Lecture
“Dizzy with Wonder:” Early Cinema and the Birth of Movie-Fandom in Egypt, 1896-1935
- Date
- Thursday 16 October 2025
- Time
- Series
- What's New?! Fall Lecture Series 2025
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
The cinema arrived in Egypt in 1896 and quickly became a part of the country’s already established urban entertainment and business networks. By the early 1900s, movie-going became a regular feature of Egypt’s leisure infrastructure, and cinema theatres increasingly appeared throughout the country. In tandem with an expanding movie-going landscape, a vibrant cinema fandom emerged that found expression in the press and material culture of the time. In this talk, I will share my ongoing research on early movie cultures and audiences in Egypt from 1896, when the first cinema exhibitions took place, until the mid-1930s, when the cinema was firmly consolidated. Using a variety of sources, I will sketch an outline of Egypt’s early cinema history and explore how audiences in Egypt made sense of the cinema in their lives, contributed to the broader social formation of cinematic cultures, and pegged their aspirations and desires onto the world of cinema.
About the speaker
Ifdal Elsaket is assistant director (Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle East Studies) at the
Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo. Ifdal received her PhD in history and Arabic and Islamic
Studies from the University of Sydney, Australia, where she worked on the history of cinema in
Egypt, 1896-1952. She continues to work on histories of the cinema in Egypt, focusing on the early cinema, audiences, the star system, and the off-screen dynamics of film production and exhibition and audiences. She co-edited (alongside Philippe Meers (UAntwerp) and Daniel Biltereyst (UGent) the volume Cinema in the Arab World: New Histories, New Approaches (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Ifdal is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled: Movie-Mad in Egypt: Cinema, Empire and Nation, 1896–1939.
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