ASMAHAN
Driven by an obsessive fascination with the Syrian-Egyptian actress and singer Asmahan, this 21-minute film poem re-edits footage from a 1944 feature to dismantle its original melodrama in favor of an ethereal, dreamlike portrait. Isolating her gestures, glances, and presence, the film transforms the actress into a cosmos unto herself—a magnetic figure stage-managing the world around her even as it threatens to collapse into shadow.
“Unlike most cinephiles, I’ve never been interested in the cult of the actress—or actor—until Hisham Bizri rendered actress-fascination palpable… Bizri’s work is an obsessive fever-dream not of a movie narrative but of an actress’s presence; as in his great predecessor, Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, his actress is presented as a world in herself, with a cosmos of both varied emotions and varying degrees of inscrutability contained in her face.”
— Fred Camper, Artist and Film Critic (Chicago, June 13, 2006)
21 min (2005)