Strategies of unworlding in Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte (1985)

ABSTRACT

Bonaparte’s famous pronouncement regarding forty centuries of history looking down on his soldiers from the top of the Pyramids, is emblematic of his imperialist aspirations in Egypt. It also implies the production of a ‘worlding’ (Spivak, 1985), by its inscription of imperial discourse upon colonized space, or more specifically in this case, a relatively short military occupation with lasting consequences. At the time of its release in 1985, the film Adieu Bonaparte directed by Youssef Chahine, displeased critics in the two countries that co-produced it. In France, it was seen as ‘chaotic’ and ‘anti-French’; in Egypt, rather than a film that properly showed the Egyptian resistance to the French invasion, it was deemed as a film ‘about love’. Arguably, these critiqued aspects of the film could be seen as part of Chahine’s strategy to counter the violence of Bonaparte’s worlding of Egypt, and to affirm a national self-determination that is responsible and responsive to the other. Working with Spivak’s term, I contend that Chahine resists and undoes Bonaparte’s hegemonic structure through a series of formal strategies that I call strategies of unworlding, among which the depiction and references to the Pyramids of Giza are notable examples.

KEYWORDS:

• Chahine
• Spivak
• Bonaparte
• worlding
• unworlding
• pyramids

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the attendees of the research seminar in which I presented an earlier version of this article, to my reviewer Dr Ifdal Elsaket, and to the editors of the journal. I would also like to thank Misr International Films for their kind permission to reproduce the images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The theories and politics of ‘worlding’ and ‘unworlding’ was the theme of a recent Screen Studies Conference (University of Glasgow, 30 June − 2 July 2023).

2. Darwish’s songs were also sung in Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution. In 1979, one of his songs was adopted as the national anthem of Egypt.

3. The song continues: ‘My grandparents created great science/My generous Nile is alive in the fertile valley/My ancestors have survived for thousands of years./The universe could perish and they still remain/Shall I tell you about a lover that forced me to emigrate and leave my family and friends?/I have given my life as a gift to that lover. I cannot love another.’

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Notes on contributors

Carla Ambrósio Garcia

Carla Ambrósio Garcia is an independent scholar currently based in Lisbon. Previously she was a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the British University in Egypt. She has a PhD in Film Studies from King’s College London, and is the author of Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film (Routledge, 2017). Her recent research focuses on Egyptian cinema and heritage studies. She is also a filmmaker, currently working on two parallel film projects: one that investigates uses of heritage in Egyptian cinema, and another that reflects on her experience of living in Egypt.