Permutations: an introduction

Let’s step back and begin looking at these films by looking at the film program that brings them together, “Fire Walk With Her”. Skip the title, because to parse it (apparently, a no-brainer) means to parse the part of the original title that inspires it, Fire Walk With Me, a task which, along with parsing the, well, Lynchian film itself, and thus also, inseparably, the original TV series, has kept a cult following busy for (soon to be) 3 decades. Don’t jump into studying or inspecting the films themselves. Again, skip the titles, ignore the credits, the durations, the genres and all the info. By “looking at” I simply meant something as basic as counting; just see how many films these are. Simple as that. But not that simple. Watching the 7 films in this program in the specific order of the event schedule (the opening film, The Girls Who Burned the Night, then Adam, How My Grandmother Became A Chair, J’ai le cafard, Certified Mail, Al-Sit, and Lift Like A Girl), is, you guessed it, only one way, one possible arrangement, among many. But exactly how many? Before you get too excited and start finger-counting the possibilities, or more judiciously reach for a calculator, consider (manually) some of the other ways you could have chosen to watch them:

Lift Like A Girl-Certified Mail-Adam-The Girls Who Burned the Night-Al-Sit-J’ai le cafard-How My Grandmother Became A Chair

Lift Like A Girl-Certified Mail-Adam-The Girls Who Burned the Night-Al-Sit-How My Grandmother Became A Chair-J’ai le cafard

Lift Like A Girl-Certified Mail-Adam-The Girls Who Burned the Night-J’ai le cafard-Al-Sit-How My Grandmother Became A Chair

Lift Like A Girl-Certified Mail-Adam-The Girls Who Burned the Night-How My Grandmother Became A Chair-Al-Sit-J’ai le cafard

Lift Like A Girl-Certified Mail-Adam-The Girls Who Burned the Night-J’ai le cafard-How My Grandmother Became A Chair-Al-Sit… 

These 5 scenarios are among 720 scenarios (yes, you read that correctly) where Lift Like A Girl is the opening film, the same number of scenarios there are for schedules that open with The Girls Who Burned the Night, or that open with any of the other 5 titles for that matter. Multiply 720 by 7 and you’re all set. Or alternatively, in a more straightforward manner, multiply 7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1. Or, more conveniently, just compute (google) “7!”. Yes, these are the 5040 ways of watching these 7 films, such a small number of films. Beware though—we’re not considering scenarios where one or more of these films are skipped or missed (a bummer film programmers can only live with; it can’t be helped—ideally, every single member of the audience will committedly go and watch every single film in the program), or watched twice in a row, etc. As for the other ways of watching these 7 films, where people’s different experiences, moods, tastes, interpretations and other reception elements, should be factored in, these are, you guessed it again, incalculable.

Here’s the thing then: the curator(s) of this program opted for this specific order ruling out a whopping 5039 options. Why? Is there a logic to it? Does it mean anything? The curatorial statement gives us a clear yes:

[T]he program will open in October… [with] the UAE premiere of the Saudi rising star Sara Mesfer's short narrative The Girls Who Burned The Night (Saudi Arabia), Nicholas Fattouh's animated loving letter to his teta How My Grandmother Became a Chair (Lebanon) and Maryam Touzani's Adam (Morocco) her piercing ode to female friendship. In November, despair takes to fantasy with the imagined refuge of Maysaa Almumin's Bent Werdan (Kuwait) and her cockroach friendship and the dark nights of Hala's soul in Hisham Saqr's Certified Mail (Egypt). In December, she will shake it off and destiny's plans along with it. The program closes in December; but only on her terms. In Suzannah Mirghani's Al Sit (Sudan) the girl will say no; while another will demand only a yes as Mayye Zayed's observing gaze honors her pursuit of triumph.

By merely showing the films in this exact order (over a certain span of time), the curators are telling a story. It doesn’t seem to be a random choice. (I hear you, skeptics, but at least they ended up with a proposed schedule and then saw meaning in it, or gave it that meaning. Can we at least give them that?) Thus, we might wonder: does/can every single order of these thousands of sequences tell a different story? We’re on to something here. Having already watched one of these films on Netflix, then the rest from screeners, I wondered if my own reception was necessarily partly influenced by my own viewing chronology. This was followed by a question that I’m now going to ask you: From most to least realistic, how do you order the 7 films of “Fire Walk With Her”? The following is my own answer. There is no right answer. Actually, many of those 5040 options can be possible answers. The reason has to do with the very concepts of reality and realism.

Realities, realisms 

“There is nothing more real,” Confucius tells us “than what cannot be seen, and there is nothing more certain than what cannot be heard.” Numbers cannot be seen or heard. Numbers Don't Lie, screams the title of a recent book by a famous scientist. Yet we continue to find them crazy. Had this been a 3-film program, there would be only 6 possible ways to arrange them. A mere four more films take things to counterintuitive, exponential results that most of us, those with minds untrained in this kind of magic, would not see coming. King Shirham of India gave his kingdom (and much more), unwittingly, either because he was unrealistic or because he was too realistic, i.e. lacked the numerical imagination. In a Gradgrindian world, reality is nothing more than the aggregate sum of “facts alone” and “nothing but facts”, and Gradgrind himself ceases to make sense, is not as soulless as we think he is judging from our own world(s), but just meaningless.

Much ink has been spilled on what realism is or what it does and what might or might not come across as realistic in the arts (to sound as realistic as possible myself, I should add, “much airtime and many megabytes have been wasted”). But in Alif’s 1995 issue dedicated to “Arab Cinematics”, Tewfik Saleh (a pioneer of realism in Arab cinema, as many sources will introduce him) says bluntly: “I dislike the word ‘realism’... I just don’t find it palatable.” Remarkably, Saleh’s contribution to the thematic issue is mainly about "reception" of Arab films by Arab audiences. To each their reality, Saleh might well have said; to each their realism. Fast forward to 2020: In an episode soberly titled “Signified and signifier” from the economics podcast Invisible Hand, it bugs economist Mohamed Soltan that there is no Arabic word for “realities” in plural form. In fact, there is. But he still has a point. We Arabic speakers never use the plural form, and thus the word - the whole idea - disappears. It’s as good as nonexistent. In English, while “reality” in singular form would evoke psychological and philosophical lines of thought, in its plural form, “realities” has an unmistakably socioeconomic ring to it. However, it seems that “multiple realities”, as some sociologists and modern philosophers tried to establish the concept, is what Soltan is missing; a multiplicity of “finite provinces of meaning” as one of them put it. So far, to speak of multiple realities will generally suggest someone needs therapy or is contemplating science-fictional what-ifs. The more we talk about realities in that sense instead of (a) reality, the more the realities accounted for by economic indicators and motion pictures, the more accurate, honest and just the “inventory” that “started in 1839” (Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”), the more real it gets.

The 7 films discussed below ostensibly come from 6 Arab countries enumerated in the curatorial statement, but purporting to be set only in 5, including this writer’s country of origin and residence, and thus to show their specific national realities. Four of them are shorts, a film genre or format more compatible with experimenting than longer formats due to production reasons; one of them is a highly imaginative animation; another is a documentary, a genre or a filmmaking mode normally associated with stronger claims to, and expectations of, truth and representing reality, than the narrative (aka fictional) films.

Patriarchy without patriarchs

The documentary, Lift Like A Girl (2021), is true to a twofold historical fact: from the outset, Egypt’s top medal-winning sport at the Olympics has been weightlifting, followed by wrestling; in addition to boxing, these together are the historical stronghold of its lower classes, working class or urban proletariat (depending on how one groups the people whose reality(ies) any of these words somehow describes). It should be striking that such a story of domination (albeit a reverse class domination) that figures in a few narrative features - most prominently in two “boxing films”, to use Cate Blanchett’s classification, from 1984 and 1990, both starring Ahmed Zaki - had to wait so long to figure in a documentary feature. Miraculously released at what has been described as a shameful moment for Egyptian weightlifting, Mayye Zayed’s rare film about a not-so-obscure reality picks up the history from the moment Egyptian women triumphantly entered the scene in 2003, having since then changed this reality in its gender dimension. While other sports realities are amplified on Netflix (now featuring HBO’s 2019 Diego Maradona by Asif Kapadia, of Amy fame), Asmaa Ramadan’s coming-of-age-in-real-time story as told by Zayed heroically gives a foothold for a larger story that’s still marginalized on so many levels. Lift Like A Girl is equally the unvarnished portrait of coach and retired athlete Ramadan Abdel-Moati (aka ​​Ramadan Mohamed El-Sayed), and if one or two strokes of brilliance in the Arabic title get lost in translation so that the feminist overtones can survive (but in turn losing all their original subtleness in the process), fortunately we still have the film itself where “Captain” of the Arabic title can be either captain Asmaa or Captain Ramadan. The nice gender neutrality of the Arabic title is not a mere embellishment but eloquently distills a major theme in the film (to say nothing of its other virtues, namely the hint to life, death and immortality). 

Captain Ramadan is one of my most favorite characters in all the documentaries I’ve ever seen, and not just because he’s quite a character—which he is. You almost forget his disability (and his smoking habit and his denture) as he moves constantly doing all kinds of things these able-bodied girls need, which when it comes to keeping bullies away includes throwing stones and spewing out swear words, but not the tirades and finely crafted obscenities that he saves for the girls whenever one of them screws up, or seamlessly fuses within his improvised motivational speeches, or the stories he spins when he’s in a good mood and everyone is kind of chilled. He's every bit the father figure you’d expect him to be as he’s a mother. Class-wise he never tries to fit in the pool of middle-class conservatism that provides the presentable TV-worthy guys, the referees, the men in suit and tie in their reviewing-stand-like seating, or the tracksuit-donning man who takes him away by the arm, grinning, after coach Ramadan got too close shouting his signature outdated baladi cheerleading from a toothless mouth (the English subtitling’s insistence on following him closely is admirable). Social history-wise, he strikes us as a living anachronism, coming all the way from a bygone Egypt with an obsolete culture and unapologetic shaabi attitudes. But what’s even more astonishing is his gender values, beliefs and behaviours, shared and acted out by the teenage girls and young women around him, especially when you remember this (or this brave film) is taking place in an increasingly family-friendly media environment or more generally in a country whose ideological apparatus is increasingly geared towards so-called “Egyptian family values”, acts and expressions against which are quickly criminalized and penalized. These young ladies from the “hood” (some of them wearing hijab on-and-off) sit on the coach’s lap to take selfies, they all take group hugs, and you never sense the kind of physical uneasiness so common in the contemporary world seeping in. Under Ramadan’s gender equality men can make great belly dancers while women can make great weightlifters without any trouble. But this spirit doesn’t survive unadulterated when the girls are eventually addressed as boys, having been expected from start to finish even by one another to “man up.”

Cut to Hala. She isn’t a “good mother”, is she? In Certified Mail (2019) it is the woman living upstairs who sows our first seeds of doubt, and later implores her rather bluntly to be a better wife and stand by her husband. Yet, at least on the surface, they are good friends and neighbors who care for each other and there’s a sort of unwritten mutual aid agreement between them, which Hala at one point is accused of having breached. Is she that bad and self-centered? Or does she fully deserve our sympathies as the woman whose face speaks volumes about anxiety and great exhaustion, the mentally struggling daughter in grief for her father, the emotionally drained older sister, the mother with postnatal depression feeling disconnected from her own baby girl, and the wife who’s been inviting her husband to sex, or accepting his invitations, only on rare occasions? Could it be both? Does she need to recognize the suffering of the other women (and men) and try to do something about it, shaking off her sorrows or at least burying them in theirs? Certified Mail is an early sign in Egyptian cinema of what might eventually prove to be a shift in how Arabic culture deals with motherhood. Iman Mersal’s forceful book of personal essays How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts can serve as the opening chapter in such a cultural shift.

The messiness of gender struggle is taken to unsettling levels in Adam (2019). If the Egyptian social drama is mainly about a growing amount of mostly mute friction between women, while men are kind, understanding, dutiful and harmless or even meek, the Moroccan one brings women’s oppression to the fore in a manner that incessantly begs the question of who’s oppressing whom. Women at the bakehouse are slutshaming a preganant Samia after the male baker offers her a chair. We never see or know about the man who presumably “knocked her up” and don’t even know what happened. Viewers will be reminded of Sofia (2018, Meryem Benm'Barek-Aloïsi), another film set in Morocco which also problematizes women’s narratives and the gender conflict revolving around an illegitimate pregnancy, adding to it the class dimension. 

The timid presence of men reaches near-absence in the most realistic of the shorts in this program, The Girls Who Burned the Night (2020), aptly so, one might think, since this is Saudi Arabia. The Arabian desert outside is forbidden to the two cloistered girls in a way that could partly explain why this region has historically produced so few well-known poetesses compared to an impressive number of machoes whose poetry is full of nocturnal adventures. Blanks, silences and minimalism allow for so much complex tension to be expressed in this charged one-day single-location domestic drama that intensifies the sisterly she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not situation playing out in the aforementioned films. Sara Mesfer’s “female gaze” and aesthetics of space and distance go hand in hand with an ethics and a politics: we’re not allowed to go anywhere close enough to even glimpse the scars and burns the singer’s passion cost her at the hands of her brother, a painful reminder that singing or even listening to love songs is a right Arab women have fought for and still fight for and die for as in the music and femicide story of Mohamed Malas’s 2005 Bab al-Maqam (Passion).

The almost never straightforward nature of women’s struggle is something all the films in this program don’t take for granted. This focused curation naturally leads us to think that this program is about patriarchy as an impersonal force, an experiment in looking deeper in a manner that is not possible when we’re distracted by vulgar masculinism and typical all-too-familiar sexist men in male-centered universes, a method akin to “isolating a variable” in scientific method. The next short film makes this curatorial approach even clearer. 

“Matriarchy,” writes Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex, “is a stage on the way to patriarchy, to man’s fullest realization of himself; he goes from worshipping Nature through women to conquering it.” Al-Sit (2020, Arabic for The Woman, The Lady, The Mistress) is this worshipped female Nature. She’s identified with the Land, the Soil, the raw cotton that in turn symbolizes her formerly colonized country. And yet, the “misery of the goddess [that] has been portrayed admirably in Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi” as Firestone notes, is also her, and her granddaughter’s, misery, in Suzannah Mirghani’s Sudanese equivalent of the Indian modern-day mythology. Although the historical matriarchy discussed and critiqued by Firestone is not the non-matrilineal form depicted in Al-Sit and practiced by the title’s head of the household - because the film’s allegorical structure, dreamlike mood and theatrical performance still keep its essential realism intact - what’s at stake is the same: “Though it’s true that woman’s lot worsened considerably under patriarchy, she never had it good; for despite all the nostalgia it is not hard to prove that matriarchy was never an answer to women’s fundamental oppression.”

Chimeras

In the two least realistic films, fabulism and mythology are the two laws that inform the fiction’s contractual terms. But even the familiar settings and elements that give J’ai le cafard (2020) its mundane everyday framework within which the unreal wreaks havoc, Maysaa Almumin (read the interview) carefully and ​​almost unnoticeably distorts with what can be described as intentional errors, those kinds of things that would normally be called “goofs” had they been unintentional. One result is that she conflates what can be understood to be Cairo with other unnamed Arab cities. Suddenly this very familiar atmosphere turns out to be happening in a fictitious place, as if in a lucid dream, which lends the nightmarish content an added force and horror. But even more seriously, it becomes what Marc Augé calls the supermodern “non-place”, which is as Mark Fisher explains: “airports, retail parks, and chain stores which resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces in which they are located, and whose ominous proliferation is the most visible sign of the implacable spread of capitalist globalization.” ("What Is Hauntology?")

But what is this giant cockroach that doesn’t quite behave like one? The Woman’s visual hallucinations or her “black dog”? Repressed desires? Her alibi for existence? This time, in the absence of a metamorphosed salesman we have no clue as to what or who else is involved in the transformation or chimerical formation. What would have changed if The Woman was The Man?

Although the title’s transformation in How My Grandmother Became A Chair (2020) obviously involves said person and object, neither objectification nor reification is the mot juste. It’s easily decipherable as a metaphor for old age. The more intriguing transformation in this dark and quirky family drama involves an inexplicable two-way metamorphosis ending with a transfiguration of the dying grandmother’s cat/cat-woman/caretaker (back) into a human being, while her own offspring turn into werewolves or she-wolves (“she or he”?).

Almumin’s and ​​Nicolas Fattouh’s films are two of the latest additions to a growing list of visual, audiovisual and literary works from the Arab world that over the last decade have featured such chimerical or metamorphic themes, of which Maha Maamoun’s Dear Animal (2016) and Omar El Zohairy’s Feathers (2021) are only two examples. To try and understand this phenomenon we’ll need to look at an increasing interest in animals at least in the Egyptian media and an unprecedented increase in pet adoption that writer and psychologist Shady Lewis says is open to interpretation as telling of a misanthropic trend or an extension of a new humanistic politics to include animal rights.

“Batwannes beek”

To call an animal, a cat or even a cockroach - or anything or anyone who keeps you company - family, is one of the different meanings of fire in this film program. It’s not only feminine anger. It’s also the warmth of company around a firelight and the security and guidance of torches for a caravan of travellers through the dark. Fire that must be redefined and rediscovered though. Family that must be reinvented. It can be found in correspondence or even anonymous letters.  

There is a moving scene in Jacques Demy’s 1961 debut feature Lola, in which Madame Desnoyers shows Roland Cassard out and says: “We’ll be lonely without you.” She and her teenage daughter have barely made the young man’s acquaintance. This scene is wordlessly echoed in the closing scene in Adam. Just why does she have to go?