Shadi Abd al-Salam’s al-Mumiya: Ambivalence and the egyptian nation-state

Abstract

When asked to pronounce judgment, Egyptian critics consistently list Shadi Abd al-Salam’s Yawm an tuhsa al-sinin: al-Mumiya (The Day of Reckoning Years: The Mummy) as one of the most important films, if not the most important film, of Egyptian cinema. Given the film’s striking visual style and its impressive production technique, it is not hard to see how this would be so. Yet there is a real dissonance between critical discourse that places the film at the heart of Egyptian cinema and the fact that as a text, its presence in and influence on the Egyptian cinematic canon is relatively negligible. Al-Mumiya is a film that, although produced in 1969 within the public sector studio system of the Nasserist state, had no public distribution until roughly six years later. When at last al-Mumiya was commercially released in late January 1975-an unlucky week, as the Arab world was awaiting the news of Umm Kulthum’s impending death-it failed to draw audiences and was quickly pulled from circulation. In other venues such as television or video, al-Mumiya might have enjoyed a life in Egypt that extended beyond its brief theatrical release. But that does not seem to have been the case. Likewise, as much as Egyptian filmmakers reverently invoke the name of Shadi Abd al-Salam in interviews, they have not been so apt to apply elements of his cinematic style that appear in the film. In short, for all the talk about the centrality of al-Mumiya within the Egyptian national cinematic canon, the actual film enjoyed only a brief moment of commercial release in Egypt, no lasting public venues there, nor much visible influence on subsequent schools of Egyptian film.