Film and Audiovisual Media colloquium - Viviane Saglier (University of St Andrews): Icon as Infrastructure: Anticolonialism and 1950s Egyptian Cinema

In 1950s and 60s Egypt, current affairs, political, and consumer magazines featured stars, female freedom fighters, and military officers in shared photographs and gossip columns; they published stars and officers’ diaries and biographies, and their covers interchangeably figured war heroes and heroines, film stars, and political leaders. Across these paper-based media, but also certainly in many of the films that such magazines promoted, the militarized and gendered icon reigned as a figure which articulated the state feminist, anticolonial, and socialist-leaning ambitions of the newly independent government. It denoted a wide-spread belief not only in the image’s capacity to celebrate anticolonial popular narratives but also in its ability to organise a political project audiovisually, symbolically, and materially. At the same time, the icon registered the internal contradictions of this multifaceted political project.

This talk argues that the icon provided a crucial representational framework through which anticolonialism was conceived, imagined, and disseminated in 1950s Egypt. Exemplary is the revolutionary melodrama Jamila the Algerian (dir. Youssef Chahine, star and producer Magda, 1958), which centred on the eponymous freedom fighter’s contribution to the Algerian struggle for liberation against French colonisation. Drawing on newspapers, magazines, film, posters as well as the star and producer’s memoires, the talk charts the film’s production history to illuminate both the distinct affective and political investments in the anticolonial icon and the changing institutional context in which it took shape.