The body of the Amabella is an iconic building in the history of Egyptian cinema.
Standing just north of Abdul Samad Street in downtown Cairo, the building has hosted many production companies house many movie stars,
attracted many cinephiles to its clubs and even featured in films like Hire, Elmont and Some Memoir.
The majestic white building has its entrance in a smart,
small dark alley behind a grand metal door, leading onto marble stairs in a huge, badly lit lobby.
Sand and dirt accumulates on an unlit neon sign bearing the Arabic caption of a long gone production house.
They had the Uplus company for film production.
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.
I'm filled with excitement and angst when I first enter the lobby on September 2nd, 2013.
This was the very first time I would visit a production company.
What I had envisioned for a whole year as the start of my field research not caring much about the story building.
I go straight to the sixth floor where I have an appointment with the general manager of New Century Ahmedabad.
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.
The man behind the desk stands up. Yes, sir! He asks.
With the half upright, half suspicious tone characteristic of gatekeepers in Cairo, I'm here to meet Mr. Ahmed Badawi.
What? Exclaims the man as he leans in. I had spoken to softly as usual.
I have an appointment with Mr. Ahmed Badawi. The man walks behind his desk, opens a glass door,
leading further into the office and asks me to sit down on a small leather couch next to the entrance.
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.
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.
One or two minutes later, he comes back saying the toddler politely nudging me to come through.
Welcome to Middle East Senator Bob Talk, The Oxford Podcast on new books about the Middle East.
These are some of the books written by members of our community or the books that our community are talking about.
My name is Walter Armbrister and I teach social anthropology of the Middle East, and I'd like to introduce tonight's speaker.
My guest is Shehab al-Shaab. She came to Oxford in, I think it was 2010.
It might have been 2011, 12th, 2012 2012.
OK, so after I got back from Egypt, not the forum to do a DPhil or a Ph.D. in Oxford is an anthropology.
He was supervised initially by Paul Gresh and when Paul, retired by Marcus Banks and myself after completing the DPhil in 2016 or 2017,
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.
British Academy Early Career Fellowship at Cambridge, which is where he is now.
She has dissertation was an ethnography of film production in Egypt,
which has now been converted into a book published by the American University in Cairo
Press titled Making Film in Egypt How Labour Technology and Mediation Shape the Industry.
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.
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.
In many ways, I think, well, in my first year at Oxford, I did quite a bit of reading in general,
kind of visual anthropology and especially people who kind of work on film and anthropology and other parts of the world and Egypt specifically,
there wasn't that much written. I mean, there was your work, essentially and maybe a few other people.
But basically being an Oxford and being supervised by Marcus and Paul dressed, as you've mentioned,
give me a kind of broader sense of the field of visual anthropology and what kinds of gaps there were
in terms of studying film in different parts of the world as well as having a Middle East centre,
I think was a big difference.
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.
I think I had a lot of connexions with some of the people who had ongoing work fieldwork, society in the region.
And I think that helped quite a lot to gain a sense of the particular type
of audience they would be going for if I'm going to do my research in Egypt.
So that's before even fieldwork and post fieldwork. That was even more important.
I think the particular community of scholars that gather around issues of visual anthropology in Middle East studies.
I think Oxford was quite central in bridging those two interests together,
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.
I mean, what made you want to write about the film industry in the first place?
Media professionals, in my experience tend to be really tight knit group.
I mean, it may not be easy to talk to in general, but work tends to be really specialised.
So how did you go about transforming yourself from an outsider to somebody that filmmakers could talk to about their work?
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,
I always had an interest in film and, you know, watching movies and and trying to understand how they're made specifically.
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?
And at the time, when I started having those ideas, there wasn't much in the way of a literature that's very ethnographic,
but also on commercials and production reasons that partly have to do with what you describe.
But it's quite a specialised field. That access is quite difficult.
And I think what helped me a lot in this, specifically in the case of Egypt, were two things.
I think one of them was luck in some ways that like I managed to meet people that were open
enough to the idea of having an ethnographer hanging around there Saturday night all day.
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.
In the excerpt that I read at the very beginning of today was basically the first time I met one of the really important
people from my fieldwork that then kind of connected me with one of the projects that I followed from beginning to end.
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.
And I think the other thing that helps out quite a lot was that I came off as just like a young single man,
which is what a lot of people in the industry are, you know, single Egyptian and specifically, right?
Like, I didn't necessarily look like I was out of place in that sense.
So most people, when I encounter them, they would assume that I was doing some kind of thing on set,
and then I'd have to explain to them that I'm actually an ethnographer. And then what is ethnography?
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.
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.
And I think the other thing is, I think I was a fairly quick study in the sense that like,
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.
And so I hope that I wasn't too annoying for people to, you know, be around too much.
Your books about labour, but it's also about mediation. Mm-Hmm.
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,
and I suspect it doesn't take much of a leap of imagination for most people to think of media as a business,
but not necessarily as labour and mediation sounds like something has done between two people, between two entities to bring them together.
And so I just want to ask, how did you conceive of making a relation between media and labour in your in your work?
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,
I realised that there was quite a bit of literature in something specifically in media studies
that's called production studies that studies that specific relation between media and labour.
But really, for me, it came from just hanging out with people on film sets and hearing them talk all the time about
like their work and the next contract that they're going to get and how tired they were.
Because, you know, shooting days are super longer, how difficult it is to, you know,
negotiate certain things because there aren't very strong unions, for example, or things of the sort.
So there was a lot of talk about labour and there was a lot of kind of embodied instances of,
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.
And this is the first chapter that I actually wrote back when this book was a thesis.
And I think in terms of thinking about mediation and the relationship to labour, like a lot of the literature and production studies,
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,
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.
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.
There's quite kind of a large division of labour, lots of equipment, lots of stuff happening all the time.
And so to conceive of the process that leads to the making of a finished kind of polished product as a series of,
you know, mediations, in some ways, it's something that,
you know, it's not just me who's doing a bit like a lot of other people who work on media,
but this is something that really comes from that experience of like being there and,
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,
watching this interview on a podcast on YouTube or something,
then you don't necessarily get to understand the thickness and complexity of the division of labour that goes into it.
Ethnography is supposed to be based on what anthropologists often described as participant observation.
I mean, you're supposed to do stuff with people, you're not there with them or interview them.
And so what did participant observation mean in this book?
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.
I think what so in one of the main projects I was in, I was much more of an observer than a participant.
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,
for example, but not so close that I would be like involved in some direct decisions on the movie.
But in the other movie that I worked in, which is called Poisonous Roses, I actually worked in that movie.
I was like a contracted worker. I did some casting, I did some production, like scouting.
I did some a little bit of things here and there to help out because it was a bit of a smaller production.
And so in that case, the participation was much more direct,
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,
but hadn't like develop the feelings of as much as when I was working on that on that film.
And so I think, like in a lot of participant observation, you know, it's it's a kind of clunky term,
but it's I mean to different degrees, you're participating to different degrees, you're observing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
you know, help them understand what's happening and so on is actually quite similar.
I feel like the main difference is ultimately like the broader goal that you have.
Let's say whether it's to integrate the industry or to, like, write a book about it, which was my goal.
And I mentioned in the book that a lot of people didn't really believe me when I would say that I'm not,
I'm not in it to become a director and I'm in it to write this book.
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.
So, so yeah. And I think in some ways, the perception of that particular dynamic is inaccurate in a way like I could have,
you know, ultimately decided to integrate the industry in some way.
But yeah, I was after something a little bit different and odd from their perspective, I think.
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.
Or at least, you know, we conventionally assign the function of the author to the director,
and I guess people attribute some degrees of artistry to actors and writers and the people who write the films, music and so forth.
What do we gain from learning about the executive side of making a film? That's a good question, I think.
Well. So the first thing is that you gain to understand how the people that make the decisions end up having them executed right?
Because ultimately, like what I always find interesting about people talking about the director did this or the
cinematographer decided that is that in that verb that they're using to decide to make and so on.
There's like a lot of people that are involved in the making of it happening, right?
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,
is is a sense of all the different points at which some kind of unspoken decisions
get taken based on the particular habits that executive workers have in certain,
you know, domains, whether they're the production workers,
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,
they they do play a large role in some kind of unspoken, embodied ways in terms of how the films end up being made.
But because they're treated both by the more higher end workers and by the academic literature,
often as just kind of cogs in the machine that just like execute some decision that was already made in advance.
And there's not not much thought given to the fact that they actually intervene in quite instrumental ways in, first of all,
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.
But I mean, there's a lot of ways in which the particular way in which workers are trained in the industry,
especially executive workers, influences the particular quality of the final product.
And this is something that I've conveyed in bits and pieces,
but that I think is quite important to know about like, you know, this aspect of the industry.
And the other thing I would say about this whole artistic and executive dynamic that I think is
quite important is to understand that the industry is a hierarchical space that it's not like,
you know, everyone is having fun and collaborating and then making something at the end.
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,
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.
And a lot of the labour complaints that some of the lower end or executive
workers have have to do with that particular dynamic of exploitation so that,
you know, by the end, you see a movie that looks glossy and nice and so on.
But a lot of stuff had to go into it before you see it as it is.
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,
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.
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.
I mean, usually the goal is to make it look as natural as possible so that the person
watching feels the sensation of looking at something real or even being in it.
But what actually happens to produce that effect? And if you can just like, talk through one particularly memorable scene?
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
and the world of Mustafa Cinema had two of the characters and was an apartment in Garden City.
So ultimately ended up being an apartment in Garden City for months. Before then, the production crew was going around Cairo,
photographing different apartments and basically trying to coordinate with real estate agents.
So there's a quite kind of interesting connexion between the production side of things and the real estate world of Cairo,
where a lot of real estate agents actually have lists of apartments that are open for shooting.
And then, you know, the production workers will go visit a bunch of them and take pictures,
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.
And that crew kind of based on these pictures, starts thinking, OK, maybe these two or three locations are fine.
They go, look at it in person. And then once they find something that's good for them, they choose it.
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.
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,
you know, aesthetic in a way that have to do with like what the final film will look like.
But part of what I try to explain in the book is is how in order for them to, you know,
imagine that relationship between essentially the kind of scouting images that they have in the present and whatever will be in the future,
they have to basically as kind of artistic crew members,
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.
And so part of the production of the feeling of seamlessness has to do with this way of shedding away,
in a sense, all the stuff that has to go into kind of finding the right place.
And once you do find the right place, you try and shed away again a lot of other stuff.
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.
Part of the reason they chose that apartment was because it was quite large so they could do camera movements in some ways.
They couldn't have in a smaller place. The other part of the other reason was because there were several layers within the apartment,
which, you know, gave something nice in terms of the depth of the image and things like that.
But in order for them to reach those decisions that they tried to explain,
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.
So, you know, that's I think the the process in a way of how that happens.
There's many, many steps. The final chapter is called enchantment.
And I understood that we're supposed to be living in a more or less disenchanted world in many ways.
Yeah, although the media certainly one of the things in our lives that exercise our imaginations in ways that,
you know, can't be rationalised as described in a rational way.
But I'm wondering if people making this film feel a sense of enchantment or do they
just look at the film and remember all the stuff that they had to do to make,
you know, to bring the film to life?
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.
I mean, yeah, to enjoy the sausage, knowing what went into it, I think it depends who you ask.
I talk about this a little bit in the book.
I mean, the way I use the term enchantment is really coming from a very specific, you know, thing from Alfred Gelb,
who's an anthropologist of art who talks about enchantment as this particular thing that artists want to get out of their audiences.
Basically, and what I try to explain a little bit in that chapter is basically how the the Egyptian film crews
try to produce that sense of seamlessness in the film as a way of enchanting their audiences.
But in terms of how they feel towards their own product in a way,
I think it depends a lot on who you're asking within the hierarchy of film production.
I've met loads of workers that don't even want to watch their own movies.
I've met loads of workers that work in movies that they don't enjoy as a genre kind of,
you know, it just happens to be, you know, movies that they they find work in.
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?
Like, there's a lot of workers who work,
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,
directors can projectors. Screenwriters and so on and from the viewpoint of directors, the screenwriters or the more higher end workers,
it also depends on what the particular product is and what they,
you know, their kind of sense of how it managed to happen and I guess changes over time as well and decisive with,
you know, the movies that I followed the the the corner was made in 2014 and with time,
the more I hear back about like people reminiscing about what that movie was like and how it was like.
I think what a lot of the workers that worked in that movie retained from it was actually how
nice of of a set it was as an experience to just be there and people were nice to each other.
There wasn't major drama. There wasn't, you know, people insulting each other on set.
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.
But then, you know, in terms of the movie itself, that's not necessarily what's on the mind the filmmaker is.
So I don't know. I think, yeah, it really depends who you're asking within the crew.
It's not always the things that people retain from the making a film isn't what we think it is.
OK, well, so I'll take that as saying that some people would rather have steak than then sausage.
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for an excellent conversation on a great book.
I've been speaking with author Shehab L. Kushayb about his book making film in Egypt, how labour technology and mediation shaped the industry.
The book is has been published by American University in Cairo Press.
It's out now. I think he has a very good international distribution.
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.
This has been Middle East Centre bookshop. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.