Radicalized modernity has provided more space for experimentation and voluntary forms of intimacy, where people create their own choice of relationships and networks rather than being forcefully fitted into an existing set of routines and roles. As a result, postmodernism has come to categorize itself as the deviation from the single-line narrative structure, instead, multiple narratives are told, where no single thread is seen as more dominant than the other.
The Egyptian film The Yacoubian Building, directed by Marwan Hamed, is a mosaic of interrelated characters who all live in the same building that exists in Downtown Cairo. From the faded apartments of the main floors to the building’s teeming rooftop, the intertwined spatial narratives represent Egypt’s contemporary urbanized fabric, i.e. the burgeoning population growth in its large cities. Referred to as the social microcosm genre, the film ensembles a large cast of people who go about their lives crisscrossing and sometimes colliding, all joined together by chance. Such unrelated stories interacting in unpredictable ways are cited by scholars as fractals.
City Fractalism
The creation of an intertwined storyline that reflects the post-modern urban fragmentation of Cairo is colorfully depicted in The Yacoubian Building, where audiences are introduced to an epitome of the Egyptian society; different inhabitants of the building in Downtown Cairo embody the drastic urban transformations undergone through the past 50 years or more. The film humanizes the capital city during the 1980s and 1990s, which concurs with Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen’s work that explores the relationship between economic globalization and the social and cultural transformations of the cityscape.
During the movie’s 3-minute intro, narrated by Egyptian actor Yehia El-Fakharany, we are exposed to the rise of a new form of the bourgeoisie alongside an affluent professional middle-class community, factored with the economic withdrawal of governmental services furnishing more space for foreign financial bodies, life has become increasingly expensive.
The marginalized population has increased significantly moving from the fringes of the city towards the center, occupying both horizontal and vertical spatiality, i.e. the vacant land plots and the residential rooftops. Such a shift can be translated into Nikos Salingaros’ theory of vertical coupling, where a “separate two-dimensional squatter city [is] built on top of imposing office buildings”.
Despite Salingaros’ rejection to associate fractals with modern geometry, spatial chaos and complexity have proved their domination and main ignition for city fractalism. Traditional settings have indeed set the basic principles of fractals through implementing features of permeable coupling forces, e.g. colonnades, arcades, and rows of shops and houses, which allow for flexibility of joining the built structure with open space, catalyzing the forces of interplay of urban activities with natural forces. This collectivist geometrical, yet blunt, approach has remodeled itself towards a more individualistic semi-democratic self-notion of freedom.
"The postmodern world thus is really a revival of the Hobbesian state of nature where social relations are characterized by disorder" - AYSE AKALIN
The Yacoubian Building: The Setting, the Transformation, and Urban Coherence
The opening sequence sets the film’s narrative through visualizing the spatial disturbance caused by the progressiveness of neoliberalism, driving the characters’ depiction of societal polarization, radical Islamism, corruption, and homosexuality. These themes have been recurring within the micro scales of Egyptian urbanism concluding with the moral bankruptcy of the Mubarak regime.
Set in the mid-1990s, the film’s narrative characters can be divided into two groups, the main topics and the revolving topics.
The main topics comprise five main characters. First, the aging philanderer Zaki Pasha Dessouki (played by Adel Imam) was portrayed as the last of the Egyptian elite population. Hajj Mohamed Azzam (played by Nour El-Sherif), once a shoeshine boy, now a wealthy and highly shady businessman who exhibits highly religious social characteristics that have invaded the Egyptian mindset in the 1970s. Taha El-Shazli (played by Mohamed Imam), the son of the building’s doorman, who becomes a radical Islamist after being rejected from the police academy due to his ‘low’ social standing. Hatem El-Rashid (played by Khaled El-Sawy), a reputable gay editor of the French newspaper Le Caire, wanders through the streets of Cairo searching for lost love. And finally, Buthaina El-Sayed (played by Hend Sabry), a poor dweller of the building’s rooftop who ends up marrying Zaki Pasha finding shelter from economic hardship and sexual harassment.
The revolving topics introduce the other set of characters through whom coupling forces define the narrative’s spatial organization. Furthermore, they establish small-scale coupling via both macro and micro range forces, eventually presenting the current Cairene imagery.
One of the stories involve Abd-Raboh (played by Bassem Samra), an illiterate soldier from Upper Egypt serving in Downtown encounters Hatem El-Rashid and consensually enters into a relationship with him. Eventually, Hatem arranges work and lodging for Abd-Raboh, giving him a room on the building’s rooftop. Abd-Raboh’s final settlement on the rooftop is a typical representation of the 1980s & 1990s Cairo when the repercussions of Sadat’s open-door policy raised a variety of opportunities in the capital city witnessing a flow of internal migrants coming from the rural areas.
The natural growth of informal settlements in Cairo – from the fringes towards the center of the city – has illustrated a real-world of urban coherence and tended to follow the rules of a complex system. Yet, in Abd-Raboh’s case, coherence has come face-to-face with the post-socialist grid-like system. Despite the physical closeness, Abd-Raboh finds himself struggling between religious principles and economic hardship in the face of a taboo. His encounter with Hatem is a spatial reflection of the contemporary city that fails to couple elements at a small scale.
Cairo: What does it tell us?
Hamed’s sepian depiction of Cairo is a direct projection of Janet Abu-Lughod’s textual characterization, a dual city. It is a city that survives between the reminiscence of the early modern pre-globalized era and the current bleak highly corrupt time revealing spatial degradation of the second half of the twentieth century.
What this film portrays is a locus of countless chaotic contrasts, spatial confusion, and compromises. It offers is a new insight into complexity, within networks intertwined social narratives become dynamic as they evolve through time and space.
Have you seen The Yacoubian Building yet? Do you think there is more to this film than what is mentioned? Please share your comments, ideas, thoughts, criticism, and/or any sort of information and/or interesting facts.