Maghreb: Healthy Margins
When it comes to film, the category “NorthAfrican cinema” doesn’t tally with any actual reality. This assignment to geography and history doesn’t do justice to either the artists or their work. It may be convenient, but it nevertheless produces imaginary “insularities” and naturalises the dichotomy (still prevalent) between a dominant cinematographic “centre”, within which the essence of the present and the future of cinematographic art is played out, and “peripheral” cinematographies that are relegated to the rank of cultural curiosities supposed to inform about what is already known.
A ‘DIFFERENT’ CINEMA
We’re dealing here with documentary cinema rather than fiction, with some Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian films which, in spite of and thanks to their aesthetic and political marginality with regard to the dominant naturalist purr of the region, present themselves above all as contributions in which art (and therefore the questioning of forms) takes precedence over any identitybased anchoring. Timidly but surely, these films and their authors shed the weight of this illusory “specificity” with which they have been labelled in order to speak to the world: a world of which they are part of, needless to say. Films are made in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia against similar background in terms of public funding, and North African filmmaking can hardly be thought of regardless of the major trends affecting cinema almost everywhere in the world. A cross-section of the scenes in these three countries highlights the vitality of the cinematographic fringes, such fringes being understood in their aesthetic, political and economic sense. They breathe dynamism and diversity into these scenes, the bulk of which in the 1980s and 1990s were made up of an overscripted, rather expected naturalist cinema, favouring social drama, and to a lesser degree comedy, supported by the three states, and globally ‘harmless’ in relation to the authoritarian regimes in place. This naturalistic cinema has gradually imposed itself as a sort of supreme standard, ensuring an international recognition conferred by the major international festivals. This configuration interrupted fifteen years of effervescence following independence, during which a ‘different’ cinema had been able to emerge alongside more conventional films. For fiction, prime examples are Nahla (Algeria, 1979) by Farouk Beloufa, Le Mirage (Morocco, 1979) by Ahmed Bouanani and Khlifa Le teigneux (Tunisia, 1969) by Hamouda Ben Halima or, in a more essayist vein, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (Algeria, 1975) by Assia Djebar, Tahia ya Didou (Algeria, 1971) by Mohamed Zinet, Mokhtar (Tunisia, 1968) by Sadok Ben Aïcha, Chergui (Le Silence éloquent) (Morocco, 1975) by Moumen Smihi, as well as Ahmed Bouanani’s documentary Mémoire 14 (1971)—the twenty-three minutes that have survived— and his urban symphony 6 et 12 (1968).
MARGINS
Since the turn of the millennium, it is towards the margins of the mainstream filmmaking that one should look to measure the evolution of the region’s cinematographies. Spontaneously, these margins have gradually been carved out, without claiming to be a school or to be “representative” in any way, thanks to the films of Tariq Téguia and Narimane Mari in Algeria, Ala Eddine Slim in Tunisia; the documentary work of Leila Kilani, Ivan Boccara and Ali Essafi in Morocco, Hassen Ferhani in Algeria, Hamza Ouni inTunisia, and the essay films of Lamine Ammar Khodja and Djamel Beloucif. Those filmmakers have chosen to be outsiders because of their political line against the closed, fossilised systems who reject them; outsiders also because of the nature of the way these filmmakers look at the world, the joyful anarchy of some and the political impertinence of all. Moreover, from the point of view of cinema
tographic art, those filmmakers belong to genres considered as minor by national decision-makers (documentaries in all their variations, essay films, experimental films). Their films, having a restraineddistribution in their native countries, and being ostracised by official cultural policies, were often made without any state funding, and in the case of Algeria and Tunisia, sometimes without any authorisation to shoot (1). This dynamism of the cinematographic fringes of the Algerian and Tunisian scenes, and to a lesser degree of the Moroccan scene, is noticeable in documentary cinema in its broadest sense. A political genre par excellence, stifled by the hegemony of naturalist fiction, it chose the margins to prosper and to (positively) challenge the “established” cinema, as shown by, among others, a constellation of Algerian documentary films dating from the last decade.
ALGERIAN CONSTELLATION
The last ten years,some Algerian directors have taken their first steps into a part of Algerian reality confiscated by official television, and frozen by the representations given by the dominant naturalist fiction.This is the field of the speech of the ordinary person in the public space, and the modalities of its deployment. The films of Hassen Ferhani ( Dans ma tête un rond-point, 143 rue du désert, Tarzan, Don Quichotte et nous), Lamine Ammar Khodja ( Demande à ton ombre, chroniques équivoques, and above all Bla Cinima), Abdenour Zahzah ( El oued, El oued in particular), Djamil Beloucif ( Bîr d’eau), Djamel Kerkar ( Atlal), Karim Loualiche, Tarek Sami and Lucie Dèche ( Chantier
A), Lakhdar Tati ( Fais soin de toi), all share the same desire to reach out to other Algerians and, through cinema, to create the conditions for free speech to flourish and/or to be put into play. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the political voluntarism of their elders, who were stuck in certainties and conventional discourse on their realities, these directors thus create films that are open to the world, and whose driving force is a real desire to share with the men and women who are filmed, to talk about love, broken lives, buried wounds, daily resistance, and movie theaters and what was going on inside them when they still existed. These films, which adopt a variety of approaches, appeal through their formal freedom and their way of positioning themselves on the edge of reality by means of a shift in direction—as with Hassen Ferhani, who literally shares his direction with his characters in scripted moments lying between two documentary moments—, of a scripted claim helping out as a shifter for the documentary yet to come ( Chantier A), and of films that are entirely written and acted (faux-documentaries), such as Birdeau by Djamil Beloucif. All of them belong to a constellation that has been formed by an accumulation in the fringes of the official Algerian film scene, contesting it and shaking up its hierarchies.These eminently political gestures speak of this country in a different way, without claiming any “Algerian” specificity. These films owe their international influence to the intrinsic quality of their artistic offers, which are fully involved in contemporary debates on cinema and its relationship to the world, beyond any assignment to geography.
Translation: Chloé Baker
1 As the Moroccan public space is especially controlled, unauthorised filming is very difficult.