Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Night of Counting the Years
1969 · Shadi Abdel Salam · The Night of Counting the Years on Sightlines
A young man stands in a landscape of pale rock, and the camera leaves him there. Behind him the cliffs of the Theban west bank fill the frame. The light is hard and he is very small. His name is Wanis, his father has just died, and his older brothers have told him the secret that feeds the clan: in the hills above the village of Kurna there is a hidden tomb full of royal mummies, and for years the family has been quietly stripping it and selling the pieces on the black market.
Another film would turn this into a thriller. All the ingredients are there: smugglers, a secret, a family under strain, the government's Antiquities Service somewhere offstage. Shadi Abdel Salam, an architect and costume designer making the only feature he would ever finish, turns that film down. What he gives us instead is a young man looking. Then looking again.
This is where Gilles Deleuze becomes useful company. Deleuze split cinema into two broad regimes. In the first, the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the editing carries us from cause to effect. Most films still work this way. In the second, the time-image, that chain breaks. The character no longer knows how to answer what they see, so they stop acting and start seeing. Deleuze calls this figure the seer (le voyant): someone who watches and endures. What reaches us then is what he calls pure optical and sound situations, scenes where looking and listening are all anyone can do.
Wanis is one of cinema's great seers. His problem is not a puzzle he could solve with a clever move. The money that keeps his people alive comes from selling off the bodies of their own ancestors, and no single act can make that right. So he walks among the temples and the necropolis, and Ahmed Marei plays him with a watchful, tormented stillness. Watch his face in repose. The feeling is all there, building, and nothing lets it out. The film's slow pans and creeping zooms move at the speed of his conscience, not at the speed of plot.
The lens matters because it explains something that might otherwise feel like mere slowness. The long-held compositions are not padding. They are the drama itself. When a man cannot act, the duration of his looking becomes the story.
Abdel Salam's own invention lies in what he did with the bodies inside the frame. He had spent years designing monumental period worlds for Egyptian historical epics like Saladin (1963), and here he packs all that scenographic knowledge into single shots. Characters stand and sit in frozen, statuesque poses. Group scenes are blocked frontally, side by side, like a carved frieze. The living clan is staged the way Pharaonic art stages the dead.
Deleuze had a name for this kind of meaning carried by posture: a cinema of the body, in which the attitude of the body holds time inside it. The finer term is the gest, a posture that lays bare a social relation. Here the relation is lineage. When the brothers sit in the pose of a tomb relief, the composition makes an argument no line of dialogue could make as cleanly: these men and the mummies they sell belong to one unbroken line. They are robbing their own family.
The sound pushes the same way. Everyone speaks classical Arabic, the language of scripture and inscription, rather than the Egyptian colloquial that was standard in the national cinema. The effect is incantatory. Villagers sound like voices from a wall. Mario Nascimbene's score, all wind and lament and strange archaic textures, refuses to underline the action, and the actual wind over the stone is given room. The present tense drains out of the film. You come to feel the land as layered, a surface with the past pressing up from underneath. Deleuze, borrowing from the Straubs, spoke of a stratigraphic image, a landscape that holds buried history the way rock holds strata. The Night of Counting the Years is not built on voice-over in the Straub manner, but its frames have that same sense of ground that remembers.
There is a tension worth noticing, and the film is richer for it. André Bazin praised cinema's ability to record the world as found, and Abdel Salam shot on real locations in Upper Egypt rather than on sets. Here the antiquity is found, not built. Yet everything placed within that found world is rigorously composed. The film keeps both: documentary stone and hieratic ritual in the same frame.
Its ancestors are easy to hear once you know them. Roberto Rossellini, who lent his name to help the film travel, had just made The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966), where history is ceremony observed at a cool distance in long, undramatized takes. Abdel Salam inherits that method. Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943) gave him the frieze: figures set like carved reliefs in shadowed rooms. Robert Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) showed how draining emotion from face and voice could turn speech into recitation, which is just what the classical Arabic does here. Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960) had already stranded small human figures in monumental stone and let drama dissolve into dead time. Visconti's The Leopard (1963) offered the mournful, materially exact portrait of an order giving way to a new age. Abdel Salam takes these European lessons and turns them toward a question none of those films could ask: who owns the Egyptian past, and what does it cost to keep it?
That question is why the film matters beyond its beauty. It was made in Egypt's nationalized film sector, which freed it from the stars and melodrama of the commercial market, and it showed that an Arab cinema could think through form itself, with posture, language and duration doing the work of argument. It has become a touchstone of Arab art film, and the 2009 restoration backed by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation has given it back to the world.
When you watch it, try not to wait for something to happen. Watch where the bodies are placed, and how the stillness of the living answers the stillness of the dead. Listen to the wind. Ask with Wanis what a people owes its ancestors. The film will not hurry you toward an answer.
Concepts in play
- the seer (voyant) — Wanis, newly let in on the clan's secret, carries the drama through watchful, tormented stillness rather than action; the film turns down the thriller its plot could support
- pure optical and sound situations — Long-held static compositions, slow pans and creeping zooms through the necropolis and temples; wind over stone and the river given room in the soundtrack
- crisis of the action-image — Grave robbery, smuggling and the Antiquities Service could drive a suspense plot, but the narrative unfolds as a slow moral awakening with cutting set to the rhythm of mourning rather than suspense
- the gest — Frontal, frieze-like group blocking and statuesque poses that echo Pharaonic art, rhyming the living clan with the ancestral dead they exploit
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Hieratic, static performances and faces held in contemplative repose; emotion carried through bearing and gesture rather than outburst
- the stratigraphic image — Real Theban locations shot as monumental, layered ground, with dialogue in classical Arabic and an archaic score that remove the film from the present tense