A Man in Our House

Henri Barakat was born in 1914 in Shubra, the popular Coptic Christian- dominated area of north Cairo. He loved going to the cinema and theatre as well as reading classical 19th-century novels during his law studies at King Fuad I University in Cairo. He graduated in 1935. Barakat always paid fierce attention to details. In 1935, by pointing out many technical errors, the young graduate made himself unpopular with the crew and star cast in his first job, assisting his older brother as he edited the film Antar Effendi; it was a fiasco both at the box office and with critics. The experience induced him to go to Paris to study cinema.

Here he learnt his trade by attending the shooting of many French films and going to the cinema – sometimes four times a day – in order to write a critical study of what he saw. He returned to Cairo when the Second World War broke out, and soon started on his first film, Ashareed (“The Vagabond”, 1942), based on a story by Chekhov. It was a box-office success. His next two films were screened in the same year – and alongside “The Vagabond” – in Cairo and Alexandria. (Eight times again in his career did this happen: the years 1952 and 1954 each saw the production of five of his films.)

Barakat kept a close eye on the box office, as he believed that the audience are always right. In one of his rare interviews, however, after receiving the prestigious Egyptian State Award for Arts in 1996, he admitted his disappointment in the decline both of audience taste and of standard of films. Like many critics he pointed the finger at the large video market in the oil-rich Gulf which encouraged directors to produce low-standard films in record time – and to subject themselves to censorship – in order to enter that market; the larger than usual output of films of Henri Barakat, however, maintained a high professional standard.

Barakat argued that the surplus income from his popular films enabled him to introduce new young talent – something the film financiers dislike – and to make films with a serious social message like Al- Harram (“The Sin”), based on the novel by Youssef Idris, which was well received in Cannes in 1963; or his last film, Mwatin Tahtal Tahquik (“A Citizen under Investigation”, 1993), seen as a protest against the violation of civil rights.

In the last half of his career, Barakat was dubbed Sheikh el-Mukhergine (“The Patriarch of Film-makers”), “The Nightingale of Egyptian Cinema”, “the Father of Romantic Cinema”, “The Poet of the Silver Screen”. An Egyptian journalist called him “The Master of Poetic Realism”. He excelled in screen adaptations of novels by Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Dumas, and was the winner of several awards – three from the Catholic Film Institute in 1958, 1959 and 1961, and others from the New Delhi and Berlin film Festivals.

Because of his “poetic realism”, Barakat’s films had a strong influence not only on film-makers in Arab countries, but also on the social trends, fashion and life-style of hundreds of thousands of middle-class Arabs. —The Independent