Abdelrhman Mohamed's vintage poster art revives 'golden age' of Egyptian cinema

The movie poster is a religious icon — it tethers us to a different time and place, whisking us away to some point in spacetime away from here and now. It is a crystallized aesthetic and amalgam of nostalgia.

The movie poster is iconic — that the ’90s speaks so strongly to our current moment and sensibilities finds its expression in dorm rooms across America peppered with posters of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and accordingly, every decade has its movie, a distillation of the zeitgeist.

The movie poster is art. Across the world, distinct styles of movie posters have emerged, which mix cultural elements, resulting in something particular to its time and place. But as cinema has become increasingly intertwined with American and Hollywood hegemony, uniformity in design has prevailed; if movie posters were at one point a unique cultural piece of art, they’ve since been relegated to the purview of the academy and exhibitions.

Abdulrhman Mohamed’s work represents a rupture with the homogenizing forces of Hollywood

A few months ago, a friend DMed me a post on Instagram: a fan-made, Egyptian-style poster of The Sopranos. I was geeking — growing up in New Jersey till I moved away for college, The Sopranos and James Gandolfini have a place in my heart. Seeing a fan-made poster in Arabic was both bewildering and cool. I forwarded the post to a few friends and clicked through to see the account.

Enter Abdelrhman Mohamed. Based in Cairo, Mohamed is a graphic designer by training. Mohamed started his Instagram account in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and since then, has amassed a following of nearly eighty thousand followers.

From the beginning, Mohamed has focused on the interplay between Western and Egyptian media — among his first posts are an English Vogue cover for Abdelhalim Hafez and an Arabic poster for Taxi Driver.

Since then, he has produced an eclectic image of Arabic and English posters of musicians, albums, and movies. Over the last year, he’s steadily gravitated towards the aesthetic of the Egyptian 'Golden Age' of film.

For Egyptians, the Golden Age and its actors — Souad Hosny, Faten Hamama, Omar Sharif, to name a few — recall a different Egypt which, at its zenith, held a towering industry behind only Hollywood and Bollywood. The Egyptian cinema traces its history to 1923, when the first Egyptian-produced film, “Barsoum Looking for a Job,” was produced.

In the ensuing decades, Egyptian cinema entered its Golden Age (from the ’40s to the ’60s), which saw filmmakers like Youssef Chahine and Henri Barakat achieve international acclaim.

During this booming era of film, the industry produced a singularly unique and readily identified poster style which would evolve and persist beyond just the Golden Age. Whether they were domestic or foreign releases, almost all films within Egypt were released alongside a poster designed within this distinct aesthetic.

Doing so wasn’t always so easy, however. Prior to the advent of digital illustration, posters were designed by hand, and in Egypt, the technique of stone lithography flourished.

This technique produced graphics that were vivid, colourful, and textured. At poster size, these visuals can only be described as forceful and mesmerizing. The time- and labour-intensive technique of stone lithography involves drawing on a flat piece of limestone with grease-based materials.

Then, through a complicated sequence of steps, the stone is chemically processed by being etched, washed, and rolled, until finally, it is used to make a printing. Multi-coloured and complex papers would involve the use of several stones, only compounding the difficulty and time involved. In the early years of cinema, stone lithography was used ubiquitously throughout Europe.

But, as World War I raged through the continent, limestone became much more difficult to source, resulting in a slow decline. Egypt however, had no issue sourcing limestone to support its industry, and the Egyptian film industry relied on stone lithography until the ’90s, when it went the way of the dodo. Nowadays, lithography only survives among a handful of hardcore enthusiasts who keep the craft alive in their basements.

Since the ’90s, digital design has superseded lithography: digital design is faster and incurs much less material cost. In Egypt, long gone are the posters of the Golden Age.

Digital design has enforced uniformity in the industry, not just in Egypt either. Across the world, fragmented and unique cultural visions of film vis-à-vis poster abounded, only to collapse in the wake of American, late capitalist forces, which do not envision the movie poster as art in and of itself, instead choosing to situate the poster squarely within the vernacular of advertising and marketing. But, in recent years, interest in the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema has re-ignited.

On the Internet, a thriving subculture for collecting Egyptian movie posters has emerged, where sellers regularly command hundreds or even thousands of dollars USD for mint posters. Golden Age exhibits have popped up all around the world. Beyond this, some have looked to return to what they see as a forgotten tradition.

Abdulrahman Mohamed’s work represents a rupture with the homogenizing forces of Hollywood. Mohamed was kind enough to chat with me for a bit one early evening in May.

He’s a bit of an enigmatic figure — he keeps a low profile, and the only information in his bio is the word “Wtwat,” the name of a song by Egyptian rapper Abyusif. In my interview, I got the chance to learn a little bit about Mohamed, his work, the films he liked, and his worldview. For Mohamed, modern movie posters reflect the drabness of the work culture that produces them.

He noted the lack of personality in modern Egyptian movie posters. “It’s just work. Not art,” he remarks. Posters for Egyptian-made films look indistinguishable from the average American blockbuster, apart from the Arabic text.

For foreign releases, the distributor might make an Arabic language poster, but they usually resort to copying the American release poster, English and. If Egypt once held an esteemed artistic industry in making posters, that past has left little mark on the posters of today.

This is why Mohamed’s work is so important, even if he doesn’t talk about his work in such grandiose terms. When I asked what inspires his choice of posters, he replied that he just makes posters of films he likes: Al Pacino and De Niro flicks, mafia movies, Scorsese films, and bro classics (Joker, Fight Club). His work is a personal expression of this cinematic taste. “If people like it, OK. If nobody likes it, OK,” he told me.

Whenever he watches a new movie or show he enjoys, he soon decides to design his take on what a Golden Age poster would look like. Once he’s finished, he posts it on Instagram. He posts when he wants, and he says nothing about his own work — his captions are just the first paragraph of the corresponding Wikipedia article.

In the following days, his comment section is flooded with questions and demands from fans: where can I buy prints? Make a poster of my favourite movie next! His fans love what he does — even if Mohamed sees his work in personal terms, something in his work has resonated with his large following.

Why has Mohamed’s work found such a large audience so quickly? I didn’t get a chance to explicitly ask Mohamed, but we did chat briefly about the popular reception of his art. He mentioned that people all over the world have messaged him saying they love his work, Egyptians from America and France especially so. Understanding Mohamed’s work in this global context implicates not just history but the socio-politics of the Egyptian cinema and the diaspora.

In the Golden Age, as the art of the movie poster flourished and Egyptians sought to define a national identity in the wake of the 1952 coup, artists conceived the poster as a space of Western resistance. Though fleeting and ephemeral, the movie poster is a momentary reflection of broader socio-political concerns.

Seeking to emphasize their Egyptian-ness, artists frequently decorated their posters with the colours of the Arab Liberation flag, and artistic elements emphasized a shared heritage: ancient Egypt and its pharaohs, Arabic and its calligraphic forms, and the music of stars like Umm Kulthum and Abdelhalim Hafez.

In a 2015 article about the legacy of ’50s and ’60s Egyptian cinema, Kerr Houston writes to this point, “Post-revolutionary movie posters, like the 1952 revolution itself, frequently invoked resistance, both to Farouk’s legacy and to Western influence.” Simultaneously, the movie poster became a vehicle for the expression of shifting social norms.

Depictions of women within the confines of the movie poster, both positive and negative, clashed with existing notions of gender politics and gave rise to new ones. Samir Qassir, the late Lebanese-Palestinian journalist, wrote on the gendered nature of Egyptian movie posters, noting the sexual commodification of both the female and male forms. In turn, this “…put [men and women] on the same footing, as the cinematic kiss forces them to be equal.” Beyond existing forums, post-revolution national discourses found natural meeting grounds in the art of the poster. Whether what the poster depicted was controversial or not, it was undoubtedly Egyptian in its conception and execution.

"As the art of the movie poster flourished and Egyptians sought to define a national identity in the wake of the 1952 coup, artists conceived the poster as a space of Western resistance. Though fleeting and ephemeral, the movie poster is a momentary reflection of broader sociopolitical concerns"

For Egyptians in the 21st century then, Mohamed’s art represents a return to form in light of the monopolizing tendencies of the blockbuster format.

Originally, the blockbuster denoted a type of feature film: one with high production value that producers were sure would be financially successful. In the past few decades, however, the blockbuster has come to dominate the American film industry, at the expense of other feature films.

The blockbuster started as big summer hits and gradually evolved to become Hollywood’s bread and butter. Whenever we speak of movies nowadays, we speak of blockbusters, even if the movie in question isn’t, strictly speaking.

As an American cultural export, other national cinemas have come to rely on the blockbuster format — it generates hype and it’s lucrative, so why not? A distinctly American commodity, the blockbuster carries its own set of norms as part of its baggage: inter alia, certain production techniques, visual syntax, narrative choices, and not least among them, a particular style and approach to the movie poster. You just have to take a look at current DC and Marvel posters to realize what this looks like in practice. The poster frames the leading star front-and-centre (otherwise, they loom in the background) and places the antagonist in opposition, usually with their back turned.

Critics and fans have noted this uninspiring, formulaic style. The poster has no choice but to be so as a consequence of its position: the art of the poster is no longer an extension of the artistry of the film, but instead just a pure marketing tool. Moviegoers ache for something new; this is exactly what Mohamed has done by re-framing his favourite films within the vernacular of the old, Egyptian poster. He re-imagines a new, contemporary era where American movies, no matter how big, must present themselves within this aesthetic to make themselves accessible to an Egyptian audience.

Beyond just the homeland, this practice that has a particular valence for diasporic Egyptians. If they’re familiar with the Golden Age, they’re (generally) only familiar with the aesthetic, divorced from its status within Egyptian socio-political currents. The Golden Age exists squarely within the inherited nostalgia of films our parents or grandparents watched, which they maybe showed us in our youth (sometimes willingly, sometimes not so).

Egyptian film exists in its own compartmentalized box, an ocean away from Hollywood and its films. I think this is what draws a lot of Egyptians from abroad to Mohamed’s work: it presents an allegory for diasporic relationship to identity (sometimes realized, sometimes aspirational) through its synthesis of Egyptian and American cultural elements. “People love the mix between sharq (East) and gharb (West),” Mohamed said. The question of diaspora is a question of syncretism: to what extent am I both Egyptian and non-Egyptian?

This question hovers over diasporic life, particularly so in conversations about the types of media we consume: film, music, books, and so on. Among the Egyptian Americans I know, one of the most popular Egyptian films is Molasses, a 2010 comedy about an Egyptian American who awkwardly navigates the country after twenty years abroad in America.

It’s evident that diaspora sometimes constructs Egyptian and American identity in oppositional terms. In this context, Mohamed re-envisions the American cinematic past as one that exists beyond an American/Egyptian binary; instead, by presenting his work as-is, his art envisions a relation of harmony.

As Mohamed’s following continues to grow, he plans to keep doing what he’s been doing thus far, but he has big hopes. “My goal is to work in the cinema…I want to take a new film and design an actual poster for it, an original poster,” Mohamed told me. It only seems inevitable — other artists have found themselves drawn to the art of the Golden Age, and Egyptian film finds itself in a renaissance as the country finds itself home to new international film festivals. The story of Egyptian cinema does not end with the Golden Age, and perhaps Egypt finds itself perched on the cusp of a revival. Regardless of what the future brings, Mohamed and his fans will be there, no matter what.

George Iskander is a Ph.D. candidate in physics as well as a cinephile and writer.

Follow him on Twitter: @jerseyphysicist