Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema

Front matter

TOGO “MIZRAHI

AND THE MAKING OF EGYPTIAN CINEMA

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments

Notes on Translation and Transliteration

Preview

Index

CONTENTS ix

169 179 211

Nw CG

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

Screenshot from Mistreated by Affluence (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 2 Portrait of Togo Mizrahi by Studio Umberto Dorés. 4

Letterhead for the Egyptian Films Company. 21

Portrait of Félix and Togo Mizrahi circa 1915. 29

Photograph of Togo Mizrahi on the set of The Two Delegates (1934). Photograph of Togo Mizrahi with cast and crew on the set of

Layla the Country Girl (1941). 41

Photograph of Togo Mizrahi and Myriam Donato Mizrahi circa 1938. Page of passport issued to Togo Giuseppe Mizrahi by

the Italian consulate in Egypt in 1952. 48

Screenshot from The Two Delegates (Togo Mizrahi, 1934). 55

. Screenshot from The Two Delegates (Togo Mizrahi, 1934). 59 . Screenshot from The Two Delegates (Togo Mizrahi, 1934). 60 . Screenshot from The Neighborhood Watchman (Togo Mizrahi, 1936). . Screenshot from The Neighborhood Watchman (Togo Mizrahi, 1936).

Screenshot from The Neighborhood Watchman (Togo Mizrahi, 1936). Screenshot from The Neighborhood Watchman (Togo Mizrahi, 1936).

. Screenshot from Wife by Proxy (Ahmad Galal, 1936). 71

Screenshot from Mistreated by Affluence (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 74 Screenshot from Doctor Farahat (Togo Mizrahi, 1935). 76

. Screenshot from Doctor Farahat (Togo Mizrahi, 1935). 77 . Screenshot from Doctor Farahat (Togo Mizrahi, 1935). 78 . Screenshot from Doctor Farahat (Togo Mizrahi, 1935). 79 xi

67 68 69 70

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

. Screenshot from Doctor Farahat (Togo Mizrahi, 1935). 81 . Screenshot from Doctor Farahat (Togo Mizrahi, 1935). 82

Page from pressbook for Mistreated by Affluence (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 85

. Screenshot from Mistreated by Affluence (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 88 . Screenshot from Mistreated by Affluence (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 88

Screenshot from The Pasha Directors Daughter (Ahmad Galal, 1938). 89

. Screenshot from Seven O'Clock (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 92

. Screenshot from Seven O’Clock (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 95

. Screenshot from Seven O'Clock (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 97

. Caricature of ‘Ali al-Kassar in blackface in the journal Al-Ithnayn, 1934. 99 . Screenshot from Seven O'Clock (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 101

. Screenshot from Seven O’Clock (Togo Mizrahi, 1937). 103

Page from pressbook for A Rainy Night (Togo Mizrahi, 1939). 111

. Page from pressbook for A Rainy Night (Togo Mizrahi, 1939). 113 . Screenshot from A Rainy Night (Togo Mizrahi, 1939). us

Screenshot from A Rainy Night (Togo Mizrahi, 1939). 116

. Screenshot from The Straight Road (Togo Mizrahi, 1943). 119

. Screenshot from The Straight Road (Togo Mizrahi, 1943). 121

. Page from pressbook for Layla the Country Girl (Togo Mizrahi, 1941). 123 . Queen Farida on the cover of the journal Al-Ithnayn, 1942. 135

. Opening-week ad for Layla in the journal Al-Ithnayn, 1942. 136

. Screenshot from Layla (Togo Mizrahi, 1942). 138

Screenshot from Sallama (Togo Mizrahi, 1945). 151

. Screenshot from Sallama (Togo Mizrahi, 1945). 152

. Page from pressbook for Sallama (Togo Mizrahi, 1945). 154

. Screenshot from Hasan and Marika (Hasan al-Sayfi, 1958). 161 . Screenshot from Cinema Egypt (Rami Kimchi, 1998). 162

. Screenshot from Passion (Muhammad Malas, 2005). 164

. Screen capture of the film “Usman and ‘Ali (Togo Mizrahi, 1938)

from YouTube. 165

TABLES

1. Arabic films directed by Togo Mizrahi 170

Greek films directed by Togo Mizrahi 176

3. Films produced by Togo Mizrahi 177

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Putting words on a page is a solo act. Writing a book is not an act but a process, and it involves not one person but many people. I am very grateful for all the support and encouragement I have received from colleagues, friends, and family over the course of researching and writing this book.

I am especially grateful to those who closely read and provided comments on the entire manuscript: Walter Armbrust, Orit Bashkin, Joel Gordon, Elliot Shapiro, and an anonymous reader. Your insights have enriched this book.

I would also like to thank the many people who helped me by reading drafts, discussing ideas, parsing words, and assisting my research in a variety of ways. Thank you to Rama Alhabian, Anindita Banerjee, Nancy Berg, Ahmad al-Bindari, Henriette Bornkamm, Ross Brann, Rebecca Bryant, Andrew Campagna, Yomna Chami, Julia Chang, Ziad Fahmy, Ibrahim Gemeah, Shai Ginsburg, Sabine Haenni, Hanan Hammad, Liat Kozma, Or Pitsui, Gabriel Rosenbaum, Eyal Sagui- Bizawi, Ariel Sheetrit, Yaron Shemer, Salma Shitia, Louis Wasser, Seçil Yilmaz, and Munther Younes. Any mistakes in these pages are my own.

As I wrote this book, I found myself frequently engaging in imagined conversation with two mentors who, sadly, passed away before this book was completed. Sasson Somekh not only taught me about Arabic literature and the cultural expression of Jews from Arabic-speaking countries; he also served as a role model of mentorship. Ibrahim Hamid shared with me his love of Egyptian music, and taught me about composers, performers, poets, and the language of Arabic song.

Jacques Mizart has been incredibly generous with his time and in sharing his family archive. His stories have helped me understand who Togo Mizrahi was as a xiii

Xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS person, and not only as a public figure. I am also grateful to Maureen McManamny for speaking to her mother, Nancy Angel McManamny, on my behalf, and for sharing stories, photos, and press clippings of her grandparents Leon and Esther Angel, who graced the Egyptian screen in the 1930s as Chalom and ‘Adalat.

I am especially grateful to the librarians and archivists who have helped me along the way: Ali Houissa, Ola Seif, and Robin Dougherty. Thank you to the staff at Cornell's CTI (formerly the Academic Technology Center) and DCAPS for helping me capture screenshots.

Over the years, I have presented excerpts from this project as a work in progress. I would like to express my appreciation to organizers of some particularly generative workshops. Thank you to Moshe Behar, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, and Yoram Meital for inviting me to participate in the Symposium on Jewish Thought in Arab Societies, 1880-1960 at Ben Gurion University (2014); and to Hannan Hammad and Sami Everett for including me in the Workshop on Minorities in Popular Culture in the Modern Middle East, hosted by SOAS and the Woolf Institute (2015). I am also grateful for the feedback I received at symposia held at the Frankel Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan (2015) and at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2018).

I appreciate the support I have received from the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Jewish Studies program at Cornell University, as well as the other funding sources that supported my research and writing. I launched my research on early Egyptian cinema with a CASA II fellowship in Spring 2009. “Arab Lotfi, Muhammad al-Rubi, and Abeer Heidar taught me an enormous amount about Egyptian cinema history and criticism, and the language of cinema. I am also grateful for the support of the Cornell Diversity Fellowship Seminar in 2013-14, and for the insightful comments of my fellow participants. My research was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 2015. I spent spring 2016 as a fellow of the Mandel School for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I was a recipient of the Cornell Society for the Humanities Monograph Writing Group stipend in 2018-19. I am grateful to the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences and the Near Eastern Studies Department for providing the funding for a book workshop in April 2019. This book was published with the generous support of the Cornell University Jewish Studies Program, the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University, the Robert and Meryl Selig Endowment Fund in Film Studies of the University of California Press Foundation, and the TOME Initiative.

Thank you to David Myers and Todd Presner for selecting this book to launch the Jewish Histories and Cultures series. Thank you to Eric Schmidt, Austin Lim, and Francisco Reinking at University of California Press for their guidance through the publishing process, and to Carl Walesa for his attentive copy editing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV

I am grateful every day for the love and support of my family. Thank you to my parents for always believing in me. Elliot, this book could not have happened without you. You are my best friend. You are also my audience and my interlocutor. You listen to my ideas and you provide invaluable comments. You have also made it possible for me to devote the long hours it has taken to research and write this book. Hannah and Dina, thank you for your love, good humor, and patience. Elliot, Hannah, and Dina, this book is for you.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

I have opted for readability over full transliteration of Arabic. I have adopted a simplified version of the IJMES transliteration system. I use the ‘ayin (‘) and the hamza (’), but I have omitted other diacritical marks. I rely on spellings in the Oxford English Dictionary for words that have entered the English language, such as tarboosh and galabiya.

Proper names present a particular challenge. When referring to individuals whose names were not originally Arabic, I have favored the foreign spelling rather than transliterating from Arabic. For public figures, like Gamal Abdel Nasser, I have adopted the accepted English spellings. For individuals involved in the Egyptian cinema industry, I render Arabic names as they are pronounced in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. Film dialogue is transliterated according to Egyptian colloquial pronunciation, and published work is transliterated from Modern Standard Arabic. I maintain a consistent orthography for names throughout; I do this even in citing written work published in Arabic; for example, I always use Togo Mizrahi rather than Tuju Mizrahi. All translations, including the English-language titles for Arabic-language films, are my own, except where noted.

Upon first mention in a chapter, I identify films by both their Arabic title and the title translated into English. On subsequent reference, I refer to films exclusively by their title in English.

Some of my discussion of the notion of Levantine cinema (chaps. 1 and 3) first appeared in my essay “Masquerade and the Performance of National Imaginaries: Levantine Ethics, Aesthetics, and Identities in Egyptian Cinema,” Journal of Levantine Studies 1, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 31-57. Part of chapter 3 was originally published xvii xviii NOTES ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION as “Chalom and ‘Abdu Get Married: Jewishness and Egyptianness in the Films of Togo Mizrahi? Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 209-30.' Chapter 4 was originally published as “In Bed Together: Coexistence in Togo Mizrahi’s Alexandria Films; in Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict, ed. Rebecca Bryant (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 129-56.

PREVIEW

We hear a band strike up festive music. We see street vendors selling their wares from carts lining a city street. A man and boy, holding hands, walk past the vendors. As they recede into a distant crowd, a pair of young men, both in Western suits and tarbooshes, stroll into and out of the frame. Two riders—one in a dark galabiya and tarboosh, the other in a light galabiya and turban—swing a gondola high into the air, cutting an arc across the screen. Young children circle by, riding on a carousel. Men push a manually operated fun wheel, as car after car filled with children rise and disappear out of the frame. A vendor tips a large, ornate brass carafe, and a translucent liquid pours out of the long spout in a wide curve, filling a glass. In a park, girls in light-colored dresses play chase. A pair of men in overcoats and tarbooshes walk along a path, followed by a group of boys who pause to peer at the camera (fig. 1). In the background, to the left, a woman in black wearing a face veil also looks in the direction of the camera. Behind them to the right, a man in a white galabiya and turban sits on the grass, deep in conversation. At the beach, a family walks along the shore—the distinctive seaside cabins and corniche of Alexandria visible to the right of the frame. People clustered in small groups picnic on the sand. The skirt hems of women dressed in the latest European fashion flap in the sea breeze along with the awnings of beach umbrellas.

This kinetic, carnivalesque montage appears in a 1937 Egyptian feature film, Al-‘Tzz bahdala (Mistreated by Affluence).' A title screen identifies the celebration as “Shamm al-nasim, ‘id al-sha‘b”—that is, “Shamm al-nasim, the people’s feast.” Shamm al-nasim (“Smelling the Breeze”)—is a spring festival that shares some characteristics with other seasonal celebrations in the region, like Nowruz. Shamm al-nasim is also a uniquely Egyptian festival, with roots in ancient Egyptian practices. Egyptians take to the streets, parks, beaches, and green spaces.

FIGURE 1. Alexandria residents relaxing in a park. Screenshot from Mistreated by Affluence (Togo Mizrahi, 1937).

The footage shows what appear to be Alexandria residents engaging in leisure activities in identifiable locales. None of the credited actors appear in the montage. Children display curiosity about the camera. The viewer is invited to read these images as authentic—even as we recognize the constructedness of the montage. Social codes of dress give the viewer cues to categorizing the individuals included in the footage. Members of the rising middle class—the effendiyya—are shown seeking entertainment and diversion alongside members of the popular classes. This carefully edited montage constructs a festival day in which Alexandrians across the socioeconomic spectrum celebrate in public spaces together.

While the celebration of Shamm al-nasim is pegged to the Coptic calendar, falling on the day after Easter, in modern times it has historically been celebrated by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Egyptians alike. The narrative scenes that bracket the montage highlight this intercommunal aspect of the festival. In the scene preceding the montage, two families—one Muslim and one Jewish—prepare together for the next day’s feast. As the two mothers and their adult daughters package up the traditional Egyptian dishes they prepared for the picnic, the daughters’ fiancés deliver their contribution: fisikh, salted fish consumed on the holiday. In the scene that follows the montage, the two families picnic on the beach—literally breaking bread together. Read in tandem, the montage and the narrative scenes portray Shamm al-nasim as a universal practice of all Egyptians regardless of class or religion.

Mistreated by Affluence was written, directed, and produced by Togo Mizrahi, a Jewish native of Alexandria, and it stars a Jewish actor who performed under the screen name Chalom. Shamm al-nasim holds great appeal for Mizrahi; scenes from the festival feature prominently in three of his films, including Mistreated by Affluence.’ The holiday is both distinctly Egyptian, and universally celebrated in Egypt. The communal celebration of the festival enacts a pluralist vision of the Egyptian polity that Mizrahi projects in his films.

Another scene in Mistreated by Affluence also explores the intersection between coexistence and class. The protagonists—Chalom, a Jew; and ‘Abdu, a Muslim— start out impoverished and rapidly climb the socioeconomic ladder together, only to return to their modest circumstances after a fall. At the start of the film ‘Abdu is employed as a butcher's assistant, and Chalom is an itinerant lottery-ticket seller. When the butcher dies, ‘Abdu unexpectedly inherits the shop. With this windfall, ‘Abdu rents the empty storefront next door for his friend. Chalom hangs a bilingual sign (Arabic and French) on his new shop. In Arabic, the sign reads “Chalom, for the sale and redemption of lottery tickets.” During the course of the film, the arabophone Chalom demonstrates at least a passing knowledge of Italian and Greek, but he does not speak French. So, when writing his sign, Chalom adopts an accessible model—the common signs for currency exchange in the port city. In contrast to the idiomatic French that appears alongside Arabic in the credits and intertitles of the film, the broken French in Chalom’s handwritten scrawl is diffcult to decipher, reading as either “Chalom Agen dechangc or “Chalom, Agen de Change”—Chalom, agent of exchange.*

Like many of Mizrahi’s other popular comedies and musical melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, Mistreated by Affluence features a convoluted plot of masquerade, role-play, and mistaken identity. In the film, Chalom exchanges identities as well as lottery tickets. As an “agent of exchange,’ Chalom acts in ways that also set into motion the changes other characters undergo in the film. Plotted in this way, the film’s coexistence narrative serves to expose the nation’s “masquerade of unity:” The notion of exchange—from cultural exchange to exchange of identities—is a key element in Mizrahi’s films. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema teases out the relationship between the notion of exchange and pluralist nationalism in Mizrahi’s oeuvre.

The storefront also is the site of an assertion of identity. In an earlier scene in Mistreated by Affluence, the camera pans by the vacant storefront next to the butcher shop where ‘Abdu is employed. Posters advertising Mizrahi’s 1933 film, Awlad Misr (Children of Egypt) plaster the closed grate of the empty shop." In the context of the coexistence narrative, the inclusion of the ad functions as a willful assertion of identity. The signs read “Togo Mizrahi presents Children of Egypt”— but the word “presents” is written in such small letters in both Arabic and French that it is barely visible. So, in the brief moment when the sign is visible, what catches the eye is “Togo Mizrahi” and “Children of Egypt.” Mizrahi, the Jewish director, wishes to identify himself, along with the Jewish character, Chalom—whose sign