These are gloomy days when we have to live and witness a fierce attack against one of the most dynamic of arts, the seventh art, cinema.
These are gloomy days when we have to live and witness a fierce attack against one of the most dynamic of arts, the seventh art, cinema.
When Egypt’s top comedian Adel Imam is sentenced to prison on the pretext that his monumental works deride Islam, one has to pause to think just how far have we come since the Revolution last year; who’s afraid of Imam, and why.
The Islamist fears of Imam’s works brought to mind childhood memories of cowardly children being branded as “afraid of their own shadows”. This popular idiom applies to today’s fundamentalists who appear scared of khayal al-dhil, literally phantom shadow and, ironically, the name given in Arabic to the kinetoscope, the precursor of motion pictures.
Blurred line between reality and fiction
Paradoxically, the hardliners are attempting to censor a succession of images on a silver screen because they are apparently too dimwitted to see the difference between the real and the fictional. How can Adel Imam be indicted on the charge of personifying characters who do not exist in real life? Should he be accountable for playing the role of the officer-turned-addict in his film al-Nimr wal-Untha (the Tiger and the Female) or for playing the role of the killer terrorist in al-Irhabi (The Terrorist)? Should he appear in court next to Mubarak for playing the role of a dictator or should we sentence him to death on the charge of slaying a businessman in his film al-Ghoul (The Ghoul)? In this case we would be sentencing the real-life actor for crimes committed by the fictional characters he played in a fictional environment.
Similarly, if we start to chase these pictures drawn by the imagination of writers, personified by actors and led by directors, we should exhume all the corpses of the deceased great actors, headed by Mahmoud Mursi who played the roles of infidels in films such as Fagr al-Islam (Dawn of Islam), al-Shaymaa, Higrat al-Rasul (The Prophet’s Hijra) as punishment for the evil characters they played?
Unmasking the weekness
The question remains: why do the followers of these fundamentalist ideas freak out at the game of khayal al dhil, in this case motion pictures?
The answer requires a bit of psychoanalysis. Basically, people who are afraid of their own shadow are the ones who are dominated by extreme fear over their own selves and tend to venerate them. Because they consider themselves beacon of light, shadows annoy them since they expose that there is in them, after all, dark substance. The shadow practically unmasks the weaknesses and areas of conflict they had worked so hard to deny; the mask of sanctity falls off.
A shadow is usually a magnified reflection of the real object; hence, the impact of the image on the big screen is larger and stronger. Because a minor scene of no more than a few minutes on the silver screen can disclose the true characters of fundamentalists, it shakes them deeply; they run to the courts of law to demand that these fictional characters be imprisoned.
The sentences against actors are causing quite a stir as they are issued against real people, while the ones who should have been charged are fictional characters who cannot be handcuffed.
WATANI International
6 May 2012