The architectural features of socio-spatial transformation in Hassan Al-Imam’s Cairo Trilogy

Abstract

The urban scenery that dominated Cairo since the nineteenth century was a spatial superimposition of tradition and modernity, represented in the social and architectural composition of the city. The cinematic medium in Egypt attempted to visualize such overlap through a vivid depiction of spatial transformations occurring within the micro and macro urban levels revealing hidden aspects of social order and organizational behaviour. This article sheds light on Egyptian filmmaker Hassan Al-Imam’s Cairo Trilogy films, based on the critically acclaimed novels by Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz, where the story takes place in the heart of early twentieth-century Cairo spanning from 1917 to 1944. The films’ physical features illustrate the morphology of time and urban space constituting to the socio-spatial narratives of the local setting, a theoretical framework adopted by the authors named cine-spatial representation. Through the examination of such connection within the settings across the three films, the article reveals the influence of non-physical elements on the physicality of architectural and urban space, creating a visual narrative from social collectivism to individualist fragmentation.