The property. Togo Israelis film star Saba Seven O'Clock from 1937 opens with a travelling shot as the credits roll.
The camera travels four blocks along Sharif Street, passing through Munshi, a square the heart of Alexandria's commercial business district.
It then takes a right turn on back of the net street, passing the French gardens.
The shot ends as the camera approaches the seawall overlooking the Mediterranean.
In this footage, in addition to the mobility of the camera, the bureau witnesses a city in motion,
pedestrians, horse drawn carriages, cars, a bus and a tram traverse the city streets.
The footage reflects the spontaneity of an actuality. A youthful passer by leaps joyfully into the frame mugging for the camera.
Yet the camera manages to capture a cross-section of Alexandrian society.
Men and women in Western dress walk alongside labourers, and Ghalib is carrying sacks and rolling large spindles.
The camera also records police officers, carriage drivers, construction workers and a Sufi cleric.
On the right side, as the camera approaches the sea wall, we see a monumental structure under construction.
The visible semi-circular colonnade would soon house a statue of Ismail, Egypt's ruler, from 1863 to 1879.
Ismail is known as the builder of the Suez Canal and modern Cairo, as well as the architect of Egypt's late 19th century debt crisis.
In 1938, one year after the film was shot, the monument, a gift from Italy, would be ceremonially unveiled by the Italian community of Alexandria.
Both the colonnade and the statue were positioned to face the Mediterranean, symbolising Egypt turned toward the West.
By contrast to the symbolic positioning of the monument,
the visual narrative of the film does not continue in a straight line from the Port of Alexandria to the northern shore of the Mediterranean.
In seven o'clock, the seawall serves as a barrier.
The travelling shot ends, the film cuts to footage shot from a fixed camera position at the seawall,
pivoting to display and mimic the curved coastline of Alexandria's eastern harbour.
At the end of the shot, the camera has turned around, orienting itself inward toward Egypt.
I to give them in the day,
two circular urban trajectories give way to a journey through along a linear axis from its position on the Alexandria Seaside Promenade.
The camera points southward, establishing the trajectory of the narrative.
Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk The Oxford Podcast on new books about the Middle East.
These are books, some of which are written by our community and also books that our community is talking about.
My name is Walter Armbrister and I teach social anthropology at Middle East here and also graduate options on mass media of the Middle East.
My guest tonight is Deborah Starr.
Deborah is a professor of modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and film and the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University,
and also Cornell's director of the Jewish Studies Programme.
She writes and teaches about identity and intercommunal exchange in the modern Middle East with a focus on the Jews of Egypt,
and she recently published a very interesting book on an Egyptian film director.
Togo Mizrahi, who was a member of Egypt's once thriving Jewish community and also the most prolific director of the
early years of Egyptian cinema from roughly the early 1930s until the early post-World War Two era.
The title of the book is Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema.
It's published by the University of California. Press came out in 2020.
I know the book from having read manuscript version of it, and though I had seen many of Tolkien's Rahim's films,
which remained very popular with Arabic speaking audiences, I can't say I really appreciate just how important it was until reading the manuscript.
Deborah, welcome to book talk. Thank you very much for having me.
I'm really delighted to be in conversation with you in real time. And welcome to the Middle East Centre community, at least virtually speaking.
Let me start by asking you to tell us something about how the writing of your book was done.
What made you want to write about Togo Mizrahi? What was most distinctive about him and his work?
So I came to this. I sort of backed into this project from my my first book.
I remember in Cosmopolitan Egypt, where I looked at the nostalgia from the post dispersion, you know,
late 20th century literature and film about the interwar period and the cosmopolitanism that they reflected in that period.
And I was very curious to see what was happening in the interwar period for which these writers and filmmakers were not allergic.
And so I had initially envisioned this as a broader comparative project looking at a variety of different films.
And I do weave some other films into my discussion of Togo Mizrahi, his work.
I see him in the broader context of nineteen thirties and forties, you know, early Egyptian cinema.
But I found his work extremely compelling. I found his films, you know, a lot of fun to watch,
and I realised I had a lot to say about his films and looking at early cinema through the lens of his work gave me,
you know, sort of a really interesting perspective on what was motivating early, early, early cinema professionals.
And another two preliminary question. What was most challenging about writing this book?
What were your sources? What obstacles did you encounter and how did you overcome them?
Well, some of the, you know, look, and as you well know, finding the accessing materials in an Egyptian archives is really is really challenging.
And I was, you know, I really got started working on this book in 2009.
And of course, you know, in 2011, everything changed in Egypt and and it became sort of difficult for me to to travel when I was like,
this sort of the key portion of the time that I was trying to do the research for this book, you know,
but I was I found early journals from the nineteen 1920s,
30s and 40s in a variety of different archives and was able to access them outside of Egypt in order to,
you know, to get a broad picture of what was going on in the media environment in Egypt in those years.
And to look for places where you know him about his films were reviewed,
where there were sort of gossip columns about cinema actors in particular who was working with whom, who signed contracts with whom.
And so, so a lot of that material was there. And I also was very fortunate to be able to access archives, personal archives of his family.
And so I was able to find, you know, your family stories about what he was like after after having left Egypt and what you know what,
but what information and documents they had that helped flesh out him as a as a person and not just as a, you know, a person who appears in the media?
Yeah. Well, I have to say that although archival sources are often hard to come by,
when you're when you're doing research on something like this, YouTube is,
as it turns into a kind of unprecedented archive,
actually makes writing about films much easier than in many ways than it was when I first began doing it.
That is absolutely true. I mean, as far as the films themselves, YouTube was an invaluable resource for me.
I had been gathering films in a variety of formats, from VHS to the CDs to DVDs, things that were restored and released.
But you know, the broadcasts on satellite television and people capturing those and putting them up on YouTube has been an
incredible resource for for finding films and TV programmes that that introduce old films to the modern audience.
And you know, there are all sorts of visual resources that he and his films have have survived at a remarkable rate and been in
these the their popularity and YouTube really attests to the continuing popularity of programmes for his films.
Yeah, that's an interesting, interesting archive,
because it's not a record necessarily what the state considers important what ordinary people value exactly.
Egypt is the most obvious candidate for scholars of Arab cinema to write about in terms of a national film industry,
and it's and it's well known that most of Egypt's Jewish community left Egypt when Israel became a
nation state that was initially in a state of war with Egypt in its early years of independence.
And indeed, Egyptian Jews have been caught between Egyptian and Jewish.
Eventually, Israeli nationalism at least a decade prior to the Foundation of Israel.
And so how does Togo Mizrahi fit within this category of Egyptian national cinema?
I mean, do people who write about Egyptian cinema acknowledges his place within that category?
They say, thank you for that question. So. Early Egyptian cinema was very diverse.
There were people from a variety of different nationalities, some of them with the mass shooting,
some of them foreigners who came in who were either invited to Egypt or came to Egypt to create cinema.
You know, as well as Egyptian Muslims, Christians and Jews who are all working together to create this.
The cinema and the diversity of the, you know, reflected in the films is, you know, both onscreen and off screen.
You know, it's available.
You can see it in the characterisation, you know, particularly in the comedies, you know, the sort of diversity in Egypt of this period.
This is some of what drew me to these films. But the filmmakers of that era really saw themselves as engaged in a national
project that cinema was going to help produce a collective identity that they were.
They were fighting for both economic and, you know, the the the place to articulate Egyptian ness to and to project it to the Egyptian audience.
No, you know, Hollywood films and European films were very popular. And as the Egyptian film industry gets started,
they want to find a place and find screens to to make these Egyptian stories available to the Egyptian
viewership and Togo Mizrahi was very much a part of that was a real leader in that in that movement.
By the same token later,
film critics have sort of disparaged this period as very heavily influenced by Hollywood as not necessarily very Egyptian and is not very nationalist.
And so there's this real sort of dichotomy between what these filmmakers thought they were doing and how
they were being received in the press of the day and what later critics have attributed to this period.
I think there certainly has been a shift in recent years toward looking at the contributions of, you know,
not just token Israeli but other other foreign minorities in in this period, in cinema and in Egyptian culture more broadly.
You know, so it's I think I think there's there's an increasing dialogue about, you know,
about his place in Egyptian cinema and about the role of cinema in the 1930s and 40s before the Egyptian revolution.
And of course, one might also say that this whole whole idea of national cinema is problematic.
I mean, I think there's all kinds of national cinemas that that aren't necessarily what film critics and film historians say they weren't.
I don't think Egypt is necessarily unique in that regard. No, certainly not.
You know? No, absolutely. I think there's there's a lot of discussion, right, amongst scholars and film critics about what national cinema means.
And on the one hand, we have these these structures within the state that, you know, that sometimes are used to fund films.
In this case, there's this sense of, you know, this real national product project.
There's this nationalist sort of impulse that that the filmmakers are engaged in,
that they really see this as part of establishing an Egyptian national independent
Egyptian national identity independent of British colonialism and foreign influence.
But, you know, at the same time, you know, again, film critics have and, you know, particularly the Egyptian press and, you know, in later years,
look back to the Egyptian film industry of this period and try to to delineate
what makes Egyptian national cinema in a very narrow terms by who was Egyptian.
How many Egyptians were involved in the production of a particular film?
And, you know, by those by those counts, Togo Mizrahi films, I mean,
he was not he was not an Egyptian citizen are sort of questionable in the count of like, where does Egyptian cinema start?
And that's a really problematic way of going about understanding what, you know, what makes a film Egyptian.
So I do think that, you know, and of course, the flip side, of course, is that from the very beginning, Egyptian films were distributed very broadly.
So they had a wide audience of Arabic speakers throughout the Middle East and North Africa,
but also into Europe and the U.S. histories of Egyptian cinema also tend to put massive emphasis on the creation of a film production infrastructure.
And the thing they always point to is this colonial era industrialists talk Harvey's project of creating.
You'll miss her, but one of the things that your book does,
which is which is a I think a big contribution is to delve into Studio Mizrahi, which was located not in Cairo and Alexandria.
And I wonder if you could just say a word about tomes, right?
As a studio owner and a film producer and how big a player was he and has the importance of Studio Mizrahi have been obscured by nationalist politics?
Well, I mean, the simple answer to that final question is yes.
I think that's absolutely true that his his the history of Studio Mizrahi has been obscured by nationalist politics.
And I think that is both because of his identity as as a Jew and as an Italian national,
but also because of the Cairo centric narrative of Egyptian cinema.
Early, early cinema in Egypt was really started in Alexandria.
Some of the earliest cinema efforts took place in Alexandria, and Studio Mizrahi is no exception.
So, I mean, he starts off working with some some actors who some like Leon Angel,
who adopts a pseudonym, Shalom, who doesn't really have a stage persona.
But he also works with comic actors Fawzia Gazzara and and his troupe that have this stage presence both in,
you know, in Egypt and as a travelling troupe. So I'm building on their popularity.
And he makes these films in his studio in in Alexandria from the founding of the studio 1929.
His first film comes out. And first efforts come out 1930.
Until 1939, when the industry has really gotten established in Cairo and he moves his studio where he moves to the bulk of his operations,
to a new studio in Cairo and really becomes a player in the scene there.
And we start seeing bigger budget films,
less the sort of episodic comedies and more of the big budget musicals and bigger budget sort of costume comedies.
Would you describe those early films with a lot of which had Jewish characters and various other characters who
contrast with this kind of later tendency for the default characters in Egyptian cinema to always be Muslim?
Were those niche films or were just misunderstood?
What constituted the mainstream in early Egyptian cinema? I don't think that they were niche films.
I don't have a lot of information about like box office take in these sorts of things about it,
you know, in comedies did not earn as much as as musicals,
but he's not alone in the kinds of representation of minorities and what I identify as an
Idiom 11 teen idiom that is a kind of shape shifting idiom that plays with ideas of identity.
And this is both the interrelationships between, you know, particularly Muslims and Jews,
and masquerade and costuming and pretending to be someone you're not and which was a very common in Egyptian comedy, but also gender play.
So gender and sexuality get played with a lot. And when we look at someone like Asha doggers comedies from this period, I mean,
those that have survived, there's a lot of this going on and we see this in other films.
Nicky Butt of Haneef's work also does some of this.
So we see that this is not an idiom that is only attributable to Togo Mizrahi, but something that's happening in 1930s comedy that,
you know, you know, clearly has a market and more than one one troupe or one filmmaker is doing it.
So I don't think of them as niche films. I've certainly heard people argue that the shallow films were not very popular with Egyptian audiences,
but I don't really I I don't I don't know that we can say that with say that quite definitively.
Certainly, in the early years, some of Togo Mizrahi films did not get nearly as much press in the Cairo centric publications,
but that was true of the other Alexandria based studios as well.
And there is he.
He was sort of media, a little bit media shy. He didn't like to give interviews.
He didn't like to reveal anything about his movies until they were released.
And I get the sense that you didn't have. You didn't spend as much in his advertising budget and therefore didn't get as much coverage.
And so I think all of these things came to play in the early years, even though he was, you know,
his films tended to be very well-reviewed and he had a lot of respect of the the press.
They thought his his he was a very real professional and they generally liked the quality of these films.
And you pre-empted my next question, which was going to be about this concept of the 10.
But you touched on another thing I want to ask about,
which is that southern Israeli films remain popular with Arabic speaking film audiences and audiences don't
really seem to care whether or not the director is Jewish despite the climax of the Arab-Israeli conflict,
although it also has to be said that a lot of audiences identify more with actors than the directors.
I mean, you know, sort of the typical person will say, you know, an unconfirmed film or a Leila Mourad film, and it's possible.
I mean, it's speculative. I would say that maybe the most popular term Israeli films over the long haul and its
many decades at this point were the ones that he made featuring the singer Layla Moran.
I think there were at least four of them, and many mirrored like Mizrahi was Jewish there.
She didn't convert to Islam, and she never left Egypt. These are also facts that are well known at a general level by people who love Egyptian films.
So who was Leila Mourad and what did Togo Mizrahi try to do with their talents?
I mean, she kind of appears, you know, sort of at the intermediate point between his Alexandria years and his career years.
Right, so Leila Mourad was an Egyptian Jewish singer who already had a recording
presence on Egyptian radio by the time she started working with Togo Mizrahi.
She had made a film hub with Mohamed Abdulwahab and in 1939 token Mizrahi approaches her to make a film.
So the first film he makes in Cairo is a film starring Leila Mourad.
So this is sort of the big splash into the Egyptian.
It's into the Cairenes, you know, the studio and working with Cairo based support staff, some of his his staff moves with him from Alexandria.
But it was they were they were pretty scrappy bunch working with just a handful of
people making these productions and things really expand when he moved to Cairo.
So this first film is Leila Montoro on a rainy night starring Leila Mourad and Yusuf Wabi, who is a sort of theatre impresario and actor,
very well known figure of melodrama in particular, who also had forayed into into cinema before.
But what really happens under through this collaboration is that rather than appearing
Asi alongside the most famous male singer performer recording artist in Egypt,
Mohammed Abdulwahab, she becomes the singing sensation of a film with a an actor who does not sing right,
who's known for his, his acting and his melodrama. And she becomes she's able to really grow into her roles.
And through her collaboration with Togo Mizrahi, her identity and her star power grow enormously.
He recognises her potential, and really, he lights her well.
He, you know, he gives her. He, you know, he he puts her, you know, really at the centre of the narrative and really allows her to,
you know, to develop her onscreen persona and works on sort of marketing this, you know, in the in the press.
And so over the course of their relationship, we we we know that her the salary that she commands,
you know, increases sort of exponentially as her popularity grows.
And so I think this is incredibly mutually beneficial period for both of them
that his his place in the cinema industry grows alongside her rising stardom.
Yeah, I must say that was right. He made her look a lot better than she did enough and got her look where she she she was to say, I mean,
she did sing and I bet she was disabled second fiddle next to our brand by the time Ibrahim left Egypt, which, if I'm not mistaken, was 1948.
Is that correct? No. So he it's it's after 1952 1980 that after the Cairo fires, but before the revolution is where it appears that he has.
I mean, he in 1946, so his wife was Italian, there was someone he had met.
You would take regular trips to Europe and come back.
The press always reported on his returns to Egypt with new European equipment.
And so this is how we know about his travels in those years. But on one of those trips, he he met his wife, who is from from Italy.
She moved with him to Egypt.
They they spend the years of World War Two in Egypt, and then in 1946, they they get an apartment in Rome and they start sort of going back and forth.
And she was never entirely happy in Egypt. And so there's a movement back and forth.
But really, 1952 is when it appears that he he makes Rome his primary residence and he goes back to visit Egypt after that.
But but it appears that his, you know, he's he's essentially relocated to is not working anymore at that point.
So, so in those last years when he was working, he worked with most of the really many of the really big figures in early Egyptian cinema.
I mean, as you've already said,
he worked with Yusef while we worked with Layla Moran and kind of made her much bigger than she had been when she started.
But also with her sense, it gave us Rushdie. I mean, a risk and reward wedding.
Ramaphosa and uncle whom. So in order to do this, did he have to sacrifice the 11 tenets of his early work in order to sort of.
Get in sync with these bigger names in the film industry, and also at a time when arguably Egyptian nationalism was.
Perhaps not favouring the kind of weapon mess that he had kind of cut his teeth on or on the contrary,
where there are still distinctive Togo Israeli features in those later films.
So I would divide this by genre.
So, you know, the comedies continue to be 17 style comedies, even as the the visibility of minorities within the films decreases,
but certainly the gender play play in sexuality cross-dressing.
You know, the various kinds of shapeshifting and masquerade that also characterise the 17 are very much still present in the in the comedies,
the musicals, much less so. And I, I don't know whether to attribute this to a kind of normative thing, whether this again, is a shift in genre,
whether this is just as you, as you just laid out a shift in a sense of what it means to be Egyptian.
What the politics of the period are.
But I think one of the really key moments that we see evidence of this kind of Levinson ism in in a musical hour in the film Salama,
which features which stars costume and that film is actually the one film that is he, you know,
he was a writer, director, producer and early, very, very early on, a sometime actor in his films.
By the time we get to Salama, this is a film. This is a real collaboration, and he's working with a script that's based on a novel.
The script was written by somebody else. It's being produced by somebody else.
Uncle Sam has enormous clout over how things are.
You know how her character is portrayed on screen. And so, so this is the film where he has sort of the least influence over its entire arc.
And yet we see some of these distinctive elements.
One of the things I argue about this film is, you know this in this story, Uncle Sam is a singing slave girl, and she passes from one hand to another.
Over the course of the film, and one of the things that Uncle Sam was very concerned about and one of the reasons why she particularly likes these,
these singing slave girl characters and these sort of historical dramas is because it doesn't put her into the eye of various kinds of,
you know, the complications of modern sexuality, questions about women and objectification of women on screen.
And one of the complicating factors of this having been sold from one to another is that these
these kind of singing slave girls would have been sexually available to their owners historically.
Right. And so it's token. Mizrahi uses this 17 idiom to to kind of diffuse the masculinity of the some of her owners socially to diffuse
any possible reading of the film as somebody her her owner having had sex with Be with the slave girl.
And so, so it's it's really interesting use of this kind of gender, play and sexuality that we see very,
very evident in the comedies that he directs in a way that he he taps into that work to, you know, to tell this, this story.
And so it's it's a really interesting moment because we see in the film where he has sort of the least control.
We still see evidence of this love in idiom, and I'm quoting for his military career on maintaining this kind of chaste persona, public persona.
So, yeah, it's very, very interesting indeed. One final question.
Do you have a favourite Turkomans rocket film? That's a tough one.
Well, I actually I always come back to in my work to the Elizabeth Batalla is treated by affluence, but when it comes to favourites,
I may actually have to land on the south about seven o'clock,
which is this just crazy comedy that I just started this conversation out with a reading of the opening scene of that film.
This is a film starring Alec Cassar, who is again a comic actor.
Stage Persona had a travelling troupe and made quite a number of films with Togo Mizrahi,
and this is just this really crazy film where he essentially has a dream that he's,
you know, he's being chased for these that he's absconded with with funds or he's being suspected of absconding with funds.
And it just gets more and more crazy as the film goes along until you realise it's a dream.
But he in the course of it, he dresses as a woman, he becomes newbie, you know,
he he embraces the Nubian ness of this character that he has his stage persona and his onscreen persona.
He goes to he goes to Nubia.
There's a Nubian wedding, and there are all sorts of elements to this film that I think make it really, really interesting to me.
And, you know, a lot of fun to watch and has a lot of this, this 17 masquerade and shapeshifting that that I find so compelling.
Fantastic.
Your book really has brought out a lot of the flavour of Egyptian cinema, and it's the flavour of Egyptian cinema, which people continue to love.
I mean, you know, you probably have the experience of telling people you're working on Egyptian cinema
and then responding to the old films are so much better than the newer films.
And they often mean, you know, precisely these films, which remain popular even today, thanks to the illegal.
But the magic of YouTube. So I really want to thank you for this book.
I think it's a wonderful contribution to Egyptian cinema, and it's been a pleasure talking to you.
Do you have anything else you'd like to add? Well,
I guess the one thing I would like to add is that the book is available open access so
anyone can download it and read it for free at the University of California website.
Wow, that's a very good thing to mention. Yes, and thank you very, very much for having me.
I really enjoyed our conversation. It's been a pleasure.
I've been speaking with author Deborah Starr about her book Tuggle Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema.
And this has been Middle East Centre book talk. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.