Double Down

I’m back in Cairo for a few days and one of the things I was most looking forward to (apart from breathing in the sweet scent of Revolution) was going to the cinema.

I went on to Cairo360 and I, dear reader, was sorely tempted by the rotten fruits of Hollywood. Pirates of the Carribbean & X Men 4, Green Lantern, Kiera Knightley looking sultry in some adulterous trash, are all lining up against Hawi - a small Egyptian film by Ibrahim Batout, one of the vanguard of independent cinema here. As a once rabid consumer of comics, it is taking considerable strength to keep me from the range of glossy entertainment on offer.

We go to the cinema for entertainment. Or that's what we've grown to believe. And independent films – are generally thought of as not being 'entertaining'. Quite correctly. Mostly, they're not. Mostly they're boring and self-indulgent. Entertainment is considered to come at the cost of artistry. This, of course, is completely untrue. You can break in new narrative forms, tell socially progressive stories, cast unknown actors, and still engage your audience (see Memento, The Battle of Algiers and Elephant, for examples). The worthiness of the independent auteur’s struggle should not replace the audience's enjoyment. But, the sad fact is that, often, it does.

Of the films on offer, most people are guzzling down Johnny Depp's high camp in Pirates - a film of no artistic, cultural, social, historical or aesthetic relevance that has now grossed more money abroad than any other American film ever. I, personally, would be tempted by DC Comics' Green Lantern for my 114 minutes of 'switch off and just be entertained'. I used to love the Green Lantern as a scampering young lad in London, and I think Ryan Reynolds is second only to Nathan Fillion among the young, TV-reared, leading men of America. But, if I try and picture my life 100 minutes into the future, try and imagine my self being subsumed by the CGI universe of DC's best mid-range hero, I know I'll be having a lousy time. First among the series of inevitable questions: if we already had Galactus (oh He of Top Trump might!) tragically re-imagined as a cloud in Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer, why is the cloud baddie back again? It used to be that only good ideas got stolen/paid-homage-to.

Hollywood’s glaring lack of imagination echoes another brutal, dictatorial regime bent on the destruction of the mental capacity of millions unable to conceive of a fantastical narrative beyond the limits of it's own direct experience.

And when a drought of imagination leads to bad ideas not only being recycled but multiplied and folded in on themselves you're going to end up with relentless varieties of weather-related villains. And the Double Down, the latest delicacy being served up across America: a burger where the bread has been replaced with chicken. Yes, chicken. Instead of the bread.

And just as you have to disable millenia of evolutionary instincts before eating a Double Down, so mass cinema relies on you wanting to ‘switch off.’ Just as we are passive in our societal and financial relationship with cinema, so we should be passive in our relationship with the narrative - to the point where to be able to experience it properly we actually have to disable our critical faculties, have to switch off our brains.

But whereas some sensible countries have legislation preventing their children replacing the bread in their diets with fried chicken, we will never enjoy such cinematic barricades. Nor should we. We have to deal with it ourselves.

In short, I’m going to go see Hawi this week, and it would be good for our collective future if you did too.

If you're in the UK, you could check out The First Grader - terrible title, but I've heard its pretty good.

I'm not sure what you do in America. Is it too late to catch the Tree of Life?

Say 'No' to Infantilization!

Whenever possible I will try and balance the broader posts with small, practical steps that individuals or communities can take.

So, your domestic cinema is being subsumed by Harry Potter and Saw films. What can we do?

Be discerning. Choose where you spend your money carefully.

In Egypt we should boycott films that want to infantalize you. What would be left to watch, I hear you cry. Fair point. So we need to change what's on offer. So next time there's some incredible Brazilian film that's got amazing reviews and is clearly never going to be screened, talk to the cinema, question their decision. Write an email, make a phone call. From newspapers to governments to primary schools - a handful of letters can be incredibly persuasive. We don't have to be passive consumers that chew through whatever is dumped in front of us.

Start a Facebook group insisting X film is distributed in your country. Name the people that can make the decisions, publish their email addresses. Old-guard capitalists are terrified of Facebook - they still don't really know what it is. Say you're going to launch a vicious Twitter campaign you could probably get them to play an extended run of Waterworld. Do it quickly, before the world finally realises that it wasn't actually the Gods of Social Media that we have to thank for our revolutions.

The cinema exhibitor, generally, has no ideological agenda - they exist to sell popcorn. That's where they make their money (American audiences enjoy a 600% mark-up). So they are malleable.

If you're in Europe / America etc - don't just go and see the Hangover 5 and stew in self-loathing. You are actively participating in the destruction of your own cultural fabric. Your vote basically counts for shit if you're not in Ohio so at least make your money count. If you think cinema is in a fine state, then ignore me. But take note that 2011 will see Hollywood release 27 sequels - that's one fifth of the films getting a wide release this year. Merde, surely?

If you really really need to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland just download it. You need this application and then you can get the film. That film looked like a bland nightmare in 3D but it grossed over $1bn - roughly the GDP of Djibouti.

These actions are all small and relatively obvious. But that's the point. The real action is a mental shift. For too long we have thought that we don't have a choice about what is on our screens. But through small, concentrated actions and the building of a community consciousness we can change the way the cinemas work. We have to re-imagine ourselves as constructive partners in a cultural process rather than mindless consumers of unhealthy spectacle.

Now, if you're thinking this is all elitist crap written by someone who does his writing in English then it is, in fact, you that's the elitist. If you think that modern mass culture is what the masses really want then you weren't paying attention from January 25th to February 11th. Yes, entertainment has a role to play - but if we don't have the freedom of choice it is a cultural slavery.

Anything less than firm resistance to the prolonged attack on our sensibilities we have endured for so long would be counter-revolutionary.

Regulators, Mount Up

This piece was published in Arabic in al Shorouk newspaper.

As the Egyptian Revolution rolls into the challenging months of reconstructing a society, everyone is working on their areas of expertise, trying to do their bit.

I’m currently in Palestine, preparing to shoot a short fiction film. But my thoughts are always on Egypt, and the work we can be doing to strengthen the film industry there. So I thought maybe it would be useful if I started writing some of them out.

I'm thinking about Egypt specifically, but the challenges that the mass culture that has dominated the last century poses to film-makers are the same across the world. Basically: how do you make new and relevant cinema when the means of production are tied up in a globalized industry that is almost entirely bent to Hollywood’s will?

I'm going to try and keep these blog posts short and focussed - it's a massive question.

Think of a film as having four phases: conception, production, distribution and consumption. They are all part of an interconnected cycle - you make better films, you sell more tickets, you spend more on the next one, your films get better, even more people buy tickets etc.

But we need to start somewhere, so let's start with consumption.

Assuming we're not going to break the global capitalist model this year, there are numbers to be crunched.

General wisdom among Hollywood studios is that an American film that gets a broad international release can expect 50% of its total gross to be earned domestically. The entire ‘Middle East’ usually pulls in 2%. For a region with 380 million people in it, that equates to a write-off. And that’s for a Hollywood film, with a distribution company with a significant marketing and advertising budget.

Official Egyptian numbers are hard to get hold of. There are around 200 cinemas in Egypt, domestic production hit 25 films last year. 103 foreign films were released, grossing a combined total of around $13m. For a country that likes to claim it has the third largest industry behind America and India (it isn't) these are pitiful figures. And that's before we look at the quality of the films.

In recent years, the Egyptian film industry has become little more than a production line of sentimental comedies and overwrought dramas. Symptomatic of Egypt's rapid embrace of neoliberal policies, production and distribution were controlled by a handful of major players who made a comfortable profit churning out crap. And though Egypt was apparently 'open for business' the administrative quagmire (closely linked to corruption) of doing anything in the country drove away foreign productions (only 36% of films with scenes set in Egypt actually shot them there). The result is a film industry that wholly embraced the idiocy of mass entertainment, while driving away it's two traditional temptations: technical skills and employment. A piece of mass entertainment stripped of even any technical value really is a sorry product. When Hollywood is selling you crap, they at least pay for it to look good. Not so in Egypt.

And so to rebuilding. We need to rebuild the infrastructure of exhibition and consumption. We need more cinemas, we need cheaper tickets, we need some independent cinemas. There are clear ways in which businesspeople and artists can work together on this. But the government also has a key part to play (as long as we're on course for a glorious new one).

The French film industry is probably the strongest in the world. There are several reasons, but a key one is government protectionism and redistribution of a percentage of ticket sales to production. The government regulates what percentage of screens have to be reserved for French films. It also doesn't allow for any films to be advertized on television - which levels the playing field tremendously. The result – 31 of the top grossing films in France of 2010 were French productions and brought in over $300m to the national economy.

The UK has no such regulation and in 2010 only six fully domestic productions squeezed in to the year’s top 100, grossing a miserable $38m from a total public outlay of $1.68b on cinema tickets. A truly lousy situation for British film.

So the good news, for Egypt, for the Arab world, is that Hollywood just isn't interested in us. At 2% of potential gross we are not worth the hassle and distribution of most major American films is run through one Lebanese company. So, unlike in so many other spheres of economic life in Egypt, we are relatively autonomous when it comes to cinema. As a start point, this is a great advantage.

There are various things we can be doing, but let's start with the government.

Regulation and redistribution are one aspect of what's needed to give the industry the window it needs to start producing relevant, accomplished and technically sophisticated films. It was starting before the revolution, with a new independent film scene on the rise. If it was decreed that 50% of films shown must to be Egyptian productions, and 10% of those films must be independent, that would be a good start. And if 10% of the ticket price was recycled back into the national infrastructure, then you could start rehabilitating the rotting national archive, rejuvenating the cinema school, setting up a film commission, getting people trained with the necessary technical skills.

Similarly, we should consider how advertising can be controlled. A tiered structure, with foreign films with large budgets either paying more of having their airtime limited should be considered.

And so with a few very simple pieces of regulation the government can take concrete steps to ensuring there is a protected space in which a new industry can be built. A new industry that not only makes films that sell well, but is given the time and space to develop the confidence to produce films that are really Egyptian, films that find new forms and speak to a national aesthetic.

Japan, for example, doesn’t have such government regulation, but still produces and consumes a lot of it’s own cinema. 55 of 2010’s top films in Japan were Japanese, contributing over $1.1b to the economy. While the American share of the market is still enormous, the rise of anime has been at the forefront of a cinematic resurgence that is is new and exciting and attuned to cultural aesthetics and, therefore, finds strong domestic audiences.

A healthy film industry obviously doesn't hinge entirely on government regulation. But, as we push forward into our new future, regulation is necessary. The artistic and the economic challenges go hand in hand, and if we're to stand a chance of developing cinematic forms that are truly the product of the aesthetics, forms and philosophies of the country then we need to take on both at the same time.

Otherwise this will continue to be the best thing on television: