Women pioneers of Arab cinema

The task of searching for lost African classics is perhaps nowhere more complex than in relation to the cinematic output of African women. Many critics have commented upon the ‘belated arrival’ of filmmaking by sub-Saharan Africans in the early 1960s, but it is less frequently noted that the first films by African women (apart from the seemingly lost short documentary, Tam-Tam à Paris, by the Cameroonian director Thérèse Sita-Belle in 1963) did not appear until the 1970s and, even then, the pioneering work of the Senegalese director Safi Faye did not immediately inspire the emergence of films by other women filmmakers. Indeed, it was not until the mid-to-late 1990s, and the work of Fanta Régina Nacro amongst others, that African women finally began to make films in numbers that might indicate a broader shift in the filmmaking landscape. In North Africa, the role of African women in the production of films has a much longer but no less hidden history. Though we are becoming more and more aware of the contribution of women filmmakers to the beginnings of Hollywood, as documented in, for example, Cari Beauchamp's work,1 the role of women in the early development of Arab cinema is less well known. The English translation of Rebecca Hillauer's Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers is therefore extremely welcome, combining as it does critical investigations, interviews, film reviews and comprehensive filmographies.2 Hillauer's introduction to the women pioneers of Egyptian cinema is stimulating and wide-ranging, but one key Arab voice she neglects is that of Haydée Tamzali (née Chikly), the daughter and collaborator of one of the most remarkable of all Arab or African pioneers, the Tunisian Albert Samama Chikly (1872–1934). An enthusiast for all aspects of western scientific development, Chikly had organized the first film screenings in Tunisia in 1897, explored radio and X-ray technology, shot film from a balloon and underwater. During World War I he was a photographer with the French army, shooting film at the front at Verdun in 1916, and as a lifelong photographer he documented all aspects of Tunisian life. His film work comprises a pioneering short, Zohra (1922), and a first feature, Aïn el ghazel/The Girl from Carthage (1924), made three years before the first Egyptian fictional feature. Haydée Chikly, then still in her teens, was a key collaborator on both these films – writing the scripts and starring in them, as well as being in charge of the film editing. At this period she also appeared, alongside Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry, in Rex Ingram's The Arab, shot in Gabès and Gammarth in 1923. Ingram was apparently impressed enough to invite her to Hollywood, but her father insisted she stay in Tunis to complete her baccalaureate. The Girl from Carthage is, on one level, a typical 1920s melodrama. It tells of a girl who, faced with the prospect of an arranged marriage to an older man, runs away with a young schoolteacher and kills herself in the desert when he is murdered by gunmen hired by her family

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