What first draws audience’s attention while watching Mohammad Khan’s movies are the visual scenes rich with details. Khan (1942-2016) was keen on filming in the street, primarily in Cairo, and monitoring the effect of light on people.

His movies explore the city and people’s movement inside of it, while prominently focusing on the setting. During his career, Khan preferred to work with director of photography Saed Shemi. Sometimes, however, Khan worked with others such as Tareq Telmasani in ‘A Journey of Life’ (1986).

What first draws audience’s attention while watching Mohammad Khan’s movies are the visual scenes rich with details. Khan (1942-2016) was keen on filming in the street, primarily in Cairo, and monitoring the effect of light on people.

His movies explore the city and people’s movement inside of it, while prominently focusing on the setting. During his career, Khan preferred to work with director of photography Saed Shemi. Sometimes, however, Khan worked with others such as Tareq Telmasani in ‘A Journey of Life’ (1986).

I used to think that Khan focused on sound in his films, such as Radio Monte Carlo in ‘A Journey of Life,’ songs of Laila Murad in ‘The Heliopolis Flat’ (2007) and his fondness for Abdul Halim Hafez in the ‘The Wife of an Important Man’ (1988). However, over time, I noticed his passion for settings and his attempt to ascribe time to place.

It is not a tendency towards realism as written in literature, but through the setting, where Khan broadcast his messages. Place is not merely the background of the events but has a presence or influence to change the events, putting its mark on the course of the filmed story. Usually, the great encounter is between the protagonist and the city, while the time is the movie theater. Everything leaves its tracks on this space, and time only passes until the end of the film.

Image of contemporary man

A filmmaker embodies the imagination through the filmed events and places and gives a realistic character to his or her story, confirming that time has passed in this setting and art has become an achievable dream.

With Kahn’s recent death, I began to re-explore his rich world, not searching for the best, but for the place’s shoots he planted inside his art world – the hero’s relationship with the city. This concern declined in his recent works, though the sound issue remained.

Some time ago, I became convinced that art only reflected contemporary human beings, and their obsessions, concerns, pains, rashness, eternal adolescence, and how technology turned human beings’ into neglectful people. This is what I find in several works of Khan where characters wrestle with reality or contemplate the passing of time. We may notice a striking presence in these ideas and sensitive attempts to monitor the life and struggle of a contemporary human being with the city, such as in ‘The Artful’ (1983).

An artist’s career is not only measured in successes, but a mix of failures and successes. Artists employ failures artistically so as not to be in the worst image. Ultimately, artists are contemporary human beings who are right sometimes and wrong at other times. They are affected by the circumstances and are forced to take options they would have never taken otherwise.

Khan made 26 films, including commercial and light works that entertained audiences. He reflected Egyptians’ love of Asian action movies through ‘Mr. Karate’ (1993). In his film ‘Days of Sadat’ (2001), however, he did not raise any new questions or provide a different vision about the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (1918-1981). Writer Ahmed Bahgat depended on the diary of Sadat and his wife Jihan.

Going out of the conflict arena

We do not write about Khan’s life to lament or bid farewell to a great director, but because he was a contemporary artist. During his career, Khan was preoccupied with questions that may have concerned others but they moved him toward remarkable and striking artistic attempts in the Egyptian cinema. I favor the aesthetics of some, and certainly not all, of his films.

There were footbridges crossing over Tahrir Square and next to it in Bab Louq area, there was a bus station. We see passers-by, their clothing colors, body shapes, tastes, and their familiarity with the camera passing amidst them. Certainly, actor Nour El-Sherif (1946-2015) did not run among them, carrying a bag, every day, and he did not hold Nora’s hand. They were indeed moving in the street in this artistic space ‘Sunstroke’ (1980), not inside a set. I think of the effort made in order to get such high quality external filming.

Khan excelled in filming street chases, often on foot, not in cars. In ‘Half a Million’ (1983), chases were the main component. What would have happened if ‘Sunstroke’ had not had all of those chase scenes in the metro?

In ‘Knight of the City’ (1993), Fares was required to pay L.E. 5,000,000 urgently. We watch him roaming his city to collect the money, accompanied by Umm Kulthum’s songs. He was forced to sell a sprawling kingdom as soon as possible as the creditor sees. We know neither the causes of the loss nor the need to pay.

Fares’ world collapsed when the government issued a decision to confiscate the funds of investment companies in which Egyptians saved their money in exchange for a return/interest higher than that provided by banks. The decision came due to fraudulent operations by several companies.

Khan was not concerned with providing stories and secrets of the money world in the early 1990s. Fares’ crisis, after the confiscation of a company in which he was a partner, reflects the city’s reality, governance policies and distribution of powers. It is a journey of loss in a place that reviled the former dealer of dollars who founded his kingdom through bad money.

Fares worked in all prohibited areas, but escaped legal punishment. The car speedily crosses the city, without hesitation, in a reference to the loss of all his money. The film draws a map of Fares’ kingdom, which is grabbed by a new knight. He leaves his city only to go to Alexandria, for one night, where he admits his love for a nurse (Lucy) whom he met by coincidence, but he only asks her to marry him when they depart the capital together.

Khan usually freed the hero when the latter left Cairo, which challenges and crushes modern humans. Outside the center, he is free and he discovers other options in life as in ‘A Bird on the Road’ (1981) and ‘Gone and Never Come Back’ (1985).