The Lamps of Stage Seven
Are Burning Again
A winter spent inside the Nile Lantern soundstages — and what the brass arc-lamps, the cracked nitrate reels and the night watchmen still remember of a studio that taught a country how to be photographed.
The watchman at Stage Seven is called Hassanein, and he keeps the keys on a brass ring his father carried before him. On the night of the long rain in February I followed him under a colonnade of papyrus capitals — the same ones the set decorators raised in 1937 for The Vizier — and he opened a side door that nobody had opened, he said, since the last Nile Lantern feature wrapped in 1962. The lamps still worked. They always work.
IInside the Soundstage
What you notice first is the height. The roof beam at Stage Seven sits eleven metres above the floor, and the catwalks are reached by a single iron ladder that the visiting cameramen brought over with the rest of the optical equipment in the autumn of 1935. Hassanein flicked a knife-switch the size of a serving spoon and seventeen brass arc-lamps came on one after another, the way candles come on in a midnight chapel — slowly, and with a hesitation that felt almost devotional.