Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Nightingale's Prayer
1959 · Henry Barakat · The Nightingale's Prayer on Sightlines
A bird calls over the fields of Upper Egypt. It is the curlew, the karawan, and its cry gives Taha Hussein's 1934 novella and Henry Barakat's 1959 film their title: Doʿaʾ al-Karawan, the curlew's prayer, or its call. The first time you hear it, it is only a sound. Then it comes back, and by now it carries something. The something is grief.
Keep that sound in mind, because the whole film works the same way. Something is planted and then returns, and each time it returns it weighs more.
Amna, played by Faten Hamama, is a young woman from the Ṣaʿīd, Egypt's rural south. After the loss of the father, her family of women is cast out and pushed into domestic service. Her sister Hanadi works in the house of an engineer, an educated man of the new Egypt, and he seduces and abandons her. Under the village honor code, that is no private sorrow. It is a sentence, and the code that passes it allows men to kill women for it. So Amna takes service in the engineer's own house, and she means to avenge the dishonor there.
A revenge plot is the purest form of what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called the action-image. In his account of classical cinema, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. The film is the chain that links the two: situation, then action, then a new situation. The grandest version he called the large form. In it, a world surrounds a person and presses on them until a decisive act answers it. Deleuze named that surrounding world the synsign, the encompasser. Barakat's Ṣaʿīd is exactly that kind of milieu. We see it in open fields, the river and low mud-brick houses, shot with an attention that is close to documentary. Clan, custom and the vengeful uncle all point the same way. The plot asks Amna for one act.
What makes the film worth seeing now is how long Barakat holds that act back, and how much of the holding he lets us watch.
Deleuze borrowed a name for that holding from the philosopher Henri Bergson. A living body, Bergson said, is a center of indetermination. It is an interval between what we perceive and what we do, a gap where a stimulus does not pass straight through into a response. Most action cinema shrinks that gap to nothing. The Nightingale's Prayer lives inside it. Barakat keeps placing Amna in postures of service: she waits, carries and attends to the man she has come to destroy. Any one of these ordinary household gestures could become the decisive one. None of them does, at least not yet, and the film's suspense is made of that not-yet. The interval is where Amna hesitates, and Barakat makes it the film's main setting.
You can see the interval on Hamama's face. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up that shows a feeling registered but not yet turned into action. He distinguished two kinds of face. One reflects a single steady quality. The other is a face across which small movements build toward a threshold, and he called this the potisign. Hamama gives us the second kind. Her Amna has to perform servility and warmth while holding something murderous underneath, and the drama lives in what that costs her. Watch for the moments when a feeling she did not choose arrives, a reluctant, guilty pull toward the engineer himself. Vengeance and desire now aim at the same man. The face has to carry both, because the plot has room for only one.
Barakat learned the frame for this from Hitchcock. Notorious (1946) puts Ingrid Bergman inside the household of the man she is meant to bring down, and lets intimacy wear down her resolve under a constant fear of being found out. Deleuze argued that Hitchcock invented a new kind of image, the relation-image or mental image. In it the viewer becomes a knowing third party who holds the relations the characters cannot see. Barakat builds on exactly that. We know who this servant is. The engineer does not. So every exchange between master and servant plays twice, once as household routine and once as the slow approach of a reckoning.
The black and white sharpens all of this. In the engineer's villa, Barakat stages scenes in pools of light with shadow pressing in from the edges. Deleuze traced this kind of lighting to German Expressionism, where the gradient between light and dark gives rooms and objects a charged life of their own. In this house the shadows hold what Amna hides. The move from village to villa is itself an argument: the move from an archaic order of clan and custom to a modern, uncertain one. The film's ancestors explain how Barakat could stage it. Kamal Selim's Determination (1939) gave Egyptian cinema the studio-built quarter, where class and custom are staged in constructed sets. Barakat spreads that method across two worlds and makes the journey between them carry the film's moral weight.
The honor code has its own history on screen. Sons of Aristocrats (1932) brought the stage melodrama's scheme of seduction, dishonor and blood-punishment into Egyptian film. There the code drove the action. Barakat keeps the scheme and turns it into the subject under investigation. The milieu still demands its act, but the film no longer treats that demand as self-evident. It holds the demand up to the light. This is how melodrama becomes a social argument here: with moral seriousness rather than sensation.
Hamama had rehearsed this kind of role. Your Day Will Come (1951), from Zola's Thérèse Raquin, set her pattern of turning prestige literature into serious drama about guilt and reckoning. Hamama's style of controlled, interior suffering also descends from Max Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), where a woman's devotion carries the story and the camera moves with her feeling. Sleepless (1957) shows the same engine running in parallel, with Hamama's star presence co-writing a prestige novel's meaning. With The Nightingale's Prayer that engine reached its peak. The film competed at Cannes in 1960, and it is widely counted among the finest Egyptian films ever made.
Its significance for the art is subtle. The film never leaves classical continuity editing, and it never becomes the modern cinema of drifting watchers that Deleuze would set against the action-image. Instead it strains the classical form from within. It takes the most action-hungry plot there is and spends its length in the gap before the act. It asks what happens to a person when the world's demand and her own feeling cannot both be met. We won't tell you how Barakat answers that.
Listen for the curlew. Each time it calls, ask what Amna would do if she were only the plot's instrument. Then watch Hamama's face to see what she does instead.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — The revenge plot: the milieu of honor demands that Amna avenge her sister's dishonor by a decisive act against the engineer.
- the encompasser — The Upper Egyptian village of clan, custom and the vengeful uncle, shot with near-documentary attention to fields, river and mud-brick architecture, as the encompassing milieu that calls for the act.
- the interval — Amna's long stay in the engineer's house in postures of service, where everyday domestic labor carries a concealed intent that the plot keeps deferring.
- icon of power — Hamama's performance of suppression: servility and warmth performed over murderous grief, with real feeling intruding slowly and involuntarily.
- the mental-image — Suspense structure modeled on Notorious: the audience holds the secret of Amna's purpose against the engineer's ignorance, so each household exchange reads twice.
- expressionism — High-contrast black-and-white interiors in the villa, with pooled light and encroaching shadow externalizing Amna's concealment and the moral darkness of her plan.
- symbol — The curlew's recurring call, a sound motif planted and recalled on the track, condensing grief and fate and giving the film its title.