Egypt’s cinematic gems: Blind Ambition

When I hear the expression “blind ambition” I think of a clichéd shot of New York’s skyscrapers that I’ve seen so many times in Hollywood romcoms.

For this repeatedly memorized shot with a repetitive making process, the camera is on a tripod doing a 45-degree rotation horizontally or vertically directed at the sky, with an ultra convex lens that over-emphasizes the buildings’ curve to make it seem like their tops are miles away, the grey concrete coldly splitting the sky’s blue to a soundtrack full of optimism. It’s a visual transcription of a fantasy, which visits us all, of what success looks like. Success is to be hard, tall, shiny, grey, silent and of a complicated geometric composition. Either projected on us or reflected from inside us, the image touches — if the conditions are right — a feeling, and we become happy, regardless of how close or far this success and its eminent skyscrapers are.     

Blind Ambition (2012) was the first video work I saw by Hassan Khan. I was starting to develop an interest in Cairo’s contemporary art scene at the time. Before Blind Ambition I had seen images of artworks Khan had showed in other places in the world — writings, sculptures, photographs and complex physical installations — that drew my attention to an extremely dense and genuine visual language. I was astonished at how embedded it is in details that cannot be called anything other than “Egyptian,” without any orientalism or exploitation. I admired how Khan spoke this language without falling into the trap of either bourgeois-artist-fascinated-by-the-poor or self-orientalizing-third-world-artist. So when the chance came to watch a 45-minute film he had shot entirely on two Samsung phones in Cairo, I was excited to see it.  

The truth is that I met the film with an open mind and no sinister intentions. Having previously sometimes failed to understand things or felt unwelcome looking at contemporary art in Cairene art spaces, I was prepared to watch what I might not understand or like. But this experience was different.

I don’t want to give too much away, but you realize immediately that Blind Ambition deliberately put itself in the predicament of relying on very limited yet flexible technology and resources. The mobile phone, as a device made for basic personal use, contains a camera that produces a dramatic image that has certain limitations that mean it can never compete with a camera made for cinematic production. It’s also a device that can exist anywhere and move smoothly in convoluted contexts, like Ramses Square at rush hour or a busy shopping mall or public transport. What can its camera do when it conspires with a cast of actors planted in such contexts pretending to be normal?

From the first frame, Blind Ambition plays a game with you that depends heavily on contrasts, as reflected through many of its components.

It pretends that it’s about to give you a traditional, captivating dramatic plot and shows you seeds of a conflict worthy of your attention. Conflicts occur between groups of characters and stories that have nothing in common other than a psychological ground we'll talk about later, but everything looks like it's shot on a phone just like yours — a medium-quality cinematography associated in your subconscious with events unworthy of the cinematic glorification or sophisticated artistic treatment you're watching now. It’s confusing.

The camera alternately swings closer to and further away from the characters and events, convinces you for a second that it’s extremely interested in what’s going on, then drifts away and loses interest and the dialogue fades with it. Then it jumps back into the center of things, full of enthusiasm, with no obvious explanation other than an enigmatic mood swing that fits — despite its ambiguity — with all the vicissitudes surrounding the situation.  

The actors argue. The dialogue is rich in detail and references that make it sound real. The characters are cleverly designed and the differences between them are loud and clear. The conversation is steered firmly. But the speech was recorded separately in a studio then added to the video, in a way that insists that what you see and what you hear don’t perfectly sync. The total absence of surrounding noise in scenes shot in a city that never stops producing it makes the film feel like an uncomfortable dream during a nap on public transport or in a room full of talkers.

The people get heavily involved in their conversation and their feelings swing around the center of it, from explosive passion (as if winning in this moment is of utmost importance) to sudden loss of interest in which they drift to a point far away from the moment they are in.  

The movie splinters sometimes violently and other times softly into nine main moments or scenes. In each, there is a dynamic between two or more human beings. If we try to find a common pattern between these nine moments — other than the absurdity of them all being completely normal, like transparent documentation of standard moments your ears overhear every day in Cairo — we find a recurrent conflict over some sort of domination. In each scene, parties fight to triumph over each other using physical strength, emotional blackmail, deception or stalling and exhaustion. Blind Ambition doesn’t judge these attempts, nor try to make you empathize with any party. It actually feeds your confusion by shuffling its presentation of the characters between glorification and contempt.  

The camera orbits the events the same way the people orbit each other in their tiring, looping conversations. Each moment of tension ends with nothing, just like the cycle of biological functions, as if people’s verbal wrestling is nothing more than human consumption of stress and slow death. The movie seems to have a strong opinion about each event and its surroundings, more than it cares about judging humans. Here lies the importance of the city in the story.  

Just as the camera moves closer and further from the actors’ faces and bodies, it also shifts its relationship with them or the way it perceives them as beings and organisms. Sometimes an actor appears as a universal embodiment of the one and only, the protagonist and the hero, other times he or she seems like one of many blind insects multiplying and running around the corners and cracks of their weird colony. The movie feels the surface of this colony/city, sees how people impose themsleves on it and how it imposes itself on people. The lens smells the metal of the vehicles, meandering, then jumps to a 40-year-old man’s face blowing out cigarette smoke like an old engine. The human is mashed with the mechanical, the hard with the soft, and everything melts into a gigantic multi-fabric sooty mass of detail and accumulations.  

Between each chapter of Blind Ambition there is a scene of a traffic jam through which the movie streams across the city’s congested veins. These segments remind you that there's a current much bigger than that which the protagonists of each scene are going through, and this current leads to every moment and is fed by every moment. Before each event we see a segment of temporary clinical death inside some metal body crawling slowly under heat, dust, boredom and nothingness. The motion from and toward the ambitions around which the obsessions of the humans in the film revolve is covered and woven with hours of blind paralysis.

Writing that last sentence changed my relationship with the expression “blind ambition.” For the first time I don’t think of blind ambition as a selfish, harsh, American evil, but as an evolutionary failure coming out of the limited collective sensibility of humans stuck in their colonies like worms under forgotten rocks, looking every day for meaning in survival.

The final scene — in which the camera follows a man in an elegant suit swinging a keychain from his fingertips in a coquettish manner as he crosses the famous Ramses Square in the middle of the city until he reaches a casino on top of the square’s highest building to look down on everything — encapsulates all the meanings of power and ambition that the movie has been prodding at. The whole film will stick to your memory like everything you saw in and on the edges of it. It will be difficult for you to drive along 6th of October Bridge above Ramses Square in the future without thinking you’re flying over the center of this city’s misery, the monument of its gloriously obsolescent glory, at an elevation that is exactly in the middle between a bottom and a top, and not remember Blind Ambition.

This is an edited translation of a text originally commissioned by Cairobserver.