Cabaret Crusades the secrets of Kabala – MOMA PS1 Final Project

Cabaret Crusades the secrets of Kabala – MOMA PS1

Wael Shawky is a 44 year old Egyptian artist who born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1971. He studied fine art at the University of Alexandria before receiving his master’s from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000.

In 2010 Shawky shows his remarkable third and final film of his trilogy called “Cabaret Crusades” a film made out of puppets. These marionettes are made out of a material called “Murano glass” a glass that is made on the Venetian island of Murano, Italy. The Murano glass comes in different colors and this could be shape into any type of object that is desire for the glassworker. In the film “Cabaret Crusades” Shawky created and uses marionettes made of Murano Glass making his film especial from others.

In the year 1167, the caliph of Cairo struck an unlikely alliance with the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem against impinging Turkic forces. Clinching the deal, a Christian delegate asked to shake the bare, ungloved hand of the caliph, a request that scandalized the Egyptian court.

This film was inspired from a 1983 book called “The Crusades through Arab Eyes” made it by a Lebanese historian named Amin Maalouf, this film span the period from the Pope Urban II’s council of Clermont, Which called for the First Crusades in 1095, to the Venetian Doge’s sacking of Constantinople in 1204. Shawky recounts these chapters from the Arab perspective using puppets. Shawky version of the Crusades is not based on a sentimentalize history, what he shows is the simplify story of a battle between Islam and Christianity. Making the viewer’s feel and see the ambiguity and contradiction of the humanistic missions of both sides. Among Muslims and Christians there is a wave of violence that are motivated by vanity and cruelty.

The dialogue of Crusaders is made in Classical Arabic, the language of the Koran. Once I went to see “Cabaret Crusades” for the first time complete I could say that I did not understand the language that they were speaking during the film. However, the film have subtitle in English in which made my life a little bit more easy to understand.

At the end of the film the viewers can appreciate a room of all Shawky marionettes that he used on his three film made it by him. Even a copy of the castles that he made with clay can be seen in this room. P.S the only marionettes Shawky didn’t created was the one made out of “Murano Glass”. I felt really interested in the way of how modern artist like Shawky implement a unique technique of using puppets in his film to narrate the history of the Crusaders in a simplify version. Even though Shawky touch a topic of two religion the Islam and Christian, this could be easily be a cliché and can be ethnic, and really problematic to those who are extremely religious. 

In here i'll show you couple of pictures from the MOMA PS1 "Cabaret Crusades"