The city of movies… and the city of reality! – Mahmoud Abdul Shakur

When I returned to Cairo, I traveled to Upper Egypt until I finished secondary school, and one of my hypothetical dreams was to take a photo in front of the Nahdet Misr statue with the dome of the university behind it, but I was disappointed when I discovered that the dome was not exactly in front of the statue as it appeared in the movies. Cinema, they are far apart, captured by the camera through the lens! I thought of this as I read with pleasure this unique reference book, whose method, form, theme and structure are published by Dar Al Ain, in its Arabic translation as “City of Cinema … A History of the West”. “Modernity from Screen to Reality”, the book is written in English by Dr. Nizar Al-Sayyad, Distinguished Professor of Architecture, Planning and Urban History at the University of California, Berkeley, and translated by Hala Hassanein. Narrated by Dr. Nizar’s book contains something similar to my story. He was touring New York with an Indian friend and her son, who had been looking for the “Statue of Liberty” based on the location he had seen in the movies. That is, movies have become a real reference for cities and their landmarks. Nizar himself teaches his students in the United States a unique subject, which he calls “The History of Cinematic Cities”. If this amazing and monumental new book traces the impact of modernity and postmodernism on small towns in the West, as presented in famous films, the same complex and comprehensive approach is applied by Dr. Nizar and a team of Egyptian researchers who published a book last year entitled “Cairo in Cinema”, which is also one of the most famous and profound publications. The new book tells that modernity is logical, that modernity took root in the West, and that its influence has reached us. As for the concept of “city”, it is not only related to the structural space that appears on the map. , translated as streets, housing, playgrounds and parks, but it is also about humans, and their social, class and economic relations, and this interaction between people and places, cities and the ideas that create and produce them; that is, we are dealing with a concept that is closer to “urbanization” in a general sense, or the laws, relations and formations of human society in time and space. This is the basic definition before you read it, and you should also note that Dr. Nizar not only turns from the city on the screen to the city in reality, but he also tells you about the transformation of small towns into large modern cities, and then he turns to the films presented. Their view of these transformations is as important as the image of the city on the screen and the image on the ground, and the two images echo each other. Due to the historical tracing of urban development, with and the historical trace of the films that talk about the city, we are faced with a thick book that resembles the city in its breadth, the diversity of its neighborhoods, the variety of its streets, its entrances and exits, or as if we were standing in front of the Russian “Matrushka” bride, because each small part leads us to the larger part. What is amazing is the culture of Dr. Nizar, the grand architecture and cinema, and perhaps also literature and philosophy, integrated into a very rich approach, he reads the city as he reads the cinema and tells the story of wealth, power and Western society with the same depth as the cinema. He tells and analyzes the stories of important films in the history of cinema, such as: “Metropolis”, “Berlin: A Symphony of a City”, “Modern Times”, “Annie Hall”, “Manhattan”, “Taxi Driver”, Behind the Window, Brazil, The Truman Show, Blade Runner…even comparative studies between films are proposed, tracing ideas in terms of modernity and postmodernism, class and race, and the image of the city as an ideal utopia versus the image of the city as a dystopia, and tracking the different film metaphors that express each urban development, from the vagabond to the tramp, from the human machine to the clone, and from the individual voyeur to the systemic voyeurism, as in Orwell’s novel 1984. Each urban development is reflected in the vision of the film artist and has countless variations in various eras, both documentary and narrative, and embodied through the great talents of directors such as Fritz Lang, Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Jacques Tati. Cinema has the power of imagination and prediction, she also has a powerful and sharp capacity for satire. For example, can we forget Chaplin’s satire in Modern Times? It appears in the film Freedom, where modernity marginalizes the human being and reduces him to a machine? Have we forgotten that in Allen’s films Annie Hall and Manhattan, New York was an elegant theatre of intellectuals and artists in crisis, in stark contrast to the grimy New York and Sin City in Scorsese’s most famous film Taxi Driver? Should we forget the nightmarish vision of the cruel virtual city in the film Brazil, which watches everyone? Or the city that reaches revolution and explodes in Metropolis? Can we easily forget the closed city in the game of a lonely prisoner in the film The Truman Show, which was shown to the whole world? The City in the Movies is undoubtedly the result of biased self-creativity, but at the same time it also reveals the development trend of modernity and postmodernism in the fields of architecture, urbanism and planning. The demolition of the city in the form of closed and controlled communities (such as the compound) soon found its resonance in critical or satirical film works, and the nostalgia for the city of the 1950s as a “lost utopia” was soon met with obvious satire in films such as Happy Valley, and the racial tensions in the United States soon appeared in memorable “prophetic” films such as Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. As a lover of cities and cinema, I love this mixture between places and people, between economics and social theory, because in my opinion, ultimately a city violates the freedom and creativity of the individual and isolates him from society. The Other Human is a failed city in any name, no matter how many masks of modernity and postmodernism it wears. There is no better art than The Other Human. Criticizing the creators of the robot city, the observers of the people on the screen and the marginalized poor in the miserable neighborhoods, it is one of the most important, profound and interesting books of this year. .