The Night of Counting the Years, directed in 1969 by Egyptian set-designer, script writer and director Shadi Abdel Salam, has remained his only film. It stands out in Arab film history for the specific artistic and intellectual vision of its director. In order to comprehend this film’s uniqueness, we need to be aware of the fact that despite the excellent photography of many early Egyptian movies, from the late 1920s up to the 1960s, they unequivocally adopted and refined the visual vocabulary of Western cinema without really exploring indigenous home-grown forms of visual language. Particularly during the Arab-Islamic era, the region’s culture had followed and applied largely non-figurative forms of representation. In contrast, the indexical character of the modern photographic image—which mechanically mirrors what is in front of the camera onto the medium—reproduces a specific visual realism that reaches back to the European renaissance, and has informed cinematic ways of composition such as the central perspective and the golden cut up to date.

In using indigenous pre-Islamic (in this case Ancient Egyptian) artistic traditions for cinema, Abdel Salam’s work corresponds ideologically with the Pharaonist movement of the 1920s and 30s, represented among others by writer Taha Hussein and sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar. The director’s artistic vision has found no successor in Egypt. His following project on the pharaonic heretic and philosopher Akhenaten was never realized, despite many years of intensive preparation and research. After the partial re-privatization of the Egyptian film industry and up to Abdel Salam’s premature death in 1986, no Egyptian producer was ready to finance such an expensive and distinctive project.

In the 1960s, however, the evolution of artistic arthouse cinema on all continents was inspired by worldwide de-colonisation. The interest in indigenous forms of narrations and visual representation rose tremendously and allowed such exceptional cinematic experiments like The Night of Counting the Years. In Egypt, the temporal change of orientation was expressed in the creation of the (short lived) public Experimental Film Unit Center, where Shadi Abdel Salam served as supervisor from 1969 to 1975. Abdel Salam’s Unit propagated exclusively visual forms of expression, doing away with the explanatory voice over narration in most of its documentary productions, a prime example being Abdel Salam’s Horizons (1972), a medium length audio-visual symphony that pictures the state of the arts in Egypt at the time of the silent war between Egypt and Israel.

The director’s nomination was most probably initiated by the then-Nasserist cultural minister Tharwat Okasha, an enthusiastic defender of film arts who had encouraged the production of The Night of Counting the Years against the resistance of the bureaucratic apparatus of the General Film Organisation. The film was screened in 1970 at the Venice Film Festival (without gaining a prize, as the festival was non-competitive from 1969 to 1972), as well as at the Carthage Film Festival (JCC) where it is said to have won the Critic’s Prize; this festival success was not immediately acknowledged within the country. The Film Organization delayed the film’s release for five years, considering it unsuitable for commercial exploitation. Indeed, it lacked the essential components of Egyptian popular films, such as big stars (Nadia Lotfy was a good friend of the director and only has a short cameo in the film) and Abdel Salam’s pointed choice to use classical Arabic for the dialogue, instead of the local Cairene dialect that audiences were accustomed to.

The story takes place during the archaeological discovery of the royal tombs at Thebes (Luxor) in 1881. Following the death of the chief of the Hurrabat tribe, his chief’s younger son Wanis learns that for generations, his tribe has made their living by robbing tombs. His older brother refuses to take part in the ongoing violation and is murdered on the orders of the tribe’s elders. This leaves Wanis helpless, torn between his shame and loyalty to his kin. He starts asking questions about ancestors whose graves they’ve been defiling. He neither knows their history nor is he able to decipher the signs that they have left on the walls of their temples. When he discovers that the archaeologists investigating the area have this knowledge, he decides, after a long internal struggle, to confide to them the whereabouts of the tombs.

The film was inspired by the real discovery of the hiding place of several royal mummies, which had been relocated and hidden from thieves in ancient times. Its modern violators belonged to the “Arab” village of al-Gorna on Luxor’s West Bank, close to the Valley of Kings, literally built on top of an ancient graveyard. In using such a historical setting, Abdel Salam was able to tackle the congested, unresolved relation between contemporary Egyptians, their ancient past, and their pharaohs, who had become demonised by consecutive monotheistic beliefs.

The protagonist’s confrontation with the forgotten past reaches out to include the spectators, who have to adapt to the uncommon visual and narrative language before them. The clear and strict composition of the images is reminiscent of old Egyptian sculptures and paintings. The same effect is achieved by the spare, dignified movements of the actors, their relief-like arrangement on each backdrop, the ancient walls, the horizon, or the desert. The use of classical Arabic reinforces the impression of remoteness, alienation, but also monumentalism. However, these allusions to past greatness are not a shallow glorification: they are starkly contradicted by the painful loss of and alienation from that very past, as expressed through Wanis. The theme of a thwarted reconnection to the country’s historical roots makes this film still topical to this day.