In all of Egyptian cinema, few movies have been made like Al Momia (1969) (also known as The Mummy and also known as The Night of the Counting Years), whether before or after. Shadi Abdel Salam’s epic about an Upper Egyptian clan who makes their living looting a Pharaonic tomb in a mountain they control remains the guiding post for many an Egyptian filmmaker in terms of what is possible within the industry. But the initial commercial failure of the film continues to raise questions over its role in the history of Egyptian film, particularly as little to no imitators followed in its wake: was The Mummy a landmark of mid-century Egyptian filmmaking, or was it a one-off endeavor the likes of which we may never see again?
Youssef Rakha’s mesmerizing book Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy, takes on the gargantuan task of attempting to place The Mummy within both a historical and personal context; weaving the political and cinematic history that birthed the film with the author’s own tenuous relationship with it. Rakha’s account is that rare blend of criticism, memoir, and theory that is as academically poignant as it is emotionally revelatory. In a way, the overwhelming density of the film demands such a hybrid approach. You can’t discuss its plot without bringing up the historical events on which it is based. You can’t really discuss the time in which the film was made without unpacking the significance of Egypt’s defeat in the devastating Six Day War, or Naksa, and the collective trauma it engendered. Most of all, you cannot hope to grasp The Mummy’s role in the history of Egyptian cinema without discussing the film’s ambiguous relationship with the mainstream.
In terms of its legacy, The Mummy is important less for its direct influence and more for its self-sustaining legend. This is one of the reasons why the film remains so viscerally striking today—there simply hasn’t been anything quite like it in Egyptian cinema since, or at least nothing that has come close to its stature and fame. Abdel-Aziz Fahmy’s achingly gorgeous cinematography alone is virtually unparalleled. Shot in academy ratio, a rare choice for an Egyptian film of its time, The Mummy captures the claustrophobic tunnels of the mountain and the open landscapes of Upper Egypt with equally haunting grace. As for the tombs, there’s a tangible sense of both dread and awe as the camera approaches them. Just like Wannis, the protagonist, we get the sense that we are stumbling upon something monumental and unfathomable; a cosmically significant point of no return.
Rakha’s refreshing exploration of the film is anchored in those two terms that make up his title: barra and zaman. If translated neutrally, each seems to denote a simple phrase, respectively “outside” and “long ago.” But in the context of the nation, the usage of both in modern Egyptian Arabic is charged with intense and melancholic feelings of longing and nostalgia; “outside” where it is presumably better, “long ago” when it was presumably better. The “it” in question can be the country, the economy, or an urban landscape. “It” doesn’t matter, a mere excuse to escape the present. As a period piece set at the dawn of Britain’s colonial occupation of Egypt, centering on the initially colonial field of Egyptology, and produced after the devastation of the Naksa, The Mummy practically demands Rakha’s framework.
As he recounts, The Mummy was neither produced through the conventional mechanisms of the Egyptian film industry, nor was it ever really intended for a mass commercial audience. Rather, the film was built from the ground-up as a kind of prestige picture meant to circulate around festivals and potentially be Egypt’s first shot at the Oscars. It might not even have been made if it wasn’t for the efforts of none other than Roberto Rossellini, who championed Abdel-Salam’s script so much that he famously went so far as to confront the Egyptian Minister of Culture at the time, demanding a reason as to why he wouldn’t initially fund the project. With the exception of a handful of filmmakers, most notably Youssef Chahine, Egyptian films had scarcely made rounds on the international festival circuit, mostly due to the industry’s prioritizing of the domestic market. This is an essential irony in the complicated legacy of The Mummy. The film was meant to enrich the international status of Egyptian cinema, but it set out to do so by catering to international exhibitors and sensibilities.
And yet to say the film was not “meant for Egyptians” would be criminally simplistic and anything but productive. It would certainly be more accurate to say that the film was never meant for a popular commercial release within Egypt, but this spiral of questioning “authenticity” is precisely the kind of rabbit hole one tumbles down when engaging with a discourse as romantically nationalistic as that of The Mummy. The film itself is trapped in a desperate cycle to legitimate itself, to look for the real and essentially “Egyptian,” that which is “untampered” by the west or modernity, or what have you.
Rakha unpacks this mess eloquently, walking the reader briskly through the early developments of Egyptology, for instance, and how the history of that field alone demonstrates the impossibility of locating an “authentic” and timeless sense of Egyptianness, untouched by colonialism and modernity. Egyptology was, after all, pioneered by colonists and professional orientalists. The film gestures towards this ironic reality through the character of Kamal (Mohamed Khairi), a young archeologist sent to Upper Egypt by none other than the famous French Egyptologist, Gaston Maspero. Due to the Huradat clan’s looting of the tomb within their mountain, uncatalogued antiquities have been showing up on the international black market, much to the chagrin of European Egyptologists like Maspero. Kamal’s mission is thus to investigate the origin of these trafficked pieces, and fate has him arrive on the same day the Huradat patriarch dies, leaving the job to his son, and our protagonist, Wannis (Ahmed Marei).
The film is driven by Wannis’ sense of abject horror at the discovery of how his clan has been sustaining itself, presumably for the last few centuries or so. He doesn’t get the job right away, though. It first falls on his brother (Ahmed Hegazi), who is swiftly murdered by his uncles when he announces that he has no intention of carrying on the family legacy. The burden passes onto Wannis, who seems more tormented by the possibility of raiding an ancient tomb than he is by the murder of his older brother. He finds his salvation in Kamal’s arrival, ostensibly redeeming his family by informing the authorities of the tomb in the mountain, what in the real world would come to be known as the Royal Cache. Heavy as it is to turn his back on his clan and their traditions, Wannis’ submission to the Cairene authorities is framed as a heroic move, the victory of the modern nation over the premodern tribe.
Underpinning the film’s moral logic is the assumption that every single Egyptian, even before the establishment of the modern Egyptian nation-state as we know it today, intrinsically knows to treat Ancient Egyptian artifacts as the property of the state. Wannis is horrified by the notion of disturbing the dead and selling their treasures for profit, yet why would sending off the dead to a museum in Cairo be any different in 1881? Without the 20th century spread of a nationalist discourse that views antiquities as the right of all Egyptian nationals (to be safeguarded by the state, of course) why would an Upper Egyptian clansman care who gets the loot of dead kings? After all, their display behind Cairene glass would have scarcely been a better deal for the people who used to be those mummies than if they were sold off to Europe. In the absence of the righteous postcolonial possessiveness of Ancient Egyptian artifacts that would arise during the British colonization of Egypt, why would an Egyptian like Wannis in the 19th century simply care?
Such is the intensity of Abdel-Salam’s projection of his own contemporary nationalist view of Egypt and Egyptian history onto the Upper Egyptian clansmen of the late 19th century. The Mummy’s view of the modern Egyptian’s relationship with the ancient is so fervently romantic that the relative infancy of the modern nation-state is taken for granted. The film is so imbued with nationalistic iconography that it is even bookended with processions of wailing Huradat women, representing a gendered distillation of the nation; first commemorating the death of the patriarch, then the exodus of the mummified pharaohs as they are carried out of the mountain, and into the steamer that will take them up the river to their new home.
For all its obsessiveness with authentic “Egyptianness,” however, The Mummy distances itself the most from the modern Egyptian viewer by its choice to have the dialogue be in formal standard Arabic instead of contemporary Egyptian dialects. The absence of colloquial speech isn’t jarring in and of itself, as the use of formal Arabic in Egyptian cinema was by no means unheard of by 1969. Audiences mostly saw it in the religious and historical epics of the 1950s and early 1960s, the most notable of which, to this day, being Youssef Chahine’s Saladin the Victorious (1963). But unlike Abdel-Salam’s relatively modern tale, the vast majority of these films were set centuries, if not an entire millennium, before they were made.
Comparable to Hollywood’s Biblical and historical epics of the same era, these kinds of films didn’t use formal Arabic because it was in any shape or form accurate for their settings. Rather, the use of the formal register was meant to denote a sense of grandeur and self-importance, to evoke an effervescent feeling of history with a capital H. Think of how American period films commonly use the Queen’s English to denote an olden time, even when the characters of said time did not actually speak English. The Mummy is different, however, because it takes place less than a hundred years before it was made. There’s a fascinating paradox at play here. The setting is at once too “ancient” to warrant the use of modern speech, yet the basic logic of the hero’s journey is incomprehensible without a fundamentally modern nationalist context. This incongruence isn’t helped by the cast’s overwhelmingly theatrical background, which gives virtually every line of dialogue an overblown pompousness, and the whole story a further layer of alienation.
At the same time, all these contradictions are precisely what necessitate a constant process of return to The Mummy. While I intimately related to Rakha’s reaction that the film just wouldn’t “grip or provoke” him the way one expects a “good” film to, I nonetheless feel like ignoring Abdel-Salam’s only feature is simply not an option. For all the messiness of its politics, one cannot help but hope that the film continues to inspire more writers like Rakha to attempt such feats of literary, critical, and personal incision.
