how labour technology and mediation shaped the industry.

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The book is has been published by American University in Cairo Press.

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It's out now. I think he has a very good international distribution.

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Yeah, it's available everywhere. Essentially, we should be looking at a bookstore near you or an online book vendor or whatever one you use.

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This has been Middle East Centre bookshop. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.