Screens and Veils

Maghrebi Women's Cinema

Florence Martin

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780253223418
• eBook ISBN: 9780253005656
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

An analysis of seven films by female directors from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Examined within their economic, cultural, and political context, the work of women Maghrebi filmmakers forms a cohesive body of work. Florence Martin examines the intersections of nation and gender in seven films, showing how directors turn around the politics of the gaze as they play with the various meanings of the Arabic term hijab (veil, curtain, screen). Martin analyzes these films on their own theoretical terms, developing the notion of "transvergence" to examine how Maghrebi women's cinema is flexible, playful, and transgressive in its themes, aesthetics, narratives, and modes of address. These are distinctive films that traverse multiple cultures, both borrowing from and resisting the discourses these cultures propose. "Produced by a diverse group of women filmmakers—Assia Djebar, Farida Benlyazid, Yamina Bachir-Chouikh, Raja Amari, Naida El Fani, Yasmine Kassari, and Selma Baccar—these movies reflect the Algerian civil war, colonialism, patriarchy, undocumented immigrants, sexuality, identity, and the social mores that have dominated the political, social, and economic spheres in the Maghreb.... This book inscribes a new chapter in women filmmaking on the Maghreb; it makes an important contribution to cinema, literature, and cultural studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended." — Choice "An excellent presentation and analysis of women's filmmaking from North Africa.... Its attention to contemporary film theory is matched by its presentation of materials derived from Martin's interviews with filmmakers, interviews that reveal a sincere engagement with the filmmakers and a deep understanding of contemporary production. In short, this is a fine book that will be of interest to anyone working on or teaching film and gender studies in North African and Middle Eastern studies, and beyond." — Journal of Arabic Literature, Issue 44, 2013

Coda

Films by Maghrebi women are exceedingly diverse in both form and content. Gathering them under the singular, reductive label of “Maghrebi women’s cinema” does not do justice to the array of their nuances and idiosyncratic styles. Nonetheless, we observed similar trends and patterns in the films we examined, which unite the directors beyond the geographical and cultural site from which they operate. These include a dialogical practice very similar to the ones highlighted by the two Mediterranean storytellers, Echo and Shahrazad; a transnational feminist worldview and agenda; and mobile patterns of transvergence.

This study is structured in three steps that retrace – along a loosely chronological axis – the cinematic pattern of delivery, as it examines: (1) the storyteller/film director’s narrative devices; (2) the performance of the tale (with its play on the cinematic hijab on which the narrative is performed and projected); (3) the transvergent audience that receives and responds to the filmic tale. Through it all, modern-day directors recycle and adapt ancient narrative devices to their transmodern reality. The first act of the book, in which Echo and Shahrazad are reinterpreted by Djebar and Benlyazid in their films (The Nuba and Door to the Sky), has firmly established that the structures of storytelling away from the male (narcissistic) center of power endure. Echo’s words, which the nymph steals from Narcissus and then manipulates, linger long after her corporeal obliteration from the landscape. The self-absorbed male power figure is unable to erase them. Shahrazad’s narrative mise en abyme allows today’s filmmakers to inject politics in their films, and talk to both the sultan and Dunyazad.

Dunyazad is the primary witness of everything, once she has been invited on the first night into the sultan’s chamber at her sister’s request.¹ The storytelling rests on Dunyazad’s cooperation. She asks and her sister responds. Yet, Suzanne Gauch tells us, there is more to this relationship: “The often overlooked relationship of the two sisters is fraught with complexities, for without [Dunyazad]’s convenient, prearranged prompting, Shahrazad would never have had occasion to deploy the power of her stories. [Dunyazad]’s discreet presence, her disembodied voice from beneath the bed, effectively legitimates Shahrazad’s voice.”² The “disembodied voice” of the sister resembles the one of Echo, as it responds to and helps fashion Shahrazad’s narrative. In a cinematic context, Dunyazad’s incorporeal voice serves as a useful metaphor for two phenomena: the asynchronous relationship between filmmaking and film screening, as well as the mode of construction of meaning specific to film viewing. The viewers in a movie theater see the film long after it has been made, and thus they respond to the director’s film projection in a delayed fashion; while she makes her film, the director has to imagine and stage their future responses, their disembodied voices that will respond to and complete its performance at the time of projection. The audience sees the film and then mentally brings together clues taken from the referential space off-screen shared with the tale-teller. Here the prompt comes after the time of the storytelling, but the director still relies on that prompt for the performance of the film to achieve full meaning.

Hence the mythical Shahrazad/Dunyazad dyad mirrors the contemporary director/viewer dyad. A transnational feminist reading of these films has allowed us to see a set of not only shared narrative structures, shared filmic aesthetics, but also what de Lauretis calls women’s “aesthetics of reception” across borders. In that regard, women directors are clearly whispering to their female audience. Such revelatory cinema may backfire at times, when the directors (who often commute between the Maghreb and Europe) face an extra layer of culturally enforced resistance from their audience at home.³ Yet women directors (like participant observers born in the culture they represent), given their intimate knowledge of women’s interiors and language, are the only ones in a position to project women’s hushed, private secrets. If the revelation is at first deemed obscene (in the original sense of the term: off-stage, away from the proscenium), it endures nonetheless and becomes recognized at an institutional level – Satin Rouge, for instance, became the official Tunisian film shown at Tunisian embassies in the United States and Europe over the next few years following its release.

In this study, the critique of transvergence yields use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Overture: Maghrebi Women’s Transvergent Cinema
• Act I: Transnational Feminist Storytellers: Shahrazad, Assia, and Farida
• Act II: Transvergent Screens
• Act III: From Dunyazad to Transvergent Audiences
• Coda