Manifesto of New Cinema in Egypt: New Cinema Group, Egypt, 1968

During October 1966's General Conference of Filmmakers, and similarly at the Filmmakers' Conference that took place a few weeks ago, we young filmmakers noticed that the solutions being proposed spun around the same closed circuit that has constrained Egyptian cinema for more than twenty years. At the same time, we felt our voices getting lost among many others that lacked a grounding in objective discussion and the spirit of scientific inquiry. Responding to guidance given by the Minister of Culture when he met with the young filmmakers, we decided to convene a gathering involving all young people working in cinema: directors, cinematographers, set designers, editors, screenwriters, sound engineers, and production managers. We also extended the invitation to young critics and cinema intellectuals. Committees were formed around shared skills, one each for directing, screenwriting, cinematography, editing, set design, and sound, and attendees were asked to vote on whether to set up a coordination and writing committee. We determined that it would be necessary to produce a comprehensive amalgamated report laying out all the young filmmakers' demands along with the workable solutions that could arise from their experience and culture.

We also recognized that, in order for the report to be thorough and precise, it should be divided into four sections:

• • Section One: Our definition of cinema. We derive this first by exposing the backwardness of conventional filmmakers' understandings of cinema. Then, second, by rectifying perspectives on it in response to standards accomplished by European cinema in countries that, despite having come to film only recently, have attained phenomenal success at international festivals.

• • Section Two: The organizational structure we must implement if Egyptian cinema is to traverse the chasm necessary for catching up with the rest of the world.

• • Section Three: A plan to practically solve problems related to production, distribution, and exhibition, drawing on our own reality as well as expertise gleaned from countries that have preceded us in addressing such circumstances.

• • Section Four: We specifically demand a healthy social climate that must be created through film culture.

Our Understanding of Cinema

We believe that the crisis in the public sector has arisen, first and foremost, because a specific conception of cinema, one that now lags behind on all fronts, predominates. Our own audience ridicules it and any foreign country where our films are screened acknowledges their backwardness. This is the reason for the decline in audiences for Egyptian cinema and a turn, conversely, toward foreign fare. In point of fact, our audiences are responsible for the success of excellent films by Antonioni, Lelouch, and Cacoyannis, for Blow Up, A Man and a Woman, Live for Life, and Zorba the Greek, which played here for months. Notwithstanding, conservative filmmakers insist on addressing the same topics to which Egyptian cinema has cleaved for twenty years, the unvarying artistic forms that have now become outdated, even laughable. The audience has proven the falsity of the myth oft repeated by conventional filmmakers who claim it is impossible to develop unfamiliar artistic forms and novel methods, or introduce new actors, directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers, for fear of losing the audience through such experiments.

Clearly, they are propagating a fiction that does not correspond to reality. Not satisfied with confining Egyptian cinema to this outmoded framework, they have committed a fatal error for our national economy by also insisting on high production spending for Egyptian film, even though distribution figures for these types of movie barely cover half the allocated budget. This means that they know in advance that films they make yield no profits and sustain distinct losses.

In our opinion, the entire problem lies in the conventional filmmakers' notion of cinema. It is a model that trails behind in the following ways:

On the Intellectual Level

The conventional filmmakers' origins account for their understanding of cinema. Most of them did not enter the profession to express particular ideas or implement specific artistic styles. They have no grasp of this. Consequently, the entire history of Egyptian cinema has not brought forth a single thinker that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Eisenstein, Rossellini, Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, or...