Mahmoud Qasim – författare

Egyptian cinema... is not completely Egyptian, except for a small group of its films, which are close to four thousand and five hundred films. We will find that most of the films are imported from abroad. Either influenced by global waves that gained popularity at a certain stage, or by direct quoting from films, literary novels, or plays, and with such a clear influence on Egyptian cinema, it becomes clear how important comparative studies are, or what can be called comparative cinema bypassing.Comparative cinema, in its simplest form, studies the relationship between the written word in the literary text and the film image. The image is essentially a written word, depicted in a way that the eye can see it after mixing it. And if the word has its expressive vocabulary that distinguishes it from the image, and that it is often difficult to embody, then the image, on the other hand, is difficult to describe with a word with the same accuracy, no matter how precise the expression, or the eloquence of the writer, and from that the importance of linking the word and the image as a language of expression becomes clear.

It is important to have a study on science and imagination, to what extent cinema has reached this brilliant status of imagination, and the creation of eternal dreams that humans have dreamed of achieving, most notably ascending into space, conquering galaxies, descending to the cities of the depths of the seas and oceans, learning about the achievements of genetic engineering, the conflict between human brains and artificial intelligence, and all the topics of science that have become at the forefront of the interests of writers and filmmakers who presented all these numerous films of scientific imagination, in all parts of the world, especially in The United States and the former Soviet Union, so the parties competed not only in laboratories, but also in movie theaters and the shelves of scientific imagination libraries, to anticipate the future through what scientists imagined about the achievements of their work in the future.

The book is not the first of its kind in the Arab world, but it is the first of its kind to devote such pages to Arabic literature written in French, both in the Arab world and abroad. The author asserts that Arab writers who write in French have been greatly wronged in their homelands, in many ways. These include the scale of the translation movement, on the one hand, and the perceived distrust, intentionally, as if this writer, who has adopted a language of expression primarily for the colonizer, has thereby become a collaborator!! This is a naive notion. The book attempts to panorama many important names and shed light on the most prominent figures in their countries, through research, analysis, and monitoring of this literature.

Thirty-five years after the publication of the novel "Why" by the writer Mahmoud Qasim, in a limited edition that did not go beyond the city of Alexandria, here we are publishing this novel full of flow and experimentation, which carries all the writer''s energy and ability to change the traditional form of storytelling and novelistic dialogue. We are rediscovering a literary text with its own identity.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the contemporary world has become obsessed with awards, especially literary awards. These awards came with the expansion of the concept of transforming human thought and creativity into material value. The primary goal was to promote award-winning works in order to bring in more money. With the escalation of wars in the twentieth century, the number of awards increased in a way that became closer to the prices.Real and fictitious institutions competed to issue new awards, and the money spent on awards became less than the money the awards brought in, especially in the Arab world.It is a wild world that reflects the times of capital and investment, and it is important that we stop at this phenomenon. Is it in favor of creativity or against it?

With every love story in our lives, there''s a particular song that seeps into our souls, bringing back memories every time we listen to it. We lived in a fortunate era called the era of Abdel Halim Hafez, when he sang "For Girls," "The Homeland," "The President," and "The River." Through these songs, we lived years of happiness and romance. Our lives included not just a few songs, but dozens of songs by Arab and foreign singers. But Abdel Halim Hafez was always at the forefront, and his songs are present in every love story we''ve memorized by heart... songs that continue to stir longing for successive generations. The films from this era also played a notable role in enriching our feelings toward everything around us. It''s the first novel of its kind, about a time that can never be forgotten, no matter how many years pass.

Film critic Mahmoud Qassem discusses political films that discussed many of the political and social phenomena that occurred during the time the film was released, including "Miramar," "Terrorism and Kebab," "The Terrorist," and others... These films had to turn into historical films with the passage of time, given that both politics and history move around us quickly, especially in Egypt, which witnessed many rebellions, revolutions, and coups in the era of cinema, and we have to understand the correct meanings of what we see or read.

They asked many lovers to search for alternative words to the famous phrase with which a person expresses what is hidden in the heart, which is "I love you." So all the writers kept searching, and not one of them found a new sentence. The author of the novel in our hands relaxed himself while writing, and left all the things that were around him to bear witness to every whisper and touch with his girl whom he loved, and he let each of them speak and record what he saw in search of the alternative sentence.The author seems to have tried to revive his fertility through these witnesses who all confessed what his words allowed him to do, so the one novel that linked two mature lovers had more than one vision, and only one fate... Let us know what the author did?

It is written on the front cover of this book that it is an autobiography of the author. Do you see to what extent the phrase applies to what was said by its author? Is it an autobiography, memoirs, or notes written by its author over successive years of his life? He moved from a child to a boy and a young man until he was close to seventy. He did not release his book to the people until he had become more experienced and mature, and he had dozens or even hundreds of secrets that he had hidden from others for years. They were written in different linguistic vocabulary, each of which expresses the year in which each number of pages is written. When he was over sixty, the writer was overcome with courage and took out his book, repeating: Let them say what they want about me. They are doing what they can to me, as I have become almost unfit for human consumption in all its forms.Do you think he was honest in what he wrote, or did he hide a lot of prohibited things that cannot be revealed?

This is a book about the films that people watch now, especially at the beginning of the current century. There may be many films around us that are characterized by superficiality and naivety, but fortunately we have filmmakers who dealt with films very seriously, stood against the abusive censors, and presented a good group of controversial films on many very sensitive topics, including sex, religion, and politics. This book is an examination of this cinema, its makers, and an attempt to identify to what extent the films were worthy of controversy.

It deals with cinema and the city, or to say cinema and place. The cinema camera was able to penetrate all places, both imagined and real, and the cinematic image preserved the old forms of the cities in which we lived or visited, as it were, and films became a witness to the rapid transformations that occurred in life in places, and created a state of nostalgia for people.Cinema also revealed that places are eternity, and that all the stories that took place in them fade, but the only ability of the cinema camera remains to preserve memories of the place, no matter how its features change. In this book, the pen of critic Mahmoud Qassem travels to record how the camera recorded the cities'' approaching cities, and reading becomes a state of recalling wonderful memories.

In the darkness of cinema, these beautiful stars are in our company. We see them in all their states, when they are immersed in love or sadness, dancing or singing, covering their bodies, or revealing some of them, and you feel that they did all that for you alone, so you are overcome with euphoria and pride, and you begin to search for everything related to this beauty, how she lives, and whether she is in life as she was on the screen, and from here the art magazine industry became popular, and we learned what is called girl power. The cover, and from here we also saw specific female faces shining on the fronts of art magazines. These magazines knew how to deal with the faces of magazines without other people, whether they were men, or they were stars who did not have the same attractiveness.

Mahmoud Qassem''s cinematic writings are distinguished by their archival ability to collect these cultural materials related to Arab and international arts and literature, especially in cinema and literature. He owns a large number of files on figures in literature, cinema and plastic art. There was a special interest in contemporary literature, and these materials served as references through which he wrote and created many of his books, the most prominent of which are cinematic and cultural encyclopedias. But the pace of work increased significantly after he acquired collections of Egyptian and Arab film notebooks, and since such notebooks contained documents and pictures not found in any other source of information, the idea of ​​this book came, which was to read those documents that were issued between the years 1927, the year in which feature cinema was born for the first time, and the year 1959, and that period was the most fertile in interest in issuing such publications.

Faith will remain the primary focus of human interest at all times and places. In the era of cinema, people watched on screens a lot of things related to their beliefs. As for Egypt, Islam is the main focus in most of the stories we see, whether in historical films, or in stereotypical stories in which good triumphs over evil.This is a book about cinema and religion in Egypt. How cinema portrayed people''s religiosity, the status of clerics, how we practice rituals from one person to another, and of course the relations between Muslims and people of other faiths under the same sky, the status of the prophets, and the religious symbols on the walls that express a person''s relationship with his faith. .

If each of us reviews his life, whatever the age stage, he will discover that a person is a group of complex expectations, intertwined with each other, and cannot be separated into individual units. You are waiting for success, with the arrival of an important message, in addition to a call from your beloved, or hearing news in the news. Or attending a football match, or the arrival of sums of money that may arrive or be delayed for a long time, in addition to millions of small waits.This novel''s heroes have been waiting for wealth to arrive all their lives, and they discover that they are waiting for many things that will come with wealth. Including better housing, marriage, and moving to the other shore.This is the first Arabic novel that talks about waiting in its multiple meanings, and it believes that we actually spend our lives inside an eternal basement of waiting... and that time means waiting inside or outside yourself.