Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements 0190262575, 9780190262570

Citation preview

Maghrebs in Motion

Maghrebs in Motion North African Cinema in Nine Movements Suzanne Gauch

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

© Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gauch, Suzanne, 1965– Maghrebs in motion : North African cinema in nine movements / Suzanne Gauch. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–026257–0 (cloth) — ISBN 978–0–19–026258–7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978–0–19–026259–4 (updf)  1.  Motion pictures—Africa, North—History and criticism. 2.  Motion pictures—Algeria—History and criticism.  3.  Motion pictures—Morocco— History and criticism.  4.  Motion pictures—Tunisia—History and criticism.  5.  Africa, North—In motion pictures. I. Title. PN1993.5.A35G395 2015 791.430961—dc23 2015018326

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For L. M.

{ Contents } List of Figures  Acknowledgments  Note to Readers 

ix xi xiii

Introduction: Imperatives of Wonder; or, Moving beyond The Battle of Algiers 

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Part I Sight Lines 1. Doubling Back, Moving On: Farida Benlyazid’s A Door to the Sky (1988) 

15

2. Twilight Dawns: Mohamed Chouikh’s The Citadel (1989), Youssef (1994), and Ark of the Desert (1997) 

32

3. Sand Castles: Nacer Khemir’s The Wanderers of the Desert (1986), The Lost Neckring of the Dove (1991), and Baba Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul (2005) 

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Part II Hero Complex  4. For the Record: Nabil Ayouch’s Mektoub (1997) 

75

5. Off Road: Lyes Salem’s Masquerades (2008) 

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6. Signal Crossings: Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003) 

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Part III Scan Backward / Scan Forward 7. Vacancies: Tariq Teguia’s Rome Rather Than You (2006) 

133

8. Hooking Up: Faouzi Bensaïdi’s WWW: What a Wonderful World (2006) 

153

9. Breaking Out: Nejib Belkadhi’s VHS Kahloucha (2007) 

171

Epilogue: Now Playing 

190

Notes  Bibliography  Index 

193 219 227

{ List of Figures } 1.1 Nadia’s father surveys the courtyard of his ancestral home  17 1.2 Servants poised for a choreographed crossing of an inner patio  18 1.3 Nadia refusing her sister’s invitation to join the other mourners  23 1.4 A newly veiled Nadia and her boyfriend Jean-Philippe in his hotel room  25 1.5 Bahia preparing her departure  29 1.6 Nadia and Abdelkrim on their pilgrimage  30 2.1 Kaddour pausing in his morning rounds to admire the cobbler’s flirtatious wife  37 2.2 Kaddour passing by a group of chair-bearing men on his way through the village  39 2.3 Kaddour listening to the story of the king and the painter  40 2.4 Youssef, dressed in a black haik, draws unwelcome male attention  43 2.5 Youssef speaking with those come to seek his assistance  44 2.6 A screening of The Battle of Algiers (1966) in Youssef’s cave  45 2.7 Men digging a trench in the desert  47 2.8 Mutanabbi aboard his ark  50 2.9 Crossing the desert dunes at the end of The Ark of the Desert  51 3.1 Schoolteacher Abdesslam arriving at the village  57 3.2 The red hand beneath the tapestry  60 3.3 The police inspector in Abdesslam’s former room  61 3.4 Hassan discussing the names of love with a public scribe in the marketplace  63 3.5 Zin running through the just materialized Mosque of Cordoba  64 3.6 Hassan among the ruins of the city  68 3.7 Baba Aziz and Ishtar at the outset of their journey  69 3.8 Baba Aziz encounters a modern motorcycle rider 70 3.9 The moussem  71 4.1 Three spectator-abusers  80 4.2 Taoufiq and Sophia seen through the looking glass  81 4.3 Taoufiq and Sophia in Cherif Bakel’s office  88 4.4 Sophia and the village chief  90 4.5 Unseen wanted posters of the couple  92 4.6 Sophia and Taoufiq after their escape from the bus  93 5.1 Mounir waiting by the side of the road  98 5.2 Redouane, Mounir, and Krimo bilking two shepherds  101

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List of Figures

5.3 Khliffa and Rym striking a cinematic pose  105 5.4 Khliffa creating a poster collage for his new shop  106 5.5 Mounir anxiously attempting to revive Khliffa  108 5.6 A frustrated Redouane  111 6.1 Kalt’s alter ego intervening in a historical broadcast about nuclear power  117 6.2 Kalt hacking into the police database  121 6.3 Chams learning via Internet chat that Julia has been spying on him  125 6.4 Kalt and Chams arguing in the desert  126 6.5 Kalt and Qmar hacking into the airwaves as Julia attempts to stop them  128 6.6 Kalt and Qmar’s final hack  129 7.1 Rafiq presenting his sign  134 7.2 Kamel at the portrait studio  139 7.3 Zina reading  140 7.4 The attack on Zina and Kamel’s car  144 7.5 Zina and Kamel on the bridge near the Port of Algiers  148 7.6 The printers at work  149 8.1 Kamel photographing ATVs on the beach  155 8.2 Kenza heading out with her phone and stopwatch  158 8.3 Kamel and Kenza sharing an elevator  160 8.4 Hisham posing for photographs  162 8.5 The luxury liner crushing the migrants’ wooden fishing boat  164 8.6 Kamel and Kenza’s moment of recognition  168 9.1 Kahloucha playing Clint Eastwood  172 9.2 Filming a chase scene from Tarzan  176 9.3 Editing the chase scene  179 9.4 Kahloucha and his son at home  181 9.5 Khalti Mna explaining her decision to act  184 9.6 Tarzan returning to the wilderness  189

{ Acknowledgments } Many were those organizations and individuals who, in critical ways and at crucial times, contributed to the momentum of this project. When this book was still but a faint idea, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant afforded me the opportunity to spend a year in Morocco teaching, conducting research, and solidifying my ideas. A Temple University Study Leave and a later Temple University Summer Research Grant permitted me to move forward on the project at important moments. I am grateful to the staff of MACECE in Rabat, especially Saadia Maski, for invaluable support, as well as my students and colleagues in the Women’s and Gender Studies and Moroccan Cultural Studies Programs at Sidi Ben Abdellah University in Fez for moving my thinking about film along in unanticipated directions. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Temple English department chairs Shannon Miller and Joyce A. Joyce, along with my colleagues, the students in my undergraduate and graduate film courses, and my most excellent graduate student Nicole Cesare, for continuing to make Temple such a stimulating place to work. This would have been a lesser work without the assistance of the staffs of the Cinématheque in Algiers and the Centre Cinématographiqe Marocain in Rabat, who generously opened their archives, and sometimes unexpected paths of inquiry, while assisting me in tracking down films. Enormous thanks are due to Brendan O’Neill and the staff of Oxford University Press for seeing this book through to publication. Several earlier portions of this work were tested at talks, conferences, and in study groups. In 2008, the “Cinemas and the Maghreb” AIMS Conference prompted my initial formulation of this book, and I  thank the organizers, Michael Toler and Joelle Vitiello, the staff of CEMAT, and the conference participants, especially Nadia Cherabi-Labidi, Kamel Ben Ouanès, Robert Lang, Hédi Abdeljouad, Patricia Caillé, and Florence Martin for thought-provoking conversations, remarks, and contributions. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to Khalil Damoun and the members of the Association Marocaine des Critiques de Cinéma, Fatima Sadiqi, Souad Slaoui, Josephine Park, and Oliver Gaycken for invitations to present my work in Tangiers, Fez, and Philadelphia, as well as to fellow panelists, panel chairs, and audiences at conferences of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Middle East Studies Association for their essential contributions to this project. I am indebted to Nora Alter, Chris Cagle, Franklin Cason Jr., and Kathleen Karlin for inviting me to join their works-in-progress group and

xii

Acknowledgments

for their enthusiastic recommendations for this project. Without the insights of the three anonymous readers at OUP, this would have been a lesser work. This book emerged from conversations and exchanges with colleagues across a ranges of disciplines, as well as filmmakers themselves. In addition to those named above, I would like to thank Nezar Andary, Nabil Ayouch, Cheira Belguellaoui, Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Bensalah, Debbie Harrold, Fatima Ithri Ighoudane, Tsitsi Jaji, Peter Limbrick, Douja Mamelouk, Gareth McFeely, Fatema Mernissi, Targol Mesbah, Jonathan Smolin, Gabe Wettach, Patty White, and Jessica Winegar. In addition, this work owes a special debt to many film fans who are unlikely to ever read it: Leila Bouarfa, Arabic teacher extraordinaire; the many purveyors of bootleg DVDs in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia who made numerous recommendations and shared their assessments of public reception, and those taxi drivers who safely conveyed me from one place to another while detailing their own love of film. Heartfelt apologies if I have omitted to name you; please rest assured that this work bears the traces of your influence. Always, thanks are due to my family—Marian, Eric, Dan, Vicki, Kristine, Jessica, and Michael—for their support, and above all to Lourdes, who has never ceased to move me. Chapter 1 revisits an article published in Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 (2009) as “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Transnational Feminist Spectatorship and Farida BenLyazid’s A Door to the Sky.” An earlier version of c­ hapter  2 appeared in Third Text 27, no. 2 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080 /09528822.2013.772347#.VRcw94Aihe5). Chapter 6 revises an essay published as “Jamming Civilizational Discourse in Tunisian Film” in Screen 52, no.  1 (Spring 2011). My analyses have evolved in the course of writing this book and my conclusions sometimes shifted, but where they duplicate the earlier works, they are reproduced with permission.

{ Note to Readers } Because this book is intended for an interdisciplinary audience, I have erred on the side of readability rather than philological precision in transcribing Arabic names and terms. The historic French influence in the region has established transliteration conventions used inside as well as outside the Maghreb, and to avoid confusion I  have largely retained these here, trusting that specialists will easily be able to reconstitute the Arabic. Diacritics in book and article titles are retained in the notes. Arabic appears in a few instances in the text; it is followed simply by an English translation. Finally, in order to highlight the distinctiveness of the spoken Arabic of the region, which possesses no standard transcription form, I have followed the lead of the popular press and employed the Maghrebi variant of texting language alternately known as Arabish, Arabizi, or Franco-Maghrebin. Accordingly, the number “9” stands for the letter “‫( ”ﻖ‬or q) while “7” continues to represent “‫( ”ﺡ‬or ḥ) and 3 the letter “‫( ”ﻉ‬or ʿ).

Maghrebs in Motion

Introduction Imperatives of Wonder; or, Moving beyond The Battle of Algiers In cinematic time, it had been ages since anything from North Africa provoked true wonder. Back in 1966, the Battle of Algiers had excited admiration and curiosity worldwide, rattling the entrenched perspectives and geopolitical paradigms that had survived the very events of decolonization it depicted.1 Yet in the postindependence decades that followed, no similarly moving images were seen of, or in, those countries of North Africa—Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia—known collectively as the Maghreb. 2 Yes, films from all three countries sometimes met with national audience success, state enthusiasm, or international festival honors. None, however, unsettled perspectives, cinematic and otherwise, as broadly as had the Battle of Algiers. Then, on January 14, 2011, popular, apparently nonideological, and increasingly mediatized protests in Tunisia ousted Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and his long-standing autocratic regime, vertiginously sweeping away accumulated certainties and replacing them with a newly excited, mobile curiosity. Spreading from Tunisia across North Africa and the Middle East, wonder touched Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians, Yemenis, and Bahrainis, as well as followers of international news around the world. As social media, the Internet, and pan-Arab satellite news stations continuously relayed multisourced information and images of unfolding events, vistas of previously unimaginable relations opened. Some prominent cultural critics even announced the final demise of postcolonialism and orientalism, and participants in sociopolitical movements around the world, including those in Europe and the United States, proclaimed kinship with what quickly became known as the Arab Spring. 3 Not least, into the wake of televisual and Internet images came scrambles for filmic accounts able to instruct and dissect, but also to c­ ommunicate, the power of this revolution. But what, exactly, were we—local and international audiences, neighbors, regional experts, activists, scholars, and students—hoping to see? Certainly

2Introduction

the Tunisian protests succeeded in breaking through decades of unbending state censorship, but what of the softer, more insidious censorship of global media? Had our perceptions, or more fundamentally, our habits of perception, really been touched by the turn of events? Mere months later, the astonishment and admiring inquisitiveness precipitated by the toppling of Tunisia’s president had largely evaporated in the face of both doubts and certitudes; old geopolitical models, knowledge conventions, and patterns of relation re-emerged in force. First credited with effectively relaying, enabling, or fueling the events that had fleetingly aroused such wonder, social and televisual media no longer disoriented; popular revolution had been normalized, even as regular programming resumed. Attention had again shifted eastward, Tunisia’s originary role eclipsed by Egypt’s political and economic weight. While still avidly sought out as sources of clarification and instruction, films were no longer expected to translate the recent past into the imminent future with anything approximating the world resonance of The Battle of Algiers. Yet the almost forgotten, transitory but radical perceptual shift that greeted the ouster of Ben Ali—and inspired the popular uprisings against rulers in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, as well as mass demonstrations across the Maghreb—remains remarkable on at least two accounts.4 For an instant, there it was, that impossible to predict or contain dissolution of habits of inference and ideological constraints that had so long been the goal of activists and filmmakers alike. Worldwide recuperations of the term “Arab Spring” as a label for popular movements for social justice simply reiterated its imperative: the necessary possibility of sweeping, all-embracing transformations of perception and relation occasioned not by epistemological violence, but rather through its dismantling. Long promoted as at once the motor and goal of revolutionary change, radically transformed perceptions and relations have also been a primary objective of political cinema, a cinema that simultaneously sought to tap the originary vision- and relationship-altering capacity of motion pictures themselves. Equally remarkable about the perceptual and relational shift that occurred when Ben Ali fell, however, was precisely its fleeting nature. How quickly both familiar habits of inference and ideological constraints forcefully reasserted themselves as subsequent events defied easy, orderly, progressist, triumphalist trajectories. For this at once implies that neorealist, ultimately commercial narratives such the Battle of Algiers continue to exert a hold on popular imaginations worldwide, and that we had for some time been looking as much in the wrong places as for the wrong kinds of things, in cinema as elsewhere. 5 These two interlocking points had certainly not been lost on Tunisian, as well as Moroccan and Algerian, filmmakers striving amid accelerating economic and cultural globalization to create works not limited by

Introduction

3

postindependence classifications of cinemas from the Maghreb—political, auteur, national, thirdist, commercial, art house, ethnographic, festival—or by the various forms of autocratic government in their home countries in the decades leading up to January 2011. Looking away from the region’s cinemas had perhaps been premature. As it happens, from the perspective of the years following the Arab Spring, it suddenly becomes apparent that a number of films from the Maghreb, though not openly political, had yet prefigured and captured many of the transformations in knowledge and understanding that shaped the stunning uprisings across region. This book will analyze nine of those films and film cycles:  Farida Benlyazid’s A Door to the Sky (1988); Mohamed Chouikh’s The Citadel (1989), Youssef (1994), and Ark of the Desert (1997); Nacer Khemir’s The Wanderers of the Desert (1986), The Lost Neckring of the Dove (1991), and Baba Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul (2005); Nabil Ayouch’s Mektoub (1997); Lyes Salem’s Masquerades (2008); Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003); Tariq Teguia’s Rome Rather Than You (2006); Faouzi Bensaïdi’s WWW:  What a Wonderful World (2006); and Nejib Belkadhi’s VHS Kahloucha (2007). They have been chosen because they experiment with conventions of perception and established relations on a range of formal as well as thematic levels, and because they are broadly accessible. No more than the uprisings and the movements and events that followed, however, do they fall into any neatly ordered, determinate narrative. Rather, resisting any orderly sorting into a single movement that would flatten the distinctiveness of their experiments with the potentialities of those uneasy, radically transformative, qualities of film itself, they constitute nine movements in motion. By the mid-1980s, when the first of these filmmakers began making feature films, the possibility of presenting a new nation as national cinema in a venerable international venue, as had The Battle of Algiers, had long since revolved.6 Two decades after the release of that iconic film, ideals of internally unified, modern nation-states had begun to fracture. In Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, the increasingly palpable effects of neoliberal economic globalization and the rise of movements for local autonomy occurred in tandem with new government crackdowns on dissidents and activists. Likewise, the hegemonic, taste-making stature of a small group of European film festivals had waned, gradually replaced by a proliferation of competing festivals around the world, all while venues for theatrical exhibition in the Maghreb declined. Movie theaters fell into disrepair, all but the most exclusive and Europhile soon labeled as places of ill-repute; state support of filmmaking declined; and VHS technology made possible the emergence of local video clubs and more private viewing practices.7 In spite, or rather because of this, The Battle of Algiers continued to be fetishized as national narrative in Algeria and far beyond. While admiring the film’s impact, however, Maghrebi filmmakers grew increasingly wary

4Introduction

of its dominance in regional cinematic imaginaries.8 For rather than representing the first step in the emergence of a national cinema, an international opening for Algerian filmmakers, as its producers had intended, Gillo Pontecorvo’s storied film was widely seen as the epitome of Algerian cinema, a model to emulate at home, in the region, and abroad.9 Postindependence filmmakers who developed its social realism at the expense of commercial cinematic tropes found themselves progressively losing audience interest despite their engagement of pressing social issues in each country. As the second postindependence decade dawned, the repercussions of the Iranian revolution played out in the region, the collapse of the Soviet Union loomed, and filmmakers realized that regional audiences had grown both more critical and more distracted. Pervasive formal and informal media censorship and the heavy-handed propaganda of state-owned television stations had made Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian spectators dismissive of the aesthetics and wary of the truth claims and progressist narratives of nationally sponsored media, while regional rivalries gradually halted filmmaking collaborations along with cross-border media consumption.10 Simultaneously, the formal and informal circulation in the region of media produced in Euro-America ensured that film spectators (and later television audiences and Internet users) in the Maghreb were keenly aware of depth and tenacity of stereotypes of Arabs, Muslims, and Africans abroad. This awareness was only exacerbated when, at the dawn of the 1990s and in the aftermath of the American-led Gulf War, pan-Arab satellite television swept across the region.11 For not only did satellite television bring, as has so often been observed, Arabic-language, US-style news reporting, commentary, and political debate to what had been a televisual landscape controlled by state-owned television stations, it also brought twenty-four-hour movie channels, many of them featuring recent Hollywood genre movies subtitled in Arabic, alongside regionally and globally popular genre films.12 Avidly consuming the American, French, Italian, Egyptian, Indian, and Asian movies (and Latin American soap operas and music videos) offered by such channels and available as bootlegs on VHS cassettes (and later DVDs), the publics of the Maghreb came to eye with equal suspicion films labeled Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian and funded largely by European and festival agencies; films supported by nationally funded organizations and circulated abroad; and films funded by national agencies for local consumption. The first were assumed to pander to Euro-American stereotypes and colonial and imperialist interests; the second regarded as cynical efforts by the state to bolster its international image as liberal and pro-human rights on the backs of marginalized segments of the population; and the last dismissed as more or less heavy-handed propaganda, often deficient in quality.13 In all three instances, as well as in the case of foreign productions set in the region, women’s continued representational

Introduction

5

and thematic function as markers of national progress or backwardness is sharply criticized, with the result that women filmmakers continue to be subjected to special scrutiny. Negotiating these impasses of audience skepticism, three filmmakers who started making films in the 1980s—Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, and Nacer Khemir—privileged popular aesthetics and entertainment value over didactic realism. Forging unanticipated cinematic trajectories, their films disrupted postindependence binaries of (backward, private) tradition and (progressive, public) modernity and exposed something of the depth of both official and internalized, self-imposed forms of censorship. Part of the pleasures of film spectatorship had always been the medium’s capacity to transform its audiences’ experiences of the material world, and Benlyazid’s, Chouikh’s, and Khemir’s films revisited prenational popular arts, practices, and spaces that had fulfilled similar functions in order to reconsider the form and function of late postindependence cinema.14 Each of their films revolves around issues of mobility, whether individual, national, or historical, exploring at once the nature of mobility and where possibilities for it really lie. Sidestepping state as well as opposition ideologies—and dualities such as modernity and tradition, reason and faith—their work strives to foster a mobility of perception and mind that carries over to the social world. In this respect, these three filmmakers and their successors tap into several of the key features of cinema famously articulated by Walter Benjamin: By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action [Spielraum]. Our taverns and metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroads and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.15

For Benjamin, the novel perspectives proposed by popular film prove radically transformative, space clearing, and both intellectually and socially propulsive. Decades after he wrote his 1936 essay, long after the technology of film and the perspectives it offered had ceased to appear novel, the nine filmmakers examined in this book eye new kinds of prison worlds, some of them even cinematic. Experimenting with established film styles, they extend existing, and forge new, fields of action in order to expand the possibilities of perceptual and physical mobility for their audiences, and for Maghrebi film itself.

***

6Introduction

From the time of postindependence cinema’s emergence in the Maghreb, and even more so in the 1980s and 1990s, the trajectories of film production across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia diverge. In part this results from the individual backgrounds and paths to filmmaking of each filmmaker in countries where dedicated film schools and industrial models of film production have been largely absent.16 Yet it also results from the different approaches to film funding followed by each of the three countries, bound up as these are with distinct political, social, and economic trajectories and approaches to censorship and media freedoms. While the advent of Arab satellite television, for example, upended viewing habits across the Arab world in the 1990s by undermining state media monopolies, Morocco responded by significantly increasing press freedoms and funds available to Moroccan filmmakers; Algeria found itself in the midst of a protracted and brutal civil war in which religious extremists targeted filmmakers and journalists, among many others, just as filmmaking had been denationalized; and Tunisia, if anything, intensified its pervasive censorship apparatus even as it continued to urge filmmakers to turn to private production companies and cofunding.17 Consequently, the nine films and film cycles examined here in no way coalesce into a single movement, but rather create nine movements on the theme of mobility in a medium defined by motion. Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, Nacer Khemir, Nabil Ayouch, Lyès Salem, Nadia El Fani, Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaïdi, and Nejib Belkadhi all approach cinema from the Maghreb as participating on equal terms with cinema from so-called film centers in dialogues about the medium. Albeit distinct in thematic, generic, narrative, and aesthetic approach, the nine films discussed in this project all dismiss the regional rivalries, easy dualisms, and fetishized signs that were colonialism’s deepest legacies. As a result, national labels no longer prove fully adequate, though the rubric “Maghrebi” remains vexed. Less familiar to English speakers, the designation “Maghreb” continues on one level to tether Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia to a French colonial past to the exclusion of other past and present sociocultural, political, and economic influences, erasing the myriad names and geopolitical positions that the northwest rim of Africa has held throughout the ages. In this sense, it severs the three countries from both Africa writ large and the Middle East, against both of which the region has been politically positioned to serve as a buffer zone. Most problematically for the purposes of this study, the term “Maghreb” easily glosses over the very distinct political, social, and economic trajectories of the three countries since independence, as well as under colonization. Still, the notion of the Maghreb is less externally constructed than Denise Brahimi suggests in the introduction to her study of Maghrebi cinema.18 Activists and cultural icons with cross-border appeal have long called for unity across national borders with the aim of combatting misperceptions of the region and its people abroad, as well exerting pressure on autocratic governments

Introduction

7

at home.19 At various times since independence, filmmakers have received funding, used film facilities, and worked collaboratively with colleagues from neighboring countries.20 More concretely, the notion of a Maghreb Union has been promoted with varying degrees of enthusiasm by leaders in all three countries since the days of independence, and was formally signed into existence in 1989 with a view to creating a regional economic bloc able to negotiate on stronger terms with international partners otherwise eager to exploit political divisions in order to better access the region’s resources. As a result, to view these films only within frameworks of national cinema is to ignore the myriad cross-border ties, interests, and rivalries of the people of the region as well as the filmmakers themselves. Cognizant, first of all, that popular cultures are today as shaped by globalized media as by any localized practices, and second, that the twinned legacies of colonialism and orientalism left Maghrebi publics not only expecting local movies to fulfill a social function but also longing to see them hold their own as entertainment, these nine filmmakers fashion films that are neither imitations or curiosities. Instead, their works reverberate with what has remained unexamined both at home and abroad as they seek to transform relations to and through cinema. In their famous manifesto for a third cinema, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino cautioned filmmakers against speaking down to their audiences: Be receptive to all that the people have to offer, and offer them the best; or, as Che put it, respect the people by giving them quality. This is a good thing to keep in mind in view of those tendencies which are always latent in the revolutionary artist to lower the level of investigation and the language of a theme, in a kind of neopopulism, down to the levels which, while they may be those upon which the masses move, do not help them get rid of the stumbling blocks left by imperialism.21

Around the time the first of these films was made, Gayatri Spivak, theorizing colonialism’s enduring legacies, repeatedly articulated an imperative to learn from below—where “below” signifies those residing in the interstices of class and citizenship, without political representation—through a process of what she deems ethical singularity, or love, because “large-scale mind change is hardly ever possible on the grounds of reason alone.”22 Together, these nine films and film cycles follow both directives, effecting a shift in approach to regional and internationalized audiences, both in their representations of multiple strata of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian populations, and in the narrative trajectories they propose to and for them in the world. Not surprisingly, many of their films feature love as a central theme, although not often in its classical cinematic sense. For the filmmakers whose work is studied here employ yet break generic molds, refusing both didacticism and romanticism, not by opposing unreason to reason, but by constantly testing

8Introduction

representational approaches to the “below,” reassessing how it is subject to unceasing reformulation, recuperation, and erasure in the very processes of representation. Because they engage by reformulating, or creating new, popular cinemas, the representativity of these films is ceaselessly debated, sometimes heatedly, among critics, journalists, scholars, and popular audiences. Language, subject matter, funding sources, exhibition history, and the filmmakers’ education, class origins, and personal backgrounds all factor into these controversies, more open and intense in countries like Morocco, where film production has recently increased in tandem with fluctuating freedoms of the press.23 Yet such controversies are entirely to the point. Perfectly in keeping, despite the uncharacteristic forms they take, with the legacy of third cinema according to which films served as “detonators” for social movements, and accentuating the lessons behind Spivak’s famous admonition that the “subaltern cannot speak,” these disagreements raise crucial questions about citizenship—with all the attendant issues of gender, class, ethnicity, language, and culture citizenship entails—the nature and obligations of the postindependence nation-state internally, regionally, and globally, and the power of the evolving, circulating images that is film itself.24 Necessarily mobile in theme and approach, the films I discuss in this study were made with various forms of funding—some funded primarily by national or regional institutes, some a mix of local funding and international funding (private investors, a range of European film funds, including festival funds and funds from distributors)—by directors with diverse backgrounds and training in film. Two, Bedwin Hacker and VHS Kahloucha were shot on digital video rather than film stock. All have received some manner of European and American exhibition or distribution, as well as play at home and at festivals in Africa and the Middle East and Asia. They are brought together here because all have calmly gone traveling along different paths, all have found distribution in North America and Europe or are easily accessible on the Internet, and all explore issues of mobility on thematic as well as stylistic levels. In so doing they fall into three broad, by no means hermetic, groupings. A first group, represented by filmmakers Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, and Nacer Khemir, works to translate precinematic cultures—architecture, poetry, calligraphy, painting, dress, music, popular celebrations—into films that challenge prevailing ethnographic representations and unsettle hierarchies of modernity and tradition to create new kinds of popular film genres. A second group, encompassing the films of Nabil Ayouch, Lyès Salem, and Nadia El Fani, reimagines popular global generic forms as locally informed, refuting the Maghreb’s assigned role as latecomer in narratives of cinematic culture and cultural modernity while exposing internalized obfuscations and occultations. Finally, a third group, typified here by Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaïdi, and Nejib Belkadhi, positions the Maghreb at the center of cinematic history

Introduction

9

by reworking landmark films and movements to both seriously and whimsically shift the position from which Maghrebi audiences project themselves into cinematic history and narratives of cultural globalization. Mobility characterizes the shape and content of these three groupings, as well as the aesthetic, narrative, and thematic approaches of the films within them. Films in all three groups play with expectations of cinematic realism and its relation to representational authority in the medium and beyond. Thematically, these nine films explore economic and cultural globalizations; the idealized attractions of distant pasts and technologically informed futures; the artifice of postindependence socioeconomic hierarchies; the politics of “wastelands”; and flows of authorized and clandestine migration. Stylistically, they experiment not only with form, perspective, cinematic tropes, and narrative structures, but also with acting methods, production values, and exhibition venues, challenging those publics that would dismiss them because of their relative absence from pan-Arab satellite television and Euro-American film distribution and streaming websites.25 Far from signaling capitulation to commercialism or a slavish devotion to Eurocentric film history, these experiments with generic conventions and iconic film movements aim to interrogate the very bases of cinematic authority, even their own. In other words, Benlyazid, Chouikh, Khemir, Ayouch, El Fani, Salem, Teguia, Bensaïdi, and Belkadhi ask their audiences to consider the historical relation of film to the post-Enlightenment thought that informed colonialism and anticolonialism, nationalism, antinationalism, and globalization. In this, they shift audience attention from a long-standing focus on content—its evaluation in terms of its positive or negative contribution to national, social, ethnic, religious, and cultural image and self-image—to break through expectations of the social, political, and cultural work Maghrebi postindependence films in particular, and films more generally, are expected to perform.26 Each film explores perspectives hitherto deemed unimaginable with a goal that far exceeds simple shock value. Suggestive rather than definitive, concerned with unraveling the forces that have bound Maghrebi cinema to certain paths, these films ignore the boundaries imposed by various national and international film histories. Not political in the sense envisioned by theorists of third cinema, who called for film to radically break with commercial and art house models in order to assist in the complete decolonization of minds, the films studied in this project draw on legacies of critical curiosity and intellectual mobility that traverse spatial and temporal divisions. While some have been dubbed auteurs—sometimes consciously in the absence of classical political motifs in their films, and sometimes less so, merely in the absence of national or industrial filmmaking infrastructures—all of the filmmakers presented in this study seek to dynamize popular interest rather than cultivate personal style, all while fashioning works that probe the political boundaries erected in and through film.

10Introduction

The first part of this study, “Sight Lines,” examines films that redefine mobility in the face of narrowing postindependence horizons. Building upon both classical and folk cultural forms—music, performance, storytelling, devotional practices, artisan crafts, literature, visual arts, and architecture, among others—filmmakers Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, and Nacer Khemir jar the expectations contemporary audiences around the world bring to cinema from the Maghreb. In a period where the authority of folk and traditional popular art forms as well as classical literary and artistic models has largely been eroded by the incursions of television and video, the films of Benlyazid (Morocco), Chouikh (Algeria), and Khemir (Tunisia) undermine increasingly entrenched postindependence dichotomies that pit Arab or Muslim tradition against European modernity. In this way, they foster a multiplicity of narrative trajectories and self-reflexive ways of reading moving images. Benlyazid’s poetic first feature, A Door to the Sky (1988), strives to elaborate an alternative to popular cinema from abroad by adapting Morocco’s unique cultural heritage in a story that upends contemporary notions of social mobility. Chouikh’s trilogy—The Citadel (1989), Youssef (1994), and The Ark of the Desert (1997)— skewers the self-mythologizing practices of Algerian state-sponsored cinema through a contrapuntal engagement of popular cultural practices and postindependence orthodoxies. Khemir’s trilogy—The Wanderers of the Desert (1986), The Lost Ring of the Dove (1992), and Baba Aziz (2005)—conjures enthralling, resolutely artificial images that profoundly rework the semiotics of film while recollecting yet not duplicating older Islamicate art forms. All of their films address the shrinking horizons of Maghrebi cinema of the postindependence era, probing various paths to its reinvention in order to open up new fields of play. Popular at home yet enjoying some measure of success abroad, films like those analyzed in Part II of this study, “Hero Complex,” rescript globally popular genre films from within regional particularities. At first glance more immediately accessible to media-savvy audiences worldwide than the films of Part I, they nonetheless reject imitative relationships to European, American, Asian, and Middle Eastern cinematic models as they both play with and challenge audience expectations. Nabil Ayouch (Morocco), Lyès Salem (Algeria), and Nadia El Fani (Tunisia) variously adapt the conceits of the horror film, the road movie, the thriller, and the romantic comedy, drawing on globalized cinema narratives to articulate experiences and concerns that are distinctly Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian, all while challenging the internal exclusions that have structured such national identities. All prominently feature spaces often denigrated as wastelands while simultaneously examining their positioning with regards to webs of surveillance and voyeurism. A  love story / road movie / thriller written, filmed, and edited with a Euro-American, popular-film sensibility to relate a dark tale of corruption, voyeurism, and sadism, Mektoub (1997)

Introduction

11

probes the fraught dynamics of seeing and being seen at the dawn of an era of global hypervisibility. The light-filled, screwball romantic comedy Masquerades (2008) recuperates an outwardly politically neutral, feel-good genre as well as the tropes and characters of folktales to breakdown dichotomies of us and them, while skewering national and global systems of inequity. A cyberthriller set in contemporary Tunisia and France, Bedwin Hacker (2003) unsettles the tropes of otherness on which the popular media depends while representing the formerly unseen in ways that break with the conventional techniques of representing women and men in Tunisian cinema and beyond. Devoid of the pathos and melodrama that came to characterize many Maghrebi auteur films in the late 1980s and 1990s, these films flip the script with their unexpectedly upbeat, heroic yet multidirectionally critical perspectives that challenge the relationships of post-independence cinema to the nation-state. “Scan Backward / Scan Forward,” the third and final part of this study, examines three films that emphasize the pernicious blind spots of global cinematic history as they foreground deeply familiar yet elusive cinematic places and protagonists. Paying tribute, each in its own way, to a cinematic imagination created by the circulation of motion pictures, each film multiplies metatextual film references in ways that constantly shift their audiences’ positionality. Tariq Teguia (Algeria), Faouzi Bensaïdi (Morocco), and Nejib Belkadhi (Tunisia), all foreground how the modern circulation of images intensifies desires for mobility and connection across seemingly insurmountable social and physical gaps. Not surprisingly, they all showcase tropes of clandestine migration and undocumented immigration, mobilities so often taxed with illegality in the popular discourses of the global North. Set in Algiers during the dark decade of the 1990s, Rome Rather Than You (2006) offers a study of declining mobility in the era of accelerating globalization by hinting at all that remains unseen in a universe saturated by images. A hyperkinetic tribute to film from its earliest narrative forms to the avant-garde, WWW:  What a Wonderful World (2006) pays tribute to the improbable love stories sparked and thwarted by new communication technologies in a witty reflection on dreams of a truly global cinema. Finally, the often hilarious VHS Kahloucha (2007) introduces the work of an amateur filmmaker who recuperates American and European genre films in order to illuminate how the cinema of the global North depends on those like him for its global success. Together these films confirm the desire for radical transformations of perception and relation, along with their indeterminacy, unpredictability, and irreducibility to image, formula, form, and place. Permeable and provisional, the groupings of each section in this study highlight how ideas, images, and people run up against political, economic, social, and cultural borders even within a given region, as well as how they filter across them. Deliberately porous, this study is meant to complement rather than substitute for the many fine works on the evolution of cinema in

12Introduction

the Maghreb, as well as to inspire further work on the many pathbreaking films that for reasons of timing, space, or simply chance could not be ­covered here. Many are the films whose preoccupations and approaches intersect with those of the works addressed here, and many are those who take fi ­ lmmaking in entirely different directions. For this reason, here as ­elsewhere, it is ­imperative to keep moving beyond.

{ Part I }

Sight Lines The three films featured in this first part tap precinematic pasts in order to clear new spaces for mobility in an era of accelerating cultural and economic globalization. All look to past and current local cultural practices—pre- and postcolonial, regional and national—in order to reconceptualize the look, function, and future of national and regional cinema. Each, however, does so in a distinct way. Farida Benlyazid’s A Door to the Sky (1988) presciently explores how Morocco’s centuries-old aesthetic and spiritual heritage might offer a means to bridge, rather than enlarge, a perceived postindependence abyss between modernity and tradition. Similarly challenging the progressist self-representations of the postindependence nation-state, though to different ends, Mohamed Chouikh’s trilogy, The Citadel (1988), Youssef (1993), and The Ark of the Desert (1997), underscores the persistence of the premodern in state-sponsored narratives and iconography. Undoing such oppositions altogether, Nacer Khemir’s trilogy, The Wanderers of the Desert (1986), The Lost Neckring of the Dove (1991), and Baba Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated His Soul (2005), employs not just the themes, but also the forms, of classical and popular Islamicate arts to reimagine cinema itself. Each film or film cycle targets cinematic and social stasis in unexpected places and from uncommon angles, their novel trajectories unsettling film viewing habits. Benlyazid’s Door to the Sky—the episodic tale of a privileged Franco-Moroccan woman who returns to the old imperial city of Fez for her father’s funeral, and experiences a spiritual-social awakening that prompts her to stay and establish a shelter for women in the family’s stately old home—shuttles between social and magical realism, alternately privileging change and transcendence, every shift in register challenging what has come before. Chouikh’s

14

Sight Lines

trilogy—the first a tale of the ultimately fatal humiliation of a childlike simpleton who poses a threat to his power-hoarding elders; the second a recounting of the equally fatal adventures of a former FLN combatant who continues to live and fight the war of independence long past its end; and the third an allegorical rendering of a fratricidal war sparked by forbidden romance—skewers the heroic tropes of Algerian cinema to highlight the gulf between state-sponsored cinema and contemporary audiences, all the while placing its own images into limbo. Meanwhile, the works of Khemir’s film cycle—the first a depiction of a modern-day schoolteacher who vanishes in a crumbling, sand-buried village that seems to have emerged from a semimythical past; the second a young calligrapher’s search for love in an imaginary, idealized, yet  already crumbling, past; and the third a celebratory chronicle of a young girl and her grandfather on their way to an uncharted Sufi reunion—play upon orientalist tropes while confronting audiences with a radically new semiotics of film. While reception of all three films and film cycles was mixed, each nonetheless contributed significantly to the mobility of local, regional, and transnational cinemas. Their exhibition trajectories, alongside their thematic and aesthetic choices, funding structures, and production history propelled them beyond national frameworks, yet  also troubled conventions of transnational and global cinema. Reflective of regional cooperation in matters of film production (Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli was the film’s editor) and featuring a self-aware female protagonist with sociocultural agency, Benlyazid’s first film immediately took its place among the paradigm-defying works of a new international women’s cinema. With their theatricality, renewed focus on rural milieux as the setting for criticisms of state corruption, and challenges to the prominent legacy of Algerian cinema, Chouikh’s films redynamized neglected spaces within Algeria while renewing interest in Algerian film regionally as well as internationally. Finally, Khemir’s meticulously designed and layered, nonlinear yet evolving, diversely funded films dissolved temporal and geographical boundaries in a unique articulation of transnational cinema. At once accepting and confounding national and regional representativity, these works exceed national frameworks even as their explorations of exclusions and obfuscations work toward the renewal of national or regional cinemas. Not surprisingly, these films have had many successors.

{ 1 }

Doubling Back, Moving On Farida Benlyazid’s A Door to the Sky (1988) We, too, are descendants of the Prophet. —Amin’s mother, Ark of the Desert Moroccan director Farida Benlyazid’s first feature film, A Door to the Sky (Bab al-Sama Maftuh) (1988), follows Nadia, a young Franco-Moroccan photographer initially portrayed as something of a punkish radical, as she returns to the conservative Moroccan city of Fez to visit her terminally ill father.1 Once there, she experiences an existential crisis, embraces a mystical, popular form of Islam, and founds a women’s zawiya—normally a Sufi lodge, but here a women’s shelter—in her family’s opulent home. Striking for the trajectory of Nadia’s evolution, which runs counter to prevailing discourses that situate not only modernity, but also the possibility of personal liberation, in the global North, Benlyazid’s film emerged from a critical period in North Africa’s postindependence history. As in other countries where transformations in women’s status had been tied to nation-building rather than to the kinds of activism familiar to feminists in the global North, Moroccan women were challenging the limitations imposed on them by postindependence personal status laws.2 At the same time, filmmakers concerned by sparse internal funding and censorship from within, alongside waning audience interest nearly thirty-five years after independence, were seeking new ways to connect with and cultivate national audiences.3 Activists, filmmakers, and potential audience members alike confronted growing postindependence economic woes in the face of uneven, accelerating globalization brought by incursions of neoliberalism; the repression of any political opposition during Morocco’s “years of lead”; and the concomitant rise in the power of Islamist movements initially promoted to oppose Marxist activists.4 Intervening in this climate, A Door to the Sky broke with social realist aesthetics, seeking to create a new kind of distinctly Moroccan film. Without fully abandoning the examination of social, cultural, and economic issues that characterized social realist cinema, A Door to the Sky re-examines Morocco’s creative and artistic heritage in an effort to forge a

16Sight Lines

specifically Moroccan popular film aesthetics. A somewhat fractured focus results, situating the film in an uneasy space between art, entertainment, and politically engaged cinema. Like, to be sure, many other contemporaneous Moroccan films, A Door to the Sky never gained theatrical release in Morocco, screening instead at festivals and film clubs.5 More significantly, it garnered particularly contentious responses from viewers at home and abroad. In Morocco, reviewers charged that it folklorized Moroccan culture, presented Islam as little more than magic, and glossed over the existence of modern institutions to address the dilemmas confronted by the women in Nadia’s shelter.6 Situating the film in the broader context of Arab cinema, Viola Shafik problematizes its shift from an initial focus on the material bases of identity to metaphysical concerns: “[Nadia] reconciles only with her Moroccan heritage, but cuts her relation to France abruptly and thoroughly, leaving again a wide fissure between tradition and modernity as absolute contradictions, at least on the material level. Hence, her search for identity concentrates on metaphysics.”7 European critics similarly questioned the protagonist’s turning away from material concerns, a German reviewer dismissively asking: “A woman’s happiness combined with spiritual awakening: an expansion of opportunities or regression? Utopia or simply propaganda?”8 While Benlyazid herself esteemed that A Door to the Sky would pose difficulties for audiences in the global North because it broke with an existing focus on “exposing the Arab world’s miseries,” praise for the film nonetheless came largely from those viewing it from more transnational perspectives.9 Comparing the film to one by a Tunisian filmmaker, Mona Fayad lauds the novelty and effectiveness of Benlyazid’s metaphysics: “Overall, the film provides a landmark in the cultural production of a ‘feminist’ consciousness. Drawing on alternative traditions of Islam, Farida Ben Lyazid has succeeded in creating both a practical and spiritual direction specific to Arab women.”10 Meanwhile, Ella Shohat praises A Door to the Sky for its departure from the militant socialism of third cinema in its treatment of everyday postindependence injustices and exclusions.11 For Shohat and Robert Stam, the “film’s aesthetic favors the rhythms of contemplation and spirituality . . . affirm[ing] Islamic culture, while inscribing it with a feminist consciousness, offering an alternative both to the Western imaginary and to an Islamic fundamentalist representation of Muslim women.”12 This description, which like Fayad’s positions A Door to the Sky as a unique and virtually solitary work, highlights the weight of edification, insight, and resistance that accrues to films by Arab women as they circulate outside their home countries. Criticisms notwithstanding, Benlyazid’s film succeeded in juggling these burdens compellingly enough to become a mainstay in film festivals and classes devoted to women in the Arab or Islamic worlds. At the same time, it spurred vital debates about the purpose and scope of cinema in Morocco. It was long the only Moroccan film in US distribution, and for a time, even The Lonely Planet Guidebook

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recommended the film—one of a handful of Moroccan-made films alongside classical and more recent Hollywood films set in Morocco—as essential viewing for travelers to that country.13 With its initial images of the palatial, opulent home of a wealthy Fassi family —rendered in saturated colors and shot to accentuate architectural grandeur—A Door to the Sky can seem to open up intimate spaces of Moroccan life in a manner congruent with the kind of long-standing orientalist fantasies exploited by tourist guidebooks. The establishing shots of the film make clear that the winding, narrow alleys of the old city of Fez primarily present water-stained walls to the eyes of outsiders who wander through them. When a small blue metal door opens and the bowler-wearing man viewers have followed through these alleys traverses a long, twisting dark hallway—the screen going entirely black for moment—they discover a spacious, mosaic-tiled courtyard, replete with bubbling fountain, lush greenery, and gardening servants against a soundscape of Bach. While this man in a European suit, who we later learn is Nadia’s father, pauses in the garden, cocking his head skeptically, viewers are given a few moments to admire the surroundings, absorb the competing cultural elements, and perhaps puzzle out his response to them (fig. 1.1). Such lingering, carefully choreographed shots of Nadia’s family home recur throughout the film as, years later, she looks upon the preparations for her father’s funeral, wanders with a

Figure 1.1  Nadia’s father surveys the courtyard of his ancestral home

18Sight Lines

servant through the deserted home, and establishes her zawiya. For as Nadia embraces her past by immersing herself in Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, the film increasingly foregrounds the Sufi tenet of looking past surfaces to the meanings they may conceal. Throughout the scenes that take place in Nadia’s family home, the length of the takes and the actors’ considered movements encourage viewers to reflect that these images are not, or not solely, what they first seem (fig. 1.2). Yet Benlyazid also employs this stunning locale to suture together abrupt temporal transitions backward and forward. For the Sufi initiate, Nadia’s repeated remarks suggest, time exists in a continuous present. Still, these elisions of everyday milestones that mark the passage of time, coupled with the film’s focus on Nadia’s family home, have the effect of sealing the film’s universe off from history, from the real labor and struggle required to resolve the issues that the film raises. In so doing, they forestall deeper insight into the women’s battles represented both by Nadia’s efforts to keep the family home in spite of inheritance laws that disenfranchise women, and by the personal situations—pregnancy out of wedlock, domestic violence, child labor, mental illness, exile—that prompt women to seek refuge in her zawiya. Intruding upon the film’s exploration of the family home as a space symbolic of the cultural, economic, religious, social, and political power dynamics that have shaped Fez’s, and by extension Morocco’s, past and present, the film’s magical

Figure 1.2  Servants poised for a choreographed crossing of an inner patio

Doubling Back, Moving On

19

realist interludes and temporal leaps present the house as a privileged space that magically resolves Nadia and the other women’s problems. Within its confines, Nadia experiences visions that enable her to surmount not just her westernization, but also Moroccan laws that would have sealed her fate. The solutions that the successful transformation of the house into a zawiya offer Nadia and the women who seek refuge there are personal and individual, without purchase beyond its boundaries. Consequently, A Door to the Sky never establishes a programmatic link to the late postindependence struggles of a broad cross-section of Moroccans. Instead, through its interplay of art, poetry, and architecture over social message, A Door to the Sky strives at once to alter cinematic culture in Morocco and the place of Moroccan cinema in global cinematic culture. It taps into the legacy of the old, imperial city of Fez—actual, mythical, and aspirational—to suggest an alternate perspective on the future of Moroccan cultural production in a globalizing world.14 In keeping with the film’s emphasis on layered meanings, Nadia’s extended fight to retain the family’s ancestral home relates her trajectory toward self-knowledge as well as her seemingly blind trust in the power of Morocco’s spiritual and artistic heritage to bring about social equilibrium. On the surface pitting Nadia against her profoundly Europeanized brother, Driss, this struggle really sets Nadia against the Moroccan postindependence code of personal status (mudawwana) that marginalized women in matters of inheritance and defined them as minors.15 According to the code, Nadia’s only brother, Driss, automatically becomes the primary heir to their ailing father’s estate. Eager to divest himself entirely of his Moroccan heritage, Driss determines to sell the family home. Although he resides in Paris with his French wife, and dresses and behaves strictly according to French mores, Driss strangely refuses to renounce the male privilege enshrined in Moroccan law by ceding the house to Nadia. Initially, then, Nadia finds her efforts to embrace her Moroccan heritage blocked by these inheritance laws that recall how identities are legally and socially imposed as much as self-fashioned or discovered. In response, she attempts to mount a legal challenge to the inheritance laws, all while proceeding to found her zawiya in the home destined for sale. To her skeptical lawyer, Nadia declares that they must revitalize the legacy of public works by Muslim women by returning to the spirit of tradition rather than adhering to the letter of laws that claim to represent it. In the end, however, the issue is not resolved by either legal challenge or stand-off. Rather, near the end of the film, faith opens the door to the sky for Nadia on the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, the Night of Destiny, directing her to a treasure chest of jewels buried in the garden, a discovery that at last enables her to purchase the home outright from her brother. Although, as Fayad suggests, this resolution may be interpreted allegorically as the removal of barriers that had prevented Nadia from accessing her inner riches, on the level of the film’s diegesis it offers only an abrupt,

20Sight Lines

improbable resolution to Nadia’s personal dilemma, glossing over the material influence of those laws in the lives of Moroccan women. At the same time, this device permits the film to play with audience expectations, setting audiences up for a tale of women’s hardship and struggle before veering off in an entirely different, and more upbeat, direction. Discussing her decision to focus on the subtleties of Moroccan culture rather than the “Arab world’s miseries,” Benlyazid admits to a double-edged strategy: “I want to display my own culture and its subtleties. I want our children, whom the curvaceous film stars haunt, to draw their identity from it. I wish that the whole world could discover in it something other than stereotypes and preconceived ideas.”16 Benlyazid targets two sets of viewers and consequently two distinct sets of filmic conventions: she criticizes the Hollywood (as well as the Egyptian) star system, embedded in models of success and beauty once alien to Morocco; and she rejects what Fayad terms the documentary, ethnographic “disclosure,” often orientalist and patriarchal, expected of cinematic works by Arab women.17 Benlyazid never questions the power of film to intervene in material realities, but rather reformulates the direction and nature of its interventions. A Door to the Sky elevates older Moroccan architecture and art, tying both to contemporary Moroccan spirituality in essential ways in an effort to mitigate their increasing disappearance from the physical world as well as from Moroccan aspirations. Yet despite Nadia’s repeated declarations that she has learned to privilege spirituality over materialism, the very focus of the film’s setting—an opulent home of the kind long divided into small apartments for urban migrants and increasingly sold to Westerners at prices out of reach for locals—itself foregrounds the imbrication of culture with material and economic concerns. A Door to the Sky acknowledges as much when Nadia’s sister implores her wealthy husband to purchase the home on behalf of Nadia. Although admiring of the stately house, and by every indication devoted to his wife, with whom he resides in the modern, or Ville Nouvelle, section of Fez, the husband dismisses the possibility on the grounds that the house is “too old and in need of too many costly repairs.” He later seems to waver when he declares that it should remain in the hands of “the descendants of the Prophet,” that is to say, in the hands of a Moroccan family with lineage, but he takes no further action, indicating that devotion to past grandeur has been superseded by more urgent concerns of material comfort.18 By contrast, Nadia’s success in keeping her home despite legal and financial obstacles ostensibly foregrounds the message that one will inevitably find a way around even the most stubborn of obstacles if one follows one’s convictions. Fundamentally modern, or “Western,” in its location of transformative agency in the individual while minimizing the formative power of the larger social whole, this message runs counter to Nadia’s apparent embrace of what many critics dub “tradition.” Nadia’s ultimately successful individualism not only belies her

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apparent transformation in the course of the film, but also ultimately renders her character foreign to those without the educational and financial means to similarly defy their family and community. If a central theme of Sufi poetics is that one must look beyond the manifest, or surface, to the latent, or concealed, A Door to the Sky does not always promote deeper reflection of the sort one would expect.19 A Door to the Sky does expose a vast gulf between Nadia and those Moroccans without her wealth, family connections, and sociolegal status, a gulf not so much between absolute categories of tradition and modernity as between an older, upper-class cosmopolitanism and the situation of the lower and middle classes in an era of rapid economic and cultural transformations. While Nadia opens the zawiya to women from all backgrounds, she retains a clear position of authority over them, the rewards of her newfound piety neatly and instantly replacing her wealth and nobility as the grounds for this authority. A Door to the Sky implicitly conveys this hierarchy by hardly developing the characters who take up residence in the home: a pregnant, unwed servant, a badly beaten little girl, an abused wife, and a woman deemed mad for her flaunting of social conventions, among others. Summary signs of larger social ills, or rather of Nadia’s engagement with these ills, their problems are seemingly resolved by their entry into the zawiya; the camera never takes these characters’ perspective to depict their relation to the space/place into which they enter, effectively blocking audience identification with them. Evoking only fleetingly such pressing social issues—unemployment, illiteracy, domestic violence, child labor, street children, marriage, divorce, and immigration—the film never follows through on initial imagery that depicts Nadia escaping from a prison of individualism into the Moroccan social collectivity.20 Instead, these characters labor in the kitchen and throughout the house in the film’s later scenes while Nadia immerses herself in study, their criticism of two characters introduced near the end of the film functioning as a distant social chorus. As much as Nadia furnishes the point of identification that stitches an otherwise disjointed film together, her character also remains underdeveloped psychologically, with the result that Benlyazid’s film never fully breaks with either Western or North African cinematic conventions. Partly as a result of the film’s sudden temporal transitions, and partly because Nadia’s psychological and spiritual evolutions are conveyed through dress and outward demeanor as well as through brief, intermittent (and clumsy) visions, it remains difficult not to read Nadia with regard to the paradigms established by social realism. Discussing the intense focus on Muslim women in recent globalization discourses, Mervat Hatem remarks that in many Middle Eastern countries the colonized middle classes failed to deliver the individual rights to liberty, equality, and fraternity that they had invoked during struggles for independence. These rights were nonetheless retained as “part

22Sight Lines

of the ideological apparatus” of the resulting postcolonial states, “reflecting both their failure and continued political subordination to Western ideals.”21 The brief scenes of Nadia’s Moroccan father and French mother blending Moroccan customs with European-style worldviews at the time of independence show them navigating such ideals, while Nadia’s struggle appears in many ways as an effort to overcome the failed legacy of liberalism in a Morocco that largely strengthened precolonial structures of governance following independence. At the same time, she herself retains access to these rights, the only obstacle to a job and comfortable life in France her will to remain in Morocco, where she continues to choose whether or not she abides by the country’s social conventions and laws. In this context, her piety sometimes appears a new justification for her life of privilege, the film’s cinematic innovations never fully compensating for the dualities that emerge between her and the women who flee all manner of familiar hardships to join her in the zawiya. This said, A Door to the Sky experiments with identification on more levels than just character and narrative. It engages viewers with sound, in the form of recitation and song, and foregrounds poetry—religious, mystical, and Western-secular—as means to test the boundaries of narrative film.22 Yet although sound, in the form of the recitation of the Quran at her father’s funeral, first breaks through Nadia’s shell of self-absorption, while the study of mystical Islamic poetry and the Quran guides her personal transformation, the visual plays a critical role in signaling her transformations. As Nadia repeatedly contemplates the architecture of the family home, first deserted and then peopled, the evolution of her connection to it is communicated through changes in her attire and living quarters. She experiences her first flashback while standing in front of her mother’s portrait of Ba Sassi, the mysterious family friend from her childhood, and throughout the film frequently returns to her long-dead mother’s studio, initially taking up residence among the paintings there. While she appreciates all of her French mother’s paintings, portraits of nudes and fully clothed Moroccans alike, the nudes elicit visible unease in Kirana, Nadia’s spiritual guide, and Tsi Tsi, a long-standing family servant. When Kirana and Tsi Tsi turn away from the paintings with a look of discomfort, the film once again highlights the divergence of Nadia’s mores from those of the dominant social collectivity. Less directly, these scenes also confirm that her spiritual awakening does not take the form of a strict return to tradition where tradition is defined as an exclusion of all that appears transgressive of the social status quo. Finally, the scenes force brief identifications, or lack thereof, with the perspective that each woman adopts. Within the overall structure of the film, Kirana’s and Tsi Tsi’s disapproval of the nudes acts as a mirror reflection of the reaction experienced by Nadia’s then-boyfriend when he finds her newly wearing a headscarf. The simplest reading of Nadia’s decision to veil is that it signals a break with her European

Doubling Back, Moving On

23

history and heritage, as well as her alignment with her Muslim, Moroccan heritage. Nadia’s French boyfriend seemingly supports such a reading, supplementing it with a secularist perspective that women who veil are essentially silenced and their agency sharply curtailed. By contrast, as cultural anthropologist Saba Mahmood observes, women pietists emphasize the veil’s capacity to signify, to make visible its wearer as inhabiting norms that empower her.23 Although not a member of any particular pietist movement, Nadia similarly views her veil as signifying her new embodiment as a member of a Moroccan, female collectivity, endowed with an authority of belonging and freedom of movement that had previously eluded her, and which permit her to finally see things clearly. Immediately after her father’s death, the still unveiled Nadia remarks in a letter she pens to her boyfriend (while drinking whiskey and smoking) that she has lost her bearings, feels guilty without knowing why, and finds life absurd, her reflections translated for viewers in a voice-over. When her sister arrives to escort her to the mourning ceremony, Nadia vehemently refuses the “disguise” of the white veil of mourning (fig. 1.3). Once she does don the veil, however, she rapidly emerges as a new person, moving from self-indulgent seclusion and complete unfamiliarity with the protocols of prayer to an assiduous practice of study, reflection, prayer, fasting, and helping others. Nadia’s progress toward this model of agency is conveyed via her newfound healing

Figure 1.3  Nadia refusing her sister’s invitation to join the other mourners

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powers and, crucially, by the visions that enable her to uncover the material riches with which she is able to maintain the zawiya. In her case, the veil screens out the visual noise with which the discourses of modernity have blinded her, permitting her to fully perceive herself and her life in Morocco. Still, some years later, Nadia writes anew to her now ex-boyfriend, explaining that her decision to re-embody herself as Moroccan was motivated in part by a fear of being singled out as racially different in France. While her belated explanation strangely recasts her decision to veil as oppositional, stemming from a desire to re-embody a difference already projected upon her, it also points to the persistence of identity markers and the limitations they impose on her personal mobility in that presumably free space. When Nadia and her solicitous boyfriend, Jean Philippe, meet shortly after her father’s funeral, this host of contradictory significations that accrue to Nadia’s appearance and behavior quickly becomes manifest. Traveling to one of Fez’s preeminent hotels to rendezvous with Jean-Philippe, who has just flown in from Paris on his own initiative, Nadia is dressed in mourning white, complete with veil, or headscarf. In contrast to the scene of her own arrival in Fez, where she, dressed as a punk rocker, shrugged off her sister’s opprobrium, Nadia now shows signs of being acutely conscious of her appearance, glancing around nervously, eyes half lowered, raising a hand her headscarf. Had Nadia chosen to wear Western clothes to this meeting, no one would have been the wiser; her mourning clothes, however, show the Moroccan public that she should not be out. When no one at the hotel—the kind that does brisk business with tourists and upper-class Moroccans—takes notice of her, Nadia constructs a disapproving gaze for herself—as well as for viewers, by means of her nervous behavior and curtness with Jean-Philippe. She obliges him to stand in for an ignorant European gaze, a role he assumes when he responds to her awkwardness by picking up an edge of the veil and remarking that she looks like a nun. This remark and the brief interaction that follows are meant to establish that he cannot perceive her transformation except in relation to his own (Western) frames of reference, yet they also reflect Nadia’s recourse to superficial markers of identity in her still-desperate efforts to refashion herself. Once Nadia ascends to his hotel room in order to speak to Jean-Philippe away from the (nonexistent) prying eyes of strangers, the scene presents a multilayered perspective that fragments viewers’ focus. Visible only through the plate-glass window, in which is reflected the old city of Fez as well as the classical geometric decorations cut into the hotel balcony, Nadia earnestly addresses her boyfriend. Framed, off-center, by the window, at times partly obscured by the reflection, the couple act out their drama as the call to prayer intensifies in volume from the minarets of the city (fig. 1.4). In this superimposition of internal with external, visual cues with sound, two levels of meaning vie for viewer attention. There is no need of a soundtrack for

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Figure 1.4  A newly veiled Nadia and her boyfriend Jean-Philippe in his hotel room

the couple’s discussion: Nadia’s self-assured demeanor as she speaks to her boyfriend, who reclines on the bed barely meeting her gaze, shows that their words fail to create understanding between them. Situated just outside the room in which the discussion takes place, the camera positions viewers as voyeurs, and thus necessarily as outsiders, its gaze substantially restricted by the reflection of the medina in the window glass, while the call to prayer increasingly dominates aurally. Yet little in the exchange that follows prompts audiences to reassess this initial interpretation. Following a brief, apparently heated, conversation, Nadia moves toward the door and slides it open as the camera closes in on her and then on the interior of the room, placing viewers on its threshold and offering them an unimpeded view of the couple. As she is about to step onto the balcony, Jean-Philippe remarks to her that she seems like a stranger, and she retorts that in this situation, it is he who is the stranger. Repudiating the dialogue they presumably shared when a couple in France, she declares that he knows nothing of her and her life, that all of this is exoticism to him. When he replies that he is, after all, here because he wants to understand, she announces with finality that he cannot understand, that he is merely a tourist in Morocco, briefly present between two airplane rides. As Nadia steps onto the balcony, trailed by Jean-Philippe, the camera now behind them, she offers him a second chance at understanding. In a remark evocative of

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orientalism, she directs him to “listen to the timelessness of Islam,” and turns her back on the view so that her face is to the camera. Thus looking inward as Jean-Philippe continues to look out over the medina, failing to meet her gaze, Nadia declares that she has finished worshipping money and that she needs to dream that everything is possible. In the next scene, they exit the hotel, everything in Jean-Philippe’s gestures revealing his uncertainty; when Nadia gets into her car, he turns his back and enters the hotel before she has even driven away, but not before Nadia has declared that she will write to him, a statement full of promise that understanding might not yet be lost, or at least that translation of Nadia’s experience might eventually be possible. Much later, when Nadia suddenly begins writing Jean-Philippe letters in an effort to explain the grounds of her sudden rejection, viewers learn that he works as a television journalist who reports on injustice and catastrophe around the globe. Although his early visit is his first and last appearance in A Door to the Sky, he continues to haunt the periphery of the film, his absent gaze evoked each time Nadia writes to him, retroactively explaining her actions. These letters—always conveyed via voice-overs—sustain the articulation of that dichotomous gaze imputed to the West that Nadia constructed alongside the disapproving Moroccan one during their encounter at the hotel. This perhaps explains their intrusion into the film at random moments, years after Nadia has broken off the relationship. For as Nadia retreats ever further from a European life that she now brands materialistic, Benlyazid’s film seems to grant viewers ever more insights into Moroccan culture, while emphasizing that there is more than meets the eye. Episodes of magical realism, where Nadia sees beyond the realities present to other characters, reaffirm that her veiling coincides with a shedding of the metaphorical veils invoked by Islamic mysticism as a symbol of progress toward perception and experience of the divine. At the same time, abrupt shifts in expected storylines and unexpected actions on the part of characters suggest that the film also subscribes to the Sufi premise that all forms of communication are themselves veils. Time and again perception is declared or exposed as misperception. In this to and fro between challenges to look beyond surface meanings and demands for valorization of specificities defined in oppositional terms, the themes and aesthetics of Benlyazid’s film sometimes seem entangled in the very categories of understanding that it attempts to circumvent as it seeks to forge a new direction for Moroccan cinema. One technique by which A Door to the Sky urges its viewers to reassess the interpretive grids through which they watch the film is the disruption of its meditative rhythms by abrupt scene changes that signal temporal leaps. Another is cursory plot development, especially in the final third of the film, where a series of events whose ramifications remain underexplored render cryptic Nadia’s sudden change in trajectory. For significantly, the film concludes when Nadia accepts a young, aristocratic yet unemployed man’s

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unexpected marriage proposal and departs with him on a pilgrimage of sorts, abandoning her zawiya, and seemingly breaking the feminist thread that had linked the disparate events of the film. That decision follows on the heels of the young man, Abdelkrim’s, disrespectful treatment of her when they first meet, as well as his later violations of the regulations of the zawiya, which bar men from entry. More intriguingly, it succeeds Nadia’s encounter with Bahia, a young, non-Arabic-speaking, French-born woman who arrives at the zawiya after her release from prison, and with whom Nadia seems momentarily to share a special rapport. To French and Moroccan viewers in the late 1980s, Bahia would represent the familiar figure of a teenager or young adult of North African background, deported to her country of origin after serving prison time in France, a victim of France’s increasingly stringent immigration laws. To make certain that no one misses this point, Nadia’s lawyer (in her second and last appearance) briefly recounts Bahia’s trajectory when she brings her to the zawiya. With her short hair, jeans, T-shirt, and vest, a crude tattoo visible on her arm, a cigarette in her mouth, and a flask in her pocket, Bahia sticks out among the women of the zawiya, all dressed in kaftans and djellabas, most with headscarves. She looks at them with an uneasy, ironic gaze, and they look back at her with obvious distaste. While Bahia appears in some ways a reflection of Nadia’s former self, she is nonetheless critically different from her would-be benefactor in her linguistic capabilities (she speaks no Arabic, colloquial or standard, but strangely perfect standard French, with none of the prison and youth slang one would expect from an ex-convict), appearance (her visible tattoo, functional, unadorned clothing), lack of means, and aesthetic tastes (her indifference to the renewed magnificence of Nadia’s former family home and preference for Rimbaud’s poetry). In contrast to Nadia, Bahia, deported to a country whose culture she barely knows and does not appreciate, exemplifies a far less celebratory side of transnationalism, one in which choice plays no role and affinities carry little weight. While Nadia, in her letters to her former boyfriend, has imagined herself a target of the racism of French nationalists, everything about Bahia, not least her expulsion, suggests that she has experienced it firsthand. Consequently, while ostensibly introduced as a kind messenger of the outside world’s urgency, as a test of Nadia’s endeavors, tolerance, and understanding, the character of Bahia also functions as a multilayered perceptual test. Not only does Bahia fit into none of the social roles available to her in the refuge, she mockingly maintains her distance from the other women, and they quickly begin to respond to her as an intruder, vocally protesting her presence. For the Moroccan women of the zawiya, Bahia represents a threat to order. She adheres neither to conventional French nor Moroccan social norms and gender roles, and they deem her too other, in terms of both culture and gender, to benefit from or contribute to the support network that is

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the zawiya. Meanwhile, Nadia’s obliviousness to the disturbance occasioned by Bahia’s presence at first once again seems to indicate the superior level of spirituality she has attained. Yet Bahia’s character, arriving as she does during the celebration of Nadia’s discovery of treasure in the garden, and therefore shortly after the Aissaoua session that prompts it—a séance during which women enter into trances sometimes described as semilicit expression of repressed emotions and desires—also gestures toward a whole new order of meaning to the film’s audiences. Curiously one of the more fleshed out characters in the film, Bahia represents the figure of the butch lesbian on seemingly every level, from her prison history to her clothing, to her short hair, lack of makeup, and tattoo. Like the nude portraits earlier in the film, the character of Bahia pushes viewers to make a snap judgment. Yet this time, it is Bahia who unexpectedly makes the final judgment. Any expectations of Nadia’s outing, or coming out, are fleeting. When the women of the zawiya demand the immediate ouster of the young woman, Nadia takes time out from the management of her newfound wealth to invite Bahia to a tête-à-tête dinner in the opulent, zellige-tiled, textile-draped space that newly serves as her quarters. As Nadia requests some dinner from the kitchen, Bahia is shown critically eying the inscriptions on the walls, the bookshelves, the fabrics, and the furnishings. After Nadia returns, Bahia reads aloud to her a poem of Rimbaud’s that describes life as a farce. She takes another swig from her flask and departs, pointedly declaring that she needs a man and doubts she will find one “beneath your skirts” (fig. 1.5).24 Nadia’s baffled disappointment at Bahia’s rejection of her hospitality briefly sustains the just undermined understanding of the latter’s character, while also exposing the limits of Nadia’s spirituality. For Bahia reveals the smugness of Nadia’s benevolent understanding as well as a lack in her life. This time, however, Nadia fails for some time to understand in what that lack consists, her flaws as a guide to understanding the film’s events foregrounded. Consternated by this failure, apparently her first, Nadia tells her spiritual guide, Kirana, that she has lost her sense of purpose in the zawiya, as if her refuge has become her prison. The poem selected by Bahia exalted the turmoil of life, urging the loss of oneself in the chaos of living. Like many of Rimbaud’s poems, it echoes the messages of Sufi poetry, which often speaks of all manner of intoxication, of illicit loves, of losing one’s bearings in order to move beyond the stage at which one may have been tempted to rest. Indeed, Nadia’s next adventure is love, one that prompts her to leave the refuge she has so carefully shaped, yet which is surprisingly conventional. Not long after Bahia’s abrupt departure, Nadia pays a visit to Abdelkrim, the ill, ne’er-do-well son of a once-wealthy family fallen on hard times. His cure is rapid, though it in no way diminishes his flaunting of society’s mores; in love, Abdelkrim haunts the zawiya, confiding to Nadia his frustrations, hopes, and failures. His presence elicits the disapproval

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Figure 1.5  Bahia preparing her departure

of the women, who exclude him, effectively separating the lovers. In Abdelkrim’s absence, Nadia’s depression deepens, her hard-won agency within the zawiya community no longer enough to sustain her. Undeterred, Abdelkrim pushes through the door one day, runs to Nadia’s room, and unexpectedly proposes to her. Just as quickly, she accepts, instantly transforming the ire of the women who have pursued him to her room into celebratory joy. At the film’s conclusion, the couple wanders through pastoral vistas, pausing now and then to meditate on nature and revel in each other’s presence, their framing and poses evoking classical representations of heterosexual consummation, as well as a commitment to a lifestyle in equal parts bohemian and spiritual. While Sandra Carter affirms that Nadia’s departure from the zawiya constitutes a renewed rejection of separatism, the film’s concluding images of Nadia and Abdelkrim as an isolated, self-sufficient couple present Nadia as far more distant from Moroccan society than she was in the populated zawiya in the heart of the medina. 25 Even as the final frames show Nadia and Abdelkrim passing through an archway reminiscent of the gateways that represent progress on the Sufi path, meandering through a landscape empty of visual indicators of modernity, their self-determination and freedom from work and family obligations also present them as a westernized, modern couple (fig. 1.6). 26 Yet these paradoxes are in many ways the film’s final message.

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Figure 1.6  Nadia and Abdelkrim on their pilgrimage

Benlyazid frames her film with a dedication to Fatima al-Fihri: “To Fatima, daughter of Mohammad al-Fihri, founder of the Karawiyyin Mosque in the tenth century, one of the first universities in the world.” Although the facts are incorrect—Fatima al-Fihri founded the mosque in 859, and it did not become a center of learning until a century later—the statement is fundamentally true in its rendering of the popular history of the Karawiyyin. For Shohat, who, like Shafik, extrapolates her reading of Benlyazid’s film from this dedication, these words announce “a liberatory project based on unearthing women’s history within Islam.”27 Taken as a declaration of Benlyazid’s intent to raise awareness of a feminist genealogy within Islam, the dedication positions A Door to the Sky alongside retroactive tracings of feminist genealogies undertaken by women around the world. Less often remarked is how the dedication’s emphasis on the Karawiyyin’s function as a very early center of learning signals the film’s educational aspirations. These aspirations are worth reconsidering from the perspective of the film’s conclusion, where the structure as well as the contents of its lessons are thrown into question. Yet one should perhaps first consider the film’s other dedication, the one that precedes this oft-cited tribute to Fatima al-Fihri and which has most often been passed over uncommented. Written in Arabic, as is the second, but left untranslated by subtitles in either the English or French subtitled versions of A Door to the Sky, this

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dedication is made “to our two fathers, Sidi Mohammed Benlyazid, el-Hasni, and Sidi Larbi Tahiri, both among the generation of Fassis at the dawn of this century.”28 A counterpoint to the more conventionally feminist dedication to Fatima al-Fihri and a departure from a North African practice of dedicating one’s film to a mother or grandmother, this first dedication apparently names the fathers of Farida Benlyazid and Zakia Tahiri, the actress who plays Nadia. Alluding to the establishment of the French Protectorate in Morocco in 1912, it salutes those from Fez who lived the colonial incursion. Overlying the opening scene of Nadia’s European suit-clad father making his way through the streets of the medina, it reads ambiguously, a potential criticism of his assimilation until a cryptic flashback that Nadia’s father experiences on his deathbed presents his life’s task as overcoming the enmity between supporters and opponents of the colonizer. Whatever the reasons for its omissions from critical treatments of Benlyazid’s film, what slips out of sight when this first dedication remains untranslated is the filmmaker’s commitment to multiple, sometimes conflicting, obligations in her search for distinctly Moroccan, resistant yet not exclusionary, film thematics and form. Nor is this out of keeping with Fatima al-Fihri’s legacy. In stripping away all signs of temporality, Benlyazid further aligns Nadia with Fatima al-Fihri, placing her in a landscape that could just as well be that of the tenth century, or more accurately, the ninth, when Fez was just beginning to emerge as a city. Fatima al-Fihri, her own family recently arrived in the region from what is now Tunisia, founded the Karawiyyin in that era partly as a center of worship for other immigrants from the region surrounding the holy city of Kairouan. In keeping with the same Islamic tradition of public works, Nadia founds a zawiya in a much-enlarged Fez as a refuge for those women marginalized by the twentieth-century societies of Morocco and France. With its dedication, Benlyazid’s film advances itself as a new kind of public work, one that is at once far more and far less easily accessible to the public than the other two. Its images fleeting, emphasizing the absences that underpin them, Benlyazid’s film attacks, to paraphrase Nadia’s words to her lawyer, the shackles of tradition to seek out the spirit that once informed that tradition. For better or worse, it never solidifies into a concrete edifice capable of shaping new cinematic communities. Yet, by simultaneously frustrating and reassuring its viewers, offering them glimpses into what they seek, and failing to fully fill in the picture, A Door to the Sky also makes clear that the task of explication and comprehension continues, that motion remains the essential property of cinema.

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Twilight Dawns Mohamed Chouikh’s The Citadel (1989), Youssef (1994), and Ark of the Desert (1997) We are divesting ourselves of what is best in our culture in order to keep only the shackles of the traditional, empty of all meaning. —Nadia, A Door to the Sky Few films have as strongly, distinctively, and enduringly impressed upon national and international audiences alike the emergence of both a newly independent nation and its cinema as The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966). Usually examined as an international success built upon internationalist principles, The Battle of Algiers has rarely been considered from the perspective of its influence upon the national cinema to come.1 Oftentimes excluded from the corpus of Algerian cinema because of its foreign director, The Battle of Algiers was nevertheless based on a memoir penned by former National Liberation Front (FLN) combatant Saadi Yacef, who commissioned Gillo Pontecorvo to direct the film, produced it through his Casbah Films production company, and acted in it along with other mujahideen, or resistance fighters.2 It screened regularly on Algeria’s sole television station and remains popular in Algiers today, sold on pirated DVDs. In 2010, Algerian newspapers testified to its enduring power to shape national identity when they announced that it had been shown as a motivational tool to members of the Algerian national soccer team at the World Cup prior to their match with England.3 Fascinating for its exemplary use of neorealism, gripping narrative, and novel perspectives, The Battle of Algiers clearly came to encapsulate something crucial about Algerian cinema, and perhaps Algeria, for audiences at home as well as around the world. In the 1992 Return to Algiers, an Italian television-funded documentary and discussion included in the masterful Criterion Collection DVD re-edition of the film, Gillo Pontecorvo foregrounds the film’s truth value in the eyes of Algerians, narrating the mistrust he and his crew encountered before the local media announced his identity. Initially greeted by hostile groups of men and children determined to expel foreigners and journalists as the country began

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its descent into a decade of violence and bloodshed, Pontecorvo and his film crew are warmly welcomed once Algerian television and newspapers identify him as the director of the still popular film. Bearded men approach to shake his hand, thanking him for making an honest film about Algeria. One leans in on camera over a disconcerted Pontecorvo to announce in a stage whisper that the leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front have been arrested.4 While Pontecorvo clearly intends these scenes to confirm the authentically Algerian character of The Battle of Algiers, they also, more pressingly, indicate just how much the film continues to exert its “dictatorship of truth” over Algerians, shaping the present as much as the past.5 For the spontaneous interjections of Algerian bystanders declare an enduring commitment not so much to the particular principles of the FLN captured in the film, as to the film’s representational tropes as the ultimate yardstick of Algerian authenticity. In the decades following the release of The Battle of Algiers, the film’s very success in structuring perceptions of the anticolonial conflict became an obligatory point of reference for Algerian filmmakers working to build a national cinema. Writer and film critic Rachid Boudjedra already lamented national cinema’s preoccupation with the war of independence at the beginning of the 1970s.6 At the same time, a number of Algerian filmmakers from the late 1960s onward creatively commented upon and challenged the mythologization of the war of independence to which Pontecorvo’s film had contributed, testing generic conventions and developing Algerian vocabularies of social realism. With the support of national agencies for film and television production, these filmmakers experimentally depicted the silences and suppressions of postindependence history, as did Assia Djebar in her La Nouba des femmes de Mont Chenaoua (1978); or wittily exposed the pitfalls of viewing Algerian realities via tropes of transparency and progress, as did Mohammed Lakhdar Hamina in Hassan Terro (1968), Moussa Haddad with Les Vacances d’Inspecteur Tahar (1973), and Merzak Allouache in Omar Gatlato (1976). Very successful at home, and in the case of Allouache’s Omar Gatlato, with connoisseurs of Algerian cinema abroad, all three comedies relied on more localized knowledge, the absence of crossover potential paradoxically both raising and diminishing their stature in the eyes of the local audiences who enjoyed them, keen for both renewed validation of their evolving realities and international recognition of Algeria’s national-cinematic arrival. Yet such films remained exceptions, the rule consisting, as Arab film historian Viola Shafik observes, of the commercialization of didactic subjects, later war-ofindependence films becoming “a sub-genre of the American Western.”7 Beginning in the late 1980s, however, former state television employee Mohamed Chouikh began to tackle Algeria’s cinematic legacies in a sustained and nuanced way, developing a unique cinematic approach that remained true to the principles of Algerian national cinema while critiquing their ossification. By that time, the Algerian agrarian revolution had failed,

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the Soviet Union was about to crumble, and shortfalls in postindependence aspirations led to increasingly insistent calls for political reform that would culminate in violent repression, a confluence of circumstances that belied the heroic and progressist narratives of postindependence Algerian cinema. Not surprisingly, the Algerian state began to waver in its long-standing commitment to the power of film (though not necessarily media) as a tool of social reform.8 It restructured and renamed the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographique (ONCIC) several times before dissolving in 1998 what had become in 1987 the Centre Algérien pour l’Art et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (CAAIC).9 Restructuring overlapped with the outbreak of the bloody, decade-long civil war in 1992, which often targeted intellectuals, artists, journalists, teachers, and filmmakers, bringing a virtual halt to filmmaking activity, at least in the capital, until 2002.10 Nonetheless, during these overlapping periods of turbulence, Chouikh made three films that visually and thematically distinguished themselves and became known as a trilogy: The Citadel (El Qala) (1988), Youssef (1993), and The Ark of the Desert (al-Arsh) (1997). As former employee of the Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérien (RTA), the state television company, for which he had made several documentary films, Chouikh remains broadly committed in his feature films to principles of socialist modernity as well as to a critique of retrograde cultural and social practices that would undermine the collectivity.11 In general, Chouikh’s films strive for the kind of balance outlined in the 1973 Resolutions of the Third World Film-makers Meeting, Algiers: The question, however, is not one of separating cinema from the overall cultural context which prevails in our countries … cinema operates with materials that are drawn from reality and already existing cultural forms of expression in order to function and operate. [Yet] it is also necessary to be vigilant and eliminate nefarious action which the information media can have and to purify the forms of popular expression (folklore, music, theatre etc.) and to modernize them.12

Nevertheless, all three films of Chouikh’s trilogy, the first two of which were produced by the CAAIC, take up the dual challenge summarized by this declaration in a manner rare within Algerian film production. Rejecting generic conventions as well as a social realism that approaches film simply as a tool by which to cultivate rational perception, to lead viewers toward the revelations of reason, Chouikh’s films foreground a deliberate fictitiousness that draws from Algerian, Arab, Amazight, and African popular cultures, as well as from Arabic and Persian literary and artistic traditions. Instead of placing “existing forms of cultural expression” in the service of “[purification] of the forms of popular expression,” they use both to comment on the farce and tragedy of postindependence sociopolitical realities and expose the deliberate opacities

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of state-sponsored social realism. Yet even as they eschew the approaches that characterize the “nefarious action of the information media,” Chouikh’s films do not so much renounce didacticism as renegotiate the complicated intersection of politics and entertainment in an era of sharply declining film spectatorship. By skewering national and political “backwardness,” in addition to divisions of class and power within rural and urban, poor and rich populations, the films of the trilogy refrain from targeting or elevating any particular group of Algerians. Similarly, they accord to no spectator mastery over perspective, plenitude of insight, or access to exemplary citizenship. At a time of plummeting film spectatorship and state funding, Chouikh’s films quietly undermine official articulations of nation and citizen in films at once accessible and difficult. Incorporating classical poetry and narrative, and popular tales, legends, music, and theater to reference familiar contemporary Algerian realities, the films of Chouikh’s trilogy unfold in settings devoid of temporal markers. Filmed on site in rural Algeria, The Citadel in the eponymous village of al-Qalah, Ark of the Desert in the Sahara, and Youssef in Taghit and Souidania, these films foreground the symbolic rather than explicitly situate themselves in any particular place in Algeria. Yet their resulting atemporality at times also threatens to reinscribe Algeria in the static, unchanging Orient of orientalism, or confirm in rural Algeria the “backwardness” of Third Worldist discourse, detracting from the contemporary politics they invoke. This applies particularly to the final film of the trilogy, The Ark of the Desert, made at the height of the bloody conflicts of the 1990s and more abstract than its predecessors. One reviewer, inadvertently reinforcing the barriers to universalism erected around the work of African film directors, quickly deems the film’s broader messages heavy-handed before suggesting that European audiences receive it as a wake-up call to better inform themselves of the plight of their neighbors to the south and to rethink French immigration policy.13 To be sure, perspectives such as these also arise from Chouikh’s refusal of auteurism and continued commitment to film’s didactic potential. For even as his films underscore the farcical and the fictional, the literary and the artistic, they do not linger on stunning imagery, strive for perfect composition, or elaborate an individual aesthetics. Rather than fully exploring the possibilities of film as an artistic medium, the films of the trilogy remain committed to testing the limits and possibilities of the trajectories and approaches, including social realism, that have characterized state-sponsored cinema. This exploration of Algeria’s cultural and artistic legacies in the service of obvious sociopolitical critique has earned Chouikh’s films mixed and sometimes contradictory receptions from critics and scholars. Roy Armes first lumps Chouikh with Algerian filmmakers who feature struggling, ultimately defeated protagonists in their social realist approach to “rural issues.” Yet Armes also singles out Chouikh as a member of a very select group of

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Algerian filmmakers who have developed a truly distinctive style.14 For Viola Shafik, The Citadel simply sets out to “discredit … traditional culture by means of Marxist social analysis,” while Youssef is one of a group of Algerian films from the 1990s that are “marked by a slight departure from official political discourses and, more importantly, increasingly place the individual in conflict with his social surroundings.”15 Regretting that such Algerian films fail to provide an “adequate representation of different social groups,” Shafik omits mention of the latter film’s pointed commentary on the postindependence representation of revolutionary ideals through Chouikh’s construction of deeply flawed protagonists, Youssef included. While Denise Brahimi devotes an article to dissecting the images, symbols, and parables in Chouikh’s trilogy, her more recent book on Maghrebi cinema largely sidesteps this component of his films to praise Chouikh for his realistic portrayal of women’s social victimization.16 As these discordant views suggest, the extent of Chouikh’s critiques of postindependence modernity are not always readily apparent for several reasons: their multilayered messages and forms of address that nuance the familiar black and white representations of Algerian cinema, their forsaking of melodrama in favor of distancing effects, and a refusal of seamless, naturalizing “reality effects” that can appear as technical clumsiness. To be sure, films like The Citadel and Ark of the Desert skewer North African sociocultural structures and practices such as tribalism, feudalism, polygamy, the seclusion of women, and devotion to saints. Yet by exploiting film’s oft-heralded ability to defamiliarize the ordinary in such a way as to render it worthy of renewed examination, Chouikh’s films also reverse the directionality of their critique to encompass those who would distinguish themselves as modern. Demystifying a range of representational practices, including, by implication, their own, and those of the body that funds them, Chouikh’s films at their best expose the modern, postindependence Algerian nation-state as sustained by representational practices no less manipulative, occult, hierarchical, and exclusionary than those dubbed traditional. A variety of filmic strategies aid in undermining anticipated, or surface, meaning and targets. In The Citadel, for example, repeated use of off-screen sound alludes to critical blind spots cultivated by its own and other media representations of sociopolitical realities. Youssef interpolates in a darkly satirical way the iconography of independence to expose its dangerous misappropriations and fracture its hold on the national imaginary. For its part, The Ark of the Desert reduces to symbols distinctions between competing groups, disregarding character building and continuity editing in order to plunge spectators into a world of chaos and violence irreducible to the dialectic on which Algeria’s progressist national narrative has relied. A breakthrough film and still his best known, Chouikh’s The Citadel adapts the very cultural and social practices it ostensibly targets in the service of a

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critique of Algerian political modernity. A farce that veers to melodrama in its conclusion, The Citadel juggles multiple storylines, values off-screen sound and space, and balances allegory, satire, and social realism. Set in a town high in the stony mountains, the film centers on Kaddour, a man of childish innocence, who draws the ire of the village men when he is caught gazing rapturously at the cobbler’s flirtatious wife (fig. 2.1).17 As the film progresses, viewers learn that the hard-working, humble Kaddour was abandoned as a baby on the doorstep of Sidi, a prosperous, well-respected, no longer young fabric merchant with four wives and countless young children. Sidi treats Kaddour much like the animals the younger man herds, less as a son than a slave. When the village men gather outside Sidi’s compound for a second protest of Kaddour’s behavior, his adoptive father vows to marry him before the day’s end, swearing that he will repudiate his own four wives if he fails to do so. Sidi’s oath, a repetition of one made by the cuckolded cobbler over a game of checkers, underscores how the women are casually charged with representing male honor at the same time that they are perceived as interchangeable objects. Yet it also foregrounds the less overtly feminist theme—introduced in the film’s opening montage of grooms, in all but one case disappointed or dismayed, unveiling their brides after a striking group wedding—of the threat presented by younger men, even those as seemingly innocuous as Kaddour, to

Figure 2.1  Kaddour pausing in his morning rounds to admire the cobbler’s flirtatious wife

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an older generation that hoards power and resources, including women. Both themes explain not only why Sidi self-assuredly goes through with the wedding when he fails to find Kaddour a wife, simply substituting a dressmaker’s dummy for a living bride, but also why the assembled men laugh so derisively at Kaddour’s deception, which only grotesquely mimics, or soon will, their own frustration. As the men, many of them young, crowd around him laughing, Kaddour stumbles and plummets to his death from a cliff. Yet the visual and narrative techniques of farce and satire that have underpinned this drama prior to its melodramatic conclusion ensure that audiences receive it as something other than a stern condemnation of barbaric rural societies. Chouikh’s use of stock characters, whether greedy, lustful old men; lascivious, wily, wayward wives; or grasping, cruel charlatans, among others, certainly drives the narrative to this end, but constant aural, visual, and spoken allusions to greater, unseen powers indicate that the village merely functions as the microcosm of a higher, rigidly hierarchical, oppressive sociopolitical structure. As the action centers on the mean-spirited jokes, cruel pranks, childish tantrums, and hypocritical displays of Hadj Aissa and Hadj Moussa, Sidi’s jealous, spiteful friends and rivals; on Sidi’s tyranny over his four wives and unabated skirt-chasing; on the ruses of his mistress, the very cobbler’s wife who is the object of Kaddour’s adoration; and on the money-grubbing schemes of a charlatan posing as holy man and healer, a flurry of activity around shuttered buildings in the town center indicates that the attention of the townspeople lies mainly beyond the frame offered to the film’s audiences. Instead of advancing the film’s central intrigue, these glimpses of action centered on unidentified buildings, one of which appears to be the town hall, and the other possibly a school, introduce distracting peripheral views that point to a deliberate withholding of critical insight. The movements and plight of Kaddour teleologically unite the film’s disparate vignettes. Herding animals and running errands, he moves through his adoptive (and perhaps biological) father’s compound, the countryside, and the town, the camera alternating between his point of view and a more omniscient perspective that at times excludes him entirely, the better to expose the broad web of machinations that encircles the townspeople. Intentionally flawed as are all of Chouikh’s protagonists, thereby encouraging a kind of Brechtian distancing, Kaddour neither makes sense of what he sees nor establishes logical connections between events, one justification for the film’s episodic structure. When Kaddour first passes the town hall, for example, a group of chair-bearing village men struggle to break through its locked doors; during his subsequent passages, snatches of oratory and applause issue mysteriously from behind those same closed doors (fig. 2.2). During his final passage, as he is paraded through town prior to his wedding, Kaddour comically waves at an invisible audience as applause bursts forth once again from

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Figure 2.2  Kaddour passing by a group of chair-bearing men on his way through the village

the building, his naive belief that he is the center of everyone’s attention on second thought a jab at spectators’ own gullibility in taking him for the film’s central protagonist. Like the citadel-village itself, this never clearly defined building with its unseen theater of activity offers and withholds representation, both artistic and political. It summons with a promise of inclusion born of insight, yet its tightly and consistently shuttered doors block access to a mysterious interior that may either privilege or imprison. As Kaddour walks through town, he passes a similar building—perhaps even the same one seen from a different angle—that village men are boarding up while admonishing someone inside. This time, however, the film partially elucidates the mystery later when Youssef, seemingly a schoolteacher, is freed by children and flees to the hills where Kaddour has been bound in a lean-to and left to await his wedding. Attentive yet innocent, Kaddour assumes the role of perfect student for Youssef in the scene that ensues. When he explains his bonds to Youssef by shyly announcing that he is to be married, the teacher laughs uproariously. Unbinding Kaddour, Youssef urges him to “make Sidi proud,” before scrambling up to a large boulder, spitting, and cursing the inhabitants of the town below. Marveling at this behavior, Kaddour asks him to explain. No sooner has he posed the question than the film cuts to the interior of Hadj Aissa’s

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home, where Sidi’s eldest wife is attempting to calm Hadj Aissa’s three wives, upset by the delivery of an additional loom that signals their husband’s intent to take a fourth wife. In the end, Sidi’s wife shrugs in resignation and urges them to accept their lot as women, and the film cuts back to Kaddour and Youssef, now seated calmly among the boulders. Over the visual lesson in gendered economic and social injustice acted out by the four women, Chouikh adds a metacritical parable about vanity, power, strategic representation, and perhaps resistance, in the form of Youssef’s tale. Speaking to Kaddour as one would a child, yet looking beyond him as if in thrall to a broader audience, Youssef tells of a vicious, one-eyed, lame king who sought to have his portrait painted (fig. 2.3). After putting to death a long succession of painters whose paintings had failed to please him, the king finally approved a portrait, lavishly rewarding its painter. Kaddour interjects sagely that the man must have been a better painter. But Youssef answers in the negative, assuming the pose he describes, wherein the king is hunting, kneeling on his bad leg, and sighting his target with his bad eye closed. “That son of a dog wants me to do the same,” Youssef bitterly concludes, “and I refuse.” As Youssef speaks, the camera tracks toward him, cutting Kaddour out of the frame; as he mimics the pose of the king drawing an imaginary arrow, his face is framed in close up, pulling back as he gestures toward the unseen “son of a dog.” Yet Youssef subsequently vanishes from the film, “the son of a dog”

Figure 2.3  Kaddour listening to the story of the king and the painter

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he vows to defy never named, hanging over the film as a broad reference to the political pressure exerted on all artists, including the filmmaker, as well as to power dynamics that exceed those of the town. Socratic dialogue staged with the unwitting complicity of Kaddour, who cannot absorb its message, Youssef’s parable encourages a critically skeptical approach to verisimilitude in visual media, from portrait painting to film, by indicating that realism is by no means progressive, truthful, or at odds with self-interest. As the camera closes in on Youssef’s face, he fixes intently on an invisible interlocutor beyond the camera, as if addressing an as yet invisible critical spectator. The second film of Chouikh’s trilogy more adamantly foregrounds the political role of artistic representations by reworking a religious and philosophical parable in order to examine the trajectory of postindependence Algerian cinema. Subtitled The Legend of the Seventh Sleeper, Youssef transposes to early 1990s Algeria a legend known to Christians in the Middle Ages as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and to Muslims from Sura 18 of the Quran, as Ahl al-kahf, or The People of the Cave. Both versions recount the miraculous experiences of youths who flee religious persecution by retreating to a cave where they fall into a deep sleep. Awakening several centuries later, they are discovered when they send an envoy into a nearby town for provisions and he attempts to pay for them with archaic currency. Incredulous, the townspeople journey to the cave and bear witness to this miracle, and the youths lie down and die. Chouikh, like Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim in his 1933 Ahl al-Kahf, secularizes the story, highlighting issues of time, progress, change, and continuity. After sustaining a severe head wound in battle during the waning days of the war of independence, Chouikh’s title character, Youssef, has spent nearly three decades confined in a psychiatric hospital in the Algerian south. Unlike the Seven Sleepers, in that he does not emerge into a transformed world that vindicates his faith, Youssef returns to the cave where his former military unit was headquartered in order to pursue his quixotic quest. While his efforts to grapple with postindependence realities underscore the failures of the Algerian state to live up to its revolutionary promises, his ultimate acceptance of Algerian cinema as a substitute for tangible signs of revolutionary social movement proposes a sharp critique of the stasis of postindependence cinema. Introduced as he attempts to hang a fellow patient who has sought to escape from the psychiatric hospital, Youssef, like Kaddour, appears at once an object of sympathy and revulsion. His revolutionary ideals steadfast and undiluted by the passage of time, he upholds a military code of conduct by fanatically fixating on an innocent man. Although delusional, Youssef recognizes certain realities well enough to practice deception, as when he attempts to disguise this attempted homicide as a suicide, in the process recalling the French colonial war tactics memorialized in Algerian film and

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literature. Alternately a grotesque parody of Algerian war film heroes and a pure spirit, Youssef but occasionally rises to the level of sympathetic figure. Instead, critical distancing again proves central to Chouikh’s second film, which explores the manner in which representations of the revolutionary era, including filmic ones, have been co-opted by both ruling powers and their opponents to justify repression and violence. As Chouikh exposes the infiltration of revolutionary mythology, via social realism, into every aspect of contemporary Algerian existence, The Battle of Algiers, with its euphoric realism, becomes a significant intertext. Youssef repeatedly crosses paths with banner-waving protesters chanting “Tahya Djezaïr” (Long live Algeria), as in the famous crowd scenes of The Battle of Algiers, for example. Yet never having seen Pontecorvo’s film, he fails to connect these protestors, who seem to oppose FLN party politics, to his own cause. Such scenes challenge spectators to consider the reality presumably at the core of now iconic social realist representations, questioning the relationship between mimesis and actual revolutions in consciousness, society, and politics. Like the emerging “New Man” of revolutionary theory, Youssef pursues his revolution without the benefit of role models. Yet Chouikh’s film counts on spectators who will recognize him as a composite of postindependence cinematic clichés. This results in some darkly satiric moments when the situations he encounters mimic those of The Battle of Algiers or Mohammed Lakhdar Hamina’s early films, yet with very different, dismaying or comic, outcomes. When Youssef encounters the familiar figure of the grief-addled, martyred mother soon after his initial escape, he gravely pronounces her a victim of the colonizer’s cruelty and inhumanity. Yet the villagers’ obvious lack of sympathy and disparaging remarks regarding the woman’s “lax morals” make clear that the house fire in which her young son perished was deliberately set by one or more of the spectators to her misfortune. Based on an actual incident that took place in the early 1990s and was attributed to the Islamist opposition party Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS, the scene also uncomfortably recalls a sequence early in The Battle of Algiers, where FLN edicts about cleansing society of addicts and prostitutes were layered over shots of children and adults punishing addicts and pimps (although never women). The scene blends Chouikh’s dual running themes of the pre- and postindependence scapegoating of women and Algerian cinema’s fostering of illusory rhetorics of victory over true movements in consciousness. Similarly, in a more comic scene, Youssef veils himself in a haik so as to move about unnoticed as he plots revenge on a man he has recognized as a traitor. More successful than the similarly disguised militants in Pontecorvo’s film, he is tailed and harassed by an eager farmer who derails his plans (fig. 2.4). Elsewhere, Youssef dramatically accosts the traitor in a gesture reminiscent of Ali la Pointe only to have his ancient gun fall apart when he attempts to fire it, leaving the man alive to manipulate representations of revolutionary glory

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Figure 2.4  Youssef, dressed in a black haik, draws unwelcome male attention

in his own favor. Far from naturalizing Youssef’s behavior and actions, these re-enactments of sequences from films he has never seen undermine the reality effect of their predecessors, defusing their emotional impact and ideally breaking their iconic spell with mockery. Confronted by repeated failures, Youssef retreats to the cave in the mountainous north where he was stationed with his unit during the war of independence, before his head wound sent him to the psychiatric hospital. However, his failed assassination of the traitor, now a powerful local politician, has attracted broad notice to his presence. The ancient radio transmitter abandoned in the cave, on which he had vainly attempted to contact headquarters when he first stumbled upon the skeletons of his former comrades, now broadcasts his description, dangerous status, and approximate location. Former comrades in arms and fellow patients begin to visit the cave with reassurances, urging Youssef to relax and enjoy the fruits of independence. Sensitive to the disparities between their words, actions, and appearance, Youssef stays put. At the same time and despite the authorities’ warnings, large groups of women and men, old, infirm, and sometimes young, but all situated on society’s margins, begin to seek him out in pilgrimage, seeking remediation for social injustices. Visiting the cave as they would both a saint’s shrine and an influential official’s office, they leave letters in which they recount their ills and frustrations (fig. 2.5). Disconcerted, Youssef

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Figure 2.5  Youssef speaking with those come to seek his assistance

nonetheless accepts these quasi-religious devotions that run counter to his Marxist revolutionary principles, and promises to intercede on their behalf to higher powers. In these scenes, Chouikh’s film pointedly indicates how the postindependence idealization of the revolutionary past, the sacralization of its heroes and holy sites, ironically replicates forms of worship summarily dismissed as backward and superstitious in the modernization discourses of the postindependence Algerian state. Youssef finally concedes that the war of independence has ended after his former comrades screen The Battle of Algiers on the walls of his cave (fig.  2.6). Enthralled by the film’s exultant closing scene, where, to employ Ella Shohat’s apt formulation, “The woman ‘carr[ies]’ the allegory of the ‘birth’ of the nation,” he regrets having missed the celebrations of independence.18 Hastily reassuring him, his comrades convey Youssef’s capitulation to the traitorous politician, who issues an edict to prepare the city for independence celebrations. There follows a series of short vignettes depicting ordinary citizens grumbling with resigned cynicism as they hang banners and prepare the town’s main avenues. Yet when evening arrives, the most marginalized members of the crowd genuinely fête Youssef, convinced that he, untainted by postindependence corruption, will now fulfill the promises of the revolution. Dazzled by their devotion and utterly taken in by the staged celebration, Youssef lingers along the route to the podium, where the

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Figure 2.6  A screening of The Battle of Algiers (1966) in Youssef ’s cave

traitor-turned-politician awaits him. When he suddenly hesitates as he is about to mount the podium, a rooftop sniper guns him down. Silence overtakes the crowd in response to this unexpectedly realistic denouement.19 As did The Citadel, Youssef ends just after the camera closes in on a wide-eyed young child in the crowd, silent this time. Opening his War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception with a reference to the underground militant tactic of circulating photos of “sacrificial victims,” Paul Virilio provocatively remarks that this talismanic use of visual evidence illuminates the irrational, ritualistic, and hallucinatory dimensions of even the most modern, legitimate wars: When underground militants—Irish, Basque, Action Directe or Red Brigades—use outrages, murder or torture to gain publicity, feeding the media with photos of their sacrificial victims, the act of internal war throws back to its psychotropic origins in sympathetic magic, to the riveting spectacle of immolation and death agony, the world of ancient religions and tribal gatherings. Terrorism insidiously reminds us that war is a symptom of delirium operating in the half-light of trance, drugs, blood, and unison.20

Virilio’s statements remain striking for their refusal to draw a fundamental distinction between the wars waged by terrorists and legitimate armies, more significant than ever today when the Internet renders quicker and

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more pedestrian the circulation of talismanic images destined to “psych out” or “psych up.” Chouikh’s Youssef—with its layering of references to archaic religious rituals and military hero worship; with its blurring of the boundaries between madness and sanity; with its exposure of revolutionary tropes exploited equally by former-combatant politicians and antigovernment religious extremists—skewers this common delirium via a linear, character-focused narrative. By contrast, Ark of the Desert, made at the height of the bloodshed of the 1990s, which many refused to legitimate with the title “civil war,” plunges viewers much more precipitously into the chaos and superstition of war, abandoning linear exposition, continuity editing, and character development. By contrast with Merzak Allouache’s Bab el Oued el-Haouma (Bab El Oued City) (1994), the Algerian film most often cited abroad for its portrayal of the rising tensions of the 1990s, Ark of the Desert does not suture viewers into the ostensibly more rational perspective, the one aligned with the struggling youths increasingly oppressed by shadowy, conflicted, self-deceiving extremists.21 This final film of Chouikh’s trilogy not only refuses ethnographic accuracy in its rejection of reality effects, but also refrains from rationalizing one side or the other in the conflict it depicts. Where Allouache depicts hypocritical extremists who terrorize endearingly familiar, if frustrated, young men and women, Ark focuses on heavily symbolic, successive constellations of events that collide in a devastating conclusion that implicates all. Characters such as Miriam and Amin, the lovers from antagonistic clans likened by Euro-American advertising copy to Romeo and Juliet, whose illicit liaison furnishes the pretext for the outbreak of hostilities, are weak, inconstant, and quickly sidelined by the hostilities they have unwittingly unleashed. A jumble of allusions and references by turns apparently simplistic and opaque, Chouikh’s film offers spectators no single strong allegory that might aid them in logically parsing the accumulation of reactions, events, and interventions. No side emerges as just or even justified, as a hedge against violence and destruction, least of all the lovers whose lighthearted tryst initially seemed to promise a new order. Yet while its lack of linear narrative development may thwart seekers of narrative pleasure, the film’s long pans over stunning desert landscapes and ruins, allusions to biblical disasters, Greek tragedies, canonical Arabic poetry, and conflicts past and present create a web of reference points that entice and implicate. Ark became the only film of Chouikh’s trilogy to obtain commercial distribution in the United States through its inclusion in volume 3 of the Great African Films Collection, where it was promoted as a “Romeo and Juliette in the Desert” and “a universal metaphor to denounce all extremist violence.”22 Although stressing the film’s universalist aspirations, these remarks continue to depend on Eurocentric divisions of representational labor, divisions that look to the Arab world and

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Africa largely for exemplars of violence and extremism. Yet Chouikh’s Ark resists co-optation as another weapon in the arsenal of the war on terrorism. Not only does the final, brutal destruction come at the hands of an army that represents an otherwise unseen nation-state, but the film also deliberately thwarts binaristic interpretations and moralizing by emphasizing the contingent and the banal rather than the melodramatic or the epic. In lieu of understanding or entertainment, Ark upends the delicate balance of insight and duplicity that have characterized Euro-American narrative cinema since its origins and in which Virilio exposes a military logistics of perception. Incorporating irrationality and blindness, this final film of Chouikh’s trilogy rejects the magical ability of cinema to impart life, insight, reason, and desired outcomes to vanished pasts and unknown futures, instead consigning spectators to an uneasy half-light. From its opening shots, Ark plays with film’s ability to cultivate deception. As the camera slowly pans over a vast expanse of water, the changing light gradually transforms the blue waves into desert dunes. No sooner does the film cut to an extreme close-up of the sand than a spade strikes it, followed by a splash of water, the camera pulling back to reveal a long line of men, singing as they work at the Sisyphean task of digging a trench in the apparently bottomless desert sands, aided by women who dampen the ground with water ferried from the adjacent oasis (fig. 2.7). Their activity

Figure 2.7  Men digging a trench in the desert

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recasts the expanse of water that opened the film, for a fleeting moment before the action shifts, as a dream or mirage that nourishes their rhythmic labor. Quickly forgotten as the film’s action shifts to the discovery of the two lovers in their innocent tryst, these opening shots nonetheless establish the preoccupations and aspirations of the oasis community. Still hidden is how the film will expose and undermine the expectations of its spectators. Theorist-practitioners of third cinema sought to destroy those expectations of cinema instilled by the capitalist, imperialist, industrial-military complex, replacing it with a cinema capable of effecting profound transformations in structures of perception and their relation to action. Yet Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino famously adopted the language of guerrilla warfare throughout their manifesto announcing its advent:  “The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.”23 More sober from its vantage point at the far side of Algeria’s failed engagement with third cinema and from within a culture that has for many come to embody violence, Ark sets out to unsettle film’s and Arab culture’s affiliation with violent combat, whether traditional or guerilla. Ark is framed with an epigraph from al-Mutanabbi, the great Arabic-language poet:  “A chaque fois que croît une branche, l’homme en fait un baton” (Every time a branch grows, man fashions it into a stick).24 Unremarkable in itself, for Arab spectators would be accustomed to proverbial citations of the tenth-century Iraqi Abu Tayyib Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi’s poetry, the epigraph nonetheless offers a twist by recasting the great poet of glorious battles and tribal solidarity as a world-weary critic of endless cycles of violence. Al-Arsh, the film’s Arabic title, denotes both “tribe” in the North African dialect and “throne” in classical Arabic, and Ark juxtaposes and challenges the worldly and spiritual power both terms connote. Multiple tribes figure in the film, two of them dominating the film’s diegesis through their mutual hostilities. At the same time, these two central groups are indistinguishable from each other and the other tribal groups, so that Chouikh resorts to color-coding their apparel, blue for one side, green for the other, a symbolism that emphasizes the superficiality and absurdity of the distinction. An encounter between the mothers of the two lovers, Amin and Miriam, further stresses the fabricated yet stubborn quality of the distinction: Miriam’s mother haughtily rejects the face-saving marriage proposal of Amin’s mother on the grounds that her daughter is “bint al-3arsh.” Roughly, her statement translates as “Miriam is a daughter of the people of the tribe/throne.” Amin’s mother quickly counters, “7ata 7na nass al-sharafa,” or “We, too, are people of nobility/descendants of the prophet Muhammad.” While the language of Amin’s mother references a common religious heritage intended to trump

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tribal distinctions, it also emphasizes the persistence of privilege based on bloodlines, just as the words of Miriam’s mother, boasting of superior tribal affiliation, invoke religiosity through the word arsh, referenced in several Quranic verses as the domain of God.25 Unable to privilege community in religion over purported distinctions in lineage, the two mothers fail to halt the dispute, and the arms dealers and army that arrive later pay no heed to tribal distinctions, selling arms and massacring indiscriminately. Neither side is accorded more screen time than the other; neither emerges as more justified or reasonable than the other. A freethinker wryly named Mutanabbi builds dramatic tension by initially appearing as a deus ex machina, yet his own increasingly evident delusions undermine any hopes of redemption as the conflict inexorably intensifies. The French title of Chouikh’s film, L’Arche du désert, plays on the assonance between the Arabic arsh and the French word for ark, arche, foregrounding the symbolism of a wooden boat improbably beached amid the desert dunes. Physical trace of an archaic memory that reinforces the film’s opening images, this boat becomes the center of Mutanabbi’s deranged hopes for salvation, for he envisions himself as a latter-day Noah who will miraculously sail away from the impending cataclysm with a select group of women and children to recreate life elsewhere. Recalling but not doubling the famous poet, and perhaps those extremists who promote apocalyptic violence in the name of a fresh start, Mutanabbi lives with an iconoclastic outcast woman named Houriya, the Arabic word for freedom, among ruins overlooking the oasis. While Houriya apostrophes the oasis dwellers with denunciations of their disregard for love and life, Mutanabbi contents himself with reciting verse that extols the virtues of love and wine, and welcoming other outcasts, such as Miriam and Amin. As war looms, rather than intervene, Mutanabbi drinks to intoxication, climbs aboard the derelict wooden ship, and calls out to Noah, ironically illustrating his nickname, Mutanabbi, literally “he who would be prophet,” or more pejoratively, “false prophet.” Like his predecessor, the poet whose verses are often cited as proverbs, Chouikh’s Mutanabbi fatally conflates self-representation and reality. After the oasis burns and as the sun’s heat intensifies, he climbs aboard the boat as Houriya and her followers flee, vainly imploring the few survivors to join him (fig. 2.8). Similar to the tenth-century al-Mutanabbi, who according to legend escaped an ambush by bandits only to foolishly turn back and confront them in fatal attempt to live up to his poetic self-representations, Chouikh’s Mutanabbi survives the oasis massacre only to consign himself to certain death by clinging to delusions of his power to generate an exceptional mobility. Insistently elaborating a fallacious vision on a dilapidated sign from a long-lost era, excluding present realities in his zeal to reinscribe that past in the future, the character of Mutanabbi goes

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Figure 2.8  Mutanabbi aboard his ark

nowhere, presaging not only his own death but also the demise of Algerian cinema. In and through this final film of his trilogy, Chouikh reemphasizes the artist’s sociopolitical responsibility with accusatory rather than celebratory inflections. As a young boy fleeing the destroyed oasis repeatedly rejects Mutanabbi’s wild entreaties to climb aboard the ark, the film crystallizes its portrayal of a crisis in contemporary Algerian art, including filmmaking, that exceeds the crises engendered by cuts in state support for filmmaking and the targeting of image-makers by religious extremists during Algeria’s violent civil war. Running from the horrors of the oasis, the young boy rejects Mutanabbi’s promises of salvation, his repeated refusals culminating in the declaration that he no longer wishes to see the old man. As if obliging his request, the camera squeezes Mutanabbi out of the frame as it tracks the young boy slogging his way laboriously through the sand, the blue shadows on the dunes gradually stretching to once again approximate waves (fig. 2.9). His difficult passage over the changing dunes hardly inspires hope, nor do his final words, which signal his rejection of not just present reality, but also alternate visions that ­conflate prophecy and art to circle at the site of destruction. With the boy’s cry that he no longer wishes to see Mutanabbi, Ark takes stock of a creative impasse in Algerian cinema, whose works increasingly failed to hold the attention of the country’s younger generations restless for

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Figure 2.9  Crossing the desert dunes at the end of The Ark of the Desert

a mobility increasingly denied them. Resembling a cynical spectator weary of predictable messages of exceptionalism and salvation in the face of dismal social and political realities, the young boy implies that only a cinema truly in motion will be able to surmount the blackout of cinematic images in Algeria between 1997 and 2002. When the screen went dark in 1997, however, no glimmer of that reinvention of Algerian cinema had yet reached spectators.

{ 3 }

Sand Castles Nacer Khemir’s The Wanderers of the Desert (1986), The Lost Neckring of the Dove (1991), and Baba Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul (2005) Now are we lost yet? —Zina, ROME RATHER THAN YOU Without a doubt, Nacer Khemir’s films are stunning. Resolute in their artifice, they forgo realism in favor of visually, aurally, and structurally captivating scenes allusive of Persian and Arabic art, narrative, and philosophy. Irreducible to a single linear narrative, Khemir’s Desert Trilogy—The Wanderers of the Desert (1986) (Al-Haimoun, Les Baliseurs du désert), The Lost Neckring of the Dove (1991) (Tawq al-hamama al-mafqud, Le Collier perdu de la colombe), and the 2005 Baba Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated His Soul (Baba Aziz: Le Prince qui contemplait son âme)—nonetheless pulsate with fragments of familiar tales, figures, images, and sounds that represent the legacies of an Islamic golden age. Rather than simply elucidating the significance of literature, art, and music from that golden age, however, all three films profoundly rework the semiotics of popular film. Unlike anything else in Tunisian cinema before or since, they do not so much reject the social themes and realism of the New Tunisian Cinema movement that emerged around the same time, as reimagine cinema wholesale in the service of a mobile, transnational Arab culture.1 Exquisitely designed, staged, and framed shots interrupt narrative flow, engaging contemplation rather than offering direct meaning. All three films are grounded in a Sufism, or mystical Islam, that, in addition to luring viewers to look simultaneously at surface meanings and beyond them, places popular culture on a par with canonical works in a radical model of populist interconnection. At the same time, Wanderers, Lost Neckring, and Baba Aziz exploit the sequential nature of film in such a way that the forces of narrativization ceaselessly disrupt the contemplative postures fostered by each film’s compositions.

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Powerfully attractive in their radiant images, unique aesthetics, and themes, the films of Khemir’s trilogy unsettle in their hermeticism and the unusual, shifting interpretive demands they make upon spectators. Because they challenge the work that Tunisian film specifically, and Arab film more generally, has long been expected to do, they have repeatedly drawn accusations that they play to the legacies of an orientalism that posits the Arab world as an ahistorical place irrevocably at odds with Western reason.2 Scholars of Arab cinema have been simultaneously captivated by and wary of Khemir’s work, lauding its unique aesthetics yet worried that it cultivates the oneiric at the expense of the critical. Qualifying Khemir’s own remarks that his second film, The Lost Neckring of the Dove, “breaks with traditional Arab cinema, because it is fabricated like a miniature and does not represent a copy of reality,” Viola Shafik expresses concern that a fairy tale-like enchantment might overtake audiences.3 Despite the filmmaker’s insistence that his goal is not to restore a lost culture but to rework classical and popular art and thought in new ways through the populist medium of film, interpretations of Khemir’s films as a rejection of a degraded, contemporary “Arab world” in favor of a truer, glorious past persist. Sonia Lee, for example, finds that Khemir “deliberately situates himself at the antipodes of realism the better to capture the truth of the contemporary Arab world,” while Youssef Rakha, interviewing Khemir for the Egyptian English-language weekly al-Ahram and emphasizing his long residence in France, qualifies the viewpoint of his first two films as that of an outsider, alienated from the Arab aspect of his identity, and taking to the extreme the orientalist tendency of Tunisian cinema.4 Certainly, the difficulty of discerning in Khemir’s films the sociopolitical critiques with which Tunisian cinema has often been coded, combined with his neglect of both Hollywood markers of quality and Arab (Egyptian) cinematic populism, underpin the skepticism of Shafik and Rakha. Nonetheless, the prominence that the trilogy accords Sufism, on structural as well as visual levels, also draws the films into the complex controversies that have attended Sufism in colonial, anticolonial, postindependence, and contemporary anti-Islamist politics in Tunisia and the broader Maghreb.5 For these reasons and more, Khemir’s trilogy avers itself anything but apolitical, even if each film is foreign to the familiar themes, characters, and structures of explicit political allegories.6 Far from absent, acute political issues permeate the three films in complex and nuanced ways that resist one-to-one correspondences: Wanderers of the Desert brings to life the forgotten inhabitants and neglected ruins of a once-great desert city to signal the lacunae of modern national history; Lost Neckring draws on art and actors from throughout the Islamic world, overdubbing dialogue into standard Arabic or French to emphasize the fault lines lurking even in a collectively reimagined, idealized past; and Baba Aziz seamlessly blends dialogue in Tunisian Arabic, standard Arabic, and Farsi with footage filmed in Tunisia—a majority Sunni,

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officially secular republic—and Iran—a majority Shia Islamic republic—in single scenes, blurring boundaries between two countries normally situated as polar political opposites.7 Ever-mobile inventions, the three films bear witness to multidirectional creative impulses and a longing for transhistorical, transnational connections that official and unofficial forms of censorship often seek to manipulate or suppress. Not least, the films of Khemir’s trilogy, either singly or as a whole, resist finalizing ethno-aesthetic interpretations. In their essence, Khemir’s films are motion pictures. Lending themselves to multiple viewings and soliciting flexibility from their audiences, they never coalesce into a representative “Tunisian or Arab aesthetic” that would facilitate their classification in catalogs of world cinema. Perhaps this stems from Khemir’s long experience as an artist, illustrator, and storyteller who exhibits and lives in France and Tunisia, acutely cognizant of multiple angles and lenses through which audiences will view his work.8 Certainly, it exemplifies his dedication to exploring Sufism, with its privileging of multiple levels of meaning and initiation. Unsurprisingly, scholar of religion Michael Sells’s remarks regarding the poetry of the great Ibn al-Arabi, one of Khemir’s avowed influences, offer a particularly apt description of the films’ effects: Each new passage reveals something and veils something. There is always an obscurity, an undefined term, a new paradox. The reader [viewer] is led from passage to passage, from one question to another. It is the moving image rather than any particular frame that is significant.9

Try as one may to pin down the significance of one or all three of the films in a single composition, element, or narrative thread, motion each time destabilizes and transforms meaning. In distinct contrast with the essences upon which orientalism relied and which often manifested in philological obsessions with the roots of Arab words, Khemir’s films are concerned with a multiplicity of interdependences and correspondences, as well as their mutations. Whether for political or aesthetic reasons, or both, Khemir was obliged to search long and far—in Tunisia, Europe, and the Middle East—for financing of his three films.10 With its engaging soundtrack of Sufi music as well as an original score, striking cinematography, presentation of death as renewal, unification of lovers, disarming child protagonist, and concluding celebration, Baba Aziz emerged as far more accessible than its predecessors. In an interview with Nawara Omarbacha, originally conducted for the online journal Spirituality and Practice and accompanying the US DVD version of Baba Aziz, Khemir explains the underlying philosophy of his films: Love has many shapes in the movie. The example of Ishtar, the little girl who was born from the sand, like the Arabic language, is reminiscent of the letter “Waw,” which in Arabic means “and.” The Sufis call it the letter of

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Love, because without it, nothing can come together. We say “the sea and the sky,” “Man and Woman.” The “Waw” is the meeting place, thus it is the place of Love. It is also the letter of the traveler, because it gathers together things and beings.

In contrast to lessons on the root system of Arabic and the fundamental meanings so many would discover there, then, Khemir proposes breadth and mutability in the form of a single letter, ‫ﻭ‬, or waw.11 An explicit reference in Lost Neckring, where a young apprentice calligrapher, sitting in the ashes of his city after losing his beloved, receives the pen of a calligrapher who devoted his life to perfecting his waw, the letter functions to renew a quest that appears to have conclusively failed. It does so, in part, by suggesting the possibility of unlimited, and previously overlooked, connections. As such, the waw refutes the finality of the images of ruin that close Lost Neckring, resurfacing in less literal form in Baba Aziz, which more joyfully, if also sometimes less obviously, rejects the finality of place, time, and realism. Although no more linear or expository than Wanderers and Lost Neckring, Baba Aziz functioned as a breakthrough film for Khemir, screening worldwide at international film festivals, festivals of Sufi culture, and art-house cinemas. Its higher production values, more successfully juxtaposed narratives, and vibrant incorporation of Sufi music familiar to fans of world beat music as much as to followers of mystical Islam, all contributed to its success, as did its release at a time when North African governments were eager to employ Sufism to mitigate stereotypes of Arabs as violent fanatics in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, and the US war in Iraq.12 Baba Aziz also drew renewed attention to The Wanderers of the Desert and The Lost Neckring of the Dove, films more indecipherable to casual viewers not only because shot through with a proximate loss borne of death, wars, political conflict and upheavals, and abrupt foreclosures, but also because they demanded a closer familiarity with the written works and art of Arab golden ages. Despite their differing levels of critical and popular success, however, all three films explore the possibility of a popular visual language that sidesteps the cinematic rules of realism and expository narrative long associated with messages of progressive modernity. Each film thus builds upon its predecessor(s) in order to dynamize the ways we read film, proposing and yet withholding transcendence, disrupting expected narrative trajectories, and redefining conclusions while interrogating the relation of still and moving images, past and present. Tangled yet similar quests thread through each film in Khemir’s trilogy. All three follow characters obliged to abandon acquired knowledge in order to reach destinations very different from those originally targeted. At the same time, all three challenge their viewers to abandon not just narrative and cultural, but also cinematic, knowledge in exchange for unforeseen

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vistas. In Baba Aziz, the only film of the three not to revolve around the text and illustrations of an imaginary book, the young girl Ishtar accompanies her blind dervish grandfather, Baba Aziz, through the desert in search of an international meeting of dervishes that takes place every thirty years. As he tells her, and as she in turn tells others, there is no map or marked path; the meeting is accessible only to those capable of listening and seeing with their hearts. As they wander, Baba Aziz relates to Ishtar the story of a prince who abandons wealth and privilege to contemplate his soul, eventually taking up a dervish’s cloak. Interspersed with episodes of this story are encounters with other seeker-storytellers: Zaid, a young man in search of his beloved Nour, who vanished after a single night of lovemaking; Hassan, a young man pursuing the red-haired dervish he deems responsible for the death of his brother, Hussein; and Osman, a sand merchant once determined to emigrate to a land without sand, but who now seeks only to return to a mysterious castle he discovered when he was sidetracked. All of them, along with others, traverse a blending of contemporary and imagined worlds in search of their beloved/ Beloved. Like Ishtar, they eventually find their way to the reunion of Sufis. In contrast to the revolving circles of Baba Aziz, Khemir’s second film, The Lost Neckring of the Dove, traces interlinked stories of loss. In its reference to Ibn Hazm of Cordoba’s famous early eleventh-century treatise on love, the film’s very title evokes a loss at once imaginary, cautionary, and suggestive. While Ibn Hazm’s Ring of the Dove is extant, the film implies that it is in danger of being forgotten, depicts a world in which it is almost lost, and suggests that only the near loss of the letter of the text enables the revival of the ideals it celebrates.13 The only film of the trilogy not to blend characters from the contemporary world with those of fantastical provenance, Lost Neckring follows Hassan, a calligrapher’s apprentice living in an imaginary city on the verge of political collapse, as he searches for the sixty Arabic words for love. When Zin, the child who is the go-between for the city’s lovers, saves from a book burning a manuscript page illustrated with a miniature of the Princess of Samarkand, a smitten Hassan sets off in pursuit of the full manuscript. No sooner has Hassan found this manuscript and united with Aziz, the sometime manifestation of the Princess of Samarkand, than both are lost as the city is sacked by bloodthirsty invaders. On his journey through a desert landscape toward the center of ruined city, Hassan encounters a former bookseller seated in a now vanished marketplace. Stopping to speak with the old man, who inquires about his story, Hassan unearths a reed pen from the sand. Remarking that many people chase after their dream, often encountering it without recognizing it, the bookseller urges Hassan to take the pen that a now-vanished calligrapher employed to perfect his drawing of the letter waw. As in The Lost Neckring of the Dove, themes of love and loss appear central in The Wanderers of the Desert, Khemir’s first film and, despite its title, the only one of the three tied to a single, physical location. Although lost

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in translation, the Arabic title al-haimoun encompasses the significations of “those mad with love,” and “perplexed,” as well as “wanderers,” assimilating the errant young men of the village designated by this title to spiritual seekers as much as to lost youth. Khemir himself plays the schoolteacher Abdesslam, assigned to a desert town that the bus driver insists does not exist. When he finds it nonetheless, he discovers that the windswept village possesses no school and is populated by characters who long for past glories (fig. 3.1). Their children, led by the orphan boy Houcine, avidly seek knowledge, though not the kind the teacher has come to impart. Perplexed by a realm of signs that nothing in his education has prepared him to decipher, Abdesslam finds himself transfixed by the mute language of lover’s signals in which the village sheikh’s daughter communicates, the stories and books of the villagers, and the shadows, haunting song, and residual signs of the youth who err in the desert. During the villagers’ annual pilgrimage, Abdesslam is left behind, entrusted with an ancient manuscript he is to remit to the wanderers. Before he is able to do so, an old woman materializes to lead him away, and he vanishes without a trace from the remainder of the film. The police inspector sent by authorities to investigate his disappearance grows quickly frustrated with the illogical happenings in the village, and soon curses and abandons it. In the wake of his departure, the young Houcine decides to set off across the desert for Cordoba, the fabled city of the villagers’ tales.

Figure 3.1  Schoolteacher Abdesslam arriving at the village

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Described as a prelude to his subsequent two films by Khemir himself, Wanderers begins the process of challenging conventional understandings of film that will culminate in Lost Neckring before striking a more successful balance in Baba Aziz. It immediately counters an understanding of visual representation rooted in Enlightenment ideals through a play of iconicity that breaks with dominant models of meaning. Schoolteacher Abdesslam, the product and promoter of models of knowledge that support orthodox, state-sponsored visions of progressive modernity, finds himself confronted by an utterly foreign realm of signs. Having arrived prepared, as he tells a curious Houcine, to teach the village children grammar, literature, and the history of their country, he is instead solicited by the villagers to recover and transmit their and their sand-buried city’s forgotten heritage. Intrigued by this village that those who follow the maps of the modern nation-state insist does not exist yet which emerged from the sand dunes at his approach; whose young men forsake home to err endlessly in the desert; and where he is welcomed as the agent of a destiny in which he hardly believes, Abdesslam shifts roles, becoming a student-observer in turn. Almost immediately neglecting his project of building a school, he abandons the ideals of liberation through modern education with which he has been entrusted by the state. As a result, he fails as a protagonist to drive the narrative forward in expected ways. Rather, his attentive watching and listening, accentuated by point-of-view shots, replace narrative cinema’s conventional processes of meaning-making through progressive exposition. The constellation of images and scenes that result exact contemplation in their refutation of the familiar relations of time and space in which cinema normally evolves. In her brilliant book on medieval, illustrated wonders-of-creation manuscripts, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam, Persis Berlekamp highlights these works’ strangeness to contemporary sensibilities. Explaining how their illustrations reflect Neoplatonic doctrines of emanation that have long fallen out of favor, Berlekamp underscores the new interpretive strategies for which such works call: “The manuscripts do not just challenge what we know, or think we know, about the possible roles of images in Islam. More fundamentally, they challenge the basic assumptions of our own modern educations—assumptions about what it means to think logically, to see and perceive, and to grasp the truth. How, then, ought they to be analyzed?”14 Employing the character of Abdesslam as an initial focal point, Wanderers soon poses a similar question to spectators. Yet while the film evokes the kind of radically unfamiliar worldview that Berlekamp describes, it proves far less stable than the manuscripts she studies. In keeping with the film’s Sufi intertexts, and with the mobile nature of film itself, the relationship of each sign, image, or scene to a larger whole is constantly dissolved and reconfigured. In essential ways, Wanderers insists on the value of ajab, or wonder, which drives the desire to study the unfamiliar. Berlekamp explains that ajab was defined

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in the thirteenth century by the most famous wonders-of-creation author as “the sense of bewilderment a person feels because of his inability to understand the cause of a thing.”15 Similarly, Wanderers does not so much show its audiences disparate worlds as induce a bewilderment that calls into question how we make sense of what we see in film and beyond. As such, this first film of the trilogy cultivates this bewilderment as a means of initiating a reassessment of modern epistemologies. Very soon after his arrival, the young boy Houcine’s grandmother visits Abdesslam in the room where he is being lodged. Thanking him for his presence, she expresses her wish that he teach her grandson knowledge that will help him avoid the fate of the wanderers, among whom are Houcine’s father and the sheikh’s son, the former occupant of the room where Abdesslam lodges. When Abdesslam poses questions about their whereabouts, the old woman stands and lifts the silk tapestry depicting al-buraq (the winged steed that transported the Prophet to the heavens); behind it, in artful handwriting emanating like rays from a red palm print, is written the following poem: Don’t blame me, blame from me is baeed [far away] Reward me! Master, for I am waheed [unique] In your true threat, I am made true Desert in desert, my plight is shadeed [severe] Whoever wills a speech, here is my book and testament, Read it, and know that I am a shaheed [witness, martyr]. (Fig. 3.2)16 Much later, the poem’s author is finally identified as the tenth-century mystic al-Hallaj, who was executed for heresy. At this moment, however, neither Abdesslam nor Houcine’s grandmother appears to recognize the poem’s author, much less its source text, a unique and often impenetrable Sufi work that recasts Satan as a heroic monotheist.17 Even in the absence of any textual context, however, the poem introduces into Khemir’s film a radically new perspective, beyond the comprehension of the characters as much as of audiences. Emanating as it does from a red handprint, itself a much-appropriated symbol both within the diegesis and beyond—both as a “hand of Fatima” meant to ward off evil and as a classic piece of forensic evidence—the handprint, like the poem, presents itself alternately as testament and clue, symbol and physical trace.18 Seemingly dissimulated as they are beneath the iconic buraq—a horselike figure with a human face on which the Prophet is said to have been carried from Mecca to Jerusalem and back—poem and handprint call out to all who discover them, diegetically as well as extradiegetically, to bear witness. That to which these signs ask one to bear witness promises to be revealed first through Abdesslam, and later through the police inspector, but when both vanish, spectators are left, much like the wanderers of the desert, searching for a path through an ever mobile landscape.

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Figure 3.2  The red hand beneath the tapestry

When the hajj, or village elder, entrusts Abdesslam with an old manuscript that harbors the extraordinary power to actualize destiny, he instructs him to convey it to the wanderers when everyone else has left town on their annual pilgrimage. Curious, Abdesslam opens the large tome once he returns to his room. As the camera closes in on an illustration of an old woman with facial tattoos, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a black turban, Abdesslam’s voice reads, “On the third day after he opened the book, the old woman came for him, took him by the hand, and led him across the desert to the garden of his beloved. On the door of the garden was written, ‘Only lovers may enter here.’ ” With these words, Abdesslam has articulated his own fate. On the day of the villager’s departure, the illustration again flashes on screen, dissolving to a shot of an identically attired old woman standing in the desert working her prayer beads as the sands blow about her. In what follows, the thread of cinematic realism drawn through the film by Abdesslam is broken. Alone, Abdesslam enters a deserted courtyard, its floor-level fountain nearly buried in sand, staring in wonder at the intricate brickwork of the walls. What begins as a panning point-of-view shot returns to include him in the frame as he reclines against a wall. When shuts his eyes against the sun, the orchestral soundtrack punctuated by bird calls falls silent, immediately replaced by a clank of metal. Water splashes in close-up on the blue tiles of fountain as the silent, elaborately costumed, tattooed daughter of the sheikh

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enters the courtyard. Setting her clanking pail on the ground, she removes a small mirror from the folds of her robe, wipes it with her sleeve, gazes into it with a smile, and poses it carefully on the edge of the fountain. Another clank of metal wakes Abdesslam, his eyes widening as he looks first toward the fountain and then at the old woman standing in the courtyard entrance. Picking up the mirror as if dazed, Abdesslam gazes into it, looks up at the old woman, and glances back to the mirror, gaze shifting between mirror, fountain, and his guide as the old woman takes his hand and leads him into the desert. Abdesslam’s function as an organizing figure is brought home by his disappearance, for with him, conventional film perspective vanishes. No sooner has he been guided over the desert dunes than the police inspector appears, ostensibly to elucidate the mystery of his disappearance. First seen with his modern uniform-clad back to the camera, he stands rigidly looking out the tiny window of Abdesslam’s room as he barks questions at the sheikh (fig. 3.3). From the beginning, he and the sheikh—whose name is now revealed to be Hedi Gharnati, or Hedi the Granadan, marking him as a descendent of Andalusia—misunderstand each other. Gharnati eagerly speaks of his wandering son, Boubakr, while the inspector is persuaded that he is being played for a fool by villagers seeking to conceal the murder of Abdesslam. He pushes forward with his clipped, often accusatory and sometimes insulting questions,

Figure 3.3  The police inspector in Abdesslam’s former room

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while the villagers respond with narratives more suited to the Thousand and One Nights than the kind of police procedural in which the officer imagines himself. As the film flashes back to the villagers returning from their pilgrimage and discovering a boat beached in the desert at the village gates, and forward again to the inspector’s increasingly violent questioning, the clerk who has accompanied him observes mainly in silence, seated cross-legged over a giant ledger-like book. When the investigation turns in circles, the dark-robed, turban-wearing clerk increasingly engages with the villagers, recounting bits of his own story and entertaining them with a wistful song of exile. This splitting away from his superior, signaled by the latter’s absence from many scenes in which the clerk features, only accentuates the growing irrelevance of the police inspector to the film’s diegesis. As the inspector—who treats the villagers as backward, duplicitous criminals—grows increasingly violent, authoritarian, and unsympathetic, his point of view, his manner of finding and interpreting his “evidence,” becomes the object of ridicule rather than the source of revelation. Because he represents both the modern, repressive Tunisian state and the methods of narrative cinema, the inspector’s expulsion from the village—on the back of a donkey, no less—announces a definitive rupture with expository reasoning, teleological structure, and official state narratives. In their place, Wanderers turns back, as does the clerk when he recognizes the source of the Hallaj poem upon which the inspector has seized as evidence of Abdesslam’s murder, to embrace cinematic codes still only perceived as riddles.19 If Wanderers proposed a graduated unmooring from cinematic realism, the central film of Khemir’s trilogy, The Lost Neckring of the Dove, plunges audiences immediately into a strange hermetic realm at once indecipherable and deeply familiar. While no “modern” characters serve as intermediaries between the audience and the film’s radically unlocalizable universe, the film’s title, which draws upon a well-known text central to Andalusian studies, roughly situates the film both temporally and spatially. Yet adding the qualifier “lost” to the title of Ibn Hazm’s celebrated tenth-century work, a treatise on love and a tribute to his beloved city of Cordoba, undermines all certainty, suggesting both that the extant text is incomplete and that those familiar with Ibn Hazm’s work may, or must, be the source of its loss. A  dedication prefaces the film, further destabilizing the reference points proffered by its title; culled from the work of French orientalist Jacques Berque, it unusually names an idea, or rather ideas, rather than a person: “To the always recommenced Andalusias, of which we carry in us simultaneously the heaped-up ruins and the tireless hope” (Aux Andalousies toujours recommencées, dont nous portons en nous à la fois les décombres amoncelés et l’inlassable espérance). Firmly resituating the film in a realm defined by projection, memory, loss, and hope, this dedication sweeps away notions that the reinvention to follow grounds itself in historical or textual fidelity.

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The opening scene in a cemetery establishes a sense of urgent unreality. There, the young boy Zin and the adolescent Hassan look out over a valley from a saint’s tomb on a hillside, shot from high angle, before they turn and run up the hill toward the camera, zigzagging among the tombstones on their way back to the medieval brick city. Their multicolored robes and slippers, the braid that falls down each boy’s back, and the verticality privileged over depth of field combine to instantly evoke a tradition of Persian miniature painting, one temporally and spatially distant from Ibn Hazm’s tenth-century Cordoba. An orchestral soundtrack creates a sound bridge between the dedication and this opening scene, imparting to the boys’ course a sense of melancholic foreboding that only dissipates with Hassan’s arrival at the workshop of his master, a calligrapher who recalls the ancestor evoked by the villagers in Wanderers. Zin’s character—self-reliant, in constant motion, curious, and intrepid—likewise brings to mind Houcine, whose vow to reach Cordoba had closed that film. To be sure, both Hassan, as a calligrapher’s apprentice searching for the sixty names of love while devoting himself to the caliph’s daughter from afar, and Zin, as a mischievous lovers’ go-between, conjure the central themes of Ibn Hazm’s work, an exposition of codes and practices of courtly love (fig. 3.4). Yet the film continues on multiple levels to deny fundamental correspondences to any historical Cordoba.20 It perhaps most strikingly marks out its divergence in a scene where, pressured by Hassan to hand

Figure 3.4  Hassan discussing the names of love with a public scribe in the marketplace

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Figure 3.5  Zin running through the just materialized Mosque of Cordoba

over the page he saved from a book burning, Zin enters the prayer space of a mosque so that he may discreetly remove it from his shirt. Where moments before he had walked among its familiar white marble pillars, he now discovers to his amazement the forest of red and white marble columns that characterize the celebrated Mosque of Cordoba (fig. 3.5). Rushing to enlist Hassan as witness, he is dismayed to discover upon his re-entry that the mosque has reverted to its commonplace appearance. Zin’s vision signals both that the present in which the film takes place is already shot through with loss and that the very ideals and things perceived as lost may reinvent themselves in any time and place for those attentive to them. The scene further emphasizes the film’s resolute antirealism, its ultimate refusal of fidelity to any text or representation in a search for that which cinematic realism as much as historical revisionism have failed to satisfy. Flattening out, wherever possible, the depth of field that Andre Bazin hailed as a fundamental step forward in filmmaking, and favoring archetypes over psychological depth, Lost Neckring replaces reality effects and illusions of self-sufficiency with renewed demands for active viewership.21 Still, its active spectators have little in common with certain manifestos of third cinema that called for films to propel audiences into the streets as participants in revolution. Instead, the second film of Khemir’s trilogy addresses Muslim and Arab spectators as both connoisseurs of art and creators of meaning. In this, it

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contravenes as much orientalist as anticolonial and postindependence characterizations of the masses, not to mention European distinctions between high and low art.22 Like imperfect-cinema theorist Julio Garcia Espinosa, Khemir presents the creation of art as a fundamental human activity, yet rather than looking to contemporary popular cultural practices, his film hearkens back to the Islamicate artistic, artisan, and popular traditions of the past: calligraphy, miniature painting, tailoring, brickwork, storytelling, and so on.23 In this, Lost Neckring obviously seeks to rehabilitate cultural legacies denied a place in post-Enlightenment art histories, as well as to reverse orientalist myths of contemporary Arab stagnation and decadence, revalorizing artistic as well as artisan practices sidelined by postindependence nations eager to stake their claim on modernity.24 Yet Lost Neckring struggles to succeed in this endeavor, never quite able to counter the conditioning of modern state educational and media institutions, or the pressures of cultural globalization.25 Hermetic and devoid of the familiar signs and matter of action and resolution, the film lends itself the very ethno-aesthetic readings it seeks to disrupt. Using its carefully constructed images as a support and reiterating Sufi doctrines of loss, confusion, and transcendence, Lost Neckring nonetheless everywhere strives to divert attention from the most obvious focus and meanings. At the beginning of the film, Hassan shows his calligraphy exercises to his master, who pronounces them well executed yet adds: “Calligraphy is more than measures, Hassan. Calligraphy rhythms the absolute. It is the link between the evident world and the hidden world. The letter is our prayer, Hassan. By this and only this, the calligrapher testifies to the beauty of God.” In place of the page, the camera focuses on the two men’s faces. Reflections of happiness, concern, and reverence pass over Hassan’s, but the camera does not linger long. Calligraphy imparts new dimensions to the movements over the page required by writing and reading, slowing the usual meaning-generating trajectory. For its part, Khemir’s film masks cinema’s constant displacement of one image by another, its relentless forward motion, and the tension created by shot reverse shots, through its measured treatment of characters and spaces saturated by signs. Even in the simply designed, sparsely furnished, workshop space, colors borrowed from Persian miniatures, carefully framed doorways, screens carved with letters, banners of calligraphy, and a chess game set up in a wall aperture vie for attention and importance with the speaking characters. Together they gesture toward layers of meaning beyond the dialogue and movements of the characters. Pulling against the forward motion that constantly replaces them with new images, the objects and architecture of each scene radiate with layers of potential meaning. At the same time that its multiply-signifying frames tug against the flow of narrative, Lost Neckring portrays singular focus and determined quests for absolute knowledge as certain sources of loss. The book burning upon which Hassan and Zin stumble was occasioned, Hassan learns when he queries the

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guardian feeding pages into the flames, by the author’s will that no one learn of his dream of the Princess of Samarkand. An illustration and brief description of a scene from a dream featuring this princess graces the very page Zin snatches from the flames, preceded by the phrase “Love, may God honor you, begins in jest and ends gravely.”26 Readers of Ibn Hazm’s Neckring of the Dove will recognize the opening line of the treatise, even though no mention of any dream of the Princess of Samarkand figures in that work.27 They will also know that Ibn Hazm cautions against falling in love with a dreamed being, roundly dismissing dream-love as a product of wishful thinking and mental hallucination, even less excusable than falling in love with an image painted on the wall of a bathhouse. Ibn Hazm nonetheless manages to find an example of such delusion among his friends, for throughout his work, the Cordoban jurist insists on the importance of concrete manifestations of love over abstract ideals or hidden meanings. Through this example, the medieval author affirms that with great effort and the author’s constant encouragement, his friend was at last able to overcome his fantasy love. Hassan, by contrast, seemingly succumbs to the dream, or the image, turning his attention to the lost manuscript in the hopes of completing his knowledge of love, rather than pursuing his flesh-and-blood beloved, the caliph’s daughter. His quest imperils him, causing him to miss the increasingly urgent signs of the city’s impending ruin, and no sooner does he find the manuscript, along with Aziz, the sometime manifestation of the princess, than he loses everything. Yet his quest also saves him, for he survives the sacking of the city and gains the departed calligrapher’s pen. Despite its cautionary references to immersion in dreamworlds, Lost Neckring also seeks to sidestep politics through its implementation of an aesthetics of transcendence. Given this ambition, Khemir’s film wavers between a commitment to universalism and acknowledgment that concepts such as beauty and love are materially and historically conditioned. This tension is inscribed in the very scenes that convey transcendence, for they depend on viewers’ knowledge of particular histories and forms of classical art. For example, in pursuit at once of the Princess of Samarkand and the book that features her dream, Hassan happens upon a scene that duplicates the drawing on his rescued manuscript page. Peering through a chink in a garden wall, he sees the princess holding a pomegranate—symbol of love and eternity—while seated at the edge of a very large empty basin into which two women are splashing water from small jars. Reciting the words of the dream set down on his page, Hassan smiles and concludes, “Every dream has its double,” before continuing on his way. Fans of Islamic architecture will recognize the setting as Medina Azahara, the fabulous city built by Abd al-Rahman in the tenth century outside Cordoba (very far from Samarkand) as the seat of the Umayyad caliphate and completely sacked in civil war in 1010. Popular legend has it that Medina Azahara was constructed as a tribute to Abd al-Rahman’s favorite wife or

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concubine, while historians assert that its grandeur and lavish beauty were rather intended to impress political rivals. Lost Neckring makes space for both versions, while filling the setting with a scene that demands familiarity with multiple additional histories and sign systems. Hassan’s momentary appreciative contemplation of this dream that nonetheless does not keep him from pursuing his destiny underscores that, in order to transcend, love and beauty must constantly be given new form in accordance with particular times and places, for the upheavals of politics are never distant. Finally, Hassan encounters the fictive form of Ibn Hazm’s text, only to immediately lose it. Crossing the countryside on foot in the company of the horseman Aziz (the sometime manifestation of the Princess), they happen across a man ferrying the corpse of his master, who died, he tells them, pursuing his love for the Princess of Samarkand to “the garden of his dreams.” He bestows upon them a book containing his master’s dreams and secrets, and when Hassan opens it, he discovers that it is Ibn Hazm’s The Dove’s Neckring, one that includes the dream of the princess already in his possession. At that moment, he and Aziz are set upon by marauding rebels and jump from a cliff into the sea to save themselves. Emerging from the water, Hassan finds that both Aziz and the book have vanished. As he makes his way by night across desert dunes, Hassan encounters an old man, a former bookseller who presses him for his story and gives him a pen that once belonged to a calligrapher “who spent twenty years writing the letter waw.” After briefly sharing his story with the old man, Hassan takes the pen and returns to his utterly ruined and abandoned city, which he contemplates until the calligraphy of a waw, drawn as if endlessly refracted, closes the film (fig. 3.6). Unique among an oeuvre otherwise comprised of works on Islamic jurisprudence, Ibn Hazm’s The Dove’s Neckring was not composed until long after Cordoba’s descent into political chaos and Ibn Hazm’s imprisonment and exile.28 Considered an intimate and unique historical depiction of Cordoba, it memorializes a world that no longer exists while implicitly acknowledging the loss of that world as the condition for its existence. Meanwhile, the film’s conclusion implies that fidelity to Ibn Hazm’s work is only possible through acts of renewed creativity, by extending rather than returning to history, through a recognition of loss and a search to gain it. As the voice of the master calligrapher reiterates over the final frames of the film: “Waw, Hassan, is the only letter of the alphabet that has its own meaning. It is unique and multiple like God. It is the letter of the traveler.” Unsurprisingly, given its neglect of the mechanisms of cinematic identification and other common tools of popular cinema, criticisms of Lost Neckring centered on its deliberate artifice; Rakha, for example, summarizes it as follows: “Incredibly flowery costumes, unremarkable classical Arabic dialogue and claustrophobic, low-budget sets aside, the acting seemed somewhat

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Figure 3.6  Hassan among the ruins of the city

simplistic, the pace crawling, the subtle message progressively lost in an ever more complex phantasmagoria of love, loss and spiritual journeying.”29 Yet although just as concerned with Islamicate cultural heritage, both classical and popular, with the nonlinear trajectories of Sufi thought, and with a cinema that works against conventions of realism, Baba Aziz met with a far wider and more positive reception.30 Made fourteen years after the second film of Khemir’s trilogy and only four years after September 11, 2001, Baba Aziz certainly emerged in a political climate that had intensified interest in films that complicated “clash of civilizations” discourses.31 At the same time, however, Baba Aziz differed from its predecessors in its emphasis on living transhistorical culture, specifically the dhikr traditions of different Sufi brotherhoods (in addition to an orchestral soundtrack).32 Immediately accessible—in contrast, for example, to painted miniatures familiar only to a small audience of scholars and art aficionados outside their regions of origin—the songs of the dhikr are still sung by Sufi groups who appreciate cross-regional examples of the practice, sampled by musicians around the world who have found them inspirational, and widely available across media platforms. In other words, audiences for these songs cross regional and age-based demographics and are not limited to practitioners of Sufism, as is evident in the rock-star-like status attained, for example, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Not least, the sung works of the film include “Poem of

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the Atoms,” composed by Rumi, the best-selling poet in North America and arguably the Sufi with the greatest name recognition worldwide.33 Like music, poetry furnishes its audiences with an immediacy of experience that enables them to claim expertise far more readily than do visual arts and architecture from bygone centuries.34 Consequently, the enduring renewal of Islamicate culture and the mutual interpenetration of classical and popular art forms that Khemir’s first two films labored to demonstrate are self-evident already at the outset of Baba Aziz. No less significantly, despite the setbacks that Ishtar and her grandfather encounter in their quest for the thirty-year gathering of dervishes, and the losses that befall some of the other seekers they encounter, the tone of the film veers steadfastly toward exuberance rather than lament (fig. 3.7). As in Wanderers, characters marked by the contemporary world enter the otherwise seemingly parallel, mythical world of Ishtar and her grandfather. Yet unlike Abdesslam, these characters—Zaid, Hussein, Hassan, Nour, a motorbike-riding desert bandit—greet and interact with Ishtar, Baba Aziz, the red dervish, and the other seekers as if they occupied the same temporal planes. Furthermore, augmenting the visual cues of atemporality supplied by clothing (robes and costumes influenced by miniature painting versus jeans, shirts, and modern veils) and modes of transportation (walking versus motorbikes, buses, and airplanes) are differences in language that normally signal geographic distance (fig. 3.8). While Ishtar and Baba Aziz speak Persian with one another, Zaid converses with them in Tunisian colloquial as well as classical Arabic, all while singing Rumi’s poem in the original. Ishtar sometimes responds to him in Arabic dialect, but the three comprehend one another regardless of the language spoken. Similarly, Osman oscillates between Tunisian colloquial

Figure 3.7  Baba Aziz and Ishtar at the outset of their journey

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Figure 3.8  Baba Aziz encounters a modern motorcycle rider

and (accented) Persian, and the dervishes sing in a range of vernaculars. These linguistic, temporal, spatial, and fantastic mobilities dissolve the practical, national boundaries to which the film briefly alludes via references to clandestine migration, stolen passports, and restrictions on women’s travel—in order to celebrate intellectual and cultural continuity. At the same time, the film itself taps into the cachet of Iranian cinema through its use of largely Iranian settings, as well as an Iranian cinematographer and actors, and not least its focus on a child lead, long a hallmark of internationally popular Iranian cinema. Although Ishtar, like her precursors Houcine and Zin, seemingly emerges from and communes with the spirit world (she emerges from the sands at the film’s outset), she nonetheless presents a level of depth absent in the characters of the two boys. Unlike them, she remains the film’s focal point throughout, frequently framed in close-up. Eyeline matches place her at the center of the film’s point of view, and all the stories are told in her presence. Baba Aziz and Zaid, for example, relate their stories directly to her, often as she sleeps, so that the flashbacks they generate are situated as if in her dreams. Much more than any of the characters in Khemir’s previous two films, Ishtar facilitates classical cinematic identification, thereby naturalizing the fantastic world of the film. Named for the Babylonian goddess of love, she also adds historical depth with references to a premonotheistic era that has been absorbed by past and present cultures. Other leading characters, chiefly Baba Aziz and Zaid, are similarly fleshed out: shot in close-up, they seem to control perspective and drive the action, or at least storytelling. None of the three vanish before their time or otherwise radically disrupt viewers’ perspective. Rather, they all find the thirty-year Sufi reunion, or moussem (literally a harvest festival), and they seek and fulfill

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Figure 3.9  The moussem

their destinies in ways that suggest not just spiritual renewal, but also a veritable transnational renewal of Islamicate cultures (fig. 3.9). Baba Aziz passes his Sufi cloak (khirqa), and with it his quest, to the young, troubled, former libertine Hassan; Zaid finds his beloved Nour singing her “father’s” poem (Rumi’s “Poem of the Atoms”), and Ishtar delights in the reunion of Sufis and lovers. Narrative has led inexorably not to final resolution, but to new matter for contemplation. At the end of Khemir’s film cycle, at least, narrative drive and contemplative iconicity enter into balance in a radically mobile scenario. Yet  almost lost amid the film’s largely positive reception as an antidote to the stereotypes of Muslims as violent, intolerant fanatics is the audacity of many of its juxtapositions. Much more remarkable than the reference to pre-Islamic history connoted by Ishtar’s name is the blending of Tunisian and Iranian languages, actors, and locations, and through them religious, national, and political histories. Seamlessly linking the cultures of largely Shia, theocratic Iran with predominantly Sunni, avowedly secular, Tunisia, Khemir’s film makes a pointed comparison between the autocratic nature of both republics. Just behind the joyful reunion of Sufis lies the reality of contemporary politics, where Tunisia (prior to the overthrow of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali) strives to align itself with the officially secular Turkey, banning the veil in the public sphere, promoting a Sufism long repressed as antimodern as an alternative to a harder-line political Islam, and fearing incursions of a more powerful Iran in regional politics. Also behind the communion of Sufis lies centuries of religious strife between Sunni and Shia with which contemporary Muslim viewers are quite familiar, as well recent attacks on Sufism by followers of Salafi Islam.35 Still, Baba Aziz envisions a creativity always in motion, ignoring rather than exploiting or consolidating political

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borders. Benefiting from the status of Iranian film in world cinema without for all that becoming an Iranian film, any more than its funding makes of it a European film, Baba Aziz is also not a Tunisian film. Instead, its politics lie in its resolutely transnational scope. In such an environment Baba Aziz, like its predecessors, is a film that will always be in search of its audiences.

{ Part II }

Hero Complex If Part I began with three films and film cycles that reformulated the look, dynamics and parameters of Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian cinema on regional and world screens, the three films of Part II address generations impatient with invocations of the bygone grandeur of Arab golden ages as much as with the low-budget pathos of national cinema. All three of these first feature films embrace globally popular generic forms, whether horror, road movie, romantic comedy, or cyberthriller. Each also reinvents these forms from local—sometimes national, sometimes regional—concerns, employing the tensions between ostensibly “imported” form and locally grounded contents to surprise on narrative and visual levels. Nabil Ayouch’s Mektoub (1997) strikingly weaves neglected views of Morocco into a cinematically plausible story that yet runs counter to local history and received wisdom. On another register, Lyès Salem’s Masquerades (2008) sets slapstick interactions against stunning panoramas of presumed wasteland, testing simultaneously the global accessibility of genre conventions, folk tales, and narratives of neo-liberalism. Focused explicitly on the gaps and margins of circuits of nation and globalization, Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003) playfully scrambles the conventions of the cyberthriller, unsettling assumptions about the directionality of knowledge flows and the nature of freedom in a media-centric world. At least two dominant visual and narrative themes characterize these three films released over a twelve-year span at the very end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. First, each film prominently features breathtaking views of politically abandoned, desert-like regions, revaluing these spaces as kinetic sites and the disenfranchised who populate them as forgers of vital, if often unmarked, routes. Second, all three engage tropes of surveillance and voyeurism,

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foregrounding the power of individuals, collectivities, and governments, as well as local and global media, to impel, direct, and constrain mobility. Chronicling both the videotaped violation of a woman at the hands of powerful police authorities and her and her husband’s audacious efforts to obtain justice, Mektoub shows disenfranchised Moroccans forging hitherto unimagined paths from subjecthood to citizenship. Set almost entirely in a desolate, dusty village where privacy is nonexistent and public opinion easily becomes destiny, Masquerades relates the dual narratives of a working-class everyman seeking to bolster his social standing by leveraging global ideals of masculine power, and of an ultimately triumphant couple who revise the marriage script in defiance of local standards of value. Bedwin Hacker, in turn, features an ever-mobile, counterculture heroine and her friends, all adept at slipping through the grids of national and international surveillance agencies in order to reshape public opinion and thwart civilizational hierarchies. Putting forward protagonists who refuse the stasis of the local, national, and regional status quo, these three films set out to expand regional cinema’s fields of action by addressing their audiences as necessarily transnational even if they have never left “home.” Not coincidentally, each emerges following a crisis moment of Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian cinema, abruptly transforming what audiences expect to see from Maghrebi films. Mektoub, its American-educated protagonist and his seemingly bourgeois wife thwarting character and genre expectations, broke box-office records in Morocco, becoming that country’s Academy Award nominee for 1998, inaugurating a new era of filmmaking in Morocco, and transforming the landscape of cinema in the Maghreb. Reflecting regional negotiations of a culture of disdain, or hogra, while tapping into far more geographically widespread anxieties about losing out on the benefits of economic globalization, Masquerades became a popular success in a country virtually devoid of movie theaters, promoted abroad with eagerness by a government concerned to put behind it images of the bloody civil war of the 1990s. Explicitly treating such sensitive issues as the Internet as a tool of popular mobilization against oppression and playing on fears about cybersecurity, Bedwin Hacker met with censorship in Tunisia, yet no less transformed notions of the look and purpose of cinema, enjoying the kind of circulation common to films of cult status and finding rare distribution abroad while anticipating something of the future at home. Each challenging late postindependence formulations of national and global citizenship, these three films redefine progress, cinematic as well as that promoted by neoliberal globalization, for audiences across the region and far beyond.

{ 4 }

For the Record Nabil Ayouch’s Mektoub (1997) The films I like are those with Belmondo and Delon. I like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Jim Brown. Those guys are great. When I see them, it’s as if I’ve seen my father; they make me cry. —Moncef Kahloucha, VHS Kahloucha In 1997, James Cameron’s Academy Award–winning, epic disaster melodrama Titanic swept through movie theaters around the world to become the most popular Hollywood film of all time. Along the way, it acquired the status of film-viewing experience of reference for several generations of Moroccans. Four decades after independence, as French-built movie houses increasingly fell into such disrepair that they closed or once again consigned moviegoing, especially for women, to the ranks of disreputable activities, Titanic stood out not just for its scale or intensity, but also for its success in drawing Moroccan audiences to theaters for a final or singular movie theater experience.1 Certainly, Titanic continues to fascinate even those too young or too removed from urban centers to have seen the film during its original run in theaters, eighteen years ago and counting. Its sweeping and spectacular engagement of the globally popular genre of melodrama and its themes of transgressive romance, defiance of class strictures, and struggles between filial duty and desire for self-definition, propel, in Morocco as elsewhere, the continuing popularity of the movie, its soundtrack, and its stars. While it intensifies audience expectations regarding the spectacularity of Hollywood blockbuster films, however, neither its form nor its content break with ­established viewing habits or really shatter any worldviews. Yet that same year saw the release of another film, Moroccan this time, that surpassed even Titanic in 1997 Moroccan box office receipts.2 Nabil Ayouch’s debut feature film Mektoub also repackages a historical incident, one much more temporally and culturally immediate than the sinking of the Titanic, to bring to cinema screens a suspenseful tale that pits lovers against overwhelming odds. Sexuality—albeit of a darker, far less triumphant,

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nature—likewise dominates its narrative. A love story / road movie / thriller written, filmed, and edited with a Euro-American, popular-film sensibility, Ayouch’s film recounts the adventures of a young, bourgeois married couple who fall prey to the machinations of corrupt law enforcement officials, and who against all odds, received wisdom, and their own intentions embark on a quest for justice. Transformed into fugitives in their own country, the couple traverse isolated, politically neglected, rural regions of Morocco, breathtaking panoramic views giving way to insights into sociopolitical exclusion. Distinguished from the majority of previous Moroccan films by its careful, lingering photographic treatment of landscape, Mektoub underscores the silencing, erasure, and attempted immobilization of those who inhabit such spaces, training Moroccan gazes on neglected views of home while proposing new ways of looking at it.3 Loosely premised upon the real-life case of Haj Mohamed Mustapha Tabet, a police commissioner who in 1993 was arrested, tried, and executed for his sexual assaults of 518 women, which he recorded on at least 118 videocassettes sold abroad by his affiliates, Mektoub rejects both strict social realism and melodrama.4 Instead, the film reimagines the event according to the conventions of nonmelodramatic genre films, simultaneously highlighting the disturbing familiarity of the scenario and the constraints imposed by the demands of such scripts. While the film does not attempt any radical aesthetic or narrative innovations, its enthusiastic reception in the shrinking public space of Moroccan movie theaters suggests that its innovation lies in just how well it renders this story in popular generic form, complete with high production values. At the same time, its studied twists on these same genre conventions raise key questions concerning just how much mobility Moroccan cinema’s entry into the field of action that is popular genre film really offers. In his compelling study of the evolving treatment of police, crime, and politics in Moroccan popular culture, Jonathan Smolin identifies the Tabet affair as the source of a revolution in media coverage of the authoritarian Moroccan state.5 Released several years after the trial and focused on fictional characters, Mektoub benefits from these transformations in the Moroccan media’s portrayal of institutions such as the police, among them a new sensationalism and more openly critical views of government authorities. Like Ayouch’s subsequent films, it pushes against official censorship as well as broader societal taboos.6 More than those films, however, it seems to interrogate the emancipatory potential of the very forms and modes hailed as progressive.7 Centered as it is on the violation and manipulation of Moroccan women at the hands of the authorities of the modern state and for the sake of creating transgressive images that subsequently enslave, Mektoub taps deep anxieties regarding how images inspire, enable, and restrict mobility. Sweeping along audiences in a trajectory previously unimaginable to victims of state-backed authorities, the film’s open-ended conclusion indirectly inquires just how far they

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have come.8 Poised, as it circulated in international film festivals, to break perceptions of Moroccan cinema as chiefly preoccupied with individuals confronting barriers of social mores, Mektoub further exposes the contradictions inherent to viewing national cinemas from the global South as discrete, stable entities, renewing debates regarding the conception and formulation of global or world cinema.9 The premise of Mektoub is a confrontation at once with invisibility and with degrading, violent, exploitative images of and by Moroccans for the benefit of those affiliated with the state. After his wife is abducted by sinister shadowy forces, her violation videotaped, Taoufiq, the son of a bourgeois family who has recently returned to Morocco as an ophthalmologist after completing his studies in the United States, (re)discovers his homeland from the unexpected vantage points of a fugitive. Through Taoufiq’s eyes, the stunning Moroccan landscape appears now as a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, now as a vista of hope on previously bounded horizons. As he and his wife Sophia run toward those horizons, Taoufiq’s eyes are opened to the social fractures within a Morocco he had hitherto viewed from the narrow circle of the country’s elites when the couple are obliged to depend upon men and women who have endured devastating marginalization through decades of deliberate political neglect.10 While Taoufiq had earlier reasoned with Sophia that he chose his profession so that they might enjoy views like those from their five-star hotel balcony, it is only after he has been confronted with that which he would rather not have seen that he begins to grasp the stakes of such visual pleasures. From the very first shot of the film, spectator vision is similarly engaged. Alternately given privileged, behind-the-scenes views of the action, while being prevented from seeing all there is to see, audiences are placed in a position of fearing what will come, yet desiring to see more. Although the intrigue of Mektoub revolves around the delivery of visual evidence of a crime into the hands of those hopefully able to see it for what it is, a visionary action that breaks with historical record, the crucial evidence in question remains unseen and unseeable by audiences. Certainly, the establishing shots of the film give viewers to understand the nature of this evidence, yet they also cultivate a lingering sense that the picture must remain profoundly limited, that justice depends on properly acknowledging and articulating, while not repeating, it. The first shot of Mektoub leaves spectators in the dark, shifting the burden of viewer expectations onto the sequence of sounds that accompanies the credits and dedication to the filmmaker’s parents and wife. A tone, as if someone were adjusting sound equipment, accompanies the initial black screen, and is soon followed by a child’s voice reciting a lullaby—“I have a mother; I  have a father; they’re always with me, until daylight”—which gives way to deliberate footsteps, a flurry of unidentifiable sounds, and a knock on a heavy door, the dimly lit top half

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of which comes into view and opens inward with a creak. A bald, heavy-set, suit-clad man looks out unblinkingly, nods briefly, and kisses the hands of three men in Western-style suits who stride past him, shutting the door on viewers. Viewers are transported inside the apartment via an extreme close-up of a man’s face, shrouded in shadows. As he turns his head, there follows a second man’s face in extreme close-up, and finally a third. A  finger flips a switch and a spinning VHS tape dominates the screen. The apparently nondiegetic noises mount in intensity as the doorman’s head appears in profile. A hand bearing a strange ring flips a switch, a flash sounds, and a woman, her heavily made-up face bathed in green light, squints, flinches, and blinks in the direction of the light source. Dressed in a kind of toga, she hangs from her hands, presumably tied above her. A reverse angle shot frames the man seated beneath the green spotlight, but as he turns his head, the scene cuts away to black-and-white video feed from a high angle camera, showing three men ensconced in large armchairs in a carpeted, heavily draped room. Another cutaway back to a close-up of the doorman’s fixed, avid stare in the shadows precedes the illumination of a second woman, dressed identically to the first, in a yellow spotlight. Another flash sounds as the screen goes black to a soundtrack of anxious, electronic music. Less than two minutes in length, this opening sequence cultivates a sense of unease, offering a series of ominous clues about the big picture that accentuates fears at what might appear next. Its often disproportionately loud, off-screen, nondiegetic, and mismatched sound; its play with shadows and darkness; its juxtaposition of close-ups that prevent spectators from grasping spatial and personal relationships; and its discordant electronic music generate a horror-film suspense. As is often the case with horror films, the contents of the scene as much as the manner in which it is filmed, edited, and scored sets spectators on edge. Familiarity with the globally popular mise en scène of pornography is not even required to deduce the fate of the bound women. Trepidation in this particular instance is nonetheless heightened by anxiety that one will be forced to witness a staged pleasure in which coercion and violence, and possibly death, are made manifest. Until Mektoub unexpectedly cuts to the video feed of the three watching men, the scene plays on the boundaries between slasher/horror film and mainstream, heterosexual pornography, which, Linda Williams observes, “hinge on the spectacle of a ‘sexually saturated’ female body, and … offer what many feminist critics would agree to be spectacles of feminine victimization.”11 Viewers habituated to either or both genres will find the dazed and struggling women’s apparent disorientation indicative of unwilling participation, concluding that despite their costumes, makeup, and jewelry, they are not familiar with what the measured gestures and silence of the four men present as a highly ritualized scenario. Spotlights blind the women to the shape of the threat that

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confronts them, while viewers are treated to a series of close-ups that prevent them from anticipating what image might jump at them next. A  common ignorance about the shape of what is to come fleetingly positions spectators as victims, an alliance rattled by the intrusion of the omniscient perspective of the black-and-white video trained on the three men apparently oblivious to the camera’s presence. Unremarkable to Euro-American audiences habituated to the display of bodies, desire, and sex across a range of film and popular culture genres, the contents of this prelude nonetheless modify the valences of its suspense-building camera and editing techniques for audiences unaccustomed to such spectacles in the mainstream Moroccan media. Despite the popularity of many kinds of foreign-made genre films, including officially unacknowledged pornography, in movie theaters and on home video and satellite television, Moroccan audience members concerned to affirm their status as irreproachable members of society were constrained to profess ignorance of such “foreign” products, at least within the space of the movie theater, where there persisted the sense that they, too, were under scrutiny. The film’s framing of Tabet’s cinematic recording practices highlights how these were destined for elites at home and abroad who delighted in his abuses of those he made his subjects while placing viewers in the position of those elites, something not entirely mitigated by the inclusion of the women’s violators in the film’s frames.12 While its confrontation of the taboos at the center of Tabet’s actions may have prompted some to turn away their gazes momentarily, judging by its box-office success, many accepted the film’s challenge to keep watching. Mektoub did not transform domestic social norms, apparent in popular views of some of Tabet’s victims as deserving of their abuse.13 Yet far from signaling visual illiteracy, naïveté, or merely conventional, intractable sexism, this rejection of the genre pact challenges the appropriateness and progressiveness of the film’s generic encoding, indicating that the form that will finally do justice to the victims, and Moroccans as whole, remains yet to be found. When Mektoub switches over to the black-and-white video feed of the three men seated in a row of armchairs observing the bound women, they resemble nothing so much as filmgoers, the cut startling in its abrupt revelation of an unseen eye that watches the watchers, refracting the act of watching (fig. 4.1). The camera angle and length of the take are all wrong, upending the assumed hierarchy of gazes, both social and cinematic, in which men see and act, and women are seen. Directed at the seated men rather than at the location of the captive woman in the green spotlight whose image preceded this break, the sequence introduces into the diegesis an opportunity to scrutinize those whose power resides in their invisibility as agents of surveillance. Specifically, the sequence gives fleeting play—long enough to introduce doubt—to the rumor that the quick post-trial destruction of Tabet’s videotapes may have had less to do with safeguarding his victims from public shame than with

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Figure 4.1  Three spectator-abusers

protecting high-ranking perpetrators who may have served the interests of those even higher up. Indeed, news accounts relate that Tabet employed two cameras, although the evidence presented at his trial was compiled primarily from footage taken by one.14 Beyond historical specificities, the footage of the seated men implicates—if only for a second—film spectators in the scene that they also watch from a comfortable remove. All the while, it works on anxieties not just about the increasing instability of the public and the private, but also about the extent to which the structures and conventions of visual media have already shaped the most private domains of the imagination. All the more so when revisited from an era of omnipresent digital media and transnational circulation, the prelude to Mektoub explicitly conjures anxieties about the management, manipulation, and circulation of one’s (in both the personal and collective sense) images. When, after close-ups of the second captive woman and the doorman, the title Mektoub appears in orange letters on the black screen, it speaks to these phenomena. Literally, mektoub means written, most commonly in the abstract sense of one’s fate being written. More prosaically, the word also denotes that which is set down, or recorded; in the aftermath of what spectators have just witnessed, the two definitions of the term merge in the sense that what is set down or recorded becomes, contributes to, or directs, fate. As the title lingers, the music changes markedly in mood and tempo and suddenly rushes in a light-filled scene of a bustling hotel

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lobby, where men and women are arriving for an ophthalmology convention. Within moments, Taoufiq appears on-screen, stretching as if after a long car ride, and places his hand affectionately on the small of Sophia’s back, escorting her into the hotel. While they check in at the reception desk, happy, smiling, and relaxed, a current of anxiety suddenly pervades the scene. Caused by an abrupt sound mismatch, it precedes by a second a reverse angle long shot in which Taoufiq and Sophia appear through a two-way mirror from a room behind the reception desk (fig. 4.2). In the absence of sound, spectator voyeurism is ominously doubled, as underscored by the vague outline of an otherwise invisible man’s suit in the mirror’s reflective surface. But a moment later, another cut replaces spectators on the side of the smiling, unselfconsciously flirting Taoufiq and Sophia, the only visibly married couple in the busy lobby. This introduction of the film’s protagonists primes spectators for further signs of an external threat, yet the film’s initial constructions of the couple also merit scrutiny. French film scholar Denise Brahimi describes Sophia and Taoufiq as a highly likable, young, American-like couple, whose relationship exhibits “not a shadow of traditional behavior.”15 Reading Mektoub as a work of social realism, she discerns in the film a critique of a selfish and sadistic bourgeoisie, who accept rape as the price that liberated, well-to-do women and their husbands are expected to pay for their social and material advantages.16 Interpreting the

Figure 4.2  Taoufiq and Sophia seen through the looking glass

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film as a class-conscious condemnation of the feudal underpinnings of the Moroccan bourgeoisie, Brahimi overlooks how Ayouch’s work within globalized filmic conventions challenges such views of Moroccans and their recent history. Sophia and Taoufiq are presented as an unselfconsciously modern couple at the same time that the film signals their uniqueness within the context of the professional event that brings them to the upscale five-star hotel. When they enter the hotel, the model-thin, minidress-wearing Sophia is the only woman not clad in professional business attire. Surrounded by Taoufiq’s professional colleagues, they self-absorbedly focus on each other, combining pleasure with business in a context where concern for “modern” professional relationships and status clearly dominate. Later, Taoufiq arranges a Western-style celebration of their first wedding anniversary among his networking colleagues in the hotel dining room, they sip champagne, and Sophia openly declares her desire for her husband. Yet while Mektoub furnishes these various signs that the couple are crossing long-standing boundaries of Moroccan propriety, their actions are normalized in the diegesis. Aside from the occasional glance of admiration or recognition directed at the couple, none of the ophthalmologists filling the hotel act in a manner that would cast Sophia or the couple’s behavior as out of place. No stares, leers, or frowns follow them; Taoufiq’s colleagues focus on happily greeting their peers. While one might remark that such professionals would be European or American educated, they all hail from Africa at this regional convention. Meanwhile, the mere absence of traditional behavior does not necessarily make the couple “very likable,” for the reason that they, especially Sophia, conform too closely to generic types. Flirtatious, on the edge of boastful regarding her husband, for all appearances pampered and focused on material comforts, her behavior sometimes veering toward childishness, Sophia initially seems the jealous, controlling trophy wife, and Taoufiq, the dull, if well-off and Western-educated husband. Overriding these first impressions, however, is the sense of menace that falls over the couple from the outset, the characters’ failure to notice that their happiness is under ominous surveillance generative of an aura of anxiety. This omniscient perspective, where audience unease anticipates and then mimics that of Sophia, drives identification with the privileged couple, and more particularly with Sophia herself. As they enter their room, Sophia’s character acquires some additional complexity as her exclamations of delight give way to annoyance when she learns that they are (again) beneficiaries of the largesse of Taoufiq’s father. In the near argument that follows, it grows apparent that she, committed to a modernity that extends beyond appearances, believes they must earn their luxuries independently, while Taoufiq shrugs off her concerns, and steers her attention to the beautiful view from their balcony. Not coincidentally, the couple speak almost exclusively in Darija, or Moroccan colloquial Arabic,

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their conversations oddly devoid of the French or English expressions with which the upper classes pepper their speech, especially at a continent-wide professional event where the official languages would be French and English. As Sophia swims alone in the lush, otherwise empty, hotel pool in the following scene, she again falls prey to the gaze of the unseen voyeur. This time, however, she senses something amiss, catching sight of the man just hidden behind the blinds of the full-length windows that overlook the pool. In response, she first ducks closer to the water, before defiantly swimming in the other direction, glancing quickly over her shoulder. In part because audiences are not this time transported to the voyeur’s side; in part because the solitary, swimming Sophia has, despite her skimpy bikini, nothing of a narcissistic exhibitionist about her; and in part because she avers herself much more perceptive of her immediate environment than does her ophthalmologist husband, Sophia begins to break with the stereotype of the privileged agent of foreign values. As the couple dines, Taoufiq’s commitment to living their relationship in the public domain grows clearer, along with a sense that conventional Moroccan categories of public and private have already undergone considerable redefinition, especially in such spaces as are the hotel and the professional conference. Veering between a focus on the balletic moments and conspiratorial whispers of the waitstaff and the hotel manager, and the lovers’ banter, the pacing of the scene keeps spectators second-guessing. Initially, Taoufiq’s distraction appears suspicious, but just as Sophia shrinks back in her chair in response to a strange undercurrent in the room, announcing that she wants to leave, Taoufiq takes out a jewel box and offers it to her. As she, delighted, pulls off the ribbon, the lights dim and singing waiters deliver a heart-shaped cake to their table in honor of their first anniversary. Yet the arrival of the hotel manager with complimentary glasses of champagne again darkens the mood, and Sophia frowns in semirecognition at his retreating figure. Taoufiq interrupts her reflections, sloppily clinking her glass in a toast, and they pose, smiling, for a photographer, his flash ushering in a whiteout that signals a time lapse. Later that night, Taoufiq writhes and moans in bed, waking Sophia, who calls the lobby for the house physician. Told none is on call, she stomps angrily to the lobby, where the obsequious hotel manager directs her to a waiting cab. It careens through dark, deserted streets, Sophia increasingly alarmed, before screeching to a halt only at the periphery of old city, where two men grab her as she screams and the screen goes black. A gong sounds, followed by the familiar flash effect, and Sophia is illuminated by a red spotlight, dressed and made-up like the women in the film’s prelude. She, too, squints outward, her blurred face reflecting internal disorientation. Three men occupy the familiar chairs beneath the illuminated lights, waiting as a hooded figure slowly serves them tea. Again the scene lingers on the ritual, intercalating such stock ominous details as

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the milky, blind eyes of the hooded man. Still, this time, the spatial and causal relations in the room, as well as the men’s faces, are clearer, and we observe that each chair has embedded on its right arm three color-coded switches. One man pushes his, and the yellow and green lights illuminating Sophia’s two captive companions switch off. As the man beneath the remaining red spotlight stands, the camera pans up a wall to reveal a small camera scope, and the scene leaves spectators to imagine what happens to Sophia as it cuts to the doorkeeper’s avid stare, lights flickering across his face before the scene fades to black. Reversing from black to white, the faces of a frowning couple come into focus, a brilliant morning sun behind them as they exchange a few disapproving words, and quickly move on. A reverse angle shot shows Sophia, clothed in her turtleneck and slacks but prone on the sidewalk, emerging from a stupor. Back at the hotel, Taoufiq is awakened by sounds of doors shutting and running water. Shaking off his daze, he leaps from the bed and rushes to the bathroom door, calling Sophia’s name, and pounding on it. Finally breaking through, he finds his hysterically sobbing wife naked and pulled into a fetal position in the tub. Murmuring to her to stop crying, he clasps her in his arms, telling her everything will be all right. Although fully apparent only later, the generic category of the film has just shifted. Until now, much about Mektoub has been building to a horror film, replete with discordant soundtrack, settings of dark, secret rooms, extreme close-ups and tight-framing, themes of monstrosity, and a happy, young, slightly transgressive couple. Of course, there are complications, even in these first scenes, and certain qualities of the horror film may still be spotted in the thriller, road movie, and for a brief moment, Western, into which the film morphs. In this, Ayouch’s film offers a perfect illustration of genre theorist Robin Wood’s foundational contention that it is a mistake to treat genres as discreet, that “at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions.”17 To be sure, it would also be a mistake to assume that Ayouch’s film mimics the ideological premises of the Hollywood films in which its generic models originated, as Roy Armes implies when he dismisses as “only partially successful” its “adoption of a pseudo Hollywood thriller format,” even though he credits it as being a “breakthrough film for the younger generation.”18 Ayouch’s film—while it may seem less overtly to embody native Moroccan values than the social realist films Armes favors—visually and narratively plays upon multiple, sometimes irreconcilable, ideals and values, self-reflexively engaging the ideological tensions circulating in the cultural globalizations from which both it and its audiences’ expectations emerge. With its gripping, by turns odd and reassuringly familiar reflections, Mektoub promotes, as social realist films rarely do, a sustained, nuanced, and ultimately mobile vision of the vexed representations of late twentieth-century social, political, and cinematic history.

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The specter of the horror film recedes the moment Taoufiq comforts Sophia after her rape, for contrary to the conventions of horror films, not just both individuals, but the couple, survive. At the same time, Taoufiq’s embrace of Sophia runs contrary to widespread practices of victim shaming, and stands out as a surprising scene in Moroccan film. Tabet was able to continue assaulting women for so long because the majority of his victims concealed what had happened to them for fear of divorce, ostracism, or official retribution, fears fueled by dominant social representations of rape. From the moment he clasps Sophia in his arms, insisting that “it’s nothing,” Taoufiq rejects social pressures to see first of all his own dishonor in a wife’s violation. Instead, his unheard-of confrontation with much-feared authorities extends yet transforms the suspense that has run throughout the opening scenes, moving the film forward against the immobilizing pull of melodrama. Both less and more transgressively, the film’s focus shifts to Taoufiq in the sequences that immediately follow the rape, his actions individuating him, while simultaneously throwing into crisis the normative values he represents and the precarious verisimilitude thus far maintained by the film. When Sophia earlier frowned upon his dependence on his wealthy and influential family, Taoufiq’s loving yet perfunctory response made it clear that she contravened Moroccan values of filial devotion, positioning her, however subtly, as a potential threat to the status quo of existing values. Unexpectedly, however, Taoufiq now takes an initiative that privileges his relationship with his wife over family ties.19 That Taoufiq first turns to his long-estranged, drug-addled, older, police officer brother, Kamel, underscores the dearth of options for redress available to Moroccan citizens beyond kinship-based networks of political influence and justice. Not least, it suggests the fragility of the modern nation whose arrival the bourgeois couple initially signaled. What Taoufiq discovers instead of a representative of the transition from kin-based networks to modern state security apparatus at his n’er-do-well brother’s dingy, sparsely furnished, beer-bottle-strewn studio apartment is just how much both the familial and social orders of which he has long been the beneficiary are maintained through the disavowal of those like Kamel. Stunned to see his younger brother after all these years, Kamel mocks his privilege by deriding the naive, self-centered motives that have brought him to his doorstep. An overwhelmed Taoufiq turns to leave, unable to articulate his dilemma, but Kamel holds him back, apologizes, and retreats to the kitchen to brew a conciliatory coffee while attempting to banter about the different social conventions, American and Moroccan, of dating and marriage. When he turns around, Taoufiq has vanished, as has Kamel’s service revolver. Despite his unconvincing English (limited in the film to a heavily accented “cheers”), Taoufiq, it seems, has absorbed some lessons on vigilante justice during his US stint. In rapid succession, he kidnaps the hotel manager at gunpoint, forces him to drive to the crime scene (in the daylight

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recoded as a kind of brothel), knocks him unconscious when he attempts to flee, and in a small dark office with a console and television monitor discovers a cabinet of dated VHS tapes, including the one on which his wife’s gang rape is recorded. No sooner has he inserted the tape into the deck than he emits a choking gasp; the beefy doorkeeper grips Taoufiq’s neck so tightly from behind that he suspends him in mid-air. For an instant, Mektoub seems about to be rewritten as a rape-revenge horror movie, in which the male member of the couple is sacrificed, clearing the way for the woman to, as Carol Clover suggests, appropriate phallic power as her own avenger. 20 But such a plot twist would project the film into the realm of fantasy, negating the tense relationship it has carefully set up with recent national history. After a brief struggle, Taoufiq kills the heavy-set doorkeeper in an anticlimatic act of self-defense. Deeply shaken, he returns to the hotel where a furious, disbelieving Kamel awaits. Back at the crime scene, the film introduces a villain, Inspector Kebir, who slides a cassette into the player, rubs his hands, and leers at the monitor until a subordinate startles him with a knock on the door. A  more familiarly human replacement for the barely seen monster that was the doorman, Kebir conveys through these gestures, as well as in his subsequent conversational exchange with the hotel manager, that the monstrosity first embodied by the doorkeeper and the three men is not confined to the dark room where they stage their assaults but permeates the ranks of those presented as the very guardians of civilization and modern statehood. As Kamel drives Sophia and Taoufiq to the police station, by turns outraged and reassuring, struggling to believe that his rash younger brother may yet justify his actions to authorities, the dead man’s name is announced over his police radio. Swerving off course, Kamel shouts at the bewildered Taoufiq that explanations are impossible, that his victim, Darif, was not only a police commissioner but also a colonial-era freedom fighter and regional hero. Protesting, as any American would, that he has legal rights, Taoufiq refuses to grasp the gravity of his situation, even as Kamal responds that in this country, his only right is to silence, and that anyway he has no evidence to back his claims. In a defiant gesture, Taoufiq pulls the VHS cassette from his pocket, pausing to glance at Sophia. As he produces this evidence, Mektoub veers decisively in the direction of adventure-thriller. The once mild-mannered Taoufiq, perhaps with the assistance of his ne’er-do-well brother Kamal, is poised to perform hitherto unimagined heroic feats to challenge the corrupt officers of the law who have wronged him, prove his innocence, and restore order and justice. While the North African setting and references to systemic corruption are familiar genre-specific devices that heighten the spectacle and increase suspense, the all-Moroccan cast and Moroccan-only context pose something of an obstacle to the positive outcome that the genre dictates. For in the absence of an American, or at least visibly Americanized, hero, along

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with a palpable presence of that familiar civilizational infrastructure, many of the assumptions that underpin Hollywood adventure-thrillers, namely that the existing system can be reformed by the removal of a few “bad apples,” suddenly seem excessively contrived.21 Straining the boundaries of verisimilitude the moment Taoufiq kills Darif, Mektoub constrains spectators to trust the power of genre conventions— after all, Taoufiq is US educated—to carry them to the anticipated positive outcome. The film gambles that these conventions will also triumph with Moroccan audiences, for whom local setting and characters might otherwise trump the expected victory of the adventure-thriller genre. For the tradition of narratives of defeat in Moroccan film history, as well as the abuses of power of the years of lead from which the country is only just emerging, make it seem more likely that the film has simply deferred its turn to melodrama, than that it will present a narrative spectacle in which genre overrides context and history to determine the ending. Still, in addition to the two glosses on Mektoub, or the written, as fate or genre convention, the film thematizes a third, that of the VHS cassette of recorded evidence with its implied capacity to rewrite the fates of Sophia and Taoufiq. Mektoub works with all three competing meanings, ratcheting up suspense while rattling spectator identifications and perspectives. Despite their involuntary yet extraordinary agency in bringing forward the evidence of widespread, long-standing crimes, Sophia and Taoufiq are not, like the heroes of many thrillers, autonomous individuals acting independently to ensure that justice is served. Nor, however, are they the kind of flat characters discovering their fate that Armes describes as typical of North African films from which the notion of free will is largely absent.22 Rather, they are a young couple intent on taking control of the very images that others would use to immobilize them. Obliged to rely on often obscure relationships among those more powerful than themselves, they set out to orchestrate the VHS cassette’s delivery to someone both outside the criminal network and capable of reading it differently, that is, outside the social and generic conventions with and in which it is inscribed. In the meantime, the couple travel as fugitives in regions of their country that belie official portrayals of a cosmopolitan, educated, dynamic, urban Morocco that is at the same time folkloric, authentic, rural, and where traditions flourish at the same time that the modern tourist industry is embraced. With each turn, Sophia and Taoufiq are obliged to renegotiate their relationship to themselves, to each other, to society, and to their expectations and futures. As tension mounts, the nagging feeling that there can be no happy ending to this tale returns as the film time and again defers or deviates from action-thriller models. Taoufiq’s heroic capacities seem largely exhausted once he has killed Darif and he realizes that there is no justice system to which they can turn for protection. For her part, Sophia quickly transitions

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from shock to anger, seemingly at Taoufiq, bypassing defeat and gratitude. As for the street-smart Kamal, the one person who possesses the connections that permit them to elude their tormentors, he soon dies in a Tangiers gutter, shot by Inspector Kebir, who is on the fugitives’ trail even before they leave the city. Yet prior to his death, Kamal manages to entrust the videocassette and the couple to a powerful friend who heads a hashish production and distribution network, Abdelkrim Bakel. Cherif Bakel presents a striking contrast to the urban police in the international port city of Tangier. A slight, older man with a dignified bearing, dressed in traditional mountain clothing, he works from a spartan office situated in a white- and blue-washed house typical of Chefchaouen (fig. 4.3). Although a wary, machine gun-toting bodyguard, likewise clad in clothing typical of the Rif region, sizes up potential visitors at the door, the mise en scène and iconography of this scene positions the Cherif as a force of good and justice in contrast to the urban police, heavyset men sporting dark Western suits, wordlessly brutalizing women in dark, concealed rooms. This presentation of the traditional authority of the Cherif of course clashes with state discourse on drug trafficking and the primary region of hashish cultivation, the mountainous Rif, as lawless threats to urban civilization and political stability. Inverting the values that usually attach to the figures of the drug lord and the police inspector, Mektoub does not simply reverse the role each usually plays, but rather exposes their interdependence

Figure 4.3  Taoufiq and Sophia in Cherif Bakel’s office

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in myriad ways. Kamel and Kebir, it turns out, are involved in the drug trade, and the respect that the mere mention of Cherif Bakel’s name commands insinuates that this involvement reaches far across rank and region. Bakel’s power, the film makes apparent, derives from his status as repressed other of the rule of law, and he scrupulously maintains this status, exerting his influence to work through, rather than against or around, the justice system on behalf of Sophia and Taoufiq. Once the videocassette has been handed off to the Cherif, thrilling action is largely relegated off-screen. Plunged into a Morocco—or rather, Moroccos— worlds away from the luxury hotel where the film introduced them, Sophia and Taoufiq negotiate poverty, exclusion, wariness, and hostility that transform them from innocent, ultimately good victims of an evil cabal into Moroccan citizens confronting their own roles in shoring up the social inequalities and injustices with which they now come face to face. Guided by a guardian to a hashish-producing village in the Rif mountains, they enter the town like a couple of misdirected strangers on the western frontier, greeted by silent stares from groups of men lining the narrow alleyways, all of them engaged in processing the hashish crop. Sophia and Taoufiq lean into each other, glancing back at the male population of their host town with a mixture of trepidation and disapproval. While they start with surprise at the discovery that the village chief is a woman, she orders them to a hut without a word of greeting. While it has no running water or heat, the villagers offer Sophia more precious means by which to begin coping with her trauma, inviting the couple to an all-night Aissaoua ceremony where Sophia enters a trance. After she is led away by the women despite the weary Taoufiq’s protective gestures, he receives a lecture in the Moroccan politics of hashish production, dealing, and use from the male villagers, who delight in targeting his prejudices. When Sophia awakens hours later and ventures alone to the village square, where she attempts to make conversation with the village chief about the Aissaoua, she is too drawn into a verbal sparring match on the topics of privilege and hardship (fig. 4.4). Her sharp responses to her interlocutor’s disdainful remarks reveal that she hails from a similarly impoverished background, these brief allusions to her personal history definitively transforming her from entitled, bourgeois wife into a self-made woman who embodies Moroccan values of education and aspirations of upward mobility. That Malika Oufkir plays the role of scornful, Riffan village chief adds ironic resonance to this confrontation. Known to Euro-American audiences as the author of the 1999 memoir Stolen Lives, treating the twenty years she spent with her younger siblings and mother in secret Saharan prisons, Oufkir is additionally remembered by Moroccans as the daughter of Colonel (later General) Oufkir, who led brutal massacres of “rebels” in the Rif region in the 1950s.23 By her own admission, the eldest daughter of the general, long reputed the most hated

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Figure 4.4  Sophia and the village chief

and feared man in Morocco, and second in power only to King Hassan II, lived her childhood and adolescence in outrageous luxury and privilege.24 Abducted and imprisoned with her mother and siblings after a failed coup attempt by General Oufkir in 1972, Malika Oufkir became a cause célèbre for the very human rights organizations that had previously fought for the tortured, imprisoned, and disappeared victims of her father. While no sympathetic reassessment of the family occurred among Moroccans following the publicizing of their plight, Mektoub represents in an unexpected light a woman long effaced from public memory, testing both the reading and writing of destinies that recent Moroccan history has presumably already sealed. Such analogies to internal and international affairs, most far less explicit, resonate throughout the film. Soon after the above-mentioned scene, Sophia vents her anger at Taoufiq, rebuking her solicitous husband for getting them into this hopeless, cold, hungry, miserable, directionless situation by killing Darif. Neither the psychologically devastated, terrorized supporting character, nor the feminist avenger of Western rape-revenge dramas, nor even the fatally dishonored, socially ostracized victim of Moroccan films, Sophia both insists on the physical and psychological impact of the rape and lets Taoufiq know that it is not something he can resolve on her behalf. Drawing strength from, but not miraculously cured by, the traditional Aissaoua ceremony, Sophia also informs Taoufiq that his version of justice has not only

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done nothing to remediate her humiliation but compounds it with not just material privations but the real possibility of death. When Taoufiq halfheartedly replies that Kamel will fix things, Sophia explodes, calling Kamel a strung-out drug addict who is “no match for those dogs.” Infuriated, Taoufiq slaps her, saying she has crossed the line, but Sophia shouts that the men who raped her didn’t respect any boundaries, caustically evoking what her tormentors did to her in the parts of the tape Taoufiq didn’t see. Their fight not only forces Taoufiq to confront the shortcomings of his rash act of revenge, but also underlines that neither American-style vigilantism nor a return to older, localized forms of remediation can compensate for the absence of a nationally valid, effective justice system that upholds the full personhood of all Morocco’s citizens. Sophia’s outburst echoes the voices of Tabet’s victims, silenced when the presiding judge peremptorily closed the case and declared no need for further public statements, abruptly immobilizing public discourse around the matter. Still very much the privileged, naive product of his bourgeois upbringing, Taoufiq determines that they will seek out the police in nearby Meknes. Slipping away from their guide, they take his jeep and head for that city, confident in their ability to make themselves heard and understood, unaware that Kebir has preceded them. Suspense is interwoven with farce as they hit a traffic jam in Meknes and are recognized by the boy selling the newspaper with their pictures on the front page, but not by the police officers manning the desk in the precinct next to their wanted poster (fig. 4.5). Disabused of their illusion that the justice system will ultimately protect them after they briefly fall into Kebir’s hands, they make their escape, running toward the mountain village of Tizgui, where they believe Kamel will meet them. After a lunch with bourgeois relatives in Fez that serves the multiple purposes of further demarcating Sophia and Taoufiq from the insouciant, materialistic couple they were at the film’s outset, hinting at the extent of the scandal their adventures would cause in their former social circle, and lampooning the Fassi bourgeoisie whose stewardship in business and politics have been touted as helping promote Morocco on a global level, they ditch their jeep in a demonstration of newly acquired outlaw survival skills. Crowded onto buses, always just one step ahead, or behind, Kebir, the couple moves forward despite a tightening net, and their relationship grows more mutually supportive. Finally realizing that their picture is in all the papers, they duck into a bus stop barber shop and slip right past their stalker. Tension almost immediately returns when the bus-riding couple are jolted from a contented reverie by Taoufiq’s sighting of a police roadblock ahead. As the bus disappears into a dip in the road surrounded by shimmering, arid, treeless terrain, the moment is drawn out by a pause in the soundtrack. Close-ups of the officers’ faces suggest that this is it as the notes of the soundtrack lengthen with the reappearance of the bus, but the tempo of the music suddenly

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Figure 4.5  Unseen wanted posters of the couple

becomes upbeat as a long shot shows the couple on the run, hand in hand, over rocky land, plowed fields, up a dry hill and through a dust storm. Harsh yet magnificent, the landscape into which they have fled looks desolate, uninhabitable (fig. 4.6). Moments later, however, they happen upon the solitary mud-brick house of a peasant family, and Taoufiq is able to diffuse the family’s almost hostile wariness by tending to their son’s seriously infected eye. The boy later cries out in delight when he spots their pictures on the evening news—making clear that the family recognized them from the outset. Yet, polar opposites of Taoufiq’s Fassi relatives, the desperately poor family pronounces their solidarity and offers to help them avoid capture. Meanwhile, the interestingly named Inspector Tabet from Meknes tails an increasingly frantic and rude Kebir, hinting that the evidence may finally be working to rewrite Sophia’s and Taoufiq’s destinies. Alone the night before they depart for Tizgui, Sophia and Taoufiq have a second conversation, very different in character from their earlier confrontation. Taoufiq reassesses his relationship with his estranged brother, as well as his own earlier judgments, musing that he never questioned the prevailing social order or the judgments and suppressions demanded to uphold it. As Sophia gently questions him, he laments his role in shunning Kamel and reflects that he no longer possesses his former self-assurance. Taoufiq’s reflections signal a renunciation of the typical action hero’s role—just at the

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Figure 4.6  Sophia and Taoufiq after their escape from the bus

moment when it seems his actions might be vindicated. Personal turmoil is not the sole source of Taoufiq’s self-reassessment, however, nor is this a plot device designed to better offset an ultimate act of heroism. Rather, Taoufiq’s increasing assumption of action-thriller hero characteristics in the second half of Mektoub has coincided with a decidedly un-American critique of capitalist neoimperialism and neoliberal globalization alongside a condemnation of Morocco’s socioeconomic stratification. His flight with Sophia across a Morocco he previously ignored or dismissed has brought to the foreground how much their lives—before their fatal visit to Tangiers as well as since their flight—owe to their Moroccan others. Sophia’s complicity with Taoufiq throughout his introspections and self-reassessments signals that her respect for him has only increased as he breaks with both Moroccan and action hero ideals of machismo and success, the resulting solidity of their marriage an unexpectedly radical and far-reaching challenge to those who targeted them. Once daylight returns, the pace of events quickens: their host takes Sophia and Taoufiq over back roads to Tizgui; a black limousine discharges Cherif Bakel at the Meknes police headquarters, where he hands the videocassette to the local chief of police; Kebir, hearing on the police radio that the tape has been delivered, rounds a bend in the road and finds a smiling Inspector Tabet blocking the road with his car. In the film’s final scene, Sophia and Taoufiq arrive in Tizgui just as Kamel’s body, wrapped in a simple white shroud, is being carried over the rocky fields to the cemetery. They stand together on

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a windswept plain, Taoufiq staring, open mouthed and speechless at the funeral procession in the distance, and Sophia looking on sadly, before turning to search his face. Amina Alaoui’s distinctive voice intones a song that urges listeners to confront what they believe to be their fates, to struggle; the lyrics appear on screen in calligraphic script.25 With the foregoing sequence of shots, Mektoub has assured spectators that the couple’s adventure has, against seemingly insurmountable odds, ended unexpectedly well. Yet while Sophia and Taoufiq have come to the end of their road, the evidence has been delivered into capable hands, and the chief villain arrested in a promising conclusion, resolution proves more elusive. If the couple have proven that they possess the resources to fight those who would destroy them, there is also no possibility of return to their previous untroubled bourgeois existence. Taoufiq has killed both Darif and, indirectly, his own brother; they have plunged into the parallel worlds of drugs, crime, and poverty that they now realize are deeply intertwined with the modern civilization of their past; only regional rivalries in the national police force rendered possible Kebir’s capture; and convicting their tormentors will depend on the replaying of Sophia’s violation. Impossibly open-ended, Mektoub breaks the rule that genre films should never leave audiences asking, “What next?”26 In the absence of a neat wrap-up signaling that order has been restored, the kind of identification usually fostered by adventure-thriller films remains incomplete. Having drawn spectators along through a series of thrilling adventures, Mektoub now deposits them before an intellectual problem that far exceeds the parameters of its diegesis. Underlining the iconicity of the film’s images, the voice-over poem at its conclusion abstracts the intellectual problem confronting spectators: to critically reassess what has been written about themselves as well as others, to test new narratives of individual and collective destinies, to record, and to keep moving.

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Off Road Lyes Salem’s Masquerades (2008) I’m in the desert with some guy who sees nothing and understands nothing. —Kalt, Bedwin Hacker The picture is familiar: girl loves boy, and boy loves girl but postpones making a commitment. In this case, girl’s brother and overprotective guardian—a comically hypersensitive and obtuse, but essentially good-hearted, working-class man who gets no respect—is also boy’s best friend. Boy, whose name is Khliffa, is anxious that girl’s brother, Mounir, will not find him good enough for girl, Rym, a narcoleptic who is the target of village ridicule. Khliffa’s fears are justified, for Mounir perceives his friend’s secret courtship of Rym as a betrayal of trust that would do nothing to overcome the stigma of his sister’s illness. In Masquerades (Mascarades) (2008), director and actor Lyès Salem’s debut feature film, the crisis is set in motion when Mounir, distraught by malicious gossip, drunkenly stumbles into the village square one night and informs everyone that his sister has a wealthy suitor. Confronted the next day by his more down-to-earth and furious wife, Habiba, Mounir admits to inventing the suitor and acquiesces to a face-saving plan. All goes well until Rym, frustrated by Khliffa’s reluctance to declare himself, decides to claim for herself this tale of a wealthy fiancé. Taking the hint, a panicked Khliffa rushes to declare his love for Rym, with predictable results. For the remainder of the film, Khliffa and Rym, aided by Habiba, endeavor to change Mounir’s outlook. Meanwhile, Rym’s imaginary suitor fires up village imaginations and aspirations, and Mounir is dazzled by the unexpected jump in social status he experiences as the future brother-in-law of the phantasmal William Vancooten. Eventually, however, Rym and Khliffa’s love finds a way, for Salem’s film is a comedy, a blend of slapstick, lighthearted subterfuge, and fairy-tale romance set in an undefined, if spectacular, dusty landscape. Certainly in its basic outlines, this story could take place almost anywhere. Unfamiliar names and identifying details of time and place apart, Masquerades contains stock elements of romantic comedies and fairy tales,

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while the characters of Mounir and Habiba recall the clueless or frustrated blue-collar worker and his good-humored wife that have been developed to popular acclaim in US sitcoms from the Honeymooners to Everybody Loves Raymond.1 Within the history of postindependence Algerian filmmaking, however, Salem’s hit is unusual. One of the very rare films in recent times to garner US distribution, Masquerades sidesteps invocations of nationally specific sociopolitical issues, gritty realism, and urban settings in favor of archetypical plot lines and an indeterminate rural setting, with the result that the focus falls on the quirks and foibles of individuated characters and their social relations.2 Abundant close-ups, shot reverse shots, and cross-cutting accentuate characters’ emotional responses to events and one another, succinctly fleshing out character types and the web of social relations into which they are woven. Meanwhile, the careful choreography of slapstick sequences and visual gags, coupled with the pacing of events, expertly creates and diffuses suspense in a tight, generically familiar, narrative. Throughout, faux pas, reversals of fortune, coincidences, and inept responses to shifting situations delight rather than alarm as they further Rym and Khliffa’s marriage plot. Brilliant use of the child character, Amine, along with a soundtrack that combines an original score with global beat hits further assists Masquerades to transcend specificities of place and time, thereby not so paradoxically dynamizing the spaces of twenty-first-century Algeria. Released eleven years after Ayouch’s Mektoub and in form less action-based, while in content both less overtly political and less focused on tropes of sight and surveillance, Masquerades nonetheless raises similar concerns regarding the typecasting, or immobilization, of citizens of the nation-state in the era of neoliberal globalization. By no means the first (or the most recent) comedy or commercially inclined feature in the history of Algerian cinema, Masquerades nonetheless differs from its predecessors in privileging an ultimately successful love story over sociopolitical satire as well as an undefined setting over representations of national specificity.3 Sophisticated in its reworkings of generic forms, as well as its adoption of conventions of verisimilitude, pacing, and character development, it is entirely legible to audiences unfamiliar with Algeria. At the same time, by drawing on folk- and fairy-tale narrative elements, the film seems to align itself with the films of Part I. Its aims, however, are distinct, for rather than seeking to establish a unique national or regional cinema, Masquerades highlights just how much these folk- and fairy-tale plots, tropes, and characters have traveled, informing the very genre conventions popularized by Hollywood and vice versa.4 Still, the film’s apparent abdication of direct social criticism drew criticisms that it was insufficiently Algerian from some quarters, despite its relative popularity within the country itself.5 Yet if Masquerades in no way exacts critical sociopolitical readings, that does not mean that it does not lend itself to them. Remaining true to its title, Masquerades reminds us that the most whimsical narratives often

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pack a critical punch, and that genre can challenge as well as vehicle ideology. Beneath its slapstick humor, encoded in dialogues, costumes, and sets, as well as in what remains unseen, lies a particularly Algerian-inflected reflection on the collision of neoliberalism, the ruins of postindependence socialist ideology, and an autocratic state.6 Fully developed as a romantic comedy, Masquerades nonetheless conveys the socioeconomic struggles of its characters through their shabby houses— cinderblock dwellings complete with peeling paint, dented doors, collapsing shutters, and minimal, run-down furnishings—rattling, dented, and dusty cars and a general absence of consumer goods. In another film, such a mise en scène, maintained throughout and distinct from the staged working-class milieux of US films and sitcoms, would contribute to a moral message or presage a more somber outcome. In Salem’s film, however, reflections on the impact of neoliberal formulations of happiness in the remotest outposts of global capitalism are a bit more nuanced than this decor alone suggests. While the opening scene of Masquerades speedily establishes the film’s concern with earthly matters, employing a now clichéd pan down a minaret to the street below, the voices overlapping the funding credits resolve into a series of scenarios that quickly sketch out village social dynamics. A driver berates workers who have dropped onto his windscreen a bunch of cables; a shopkeeper shouts orders and criticizes; two men argue over a debt; a boy rushes up shouting, “They’re coming, they’re coming”; and merchant, workers, cafe patrons, and shoppers scramble, some grumbling, some with enthusiasm, to clear the village square, one man exclaiming, “I’m not moving. They can run me over.” Silence, punctuated only by the bleating of sheep, falls on the now cleared square, soon broken by a quickly intensifying cacophony of car horns; the camera jumps to an extreme close-up of a large flower heart spelling out “Love for Ever” affixed to the grille of a black SUV speeding toward the town square. Several black cars, all with tinted windows, follow it, circling the dusty village square as the camera cuts to close-ups of boys’ and men’s faces, the former openly delighted and the latter resigned, appraising, or envious. Upbeat music concludes this spectacle as three dust-covered, impassive old men slowly remove the handkerchiefs covering their noses. Alongside the classical theme of romantic love that finds resolution in the normative institution of marriage, displays of commodity envy such as this one ensure the transcultural reach of Salem’s film. While particularities such as dialect, language, rural village setting, clothing, manners, and faith introduced in this opening scene function to varying degrees as distancing mechanisms, the silent appraisal by the have-nots and aspirational “will-haves” of the gleaming, late-model cars that promise “Love for Ever” is deeply, even universally, familiar. Clearly a notable, yet ritualistic, occurrence, the provenance of the cars, along with the full range of their significations, is introduced in the next scene, to which the speeding cars provide a bridge. It

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Figure 5.1  Mounir waiting by the side of the road

features Mounir, the struggling workingman and rather incongruous focus of much of this romantic comedy that revolves around the romance of his sister and best friend. He stands in a posture of defiant exasperation on the side of a road, dressed in a dusty British football track suit and grasping the feet of a limp chicken in his right hand, framed by a spectacular backdrop of desert mountains (fig. 5.1). Mounir, however, is resolutely impervious to the scenery’s appeal. Close-ups of his exasperated face alternate with views of the sporadically clucking chicken and shots of the empty road, his posture of bad humor intensifying even as Khliffa’s battered Lada appears on the horizon within an entirely reasonable interval in film time. As the battered car rattles and squeals to a stop, Mounir glares disdainfully before getting in and berating his friend for making him wait in the hot sun. Shrugging and looking anywhere but at Mounir, Khliffa wisely remains silent, clearly accustomed to the abuse. As they sputter along, Mounir shouts familiarly into his cell phone, asking an interlocutor who apparently spurns his bonhomie about a microwave. Just as the line goes dead, the cortège of hired cars appears on the horizon, speeding toward them and forcing the Lada off the road. Mounir whoops and hollers in open admiration. As an exasperated, resigned Khliffa maneuvers the Lada back onto the road, Mounir effuses about the car rental fees charged by “the Colonel.” This reference to the Colonel finally prompts Khliffa to speak; he redirects the conversation by asking whether the Colonel, Mounir’s employer, gave him the chicken. When Mounir dodges a direct answer by exclaiming that it is for his sister, Khliffa points out that it has mange. Undaunted, Mounir asks for a knife (to slaughter the chicken on the spot, in the car). Next to Mounir’s unsuccessful posturing and obliviousness to social propriety, the

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cars in these opening scenes—the hired caravan announcing a wedding, on the one hand, and Khliffa’s unspectacular, yet dependable Lada, on the other—represent a constellation of socioeconomic and political relations. Both cars, of course, are imports, material representatives of once-divergent ideologies that have uneasily converged in this backwater village. Khliffa’s Lada, evocative of the Algerian state’s crumbling official socialist ideology, is easily dominated on the roadway by the Colonel’s German cars, which figure the occult power and financialization of the country’s present-day rulers. Metonym for the never-seen Colonel’s totalizing authority, their tinted glass reflects only spectators’ projections of the occult forces that govern their lives.7 Along with his pool and a lush garden, they are all that appear of the Colonel in the film, prompting spectators to fill in the remainder of the narrative. Known only by the title Colonel, which speaks to the militaristic nature of the nominally socialist government, this local authority wields a feudal power over the village, signs of his wealth contrasting so sharply with the poverty of the village residents that, for those in the know, his corruption is certain. A familiar figure in postcolonial narratives, this profiteer nonetheless remains in the background of Masquerades, eclipsed in visibility by the Lada-driving, self-effacing Khliffa, whose resourcefulness and generosity are constantly derided by Mounir. Working for the Colonel as a gardener, or as he proudly tells his friends, a “horticultural engineer,” Mounir stands in awe of his employer’s wealth, his affectations presumably attempts to divert to himself a modicum of the respect and prestige that accrue to the Colonel. Clearly, Mounir’s job, his dependence on his humble friend for transportation, his showy use of his cell phone, the flashy, knockoff watch he wears with his dusty track suit, and his avid pursuit of the microwave—a consumer good not only ubiquitous in the global North but also readily available in the neighboring countries of Morocco and Tunisia—situate him close to the bottom of the village social ladder, not to mention global hierarchies. Hypersensitive to his lack of social status, Mounir nonetheless takes pride in and works hard at his job, presumably a recent acquisition, despite repeated indications that industriousness alone counts for little. To compensate for the impossible situation in which he finds himself, he struggles to bolster his social standing through emulation of a globally hegemonic masculinity that looks down on the “backwardness” of the fishbowl of a village by which he feels rejected.8 His belittling of Khliffa and repeated designation of the villagers as retrograde “peasants” obviously testify to his social anxiety, rather than to a fundamental mean-spiritedness. Yet as Masquerades progresses, Mounir’s machistic posturing intensifies. While at the film’s outset, it is offset by his clear and reciprocated concern for his son and sister, and respect for his wife (all exposed via privileged insights into his household) the real crisis intervenes when he first loses sight of, and then betrays, his modern family values.9

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Outside the home, in the company of his friends and fellow male villagers, Mounir’s behavior also undergoes a shift. While he postures throughout the film, his early efforts strive to deflect the disrespect and insults of which he imagines himself and his sister the target. Driven to drink by the revelation that the town gossips impugn his masculinity on the basis of his inability to have cured or marry off his sister, Mounir invents a suitor “the likes of which the village has never seen,” a great and wealthy gentleman who finds Rym’s illness no obstacle. Though his words end up aligning him with the very masculinity he thus seeks to rise above, Mounir does retain some consciousness of what he is doing, muttering to himself that “even Rym will be surprised by this news.” Midway through Masquerades, by contrast, Mounir has grown blind not just to the fictive nature of the suitor on whom Rym bestowed the name William Vancooten, but also to his exploitation of his sister for the sake of newfound social acceptance. Not coincidentally, his posturing grows more consequential as he in turn becomes contemptuous of the less ­fortunate, ­joining forces with those who once dismissed him. While the film becomes, at least until the crisis moment, no less comic, Mounir grows complicit with the very system against which he earlier railed, a system defined by l’hogra. Difficult to translate precisely, l’hogra denotes contempt but also carries connotations of spite, neglect, and humiliation. Originating in the disdainful attitudes of Algerian government officials toward the people they govern, it now qualifies the attitude and behavior of any one who wields social and economic power over anyone else, whether they are minor officials, businessmen, citizens of major cities, rural shopkeepers, or, of course, men like Mounir’s neighbor Redouane, who think nothing of exploiting others for personal gain.10 Like the many young men—whether uneducated, partly educated by crumbling systems of education that fail to guarantee credentials, or educated for positions of which there are too few—Mounir experiences an erosion of male privilege while both postindependence and global systems of authority remain out of his reach. As a result, he finds himself caught between conflicting, if not self-contradictory, models of masculinity, surrounded by l’hogra as he strives to live up to the ideals of husband and father. Despite this, the comedy only intensifies as Masquerades tracks Mounir’s increasingly enthusiastic victimization by the network of dissimulation that he himself set in motion. Yet ultimately, Rym and Khliffa’s triumphant union entails her brother’s defeat, a defeat that is coded as comedic because of how little he has to lose, or rather, because of how much he gains. First, however, Mounir tastes what he imagines to be unmitigated success. As the promise of a grand wedding ignites the imaginations of his fellow villagers, Mounir’s neighbor Redouane—the leisure-suit and gold chain-wearing, paunchy, reigning “big man” of the village—gradually moves from profound skepticism to intense anxiety, fearing that he has misread his much-scorned

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neighbor and that an unimaginably huge opportunity is about to pass him by. Hastily putting aside his contempt for Mounir, he embraces him like a lifelong buddy, offering him a lift in his sagging station wagon, delivering a haul of mismatched rickety chairs for the wedding ceremony, and, most importantly, counting him in on a “business deal.” For this, he dresses Mounir in a sharp suit and drives him and another buddy, Hamza, to the edge of town, where they meet two poor farmers seeking additional pasture lands. Quoting liberally from the Quran, Redouane presents Mounir as an important friend of the minister, willing to intervene in a bureaucratic impasse on their behalf. As Mounir silently struggles to master his assigned role, the camera zooming in on his twitching face, Redouane bilks the two farmers of a shockingly large sum of money (fig. 5.2). Nonetheless, in the ride back to the village, Mounir celebrates as enthusiastically as his newfound friends, newly complicit in the system of hogra that once targeted him. The next day, Mounir dresses in a traditional robe and hires Aissaoua musicians to parade him through the village, fêted by the other men as he makes grandiose proclamations of friendship in expressions borrowed directly from Redouane. When his son Amine runs up with a bloodied face that he received in an attempt to intervene in the torture of a frog, Mounir publicly chastises the confused boy for not siding with those who are more powerful, because “that’s democracy.” Reveling in what he believes is Redouane’s respect, Mounir affects the manner of someone who has made it, this scene marking his transformation from someone who is mahgour (a target of contempt) into a casual hagar (a dispenser of the same). Before this fully sinks in, the slapstick continues with delivery of the truckload of rickety, mismatched wooden chairs from Redouane, showing once again that the village big man is completely out of

Figure 5.2  Redouane, Mounir, and Krimo bilking two shepherds

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his league with the fictional William Vancooten, his chairs and small swindles unlikely to impress this blond, Australian, Swedish international businessman who thinks nothing of renting two floors of a five-star hotel to ensure his privacy. Not only does Mounir’s sense of success obscure the mismatch between his fiction and Redouane, however. It also blinds him to his original avowed intention in fabricating this fiancé, namely, the dignity of his sister Rym. Aissaoua musicians are usually hired to accompany the wedding procession, not the bride’s brother; as Mounir’s public performance indicates, he has projected himself into the role of William Vancooten’s intended. Comic as the fickleness of his cohort may be, this scene also playfully foregrounds the homosocial structure of patriarchally dominated societies—in this case generically Western as well as Algerian—where, as feminist scholars have long observed, women serve as objects traded to cement ties between men.11 Masquerades later makes apparent in an amusing scene where Redouane practices his introduction of Vancooten to the Colonel that he, too, has fallen hopelessly in love with this mythical suitor. As he anticipates how he will leverage his connections with the global financier to gain inroads with the local autocrat, Rym seems to have vanished entirely from the picture. Metaphorically, of course. Although she gave William Vancooten form— fully aware, as she tells a speechless Khliffa in his shop shortly after his proposal, that the fools in the village would buy her invention wholesale—Rym soon grasps that the entire scenario has turned her brother’s head. Far less fleshed out as a character than her buffoon of a brother, the slumbering Rym nevertheless proves an astute social scriptwriter, resisting with humorous matter-of-factness rather than direct confrontation the role of slumbering princess that Mounir would bestow upon her. Yet when she realizes both that he has become powerless to put an end to the charade and that Khliffa cannot bring himself to shirk his duties to his family by eloping, she momentarily despairs before confronting her brother with a direct and pointed sarcasm in what becomes the film’s crisis scene. In it, she and Habiba stop attempting to reason with Mounir, instead mocking his behavior by rushing about listing all the things they will require for the wedding and enumerating all the gifts they will receive. Initially disconcerted, Mounir soon patronizingly smiles and nods that he has caught on. At that moment, Rym turns to him, and in a voice dripping with sarcasm asks: “Help me to understand, dear brother, who are all these presents for, for me, for you, or for Vancooten? Either I was born crazy, or you’re no longer normal.” Rym imitates his greetings to all and sundry, angrily exclaiming that he now runs around with everyone, making new friends, prepared to do anything for the respect of these fools, and finally, shouting that he is even prepared to allow them to look up her skirt. Mounir’s face darkens during her tirade, and when she utters this last line, he slaps her. In the silence that follows, Rym leaves the room, as does Habiba, telling Mounir that with all due respect, this situation has driven him crazy, and that

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she has no desire to share a bed with him. For the two women, Mounir’s slap has exposed the hollowness of not just his present pretensions, but his consistent claims that, as a “civilized” (read modern, westernized) man, he remains superior to the “peasants” from which he once claimed to protect his family. Rym has let her brother know that his quest for social mobility in the local, “traditional,” and global neoliberal patriarchal systems rests on a dismissal not just of her personhood, but also of his own. But Masquerades is a comedy, not a meditation on the plight of women in rural Algerian society or in the interstices of global neoliberalism. In a the fairy-tale turn that follows, the prince materializes after all. It just turns out that he never really was Vancooten. To be sure, Arabic-speaking spectators have known the prince’s identity since the film’s beginning; “Khliffa,” after all, is the Algerian pronunciation of the Arabic word caliph. With his dreams of opening a DVD rental shop, his rattling Lada, his Chinese worker’s shirt, his indifference to status symbols, posturing, and opportunities for male bonding, his devotion to his own destitute family (his father is senile and handicapped, and his brother unemployed), Khliffa is no less a target for l’hogra than is Mounir. Yet in distinction to his best friend, Khliffa cares not one iota about the opinions of his fellow men or their notions of success, utterly baffling and frustrating Mounir. Overshadowed by his best friend and polar opposite, Khliffa is distinguished as a character by his remarkable physically agility, scaling garden walls and diving through car windows, and also for supporting Rym’s dreams. Perhaps not coincidentally, in its Algerian pronunciation, Khliffa’s name resembles the Arabic word for difference, dissimilarity, or disparity, exactly these qualities ensuring that he remains invisible as a suitor in Mounir’s eyes—that, and the fact that in the modern, “Western” romantic comedy as much as in the classical Arab romance, Khliffa’s love for Mounir’s sister cannot appear but as a betrayal of fraternal bonds, the rupture of a code between men. In the particular setting of Masquerades, which additionally flirts with the specter of those Arab romances that often end tragically, Khliffa’s long-secret love for Rym must read as a taking advantage of the privileged access to domestic space that his closeness with her brother grants him. As Mounir tells him during their crucial confrontation, “How could you profit this way? I could accept it from someone else, but not you!” For while Khliffa can see past the typecasting and stock scripts, Mounir cannot. Because he is in the movie business, however, Khliffa has by the time of this confrontation puzzled out that he must take charge of the script. Until then, his encounters with Rym repeatedly yet casually underscore his awareness of how cinema and other media structure the villagers’ lives, his genre range far broader than that of the other male characters. Less than eight minutes into the film, the stillness of night and the sound of a ney playing a slow tune replace the light, movement, and jaunty soundtrack of the first scenes, as Rym and Khliffa play star-crossed lovers.12 Rym’s sleeping face rhythmically fades

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in and out of darkness before she opens her eyes with a gasp. A point-of-view shot shows Amine, sound asleep on his bed, before Rym whispers, “Are you there?” and Khliffa, crouched outside the window, replies, “Sleep until tomorrow, and you’ll still find me here under a blanket of dew.” Their secret, romantically overwrought conversation—“I dreamt of you three times today,” “More than yesterday,” “But less than tomorrow”—introduces the classic tropes of courtly and Arab love stories: the lover’s unwavering love; secret rendezvous (often arranged via a child who shares the secret); a cloistered beloved, a lover striving to convey his worthiness through poetic language. As they begin discussing the upcoming marriage of Rym’s friend, Nadia, to a man she’s barely seen, the scenario holds for a moment. Yet Rym abruptly alters the script, her consternation that Nadia would marry a man she’s seen only five times not only undermining the generic expectations with which the scene initially toys, but also criticizing the social network in which the village women are caught. Her pragmatic declaration that Nadia is crazy suggests the foolishness of trying to play to type, while her elaboration that Nadia will make mincemeat of her husband within ten days resituates the film in the realm of unstable gender roles of modern Hollywood romantic and situation comedies. Khliffa easily follows this change in the script, laughing in all the right places and telling Rym that he will chauffeur her to and from the wedding, but will not hang around all day drinking tea with the men. Yet he has misread the potential valences of his statement, and Rym hears marriage phobia rather than a rejection of the ossified male social scene in his words. She hastily interjects that she was dreaming he had asked Mounir for her hand. At a sudden loss for lines, Khliffa falls back on tired diversionary tactics, hurriedly explaining that he has to get his video rental business up and running before Mounir will recognize his worthiness as a suitor. Just as it dawns on him that Rym is angry, Mounir bursts into the room, and Rym calls out as if she’s had a nightmare, obliging Khliffa to scramble over the garden wall. When, many scenes later, the two slip away to meet atop a cliff overlooking the ruins of a city carved into the mountainside, Khliffa more successfully keeps up with the scenario directed by Rym. As she details her desire to travel through their large country, listing the destinations of which she dreams, he reassures her that he will take her everywhere, and never become like other men, who expect their wives to stay home, tending to children. Still, Rym nods off. When she awakes, she announces her desire to become a pilot, and Khliffa enthusiastically supports her ambition. Again, he has misread his role, for Rym chides him for his encouragement of an unrealizable fantasy. Undeterred, he ventures that her illness might not last. At the scene’s conclusion, Rym throws herself into Khliffa’s arms, asking whether her behavior mimics that of the women “in your films.” She holds his gaze when he asks whether she wants him to do what the men in his movies do with women, answering “not yet” after a long pause (fig. 5.3).

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Figure 5.3  Khliffa and Rym striking a cinematic pose

If these two scenes suggest that no ready-made script will do for this particular romantic comedy, the disparaging comments about Khliffa’s soonto-open video rental business by the village men and Mounir offer arch commentary on the paradoxes of filmmaking in the early twenty-first-century Maghreb. Obviously rescripting their lives, and William Vancooten’s, in accordance with cinematic tropes, the male characters in Masquerades simultaneously declare cinema a thing of no consequence, a frivolous pastime to which there can be no payoff, at least for locals. If Mounir’s buddies declare that they certainly won’t be renting films from Khliffa’s shop, a set of parallel scenes, the first in the female space of the beauty salon, and the second in the male space of the local cafe, show just how deeply genre films structure their visions of mobility. The same hairdresser who earlier denigrated Rym now extolls the wealth of William Vancooten, international businessman, a blond, Swedish version of a fabulously wealthy sheikh from Dubai, willing to convert to Islam and be circumcised for the love of his intended. Meanwhile, her male counterpart and Mounir’s friend, Salem, holds court in the cafe, casually leaning on the bar and addressing a rapt circle of men, among them the by turns skeptical and alarmed Redouane, who has made a habit of needling him in the past. Speaking as an eyewitness, he begins by assuring them of Vancooten’s devotion to family (implying his willingness to materially support the extended family of the village). Accused of lying by Redouane’s friend, Krimo, he piles on details about the size and prestige of Vancooten’s entourage, cautioning the doubter that “this is a film, my friend, an American one.” In conclusion, he adds that the Colonel’s cars seem like nothing by comparison with Vancooten’s wealth. His statements wryly show how much the fantasy

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worlds of American movies have come to overshadow concrete and urgent local realities, shifting the parameters of what Algerian films once sought to claim as unbounded fields of action. While the shorthand reference to William Vancooten as the hero of an American movie immediately pays dividends of social capital for Salem, Khliffa’s involvement in the movie business brings him no similar payout. Assiduously preparing for the opening of his shop, he creates collages of iconic figures and plot lines from stock movie posters and magazines, a kind of innovation that also functions as a satirical microcosm of the genre play within Masquerades. His creativity, however, fails to register as a value with the person who matters, namely, Mounir. Nonetheless, these models of bricolage hint at something more complex behind Khliffa’s largely inconspicuous character. Hovering at the edge of several scenes in his soon-to-be video rental store, they evoke cinema as something more than a form of ready-made escapism. Still early in the film, Mounir storms into Khliffa’s shop-to-be after he perceives an insult to his sister in a friend’s remark, declaring that Rym is a princess who has nothing to do with such rabble, and that he will marry her to a real gentleman. In response, Khliffa calmly continues to fabricate his collages, critically appraising a juxtaposition of images while telling his friend to stop rising to such obvious bait. When Mounir calms down enough to inquire what he is doing, Khliffa declares himself an artist who needs no one’s permission to practice his art. Holding up a cutout of a hand holding a gun to a giant Bruce Willis’s ear, he reflects on the effect (fig. 5.4). “Fan [art]”? sneers Mounir; “Faneaen [from the French faineant, or layabout] is more like it.” Yet Khliffa, in this still pre-Vancooten scene, simply shrugs off his friend’s criticism.

Figure 5.4  Khliffa creating a poster collage for his new shop

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Once matters have come to a head, however, Khliffa seems at a sudden loss as to how he might stitch together the conflicting genre scenarios by which he and Rym are trapped. Just prior to the slap scene, he and Rym hold an urgent tête-à-tête in her home, as Habiba stands nervous lookout. It begins with an extreme close-up of Rym’s happily expectant face, and from Khliffa’s reply, it grows evident that she has advocated that they elope. Yet while their encounter occurs in broad daylight and face to face, enabling Khliffa to accurately gauge Rym’s expectations, he is unable to speak the desired words, saying only that he cannot leave like this. When a disappointed Rym inquires whether he still wants them to be together, he affirms that he does, but continues to hedge, asking where they will go, protesting that he has to arrange things first, and pointing out that he is the only wage earner in his family. Rym reminds him of his promises, and he earnestly holds her face in his hands while explaining that she lives in her dreams where everything is easy, contrary to the real world that he inhabits. Stunned, she accuses him of being a fair-weather lover. Hurt in turn, Khliffa’s reply is cut off by Habiba’s hurried entry; as she pulls him from the room in preparation for Mounir’s arrival, he shouts to the now silent Rym that she can’t really mean what she just said. She falls into a silent funk as Mounir enters, preens in new Western clothing, and departs to join his new “friends.” After Nadia and l’Hajja, a grandmotherly yet sly neighbor who has followed the entire intrigue, have arrived and exclaimed in surprise over the chairs, Rym blames herself for the whole scenario, agrees that exposure has led to complications, and concludes that men are always right. After an incredulous pause, the women tell her to stop talking nonsense, and l’Hajja proceeds to hatch a plan. Yet it is Rym who finally takes over the direction of events when she challenges Mounir, showing him the key to the system even as she exposes that system’s narrowness. Appropriately for a comedic film, the scenes following the slap focus on three men, their macho posturing, tussles, and drunken antics mitigating the gravity of Rym’s frank exposé. In the first scene, Redouane, dressed in an undershirt and reading from a sheet of paper, rehearses before a mirror his welcome speech for Vancooten in a hodgepodge of broken English, French, and Algerian Arabic. Repeatedly stumbling over the unfamiliar English, he reverts to dialect and more familiar mannerisms, pitching Vancooten a partnership, to be cemented with a meal cooked by his mother. The fluctuating linguistic and social register, of course, but more deeply marks him as a petty, self-deluding operator. By contrast, Khliffa simply stands lost in thought outside his now open shop as customers (the three old men from the opening scene) browse inside. Music bridges this shot to the next, a trumpet solo dominating as the film skillfully cross-cuts between close-ups of Khliffa dressed in a faded Chinese worker’s jacket, and extreme, medium, and full-length close-ups of Mounir pruning the Colonel’s roses, pricking his finger on a thorn, breaking into sobs, and reappearing dressed in his new clothes as he

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Figure 5.5  Mounir anxiously attempting to revive Khliffa

walks along the side of the dusty road where he first appeared. When Khliffa’s Lada rounds the corner behind Mounir, the latter roughly wipes his eyes and hastens his pace, as the music abruptly ends. Refusing his offer of a ride, Mounir angrily dismisses Khliffa’s attempts to speak seriously of his love for Rym with accusations that he has taken advantage of their friendship. When Khliffa demands to know just what it is that Rym would be lacking with him as a husband, Mounir insults him once too often, prompting Khliffa to shoot back that Mounir is really a big nothing. A classic slapstick sequence ensues as Mounir charges after the ever agile Khliffa, who runs back to the car before diving out the passenger window and down a rocky embankment. Alarmed, Mounir rushes down the rocky slope to his motionless friend, fussing over his prone body (fig. 5.5). Encouraged by this reaction, Khliffa sits up and in true romantically overwrought fashion declares that while he may be fine for now, he won’t be for long if he can’t marry Rym. Yet the film quickly shifts to a more serious register. To Mounir’s now pro forma insults Khliffa replies by asking why, if they are truly friends, they can’t work out an agreement. “Wake up to reality and look at where we are,” answers Mounir, gesturing at the arid landscape: “There’s only this road; you can come from one side or the other.” So, says Khliffa, there’s no hope that things will change? When Mounir inquires what he wants to change, Khliffa squints and answers that he doesn’t know, but if they began by reaching an accord, it would be a start. Sure, comments, Mounir, “We’ll begin the day we take a vacation,” and gets to his feet, clambering back up the ravine while announcing that he is thirsty, and not for water. Mounir’s resolute insistence on the limited and fixed paths available to them nonetheless fails to curtail Khliffa’s newfound determination to forge a new path.13 By the scene’s

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conclusion, Khliffa’s character has gained heroic depth through his desire to ameliorate circumstances Mounir perceives hopeless, all while refusing to cede to either the contempt that conditions his immediate surroundings or the mirages of global capitalism. Yet it is during his drinking bout after the two men’s confrontation that Mounir finally gives Khliffa the heroic role for which he was destined. Repeating that Rym is a princess, Mounir slurrily announces that Khliffa must pass several tests to earn her hand. Eager to be done with the first test, that he unburden Mounir of Vancooten, Khliffa races to the village center and shouts for everyone to wake up, that Vancooten is not coming, knows nothing of their existence, and will not marry Rym because Rym is his, his, his. Roused from his stupor, Mounir pulls Khliffa from the square and the two run home, where they sit laughing. Encouraged, Khliffa extemporizes by bellowing in the direction of Redouane’s house that he is outdated and was born outdated. Aghast but still amused, Mounir concedes that he has passed this first test and announces the second: that he diminish Rym’s attacks of narcolepsy. Habiba interrupts the two men before Khliffa can respond, but as she shoos Mounir off to bed, Khliffa and Rym seize the opportunity to get moving. Salem handles the sensitive matter of how the couple spent the night simply:  Khliffa scopes out the street as he exits his shop the next morning, followed by Rym, who now wears his jacket. In the intervening scenes, Mounir has discovered Rym’s empty and undisturbed bed, his shock and panic modeling the conventional response to a perceived violation of the virginity taboo. Yet Masquerades sidesteps both sensationalism and moralizing not just by conforming to the generic codes of the classical romantic comedy, signaling that Rym and Khliffa’s coupling will inexorably result in marriage, but also by employing Habiba and Mounir to contrast the social purchase of this taboo with lived experience. For although virginity is still normative and, according to the Algerian family code, women until recently were required to obtain a father’s or brother’s permission to marry, Masquerades reveals that Mounir and Habiba, the everyman so concerned to fit in and his doting if often exasperated wife, likewise consummated their relationship before marriage.14 In a ruined house overlooking an old city carved into rock face, Mounir rages against Khliffa while Habiba seeks to reason with him on behalf of the couple. When he bursts out that Khliffa has dishonored Rym, Habiba quietly tells him that he can say what he wants to other people, but not to her, and not in this place. The quiet matter-of-factness of her voice belies the shock value of her words in the village milieu of Masquerades and beyond. Although Mounir continues to protest a few more times for form’s sake, Habiba calmly refutes each of his remarks with the example of their own happiness as a couple, concluding with the recommendation that he “let [the couple] live their lives.” Thus emphasizing the gap between norms and experience, Habiba displaces Mounir’s desire to perpetuate the status quo

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with his need to drive his own destiny, opening the way for the story to move in unexpected directions. Mounir and Habiba’s discussion follows Khliffa’s elevation into a new kind of action hero by the gossips in the cafe. There, Hamza (Redouane’s and Mounir’s associate in the swindle of the farmers), recounts Khliffa’s dramatic performance with amazement to Salem, who replies with some awe that Khliffa fears nothing. Krimo, long skeptical of the Vancooten story, interjects with satisfaction that Khliffa has become “Khliffa Vancooten.” Their amused admiration infuriates Redouane. Reasserting his authority, he tells the three men to shut up, adding that he, Redouane, is more man than any of them and will not let such an insult go. When the three men defend Khliffa as a harmless, destitute romantic, Redouane storms out, declaring that he will show him who is in charge. Momentarily stunned at the depth of Redouane’s rage, the three men make eye contact, shrug, grin, and rush out after their friend, alerting everyone in the cafe that there is to be a confrontation. Unbeknownst to all except the happy couple, however, Khliffa’s fairy-tale ending is already in play, and Redouane’s efforts to assert the proper order of things will only result in his definitive defeat. Out of nowhere, an elderly sheikh has arrived in the village. When Rym answers his knock on the door, he tells her that he has heard the news and “come to fulfill destiny.” Delighted and utterly nonplussed, Rym invites him in and instantly begins to direct events, playing the nervous bride to be and requesting a rehearsal ceremony, with her “cousin” Khliffa playing the role of the groom. Nadia, l’Hajja, and Amine, all present, quickly catch on and rush about preparing the scenario as a stunned, wide-eyed Khliffa stands by. While Rym is dressing, l’Hajja dashes out for a camera, almost running straight into the mob formed by Redouane and his men. Bracing herself, the diminutive old woman orders them to stop. Redouane complies, but demands to see first Mounir and then Khliffa. Meeting with l’Hajja’s statements that this is impossible, he stares in disbelief at the old woman before trying to reason with her, asking her how she could let Rym choose her own husband, and finally vociferating that Mounir would never trade Vancooten for Khliffa, “a loser from a godforsaken place,” a “barefoot peasant.” These last sentences silence the film’s music as well as the crowd of men. Only the distant sounds of animals and Redouane’s footsteps break this silence as the camera moves between the men’s hardening faces, their dust-covered, sandal-shod feet, and point-of-view close-ups of l’Hajja’s disdainful expression and Redouane’s panicked one. He turns to tell the men that he wasn’t referring to them, but he has overplayed his position as hagar. The men slowly turn their backs and walk away, deaf to his pleas not to lose this chance. In a bit of parodic play on Marlon Brando’s iconic scene in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) he asserts his identity as “Redouane Lamouchi,” screaming at Krimo and Hamza to return as l’Hajja sardonically looks on (fig. 5.6). His furious,

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Figure 5.6  A frustrated Redouane

agonized cries only meet with Hamza’s contempt and the men’s receding backs as his social power crumbles. From this point, Masquerades moves quickly toward its conclusion. Rym and Khliffa are married by the beatifically smiling and presumably unsuspecting sheikh; Mounir lights a cigarette, and Habiba replaces her headscarf as she remarks that they should consider having a daughter to fill the void left by Rym. The Lada, occupied by Rym, still in her wedding dress, and Khliffa, as always in his T-shirt and Chinese worker’s jacket, is rolling out of town when Mounir begins chasing it down the road. It enters the town’s central square just as the cortège arrives from the other direction, presumably to announce Rym’s upcoming union with Vancooten. Kicking up clouds of dust, the Lada and the Colonel’s cars circle as Mounir stands in the center, shouting at Khliffa while the villagers look on with a mixture of alarm and horror. In the midst of the chaos, Rym announces to Khliffa that she has not slept since the previous day, prompting her overjoyed husband to lean out of the circling car shouting that “she doesn’t sleep when she’s with me.” On these words and Mounir’s threat that “if he so much as scratches her . . .” the Lada is pulled out of the circle in the wake of the cortège, the bride and groom heading off to their unknown destination. Out of breath, Mounir turns to look at the silent assembly of men and boys as Habiba and Amine walk over to him. Encircling his wife and son with his arms, Mounir stares proudly at the immobile others as they head home. In their wake, Hamza turns in the direction of the camera, saying, “What are you looking at? Everyone go home,” and the crowd disperses to reveal the three old men of the opening scene, who linger for a moment before removing their handkerchiefs from their dusty faces, as expressionless as ever.

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Despite the fairy-tale echoes of Rym’s narcolepsy, Masquerades does not deliver a simple feel-good fantasy about true love transcending or elevating the couple’s social class. Rather, Rym and Khliffa’s union suspends, however temporarily, the forces of neoliberal globalization as well as the mechanisms of an autocratic political system, both dependent on the devaluation and objectification of the majority to establish the status of, and cement ties among, the minority. Redouane’s final scene, a sly détournement of Stanley Kowalski’s cry that links classical Hollywood cinema to the autocratic structure of Algerian micro and macro politics, demonstrates as much in its furious, disbelieving frustration.15 While conventional in its denouement, in which rebellious romantic love is normalized in marriage, Masquerades does not quite relate the classical narrative of the potentially disruptive individual’s (re)insertion into society. Rather, the very achievement of Rym and Khliffa’s union troubles many of the premises on which the institution of marriage is based, disrupting numerous codes that ensure the replication of social norms and script marriage as a validation of neoliberalism. Finally, even as the happy couple drives away, the focus returns to Mounir. For ultimately, the film is about the defeat of Mounir’s repeated, refracted masquerades. Recasting as positive his failure to succeed within prevailing socioeconomic models as well as within fantastic fairy-tale-like scenarios, Masquerades clears a space for the ­revalorization of the marginalized as agents of real mobility. Meanwhile, there is Rym, a seemingly liminal, semiconscious character, who nonetheless orchestrates the most profound changes in the couple’s trajectory. Rather than rebelling against the society whose predictability incessantly bores her to sleep, Rym expresses her desire to better know it: When she and Khliffa discuss travel, Rym does not list countries to the figurative east or west, but regions of Algeria, from desert to coast to city. Her wedding dress, in the style of eastern Algeria, is gifted to her by a woman from that region, who offers it to her with the words that she “is not narrow-minded like others.” Habiba enjoins her to realize her own and Mounir’s long forgotten dream of traveling the country. In Rym’s narrative, scripted from bits and pieces thus gleaned, she and Khliffa become new individuals (rather than “new men”) not through revolutionary violence but by challenging the meaning and boundaries of the ossified structures of relation available to them. When Rym tells him that she hasn’t slept since yesterday, Khliffa shouts with joy that he has fully earned his role of the prince who whisks away Sleeping Beauty; as he does so, Rym totters on the edge of another attack of narcolepsy, her somnolence, as always, coinciding with his more predictable statements and responses. By this point, spectators have realized that what has really kept her awake has been her crafting of a new social script, one that has opened up a new road whose endpoints are still unknown. If this were a classical Arab romance, Khliffa’s love would remain unrequited as Rym married another. If it were a modern Arab film melodrama,

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oppressive social expectations would doom their union in the present. (If it were a tragic melodrama, it would additionally be fatal to one of them.) And if Masquerades aligned itself straightforwardly with the emerging genre of Maghrebi films about young men and l’hogra, Khliffa would strive to emigrate to Europe in an effort to prove himself worthy, experiencing either death, disillusionment, or more rarely, wildly improbable success. At the same time, if this were a classic romcom, Hollywood or otherwise, either Khliffa’s friendship with Mounir would be sacrificed, or he would renounce his claims on Rym in order to affirm his bond with her brother.16 If it were an American sitcom, Mounir would slog on in his quest for material success, continuing to bully Khliffa, perhaps sometimes taking him under his wing, but never allowing himself to be left behind.17 Yet as much as it lends itself to partial readings along all these lines and borrows from all these genres, Masquerades remains as open-ended, if more optimistically so, as Mektoub. For Rym and Khliffa have propelled themselves from the village on a path other than those two roads once perceived as the only options, confident that they can ­maintain their momentum.

{ 6 }

Signal Crossings Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003) If your love is a moon, it will guide you toward me. If your love is a cloud, it will blind you. You will lose me forever. —Kenza to Kamel, WWW: What a Wonderful World In 2003, Nadia El Fani’s first feature film, Bedwin Hacker, strikingly departed from the status quo of Tunisian film, characterized since the 1980s by often visually remarkable, feature-length films focusing on pre- and postindependence social struggles, particularly those of Tunisian women. As distinct as Nacer Khemir’s films, yet in an entirely different way, El Fani’s film resolutely focuses on the obstacles to, and practical means of, mobility in the here and now of early twenty-first-century Tunisia. Shot in digital video and often employing handheld cameras, Bedwin Hacker taps into the genre conventions of the cyberthriller, playing upon prevailing anxieties about the vulnerability of information, technology, and national boundaries while celebrating counterculture activism. If its privileged heroine’s rejection of a European modernity that presents itself as civilizationally superior to the societies of the global South establishes a kinship of sorts with Nadia of Benlyazid’s A Door to the Sky, its simultaneous use and questioning of globally popular genre conventions, combined with its motif of reclaiming mobility in a nation-state where surveillance aims to keep citizens in their place, allies it more closely with Mektoub and Masquerades. At the same time, the film’s focus on the role of Eurocentric formulations of global hierarchies in shoring up what Lila Abu-Lughod terms “civilizational discourse,” in which national elites situate “continuing problems in their countries in ‘intractable traditional culture’ (of the rural; lower castes; ethnic minorities; or religious communities),” anticipates the subversion of cinematic and geographical maps foregrounded by the films of Part III.1 Rather than developing setting and foregrounding carefully composed scenes, Bedwin Hacker privileges motion and action. Unlike the films of Tunisian New Cinema, which focus on the evolution of social mores in a Tunisia grappling with social changes and modernity, El Fani’s film casually

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pushes the boundaries of state-sponsored discourses of identity and progress with a view to undermining the civilizational discourses they support.2 Disrupting long-standing perceptions of the postindependence global South as a place of greater constraint for women and sexual minorities, Bedwin Hacker presents a free-spirited, autonomous, boundary-crossing, bisexual, tech-wizard heroine, Kalt, and her merry band of unconventional, stereotype-defying friends. As it features playful hacks into French television broadcasts from Tunisian locations, El Fani’s film promotes reflection on the transnational civilizational dynamics that shape the women’s and human rights discourses employed to justify state-sponsored censorship in the South as well as less visible, commercial appropriations and exclusions in the North.3 For ironically, even while it received limited play in Tunisia, constrained to the kind of underground circulation it models, Bedwin Hacker gained access to a kind of commercial distribution abroad quite distinct from the art-house and festival circuit international success of earlier Tunisian “global” hit films.4 It became, in other words, a uniquely mobile film. Utopian without being escapist, Bedwin Hacker transforms notions of politically engaged cinema in its enactment of a kind of civilizational discoursejamming that questions Eurocentric formulations of progress as well as attendant notions of cinematic value.5 Downplaying lush visuals, melodrama, and a tight focus on characters’ social evolutions, it instead favors grittier, open vistas and prosaic interiors, scenes of physical and virtual mobility, and entertaining, suspenseful plot twists. These latter are orchestrated both by its counterculture heroine, Kalt, and her rival in the French Security Services, Julia, who share a lover, Chams, and who were, the film later reveals, once lovers themselves while attending the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris. Made on a shoestring budget and self-produced through Z’Yeux Noirs Movies, the production company El Fani established in Tunis in 1990, Bedwin Hacker seems predestined—in its production history and format, as much as its storyline—for multiscreen, nontheatrical circulation.6 After touring a few well-known and smaller film festivals, it continues to be distributed internationally via DVD and instant downloads by Cinema Libre Distribution, a distributor dedicated to showcasing the work of independent, socially conscious filmmakers who foreground issues of global interest. El Fani herself contends that it circulated for a time among Tunisian university students by means of pirated videocassettes.7 More significantly, seven years before the uprisings of December and January 2011 that led to the ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Bedwin Hacker calls out to Tunisian and Maghrebi spectators eager for a new kind of action film, one that, contravening images of them long cultivated by the state and unconcerned with European formulations of film quality, explored new fields of action. Although as a feature film Bedwin Hacker still demands the sustained attention characteristic of “older” media, it undermines the conventions of

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the cyberthriller in which it generally inscribes itself, making some concessions to more distracted new-media viewing patterns. Its departures from convention include the film’s layering of screens to convey shifts in location; its conclusive open-endedness; its episodic relation of Kalt’s identities and motives; and the crisscrossing, sometimes partially glimpsed, storylines of her joyous group of friends and former and current lovers.8 Ostensibly from mixed class backgrounds, Kalt’s friends convey a Tunisian-inflected global countercultural vibe; they are artists, bartenders, and students who work intermittently and lead unconstricted, mobile lives. The group includes Frida, a popular singer from Algeria who leaves her husband Mehdi and daughter Qmar (Kalt’s protégé) behind in the desert town of Midès while she seeks artistic and personal fulfillment Paris; Am Saleh, Kalt’s paternal uncle and a locally well-known poet who opens his house in Tunis to his niece and her friends; Malika, a musician and Am Saleh’s daughter; Malika’s husband, who experiments with the traditional magic that is usually the purview of women on the pretext of researching a doctoral thesis; and a woman bartender and her girlfriend. Kalt’s Paris-based current and former lovers, meanwhile, at first appear freer of limitations upon their physical and intellectual movements, but quickly prove far more constrained in their thinking and actions than their Tunisian counterparts. Chams, a leftist journalist from a Tunisian immigrant family, falls for Kalt after a one-night stand in Paris and follows her to Tunisia with vague ideas of bringing her back to France; Julia, his computer whiz girlfriend and Kalt’s former lover, uses him in an effort to put an end to Kalt’s hacked broadcasts. As spectators learn that Julia works for French Secret Security services and Chams is beset by fears of jeopardizing his French citizenship application, their entanglement in familiar, neo-orientalist civilizational discourses grows clear. Kalt’s Tunisian “tribe,” by contrast, forms an independent-minded group that rejects mainstream gender roles, family structures, social norms, nationalism, cultural essentialism, and predictable political agendas. From the outset, the establishing sequences of El Fani’s film compile a series of sociopolitical and historical references before pulling into focus any narrative. A  shot of a silent, black-and-white television screen shows an atomic explosion and President Truman at the 1945 inauguration of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kentucky Dam, his speech translated by French subtitles on the silent TV screen while a keyboard clicks in the background, soon joined by electronic music. A woman’s voice breaks in, saying in French, “An enemy to the right … An enemy to the left” as a cartoon camel appears first on the right side of the television screen, then on the left. After an “Attention, there’s one behind—centre,” a final camel appears—looking like a dazed Joe Camel—sitting with its rear legs splayed out to either side, clothed in jeans and a T-shirt, tongue lolling out of its mouth (fig. 6.1). Suddenly a dramatic desert rift fills the screen against a soundtrack of joyful children’s

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Figure 6.1  Kalt’s alter ego intervening in a historical broadcast about nuclear power

voices. Credits begin to appear and techno music plays as Western-attired schoolchildren enter the frame, shouting to one another and leading a donkey. Another scene shift shows Mehdi, cigarette in mouth, looking into a wooden barrel before calling out in heavily accented French through a barred window, “Kalt, it’s already connected.” As Kalt stands and walks out the door, pulling a camouflage cap over her short hair, the film’s title, Bedwin Hacker, is overlaid in large letters across her body. Mehdi hands her a remote control device, urging, “Go on, the honor is yours.” When she pushes the button, the film cuts to the schoolchildren, now arriving en masse in the dusty central square of the town, identified by a sign as Midès. A moment later, a schoolgirl, Qmar, rushes up to Kalt and effuses, “I knew you’d do it. You’re the best auntie.” As an antenna rises from the barrel Kalt responds, “Don’t call me that,” and exacts from the girl a promise to always put her schoolwork first. A dedication, in Arabic subtitled by French, flashes across a close-up of the rising antenna: “To my grandmother, ‘Bibi,’ who instilled in me the strength to resist.” In these opening images, El Fani’s film evokes two technologies, nuclear power and the Internet, developed and perfected in the service of war yet also promoted as tools of peace. The documentary footage of President Truman boasting that Americans have “harnessed the power of the sun,” recalls a moment when the atomic bomb and the knowledge required to produce it seemed under the firm control of the United States, the president optimistic that its destructive, wartime uses were about to be replaced by nuclear power’s potential to fuel economic development and modernization projects.9 Meanwhile, Kalt’s hack into the fifty-eight-year-old footage reawakens Cold War fears concerning nuclear proliferation that viewers well know followed,

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exacerbating them with growing twenty-first-century apprehensions about cybersecurity and emerging enemies of capitalism. Yet her hack articulates no direct threat, offering instead a whimsical reflection upon the now dated representation of atomic weapons as guarantees of (self) control, progress, and freedom. The gender-neutral cartoon camel, appearing in color against this black-and-white background, pokes fun at the binaries of post–World War II politics, as if mocking their quaintness in the era of the global marketplace, where ideology has been usurped by the power of brands. Kalt’s imprimatur, the camel simultaneously hijacks stereotypes and a familiar brand icon that played to them. A reminder of the one-sidedness of broadcast media and the limitations and exclusions of the Internet, the camel suggests how the utopian visions of cyberspace as facilitator of global democracy have lost ground to its exploitation as a commodity delivery system and shaper of consumer identities. Meanwhile, Kalt’s military cap reappropriates militancy, her remote, desert location evoking the seemingly extraterritorial spaces where the atomic bomb was initially developed and tested, and where weapons of mass destruction are feared to proliferate today. Yet the rickety antenna that emerges when Kalt pushes “the button” implies that her efforts focus primarily on a digital divide, on the gap between those linked in modernity and the premodern spaces allegedly grasping for access to that modernity. Bedwin Hacker, however, will wear down such binary oppositions, unsettling perceptions of the desert as either backward wasteland or extremist lair and of contemporary Europe as a privileged site of knowledge production and freedom. This, Kalt’s first hack of the film, already inverts the presumed terms of the relationship, the cartoon camels so many manifestations of critical reflection on recent world history flowing from the global South northward, rather than vice versa. In a series of articles and book chapters, Florence Martin explores how Bedwin Hacker deftly sidesteps binary after binary, exploiting the multiple significations of globally familiar representations to fashion a tale of motion and mutation where self and alien lose their well-defined boundaries and “a totalitarian regime of truths is decentered.”10 Kalt’s camel logo, Martin notes, references for Tunisian audiences the legacy of Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century, Tunis-born historian and sociologist who characterized nomads “as wandering rebels against established seats of power.”11 Yet El Fani’s references to Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history, in which the Bedouin, and nomadic peoples in general, emerge as threatening to sedentary authorities, go far beyond Kalt’s logo and in no way partake of romanticism or mere nostalgia. For as Mounira Charrad meticulously demonstrates in her study of the development of Maghrebi women’s rights, Tunisia’s postindependence leaders re-engineered social relations to promote the modern, nuclear family, reinforced the centrality of the state, and fostered a sense of membership in the “imagined community” of the modern nation over and

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against the extended kinship networks of nomadic peoples that Khaldun posited as the foundation of (revolutionary) power.12 To be sure, these measures, as well as mandatory, universal education, afforded Tunisian women new socioeconomic and political power, yet they also carefully delimited the routes of women’s activism and reinforced the paternalism of the state. It is these aspects of Tunisian modernity whose limitations Bedwin Hacker seeks to overcome without, however, having recourse to that conventional opposite of modernity, tradition, or returning to Khaldun’s emphasis on blood ties as the foundation for group feeling. Rather, El Fani’s film attempts to jam the civilizational discourse that breathes new life into such oppositions, while lightheartedly fending off the omnipresent counterthreat of recuperation that hangs over its counterculture interventions. El Fani’s dedication of the film to her grandmother, while a standard feminist reclamation, nonetheless contests dominant views of Tunisian women’s feminism as only recently engineered by the postindependence state. The revelation of the concealed antenna signals that Kalt’s struggle takes as its target not a local patriarchy or reactionary mores, but rather ideological and knowledge formations embedded in far less easily localizable networks. Kalt’s reprimand of Qmar for calling her “auntie” presages her retreat from established signs of authority and deference, for throughout the film, Kalt favors affinity-based, collaborative relations over the essentialism of blood ties. Unlike her namesake, the famous Egyptian singer and national icon, Um Kalthum, Kalt is no respectable figure giving voice to officially sanctioned patriotism, but rather one member of a self-constituting tribe of artists from across the Maghreb, some loosely related by blood and some not, who defy mainstream mores and concepts of ownership, success, sanity, or fixed work schedules. Hardly throwbacks to a premodern past, they exceed Tunisian state-sponsored formulations of the modern family that function as supports of the nation-state, while blithely disregarding the national boundaries reinforced by postindependence governments: Kalt’s casual liaison with Chams defies moralizing visions of love or respectability; taboos on public behavior, sexual relations outside of marriage, and homosexuality are briefly alluded to and promptly rejected; the group openly drinks and smokes in front of Kalt’s uncle, Am Salah; they cross without fear or official approval the Algerian border in the desert; the men care for children and manage their homes or practice charms and magic, while the women excel at such traditionally male-dominated fields as technology, or leave their husbands and children to pursue careers; and not least, all of them disseminate and access information as they please, despite the film’s omnipresent visual and verbal references to censorship, security, and spies. All the while, Bedwin Hacker naturalizes the Maghrebi characters’ modes of existence and free-spirited pursuits in a manner that makes it clear that it could not be further from their goals simply to exchange the constraints of one political identity for another.

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As Kalt’s appeal that Qmar prioritize her formal education indicates, the characters have all benefited from the secular education system put in place by the Tunisian state. At the same time, they have sought out modes of empowerment that claim rights in excess of those allotted them by that authoritarian state. On a local level, then, the film’s characters have resolved a paradox Deniz Kandiyoti summarizes so well: The expansion of women’s social and political rights was promoted by authoritarian, dirigiste regimes that typically discouraged the development of an associational sphere where women’s interests could be autonomously represented. Nonetheless, despite the circumscribed nature of the gains achieved, growing constituencies of educated, professional women did develop a major stake in both defending and expanding their citizenship rights.13

A similar paradox inheres on a transnational level, where the social and political rights of women in the global South are expected to evolve in ways that pay tribute to rather than challenge the social and political institutions of the global North, thereby confirming existing civilizational and political hierarchies.14 Bedwin Hacker, however, moves from the inside out in both instances to shift the terms of such discourses, its protagonist’s destination never fixed, but clearly somewhere beyond the parameters of such a simple map. As the film progresses, it is gradually revealed that Kalt was once a star student at the École Polytechnique in France, thereby virtually guaranteed a top-level job with a prestigious French firm or the government, with French citizenship to follow. Presumably refusing as much to participate in this brain drain of the global South as to content herself with a paternalistically accorded access to the rights of a French citizen, however, her hacks make visible the limitations of the “freedoms” thus held out to her. Her choices and actions disturb those narratives that equate the Arab world with oppression and Europe with freedom without, however, embracing those Tunisian discourses of women’s and human rights that justify the suppression of free speech, movement, and association in their name. For at the time of the film’s making, Tunisia under Ben Ali insisted on its position as a model of modern nationhood, political stability, and even human rights support in Africa and the Arab world by attributing its track record on women’s rights to strict control over those it dubbed extremists or agents of destabilization.15 Indeed, through her hacks, Kalt seeks not only to defend and expand her rights beyond those that would be granted to her by a country that proclaims itself a model of human rights and freedom of expression and movement, but also to encourage French residents to claim their own rights in previously unimagined ways, her counterculture activism highlighting the processes of immobilization at work in the perceived home of freedom. Unlike the frustrated heroine combating taboos to realize the freedoms of her European sisters

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so familiar to audiences of Tunisian cinema, Kalt scrambles the compass by urging not just her male and female Maghrebi friends, but also anonymous European residents to resist national, transnational, and neoliberal hegemonies. In so doing, she spurns the circumscribed role assigned to filmmakers and women from the South by feminist activists in the North, as well as by the Tunisian government, while entertainingly exposing the universal need for expanded fields of action.16 Following the introductory scenes, El Fani’s film quickly shifts its focus from the desert town of Midès to Paris, the worlds connected via the device of a televised French news report during which Qmar suddenly glimpses Frida, her mother, struggling with the French police during a raid on a sit-in for undocumented immigrants. Following Kalt’s brisk declaration that she intends to bring Frida home, the film cuts to a Paris street, where Julia shrugs off a headhunter as she arrives home on her motorcycle. Once in the apartment she shares with Chams, her boyfriend, Julia reassuringly tends to a wound he incurred when striking a police officer during the raid, and then rushes back to work. As she exits, Frida, who is staying with the couple, raises a toast to her narrow escape from arrest and deportation. Following an undefined time lapse, the scene shifts back to a Paris street where the just-arrived Kalt hails Frida as two police officers conducting an identity check corner the latter. Carted off to police headquarters in Kalt’s company, a blasé Frida, now seemingly indifferent to the prospect of deportation, complains to Kalt in Arabic that she is bored with her marriage. As an irate officer condescendingly questions the two women, Kalt uses her cell phone to hack into the police computer network and assigns Frida a Moroccan diplomatic identity (fig. 6.2). Frida is subsequently freed by the officer who fails to notice that

Figure 6.2  Kalt hacking into the police database

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the two women communicate in Tunisian, not Moroccan, dialect. Returning to Chams and Julia’s apartment, Frida and Kalt bump into Chams at the front door. Kalt has a one-night fling with him while Julia works the night shift at the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire / Directorate of Territorial Security), where she is puzzled to discover that the police network hack has been traced to her home address. The following day, a goal-minded Kalt escorts the reluctant Frida back to Tunisia before Julia has time to return home and confront her. As the rest of the film moves between Paris and Tunisia, gradually revealing a tangled network of relationships between Chams, Kalt, and Julia, it indirectly references Tunisian state censorship while more explicitly targeting the discourses of civilizational incommensurability used to justify democratic governments’ restrictions on flows of information and people. As the televised coverage of the sit-in for immigrant rights shows, Kalt’s hacks intersect with growing nationalist anxieties about French identity in which Arab and African immigration to France often acts as a flashpoint. The old-school chief of the French Security Services parodically reflects a colonial era binary according to which all that comes from the poorer, presumably less free former colonies necessarily signals an attack on the civilization of the metropole. At the same time, French sit-in participants, passers-by opposed to identity checks, and the chief’s mocking DST subordinates, Julia included, convey more fluid and nuanced understandings of the constitution of national identities in an era of accelerating global information and cultural flows. A veteran of the Algerian war, the security chief reads only threats in the Arabic letters scrolling across television screens and DST computer monitors; for him they are in themselves signs of an irreconcilable civilizational difference, regardless of what they may actually say. Placing the military on standby alert, he misses entirely the multiple, playful significations of the cartoon camel, though he is quite correct to perceive it as a threat to his understanding of the world order. For the terrain thus contested is not strictly geographical or entirely virtual, but rather resides in the associative routes that map and ceaselessly reinforce the structure of each space. For her part, Julia quickly discerns the common language of hackers in the Arabic letters she seems able to decipher, and reads in the message a nonterroristic, yet nevertheless serious, challenge. For despite her hip, cyberfeminist trappings and immigrant boyfriend, Julia remains committed to notions of France’s civilizational superiority as the grantor of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Her code name, Agent Marianne, after Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, may stake a feminist claim in its assertion of an active rather than simply iconic role for women in the functioning of the state, but it also makes clear that even cyberfeminism, with its vaunted fluidity, remains mired in differences of race, class, and national origin, as does the cyberspace on which it depends.17 Although Julia subverts her boss’s plans before

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the situation is able to escalate into an international incident between sovereign states, she is fully committed to normalizing Kalt’s behavior by dismantling from within the technology that enables her to cross virtual boundaries undetected and at will. While she rationalizes her subsequent actions by arguing that her position at the center of DST power alerts her to material dangers Kalt refuses to recognize, her own civilizational biases prevent her from entertaining the notion that Kalt may be advancing the ideals of the French Republic by exposing the manipulations of media flows. Her focus on security threats, bound up as they are with international power dynamics, enables Julia to skirt the actual message of Kalt’s hacks, which de-emphasize divisive categories of national and regional identity, encouraging viewers to look beyond their screens to other ways of living. Like her boss’s effort’s to minimize the influence of Kalt’s messages, Julia’s activity has the countereffect of intensifying their importance. Meanwhile, Kalt’s transitory breaches of the commercial airwaves do not contest France’s civilizational superiority from without by inverting the North-South hierarchy, but rather draw attention to the lack within masked by the illusory comprehensiveness of the televisual landscape. When Kalt’s first message appears, Julia latches onto the word “mirage” as a clue to its author, and immediately sets to work tracking down the individual behind it. The message, however, speaks in the plural; it reads, in Arabic only: “In the third millennium, there exist other epochs, other milieus, other lives … We are not a mirage.” Ostensibly dismissing assimilation, the approach held to characterize French colonization and immigration policy, through an assertion of Arab-inflected difference, the message nonetheless renders these other epochs, milieus, and lives accessible to anyone who cares to join in following its prompt. For some, this illegible message rattles the sense of control, omniscience, and centrality that television cultivates in viewers through its proliferation of information and entertainment channels—some of them flickering across the screen during subsequent hacks. Yet others are hailed by the lure of that which cannot be confined to the screen. Nevertheless, far from exhorting them to “tune out,” Kalt’s messages direct receptive audiences to “stay tuned.” For those attracted to her message, cross-racial and cross-class community is mediated in the first instance by a common viewing experience, and later through the actions viewers determined to exist “outside the box” may undertake to actualize the claim “We are not a mirage.” Here again, Bedwin Hacker slyly destabilizes not just viewer expectations, but also those paradigms that posit the West to East, North to South flow of freedom, knowledge, and progress. Although Kalt and her protégé are far more like pirate radio operators or culture jammers than WikiLeaks activists, the DST’s retaliatory disinformation campaign recalls certain scenes in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic The Battle of Algiers (1966), where military leaders rally the French press to their side

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in a war of opinions. Yet Kalt and Qmar are not mobilizing for an armed revolution but appropriating temporary market share for some as yet undefined way of being. Instead of pitching a material or knowledge-based commodity, they appeal to their audiences to manifest their dissatisfaction with a mediated landscape where illusions of consumer choice displace demands for broader freedoms. Rather than targeting particular commodities or corporations, or even “hijacking” specific media products by introducing counterideologies, they seek to subvert distraction by advocating several random actions, of which participants must make their own meaning.18 One of Kalt’s hacked messages directs viewers “tired of the sound of boots” to wear North African slippers. Just who reclaims this icon of the exotic remains unclear, for the scene that follows shows only a series of slipper-shod feet. The resulting impossibility of profiling the respondents to Kalt’s prompt is suggestive of the cross-racial, transnational appeal and repercussions of her hacks. At the same time, the message reflects an attempt to counter from within the commodification of markers of difference, North African slippers being a favorite tourist souvenir. While Bedwin Hacker intentionally plays with audience preconceptions by leaving us in the dark regarding this and other details, it also grants us privileged insights into the real stakes of Kalt’s actions. Hijacking the seemingly innocuous, gender-neutral, exoticist symbol of North African slippers, Kalt once again garners an enthusiastic following. Her successes shake up imbricated civilizational, gendered, and (cyber)feminist divisions of labor, the slippers not coincidentally obliging their wearers to move a bit differently.19 For their part, Kalt’s circle of friends in Tunis get the joke, avidly parsing news gleaned from disparate media, laughing at both the French disinformation campaign and less directly mocking their own government’s censorship policies. No less tuned in than their French counterparts, yet far more aware of multipronged governmental tactics to suppress freedom of information, movement, and association, Kalt and her friends elaborate ever new strategies of circumvention. Unlike Chams, who persists in the belief that he is saving Kalt from herself and her surroundings, they do not naively believe that free expression and self-fulfillment stem from following legitimate channels. On the contrary, they are keenly aware of the differential levels of subjection demanded by the assimilation process that is the prerequisite of access to these channels that forever defer the self-fulfillment on offer. Meanwhile, as the film progresses, Chams increasingly turns a blind eye to violations of his privacy—as when he discovers that Julia has been spying on him by means of a camera hidden in their bedroom television set—and his diminishing agency, certain that he alone will soon control his destiny (fig. 6.3). More buffoon than the frustrated, desperate, young hero characteristic of Tunisian films, the educated, employed, liberal-minded Chams differs from the latter in never facing serious obstacles to his immigrant aspirations. On the

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Figure 6.3  Chams learning via Internet chat that Julia has been spying on him

contrary, it is his successful normalization that throws such migrant dreams into question. In this, Bedwin Hacker inverts the roles of the familiar scenario in which the westernized woman becomes the object of criticism as well as assumptions that middle-class, educated men (Arab and French) necessarily exert control over their own destinies. Once in Tunis, Chams is coerced by Julia into spying on Kalt. Blinded by his civilizational and male privilege, he misses the fact that Kalt is on to him. When he secretly attempts to access Kalt’s computer at Julia’s behest, however, Chams trips a security trap that locks him in her room. Unconvinced by his shoddy lies, a nonchalant Kalt declares their relationship over, stripping as she throws him out of her room in a scene that upends the conventions of female nudity and male-female sexual intimacy on-screen as she wields all the power. Scanning her computer files after Chams’s reluctant departure, Kalt quickly discovers the identity of her real pursuer, Julia, and Bedwin Hacker segues for the first and only time into a flashback sequence. Closing in on a jumble of computer chips in a sequence that noticeably breaks with the overall look of the film up to that point, the camera pans over the parts as it gradually pulls back to reveal a younger Kalt and Julia working in concert to build a computer. Circling them, it continues to pull back and sweeps over the room, marking a brief time lapse as it returns to the two women now naked in bed together, sleeping. A moment later Kalt is still sleeping but alone; a cut reveals Julia avidly scanning the records of her lover’s computer. Following this exposé of the double-edged uses and effects of technological manipulation, the main narrative of Bedwin Hacker resumes with a reversal of this final scene. A close-up of a sleeping Julia’s face pulls back to show her stretched out on a sofa in the DST offices while

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Kalt’s latest message flickers across computer screens. Awakened by her coworker, Julia discovers that she is too late to trap her former lover turned adversary. That Julia, a Frenchwoman, would manipulate her male, noncitizen, Arab lover plays to southern stereotypes of white northern feminists. That Kalt, a Tunisian woman who is not a French citizen, would also manipulate Chams before rejecting him without sentiment or regrets, runs counter to northern stereotypes of oppressed Arab women. Chams, himself both true and untrue to type, is utterly bewildered. In a pivotal scene, he argues with Kalt against the dramatic backdrop of a desert gorge after having tracked her down through a combination of his own volition and Julia’s insistence. In an effort at reconciliation, Chams tentatively proposes marriage and the French residence permit that would come with it. Kalt scoffs at him and turns away. Frustrated, Chams begins shouting that her defiance is futile and dangerous, that resistance is impossible. As they argue, the camera holds them in close-up against the backdrop of the desert to which Kalt gestures as a place of will and courage (fig. 6.4). When an uncomprehending Chams steers the conversation back to love and sex, Kalt redirects his attention to their surroundings, disparaging his tunnel vision: “I’m in the desert with some guy who sees nothing and understands nothing.” The scenery indeed vies with the characters for spectator attention, the protagonists’ verbal sparring unpunctuated by any shot reverse shot sequences that would privilege Chams’s inner turmoil. Changing topics and tone, he asks Kalt whether it is true that she abruptly left the Polytechnic in Paris although she was at the head of her class. Shaking her head, Kalt answers that Julia took advantage of their relationship while they were both students there to identify her as

Figure 6.4  Kalt and Chams arguing in the desert

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the hacker “pirate mirage,” threatening her with prison unless she agreed to work for the DST, and offering her French citizenship if she complied. When Chams inquires whether they slept together, Kalt offers him another opening: “That proves that we have the same taste, you and me.” Again missing his opportunity, Chams persists, “So you dropped everything?” to which Kalt replies with finality, “There was nothing to drop.” That the white, French Julia should have attempted to thwart Kalt’s autonomy and press her into the service of her own interests, again comes as no surprise to those postcolonial and antiracist women’s activists who have long been critical of an international feminism informed by the priorities of women in the global North. Yet Kalt’s easy avowal of her fluid sexuality forestalls assertions of categorical cultural or civilizational difference sometimes advanced in opposition to the real or perceived imperialistic strategies of women’s and queer activists.20 Her firm dismissal of both Chams’s and Julia’s coercions in favor of her desert base underscores that she is no member of an assimilated elite, while her gender-bending, countercultural Tunisian cohort confirms that her decision to return was no nativist quest for a less corrupt, more authentic identity or lifestyle. Rather, as is the case with her cyberactivism, Kalt’s decision refutes the notion that only Europe and the United States can be, as Karen Caplan and Inderpal Grewal phrase it, “sites of progressive social movements, while other parts of the world are presumed to be traditional, especially in terms of sexuality.”21 Her confrontation with Chams disaggregates the complex strands of a self-assured Euro-American sexual and political exceptionalism. Without regrets, Kalt dismisses the (homo) normativity of the allegedly “freer” French identity with which Julia implicitly presumed to blackmail her, at the expense of her many other personal and political affinities and ethnic, cultural, and intellectual affiliations. El Fani’s portrayal of Kalt’s Tunisian milieu at the same time offers audiences a Tunisian vision of a self-inventing and creative contemporary Tunisian society that firmly diverges from that sanctioned by the state as well as by groups that ground their authority in claims of authenticity. Bedwin Hacker makes clear that no amount of censorship can filter out the televisual-cyberspace complex that is reshaping individual and collective affiliations and identities worldwide. At the same time, it also shows that this complex is far from all-encompassing and determinative, and that it remains possible, and even urgent, to move off the grid, or out of its net. For a moment, Chams seems to get it. He hurls his cell phone, with its global positioning device, into the desert gorge, thereby frustrating Julia and the DST, who have been tracking the couple’s movements. Yet when Julia nonetheless arrives in the desert town of Midès to confront Kalt just as she and Qmar are preparing to hack another message into French airwaves, Chams knocks himself unconscious when he pulls out the electrical wiring to the house in an effort to save Kalt (fig. 6.5). Kalt

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Figure 6.5  Kalt and Qmar hacking into the airwaves as Julia attempts to stop them

matter-of-factly informs him that he saved only himself as Julia pulls him off-screen. Glancing back only once, Kalt exits the square with her friends. While Kalt’s immediate actions have been thwarted, her ideals of mobile agency have not diminished, as became clear in her sharp rebuttals of Julia’s accusations of criminality. Unsettling the civilizational discourse that positions the West as a site of superior values, freedoms, and rights without recourse to those overdetermined, oppositional symbols so long associated with the Arab and Muslim South—the veil, the primacy of the family, sexual taboos—El Fani’s film goes beyond a simple inversion of static, hierarchical categories to an exploration of the possibility of real mobility in an era of neoliberal globalization. In Kalt and Qmar’s last hack, camels march holding signs that repeat part of their first message— “We are not a mirage”—but add the question tag, “Are you?” (fig. 6.6). An explicit interpellation of television viewers in Europe, as well as the film’s own spectators, this message rallies resistance to cultures of assimilation, homogenization, and commodification. Like Kalt’s other hacked messages, it calls for ongoing manifestations of presence, while refusing to pin down the shape, geospatial location, or destination of these manifestations. Thus, without targeting Tunisian censorship policies directly, Kalt and Qmar’s final hack (at least in the short term) questions the influence of global media in shaping social consciousness, all while undermining transnationally constructed justifications for the limitations placed on Tunisians’ rights to self-expression. While Kalt’s messages never stray from playful metaphysics or outline a comprehensive revolutionary project, viewers of the film familiar with the postcolonial politics of Tunisia and the broader region

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Figure 6.6  Kalt and Qmar’s final hack

would easily have been able to discern how they fundamentally challenge the civilizational discourses that underlie those early twenty-first-century international relations. Certainly, the film’s very limited exhibition in Tunisia suggests that Tunisian authorities feared such interpretations. Yet eight years before what has sometimes been dubbed a “Facebook revolution,” Bedwin Hacker insinuates that the platform is not the message, and that unexpected communities have already moved into action beneath the familiar radars and off the grids of global positioning systems. Entertaining without being triumphalist, the film also shows how easily Kalt’s messages are silenced, spun, or co-opted by more authoritative voices and, presumably, forgotten. Yet while Julia ultimately succeeds in quashing Kalt’s messages at the film’s conclusion, branding them self-destructive and dangerous, Kalt vows to continue manifesting her existence, urging others to do the same at unexpected times and in surprising places. Despite her subsequent disappearance from the screen, the open-ended conclusion, or rather conclusions, of Bedwin Hacker seem the most optimistic—and in hindsight, the most prescient—of the three films in this part. In the film’s final scene, Julia’s coworker volunteers himself as the face of Bedwin Hacker to the chief worried over lack of evidence to parade before the press, his half-serious gesture suggesting at once the success of Kalt’s messages, as well as how easily they are co-opted by those eager to transform them into fodder for the existing networks.22 Yet Bedwin Hacker itself continues to resist easy classification and interpretations. Its media savviness renders questionable any simple ethnographic interpretation or classification, thereby eluding the civilizational, feminist, and area studies lenses through which Tunisian film has often been interpreted. Cannily foreshadowing as much the Tunisian uprisings as the revelations of WikiLeaks,

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Bedwin Hacker is not, however, ultimately a film celebrating the power of new media technologies, but rather a re-examination of a much older question regarding the relationship of moving images to lived mobility. Kalt and Qmar’s final question, “Are you a mirage?” reverberates beyond its conclusion.23 Because it does not presume any fixed audience, or rather, audiences, it continues to circulate across geopolitical boundaries.

{ Part III }

Scan Backward / Scan Forward Alongside the narrative-driven, action-filled, hero-focused films of Part II, and the more meditative, precinematic culture-recuperating, boundary- and definition-testing films of Part I, the films of this final part reflect a hyperacute awareness of cinematic trends and movements worldwide, past and present. Made within a two-year span in the first decade of the twenty-first century, each addresses the shifting terrain of Maghrebi film’s visibility at home and internationally by manipulating familiar cinematic tropes, styles, and genres into self-reflexive, nonimitative, presupposition-thwarting films. Layering scenarios or vignettes rather than unfolding a self-contained, linear narrative, each film toys with mechanisms of viewer identification, eschewing pathos and suspense as well as morality, and embracing the darkly comedic. Tariq Teguia’s Rome Rather Than You (2006) engages with independent, convention-defying, often absurdist films from Africa, North America, and Europe to excruciatingly convey the immobility afflicting Algeria’s youth, history, and cinema against a 1990s backdrop of promised global mobility. At the same time, Faouzi Bensaïdi’s WWW: What a Wonderful World (2006) ceaselessly plays with celebrated film styles and tropes to relate an intertwined series of whimsical, purely cinematic yet sometimes socially resonant, tales that seemingly overcome all obstacles before falling prey to the limits of cinematic representation. Finally, Nejib Belkadhi’s VHS Kahloucha (2007), an outwardly straightforward biopic, making of documentary, gradually exposes and lampoons the ossified social and cinematic representations that restrict creative, social, and physical mobilities. Flirting with pessimistic denouements, these films ultimately remain as open-ended as the films in Part II, neither sounding the death knell of filmmaking in the Maghreb nor promoting one filmmaking

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trajectory over any other. Rather, they lay renewed claim to filmmaking’s entire intellectual and cultural history, that defined as foreign as much as that considered local, traversing cultural, technical, and geographic boundaries both spectacularly and less obviously to place the Maghreb at the forefront of filmmaking. All set in coastal cities, two deeply rooted in cinematic and historical imaginations, and the third a popular contemporary tourist destination, all also treat clandestine migration in a manner at odds with contemporary media reports of this phenomenon. Set in a crumbling Algiers, Rome follows its young, underemployed protagonists Zina and Kamel’s as they struggle to enter the circuits of globalizations old and new from a locale that was once a nodal point of those circuits. Shot in a contemporary Casablanca that evokes as well as disrupts the film fantasy of that city, WWW episodically tracks the improbable love story of cool hitman Kamel and resourceful policewoman Kenza, their paths predictably and randomly crossing with would-be European immigrant, computer whiz Hisham as all three seek to connect with worlds beyond their own. Featuring housepainter by trade, filmmaker by passion Moncef Kahloucha, VHS Kahloucha takes audiences to the marginalized outskirts of the tourist city Sousse, where men (and sometimes women) constantly slip across economic, social, cultural, and political borders in search of more mobile futures. On one level celebrating the concept of globalization and on the other skewering the one-sidedness and inequities produced by neoliberal capital, these three films present themselves as at once successes and failures of the global exchanges they feature. As a result of their unexpectedly critical position on the very film tropes, styles, and genres they engage and despite, or perhaps because of, their hypermobility, they met with differential levels of success locally as well as internationally. Touted for breaking through conventional realism, Rome was celebrated by regional critics while leaving audiences, as well as international critics, puzzled if not irritated. Similarly, WWW was enthusiastically promoted by its sponsors at the Moroccan Center for Cinematography as well as local film critics and connoisseurs, while confounding those in search of reflections of Moroccan social realities. By contrast, VHS Kahloucha met with tremendous popular success in Tunisia and played to enthusiastic general and critical audiences at festivals such as Sundance, making its subject the star of Tunisian advertising spots, while never receiving commercial distribution. None of these films features an action-driven narrative, yet each culminates in a scenario that leaves spectators wondering just what they missed. As we ponder where some critical movement may have eluded us, however, each film has already moved on.

{ 7 }

Vacancies Tariq Teguia’s Rome Rather Than You (2006) Let’s go. I don’t like the ambiance here. —Sophia, Mektoub Shortly before the thirty-minute mark of Tariq Teguia’s 2006 debut feature film, Rome, Rather Than You (Rome oula antuma / (Rome plutôt que vous), a minor character suddenly stands up from his makeshift, street-corner cigarette stand and runs toward the camera holding up a piece of cardboard on which he has hand-lettered: “I’m alive. Do you all see me?” (rani 3aish. Shuftuni?) (fig. 7.1). For several long seconds, this sign dominates the screen against a soundscape of street sounds, only the young man’s eyes visible above it. Eventually he says with resignation, “I’m alive. Truly, I’m alive” (rani 3aish. Sa7, rani 3aish) and drops his head behind the sign just as the scene is cut. A playful, if not exactly novel, break in the fourth wall, this moment echoes a long lineage of French New Wave and subsequent postmodern films that reflect on the disjunctures between, or interdependence of, moving image and everyday life. On its own and from the vantage point of cinematic history, it may seem a futile, even trite, attempt to unsettle cinematic conventions. Yet in this twenty-first century film that traces the frustrated and frustrating perambulations of young characters seeking to escape the drudgery and violence of a once revolutionary country, futility is very much the point. In Algerian cinematic context, the scene reverberates with Merzak Allouache’s iconic 1977 film Omar Gatlato, whose young hero addresses the camera to narrate the hardships and aspirations of his generation, revealing with frank irony the failures of the postindependence state fifteen years after the revolution. Thirty years later, the forthrightness and warm camaraderie of Allouache’s film has been replaced by silence, a vague aura of menace, and minimalist social interactions in which the characters seem barely present. “Eh, the entire country slinks along walls,” Rafiq, the sign carrier, tells the film’s protagonist, Kamel, shortly before he makes his vain attempt at breaking through to an audience that is no longer there.

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Figure 7.1  Rafiq presenting his sign

One of the first Algerian films released after a virtual blackout of Algerian cinema between 1997 and 2002—a period that marks the tail end of the black years of a decade-long, undermediatized and unnamed, bloody clash between the military government and Islamic extremists that coincided with the dismantlement of state sponsorship for film—Teguia’s film looks back to the mid-1990s to seek out a new language for these years of invisibility and silence in Algerian cinema and beyond. Appropriately, it is titled with the name of a foreign capital, Rome, while Algiers and Algeria as a whole are demoted to the “you” in the qualifying phrase, “rather than you.” Replicating a real-life chant of fans of the Algiers soccer team that Kamel, the film’s fictional protagonist, follows, “Rome, rather than you” compresses not just a few years, but rather centuries of history into a taunt. The soccer fans’ stated preference for Rome references a sharp decline in regional pride since antiquity, when their Berber, or Amazight, ancestors battled the rulers of ancient Rome for the autonomy of their homeland. A threat to sell out, it is a manner of spurring their team to victory by designating it as the last potential source of identification with their homeland.1 Simultaneously highlighting the shift in political relations between the two capitals, the chant also effectively sums up the woes of Algerian cinema, whose two international successes, The Battle of Algiers and Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Embers, were made possible by financial and logistical support from Rome.2 Adopted

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as the film’s title, Roma oula antuma takes note of soccer’s clear ascendancy over film as a site of national identification while perhaps attempting to divert some of that passion for itself. Yet it is sure to disappoint, for it features no soccer battles, only the bleak purposelessness and random violence that fans desire to see transmuted in a battle of skills on the playing field.3 Refracting the neorealism and socialist realism of these two notable cinematic precursors, Rome intensifies them to a point of both absurdity and poetry, zeroing in on the absencing at the heart of the soccer fans’ chant. Unlike the state-sponsored Algerian cinema that dominated the decades following the country’s independence in 1962, or the few productions made leading up to the blackest years of the 1990s, Rome Rather Than You neither underscores the urgency of the situation nor reassures audiences of the country’s resilience, glorious past, or resourcefulness.4 Unlike the optimistically open-ended films studied in Part II, it never places easy faith in the transformative power of mobility. Instead, it asks us, Algerians and non-Algerians alike, just what we want to see beyond cinematic clichés. From the vantage point of the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, where mobile telephones, satellite television, digital media, and the Internet have noticeably speeded up flows of communication and information, Rome takes us back ten years into a world where communications and movements are frustratingly slow and circular. Media are by no means absent—the characters glance at newspapers whose headlines announce the latest massacres, watch television in cafes, listen to cassette tapes and radio, answer telephones (tabletop), and acknowledge film cameras—it is just that these forms of media fail to generate any real picture of what is happening, while the characters themselves experience not just difficulty in being seen, but also in seeing. The same is true of Teguia’s film: despite excruciatingly long takes and traveling shots, extended scenes devoid of dialogue or action, it conveys no sense of a clearer or more authoritative perspective on the recent, troubled past. On the contrary, sudden shifts to short scenes featuring never-named characters engaged in monotonous activities punctuated only by violence indicate that the most crucial elements of the story are somehow missing, that we’ve failed to see the point. Yet that sense of something missed or missing is not a shortcoming but rather constitutes the film’s core.5 As a result, Rome is a cinematic challenge, all the more so for spectators accustomed to visual media characterized by ever shorter takes, rapid cuts, abrupt changes in camera angles, and eye-catching special effects.6 As global exchanges accelerate and increase in volume and scale, it revisits the internationalist, Third Worldist principles that proved so mobilizing shortly after independence when The Battle of Algiers was released. It does so from the vantage point of a nation hollowed out by internal strife fueled by both by neoliberal global capitalism and counterclaimants of authenticity and essential justice. Jaded characters, like the police chief who cynically recounts the early

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Algerian government’s ambivalent approach to the new nation’s materialist, internationalist principles, and Zina, the film’s overeducated, underemployed young coprotagonist, expose Algeria’s Third World socialism as a national myth undermined from the outset by capitalism’s Cold War politics. Rome offers resigned, cynical glimpses of once proud revolutionary ideals while everywhere underscoring their inability to capture citizen imaginations in an Algeria seemingly absent from the transnational movements of which its youth seek to be a part. As Kamel, the film’s twenty-something protagonist who dreams constantly of escaping to Europe, tells a skeptical Zina early in the film, “Long live globalization” (Tahya la mondialisation). His remark is an ironic echo of the chants of “tahya djazaïr” that resound throughout the iconic Battle of Algiers. Insinuating the collapse of nationalism, Rome declines to solve the problem of film that calls for a mode of representation adequate to the material it depicts. Rather, following Kamel’s statement, it situates such illusions elsewhere. Like Europe’s postwar, postempire filmmakers, or more appropriately, like his fellow postcolonial African filmmakers, Teguia makes do with minimal means in a bleak, alternately crumbling, and half-built urban landscape vacant of any sense of meaning or purpose. Rome’s stylistic features—long takes, extended traveling shots, direct sound, nonprofessional actors, variable image quality, abrupt transitions, color filters, an arresting soundtrack, and so forth—alongside its narrative of a young, marginal(ized) couple result in a film as strikingly sui generis as Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki Bouki (1973). Yet while Mambety noted that he found his title characters, Anta and Mory, unique in their rejection of postindependence nationalist ideals in favor of a desire to leave Senegal for France (the former colonial power), by the postideological twenty-first century, Anta’s and Mory’s dreams have become the norm even as obstacles for Africans seeking to migrate northward have multiplied.7 Determined to reach Europe by any means, Kamel must do far more than simply amass the money for a boat ticket; he must also obtain a counterfeit passport and visa, and find a smuggler to ferry him across a dangerous stretch of the Mediterranean. For the 1990s saw a sharp change in regulations and decline in European visas accorded to Algerians, with a concomitant rise in attempts at undocumented immigration.8 As a result, youth seeking to participate in the kinds of mobility long promoted by postindependence visions of modernity, internationalism, and globalization were increasingly criminalized at home and abroad.9 By the time that Teguia’s Rome was released, news reports, popular culture, and political discourse had long been saturated with images and voices of clandestine immigrants, banalized to the point of invisibility. Far from attempting to jar national consciousness with newly spectacular images, however, Teguia’s film performs a postmortem on this invisibility, underscoring the absencing not just of its own ostensible subjects, but also of its audiences and final meaning.

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When Rafiq runs toward the camera with his cardboard sign, half suppressing a grin, his gesture is less playful mugging for the camera than the sly action of a hostage fleeing both from and toward invisible captors, struck by the absurdity of his situation. Breaking with his role in the narrative as well as making light of the character he plays, that of a young man eking out a living by reselling single cigarettes from a makeshift stand in on a street corner, he scrambles the gritty, diffident cinema verité overtones of the scene. In a country of over thirty-seven million where “very few” movie theaters still operate, Rafiq doubtlessly knows that fellow Algerians are more likely to seek out films that will transport them from, rather than more deeply into, familiar images of the bleak and absurd impasse in which they find themselves.10 Nonetheless, the scene blurs the lines between character, the miserable but resourceful moul detail (individual cigarette seller), and the actor who plays this role, drawing attention to the performance of the otherwise anonymous Algerian youth in the background, until now easily imagined as just another guy off the street playing himself. As if he were seizing upon a momentary lapse of his captors’ vigilance to pass a message to someone, anyone, he thrusts the sign toward the camera so that it fills nearly the entire frame, blocking all but his eyes from view. Yet audiences are complicit in his captivity, when they are not, like him, hostages. No enemy materializes and no urgent reality breaks through as a result of this action-statement, nor does a transcendent film world. Rather, the gesture only reinforces the film’s grim realism. Rafiq’s actions and words reflect the paradox that inheres in any kind of visual media in the era of global saturation: recognition of one’s full humanity is predicated upon visual (self) representation, yet the images that result easily dehumanize, whether because they aestheticize, banalize, or exoticize, becoming ubiquitous or passing too quickly into oblivion. His vocalized “I’m alive, truly, I’m alive” is freighted with resignation, with recognition that the condition has lost any meaning and that as a character he remains immobilized by well-established cinematic and visual tropes. On a thematic level, Teguia’s film depicts a no man’s or woman’s land on the edge of a crumbling nation. As Kamel projects himself into the horizon where he envisions the nodal points of globalization, Rome undermines his discourse by showing how economic and cultural globalization is predicated on the necessary foreclosure, for large sections of the world, of the mobility, access, and wealth it promotes. On a formal and aesthetic level, Rome time and again unsettles the authority of its images and redirects the meanings and narratives to which they give rise, reflecting liminality within the category of global cinema. Sound, intertitles, mise en scène, costumes, dialogue, and shot sequencing all converge to question not just the object, representation, of mainstream cinema, but also the influence that past cinematic images exert over contemporary ones. The plot of Rome, established through a set of visual cues and an early conversation between Kamel and

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Zina, is relatively simple. Kamel, determined to immigrate to Europe (from which he has been expelled before), and perhaps eventually to the United States or Australia, is looking for l’Bosco, a fisherman-smuggler he has paid to obtain false papers on his behalf, and possibly also to smuggle him across the Mediterranean.11 Zina, educated yet bored with her work at a clinic, where she and her coworkers are treated with condescension by their male boss and often obliged to perform janitorial work, accompanies Kamel on his largely futile trajectories across a crumbling, gray, subdued Algiers, to the concrete, unfinished suburb of La Madrague on its margins. Not officially Kamel’s girlfriend—she mentions a fiancé when they first speak—nor evincing any real desire to emigrate, the independent, sarcastic Zina seems drawn by the dual departure from boring routine and social expectations. Context confers something extraordinary on their casual, bantering relationship. In a mid-1990s Algiers terrorized by extremist attacks, every step in the city, especially for Zina, constitutes a potential death sentence. Intercut with their narrative is a parallel one, less defined, of two young men, by all appearances employees in a print shop, who prepare religious speeches, stage mock shootings, and acquire handguns. A sequence of telegraphic, wordless scenes whose relation in space or time is deliberately unclear introduces the principal characters and sketches out the film’s themes. The first is a traveling arc shot of a coastal highway at dusk. Or is it dawn? This is followed by an extreme close-up and subsequent medium shots of a still-unnamed Kamel as he poses for photographs against a studio backdrop of palm trees; he abruptly leaves as the camera shutter clicks for the third time on an empty chair. Next, barely visible young men, would-be clandestine immigrants, run among the shipping containers of a dock at night. In the following scene, two men pantomime an assassination in a cinderblock room lit by fluorescent lights. Daylight returns as a cut reveals Zina, or rather a close-up of the book she is reading, lounging on a sofa in the apartment she shares with her parents. The extended sequence that follows, in which Zina reads, makes coffee, waits, queries her mother, waits, drinks coffee on the terrace, waits, verbally spars with her mother, and rushes off to work, confirms the film’s temporal setting and introduces dialogue. It also culminates in a natural transition to the next scene, which reintroduces music into the soundtrack after the interval of direct sound that began in the first scene. Evocative of a road movie, Rome’s opening scene establishes mood in the absence of point of view, or endpoints. While it conjures wide-open spaces, the sound of a can rolling along the road that quickly substitutes for the film’s incipient musical soundtrack evokes desolation rather than euphoric flight. The only signposts of civilization among the wild grasses on the side of the road are the unlit highway lampposts and a dilapidated railing along a cliff. Kamel’s sudden appearance in extreme close-up, blinking, framed by a lurid

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Figure 7.2  Kamel at the portrait studio

blue backdrop as a camera flash pops, instantly signifies passport or visa photo, developing the theme of travel. When a medium zoom-out reveals a cheap tropical island photographer’s backdrop at the second pop, an element of farce encroaches on the frame (fig. 7.2). Almost reminiscent of a tradition of undocumented immigrants’ predeparture photos—easily recognizable to fans of recent African cinema and seemingly confirmed by the shadowy young men running among shipping containers at night in the subsequent scene—the tropical backdrop is nonetheless entirely wrong for such photos, which usually favor renderings of iconic urban buildings such as skyscrapers or the Eiffel Tower, over the kind of tropical beach scenes that appeal to tourists from Europe who dream of getting away from it all. Just as the camera pops a third time, Kamel abruptly stands and walks out of the frame, leaving the empty wooden chair. Perhaps this signals that he has decided to throw his lot in with the young men on the docks in the scene that follows. Or perhaps not, for their faces are invisible and the scene is brief. Replacing the nocturnal scene with the startlingly fluorescent one of two young men acting out a shooting with an unloaded gun, Rome creates a link, if tenuous, between Kamel, the figures on the docks, and these would-be terrorists or criminals. These brief opening scenes play with the chains of association deeply entangled with Algeria in particular, and the Maghreb in general—desolation, crumbling infrastructure, young men, immigration documented and not,

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smuggling, violence, and terrorism—yet they do not quite do the work expected of them. Zina’s appearance suddenly interrupts the unspooling of these tropes; casually attired in jeans and a form-fitting shirt, her hair uncovered, lounging on a sofa wholly absorbed in a French-language book, her initial appearance quietly breaks with every kind of typing of Algerian women that has emerged in Algerian cinema since its inception. Connected in complex ways to the series of scenes that precede it, this initial image of Zina also tests cinematic representations of women more broadly. Like Kamel, Zina first appears in extreme close-up. Yet unlike Kamel, and unlike cinematic close-ups of women in general, where women’s faces are often meant to bear meanings simultaneously self-evident and withheld, Zina’s face is not really at the center of the shot. Obscuring the lower half of her face is the book whose pages she attentively scans, the movement of her eyes not quite compensating for the blocked access to her character occasioned by its partial masking of her face (fig. 7.3). Her choice of books is significant. Zina is reading a French translation of Chester Himes’s autobiographical Cast the First Stone. Composed in the 1930s but not published until 1952 in a very much altered and censored form, Cast the First Stone recounts its African American narrator’s experience of the American prison system.12 A wry commentary on the social portrayal of young Algerian men in the previous scenes, this book also hints at Zina’s

Figure 7.3  Zina reading

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critical outlook on the United States, liberalism, and neoliberalism, as well as her broader interest in social justice. Thwarting visual conventions, the introduction of Zina adds still unfathomed layers of meaning to all that precedes and follows. Zina’s face is fully visible yet opaque in the next scene, expressionless as she prepares coffee in the family’s narrow kitchen, occasionally directing a query at her mother, who remains off camera for the time being. Shot in medium close-up by a fixed camera that accentuates the tightness of the space, Zina establishes the film’s temporal setting by opening the faucet and finding no water (running water was rationed during the 1990s) and struggling to light the cheap local matches, her failure and subsequent question as to why her mother failed to buy imported matches illustrating both the poor quality of locally produced goods and the limited availability of imports.13 This setting is reinforced, as is Zina’s fearless ordinariness, as she prepares to leave for work, rebuffing her mother’s concerns about her casual Western dress and the potential for bombs on or along her bus line, and hedging about the time of her return home.14 In between, the film’s editing emphasizes the slow pace of daily life, minimizing action and dialogue to feature Zina waiting, first in the kitchen and then on the terrace, looking alternately bored and lost in thought. Her departure is catalyzed by an unseen person on the street below, to whom Zina waves before heading back inside to grab her purse and jacket, her face largely in the shadows as she rushes through the apartment and responds with sarcasm to her mother’s questions. When she leaves the apartment, her father calls out off-screen to question her mother, who responds with sharp exasperation and pointed insults in a scene that recalls many a domestic comedy and plays upon Frantz Fanon’s assessment of the effects of anticolonial revolution on the Algerian family.15 As Zina rushes down the many flights of stairs, the volume of what at first seem to be street and traffic sounds progressively increases, soon joined by drums that for an instant distinctly recall those accompanying the famous scene of the three bomb carriers’ self-transformation in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). Just as she reaches the landing and the drums are overwhelmed by the reed instruments of an Aissaoua melody, the whole suddenly recognizable as Archie Shepp’s “Brotherhood at Ketchaoua,” Zina looks up briefly from the shadows and grins at the camera.16 Thus, where Rafiq’s break in the fourth wall is more evident, it was neither the film’s first such break, nor will it be its last. In both cases, the honor belongs to Zina, who although she is one of the film’s central figures, frequently on screen, verbal, and the subject of numerous close-ups and long takes, is in many ways the least-seen character in the film. In part, the vanishing quality of her character derives from her incongruity with the types of Algerian women historically seen in French and Algerian cinema. Yet in

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some measure, her character is also too evident, the result of its intersection with broader cinematic tropes. The observant, sardonic Zina is sometimes referred to as one half of a Bonnie and Clyde couple, for example. Certainly, we are not accustomed to perceiving with any nuance Arab, female characters on screen. Despite the lessons of The Battle of Algiers, Algerian, and more broadly Arab, women’s interior selves are still largely surmised to correspond directly to their physical appearance. Nor does film discourage such superficial perceptions, every film conjuring comparisons with a long line of predecessors. In the case of Rome, these two impulses are deliberately brought into convergence, Teguia playing with film history and spectators’ assumptions that, even when ethnographically unique, Algerian cinema necessarily remains imitative with regard to iconic European or American films. When Zina, like a character in a French nouvelle vague film, briefly grins at the camera from the shadows at the base of the stairwell, the moment tests spectators’ capacity to see beyond these metaphorical shadows, to look for a new cinematic vocabulary. Although Kamel’s quest for l’Bosco drives the film, the series of introductory scenes, coupled with Zina’s glances at the camera, establishes her as its true protagonist. Yet where The Battle of Algiers afforded spectators insight into the “real” characters of the women who appeared as modern, French, and Francophile women to the French occupier as they carried bombs through checkpoints in their handbags, Rome contains no scene of masquerade that would allow us to grasp Zina’s genuine persona or intentions. A subtle vestimentary sign later echoes the ephemeral, disconcerting sound cue heard as Zina descended the stairwell: she wears a tight camouflage long-sleeved T-shirt throughout her peregrinations with Kamel in La Madrague. Yet by contrast with Kalt in Bedwin Hacker, no indications of underground activity follow up on these vague, fleeting suggestions of militancy. Nor does Zina emerge as a femme fatale, or woman of consummate masquerade who ensnares the film’s protagonist while her machinations surreptitiously drive the film’s plot.17 Instead, Zina’s character underscores the strangely mobile immobility of the film in its refusal to see through familiar plot resolutions. More directly than any other character in Rome, hers works to represent film, the cinematic image, as cipher. The result is not a whodunit, but a film that exacts rethinking of the medium and its position in the material worlds of late postindependence Algeria and neoliberal capital. Such half glimpses pervade Rome, arising first from the scenes featuring the two young men working in what later reveals itself to be a print shop and thereafter scattered throughout the film. In addition to the mimed assassination, we see one or both of these men operating the printing machine, staring blankly into space, ordering tea from an unseen cafe owner broadcasting the lessons of a fundamentalist radio preacher, assessing with some suspicion a Black migrant he crosses on an abandoned street, drafting and rehearsing a

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speech advocating violent jihad, presumably acquiring a gun (the actors are shot from a distance and in close-up only from the chest down), entering the home of family or other members of the cell, and asking each other questions about the progress of an operation. Each scene lasts at most a few minutes, fleeting in comparison with scenes treating Kamel and Zina, and almost all take place in the desolation of a half-built suburb, many in tightly framed, shadow-shrouded rooms. Before the film’s halfway mark, Kamel encounters one of the men, dressed in a green T-shirt imprinted with the name Sonatrach, Algeria’s national oil and gas company, when he pulls up in front of the print shop in broad daylight to inquire which unfinished villa belongs to l’Bosco, while Zina waits in the car. The printer, taciturn, briefly answers that he has no knowledge of the man or his house, repeating his message when Kamel jokingly remarks that he need not fear that he (Kamel) is here to assassinate l’Bosco. Finally, the printer sends the couple down the road to a fictive group of young men, and Kamel and Zina resume their comic, frustratingly circular journey among the identical unfinished houses and maze-like roads of the new suburb. If a brief, single scene of a stocky figure in a fisherman’s cap who must be l’Bosco, waiting silently as a fence appraises and attempts to bargain down the price of a diamond in his possession, sparked a sense of intrigue near the film’s twenty-minute mark, this is now easily overwhelmed by the tedium of Kamel and Zina’s search. It is briefly rekindled at the film’s conclusion, when Kamel and Zina finally locate his unfinished villa only to find l’Bosco stretched out in bathtub, dead, likely murdered by the two men from the print shop, who may also be the figures who ambush Kamel and Zina as they drive away from the scene. Yet after at last delivering some action, Rome neglects to follow through with a resolution to its long-rambling loose ends. Instead, the closing scenes nullify what has preceded, the turn of events hinting that the film’s framing has been a ruse of distraction directing spectators’ focus to the wrong place for the past hour and fifty minutes. After nearly two hours of often incomprehensible patience as Kamel led her on a wild goose chase, dragging her into situations that endangered her and subjected her to police harassment, Zina demands and receives the keys to the car as they leave l’Bosco’s villa. She takes the wheel and slowly drives down the dirt road as the camera stays fixed on the rear of the car, a battered white Volvo. Perhaps Kamel’s agreement to turn over the keys without so much as a challenge to her driving skills signals his recognition of Zina’s resourcefulness and strength. She was, after all, the one who discovered a passport and green card in a tin in the villa’s half-completed kitchen, and who pronounced the prayer for the dead over l’Bosco’s body after Kamel dashed from the room, retching. Or perhaps the keys are a derisory consolation prize. After Zina hands him the documents following their grisly discovery, he asks with irritation what he is supposed to do with a woman’s passport, his earlier offer to take Zina along on his journey

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apparently forgotten. She looks at him in silence before explaining the purpose of the green card and pointing out its likeness to him. Eying Kamel as he remarks that at least they have not come in vain, she pragmatically concurs, and both gaze out to sea from the villa’s rooftop where they have fled from the scene below. Zina’s turn at the wheel therefore at first seems a minor victory, a fittingly anticlimactic conclusion to a film permeated by absence. As she drives off, the camera shifts to a static, off-center, aerial view of their car. The battered Volvo moves along a dirt road by a pink wall blocking the view of the sea, toward other unfinished cinderblock villas. A man in a dark track suit runs toward the car from the right side of the frame and another, dressed in lighter clothing, from the lower left. They converge on the vehicle, raising their arms, and as the first shot rings out, the camera angle jumps to eye level facing the car, both attackers already running in opposite directions as Kamel’s arm flops out the window (fig. 7.4). In the wake of this compressed action scene, time again lengthens, the camera closing in on Zina’s face from the passenger seat, as she floors the accelerator with determination, largely impassive and silent as she stares at the road ahead. After the camera shifts to the back seat, from which only a sliver of Zina’s face is visible in the rear-view mirror, it moves to the driver’s side exterior of the car as the sound alternately foregrounds the urgent whine of the motor, road sound, and a steady, low hum before

Figure 7.4  The attack on Zina and Kamel’s car

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the engine sound and rushing cars rise again in volume. Although the soundtrack, mode of locomotion, and mood differ, this extended traveling shot recalls that of Zina and Kamel’s first encounter, just after her descent from the stairwell. Shot in mid close-up as first Zina alone and then the couple walks along the arcades of central Algiers, accompanied by a striking soundtrack in which Ornette Coleman’s free jazz comes to dominate Archie Shepp’s “Brotherhood,” the traveling shot zooms in and out of the characters’ faces, sometimes losing sight of them before catching up again, while the soundtrack does the same, music fading to foreground the couple’s dialogue and then overwhelming it as they continue to smile and trade jibes, unheard. That first traveling shot comes to an abrupt halt with a change of scene, Zina and Kamel shot from behind, standing on a bridge that overlooks the railroad tracks that run by the industrial port of Algiers, no sound but the movement of trains and rush of motor traffic in the background. Unaccompanied by music, the mood of the traveling shot that concludes Rome is grimmer, although Zina’s face betrays little emotion as she concentrates on driving. She turns now and again toward Kamel, unsmiling, but as if conversing with him. After several long moments, the audio tunes into the car’s interior to capture Kamel murmuring, “I hear Cheb Hasni. Can you hear the music?” Turning her face to him, Zina responds with a single word, “Idiot.”18 She returns her gaze to the road, and after a moment, deliberately looks into the camera. As she makes eye contact, the frame freezes and the hesitant music of the film’s introduction resumes. Tempting as it may be to resume the storyline of Rome as “a young couple dreams of escaping violence-torn Algeria but in the end is thwarted by extremists,” such a summary ignores the substance of the picture. The framing of the film’s shots, its pacing, its sound and dialogue, the content of its images, and its character development (such as it is) all gesture in the direction of another focus. After all, the failure of Kamel’s quest—as in Touki Bouki, the dream of emigration belongs distinctly to the male character—is a foregone conclusion.19 A combination of political, legal, and moral imperatives, among others, dictate that such characters be punished for their world-order-contravening desires. Only the degree of pathos or melodrama, and the nature or identity of the final obstacle, varies. Certainly, Kamel’s presumed failure—his remark that he hears Cheb Hasni, a popular singer of rai music famous for his love songs and assassinated in 1994 by Islamist extremists, suggests his impending death—adheres to this generic script. Yet the absence of melodrama or pathos, not to mention the lack of causality or agency, or more importantly, spectator identification with Kamel, entails the collapse of that narrative. What startles and lingers in the film’s final moments is the casualness with which these incidents occur and are absorbed by the characters. Kamel’s perhaps mortal wound generates little more reaction from Zina than did her mother’s failure to buy matches that light properly. Nor has his own repression of emotions

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and apparent self-absorption done anything to build him as a heroic, or even clearly sympathetic, character. Not least, because the shooting scene is shot and edited in a manner that allows only for conjecture rather than clear assignment of culpability, Rome leaves little space for understanding, much less catharsis.20 Consequently, that which is most in evidence is invisibility, that relentless absencing against which all the characters labor in vain. Direct, confrontational, Zina’s final word, “idiot,” and defiant, almost accusatory look at the camera condemn the romanticization and sensationalism that result from most cinematic depictions of Algeria’s civil war. Not the kind of mass slaughter likely to make front-page news in even the Algerian press—such as the headline announcing a massacre in the newspaper Le Matin that Kamel leafs through while waiting for a delivery assignment in his uncle’s cafe—Kamel’s shooting is nonetheless far more insidious for its apparent banality, its punctuation of the steady undermining of aspirations, social relations, and everyday life that the film depicts. Not least, the assumed perpetrators differ little, at least on the surface, from their victims. Never fully fleshed out as characters, the clean-shaven young men are never shown praying, delivering or listening to any fiery speeches, or engaging in any sustained discussion or decisive act. Rather, their lives are marked by repetitive labor, waiting, and silence. Their ideological leanings are indicated by a single scene, in which the operator of the printing press, alone in the darkened workroom, methodically revises a speech encouraging his future audience to become warriors for God. Countering clichés of inspired, fanatical passion, the brief speech-writing scene shows a man carefully calculating the phrasing and delivery of what has become stock jihadi language. Later, the two printers engage in their only dialogue, as the man in the Sonatrach T-shirt serves the speechwriter a meal. Replying to an ordinary question about whether or not a certain Dirar has stopped by, the speechwriter launches into a reprimand, telling his colleague not to stick his nose in affairs that don’t concern him, accusing him both of imagining himself another Ali la Pointe (hero of the revolution and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers) and of questioning his, the speechwriter’s, judgment and actions. Aside from underscoring how revolutionary heroes, supported by cinematic treatments, were appropriated by the “wrong” side during the civil war of the 1990s, this scene, along with others, exacerbates doubts regarding the two men’s broader allegiances—are they in the service of religious extremists, criminal gangs, or even law e­ nforcement?—while hinting that preparations for a significant, even suicide, attack, are underway. No tension builds, however, and no guerrilla operation unwinds on-screen. In its place, the steady devotion to surface, the static shots that crop spectators’ sense of omniscience coupled with a lack of action that insinuates that there is in any case nothing to see, work to forestall the localization of violence in either particular characters or places. So while

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the depiction of the two young men in the print shop, who may or may not be the murderers of l’Bosco and the attackers of Kamel and Zina in the film’s penultimate scene, proceeds along the now familiar lines of a muddling of ideological purity, Rome dwells little on their motives and inspiration. Instead, it relentlessly depicts, visually and aurally, the pedestrian forms of violence—symbolic, social, ideological, gendered, raced, economic, political, and so forth, often denoted among Algerians by the term l’hogra—that everywhere confront Kamel and Zina. Kamel and Zina’s first encounter neatly and immediately summarizes the violence with which they, their surroundings, and their relationships are suffused. When he calls out to her in greeting, “Good morning, spoils of war, salaam aleikum,” she quips, “Wa aleikum salaam, potential terrorist.” While suggestive that the couple self-reflexively plays with and even subverts the social and representational burdens with which they are freighted, the Ornette Coleman free-jazz-scored traveling shot dead-ends in the silent scene on a bridge overlooking train tracks and the port that is out of their reach. After a silent pause, Kamel dreams aloud of escaping his status as underemployed, undereducated eternal suspect by emigrating somewhere, anywhere, and Zina strives to bring him down to earth with a series of sardonic rejoinders that underscore the positionality within which they are locally and globally imprisoned. Mining bits of medieval and early modern history, Kamel sketches out Arab claims on Marseilles, Barcelona, Naples, as well as his personal claim to the American and Australian dream. Zina, however, replies that Australia is full of sheep and kangaroos, and doubts his ability to leave his “beloved neighborhood.” “Long live globalization,” proclaims Kamel and a slogan in Arabic, white letters on black background appears and lingers on-screen: ‫من يتجول بحدوده في ارض االخر يمارس الحرب‬ (He who roams with his boundaries in the land of the other practices war.)21

Implying that even if he is able to physically leave the country, he will always carry with him the burden of his nationality and characterizations of young, Arab men, along with the experiences that have shaped him and all that these entail, the floating slogan undermines Kamel’s, and the film’s, optimism. Because it comes as a direct communication to spectators, unentangled in any character’s emerging personality, and with the impersonal force of law, the slogan makes visible the pervasiveness of the violence, real and symbolic, that Kamel would deny with his optimistic invocation of globalization. “ ‘Arab’ means those on the move,” resumes Kamel when the picture returns, claiming the historical resonances of the word over political realities. “Arab means those who are denied entry,” retorts Zina, insisting on contemporary geopolitics, ever the pragmatist. Persisting, Kamel recites, in classical Arabic

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translation, his abridgment of the closing lines to the famous poem by Emma Lazarus engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Without missing a beat, Zina notes that for Kafka, the Statue of Liberty holds aloft a large club.22 Undismayed, Kamel reasons that Kafka must have been denied a visa, reversing his former tactics and universalizing the structural violence in which he is ensnared, all while ostensibly unaware of Kafka’s work. Their repartee and the scene end after Zina inquires how many people the boat is able to accommodate, and Kamel giddily declares that all Algeria will leave on it. Zina falls silent, looking first at the train tracks and then turning her back on the port to face the camera, squinting as if appraising the city behind it (fig. 7.5). Devoid of any dialogue, the ensuing scene features the two print shop workers, linking them to Kamel and Zina as shadows born of the same violence. In the foreground, the man in the green Sonatrach T-shirt leans on an idle machine, resting his head on his folded arms so that only his eyes are visible (fig. 7.6). They look briefly at the camera and then away, as his colleague works in the background, the printing press clicking out copies, while observing his partner. A slogan again appears on-screen, the style of its letters and the format of its presentation identical to the first: ‫فرصة ال تضيع وطن فتي قلت خدمته‬ (Opportunity not to be wasted: Young, little-used nation.)

Figure 7.5  Zina and Kamel on the bridge near the Port of Algiers

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Figure 7.6  The printers at work

A want ad without an audience, cynical commentary on Algeria’s leadership, postindependence history, and unmet potential, the announcement evokes an already vacant country up for grabs. Permeated by a kind of nostalgia for a bygone national sentiment, it counterposes the globalization of Kamel’s dreams with the failures of postindependence nationalism. When it passes, the setting has changed to the interior of a desolate cafe that the T-shirt-clad printer enters, demanding tea, and departs. This minimal action brings to the fore the soundscape consisting of a religious radio show featuring a preacher who admonishes a first female caller that her ablutions will not be accepted by God if she is wearing nail polish, and a second that any visit to her brother-in-law without her husband is illicit. A cut follows the printer as he navigates his way through a wasteland of concrete and unfinished buildings, silent and hostile when a Black migrant queries, “Work, work?” Although the ideological leanings of the print workers are not yet apparent, they are embedded in a world of drudgery, alternately marked by calls for strict regulation of personal behavior and desperate, clandestine circulations. Innocuous and repetitive as their actions seem, the threat of violence hovers over the scene without, however, attaching explicitly to the two characters. They appear therefore as products of the same world of oppression and violence as that occupied by Zina and Kamel. Yet the film hints that by contrast with the protagonist couple, these two young men seek not to liberate themselves from, but rather to seize upon, this violence.

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Dull manifestations of structural violence and threats of something more concrete dog Kamel and Zina throughout their relentless and sometimes comic peregrinations in a somber Algiers and the nearly deserted suburb of La Madrague. Encounters with strangers, with the print shop workers, and with the employees of a backstairs cabaret are marked by suspicions and intimations that more spectacular violence might be unleashed upon them at any moment. Everything ostensibly comes to a head in a tragicomic encounter with the police in a cafe where Kamel, his friend Merzak, and Zina have gone for coffee after an impromptu game of soccer with some kids on a beach. Shot with a fixed camera located at mid-distance to the right and rear of Zina, it features the relentless, absurdly circular interrogation of the surprised, wary, baffled, and annoyed trio by a police chief and his two deputies. Crashing the young people’s table under the heavy-handed pretext of watching a televised soccer game with them, the detective opens his inquiry with a meditation on American imperialism and failed US policy in Algeria. In the process, he peppers Kamel, Zina, and Merzak with a mix of fact-seeking and ideology-discerning questions. It very quickly becomes clear that the only correct response would have been never to have entered the cafe in the first place. Kamel, Zina, and Merzak are accused of a host of transgressions: stealing a car, lying, committing unknown crimes abroad, smuggling, being in a cafe with men, consorting with criminals, shirking military duty, not working in the profession in which they earned their degree, challenging the questions posed to them, answering the questions posed to them. One deputy implies that Zina is a prostitute for being out with two men who are nonrelatives and, when she protests, reminds her that Algeria’s laws make of her an eternal minor. Almost simultaneously, the police chief taxes Kamel with having tarnished Algeria’s reputation abroad (he admits to a previous expulsion from Italy) and ideological laxity. Browbeaten and sensing a trap, Kamel refuses to name his favorite soccer team, and the cops decide to drag the trio to the police station for investigation. Once there, they are quickly forgotten and then told to go home, during curfew and without their papers, in a clear violation of numerous laws, opening them up not just to later arrest but to even more spectacular forms of violence. But that violence doesn’t come until the next day, and more obliquely than expected. Waiting to resume their search, Zina and Kamel pass a long, tense night in the backroom of a nondescript bakery staffed by a former journalist who is a friend of Merzak, and who drowns his sorrows at being forced from his profession in alcohol and rai music. Undeterred from his dream of leaving, Kamel tells Zina that their lives in Algeria are more clandestine than those of undocumented immigrants abroad. Even so, she continues to dismiss his offers to help her immigrate. Interspersed with scenes of the conversation are others of would-be emigrants running among the shipping containers in the port. At least one is caught by guards, and another stops to address the

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camera, explaining that since he has nothing in Algeria, he just wants to see what lies across the sea. Merzak and Malek, meanwhile, find themselves in an under-the-radar bar with the still loquacious police chief, who tells them to go to America, where, as D. H. Lawrence said, they will find a republic of slaves on the run. Eldridge Cleaver, he informs them, told him this was still true in 1970, when Cleaver, accused of murder in the United States, was in exile in Algeria and the police chief was assigned to protect and surveil him. After reflecting on the trumped-up nature of the charges against Cleaver and his real threat to the US state, he suddenly interjects, addressing Merzak, that Kamel is right; that he’s understood everything on his own. Enslavement for Kamel, the police chief abruptly concludes, exists no less in Algeria, where he is treated as a criminal, if not a de facto threat to the state. Always presumed in violation of some law, Kamel can only exist in his own country clandestinely, as he himself recognizes and the film conveys. As much as the slow and steady violence of his everyday existence in Algeria has persuaded Kamel, along with his nameless cohort, to invent his own exile by any means possible, he lacks the grimly realist historical perspective and disenchanted worldview of the police chief. Gazing at the ships on the Mediterranean Sea after his discovery of l’Bosco’s body and Zina’s presentation of the travel documents, Kamel imagines himself into a mobile and exciting future. Of all the characters in Rome, he is the only one who possesses a conviction that radically transformed relations—social, economic, and political—are possible. Time and again he marvels at the scope and variety of his possible destinations and at the variety of maps, from ancient to contemporary, he might employ to navigate his paths beyond contemporary sociopolitical relations. Meanwhile, Zina remains largely unmoved, seemingly too aware of the nature of geopolitics, of economic and cultural globalizations, and of gender and race politics to be able to envision that a future as an undocumented immigrant represents much improvement over her current circumstances. Yet as the trio’s initial interview with the policemen discloses, Kamel previously worked in Italy and lived in Spain, and has been deported back to Algeria at least once already. Rather than stemming from naïveté, his enthusiasm for emigration by any means arises from his desperation to escape the real and symbolic violences that enclose him on all sides. Rome depicts the crumbling of Algeria’s postindependence ideologies of socialist resistance and internationalism, underscoring the country’s deep imbrication in immobilizing circuits of global exchange as much as in the violence that emanates from hollow reclamations of resistance to those circuits. In the end, however, the film changes nothing, promoting no enlightenment. Instead it cultivates a nostalgia for romantics like Kamel while demonstrating the impossibilities of their existence. It is Zina who has the final word. Perhaps because as a woman she has always been expected to tolerate marginality, harsh judgments, and l’hogra

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as a matter of course, Zina resists Kamel’s fantasies of a transformed existence born of simple displacement. 23 While he imagines other worlds, she scrutinizes her surroundings, often squinting her eyes, and interjecting only spare, pointed, comments. Her own perspectives and thoughts remain unclear, any interiority of her character foreclosed. In any event, when she calls Kamel an idiot, she rebukes him for imagining he could ever escape the quiet violence of Algeria simply by crossing a border into another country. Her reproach extends also to his choice of soundtracks for his fate, the love-themed rai music of Cheb Hasni. Theirs is not a story of doomed love. Kamel’s death is not the noble self-sacrifice of a devoted lover. Zina is no bereft, distraught beloved. Looking at the camera with steady intensity, Zina cautions spectators not to gloss the film’s violence in this or any similar manner, forestalling even the smallest glimmer of redemption or catharsis. With this final anticlimactic shot, Teguia’s film nonetheless momentarily initiates that slide of signification which occurs in those moments when relations seem to commence a radical shift. Neither heroine nor victim, neither sex symbol nor defiant feminist, the character of Zina is something new, and not only in Algerian cinema. Far more revolutionary than the bomb carriers of The Battle of Algiers, her character acts as the conduit to a mobile perspective that, because it does not stop at herself, opening instead on the wastelands of Teguia’s film, becomes much more difficult to sustain. Easy to miss, it demands a radical revision of perspective.

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Hooking Up Faouzi Bensaïdi’s WWW: What a Wonderful World (2006) I dreamt of you three times today. More than yesterday. But less than tomorrow. —Rym and Khliffa, Masquerades Faouzi Bensaïdi’s 2006 WWW: What a Wonderful World is fundamentally a love story. Or rather, several criss-crossing, ill-fated, oddly compelling, and absurdly romantic love stories: most prominently that of traffic cop Kenza for hitman Kamel, and of Kamel for the woman who answers the phone (Kenza) when he calls occasional prostitute Souad. That of Souad for the handsome would-be thief (Hisham), who breaks into her absent employers’ home but passes out drunk rather than making off with anything of value. That of Hisham for a visa to any country in Europe or North America. That of shantytown-dwelling young mother Fatma for her absent, soldier husband. That of the owner of the photo shop, blindfolded by Fatma’s friends when they bring her to make risqué photos for her absent husband, for the unseen subject of those photos, or maybe for the experience of participating in the photography session while blindfolded. And finally, that of Bensaïdi himself for cinema. Perhaps even that of moviegoers for the iconic films evoked by the cinematic tropes Bensaïdi deploys. Facilitated by technology, both old and new, these love stories foreground desires for the mobility that comes of new connections, whether personal, social, economic, geographic, or all four. Yet they also prove impossible, fantasies sparked and maintained by accelerating flows of images and means of contact that, by misunderstanding or necessity, substitute for the very connections and mobility they ­promise. Like its title, whose meaning appears obvious until WWW is glossed as What a Wonderful World, the title of Louis Armstrong’s paean to love, Bensaïdi’s film scrambles circuits of signification, its ostensibly obvious ­referents quickly becoming elusive.

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Pointing as it does to endless chains of meaning, that is, to other movies rather than to social realities, WWW does not deliver a moral lesson, whether about film or the objects of its images. Rather, it entertainingly places on a collision course film and socioeconomic tropes, global film culture and Moroccan social and cinematic preoccupations. Bensaïdi’s second film after his much-lauded 2003 debut A Thousand Months (Alf Shuhur / Mille mois), WWW deliberately foregrounds style rather than narrative coherence, making it difficult to assimilate to any film from the Maghreb before or since.1 By contrast to Teguia’s Rome, social realism is fleeting. It teasingly gestures from many scenes in the economic situations, living conditions, and livelihoods of its protagonists, but is most perceptible in their fantasy-filled aspirations. Rather, first and foremost, WWW pays tribute to a range of film genres from film noir to French musical comedy, nouvelle vague, and slapstick, and film auteurs from Jacques Tati to Elia Suleiman without forgetting Wong Kar Wai and Takeshi Kitano.2 Set in the streets, houses, shantytowns, office buildings, malls, beaches, cybercafes, and debris-filled lots of Casablanca, WWW presents a vast city that bears little resemblance to its iconic Hollywood counterpart, yet which also serves as the support to myriad dreams of transnational mobility.3 No more than the eponymous film Casablanca does WWW strive for fidelity to the reality of place, despite possessing the advantage of having been shot on location. Rather, Bensaïdi’s film shifts the focus from European fantasies of resistance, romance, and the reluctant unmoorings both entail to the media-inspired dreams of mobility-seeking Moroccan protagonists. These Moroccan characters are themselves composites of well-known film characters and media tropes, however. At the same time, the love story of Kamel and Kenza at the center of WWW recalls in updated form the cautions set down by Ibn Hazm of Cordoba in his eleventh-century treatise on love, The Dove’s Neckring (Tawq al-hamama): never fall in love with a dream, and never fall in love with a voice.4 Instead of employing the couple as counterillustration for instruction in more salutary loves, however, WWW explores just how deeply appealing cinema’s contraventions of such sage advice has always been. The animated credits of WWW campily evoke retro film references from James Bond and the Pink Panther to silent films, musicals, and romantic comedies. Their playfulness, however, does little to foreshadow the interpretive-affective riddle embedded in the film’s opening sequence of dialogue-free scenes. Quirkily framed so as to wrest spectator attention from the figures that naturally attract their gazes, these scenes disrupt the linear organization of visual information characteristic of narrative-driven film, functioning as so many cryptic visual clues. Opening with a close-up of young couple, reminiscent of the reckless, privileged teenagers in Laila Marrakchi’s Marock (2005) as they drive a jeep on a beach in the midst of young men on ATVs, WWW misleads as to its true subject.5 The camera quickly withdraws

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from the fun-loving young couple and the ATV-riding young men to reveal Kamel (played by Bensaïdi himself) staring fixedly ahead in extreme, off-center close-up. While the sound of ATV engines links him to the first shot, neither his physical relation to, nor his role in, the scene is clear. Shifting, in quick succession, back to the ATV riders in medium close-up, a long shot of the trench coat-wearing Kamel in profile raising a camera to his eye, and another long shot of the ATVs and jeep on the beach, the sequence rapidly fills in this missing information (fig. 8.1). Or rather seems to. When the film tracks Kamel in slow motion, still wearing his trench coat as he walks along a broken sidewalk by newly constructed cinderblock buildings and debris-strewn lot, finally turning into a photography lab, the story appears familiar: looking the consummate private-eye, he must be on assignment to surveil the young couple. Less than thirty seconds later, this conjecture fades as Kamel sits among his photographs, all shots of the tire tracks on the beach, comparing their patterns to the symbols in a book he holds in his left hand. Pulling up the log-in page to a chat room on his computer, he enters the series of letters and numbers into which the book translates the beach patterns, and the photograph and personal information of a middle-aged businessman appear on screen. Listing his name, occupation, eye color, hobbies, and favorite places, the page also includes less common details such as the name of the man’s mistress, his work address, and the time and place of his execution. A click of the keyboard summons the sound of a printer as well as an aerial image of the man’s office location and a photograph of the building. Clad in a black dress shirt and slacks, smoking a cigarette, and holding the page of information, Kamel slowly walks from his darkened, minimally furnished penthouse apartment onto a balcony illuminated by a giant neon advertisement

Figure 8.1  Kamel photographing ATVs on the beach

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for champagne. He looks out over the railing, briefly stares at the paper in his hand, and walks to the neon sign, where he pastes the man’s description against the bulbs to burn up as he stretches out on the contemporary bed inside, still smoking his cigarette. In the following scene, Kamel calculatingly assassinates the businessman in an otherwise deserted men’s washroom. At the completion of that scene, WWW has reached the six-minute mark. Not a word has been spoken. Still, much has been transmitted regarding Kamel’s character. As the common link in these introductory scenes, he steals the film’s focus at the same time that he does nothing to attract attention, the very absence of self-revealing actions delineating an utterly familiar trope. Consummately cool with his deadpan expression, cigarette, measured, self-assured movements, somber trench coat over unassuming Western clothes, and stripped-down, isolated, penthouse apartment in the glow of the anachronistic champagne sign, Kamel exudes a cool ruthlessness that by turns conjures James Bond, Rick Blaine, the hard-boiled detectives of film noir, and the self-controlled heroes of martial arts films.6 In a materially real, contemporary Casablanca, his character is completely improbable. Dark, silent, smoking, and using women as he pleases, Kamel reflects not Moroccan realities, but an immediately recognizable iconic film character. A refraction of classical, popular cinema, his character is freighted with expectations regarding the narrative arc and legibility of the film in which he is embedded; in due time, the motives and purposes of his actions will doubtlessly come into focus. Until that moment, his actions and demeanor serve as an object of dramatic tension while the strange signs for which he is ever on the lookout—collecting them in unlikely places, deciphering them in terms of digital code, entering that code into a web portal in order to receive the assignment that dictates his next actions—recede into the background. When the backstory that would confirm Kamel’s knowing agency never materializes, those signs, absurd in their configuration, re-emerge to suggest that there was all along another way of reading WWW. Pure abstractions, translated in turn into code, they reference no easily extracted meaning, but directly signify only to Kamel, himself an obvious composite of artifice who nonetheless cannot quite conform to type. Reviewing the film for Variety, Jay Weissberg rearticulates Euro-American expectations regarding North African cinema when he praises the film’s originality yet remarks that “concentration tends to focus more on inventive images than genuine social commentary,” thereby limiting its chances for exhibition beyond the festival circuit. Yet so strong is this imperative that “global cinema” exemplify social or political commentary that Weissberg later generalizes some from the movie’s conclusion: “Pic’s deadly serious ending comes as a shock after the generally wry and upbeat tone, reminding auds that these people live on a potentially precarious edge.”7 Weissberg’s comments exemplify

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not a personal critical bias but rather a collective blindness to the possibility that films from the global South might comment on matters that exceed the sociogeographical boundaries assigned to them, might in fact offer social and political commentary on the production, circulation, and spectatorship of film worldwide.8 Certainly, in its self-reflexive skewering of the social or magical realist expectations that automatically accrue to it through pastiches of myriad auteurs and genres in its ironic embrace of film noir, WWW foregrounds not just the question of its positionality in the hierarchy of the slippery category of world or global cinema, but the very meaning of the rubric. Yet WWW also highlights the paradoxical expectations contemporary Moroccan and regional audiences—whether state funding agencies, private investors, film critics, scholars and students, film buffs, or casual filmgoers— bring to films set in Morocco and made by Morocco-identified directors. A  beneficiary of the country’s new prioritization of cinema through the agency of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain after studying film in France, Bensaïdi recognizes the Centre’s role in establishing and maintaining an economic and cultural presence among competing currents of global media.9 Although, like most Moroccan films, it received limited play in movie houses, and more tellingly never became a popular bootleg film, WWW did earn the esteem of Moroccan scholars, fellow filmmakers, and its partial sponsor, the Centre.10 Very much a filmmaker’s film, unlike Bensaïdi’s first feature, A Thousand Months, which was set in rural Morocco during the country’s years of lead and retained closer ties to social realism, more conventional narrative sequencing, and stylistic unity, it nonetheless develops several features of that earlier work. WWW often employs a static camera and positions characters and action at a remove or off-center, creating, as Roy Armes observed of A Thousand Months, “a complex film which simultaneously excites and frustrates the spectator.”11 Even as they become Bensaïdi’s calling card, however, these stylistic elements can also read, in Months, as commentary on the occultations of national history, and in WWW, as a both playful and deadly serious critique of Morocco and global film history. Like his improbable hitman, Kamel, Bensaïdi coolly executes one set of cinematic codes, one stylistic signature, one technical innovation, after another, until love strikes and sets him on a fatal collision course with the relentless agents of a vast network he is unable to “neutralize.” In the biographical details of his victims and subsequent pursuers—all businessmen assassinated in generic office towers and industrial parks, with the exception of the human trafficker / club owner / businessman shot outside his villa—WWW extends its critique beyond film history to that global village / wonderful world inscribed in its title. Within the film’s diegesis, new technologies promise to facilitate not just formerly difficult unions, but also previously difficult-to-imagine social mobilities. At the same time, however, they render old obstacles newly palpable, accidental and failed hook-ups

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reflecting promises of free-market economics and unfettered access to global flows that always seeming just out of reach. The film’s additional three protagonists—Kenza, Souad, and Hisham—receive the more upbeat cinematic treatment of Moroccan pop culture tropes by contrast with the dark, phantasmal character of Kamel, but they are no less products of the very currents of globalization that also seem to elude them. A traffic cop, a maid / occasional prostitute, and a hacker, all three denizens of Casablanca’s shantytowns, they exemplify contemporary urban, Moroccan social aspirations, continuing to strive even as they, no less than Kamel, are reduced to stock, albeit regionally inflected, media tropes. As a traffic cop obliged to make money on the side by renting out her cell phone, Kenza both reflects the realities of Morocco’s agents of order—she is underpaid and must generate other forms of income—and a parallel fantasy—not only is she a woman, but she effortlessly controls the notoriously snarled, undisciplined Casablanca traffic (fig. 8.2). Not least, her character ingeniously critiques local corruption by inflating her integrity and powers as a stringently by-the-book agent of the law. Meanwhile, Kenza’s entrepreneurial side business renting out her cell phone, the activity through which her character is introduced, presents not just her resourcefulness and entrepreneurial spirit, but eventually also the precariousness of those much-lauded microentrepreneurs seeking to benefit from a global capitalism whose flows are orchestrated elsewhere: her business crumbles when affordable cell phones and service are introduced—as communicated by a large billboard that looms above her shantytown. Because of this, and despite the relatively little communicated about Kenza’s past, her character is drawn with greater verisimilitude and depth than Kamel’s, whose cool circulation through the city at times brings to mind an avatar or video game

Figure 8.2  Kenza heading out with her phone and stopwatch

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character, something reinforced in a brief animated sequence that renders one of his hits. Some of Kenza’s realist credibility derives simply from her easy use of colloquial Moroccan Arabic, as opposed to Kamel’s silence on-screen and use of French on the phone, a detail that initially prompts Kenza to identify him as a gaouri, or European. Still, while Kenza appears more plausible within the social, economic, and temporal context of early twenty-first-century urban Morocco, WWW constantly toys with associative conditioning. It briefly reframes Kamel as a potential terrorist, for example, when it juxtaposes his hand moving the paper airplane he fashions of his mission instructions around the twin towers of Casablanca, icons of that city’s economic dominance. An encounter between Kenza and Kamel in the ultramodern shopping mall housed by those towers further exacerbates the play of recognition and misrecognition among the characters themselves, with Hisham acting as silent spectator invisible to both Kamel and Kenza, and recognizing only the former. As he ascends the escalator of the crowded shopping center after a hit, Kamel is unexpectedly identified by a victim he had left for dead. Undaunted, he turns, draws his gun, and shoots the man in the forehead. As panicked patrons run for the exits, lines of uniformed police officers stream into the building, sealing off the exits with comedically unrealistic timing. Kenza, in the mall consulting a technician about the repair of her smashed cell phone, is not among them. Observing that the police are allowing women, many of them in djellabas and with covered hair, to exit the center, Kamel dashes into a women’s lavatory—and reemerges wearing a long blond wig, makeup, a black skirt-suit, fake breasts, and a jaunty scarf that masks his Adam’s apple. He boards the next available elevator, which holds a Kenza seemingly unaware of the surrounding commotion. As they stand silently side by side in the elevator, Kenza surreptitiously glances at Kamel, her mouth curving in a tentative smile. Kamel nervously darts his eye back at her, each look lasting a bit longer. Midway through their ride, accompanied by a slow romantic music, an off-center close-up holds together Kamel’s left and Kenza’s right eyes as they slide toward each other before glancing away (fig. 8.3). When the elevator stops just as Kamel finally turns his head toward her, Kenza strides out without a backward glance as he stares after her. Once on ground level, Kamel pushes his way to the front of an agitated crowd, easily cutting through the crowd of men and past the police officer. Improbable on multiple levels, Kamel’s full drag contravenes Maghrebi cinematic precedent and logic, which presume that he will don a concealing djellaba and headscarf, while also bringing to the fore a not immediately visible web of assumptions at work within the film’s diegesis. Kamel easily passes muster with the police because his dress and apparent social status perfectly suit the up-scale icon of neoliberal capital that is the Twin Center shopping mall and office tower. A  parodical valorization of the transformative power attributed to the modern, commercial space of the

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Figure 8.3  Kamel and Kenza sharing an elevator

mall, Kamel masquerading as woman pushes to its logical limits the promise of self-realization imputed to the goods and services sold there. At the same time, Kenza’s apparent attraction while failing to recognize him in the elevator models a series of possible attitudes—attraction, unconscious appraisal, distraction, and oblivion—toward the universe of WWW itself. Her exit matter-of-factly concludes the encounter as if she has forgotten her elevator companion as easily as the various goods on offer throughout the mall. At the same time, Kamel’s own looks convey both fear (of being recognized) and growing desire (to know his elevator companion), the latter impossible because of his very disguise. Significantly, the relationship of power in which they have hitherto been locked is suddenly reversed as Kamel, constrained into inactivity by the space of the elevator, becomes conscious of Kenza’s gaze for the first time. This moment of self-awareness (on Kamel’s part) and misrecognition (on Kenza’s) self-reflexively encodes (Kamel is played by Bensaïdi himself) the inevitable misreading of the film’s focus and message. Like Kenza, the characters of Souad and Hisham derive their lightness from the upbeat conviction with which they embrace small-scale entrepreneurial pastimes. Looking to no one but themselves for help, they seem the very incarnation of a bottom-of-the-pyramid-up development theory espoused by proponents of market liberalization.12 Although her jobs as prostitute and maid place her on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, Souad cheerfully identifies with the wealth of her employers, a comical dance sequence with their modern appliances conveying her belief in upward mobility even as subtitles announce that she is celebrating the ten-year anniversary of her arrival in Casablanca. As a prostitute, she remains intrigued

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by Kamel, her favorite client, who calls her after every execution and tosses her wordlessly out of his bed at precisely 4:00 a.m. each time. Yet in intervals between cleaning jobs and dates, she dreams of seducing a rich Gulf Arab who will whisk her away to a life of luxury. Eminently pragmatic, however, Souad takes a cynical view of love for love’s sake, rolls her eyes at her best friend Kenza’s deepening lovesickness, and persuades Kenza and Fatima to accompany her on a gig at a senior citizen birthday party. That scene, along with others, comically highlights the contrast between idealized, tough woman warrior Kenza—who knocks out, handcuffs, and arrests the birthday party guests after Souad switches off the lights to heighten the effect of the cake candles—and caricatural Souad, a trope of Moroccan cinema who deflects both pity and censure through her attempts to make the best of the opportunities offered uneducated women. Quirky framing, rotating cinematic styles, and narrative jumps defer social critique until the film’s denouement, when Souad remains the only character still alive even as she is left behind by the film’s loose narrative. Like Souad a caricature of stock film types, though far more recent and broadly popular ones, Hisham is a youth attuned to and embracing globalization’s promises of unfettered onward and upward mobility. Self-reliant, a master of the Internet, and persistent, Hisham by all appearances aspires to become globalization’s model neoliberal subject. He works tirelessly to pull himself and his wheelchair-bound beggar father from extreme poverty, criss-crossing the city in his day job as a “honda” driver, and effortlessly navigating cyberspace during his illicit nocturnal forays to the locked Club Internet Universe. Easily penetrating the security barriers and settings of foreign corporations and individual users of chat websites such as Kamel, the young, handsome Hisham initially seems to have bested a system that perversely criminalizes his crossing of political as well as virtual borders in his efforts to join it.13 Yet even as he resembles the information-era trickster-hacker that has emerged in Maghrebi popular culture, his skills fail to get him what he really wants, wealth and the real mobility afforded by a European visa.14 Despite limited success in exemplifying this heroic archetype, however, Hisham never appears pathetic or derisory. Most importantly, he is the architect, at once conscious and unwitting, of the denouement that claims Kamel’s and Kenza’s loves and lives. Hisham first appears retracing Kamel’s slow-motion walk to the photography studio; there he immediately establishes himself as a comedic character by posing as a cowboy in front of a backdrop of New York City that still includes the World Trade Center, in a trench coat and beret in front of the Eiffel Tower, and in a kilt in front of Buckingham Palace. Electronic pop music with the refrain “I want a change, a change in my life” plays as digitalized letters scroll out, personals-style, his age (twenty), interests (soccer, this music), aspirations (Europe), the attributes of his ideal mate (young, beautiful, well-established, Western woman, and the URL of his

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Figure 8.4  Hisham posing for photographs

personal website (fig. 8.4). Apparently, no European woman responds to his overtures, for Hisham soon hacks into the site of an Italian firm and issues himself a letter of invitation. When visa officials at the Italian consulate challenge the letter’s authenticity, his efforts culminate in a Buster Keaton-esque battle between visa postulants and consulate security, most of the action blocked from view by a tree trunk in the center of the frame. Despite these setbacks—which prompt him to turn to the seedy boss of a human trafficking network who takes all his father’s savings and sends him out on a rickety, overloaded boat that quickly capsizes—and the deep poverty in which he lives, no melodramatic tension builds around Hisham’s character. Glimpses of the miserable conditions in which he and his alcoholic, beggar father live are offset by their savvy perspective on the hustles that ensure their survival. In one scene, Hisham’s father bathes in a white claw-foot bathtub set on a mud field near the wooden shack they call home, his son supplying the water and scrubbing his back. Poignancy is displaced by the incongruity of the tub in this landscape, the briefness of the scene, and the elder man’s imperious directive not to scrub too hard because cleanliness is bad for business. If such scenes telegraph Hisham’s sense of filial obligation, they do so not to emphasize his social immobility, but rather to celebrate his multifaceted resourcefulness, industriousness, and most i­ mportantly, relentless drive. Although Hisham is given more depth than Kamel, Kenza, or Souad, characters free of family ties and backstories, he remains an icon, defined solely by his similarity to other cinematic and social types and stereotypes, rather than an individuated persona. If this very superficiality might also have imbued this young, poor, Arab male character with an aura of menace,

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his repeatedly demonstrated interest in accessing rather than subverting the lifestyles and consumer opportunities he finds on the Internet dismisses any sense of threat. Overall, Hisham’s character is surprising because so little dramatic tension builds around him. When he determines to use for revenge Kamel’s secret assignment portal by setting up as his next target the chief of the human trafficking network, he lurches nervously through his preparations, rendered in scenarios from genre films. Ignorant of the methods by which Kamel normally finds his assignment access codes, he ambushes a street purveyor of Chinese-made mechanical toys with the intent of immobilizing the man so that he may temporarily take his job. The man quickly bests Hisham with his kung fu skills yet speaks perfect colloquial Moroccan Arabic. When Kamel pursues Hisham after he drops a talking toy on his cafe table, the chase quickly turns into a mutual, silent gunpoint confrontation between Kamel and Kenza, Hisham once again reduced to a peripheral figure in the film’s central love story. Indeed, Hisham appears only twice more, and briefly, near the film’s end. In the first scene, very short, he sells parts of the Internet club’s computers at an outdoor flea market; in the next, he appears amid a group of men gazing in awe at an approaching luxury liner as they float at night in a small wooden fishing boat. Characterizing WWW as a mosaic film able to “provide a slightly new perception of the world,” Patricia Pisters remarks that none of the characters in the film are subjected to moral judgments.15 Certainly, WWW presents its characters—hitman, prostitute, would-be immigrant, gun-toting, single policewoman—independently of the webs of morality in which such characters are normally embedded.16 As a result, the film modifies perception not by means of the kind of “intensive, affective encounter” Pisters finds there, but rather almost through an ablation of affective engagement. Consisting as it does of absurdist mash-ups of characters, scenes, and plot lines from sometimes incongruous film genres and social fantasies, WWW entertains through verisimilitude and expectation-thwarting takes on familiar characters and narratives.17 No less than Kamel are Kenza, Hisham, and Souad pure media archetypes; their characters differ from his only insofar as they emerge in part from regional cinema and telefilms rather than primarily from classical, auteurist, and global genre cinema. Projections of a love affair with cinema that persists even as the medium retreats from regional popularity, their stories draw upon our cinematic-visual literacy and astuteness regarding the hierarchies that inhere within global cinema as much, if not more than, any direct sociocultural literacy, at least one limited to Morocco. Yet so thoroughly do improbable encounters, comic scenarios, intertextual references, and metacinematic play pervade the film, and so rapidly does WWW cycle through off-kilter perspectives, that the abrupt and final conclusion of each narrative cannot but shock.

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An absence of foreshadowing, or rather of visual and aural devices that would draw attention to such foreshadowing, coupled with his character’s comedic resourcefulness, ensures that Hisham’s fate startles. In his final appearance, he stands on a small wooden fishing boat amid a crowd of men staring open-mouthed at a dazzlingly illuminated luxury liner. They begin to wave and call out as the first strains of Johann Strauss’s “Rosen aus dem Suden” (“Roses from the South”) become audible, breaking into cheers and frantic waves as the volume of the music grows louder and the liner moves rapidly in a direct line toward them. One man calls out for the others to sit down, the boat rocking dangerously as he works to restart the motor.18 A static medium-long shot follows, the liner sliding along majestically to the upbeat, energetic notes of Strauss’s waltz, its crushing of the men’s boat registering only as a quick crunch below the surging music (fig. 8.5). The camera holds steady as the full length of the liner moves past, no one visible on board or in the water. Death by drowning after an overloaded boat capsizes or runs out of fuel at sea is an all too frequent and familiar outcome of clandestine immigration attempts from North Africa.19 Death by luxury liner less so. The manner in which the grand ship glides into the scene, moving toward the small boat in an unexpected aerial shot that also reveals a calm, moonlit sea, along with the men’s delight at its approach, and the music that accompanies the scene, sets up a very different narrative sequence. Accordingly, immediate rescue, or at the very least, a call for coast guard help, should follow. That the ship matter-of-factly churns up the fishing boat and its human cargo may certainly be read as an unexpectedly direct metaphor for the callousness of a “global” capitalism that fails to make good on its promises to those in the global South

Figure 8.5  The luxury liner crushing the migrants’ wooden fishing boat

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while reinforcing barriers to the global North. Visually and narratively, the afterlife of Hisham, exemplary microentrepreneur and devotee of capitalism, is limited to a scene of his father maneuvering his wheelchair among cars at an intersection in the pouring rain, knocking on car windows that remain tightly closed. Night, if not the weather, suggests simultaneity with Hisham’s demise, but the arid setting of the following scene undercuts such conjecture, unmooring it from the film’s temporal sequencing as free-floating residue. Like Souad’s disappearance from the film, this glimpse of Hisham’s father suggests that cinematic tropes as much as geopolitical realities conspire to immobilize beyond certain boundaries, and that the everyday of the Maghreb will make for a popular cinema when it is once again able to inspire unbounded hopes, aspirations, and dreams. Until the moment that the boat carrying Hisham is obliterated by the cruise ship, WWW has sustained the dream of happy endings that mainstream cinema, beginning with the rise of Hollywood, has so long offered. Relentlessly optimistic even and especially in the face of the most improbable circumstances, these narratives feed upon and into neoliberal capital’s narrative that anything is possible for those diligent or adventurous enough to create or seize their own opportunities. Hisham’s death suggests the flip side of this tenacious vision, while also reflecting the inequities that structure the increasingly popular if sometimes amorphous category that is global cinema. Visually, the encounter of the would-be clandestine immigrants with the cruise ship is calqued upon a famous scene in Federico Fellini’s iconic Amarcord (1973).20 In Fellini’s sentimental-critical hymn to his childhood in fascist Italy, the curiosity and pride of the townspeople of Rimini for the SS Rex, a cruise liner meant to attest to the power and achievements of Mussolini’s Italy, provides the pretext for a night of merriment, music, and reflection aboard boats in their harbor. Near daybreak, the ship’s horn rouses them to cheers and waves as, dazzlingly lit, it passes in the fog, roiling the cellophane sea and upsetting the townspeople’s boats in its wake. If Fellini’s scene comments on the impressionability of the townspeople when confronted with the spectacle and theatrics of fascism, underscoring its clear artifice with a cellophane sea and obvious stage set luxury cruise liner, the encounter nonetheless does not prove fatal to any of the characters. Flawed yet likable, or at least highly entertaining, their adventures continue, fascinating for what they suggest about the formation and expression of great directors’ vision. In WWW, Hisham’s encounter with the luxury liner is deadly serious from the outset, precisely because its many indicators of a happy ending play so straight. Thanks to advances in computer-generated graphics, no glaring indicators of cheap artifice disrupt the reverie set up by the scenario. On the contrary, the establishing overhead aerial shot of a small boat on the moonlit sea, steadily pulling back to reveal the luxury ship gliding into the frame on

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the diagonal from the upper right, reinforces the sense that in this film universe, everything is possible. Rare in a Moroccan film where the cost once necessary to stage such shots from a helicopter or plane proved prohibitive, this perspective almost imperceptibly affirms the film’s power not merely to keep up with the tools of cinematic fantasy, but to participate in the shaping of those powerful cinematic universes.21 Because Bensaïdi is a young director, virtually unknown in the United States and Europe, the scene’s denouement has little to say about the director’s personal style or aesthetics, by contrast with Fellini’s boat excursion. Nor does the sociopolitical context of the scene, too proximate to lend itself to easily critical perspectives in the way that Fellini’s fascist Italy did. Not least, the combination of a handsome but destitute young man willing to risk everything to reshape his destiny, a grand ship, and computer-generated effects places WWW in yet another cinematic context, conjuring the never-distant ghost of James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and its hero, Jack.22 In tackling a spectacle of such scale, the film seems definitively to leave behind Moroccan cinematic treatments of immigration, whether serious or comic, to forge a cinematic reality that declares its independence from the tangled web of politics and morality in which contemporary representations of Maghrebi immigrants have been trapped.23 Like Hisham, WWW is poised to cross a line, to leave behind once and for all the role of providing palatable insights into the issues and aesthetic sensibilities of a particular corner of the globe in order to join the ranks of filmmakers whose work is seen as globally relevant. Consequently, when Hisham and his fellow voyagers are crushed by the large computer-generated luxury liner, the shock and sense of betrayal are absolute. Not only has Hisham, in an absurdist twist, finally succumbed to the worst possible fate at the very moment he seemed poised to defy all odds, but so too do the boundaries imposed on Maghrebi cinema come careening back into view. Without the material resources to fashion an elaborate adventure for Hisham, whether aboard the ship, Titanic-style, or in Europe itself, where papier mâché decor will no longer pass for baroque inventiveness, Bensaïdi substitutes for them the indigestible moment offered by Hisham’s father begging unsuccessfully in the pouring rain.24 If it may seem that WWW is thrown back into the role of local representative rather than deeply engaging with Euro-American cinema history, this scene points out the overlooked limits of precisely that Euro-American cinema, so often celebrated for its risk-taking and inventiveness, rather than any flaw of Moroccan or Maghrebi film culture. In other words, this scene and the film as a whole do not lament the absence of crossover opportunities for Moroccan directors, or even necessarily the lack of resources and access to the latest filmmaking technology that remains the lot of filmmakers who locate themselves in the global South. In its intertextual references, the scene of the fishing boat encountering the cruise ship calls attention to a thornier issue: namely how in 1973, the Italian

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Fellini, treating European fascism of the past, was a geopolitical and phenomenological insider in a way that in 2006 the Moroccan Bensaïdi, exploring the dark, everyday obverse of present-day globalization, cannot be. WWW underscores this by showing characters who are the perfect products of the global circulation of capital, culture, and images. Rather than lacking maturity as a result of their embeddedness in a nefarious ideology that inhibits personal development, as Fellini’s characters did, they are a combination of mature reflections of iconic cinematic tropes and avid pursuers of progressist Euro-American ideals. Instead of criticizing a historical past already externalized and recast as aberrant in relation to the Euro-American present, WWW explores the connectivity and rapid transformations of the here and now. Consequently, whereas Fellini was criticized for “sugarcoating” fascism by downplaying the violence of the system, the violence in Bensaïdi’s film is remarkable not for its casualness, but only for its sometimes unexpected source and directionality.25 After the abrupt, nearly invisible demise of Hisham, Kamel and Kenza fall in a hail of bullets just as they manage to finally connect. What troubles is not the on-screen violence; its tropes are all too familiar. Nor is it the identity of the gunmen, or even the intimation of a foundational disregard for life at the heart of the very ideological-economic system that promises unlimited opportunity; third, anti-imperial, and socialist films have long proposed similar perspectives. No, what disconcerts is the absence of clearly delineated bad guys, the impossibility of taking sides. For WWW approaches both classical cinema and globally popular genre films as would a passionate lover, blind to both flaws and the limits of possibility. Much like Kamel and Kenza, WWW perseveres despite repeated setbacks, approaching its beloved touchstone films as a courtly lover would his beloved, persisting even when that love remains unrequited. It presents cinema as a universe unto itself, sustaining and self-sustaining, equal in accessibility to all. So arrestingly and amusingly quirky are its juxtapositions, that the tragedy, violence, and tacit critique of the role assigned to it by global cinema easily slip from view. Even Kamel and Kenza’s love story, dogged though it is by the increasingly violent repercussions of Kamel’s already brutal profession, and centered on characters who remain fundamentally opaque, seems poised for a happy ending. An absence of foreshadowing, or rather, its outshining by style, renders their sudden demise unbelievable, a violation of the very rules of cinema to which WWW was committed and within which it so fluidly distinguished itself. Kenza, wearing jeans and a jacket, stands staring impatiently down the dusty shoulder of a road between the shantytown in which she presumably lives and brand-new, cookie-cutter concrete apartment buildings. Behind her is an unoccupied desk with a lone computer terminal and a sign advertising Internet access, her new business venture now that cell phone prices have plummeted.26 In the background, the ever suit-clad Kamel walks along the

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Figure 8.6  Kamel and Kenza’s moment of recognition

dirt strip toward her back. A couple of SUVs and a laborer-laden truck swoop past Kenza, and Kamel steps up directly behind her, raising his extended arm to her right ear. As he does so, the camera shifts to an aerial view of the couple (fig. 8.6). Instead of a gunshot, we hear Kenza’s tape-recorded voice detailing her conditions for love to a still unrecognized Kamel. At the sound, Kenza turns slowly in close-up and meets Kamel’s eyes. He lowers the tape recorder, and they confront one another wordlessly, the camera now at eye level. When they fall into an embrace, the camera returns overhead, rotating and revealing the laborers from the truck encircling them, guns drawn. A hail of bullets drowns out the soundtrack of Kenza’s voice, which is replaced by electronic music as the couple fall to the ground in slow motion, the shooters adjusting their sights downward in a choreographed movement. With another storm of gunshots at the now lifeless bodies, film speed returns to normal and the gunmen rush back to the vehicles amid shouts to hurry. Tracking over and beyond the fleeing assassins, the camera lingers on the empty streets of the new suburb, briefly taking in a man who stares out into the distance from a window on the third floor, and a woman on the floor below looking at something unseen on an interior wall. Electronic music increases in volume as the camera tracks slowly back over the expanse of dust, stopping as it encounters the bodies of Kenza and Kamel, unmoving and blood-smeared. Suddenly, Kamel weakly raises his hand to Kenza’s face and rolls with effort in her direction. She too, opens her eyes and rolls toward him in turn, but both fall back, dead, before they can complete their embrace. Settling WWW firmly in the realm of film noir, with Kenza in the unlikely role of femme fatale, this conclusion refutes the countless other film genres with which WWW has flirted for the past ninety minutes, highlighting as

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supremely ironic its own subtitle, What a Wonderful World. Yes, this killing off of the couple at the precise moment of their romantic union once again returns the film to the context of Morocco, where, as Bensaïdi has observed elsewhere, audiences are more comfortable witnessing displays of violence than love.27 Yet unease with love is also a hallmark of film noir, rendering the film’s denouement perfectly congruent with film noir conventions.28 Unlike classic noir, however, WWW flattens its two protagonists, excising from its frames any hint of psychological tension, dark or mysterious pasts, relational anguish, or secret motives. Despite her profession as a gun-carrying police officer, Kenza retains a fundamental innocence, as borne out by her discomfort with Souad’s professional activities as well as her timidity in approaching and speaking with Kamel. At the same time, she remains off the radars of those seeking to manipulate Kamel, bumbling into his path at random moments. For his part, Kamel is distracted not by Kenza’s physical presence, of which he at some point becomes suspicious, but rather by the fantasy woman he has conjured from a voice on the telephone. Although his progressive lovesickness dulls his razor-sharp acuity when he fails to notice that the hit Hisham has orchestrated is not communicated in the usual manner, Kamel remains essentially alert, as when he earlier perceived an imminent attack by armed men just as Kenza had mustered the courage to speak to him in person for the first time. Like a classic noir hero, only more literally so, Kamel’s past remains mysterious even while it enables him to perceive the bigger picture long before it looms into the sightlines of both other characters and spectators. Unlike the classic noir hero, however, Kamel is blinded at the critical moment, unable to protect himself, or even, like Rick in Casablanca, to chivalrously sacrifice his own love in order to save his beloved. “Sometimes the affair becomes so aggravated, the lover’s nature is so sensitive, and his anxiety is so extreme, that the combined circumstances result in his demise and departure out of this transient world,” observes Ibn Hazm near the conclusion of his treatise on love.29 Through the final fates of its characters, WWW becomes an unexpected parody of noir, its lovers succumbing to a lovesickness seemingly from a bygone era. At the same time, the film’s conclusion ironizes the centuries-old trope of romantic love, encapsulated in Ibn Hazm’s statement and enshrined in pre-Islamic poetry as well as in Egyptian cinema, according to which love-death is the ultimate consummation of love affairs deemed socially, politically, and economically impossible. 30 For despite Kenza’s classic mute lovelorn gaze, she is no simple victim, and WWW is no melodrama or parable of transgressive love. An at once typical and atypical tale of lovers, the film is itself also the expression of an impossible love, one constantly thwarted by misrecognition, undermined expectations, and seemingly untraversable boundaries. Stuck in a frantic chase among genres, breaking with all in this final, abrupt twist that cycles through only to exceed

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genre conventions, the film expires from its own efforts to attain recognition. “Love, may God exalt you, is jesting at its inception, and grave in its conclusion,” begins the first chapter of Ibn Hazm’s treatise. 31 Credits roll to the gently urgent pulse of electronic music, neither dramatically up- or downbeat, but quite distinct in tone from the playful James Bond / Pink Panther-esque opening title sequence. But before this happens, in a final play of misrecognition, Kenza and Kamel seem poised to rise again, almost like action heroes who implausibly survive bullets, crashes, and beatings to emerge stronger than ever. When Kamel opens his eyes and begins to turn his head toward Kenza, who blinks and moves in turn, it seems for a moment that the film might veer into another genre altogether, that something more happened, or is about to happen, in the scene than is immediately perceptible to spectators. As the mortally wounded lovers weakly turn toward each other, melodrama is not implausible. It is even possible that they might simply stand up and redo the shoot, in a final pastiche of avant-garde cinematic self-reflexivity. Yet they fall back, dead, their movement nothing more than a gestural equivalent of a Shakespearean death soliloquy, and the film ends there, on the couple’s moment of recognition, thwarted. So intensely has the film’s diegesis focused on the characters’ readings, misreadings, recognitions, and misrecognitions of signs, actions, and one another, that the couple’s long-awaited identification of each other had appeared as the crucial breakthrough capable of resolving all the film’s tensions and questions. That which slipped progressively out of view in the process, however, was the workings of spectators’ own processes of reading and interpretation, and the potential for misreading and misunderstanding. Kenza and Kamel’s final, feeble, unconsummated gestures starkly foreground the expectations and the desires, whether for certain stories, generic conventions, or messages that cinema shapes and carries, linking all films and their audiences. Their death implies that global cinema as both concept and reality will always remain somehow incomplete, lacking, essentially disconnected, ever shifting.

{ 9 }

Breaking Out Nejib Belkadhi’s VHS Kahloucha (2007) Every dream has its double. —Hassan, Lost Neckring of the Dove Few figures invoke heroic, white, early twentieth-century masculinity like Tarzan of the Apes, lord of the jungle.1 Yet regardless of the character’s entanglements in racism and imperialism, Tarzan has fueled imaginations the world over, becoming the subject of numerous, and often humorous, co-optations. Perhaps more amazing than the plasticity of the figure and his adventures—the well-known MGM and RKO films had already broken with the script of the popular written stories—is their geographical and transhistorical range.2 Nejib Belkadhi’s 2007 VHS Kahloucha, a hilarious yet probing, making-of biopic follows one fan, Moncef Kahloucha, a house painter by trade and videographer by passion, as he casts, directs, acts in, edits, and screens his latest, do-it-yourself, extreme low-budget video production, Tarzan of the Arabs.3 The complex plot of Kahloucha’s film—one that seems to involve his Tarzan assimilating to civilization, gangster murders of his adoptive family, and Tarzan’s revenge and eventual return to the wilderness—is never explicitly outlined. Rather, it is Kahloucha himself, playing the titular role, who is the focus of Belkadhi’s film. Through its subject’s passion for genre films, however, the ostensibly straightforward documentary that is VHS Kahloucha relates a Tarzan-esque tale of its own. In it, the hyperkinetic Kahloucha acts as guide to and redeemer of the marginalized, impoverished neighborhood Kazmet, liminal other to the Tunisian tourist destination Sousse.4 He and the documentary engage tough guys, petty criminals, would-be undocumented migrants, drunkards, and the unemployed—in short, the presumably uncivilized others of contemporary Tunisia who are also Kahloucha’s target audience and sometime fellow actors. Throughout, sun-drenched scenes, an Italian pop music score, and a focus on Kahloucha’s more extreme improvisations ensure a light touch as VHS Kahloucha lobs its barbs at cinematic conventions and civilizational mythologies.

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A fitting conclusion to Part III, and Maghrebs in Motion as a whole, for its direct treatment of both cinematic and personal mobility through a realism at once deadpan and parodic, VHS Kahloucha refuses to limit itself to the field of action formulations of global cinema demarcate for Tunisian cinema in particular and Maghrebi, Arab, and African film more generally. As critical of Tunisia and the broader Maghreb region’s current function as a space of containment as were Rome and WWW, Kahloucha nonetheless concludes on a more resolutely dynamic note.5 Throughout the film, Moncef Kahloucha speaks with earnest passion and unadulterated admiration of the American and European directors and actors of 1970s genre films that shaped not just his love of cinema, but, he claims, his very sense of self. He does so in candid close-ups shot as he prepares for the next day’s filming, as well as on the fly, in sequences captured as he recruits actors, gathers props, sets up a scene, or prepares to shoot. In one scene, Kahloucha pauses his shadowboxing exercises on the beach to list the actors who have most influenced him. Proclaiming his particular admiration for Clint Eastwood, he describes and single-handedly acts out a gun battle with imagined props, summing up, “He comes out unscathed. Ah, what talent!” (fig. 9.1). His unfettered enthusiasm, the intensity of his imaginary reenactment, and his earnest commentary— “I’m going to act it out in Arabic”—pose him as something of an endearing naif, a cinematic folk artist who is as much an object as a creator of

Figure 9.1  Kahloucha playing Clint Eastwood

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entertainment. Completing as it does a sequence that first showed Kahloucha directing a scene before proclaiming in a posed interview his desire to remake every genre film that influenced him as a child, this beach scene reverberates against the dignity granted by the conventional biopic structure of the documentary. On one level, such technically skillful and seamlessly edited depictions of Kahloucha’s improvised scenarios, crude approximations of props, and dated equipment impart mockumentary overtones to VHS Kahloucha. On another, the very uncertainty thus occasioned generates a nagging sense that this guy is too good, too unbelievable, to be real. Together, they cultivate an uneasy sense that someone is being played, though it is still uncertain quite how, and whether it is Kahloucha, Belkadhi, Tunisia’s citizens, or the film’s audiences. The gravitas usually reserved for biopics of famous directors with which the at once profane everyman and utterly unique Kahloucha is treated highlights the condescension, and worse, usually directed at those from his social background. Yet how fortuitous that his surname, retained as the title of VHS Kahloucha, derives from the root for “black” and carries connotations along the lines of “black sheep.”6 Functioning simultaneously as a modifier of Kahloucha’s oeuvre in the documentary’s title, kahloucha signals something of the disparagement with which the self-taught filmmaker’s work might be viewed in regional filmmaking circles. While acknowledging as much, however, Belkadhi’s documentary reveals a demand for Kahloucha’s films and especially, for more of their, and his, lead actor among audiences in Tunisia and beyond. For as entertaining as Kahloucha is as he goes about making his film—chasing down hungover actors, paying others in beer or bottles of wine, recruiting the town strongmen, ex-cons and ne’er-do-wells, and mediating domestic disputes between his leading women and their male relatives—his work forms the basis of the documentary’s deft social commentary. While social critique in Tunisian cinema—even that exposing class stratification, hinting at government corruption, and targeting sexist oppression—is hardly new, what differentiates Belkadhi’s film is its close, pathos-free focus on the self-representations of the citizens of Kazmet rather than on social realist renderings of them. That focus displaces the site of critique from those depicted in the film to its audiences, implicitly targeting national and international discourses about poor, Arab men’s masculinity as inherently retrograde and threatening to modern, progressive, postindependence Tunisia as well as to neoliberal capital. As previously noted, Tunisian cinema, especially since the 1980s, has become renowned for its focus on the social problems of women.7 Films about women’s struggles, however, no matter how ultimately upbeat, inevitably feature male characters whose masculinity is threatened by women’s growing presence and power in the public sphere, as well as their shifting roles within the family, and the resulting conflicts of urban and rural mores,

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contradictory class mobility; and cultural change. Despite their social class, in moments of frustration or despair, the men in such films tend to fall back on a masculinity defined by its brute power over women.8 In this, they do not contradict the preuprising Tunisian state’s positioning of an “uncultured,” “uncivilized” masculinity as the threat from within, a characterization that maintains an oppositional, binary model of gender relations and did little to address the realities of sexist oppression and violence. In this discourse, Tunisian masculinity, especially poor men’s masculinity, is essentialized and made antithetical to the modernity of a contemporary (and paternalistic) Tunisian state (and Euro-America) that nonetheless depends upon it to claim distinction in the arena of women’s rights.9 In hindsight, Tunisian cinema may be less a cinema about women than one deeply concerned with the “problem” of masculinity, especially the masculinity of the socially and economically marginalized.10 Variously coded as predatory, macho, tyrannical, frustrated, perverse, and dangerous, this “popular” masculinity furnishes darker undertones even in such lighthearted films as Halfaouine, becoming the central focus of an internationally well-received film like Nouri Bouzid’s Making Of (al-akhir film) (2006), which shows a young man imploding from the simultaneous pressure of Islamic extremist and modern social attempts to manipulate his sense of manhood.11 No, it is not by accident that Kahloucha happens to be remaking Tarzan as Belkadhi films him. All of Kahloucha’s films, from his first feature, I Had No Money and Now I’m Loaded (1995) to his second, Kill Everyone and Come Back Alone (1996), third, Frankenstein Kahlouchien, Not for the Under Thirties (1999), fourth, You Have No Place to Go / Misery to Get Rid of the Bottle (2000), and latest, Tarzan of the Arabs (2003), draw upon iconic European and Hollywood models of hypermasculinity.12 Certainly, the masculinity of Kahloucha’s heroes, whether Jean-Paul Belmondo, Lee Van Cleef, or Clint Eastwood, among others, and the gangster, tough guy, cowboy, and ­ne’er-do-well roles for which they are known, offer no shining examples of antisexism or gender parity. Yet significantly, this masculinity is of and for European and North American modernity. As each of Kahloucha’s films draws on these globally applauded models of leading men produced by what are regarded as the centers of civilization to connect with Kazmet’s audiences, the discourses of “uncivilized masculinity” of the Tunisian state are short-circuited. In the scene on the beach described above, Kahloucha claims these actors as his direct progenitors: “When I see them in a film, it’s as if I’ve seen my father; they make me cry.” Kahloucha’s films have sketched out, his words suggest, a family tree with entangled, linear-schema-defying roots. This creative genealogy offers to the men, and women, of Kazmet self-representations that afford them entry into the global imaginary in ways at once instantly recognizable and rather unexpected. For in tapping into iconic tropes and narratives, Kahloucha’s films counter stereotypical representations of poor, Arab

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men’s masculinity made of them at home and abroad. Much like Tarzan, Kahloucha defies the presuppositions of those wielding the social, political, and economic power conferred by civilizational centers, winning the girl and proving his worth as he rescues a series of those who would write him off.13 No less than Tarzan, Kahloucha preserves the sacred spaces of his adoptive world. In VHS Kahloucha, the sacred spaces are not the mosque (and certainly not the elephant graveyard), but the marginalized community of Kazmet and cinema writ large. Kahloucha’s work, clumsy, cheesy, and technically backward as it may seem, foregrounds the potential of cinema to shape the imagination, making visible the formerly unseen, and bringing the distant closer.14 This ability to project his community into a global imaginary as well as global imaginations is ultimately what made this film a runaway success in Tunisia, where it was extensively pirated, and an audience favorite at prestigious festivals like Sundance, where it screened in 2007.15 Reviewing the film at the latter, Harriette Yahr dubs Kahloucha “almost a caricature,” observing that the sheer entertainment value of the film eclipses its social and political commentary, yet that “in many ways, this charming doc hearkens back to the early days of Sundance, when ‘independent’ was the total spirit of the fest.”16 Resulting in part from a conflation of Kahloucha’s films with Belkadhi’s, this statement is useful for its confession of a certain discomfiture with VHS Kahloucha’s entertaining treatment of its subject as much as for its blurring of the lines between the work that films from the global South and global North are expected to perform. In its deceptively transparent realism as much as with the bait-and-switch it plays with audience presuppositions, Belkadhi’s documentary zooms in on not just the global division of representations within cinema, but on its very purpose. Discomfort with Kahloucha’s treatment derives perhaps less from a suspicion that he is being reduced to a caricature, than that the film permits him to do so without a counterbalance of gravitas appropriate to time and circumstances. For while the popular Tarzan films presented caricatures to their audiences, capturing global imaginations with increasingly worn rear projections of African scenery, incongruous inclusion of taxidermy animals and shots of US locations, repetitive plots, clumsy effects, and invented, self-referential names, they were clearly fiction films.17 Unapologetic in their projection of fantasy worlds onto Africa, they attracted audiences with something other than verisimilitude—much as do Kahloucha’s films. Still, contemporary antiracist and post-third cinema filmmaking wisdom would have it that a technically accomplished, serious documentary like Belkadhi’s should not simply relay Kahloucha’s presumably unexamined internalization of Euro-American supremacy and commercialism.18 If anything, VHS Kahloucha’s rendering of Moncef Kahloucha’s work should target the racist, classist, and sexist premises of the genre films that are his inspiration. Yet VHS Kahloucha, as much as Kahloucha’s films themselves, do not actually

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fail to do this. It is rather the particular manner in which Belkadhi’s and Kahloucha’s films work together, the documentary film’s tone, and the multiple paternalist discourses that they navigate together that disconcert. As if both to confound audiences outside of Kazmet and allay their apprehensions, the scenes bookending the credits of VHS Kahloucha show Kahloucha directing and acting in a bare-bones chase scene, and model “local” audience reaction to the finished film. In the first, an amateurish chase scene through an empty indoor market, Kahloucha gives direction to the heavyset actor who plays the bad guy, and acts the good guy himself, breathlessly at times, while his cameraman sometimes struggles to keep up and sometimes urges him on (fig. 9.2). While the name of the actor—like all of Kahloucha’s actors an acquaintance of the director—flashes on-screen with the rubric “actor,” audience recognition of Kahloucha is assumed. From the first frames of the film, then, we see men with clearly limited means deeply engaged in a scenario that is both predictable and unique. Fit, yet slightly pudgy, perspiring profusely and breathing heavily, they bear little resemblance to the leading men of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet while Kahloucha, the cameraman, and “bad guy” Mourad are taking their roles quite seriously, they do so in the clear knowledge that they are playing their parts in a fantasy scenario modeled on the countless action films they have seen and admired. This studied, yet not quite successful, enactment of hegemonic transnational machismo

Figure 9.2  Filming a chase scene from Tarzan

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renders them comical, but also nonthreatening, even endearing. Laughter is entirely permissible; there are no bad guys here. Following the appearance of the film’s title and credits—interspersed with scenes featuring Kahloucha in his other VHS films, all rendered in appropriately poor-quality images—Belkadhi’s documentary jumps to Italy, specifically to the northbound car of Habib François, a Tunisian immigrant to Italy who is returning from a visit to Kazmet with a copy of Kahloucha’s just completed Tarzan of the Arabs. In the three minutes it takes to arrive in snowbound Altamura, Italy, find compatriots from Kazmet, and round up a venue and equipment on which to screen the video, François reflects on the hot-button issue of immigration, documented and undocumented. Presumably answering a direct question posed by the filmmaker, he shrugs off his own impulse to immigrate as born of a natural mix of desire and obligation to leave and to go to Europe, Italy in particular, because that is what men from Kazmet do. Subsequently, when introducing immigrants from Kazmet, he notes that those who arrived fifteen years or more earlier have their papers, but that most recent arrivals are all harraga, or undocumented immigrants.19 When their host arrives laden with shopping bags, he jokes that the man has spent the day begging, with obvious success. With these remarks, he plays, and enlists his friends in playing, to the type of the bad guys: shadowy, duplicitous border crossers who flaunt local laws and customs and who are, as a series of quick shots of a statue of the Virgin Mary and a plaque affirming the town’s Christianity underscore, Muslim. Throughout, François’s narrative constantly taps into and picks at a nationalist political rhetoric that stereotypes North African immigrants, yet as others set up a television set and VCR, he explains to the camera that watching Kahloucha’s films reminds the men of Kazmet, helping to mitigate l’ghorba, translated by the film’s English subtitles as homesickness. More complex than this English translation suggests, ghorba signifies at once strangeness and estrangement, encapsulating the isolation wrought by what is lived as exile in a land that seeks to cordon off the southern shores of the Mediterranean.20 As Belkadhi’s film captures these men, so often deemed criminals and savages, watching Tarzan of the Arabs in a modest, comfortable living room alongside their host’s young son, and dissolving into peals of laughter, it reflects a self-awareness that runs counter to stereotype. They laugh at Kahloucha’s appearance in Tarzan drag, at his pretense of not understanding how to wear a shirt, at a character’s decision to send him off in a taxicab (whose driver may or may not be in on the conceit). All the while, they point out familiar figures and places. Significantly, these include an acquaintance from Kazmet and his English wife encountering Kahloucha-Tarzan in the street (it is unclear whether they reside in Tunisia or Kazmet) and Kahloucha scaling the wall outside a judge’s home. While the first indicates at once the breadth of Tunisian immigration and its dependence on multifaceted border

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crossings (tourism and European migration to Tunisia as well as the obverse), the second demonstrates cinema’s power to suspend the rules of reality, its attraction so powerful that either Kahloucha risks arrest for the sake of his art, or unheard-of permission to film was granted him in their heavily policed, autocratic homeland. Laughing uproariously at the film’s premise as much as at Kahloucha’s incarnation of Tarzan, this “home” audience suggests that caricature is, in fact, a vital facet of Kahloucha’s oeuvre and identity. In these circumstances, where the immigrants must navigate globally circulating images of Arab terrorists, sadistic despots, and African poverty and backwardness, as well as palimpsests of medieval and ancient maps of barbarian lands across the sea, too much verisimilitude in portraying Tarzan would not be a good thing. In other words, doing genre, with its reliance on stereotypes and thought conventions, “badly,” in this case means doing it better. All the while, these Italian scenes establish the breadth of Kahloucha’s fan base, his transnational reach in the fullest sense. Circulating as they do via autonomous, underground distribution networks, his VHS cassettes have no need of the kind of festival play and sponsorship that sanctions “global cinema,” instead tracing their own cinematic and geographical maps.21 Unperceived and perhaps illegible to mainstream audiences in the global North, Kahloucha’s videos lay claim to mobility in much the way that the undocumented immigrants do, by moving beneath the radar of European laws governing the circulation of objects, people, and intellectual property. Belkadhi’s documentary, in turn, proposes that any truly popular Tunisian cinema must be one of mobility in its subject matter, themes, technical approaches, and distribution methods. In focusing on a one-man entertainment film industry passionate about paying tribute to the genre films of his youth rather than creating sensationalist films from material to hand, VHS Kahloucha tests our expectations of the products of industrial or artisanal direct-to-video (or VCD) films, showing us how highly propulsive these often-overlooked works are. In this sense, Kahloucha’s films are disconcerting, for they show us ourselves, where those selves are defined as film enthusiasts worldwide. More so, they show us ourselves positioned as Europeanized, middle-class spectators looking at Euro-America’s others modeling themselves through the lens of Euro-American popular cinema. Neither underground cult classics, for Kahloucha is too much of an outsider to produce such works, nor ethnographic curiosities, for they incorporate too much of the Euro-American perspective to be viewed with the critical distance that characterizes the genre, Kahloucha’s films elude preestablished critical categories. In any event, we never really have a chance to watch them. Aside from these first, very brief excerpts and those scenes of Tarzan of the Arabs we see acted and filmed before our eyes during the remainder of the film, we are offered no complete product. Furthermore, Kahloucha’s films are nowhere to be found on the Internet:  this in a country where bootleg DVDs of hit

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films from around the world are readily available from numerous vendors, and Belkadhi’s own film has been extensively pirated.22 Kahloucha indeed voices his concerns regarding illegal copying of his cassettes by those who rent them from his shop, and remains vigilant regarding any special requests. Ostensibly, his reputation as one of the quarter’s “original tough guys” dissuades potential pirates in an arena where international protections of intellectual property have little purchase. Before such concerns come openly into play near the documentary’s end, however, Belkadhi’s film takes pains to validate not just the unusual physical labor involved in Kahloucha’s productions, but also the intellectual work. From Italy, VHS Kahloucha flashes back to Sousse-Kazmet eight months earlier, where Kahloucha prepares the opening chase sequence, introducing actors to his cameraman and rounding up props. Following brief interviews with the cameraman, Lasaad Rouge, and “bad guy” Mourad Nourchka, the opening sequence is replayed, this time as video footage, with the cameraman’s voice-over commentary (fig. 9.3). The cameraman and Kahloucha’s editor, Nabil, are next filmed at their day jobs, the first describing his work as a wedding videographer as he presents his equipment, and the second doing piecework at a garment factory before showing Belkadhi’s cameraman around the editing studio. Each describes how he met Kahloucha, and when Nabil, Kahloucha’s neighbor, notes that Kahloucha is a house painter by trade, the film cuts to him at work painting

Figure 9.3  Editing the chase scene

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a beach villa, the camera zooming in first on his simple lunch of sardines and raïb, and then on his paint-splattered face as he lists his previous films.23 In addition to detailing the hard work, limited means, loyalty, and pride of the key players in Kahloucha’s enterprise, these scenes—intercut with unedited sequences of Tarzan of the Arabs and culminating in finished sequences from Kahloucha’s films—insist on the self-awareness of all. Kahloucha’s actor declares his delight in playing the bad guy, whether mafioso or kamikaze, praising Kahloucha’s propensity to typecast, proud at the roles his muscles have earned him. Rouge, the cameraman, observes that Kahloucha’s popularity is evident in his ability to film in any venue without encountering resistance from the authorities, noting that people from the neighborhood clamor for Kahloucha to use their homes as sets. He further comments on unexpected turns of events in the filmmaking process, describing how Kahloucha carefully models his films after those of his heroes, but takes unexpected twists in stride. “It was so funny,” Rouge says as he introduces an excerpt from Kahloucha’s second feature in which a female costar deeply gashes the leading man’s head during a fight scene. Kahloucha interjects that he would never stop filming, because that would be unprofessional. When they screen a clip from Tarzan where Kahloucha wrestles with a stuffed wolf near the train tracks, Rouge again comments on Kahloucha’s disregard for personal safety in pursuit of his vision, but also speculates as to what the train passengers must have thought when they saw a man garbed only in a makeshift animal skin rolling on the ground with a stuffed wolf. Pedestrian, the stuff of any filmmaker commenting on process, glitches, and close calls, Rouge’s remarks nonetheless reflect an acute consciousness of the many restrictions potentially imposed on Kahloucha’s work, as well as his conscious defiance of such mobility-impairing laws and judgments. Curiously absent from all this are any concessions to, or anxiety regarding, such outside viewers. Kahloucha’s films presumably operate on the premise that all viewers will be insiders. Audiences of Belkadhi’s film are invited into this space of complicity, guided by the director and his crews’ own initiation into this world. Throughout interviews with the working-class and impoverished citizens of Kazmet, local and national governments vanish almost completely, for when these men speak of their aspirations, they direct their gazes at Italy and beyond, or at the very least at the tourists who flock to Sousse in the summer months and from whom “there is always money to be made.” Seamlessly edited as it is, VHS Kahloucha makes it difficult to tell whether the absence of references to local and national politics and the lack of interviewees’ fear of the ubiquitous undercover police results from their disregard for both or reflects caution on Belkadhi’s part.24 While it eschews direct political commentary, however, Belkadhi’s film juxtaposes the murders, kidnappings, and quests for vengeance and justice that permeate Kahloucha’s films with his interviewees’ tales of petty crime, scams, drug dealing, clandestine

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immigration attempts, fights, prison stints, and expulsion from Europe. Not least, Tunisian viewers would be well aware that Sousse was the birthplace of then-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. On multiple levels, then, the documentary wryly suggests that Kahloucha’s films are more realistic than one might suppose, although not in the manner one might expect. The very titles of Kahloucha’s films indicate as much, and a scene where Kahloucha interacts with his children, exhorting them to stay out of trouble and discussing their studiousness and work history, offers abundant evidence of his experience as a subject rather than enforcer of the law. As they eat a lunch of tripe and bean stew, he calls one son out on his bad behavior, exhorting him not to follow in his imprisoned younger brother’s footsteps, but instead to draw inspiration from his other brother, a mechanic by trade (fig. 9.4). The framing in the scene is tight, alternating among close-ups of the family members and old snapshots, and cutting from the family meal to a more formal interview of Kahloucha done at another time. In it, he dismisses his jailed son’s transgression as thankfully nothing serious, neither theft nor killing, only a violation of a law prohibiting ownership of tear gas and a knife. Immediately following, he praises his daughters for having turned out better than the boys, the younger studying and the elder helping out at home. In one of the few direct questions included in the film, Belkadhi asks why he neglected to find her a job. Kahloucha replies at length, explaining that

Figure 9.4  Kahloucha and his son at home

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factories exploit workers, the work necessitating long days and a lengthy, convoluted journey on public transportation; it pays almost nothing and excludes benefits such as social security. Although his comments are cut off by a shot of his other son arriving home, his brief description of the factories indicates that it is one of those who have found it advantageous to do business in Tunisia, where they employ a predominantly female labor force and are exempt from taxes while enabling the government to count these women’s labor as marker of women’s progress.25 Not for the first time, Kahloucha’s modest economic circumstances loom large, yet this time his explication of the grip exerted by such factories on poor neighborhoods like his own suggests a political consciousness previously unseen and thus unexpected. With the remark that his just arrived other son has never “studied a single sentence,” Kahloucha returns to Kazmet’s liminal status, something reinforced by close-ups of his tattoos, their crudeness hinting at real outlaw status. Omnipresent references to prison as the most likely destination of the young men featured in the film, along with Kahloucha’s explication of the exploitative nature of factory work, underscore both the criminalization of the lower classes within a national framework and globalization’s multidirectional reinforcement of gendered divisions of labor. Like Kahloucha’s daughter, many women find themselves stuck between two or more patriarchal institutions both promising to serve their best interests. Poor men, meanwhile, are targeted for containment by the regulators of transnational flows—while in prison they cannot escape to Europe. A  montage of interviews with Kahloucha’s actors and his editor at the midpoint of the film paint a picture of Kazmet as an easygoing, fun-loving neighborhood where people lack education and employment, a producer of sports stars and other successes, but also much violence, and many clandestine immigrants and prison inmates. Alcoholism appears rampant, and several men display their machetes for the camera. While there are no sustained interviews with women nonactors, Kahloucha’s bad guy Mourad describes the neighborhood’s women as reliable yet often compelled by a lack of opportunity to choose between emigrating and prostitution. Again, strikingly omitted from the sequence is any assignation of blame.26 Not only does no one invoke either politicians or law enforcement, but men speak in support of women and vice versa. Through it all, Kahloucha and others profess a doctrine of self-reliance, describing their neighbors as good men, women, and children trying to make an honest living, though forced to break the law in order to do so. Far from rejecting or threatening civilized society, as state-sponsored discourse would have it, VHS Kahloucha shows these men (and a few women) trying their best to participate in it. A hilarious montage of tourists declaring in various languages that they “love Sousse” underscores the harmlessness of the interviewees with respect to Tunisia’s major industry, while also accentuating the distance between the international destination Sousse and its off-the-tourist-trail counterpart.

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Unlike many Tunisian feature films, VHS Kahloucha, much like Kahloucha’s own films, features women primarily in supporting roles. Because it favors an exploration of poor men’s masculinity rather than a display of women’s struggles as women, its reflections on women’s rights take a complex form, examining how class intersects with gender in the partitioning of Tunisian society. Throughout the film, women—Kahloucha’s daughters, his mother, and the actresses Khalti Mna and Hanan Elben, among others—stand up for themselves and take on responsibilities in ways that defy stereotyped views of Arab women while nonetheless eluding Western formulations of feminism. Where state discourse would cast men in communities such as Kazmet as the causes of women’s immobility, painting the former as violent, inadequate, and hence necessarily oppressive, Kazmet’s women instead target unemployment, alcohol and drugs, poverty, and the imprisonment of men as their enemies. None seems prepared to abandon the bonds of family and community for personal success in more “enlightened” regions. Hanan Elben, Kahloucha’s leading lady, recounts how she turned down an acting job in Tunis because her conservative family disapproved of her moving to the city alone. While this might be read as an opportunity thwarted by paternalism and retrograde mores, it also scans as a refusal of exoticization, if not exploitation, and a will to make it on her own terms. Kahloucha’s mother, meanwhile, seemingly embraces the values of classic patriarchy, granting Kahloucha permission to burn down a house she had previously given to one of his sisters for the sake of his film.27 At the same time, she proclaims that she “possesses the willpower of a man.” Far from relying on her sons and their spouses, she sells lingerie in the market for a living, and proudly recounts how she raised seven children on her own. In crosscut interviews, she and Kahloucha recount how she traveled clandestinely to the Spanish territories in Morocco and from there through Spain and France to Bologna, Italy, in order to plead on behalf of her son (Kahloucha’s brother) incarcerated in an Italian prison. In her journey, easily as fantastic as any of her son’s scenarios, social marginalization, ­poverty, and international law, rather than the machismo of her menfolk, constitute the primary locus of oppression. While Hanan Elben demurs when she is asked whether she would wear skimpy clothing or do a love scene in a film, she looks utterly comfortable playing the role of a woman who shrugs off her husband’s efforts to bully her. Prior to filming a confrontation scene, she matter-of-factly queries Kahloucha whether she should fight with her on-screen husband when he demands to know where she’s been. Like Hanan Elben and Kahloucha’s mother, the actress Khalti Mna resists lending herself to straightforward recuperation as a feminist heroine as she simultaneously depends on patriarchal social structures to command respect, yet refuses to cede self-sufficiency. She seeks out Kahloucha to request a role; dons a classic, all-concealing haik to slip past her husband, who is jealous of her film work; spontaneously joins an argument

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between Kahloucha and the guardian of a beachfront hotel in Sousse when he impugns her and her female costars’ honor; insists on telling Kahloucha and Belkadhi’s cameraman her story so that they can make it into a film; tells her children to get lost when they entreat her to come home; declares that acting is a respectable profession and that Kahloucha has never asked her to (nor could she, an old woman) do anything indecent; and defies her husband’s repeated efforts to assert his male prerogative over her (fig. 9.5). Throughout, Kahloucha remains calm and helps to relate to Belkadhi’s camera how the couple battle over Khalti Mna’s eldest son, born of another father, and financially dependent on his mother at 36. When Khemaies, Khalti Mna’s husband, returns to deny her permission to film the most crucial scene, the burning of the house that can have only one take, Kahloucha calmly reasons with him, while Hanan Elben struggles to dominate her amusement at his jealousy. Finally, Kahloucha hits upon the idea of hiring Khemaies to broadcast the film’s opening, and the latter’s opposition to the film and his wife’s participation in it miraculously melts away, as Khalti Mna’s jealousy mounts in turn.28 Here and again in a more pointed manner at the film’s conclusion, Belkadhi underscores that, more than anything else, Kahloucha’s films offer the people of Kazmet both mobility and connection to a broader community foreclosed to them domestically and internationally. Based on Euro-American genre films though they may be, each film also recounts

Figure 9.5  Khalti Mna explaining her decision to act

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the lives of the residents of Kazmet, much as suggested by such titles as I Had No Money and Now I’m Loaded, and Misery to Get Rid of the Bottle. Yet as much as these gesture toward the life tales recounted and performed for Belkadhi’s camera, Kahloucha’s films are all the more attractive for their departure from such realism. In place of exposing lives bounded by struggle, they give to those who perform in them (as well as those who film and edit them) an opportunity to collectively create scenarios that do not show what really happened, but rather their inventiveness, resourcefulness, and cooperative spirit, as well as something of their aspirations. In this sense, Tarzan of the Arabs does indeed depict Khalti Mna and her son’s tribulations. And while the film’s credits notify viewers that this son was in prison at the time of the film’s premiere, the conclusion of Tarzan—in which Tarzan, deceived by civilization, returns to the wilderness—turns the critique back on the society that imprisons him. With humor—and yes, caricatural accents—Kahloucha’s films deliver a critical imaginative mobility to their participant-audiences, one often denied them in those state-sponsored films that circulate internationally. Although seeming to remain true to the principles of social message films, Belkadhi’s film works in tandem with Kahloucha’s to examine the tyranny of social realism and reformulate the work that cinema is expected to do in the region. Where Teshome Gabriel, in his famous enumeration of the stages of Third World cinema, roundly condemns identification with the Western Hollywood film industry, lamenting its focus on entertainment and technical perfection, Belkadhi zooms in on a type of filmmaking that slips through the cracks of Gabriel’s schematic, national-cinema-dependent treatment.29 Without the support of studio financing and major distribution, or even festival networks, Kahloucha’s films certainly lack the emphasis on technical perfection and style that Gabriel identifies as characteristic of Hollywood-inspired films. As a result, they reveal productive gaps not just between themselves and the Western entertainment films with which they presumably identify, but also within the latter. Highlighting the importance of his films in promoting knowledge of global film genres whose time has otherwise passed for local audiences, Kahloucha’s films simultaneously grant them license to reimagine and reinvent the Western and global genre films they presently consume. Similarly, Belkadhi’s VHS Kahloucha, with its eye-level, intimate camera work, nonjudgmental interviews, and matter-of-fact approach to potentially sensationalist issues, prompts its audiences to reassess their relationship to those audiences. This, rather than Kahloucha and his neighbors, becomes the object of critique, lighthearted though it may be. Despite its caricatural tone, Belkadhi’s film prompted the Tunisian government to grant a substantial sum of development money to the district of Kazmet.30 Quite unexpectedly, then, VHS Kahloucha establishes complicity between its socially, economically, and politically marginalized subjects and audiences

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from a sweeping range of domestic and international positions. Cementing the ties created throughout, the documentary concludes with brief summaries of what has happened to several of the most prominent figures two years after filming concluded. Unsurprisingly, many of the men are in prison, including Kahloucha’s and Khalti Mna’s sons and several of the interviewees. Yet other outcomes are more upbeat: Kahloucha’s brother was released from prison in Bologna, has returned home and just married; the young, unemployed ex-boxer with a couple of clandestine immigration attempts under his belt now works on construction projects with Kahloucha; Kahloucha’s editor has opened a studio to edit wedding videos; and Hanan Elben continues to dream of stardom. Most strikingly, however, this sequence concludes with a thumbnail of Saleh Chem Ou Taiech, one of Kahloucha’s regular and accomplished actors, and Kahloucha, a voice-over relating that they are planning a slasher film, and asking spectators whether they happen know of a producer. Offering us an entrée into Kahloucha’s world, this seemingly comic interpellation is also a challenge. It may resonate differently according to the positionality of each spectator, but its essence remains consistent. After all, Kahloucha’s unseen films are “bad” ones by multiple standards, only fully legible to insiders of the neighborhood. To those outside Kazmet, they offer little in terms of exposure, immediate relevance, and even entertainment. Yet this direct query defies us to reverse the directionality of cultural globalization, to move, as it were, in unforeseen directions. Inviting us as insiders, the query also informs us that we will be powerless to steer the course of events, for the film, both process and finished product, will never unwind as planned. Before proposing such cross-border complicity, however, VHS Kahloucha underscores the consequences of even the most inadvertent exclusions and erasures. By contrast with Khalti Mna’s husband, Khemaies, who drops all objections regarding his wife’s participation in Tarzan of the Arabs as soon as he is given the task of promoting it, several actors strenuously protest their lack of billing on the film posters for Tarzan of the Arabs. These include Mourad Nourchka, the bad guy whose pursuit opens the film, and who is featured in an interview regarding his roles in Kahloucha’s films, as well as an actor recruited because he chanced to be at home the morning Kahloucha was scouting out a replacement for a no-show. Each man’s objections are intercut with footage of the beating he receives at the hands of Kahloucha’s characters. As seemingly frivolous as their objections may seem—they are certainly well-known enough to Kahloucha’s main audience, and the second man devoted only three hours to the film—their protests emphasize the importance of conventional forms of recognition, cinematic and otherwise. Each demands that his critical role be acknowledged formally and publicly, in writing on the handmade posters produced by the neighborhood sign maker/scribe. At the same time, their protests, facilitated by the presence of Belkadhi’s camera, offer them the opportunity to extend their performance,

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to achieve recognition on their own terms in the eyes of a much broader audience by means of the billing they receive in the documentary. By including their protests in the final cut of his film, Belkadhi suggests the dangers of mistakenly viewing each man’s performance as natural, devoid of effort and art, or worse, inessential. VHS Kahloucha also zeroes in on another kind of exclusion, that of potential audience members. Several women standing in a doorway inform the camera that they have no opportunity to view the film unless they own a VCR, something clearly not the case for most of them. Although Kahloucha had instructed his ticket takers that admission to the cafe screening was free for women, there were no takers, for as the women explain in these scenes, it is impossible for them to sit in the cafe with men. Even Khalti Mna explains that she cannot see the film there, suggesting that she has never seen the finished product. Middle-aged, young, and old, the women repeat the same words: “The cafe is for men. We can’t go there.” In so doing, they give lie to the state’s claims to successfully manage gender equality, but target Kahloucha, rather than their menfolk, as the source of the conflict. In demanding that Kahloucha accommodate them on their own terms, theirs also differs from a feminist approach that would demand access to the cafe, something they in any case already possess. Ambushing Kahloucha’s daughter outside the female space of the hammam, they demand that she speak to her father about facilitating a second screening for them in a different public space. The insistence of their request redefines public space as that which includes women and men in spaces where women possess some control of the immediate environment, as in the movie theater they request and the civic center Kahloucha proposes. Most significantly, their active engagement with the film in this protest politicizes a film that on the surface could not be more distant from definitions of political cinema. Transforming not the content of Kahloucha’s films, but their very relationship to their audiences into a source of public engagement and debate, the women’s protest certainly belies the claim that the role of movies in public discourse has ended once and for all.31 Even as Kahloucha acquiesces to the women’s demands, proposing a second screening venue, he details his own struggles to maintain control of his product, which others would copy and circulate for their own gain. This emphasizes not only his devotion to his work, but also his embrace of the premises of intellectual property, at once a demand that others respect his individuality and a commitment to the workings of a neoliberal capital that regulates his community to the margins. Kahloucha’s demands that his labors be recompensed in terms of value accessible yet meaningful to his audience simultaneously attempts to socialize them in this economy. At one and a half dinars, the price of a rental is not high when compared to the commercial products of Europe and North America, yet the sum is not trivial to those living in Kazmet, especially since they must also possess, borrow, or rent the VCR on which to watch

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the tape. As his cameraman explains, he makes three or four copies of each film following the official screening, and rents them out for no longer than it takes to watch the film. In this way, Kahloucha not only maintains control of his product and lays claim to legitimacy in the global marketplace, but also, at least until the advent of VHS Kahloucha, regulates the circulation of his image. As the documentary’s footage of the screening indicates, Kahloucha is far more successful than the managers of the average US cineplex, the crowd of men and boys jammed into the neighborhood cafe gazing with rapt attention at the screen—and occasionally at Belkadhi’s camera—and laughing in all the right places. Yet their open-mouthed stares at the screen are neither dictated by fear of Kahloucha’s wrath nor by naive entrancement by the magic of cinema.32 Rather, their attentiveness reflects the amazement of seeing the familiar not only in a new light, but also transformed into something of unexpected value within a larger system that devalues them. VHS Kahloucha concludes with a depiction of two moments that signal the expanding impact of Tarzan of the Arabs. In the first, a young man rents a VHS copy of the film from Kahloucha’s shop (a true entrepreneur, Kahloucha runs the equivalent of an urban corner grocery in addition to his professions painting houses and making films), transports it on his moped to a more upscale neighborhood of Sousse (evident in the absence of graffiti in the apartment complex hallway and comfortable furnishings of the apartment he enters) and watches it with two heavyset men who immediately collapse in peals of helpless laughter. In the second, and final scene, Habib François, the Tunisian immigrant to Italy of the film’s early scene, discusses taking the film to Italy for a screening with Kahloucha in his shop. Kahloucha voices his longing to see Italy for himself one day, “because they have the means to make great films.” Following a close-up shot of the boat’s wake, the scene shifts to an arid plane outside Sousse, where Kahloucha prepares the final scene of Tarzan. As the camera rolls, he strips off the suit he has donned, running toward an underground cave in only a leopard print scarf tied over his red underwear. With a Tarzan yell, he returns to the wilderness, crawling through the cave (fig. 9.6). A voice-over enumerates the fates of the actors, and the credits begin to roll, thumbnails of Kahloucha’s films in the upper right corner, and shots of the transfixed audience in the cafe in the lower left. With this, Belkadhi’s documentary has come full circle, the final thumbnails of his actors and summaries of their fates gesturing at all that the film’s frames were not able to contain. Audiences of Belkadhi’s film may read the documentary valences of VHS Kahloucha in a range of ways, some taking Kahloucha simply as an entertaining character; others seeking out Kahloucha’s films; and still others taking the work as a mockumentary precursor of a film like Michel Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind (2008), or (and despite obvious differences) a successor to the faux naif critique of Euro-American narratives of progress in Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977). Either way, the layering of two films in

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Figure 9.6  Tarzan returning to the wilderness

VHS Kahloucha informs and educates about that which is distant or invisible to the casual gaze, and shows the improbable, if not the impossible. In the first instance, seeing cultivates belief in film’s exposition of knowledge. In the second, seeing evokes disbelief as a result of the image’s seeming contravention of the laws of the natural world, or rather, the world of neoliberal capital. This to and fro quietly foreshadows a process that resulted in the transformation of a frustrated sometime fruit vendor into the hero of a once unimaginable, and still resonating, movement.

Epilogue Now Playing Today, any effort to publish an up-to-the-minute list of contemporary Maghrebi films cannot but be felicitously futile. Morocco alone now produces some twenty feature films each year. While Algeria and Tunisia produce far fewer films, at least officially recognized ones, they continue to no lesser extent to redefine the medium as well as the nature and scope of their audiences. More significantly, even as film production statistics continue to be broken down by country, the citizens of all three countries more than ever have access to the films of their neighbors, their cross-border interests sharpened not just by the uprisings of the Arab Spring, but also by the ease with which films can be circulated online, the advent of such youth-oriented, boundary-pushing, Maghrebi satellite stations such as Nessma, and the renewed interest of the three countries’ political and economic leaders in forging a single economic zone. At the same time, films from the region no longer aim to convey the unified movement of a people or nation, but rather play with and question such concepts and the nature of the boundaries by which they are constituted. Reflecting an acute consciousness of the Maghreb’s positioning on the borders or in the margins of multiple entities, Maghrebi films at present also examine the often liminal role of film itself in public discourse. In so doing, such films resist easy co-optation by neoliberal discourses of creative economies that would position them as tools of social inclusion and their creators as models of flexible, self-rewarding labor.1 Instead, they relentlessly (and collaboratively) examine tensions between the shrinking effect that economic globalization has upon their regional audiences’ economic, cultural, and geopolitical fields of action, and an imperative to expand anew these same fields of action. Yes, in the years since the Tunisian uprisings, long-standing geopolitical narratives and habits of perception have reasserted themselves, much as they did in the 1970s in the wake of anticolonial struggles. Just as the power of film was thrown into question in the decades following independence, so too, though within a far more compressed time frame, has the transformative

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potential of social media been challenged. Film, though, is not dead. Nor is it, any more than social media, the source of transformation. Rather, for both, the capacity to transform relies on their own continuous transformation, necessitated in turn by the unstoppable motion of people, things, and entire regions. This book is meant neither as a map of movements past nor as a prediction of movements future, but rather seeks to remind us how, even if not where we expect, there is always something playing.

{ Notes } Introduction 1. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri) was based on the memoir Souvenirs de la bataille d’Alger (Souvenirs of the Battle of Algiers) (Paris: Julliard, 1962), written by Saadi Yacef, a National Liberation Front (FLN) military commander who became part of the postindependence FLN government. He formed a production company to produce the film and plays the character of Jaafar. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam write of the film’s ability to override political sympathies: “Historical contextualization and formal mechanisms have shortcircuited the reflex rejection of terrorism.” Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 253. 2. In Arabic, the maghreb denotes Morocco, while the phrase the Arab Maghreb refers to a broader region that includes Libya and Mauritania, as on Al Jazeera’s nightly Maghreb News Round-up. All five countries signed onto the Maghreb Union in 1989. However, Libya, with its distinct colonial history, is often omitted from the category by French speakers, while Mauritania is generally attached to sub-Saharan Africa, despite much sociocultural continuity with the Western Sahara, currently claimed by Morocco. 3. Most prominent among them is Hamid Dabashi, who recently published The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London: Zed Books, 2012). Only four years prior, Dabashi had published Postorientialism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (Edison, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008). Social and economic justice movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados in Spain claimed direct kinship to the uprisings of the Arab Spring, while groups as diverse as North American teachers’ unions, antirape and women’s rights activists in India, and housing rights activists in Israel have proclaimed ­affinities with them. 4. Beyond the wave of self-immolations it triggered in Morocco and Algeria, the ouster of President Ben Ali in Tunisia lent new life to existing protest movements in Morocco and Algeria, as well as birthing new ones such as the February 20th, or Mamfakinch, Movement in Morocco, sending leaders in both countries scrambling to appease populations by providing at least a semblance of economic and political reforms. 5. In their still definitive analysis of the film, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam remind us that for all of its gritty neorealism and the subversive perspectives it presented on the Algerian war of independence, The Battle of Algiers was a commercial feature film that neatly elided the contradictions inherent in the anticolonial revolution. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism:  Multiculturalism and the Media (New  York:  Routledge, 1994), 251–255. 6. Patricia Caillé makes the case that French resistance to The Battle of Algiers was rooted precisely in the film’s successful proclamation of full-fledged nationhood rather than its depiction of torture. “The Illegitimate Legitimacy of The Battle of Algiers in French Film Culture,” Interventions 9, no. 3 (2007): 371–388.

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7. Studies of the cinematic infrastructure and production histories of each country in French and English include Lotfi Maherzi, Le cinéma algérien:  Institutions, imaginaire, idéologie (Algiers:  SNED, 1980), Hédi Khelil, Abécédaire du cinéma tunisien (Tunis: Simpact, 2007), Sonia Chamkhi, Le cinéma tunisien 1996–2006 à la lumière de la modernité (Manouba: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2009), Guy Austin, Algerian National Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), Sandra Carter, What Moroccan Cinema? A  Historical and Critical Study (Lexington, KY:  Lexington Books, 2009), Kevin Dwyer, Beyond Casablanca:  M.A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2004), Robert Lang, New Tunisian Cinema:  Allegories of Resistance (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2014), Valerie Orlando, Screening Morocco:  Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (Athens:  Ohio University Press, 2011). Roy Armes offers an invaluable, decade-by-decade study of the waxing and waning fortunes of cinema production in all three countries in his Postcolonial Images:  Studies in North African Film (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2005), as does Denise Brahimi in 50 ans de cinéma maghrébin (Paris: Minerve, 2009). Studies in Arabic, thematic studies, and studies that group films from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia with films from the broader Middle East substantially lengthen this list. In her influential article on the end of cinema, Anne Friedberg notes that, long before its wide acceptance in the United States, the VCR became a popular tool for viewing banned films in countries with restrictive media policies. “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 443–444. 8. Chapter 3, on the films of Mohamed Chouikh, discusses in greater detail Algerian filmmakers’ responses to the film’s influence. 9. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam dissect the film’s impact in their Unthinking Eurocentrism, while Viola Shafik examines the lasting effects of war of independence mythology upon Algerian cinema in Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, rev. ed. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007). 10. The popular Algerian comic performer and writer Fellag, for example, has skewered the legacy of Algeria’s state-sponsored television stations in his routines. In French, see Mohand Said Fellag, Djurdjurassique Bled (1997). YouTube has both broken down borders between audiences in all three countries and fueled old rivalries, as the comments sections of music videos immediately attest. 11. MBC, or Middle East Broadcasting Center, provided the first free satellite station in 1991, followed by Al Jazeera in 1996. 12. Marwan Kraidy and Joe F. Khalil detail how the emergence of Arab satellite television displaced state monopolies and vastly expanded the range of entertainment available to viewers in the MENA region in their eminently useful Arab Television Industries (London: British Film Institute, 2009). 13. It is common practice for autocratic postindependence nation-states to censor certain films at home, yet promote them abroad as evidence not just of a flourishing national cinema, but also their own openness to critique and liberal values. Ousmane Sembene’s early films are famous examples of this; censored at home, they were actively promoted abroad by the Senegalese government as evidence of its progressiveness. Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions offers a detailed analysis of a related phenomenon in the context of Chinese cultural modernization, in which films foregrounding those marginalized by

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the modern state are promoted as paradigmatic when exported abroad. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Moahmed Zniber expresses similar concerns regarding the reception of Moroccan film as representative when they circulate abroad in his “Pour un art au service de la vérité,” in Cinéma: Histoire et société, ed. Mohamed Dahane (Rabat: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université Mohammed V, 1992). 14. See Tom Gunning’s legendary article, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31–45. 15. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 236. 16. A film school opened in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2007, and industrial models of filmmaking have begun to emerge within the last decade in that country. 17. For a comparative, decade-by-decade study of filmmaking and films in all three countries, see Armes, Postcolonial Images. 18. Brahimi, 50 ans de cinéma maghrébin, 7. 19. A Maghreb Union consisting of Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia and envisioned for decades was formally established in 1989. Political disputes, most notably between Morocco and Algeria regarding the independence of the Western Sahara, put a halt to its activities in 1994, although the uprisings of the Arab Spring have resulted in a renewal of efforts to revive the Union by creating a single economic zone and currency across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. All along, however, popular entertainers and musicians have advanced an ideal of Maghrebi unity, often fostered by friendships with immigrants from neighboring countries made in exile. An example of a cultural work received with spectacular enthusiasm in all three countries is the song 2006 “Partir Loin,” by the Algerian rai singer Réda Taliani and Paris-based rappers 113, who have roots not only in North Africa, but also West Africa and the Caribbean, and who frequently insert calls for a “Maghreb United” into their songs. Not so coincidentally, the song relates a young man’s frustrations with the poverty and contempt he experiences in his homeland, and his decision to migrate clandestinely, most likely to Europe. 20. Farida Benlyazid’s A Door to the Sky, a Moroccan-Tunisian coproduction, is one example of such a film included in this study. 21. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” trans. Julianne Burton, in New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 47. 22. Gayatri Spivak, afterword, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi (New York: Routledge, 1995), 199. 23. Valerie Orlando and Sandra Carter both devote considerable space to issues of representativity in their studies of Moroccan cinema. Orlando, Screening Morocco; Carter, What Moroccan Cinema? 24. Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” 54. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 25. Nessma television, located in Tunisia, is a private satellite station that began broadcasting in 2007 to Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, targeting the region’s youth

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with a regional version of Star Academy. Financial and political troubles have led to its reorganization (it currently receives a portion of its financing from Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset), but it continues to broadcast news and entertainment, including Maghrebi films, expanding not only audiences for these films but also expectations for them. 26. It is not unusual for an Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian film to raise a controversy based on its subject matter alone, with those who have not seen, and sometimes refuse to see, the film on this basis weighing in with particular vehemence. See Carter, What Moroccan Cinema?

Chapter 1 1. Benlyazid subsequently directed the features Women’s Wiles (Keid Ensa) (1999), Casablanca, Casablanca (2002), and La Vida perra de Juanita Narboni (2005). A  writer before becoming a director, she has written scripts for a number of Moroccan films, starting with Jilali Ferhati’s Reed Dolls (1981), which she also produced. She has also written and directed a number of films for Moroccan television. 2. Mrinalini Sinha usefully contrasts the positioning of women and women’s rights in postcolonial nations with the same in Europe and North America in her incisive study of gender and nation. “Gender and Nation,” Women’s History in Global Perspective, vol. 1, ed. Bonnie G. Smith (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 229–274. For an excellent, more specific, analysis of North African women’s rights and state formation, see Mounira Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 3. Benlyazid’s film was completed after the 1980 establishment of a CCM (Centre Cinématographique Marocain) fund to retroactively aid filmmakers with production expenses, but prior to the 1988 policy of awarding preproduction funds on the basis of scripts submitted. Funding further increased in the 1990s. 4. The years of lead, les années de plombe, in French, broadly encompass the years of King Hassan II’s reign, from 1961 to 1999. During these years, perceived political opponents including Marxists and Islamists, as well as feminist and Amazight activists, were routinely arrested, tortured, and disappeared, and the press and media were heavily censored. State repression began to ease somewhat in the 1990s, with some former opponents of Hassan II’s government even appointed to state ministries. Sweeping changes, however, set in only after the king’s death in 1999. For a detailed account of the evolution of human rights discourse in Morocco, see Susan Slyomovics, The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 5. For an account of the screening and distribution difficulties of Moroccan filmmakers, see Kevin Dwyer, Beyond Casablanca: M. A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2004). Dwyer also discusses the profound changes in this situation in an article, “Moroccan Cinema and the Promotion of Culture,” Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 277–286. 6. Sandra Gayle Carter summarizes the response to the film as evidence of conflicting sociocultural forces at work in Morocco. Carter, “Farida Benlyazid’s Moroccan Women,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17, no. 4 (2000): 343–369. Prior to 2004, when activists finally succeeded in overturning its most restrictive clauses, the sharia-based Moroccan Code of Personal Status conferred upon men the status of the head of household and

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deemed women minors, authorized the repudiation of wives by simple declaration, and authorized men to take up to three additional wives, with the consent of the first. 7. Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema:  History and Cultural Identity (Cairo:  American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 207. Shafik elaborates on this contradiction: “On the one hand, A Door to the Sky wants to support native feminists by reminding them that women held important social positions in classical Islamic times. On the other hand, the author takes a position on Western feminism by illustrating that such ‘progressive’ institutions as shelters for battered women have a long tradition in Islamic culture and that female self-realization can take place in a traditional framework” (207). 8. Silvia Hallensleben, Der Tagesspiegel, September 25, 1995, in The Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, ed. Rebecca Hillauer, trans. Allison Brown, Deborah Cohen, and Nancy Joyce (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 341. 9. Benlyazid was responding to a lack of interest on the part of European television programmers in broadcasting the film, allegedly because it was “too beautiful.” Interview with Farida Benlyazid, FESPACO retrospective, Berlin 1999. Qtd. in Hillauer, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, 343. 10. Mona Fayad, “Architectures of Identity:  Divergent Feminisms in Two Films by Arab Women,” Deep Focus 8, nos. 3–4 (1998): 29. 11. Ella Shohat, “Framing Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender and Nation in Middle Eastern / North African Film and Video,” Jouvert 1, no. 1 (1997), http://english.chass.ncsu. edu/jouvert/v1i1/SHOHAT.HTM. 12. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism:  Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 165. 13. A Door to the Sky was finally joined by Nabil Ayouch’s Ali Zaoua (2000) and four years later by Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Le Grand Voyage (2004). Since then, a small but steady trickle of Moroccan films into US distribution has continued, aided by more robust funding in Morocco and the explosion in the popularity of streaming. Paula Hardy, Mara Vorhees, and Heidi Edsell, Lonely Planet Morocco (Footscray: Lonely Planet Publications, 2005). Editions since 2007 have dropped Benlyazid’s film from the list. 14. UNESCO declared the old city of Fez a world heritage site in 1981. More documentation is available at http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/170. 15. Until 2004, Morocco’s Code of Personal Status was one of the most retrograde in the Arab world. With the reforms of 2004, it became one of the most progressive, although inheritance laws continue to privilege sons on the declared grounds that this reflects a tenet of sharia, or Islamic law, that governments are powerless to alter. 16. Benlyazid, “Image and Experience: Why Cinema?” in Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East, trans. and ed. Sherifa Zuhur (Cairo:  American University in Cairo Press, 1998), 209. 17. Fayad, “Architectures of Identity,” 24. 18. The nobility of this Arab lineage is thereby underscored and the family is casually set apart from the mass of Moroccans who do not possess a noble heritage. 19. Similarly, the film offers little sense of the marginal place assigned to Sufism by many secularizing sociopolitical movements in the Islamic world, though less in Morocco, as well as the connections of certain Sufi orders to political power. Sufism is alternately taxed by its critics with encouraging flight from material realities, supporting feudalistic practices, and encouraging occult spheres of political influence through its brotherhoods.

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Its marginality also derives from Sufism’s long history of appropriation and, in the eyes of some, Christianization, at the hands of orientalists. See, for example, Asín Palacios’s study of Ibn al-Arabi, El islam cristianizado (Madrid: Editorial Plutarco, 1931) as well as Edward Said’s critique of Louis Massignon in his Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 20. Fayad interprets Nadia’s inner turmoil just after her father’s death as a battle with an individualism that she subsequently overcomes. Fayad, “Architectures of Identity,” 26–27. 21. Mervat Hatem, “In the Eye of the Storm: Islamic Societies and Muslim Women in Globalization Discourses,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 26, no. 1 (2006): 26. 22. Florence Martin discusses the rich soundscape of the film in “A Door to the Sky,” in The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, ed. Gönül Dönmez-Colin (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 123–134. 23. In her study of women who perceive donning the veil as an essential act of piety, Mahmood astutely notes that “agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms,” summarizing the debate between pietists and secularists with the observation that “for the pietists, bodily behavior is at the core of the proper realization of the norm, and for their opponents [secular Muslims] it is a contingent and unnecessary element in modesty’s enactment.” Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 15, 24. 24. The phrase “et je doute qu’on puisse en trouver un sous tes jupes” is not translated by the English subtitles. 25. Carter, “Benlyazid’s Moroccan Women,” 360–361. 26. For more on the emergence of the modern couple in Moroccan society, see Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil:  Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 27. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 165. 28. The dedication employs the collective and more colloquial “our” rather than the more grammatically correct dual, yet adopts an archaism in the inclusion of the epithet, which translates roughly as “the Good,” after the name of Benlyazid’s father.

Chapter 2 1. Reported to have been used as a training film for leftist groups ranging from the Black Panthers to the IRA, The Battle of Algiers was also screened for Pentagon employees in August 2003 with a view to encouraging creative and strategic thinking about the war in Iraq. David Ignatius, “Think Strategy, Not Numbers,” Washington Post, August 26, 2003. All references to the film are to the Criterion Collection re-edition. 2. In recent interviews, Yacef takes credit for the initiative, for introducing Pontecorvo to Algiers, for making many of the directorial decisions, and for developing the mise en scène of the film. Saadi Yacef, “ ‘You Cannot Continually Inflict’: An Interview with Saadi Yacef,” by Jim Dingeman, Framework 49, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 48–64. 3. The screening preceded Algeria’s match with England and was quickly picked up by the English-language press. Nick Vivarelli, “Algeria Goes into ‘Battle’ at the World Cup,” Variety, June 28–July 11, 2010.

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4. The Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS (Front Islamique du Salut), is the party that dominated the first round of the later-canceled Algerian parliamentary elections in 1992. The civil war of the 1990s is alternately dated to 1991, when the government redrew electoral districts to prevent such an outcome, or 1992, when it canceled the second round of parliamentary elections in response to the overwhelming Islamist victories in the first round. 5. Pontecorvo employs the phrase to describe the power of the film’s newsreel quality in a documentary of the same name, The Dictatorship of Truth (1992), narrated by Edward Said and included with the Criterion Collection release. 6. Rachid Boudjedra, Naissance du cinéma algérien (Paris:  Maspéro, 1971). See also Lotfi Maherzi, Le cinéma algérien: institutions, imaginaire, idéologie (Algiers: SNED, 1980). 7. Despite Pontecorvo’s best efforts to make the Algerian people the collective hero of his film, the figure of Ali la Pointe anticipates the evolution that Shafik describes as follows: “The heroic Algerian resistance fighters (mudjahidun) establish law and order; totally alone (one against all) the partisan accepts the challenge of his evil adversaries (Frenchman and native feudal lords).” Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, rev. ed. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 30–31. 8. For a brief overview of postindependence Algeria’s early commitment to cinema see Maherzi, Le cinéma algérien, 9–13. The agrarian revolution had become a primary focus of the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographique (ONCIC). Roy Armes notes that postindependence films fell quickly into a pattern marked by the dual approach of “looking at progress in contemporary rural society and documenting the abuses of the colonial past.” Armes, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 25. 9. The filmmakers still on the organization’s payroll were dismissed and encouraged to form their own production companies and seek alternate funding sources. Armes, Postcolonial Images, 55–60. 10. Two feature films were released in 2002, both filmed in part in the capital, Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (Bachir-Chouikh is married to Mohammed Chouikh and has collaborated on many of his films), and Ghaouti Bendeddouche’s Al-Jarra (The Neighborwoman). 11. Chouikh made one previous film for television, al-Inquita (Rupture) (1982). 12. Published as Pamphlet 1 by Cinéaste. Reprinted in Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1 (Detroit, M: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 257. Signatories included filmmakers from Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Republic of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Morocco. 13. Eric Walravens, “L’arche du désert,” Ciné-Fiches de Grand Angle, May 1, 1998, 7–8. 14. Roy Armes, African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 130–131. 15. Shafik, Arab Cinema, 150, 153. 16. Denise Brahimi, “Images, symboles, et paraboles dans le cinéma de Mohamed Chouikh,” in Cinémas du Maghreb, ed. Michel Serceau (Condé-sur-Noireau:  Corlet, 2004), 154–159; Brahimi, 50 ans de cinéma maghrébin (Paris: Minerve, 2009). 17. Kaddour’s very name hints at his character and his fate. Formed from the second form of the root q.d.r, it suggests one who is predestined or fated. Transcribed with a “k” (typical of French transcription of the Arabic letter qaf, it derives from the root k.d.r, to indicate muddiness, trouble, annoyance.

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18. Ella Shohat, Response to “What Is the Link between Chosen Genres and Developed Ideologies in African Cinema?” in Symbolic Narratives / African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, ed. June Givanni (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 123–126. 19. Power struggles and assassinations among revolutionary leaders followed Algerian independence. In a recent article, Guy Austin discusses Youssef in the context of Algerian films that break with state-sponsored perspectives on the Algerian war of independence, pointing out that Youssef ’s character loosely recalls President Boudiaf, a war hero exiled in neighboring Morocco and publicly assassinated only months after his assumption of power in 1992. Guy Austin, “Against Amnesia: Representations of Memory in Algerian Cinema,” Journal of African Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2010): 27–35. 20. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989), 5. 21. Allouache’s film follows a young baker’s apprentice who, unable to sleep because of the incessant religious broadcasts, tears down a loudspeaker installed by a group of extremist thugs. 22. Chouikh’s film is paired with Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Daratt: A Dry Season in Great African Cinema, vol. 3 (New York: Artmattan Productions, 2008). 23. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1, ed. Michael T.  Martin (Detroit, MI:  Wayne State University Press, 1997), 50. 24. The quotation appears only in French on both copies in my possession. 25. Most notably in the Sūrat al-A ͑ rāf, where “Allah establishes himself above or on the throne” (7:54).

Chapter 3 1. For more on the New Tunisian Cinema, see Robert Lang, New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 2. Khemir’s relatively unconstrained use of orientalist scholarship also fuels these fears. 3. Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, rev. ed. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 53. 4. Sonia Lee, “A la recherche de l’Andalousie perdue,” CinemAction 111 (2004): 136, 140; Nacer Khemir, “Nacer Khemir:  Orphan of Civilization,” by Youssef Rakha, Al-Ahram Weekly 792, April 27–May 3, 2006. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/792/profile.htm (accessed June 29, 2015). 5. Among non-Muslims in the West, Sufism continues to be described as a form of mysticism and largely disassociated from Islam. Orientalist scholars became fascinated early on with various strains of Sufism, alternately dwelling on the lurid details of the practices of certain sects, and portraying Sufis as Christian-like in opposition to Muslims. The most famous instance of the latter is, of course, Louis Massignon’s The Passion of al-Hallaj, trans. Herbert Mason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). Long reviled by orthodox Islamic jurists, Sufis became associated with colonialism because of the very fascination they exerted upon orientalist scholars. At the same time, the countries of the Maghreb sought to counter the political influence of Sufi tariqas, or brotherhoods, after independence by taxing them with promoting feudal customs and undermining the financial, social, and political authority of the state. Despite this,

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members of certain brotherhoods often figure disproportionately in high government positions in countries like Morocco, prompting even supporters of Sufism to qualify these as secret societies. Finally, in the wake of increasingly popular militant Islamist movements and rising fears of Islam in Europe and North America, governments in the Maghreb have sought to promote Sufism as a tolerant form of Islam in keeping with the particular heritage of the region. 6. Khemir himself tends to fuel such concerns by refusing to discuss the deeper political references in his work, and through statements such as “I am free of any given discourse. For example, my feelings about the aesthetic components of Arab-Islamic culture cannot be expressed except through artistic interpretation.” Khemir, “A Wanderer Seeking the Words of Love in Impossible Cities:  Nacer Khemir,” by Khemais Khayati, trans. Maggie Awadalla, Alif 15 (1995): 256. 7. Khayati identifies as Nefta the city in which Wanderers was shot and which Khemir qualifies as neglected, misunderstood, and underfunded. Khayati, “A Wanderer Seeking,” 258. 8. Trained as a painter and sculptor, Khemir has also performed as a storyteller and published numerous children’s books, as well as made several animated films and television documentaries. 9. Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 64. 10. It took Khemir eleven years to amass the support necessary to make Baba Aziz, the most ambitious of his three feature films. In an interview with Yasser Moheb, he explains that European sponsors often advised him to make a film about terrorism instead. Khemir, “Conteur d’Orient,” interview by Yasser Moheb, Al-Ahram Weekly 606, April 12–18, 2006. http://hebdo.ahram.org.eg/Archive/2006/5/24/visa0.htm (accessed June 29, 2015). 11. As all students of Arabic learn, Arabic words are built from roots of three, or less commonly, four, letters. Western writers of political polemics not infrequently attempt to use this linguistic particularity to ascribe essentialist meanings to entire cultures and religions. 12. See Lee, “A la recherche de l’Andalousie perdue.” 13. Ali Ibn Ahmad Ibn Hazm, The Ring of the Dove, trans. A. J.  Arberry (London: Luzac, 1953). 14. Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 9. 15. Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos, 23. Berlekamp is citing Qazwini. 16. Translation Michael Sells (with modified orthography of Arabic), Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qurʾan, Miʿraj, Poetic and Theological Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996). 17. The work in question is al-Hallaj’s Tawasin. See Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism. 18. A French terrorist organization, La Main rouge, which had as one of its aims to misattribute assassinations by leaving behind “evidence” that pointed to Arab perpetrators, also appropriated the symbol. 19. The police inspector repeatedly proclaims that he is tired of riddles. 20. Ibn Hazm’s text is valued as much for the portrait it paints of Cordoba as for its exposition of the rules of courtly love.

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21. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 22. The term Islamicate denotes the cultural production of regions where Islam is the religion of the majority, but where the cultural production may not for all that be religious. It was first popularized by Marshall Hodgson. 23. Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” in The New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1, Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997). 24. For a useful tracing of the evolution of postindependence Arab thought, see Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Khemir’s approach to art and artisanal practices differs fundamentally from the work of iconic Tunisian auteur filmmaker Nouri Bouzid, which characterizes traditional arts and trades as mired in abusive relationships of power and slavish conformity, by contrast with modern art forms that promote individual self-expression and social renewal. 25. Khemir himself comments that his first encounter with Ibn Hazm’s text was a watershed moment for him. Khayati, “A Wanderer Seeking,” 256. 26. The remaining lines describe the staging of the dream, the Princess of Samarkand seated at the edge of an empty basin into which two old women throw water, gazing at a pomegranate, a miniature illustrating the scene on the facing page. 27. The sole surviving manuscript was not illustrated. 28. The exact date of the work’s composition is unknown, but it is usually dated to about 1022. 29. Rakha prefaces his interview with Khemir by contending that Lost Neckring failed to engage the audience at the American University in Cairo’s Falaki theater in spring of 2006. With its reclamation of an Andalusian past, Khemir’s film intersects with Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine’s far more popular Destiny (al-Massir) (1997). Nonetheless, the two differ considerably not just in their aesthetic approach but also finally in their portrayal of the link between that past and the North African present. Chahine recreates an eminently accessible al-Andalus, where a lovable, populist, feminist ibn-Rushd (Averroës) and his fun-loving entourage speak colloquial Egyptian, break into song and dance, and nobly fight the power-hungry, controlling forces of obscurantism and unreason. Drawing distinct parallels between twelfth-century Andalusia and the Egypt of the 1990s, Chahine’s film sweeps audiences along in the rational and resistant, yet open, spirit of Averroës. 30. Rakha grudgingly acknowledges as much in his interview. 31. For a reading of Khemir’s films in this context, see Firoozeh Papan-Matin, “Nacer Khemir and the Subject of Beauty in Baba Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 1 (2012): 107–126. 32. Sufi chants are present in Wanderers as the song of the desert wanderers. 33. Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (1207–1273) wrote in Persian. The popularity of his poetry in English doubtlessly owes much to the lively, skilled translations of Coleman Barks. 34. Interestingly, Khemir has previously dismissed poetry, telling Yasser Moheb, “Je n’ai jamais écrit de poésie car j’ai l’impression que le monde arabe s’en sert pour dissimuler son côté créatif. C’est comme s’il se cachait derrière la langue. Or malheureusement, notre langue arabe n’exprime plus notre pensée, et inversement” (I never wrote

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poetry because I’m under the impression that the Arab world uses it to dissimulate its creative side. It’s as if it were hiding behind language. Unfortunately, our Arabic language no longer expresses our thought, and vice versa). Khemir, “Conteur d’Orient,” interview by Yasser Moheb. 35. Post–Arab Spring Tunisia has seen the sacking of at least one Sufi shrine by extremists, as well as calls to ban visiting Iranian performers.

Chapter 4 1. The Megarama in Casablanca, Morocco’s first, and for four years only, multiplex movie theater opened in 2002. It was followed by Megarama Marrakech in 2006. While they are popular and there are plans to build them in all major Moroccan cities, the Megaramas are pricey by Moroccan standards and primarily attract an upper-middle-class crowd to watch French and American films and eat fast food. Rare theaters like the restored, colonial-era Cinema Rif in Tangiers, and the Centre Cinématographique Marocain–sponsored Septième Art in Rabat regularly screen Moroccan and regional films and European art films. In other major cities, some colonial-era movie houses, in increasing disrepair, still function, often screening action, martial arts, Bollywood, Hollywood, or Egyptian films, but they are rarely comfortable places, especially for women, and many people prefer to view their movies on pirated DVDs or download them from the Internet. An informal survey of the students in my 2009 master’s level classes in the major city of Fez revealed that well over 50 percent had never seen a film in a movie theater. 2. The website Africultures credits Mektoub with 350,000 ticket sales: www.africultures. com/php/index.php?nav=personne&no=3229 (accessed June 27, 2015). By contrast, total ticket sales for all Moroccan films in 2008 were roughly 400,000. 3. Denise Brahimi argues that despite the stunning geographical features of North Africa, features that continue to inspire many foreigners to film there, geography took a distant second to history in shaping the course of North African film. Denise Brahimi, 50 Ans de cinéma maghrébin (Paris: Minerve, 2009), 12–15. 4. In an investigative piece in the Independent, Fiammeta Rocca describes the resistance, as well as challenges to her own expectations, that she met with in attempting to trace the implications of Tabet’s crimes, trial, and conviction. Tabet was sentenced to death on charges including rape, def loration, kidnapping, violence, and incitement to debauchery; his immediate superior given a life sentence; and sixteen others, police officers and civilians, given sentences between three and twenty years. Tabet eventually confessed to having sex with over sixteen hundred women during the same three-year period, alternately pleading insanity and arguing that the sex was consensual. Tabet was also convicted of selling copies of his videocassettes abroad, and two flight attendants with the national airline, Royal Air Maroc, received jail time for facilitating these sales. Fiammeta Rocca, “The Shame of Casablanca,” Independent, May 9, 1993. 5. Working from Moroccan journalistic sources in both Arabic and French, Smolin also observes that Tabet kept meticulous records of his victims, records that suggest the real number of his victims was closer to sixteen hundred. Jonathan Smolin, Moroccan Noir:  Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2013).

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6. In a recent book chapter on Ayouch, Smolin discusses in detail the taboos that each of Ayouch’s films targets and the manner in which it has engaged public debate (and sometimes outrage). Jonathan Smolin, “Nabil Ayouch:  Transgression, Identity, and Difference,” in Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique, ed. Joseph Gugler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 7. Feature films Ayouch has directed to date include the locally and internationally acclaimed and distributed, prize-winning Ali Zaoua (2000), a whimsical yet socially critical portrait of street children; Lahthat dalaam / Une Minute de soleil en moins / A Moment of Darkness (2002), a noirish tale of murder, exploitation, corruption, and drug trafficking within a wealthy, socially prominent Moroccan family with a slick, music-video feel; Lola / Whatever Lola Wants (2008), a lighter fairy tale about a naive American dancer who follows her love to Egypt and runs up against a wall of double standards before finding success and empowering a disgraced Egyptian star; Chevaux de Dieu / Horses of God (2012), which relates the story of the Casablanca bombers. He has also directed the documentary film My Land (2010), which brings together Palestinians recalling their lost homes and young Israelis, and a number of films for Moroccan television. Ayouch’s Casablanca-based production company, Ali’n Productions, produces numerous television and feature films, including a number of Berber- or Amazight-language films. 8. In a personal conversation, Ayouch identified his motive for making the film as the subsequent hushing up of Tabet affair in the name of safeguarding public sensibilities. Personal conversation with Ayouch, Casablanca, May 25, 2009. Also mentioned in his interview with Olivier Barlet for Africultures:  www.africultures.com/php/index. php?nav=article&no=2897 (accessed January 24, 2010). 9. For more on non-Western cinemas as contested sites, see Wimal Dissanayake, “Issues in World Cinema,” in World Cinema: Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill, Pamela Church Gibson, Richard Dyer, E. Ann Kaplan, and Paul Willemen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 143–150. 10. Ayouch describes the making of his first feature as a project of discovery and connection, explaining that work on location showed him different faces of a Morocco he had previously known only through urban centers such as Casablanca. 11. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (July 1991), 6. 12. Rocca provides a graphic overview of the tapes’ contents, gleaned from her conversations with lawyers in the trial. 13. Many Moroccans blamed Tabet’s victims, and Rocca cites several who offer versions of the “they should have known better” criticism that one hears worldwide, surmising that their fault lay in anything from accepting a ride from the police commissioner to mixing with men at the university. 14. Smolin notes that despite the groundbreaking nature of the case and the level of detail available to the public via the press, the entire affair was nonetheless cloaked in an aura of cover-up. Smolin, Moroccan Noir, 25. 15. Brahimi, 50 ans, 39–42. 16. Brahimi, 50 ans, 42. 17. Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Film Comment 13, no. 1 (1977): 47. 18. Roy Armes, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 170. In Global Hollywood, the authors offer compelling evidence

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that even Hollywood products themselves do not necessarily transmit their ideological underpinnings to audiences abroad. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001). See especially c­ hapter 6. 19. Fatima Mernissi addresses the social tensions caused by evolving conceptions of the family in her early work. See Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), especially Part II. 20. For a complete discussion of rape-revenge horror films, see Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws:  Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1992), especially ­chapters 1 and 3. 21. I paraphrase here number 8 on Robin Wood’s list of the assumptions underlying the capitalist ideology of Hollywood genre films. Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” 47. 22. Roy Armes, African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 181. 23. Malika Oufkir, La Prisonnière, with Michèle Fitoussi (Paris: Grasset, 1999). Translated into English as Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (New York: Hyperion, 2001). 24. Aide to four French governors during the colonial period, Oufkir became responsible for state security after independence under Mohammed V in 1958. Always close to Hassan II, he became the latter’s interior minister in 1967. He has been linked to the disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka from Paris and to the torture of dissidents during the years of lead that began under Hassan II. Malika grew up first in the king’s palace and later at the home of her father, by then the country’s interior minister. 25. Amina Alaoui is a Moroccan singer and recording artist famous for her renditions of medieval songs from the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions. She appears in Farida Benlyazid’s film Keid Ensa (1999). 26. Thomas Schatz notes that all genre films fulfill a common social function: “Resolution involves a point of dramatic closure in which a compromise or temporary solution to the conflict is projected into a sort of cultural and historical timelessness . . . . Still, the resolution does not function to solve the basic cultural conflict.” At the same time, however, he adds that “the force of convention is such that, unless the film itself demands it, the conclusion of a successful genre film will not leave one asking, ‘what happens next?’ ” Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres, excerpted as “Film Genre and the Genre Film,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 7th ed., Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 573, 575.

Chapter 5 1. While the character of Mounir evokes such admittedly disparate characters, he is also marked by the particularities of time and place in ways that render him distinct. For example, his character retains little of the air of suppressed rage that prompts Steven Sheehan to perceive in Ralph Kramden a precursor not just of Archie Bunker but also Travis Bickle, and his haplessness stems from visible causes very different from those that prompt David Buchbinder to situate Raymond Barone in a lineage of male characters who incompetently or inadequately perform masculinity. Steven T. Sheehan, “Pow! Right in the Kisser: Ralph Kramden, Jackie Gleason, and the Emergence of the Frustrated Working Class  Man,” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 3 (2010):  564–582;

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David Buchbinder, “Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate or Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television,” Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 2 (2008): 227–245. 2. Since the 1990s, only three other feature films have benefited from US distribution, Merzak Allouache’s Bab el Oued el Haouma / Bab el Oued City (1994), Mohamed Chouikh’s El Arsh / The Ark of the Desert (1997), and the most widely available of the three, US-trained Nadir Mokneche’s Viva Laldgerie (2003). Mokneche’s film was part of a trilogy, although the other two films were not distributed in the United States. 3. The Algerian comedic film best known internationally, Merzak Allouache’s classic Omar Gatlato (1977), also features an antiheroic member of the working class, though one whose voice over commentary on his existence offers much more pointed critique of the postindependence political system. 4. Tales of sleeping princesses collide with the trope of the narrating Shahrazad, as well as with the many adventures of Joha, an Arab folk character by turns comical and surprisingly wise. I discuss the uses of Shahrazad in feminist literature and film from the Maghreb at greater length in my book Liberating Shahrazad: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 5. Its success at festivals, coupled with robust sponsorship by a government that had effectively dismantled state support for filmmaking, only exacerbated suspicions that the film had abdicated political critique in order to play to commercial interests. What Teshome Gabriel famously deemed “films of unqualified assimilation,” whose primary purpose is profit-seeking entertainment, is a concept that retains particular strength in Algeria, resulting in careful scrutiny of films that seem to share a Hollywood aesthetic. Teshome Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” in Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996). One year after its release, Masquearades was not only available in Algiers and Oran via pirated DVDs, but also on affordable, authorized DVDs, at least in the capital. 6. Salem speaks at some length about the importance of language, an insider’s perspective, and regionally specific humor and the popularity of his film in the interview included with the Global Lens edition of the film. “Interview with Rob Avila,” the Global Film Initiative, December 4, 2010. 7. Perhaps for simple practical reasons or perhaps more deliberately, Masquerades features Volkswagen Passats and Touaregs rather than the usual BMWs, possibly to obviate the darker associations of state violence, drug trafficking, or collusion with organized crimes that Maghrebi cinema has established with the latter car brand. My knowledge of the make and model of cars employed in Masquerades comes from the Internet Movie Car Database (IMCDB). 8. At times, Mounir appears almost as a caricatural illustration of a man striving to access the dividends promised by the “hegemonic masculinity” that Raewyn Connell dissects in her work on global masculinities. Raewyn Connell, Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). 9. Framed as they are by commitment to his nuclear family, Mounir’s inept compensatory efforts convey not so much an attachment to Algerian, Arab, Berber, or Muslim patriarchal tradition as a longing to fulfill the responsibilities of male head of household and provider inculcated by all patriarchal societies. For a classic description of this

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continuum, see Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274–290. 10. In popular culture throughout the Maghreb, being mahgour is often cited as the reason for a desire to emigrate, whether legally or illegally. In 2006, the song “Partir loin” (“To Go Far Away”) by the rap group 113 and the Algerian rai singer Reda Taliani became a smash hit throughout the Maghreb with its repeated “fi bledi rani mahgour” (in my country I find myself mahgour [disrespected]). 11. Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), remains the work of reference here, yet Mascarades also resonates with the sly wit of Luce Irigaray’s Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1977). The latter was translated into English as This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 12. A ney is a type of flute. 13. Mounir’s exclamation that “there is only this road” (ma kayn ghir hadh ltreeq) anticipates the refrain of the song that closes the film and encapsulates Khliffa’s as yet unarticulated philosophy, Sidi Cheikh Bémol’s “Ma Kayn Walou Kima Lamor” (“There Is Nothing Like Love”), which enumerates a host of social problems, concluding each time that “ma kayn walou khir min lamour,” there is nothing better than love. Sidi Cheikh Bémol is a Franco-Algerian rock group founded in 1992 in the suburbs of Paris. The song “Ma Kayn Walou Kima Lamour” reflects a strong blues influence. It was released on the album El Bandi in 2003. 14. In 2005, following the revision of Algerian Family Law, the authority of this male relative to reject the marriage was diminished to a ceremonial role, but not abolished altogether, as many women’s activists had wished. 15. More buffoonery than menacing, this moment nonetheless conveys the potential destructiveness of the (momentarily) powerless Redouane. 16. See, for example, Celestino Deleyto, “Between Friends:  Love and Friendship in Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Comedy,” Screen 44, no. 2 (summer 2003): 167–182; and John Alberti, “I Love You, Man”: Bromances, the Construction of Masculinity, and the Continuing Evolution of Romantic Comedy,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 30, no. 2 (2013): 159–172. 17. For Khliffa to triumph would entail the demise of the irreconcilable tensions that sustain situation comedies week after week.

Chapter 6 1. Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights: Thoughts of a Middle East Anthropologist,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1624. 2. Robert Lang describes the characteristics of some of the best known of these films and the cinema jdid, or new cinema, movement to which a number of them belong, in his book New Tunisian Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 3. In 2008, five years after the film’s release and while media and human rights activists continued to decry the authoritarian Tunisian government’s draconian censorship of the press, television, and Internet, as well as its intimidation, arbitrary arrest, and beatings of journalists, dissenters, and activists, Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France,

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praised the Tunisian state’s success in combating the religious extremists he characterized as a threat on both sides of the Mediterranean, declaring that he had no lessons in human rights to give President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. As Sarkozy’s remarks show, twinned discourses of the global war on terror and support for women’s rights had permitted the Tunisian leadership and others to mine Euro-American uncertainties and fears concerning Islam in order to employ censorship and repression to paradoxically position itself as a key guarantor of human rights, especially women’s rights, in the Middle East and North Africa region. Reuters, “Droits de l’homme: pas de leçon à donner à Tunis, dit Sarkozy,” Le Monde, April 28, 2008. All ­translations from the French are mine. 4. Bedwin Hacker screened at only a single Tunisian film festival, the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage. It also screened at FESPACO and the Rotterdam Film festivals, as well as at more modest regional and conference affiliated festivals. While it never received much movie theater play abroad, it remains in distribution in the United States, accessible via commercial streaming sites as well as on DVD. 5. Samuel P. Huntington best exemplifies this kind of discourse in his well-known The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New  York:  Simon and Schuster, 1996). 6. The film received minor financing from the Tunisian ministry, but only after four years of repeated applications. El Fani previously worked as an assistant director for, among others, Nouri Bouzid, Roman Polanski, Romain Goupil, and Franco Zeffirelli, and directed and produced a number of short films and advertisements. Nadia El Fani, “Tunisia without Taboos,” interview by Olivia Marsaud for Afrik.com, trans. Michael Dembrow, July 9, 2003: www.afrik.com/article6344.html. 7. This is, of course, a statement that must be taken on faith in light of the absence of any mechanisms of verification. El Fani, “Tunisia without Taboos.” 8. Florence Martin discusses the film’s layering of screens and viewers in the context of new spaces forged by Maghrebi women filmmakers in two book chapters. Florence Martin, “The Wiles of Maghrebi Women’s Cinema,” in Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmaking in the Mediterranean, ed. Flavia Laviosa (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 23–41; Florence Martin, Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 9. Truman inaugurated the dam on October 10, 1945. The full text of his speech is available at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum website. Harry S. Truman, “Address and Remarks at the Dedication of the Kentucky Dam at Gilbertsville, Kentucky.” http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=174&st=&st1=.  Consulted  February 11, 2015. 10. Florence Martin, “Transvergence and Cultural Detours:  Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker,” Studies in French Cinema 7, no. 2 (2007):  119–129. See also Martin, Wiles of Maghrebi Women’s Cinema” and Screens and Veils. 11. Martin, “Transvergence and Cultural Detours,” 123. 12. Mounira Charrad analyzes the mechanics of this re-engineering in terms of women’s rights in her States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 13. Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Politics of Gender and the Conundrums of Citizenship,” in Women and Power in the Middle East, ed. Suad Joseph and Susan Slyomovics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 55.

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14. Women’s rights have become the gold standard by which the development—the civility, culture, and social progress—of Arab countries is evaluated in the international arena, as underscored by the focus of the United Nations Development Programme’s 2005 Arab Human Development Report: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World, United Nations Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Arab States, 2006. www.un.org/ Publications. The UNDP report lauds Arab women’s cinema for “its visual exposure of the mechanics of women’s submission.” In assigning Arab women’s cinema a predominantly expository role, the report subscribes to a civilizational essentialism of its own. Art, for the report, at least Arab women’s art, reflects reality, sometimes magnifying it and sometimes breaking down its mechanics, and returns its observations to newly critical “native” and concerned “foreign” spectators. Nor does the summary challenge the assumption that women’s artistic production takes as its entire focus local contexts, for it assumes that these are the primary sites of oppression. 15. Reiterating its commitment to modern, secular statehood, the Tunisian leadership was able to cast its critics—whether Islamists, Marxists, human rights activists, or even non-state-sponsored feminists—as a threat to a rights-based way of life. Thereby embracing Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a “clash of civilizations” to align itself with Euro-American interests, the Tunisian leadership cautioned the international community that any relaxation of its vigilance would strengthen the enemies of Western civilization—on Europe’s very doorstep. For an astute reading of Egypt’s manipulation of Huntington’s thesis to justify its own repression of human rights and women’s activist groups, see Mervat Hatem, “In the Eye of the Storm:  Islamic Societies and Muslim Women in Globalization Discourses,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26, no. 1 (2006): 22–35. 16. The Occupy movement that emerged in the wake of the Arab Spring perfectly reflects this. 17. In her survey of interventions in cyberfeminism, Jessie Daniels underscores that claims of the Internet’s ability to dislocate “gender and racial regimes of power” remain overstated and undertheorized. Jessie Daniels, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s):  Race, Gender, and Embodiment,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, nos. 1–2 (Spring and Summer 2009): 101–124. 18. Tactics such as the “hijacking” or détournement, of media products have a notable history in France. See, along with the film of the same title, Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and friends (Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1970). 19. For more on these transnational divisions of cyberfeminist labor, see Radhika Gajjala, “South Asian Digital Diasporas and Cyberfeminist Webs:  Negotiating Globalization, Nation, Gender, and Information Technology Design,” Contemporary South Asia 12, no. 1 (2003): 41–56. 20. In his compelling analysis of the deleterious, neo-orientalizing effects of internationally focused LGBT rights groups’ efforts to liberate homosexuals in the Arab world, Joseph Massad details how their activism generally results in increased persecution of practitioners of same-sex contact, as well as co-optation by far-right groups seeking to justify neoimperialist and military intervention in Muslim countries. Focusing his groundbreaking study of orientalism’s legacy on formulations of Arab desire from the nineteenth century until today in literary and philosophical works, Massad does not take into account the growing influence of visual media and cyberspace. He also reserves

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particularly sharp criticism for Arab feminist writers, in a gesture that oddly ignores their complex, differential positioning in local and international economic, political, and juridical discourses. Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially ­chapter 3. 21. Karen Caplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 670. 22. Lisa Nakamura touches on some of these issues from a US perspective in her dissection of the myth of postracial cyberspace in Digitizing Race:  Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 23. For her part, El Fani returned to documentary filmmaking after completing Bedwin Hacker, making a series of increasingly political films. The first of these, Ouled Lenine (Children of Lenin) (2007) explored Tunisian politics via an autobiographical reflection on growing up the daughter of a leader of the banned Tunisian Marxist party. Spanning the period just prior to until just after the revolution of January 14, 2011, her subsequent documentary, Ni Allah, ni Maître (Neither God, nor Master), later retitled La Laïcité, Inshallah (Secularism, God Willing) (2011) argued the need for enshrining secularism in Tunisia’s constitution. While it sought to initiate a conversation among Tunisians, it was met with violence by religious extremists outraged by both its frankness and playful interview strategies and documentary techniques, and resulted in El Fani’s exile from Tunisia. Her response was a follow-up film that relates her simultaneous struggles with breast cancer and extremist threats, Même pas mal (No Harm Done) (2012). El Fani’s most recent documentary, the 2013 Nos seins, nos armes (Our Breasts, Our Weapons), made in collaboration with Caroline Fourest for French television, details the work of the feminist activist group FEMEN, itself the target of much media attention and violence.

Chapter 7 1. Scholars are increasingly turning their attention to the ways in which soccer (and sports more broadly) shape national and regional identities. Recent treatments of the cultural weight of soccer in Algeria include Mahfoud Amara, Sport, Politics, and Society in the Arab World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Eric Calderwood, “Waiting for a Goal,” American Scholar 79, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 6–11. 2. The trajectory of Teguia’s film exemplifies the hurdles facing Algerian filmmakers the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From screenplay to completed film, Teguia’s Rome was seven years in the making. Another two years passed before the film was screened at the Venice Film Festival and subsequently released in France. Made with a minimal budget, the bulk of which came from a 40,000-euro grant from the Berlin Film Festival, with a technical team of only six people, it features nonprofessional actors. Postproduction financing enabled Teguia to complete the film at facilities in Germany and France. In the interview with the French newspaper Le Monde that details these obstacles, Teguia emphasizes his commitment to making Algerian films in Algeria, while remarking on the problem posed by the prohibitive costs of finishing a film abroad. Teguia, “En Algérie, il y a une volonté de se faire entendre, c’est ça que j’ai envie de filmer,” by Isabelle Regnier, Le Monde, April 15, 2008. http://www.lemonde.fr/­cinema/ article/2008/04/15/tariq-teguia-en-algerie-il-y-a-une-volonte-de-se-faire-entendrec-est-ca-que-j-ai-envie-de-filmer_1034414_3476.html (accessed June 29, 2015).

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3. In her deftly written review of the film for Transition, Nancy Honicker recounts how she met two Algerian students while waiting for a special screening and discussion of Rome. Drawn by its title, in which they recognized the soccer fans’ chant, they are utterly disappointed by the film:  “When the lights come up at the end, the Algerian students won’t even look at me. ‘Nul, nul [worthless, rotten]” they keep repeating” (170). Nancy Honicker, “Algeria Breathing Free:  A  Review of Tariq Teguia’s Rome Rather Than You (2007),” Transition 100 (2009): 170–174. Needless to say, the film is not widely available via pirated DVD. 4. Yassin Temlali praises this characteristic in his review of Teguia’s second feature, Gabbla, or Inland (2008), set in a seemingly moribund village in southwest Algeria where the echoes of the war continue to reverberate. Yassin Temlali, “Tarik Teguia, ou l’esthétique au service de la vérité,” in Algérie: Chroniques ciné-littéraires de deux geurres (Algiers: Éditions Barzakh, 2011), 103–106. More recently, Teguia has made Thawrat lzanj, or Zanj Revolution (2013). The few feature films made in Algeria just prior to and during the civil war include the films of Mohamed Chouikh discussed in Part I, Merzak Allouache’s Bab el Oued City (1994), Belkacem Hadjadj’s Machaho (1995), Abderrahmane Bouguermouh’s The Forgotten Hillside (1996), and Azzedine Meddour’s Baya’s Mountain (1997). The first post-civil war films are generally deemed to be Ghaouti Bendeddouche’s The Neighbor (2002) and Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (2002). 5. In his article on memory in Algerian cinema, Guy Austin aptly describes Teguia’s film as mourning the culture inspired by the anticolonial revolution. Guy Austin, “Against Amnesia: Representations of Memory in Algerian Cinema,” Journal of African Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2010): 27–35. 6. Although Algeria remains a closed country in terms of the circulation of consumer goods, satellite television and DVD bootleggers ensure that audiences remain up-to-date on the latest audiovisual trends. 7. “The characters of Touki Bouki are interesting to me because their dreams are not those of ordinary people. Anta and Mory do not dream of building castles in Africa; they dream of finding some sort of Atlantis overseas. … Mory and Anta’s dreams made them feel like foreigners in their own country. So they were marginalized people, in that respect” (143). Djibril Diop Mambety, “The Hyena’s Last Laugh,” trans. N. Frank Ukadike, Transition 78 (1998): 136–153. 8. By the twenty-first century when the film was made, Algeria had additionally been placed by the United States on a terrorist watch list even as violence within the country was receding. 9. While labor immigration to France ended in 1974, Algerians were able to obtain short-term tourist and student visas to France with relative ease until 1995, when the crisis in Algeria prompted France to impose stringent restrictions on visas issued to Algerians, and Schengen zone countries in turn agreed to consult before granting them visas. Since then, European countries concerned by the influx of clandestine immigrants have pressured the countries of the Maghreb to shift the problem to their shores, urging them to criminalize such migrants, and financing “detainment” centers on the southern edge of the Mediterranean. Any attempt to leave Algeria illegally became a criminal offense in 2008, those caught receiving prison sentences of up to six months.

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10. In an interview with Pierre Puchot, Teguia names four still viable movie theaters, all affiliated with local cinematheques, where his latest film, Zanj Revolution, might be screened. Pierre Puchot, “Tariq Teguia, cinéaste algérien, déplie la Méditerranée,” Mediapart, April 14, 2014. http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/110414/tariqteguia-cineaste-algerien-deplie-la-mediterranee. Consulted February 20, 2015. 11. The orthography of l’Bosco reflects the name’s pronunciation in the film. 12. Chester Himes composed the novel shortly after his release from prison in 1936. Based on his prison experiences and going by several titles, it failed to find a publisher until 1952, when it appeared in much “edited” form as Cast the First Stone (New York: Coward-McCann, 1952). The original manuscript was finally published in 1998 by W.W. Norton under its working title, Yesterday Will Make You Cry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Himes moved to France in the 1950s, and his works were popular there. 13. Water was rationed during the 1990s, flowing only on certain days and at certain hours in the Algerian capital. People kept close watch on their faucets, and rushed to stock up when the water was turned on. 14. Algiers (as well as its suburbs, portions of the countryside, and other cities) was regularly rocked by bombings and assassinations during the darkest years of the civil war. Threats were rampant and fear was pervasive. 15. Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 16. Shepp first performed this piece at the PanAfrican Cultural Festival held in Algiers in 1969. 17. Honicker expresses surprise that the audience at the screening of Rome that she attended was eager to blame Zina for the film’s denouement. She speculates that this response stems from the difficulty of accessing Teguia’s film on its own terms: “His film demands that we pay full attention and abandon the narrative expectations Hollywood has taught us all too well: good guys and bad guys and someone to blame at the end—often, a female character (cherchez la femme . . .).” Honicker, “Algeria Breathing Free,” 172. 18. Cheb Hasni, a singer of the popular, and sometimes racy, rai music, and specializing in the genre of “love” rai, was assassinated in 1994. Zina’s lips are visible moving once before the audio returns to the interior of the car. 19. In Touki Bouki, Mory flees the departing ocean liner, leaving Anta to make the journey to France alone. By way of political critique, the vast majority of feature films, including Merzak Allouache’s Harragas (2009), emphasize the dangers inherent in clandestine immigration, the desperation of the migrants, and the disappointments of those who succeed in crossing only to encounter more misery. Only in comedy targeted obviously at regional audiences is success permitted. 20. Several online and print reviewers have expressed their frustration with the alienating effect of the film. The title of Brandon Judell’s review speaks for itself: “Rome Rather Than You: A Film to Recommend Highly to Your Enemies,” NY Theatre Wire. http://www. nytheatre-wire.com/bj07031t.htm (accessed June 29, 2015). Far more positive, Robert Koehler, reviewing Teguia’s film for Variety, praises Teguia as “a director of major promise and a sharp, even polemical observer of his country’s social ills,” though only after reinscribing it in a Eurocentric narrative: “First seen together in a dynamic moving shot on the Algiers streets and set to an Ornette Coleman free jazz number, Kamel and Zina seem to embody all that is hip and exciting about young Muslim youth attuned to Western

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pop culture and eager to expand their horizons.” Robert Koehler, Variety, March 26, 2007. http://variety.com/2007/film/reviews/rome-rather-than-you-1200509508/ (accessed June 29, 2015). It does seem that the atrocious translation of the film’s promotional materials into English might have contributed to its instant dislike by a number of critics. 21. My translation is intentionally literal. 22. The reference is to Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel, Amerika, and is somewhat garbled. When Kafka’s young hero sails into the New York harbor, he describes the Statue of Liberty as brandishing a sword. Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Missing Person, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 2011). 23. At moments like these, her character strangely recalls the film described within the final volume of Franco-Algerian novelist Leila Sebbar’s Sherazade trilogy, a New Wave–esque film that features a lead character named Zina, a kind of fearless, urban warrior unconstrained by any particular ideology. Zina also possesses something of Eva, the Hungarian cousin in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Unlike either character, however, Teguia’s Zina eludes the structures of male fantasy that make of the above-designated characters alternative incarnations of fantasy women. Leila Sebbar, Le fou de Sherazade (Paris: Stock, 1991).

Chapter 8 1. More recently, Bensaïdi has made La mort à vendre / Death for Sale (2011). 2. “Honda” drivers are unlicensed compact minivan drivers who, for a small fee, ferry goods (and occasionally, if illegally, people who have been stranded by public transportation) around the city. 3. Although Bensaïdi’s film never takes Casablanca as an explicit intertext, references do flit throughout the film, underscoring how the Hollywood film still looms over any cinematic portrayal of the city. 4. A. J. Arberry. The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love (London: Luzac, 1953). Unfortunately, this English translation of Ibn Hazm’s text does not do justice to the complexity, innovativeness, and poetic skill of the Andalusian author. 5. The tale of an ultimately ill-fated love that centers on a Muslim girl from ranks of Casablanca’s gilded upper class who falls in love with a Jewish boy from the same milieu, Marock unleashed waves of controversy and criticism in Morocco, not least because of the director’s French funding sources. 6. He also very much recalls the lead male characters, nonplussed by absurdity and played by the director himself, of Elia Suleiman’s films. 7. Jay Weissberg, “WWW, What A Wonderful World,” Variety, September 25, 2006, 77. Accessed February 6, 2010. 8. In contrast to Weissberg, Heike Kühn, reviewing the film for the German-language epd Film, favorably compares it to a raft of Robert Altman imitations, focusing particularly on its play upon Casablanca without, however, elaborating on the larger implications of its self-referentiality. Heike Kühn, epd Film 24, no. 12 (2007): 33. 9. Although born and raised in Meknes, Bensaïdi attended film school in Paris and divides his time between Morocco and France. All of his films, required shorts and three subsequent features, have benefited from the new funding structures of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM). Bensaïdi’s most recent feature Death for Sale was

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also financed in part by an advance on box-office receipts grant from the CCM. According to comments he made to the French-language Moroccan weekly Tel Quel, the amount, at 8 million dirhams, is 30 percent less than for his previous feature films. Aicha Akalay, “Reportage: Dans la peau de Faouzi Bensaïdi,” Telquel Online, February 5, 2010. 10. Bensaïdi briefly discusses his cinematic goals and criticizes the opportunism of some of his predecessors in an essay he contributed to the collection Lettres à un jeune marocain, ed. Abdellah Taia (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2009), 27–35. 11. Roy Armes, African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 185. 12. Hsain Ilahiane discusses the tenacity of and challenges to such policies in his study of transformative use of mobile telephones by small-scale Moroccan entrepreneurs. Hsain Ilahiane, “Catenating the Local and the Global in Morocco: How Mobile Phone Users Have Become Producers and Not Consumers,” Journal of North African Studies 18, no. 5 (2013): 652–667. 13. Or to paraphrase Hardt and Negri, criminalize his attempts to become a mobile laborer who places his productivity fully in the service of global capitalist production. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 398–399. Hakim Abderrezak persuasively argues for the emergence of a new Moroccan literary trend treating clandestine migration that he dubs “illiterature.” Hakim Abderrezak, “Burning the Sea: Clandestine Migration across the Strait of Gibraltar in Francophone Moroccan ‘Illiterature,’ ” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13, no. 4 (September 2009): 461–469. doi:10.1080/17409290903096335. 14. Spain ended its practice of permitting Moroccans to enter the country without visas in 1991, and implemented high-tech surveillance and fortification of its borders and coastlines in 1998. Cited in Abderrezak, “Burning the Sea.” In Moroccan cinema, such characters are exemplified by the shantytown dwelling Internet whiz in popular actor and filmmaker Said Naceri’s feature film Les bandits (The Bandits) (2003). 15. Patricia Pisters, “The Mosaic Film:  Nomadic Style and Politics in Transnational Media Culture,” Thamyris/Intersecting 23 (2011):  188. Pisters adds that “this nonjudgemental quality of the mosaic film is part of its non-normative strategy to provoke a universal minoritarian consciousness” (188). 16. Moral readings nonetheless prove difficult to overcome. When I  screened this film for my film theory classes at the University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Fez, Morocco, in 2009, several students expressed outrage at the amount Kenza was charging to rent her phone, taxing her with exploitation of the poor. 17. Pisters, “The Mosaic Film,” 188. The intensity of the affective encounter is noticeably more pronounced in the two films with which Pisters compares WWW, namely Babel (González Iñárritu, 2006) and Kicks (Ter Heerdt, 2007). Pisters examines all three films through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of minoritarian thinking. 18. In North African parlance, these men are harraga (from harraqa, burners), a term derived from undocumented immigrants’ practice of burning their identity papers in an effort to thwart authorities seeking to return them to their point of origin. 19. While the percentage of failed crossings is extremely high, only those with the highest mortality rates generally make the international news.

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20. In an interview with Olivier Barlet for Africultures, Bensaïdi explains that he mimicked the boat scene in Amarcord shot by shot, though to very different effect. Faouzi Bensaïdi, “Pourquoi un Marocain ne pouvait-il pas faire du polar?” interview by Olivier Barlet, Africultures, November 19, 2006. http://www.africultures.com/php/index. php?nav=article&no=4599 (accessed June 29, 2015). 21. I would like thank the students in my film theory classes in Fez, Morocco, for alerting me to this fact through their keen interest in learning how this scene, as well as that of Kenza directing traffic, was filmed. 22. Titanic remains one of the most globally popular films, as numerous articles about its success in various countries attest. See also c­ hapter 5, on Nabil Ayouch’s film Mektoub. 23. Films evoking undocumented immigration directly or peripherally range from M. A. Tazi’s 1993 A la recherche du mari de ma femme, to Mohammed Ismail’s 2002 Et Après, to Yasmine Kassari’s 2004 L’enfant endormi. 24. Fellini’s Amarcord featured papier mâché snowdrifts, among other clumsy artificial elements of mise en scène. 25. For an extended discussion of Fellini’s treatment of fascism in Amarcord, as well as criticisms of the film, see Peter F. Parshall, “Fellini’s Thematic Structuring: Patterns of Fascism in Amarcord,” Film Criticism 7, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 19–30; and Peter Bondanella, “Amarcord: Fellini and Politics,” Cineaste 19, no. 1 (1992): 36–43. 26. Ilahiane notes several important dates pertaining to the liberalization and privatization of Morocco’s telecommunications industry, including the substantial stake bought by the French telecommunications group Vivendi International to purchase a majority share in the dominant cell phone provider, Maroc Télécom, in 2004. These developments resulted in seismic shifts in the accessibility of cell phones to the general population. Ilahiane, “Catenating the Local.” 27. In his address to young Moroccans, Bensaïdi commented on the difficulty of including love scenes in Moroccan films, explaining that while Moroccan audiences may be deeply moved by such scenes in Euro-American films, they greet their counterparts in Moroccan cinema with laughter and ridicule. Bensaïdi, Lettres à un jeune marocain. 28. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) still stands as the work of reference in this field. 29. The translation is from Arberry, Ring of the Dove. 30. Romeo and Juliet is, of course, the classic European example while Laila and Majnun occupies that place in Islamic culture. 31. This is the famous opening line of Ibn Hazm’s treatise. The translation from the Arabic is my own.

Chapter 9 1. For interpretations of the Tarzan stories and films in the context of imperialism and colonialism, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive:  Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1990). For her part, Catherine Jurca offers an intriguing reading of the

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Tarzan stories as embodying white American suburban fears and fantasies in her “Tarzan, Lord of the Suburbs,” MLQ 57, no. 3 (1997): 479–504. 2. Edgar’s Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories were first serialized in 1912, and some eight films featuring that figure had been made prior to MGM’s 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man. Brady Earnhart notes that Burroughs leased MGM the Tarzan name on the condition that the studio write an entirely new story for the character. Tarzan’s most famous cinematic incarnations therefore transformed him from the exemplar of aristocratic breeding he was in the stories to s pidgin-speaking noble savage. Brady Earnhart, “A Colony of the Imagination: Vicarious Spectatorship in MGM’s Early Tarzan Talkies,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (2007): 341–352. For a history of both earlier and later Tarzan films, see Gabe Essoe, Tarzan of the Movies: A Pictorial History of More Than Fifty Years of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Legendary Hero (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1968). 3. VHS Kahloucha is Belkadhi’s first feature-length film. He previously worked as an actor in film, television, and theater, created, hosted, and directed the television show Chams Alik (Sun upon You) for Canal+ Horizons, and directed and produced the fake reality show Dima Labess (Always Well). Propaganda Productions, which he cofounded in 2002, produced VHS Kahloucha. 4. “Popular,” a calque from the Arabic chaabi, usually denotes the poorer, less Europeanized sections of a town, and even shantytowns, where mores are considered more reactionary, if not retrograde. 5. For more on Tunisia’s recent history as a site of detention for immigrants in transit to Europe, see the Global Detention Project. Accessed February 27, 2015, http://www.­ globaldetentionproject.org/countries/africa/tunisia/introduction.html. 6. The root, k.h.l, of Kahloucha’s name is the root of an often pejorative word for black, and is often used to denote those deemed “black” by virtue of skin color or sub-Saharan African origins. 7. See c­ hapter 6. 8. Examples include many, if not all, of Nouri Bouzid’s films, Raja Amari’s Satin Rouge (2002), Salma Baccar’s Khochkhach (2006), Nadia Farès’s Honey and Ashes (1996), Khaled Ghorbal’s Fatma (2002), among others. 9. The United Nations Development Programme Report on women’s rights in the Arab world reflects this paradox, initially reserving special praise for Tunisia: “Tunisia remains a model among the Arab states in terms of women’s emancipation,” yet later singling the country out for pointed criticism: “The tendency to transform the rise of women into a political tool that may be used to enhance the image of the state abroad, even at the expense of women, has become very clear.” Executive summary, UNDP, The Arab Human Development Report 2005: The Rise of Women in the Arab World, Regional Bureau for Arab States (2006), www.un.org/Publications, 12. To be sure, Tunisian filmmakers bear little responsibility for inventing this paradigm, so strategically employed by the Ben Ali regime in its brokering of international relations. On the contrary, many filmmakers attempt to address it critically, without for all that denying the realities of sexist oppression and violence, by allegorically examining the state-sponsored repressions that marginalize large sections of the population. 10. Martin Stollery and Nouri Gana have recently made compelling cases for reading Tunisian cinema along these lines. Martin Stollery, “Masculinities, Generations, and Cultural Transformation in Contemporary Tunisian Cinema,” Screen 42, no. 1

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(2001): 49–63; Nouri Gana, “Bourguiba’s Sons: Melancholy Manhood in Contemporary Tunisian Cinema,” Journal of North African Studies 15, no. 1 (2010): 105–126. 11. Roughly contemporaneous with VHS Kahloucha, Making Of is in many ways its antithesis, concentrating as it does on the characters’ preoccupation with the irreconcilability of Islam and its gender models and the modern, “westernized” state. 12. The titles listed on the official VHS Kahloucha website differ somewhat from those given by Kahloucha in the film: www.kahloucha.com, accessed May 17, 2008. 13. In the films made from the early 1930s onward, Tarzan is forever underestimated by white European and American adventurers who arrive seeking treasure and who nonetheless become indebted to him for their very survival. 14. The elephant graveyard is the much-coveted (for the ivory that presumably lies there) sacred locale of the Tarzan films. 15. It also screened in Cannes (2006) and Dubai (2006). The complete film is now finally available on YouTube, as are several clips of Tunisian television shows that follow Kahloucha and his cinematic endeavors. Shortly after the film’s release, Kahloucha was made a spokesperson for the nation telephone carrier, Tunisie Telecom, appearing in a series of hilarious spots where he played a gangster or would-be Don Juan interrupted by calls from his loquacious mother. 16. Harriette Yahr, “The Political, the Unusual and the Independent Spirit,” Dox 70 (May 2007): 18–19. 17. Earnhart takes stock of many of the obvious contrivances of the Tarzan franchise, beginning with the repurposing of leftover footage from the rare on-location shoot of W. S. Van Dyke’s Trader Horn (1931), arguing that even the earliest audiences were well aware of the artifice of the Africa there presented. Earnhart, “A Colony of the Imagination,” 343–345. 18. In Teshome Gabriel’s analysis of Third World cinema, for example, Tarzan of the Arabs would at first glance seem to represent total assimilation of commercial cinema’s themes and goals. Teshome Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” in Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996). Despite the obvious “fakeness” of their Africa, the Tarzan films also remained obviously racist, not least in the deaths of many Africans for salvation of even the greediest white explorers and treasure hunters. 19. Italy adopted the Schengen Agreement in 1999, a move that required Tunisians to obtain a visa prior to landing in the country. This made access to Italy much more difficult for Tunisians, while the abolition of border checks within the Schengen Zone also made Italy a more desirable destination. 20. The root of the word ghorba (gh, r, b) is also used to form the words for “strange” and “West.” 21. Belkadhi’s film, by contrast, takes exactly such a route in its exhibition, though not its financing. 22. Director Belkadhi rails against the video piracy endemic in Tunisia on his VHS Kahloucha blog, Kahloucha Diary: kahloucha.blogspot.com, accessed May 18, 2008. 23. Raïb is a kind of buttermilk. 24. Prior to the revolution of January 2011, Tunisia was notorious for its brutal repression of dissidents and critics. Journalists, filmmakers, and activists saw their materials confiscated and often endured imprisonment.

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25. Tunisia has done much to attract textile industries to the country, developing dedicated industrial zones for factories, embracing free-trade agreements with the European Union, and joining a number of free-trade zones. 26. Also missing, although Kazmet is exactly the kind of neighborhood held up as a breeding ground for religious extremists, is any hint of a radical Islamist presence. 27. See Deniz Kandiyoti’s classic “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274–290. 28. Interestingly, Kahloucha instructs Khemaies to address potential spectators as “mwatanun ou mwatanat,” or compatriots male and female. 29. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory.” 30. “P.S. super nouvelle, Kazmet va bénéficier de 4 millions de dinars alloués par l’état afin d’améliorer les conditions de vie dans le quartier.” Kahloucha Diary, February 26, 2007, accessed May 17, 2008. 31. Whether the demand for a separate women-only screening space is a step backward or an advancement to restructuring women’s relationship to the moving image is something the film leaves open. Such requests for sex-segregated screening spaces is something with which filmmakers in Africa are again grappling in their quest to broaden film viewership in Africa. 32. As Tom Gunning has so convincingly pointed out, early films were tremendously popular not because spectators mistook them from reality, but rather because they showed spectators things that they knew to be impossible. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31–45.

Epilogue 1. For an incisive critique of the creative economy from a postcolonial literary perspective, see Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

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Index Figures and notes are indicated by f and n following the page number. Surnames beginning with al- are alphabetized by remaining part of name. Abderrezak, Hakim, 214n13 Abd al-Rahman -, 66 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 114 Action-thriller hero, 93 Aesthetics, 4, 65, 137 Agency: in Bedwin Hacker, 124, 128; in A Door to the Sky, 23, 29; in Mektoub, 87; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 156 Ahl al-Kahf (al-Hakim), 41 Aissaoua, ceremony, in Mektoub 89–91; in A Door to the Sky, 18; musicians: in Masquerades 101–102; music, in Rome rather than You, 141 Alaoui, Amina, 94, 205n25 Algeria: cinema in, 74; civil war in, 6, 146; France as immigration destination from, 211n9; French colonial past of, 6; globalization’s impact on, 3; independence movement in, 33; in Maghreb, 1, 195n19; national identity in, 10; socialism in, 136; women’s rights in, 109. See also specific films and filmmakers Ali’n Productions, 204n7 Ali Zaoua (Ayouch), 197n13, 204n7 Al-Jarra (Bendeddouche), 199n10, 211n4 Allegory, 37 Allouache, Merzak, 33, 46, 133, 211n4, 212n19 Allusions, 38, 46 al-Qaeda, 55 Altman, Robert, 213n8 Amarcord (Fellini), 165, 215n24 Amazight, 34, 134, 196n4, 204n7 Amerika (Kafka), 213n22 Anticolonialism, 9, 190 Antinationalism, 9 Arabic language, 53, 71, 107, 159, 163 Arab Spring, 1, 2–3, 190, 193n3, 195n19 The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (Dabashi), 193n3

Architecture, 8, 10, 65 The Ark of the Desert (Chouikh), 3, 10, 13, 32, 46–51, 47f, 50–51f, 206n2 Armes, Roy, 35, 84, 157, 199n8 Armstrong, Louis, 153 Art, creation of, 65 Atomic weapons. See Nuclear power Austin, Guy, 200n19, 211n5 Autonomy, 3 Ayouch, Nabil, 3, 6, 8, 10, 73, 75–94, 197n13 Baba Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated His Soul (Khemir), 3, 10, 13, 52, 68–72, 69–71f Bab el Oued el-Haouma [Bab el Oued City] (Allouache), 46, 206n2, 211n4 Bachir-Chouikh, Yamina, 199n10, 211n4 Bahrain, 1 Les bandits (Naceri), 214n14 Barka, Mehdi Ben, 205n24 The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo), 1–4, 32–33, 42, 123, 134, 141, 146, 193n5 Baya’s Mountain (Meddour), 211n4 Bedouin, 118 Bedwin Hacker (El Fani), 3, 8, 11, 73–74, 114–130, 117f, 121f, 125–126f, 128–129f Be Kind, Rewind (Gondry), 188 Belkadhi, Nejib, 3, 6, 8, 11, 131, 171–189 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 174 Ben Ali, Zine el Abidine, 1–2, 71, 115, 120, 181, 193n4, 208n3 Bendeddouche, Ghaouti, 199n10, 211n4 Benjamin, Walter, 5 Benlyazid, Farida, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15–31, 114, 205n25 Benlyazid, Sidi Mohammed, 31 Bensaïdi, Faouzi, 3, 6, 8, 11, 131, 153–170 Berbers, 134 Berlekamp, Persis, 58 Berlin Film Festival, 210n2 Berlusconi, Silvio, 196n25 Berque, Jacques, 62 Book burning, 65–66 Boudjedra, Rachid, 33

Index

228 Bouguermouh, Abderrahmane, 211n4 Bourgeoisie, 81–82 Bouzid, Nouri, 174, 202n24, 208n6 Brahimi, Denise, 6, 36, 81, 82, 203n3 Brando, Marlon, 110 Broadcast media, 118 "Brotherhood at Ketchaoua" (Shepp), 141, 145 Buchbinder, David, 205n1 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 216n2 CAAIC (Centre Algérien pour l’Art et l’Industrie Cinématographiques), 34 Caillé, Patricia, 193n5 Calligraphy, 8, 14, 65 Cameron, James, 166 Canal+ Horizons, 216n3 Capitalism, 118, 135, 158, 164 Caplan, Karen, 127 Caricature, 161, 175, 178 Carter, Sandra, 29, 196n6 Casablanca, Casablanca (Benlyazid), 196n1 Casbah Films, 32 Cast the First Stone (Himes), 140–141 Censorship: in Algeria, 140; audiences impacted by, 4; and civilizational discourse, 115; of domestic films, 194n13; and globalization of media, 128; in Morocco, 76; self-imposed, 5; in Tunisia, 6, 74, 122, 127, 207n3 Centre Algérien pour l’Art et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (CAAIC), 34 Centre Cinématographique Marocain, 157, 203n1, 213n9 Chahine, Youssef, 202n29 Chams Alik (television show), 216n3 Charrad, Mounira, 118, 208n12 Child labor, 18 Chouikh, Mohamed, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 32–51 Chow, Rey, 194n13 Chronicle of the Years of Embers (Hamina), 134 Cinema: The Ark of the Desert (Chouikh), 46–51; Baba Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated His Soul (Khemir), 68–72; Bedwin Hacker (El Fani), 114–130; The Citadel (Chouikh), 32–41; A Door to the Sky (Benlyazid), 15–31; The Lost Neckring of the Dove (Khemir), 62–68; Masquerades (Salem), 95–113; Mektoub (Ayouch), 73–94; Rome Rather Than You (Teguia), 133–152; VHS Kahloucha (Belkadhi), 171–189; The Wanderers of the Desert (Khemir), 52–62;

WWW: What a Wonderful World (Bensaïdi), 153–170; Youssef (Chouikh), 41–46. See also Film production; specific filmmakers Cinema Libre Distribution, 115 Cinema Rif, 203n1 Cinema verité, 137 The Citadel (Chouikh), 3, 10, 13, 32–41, 37f, 39–40f Civilizational discourse, 114, 119, 122, 123, 128 Cleaver, Eldridge, 151 Clover, Carol, 86 Cold War, 117 Coleman, Ornette, 145, 147, 212n20 Colonialism, 6, 7, 9, 200n5 Commercialization, 9, 33, 175 Commodification of markers of difference, 124 Commodity envy, 97 Communications, 135 Connell, Raewyn, 206n8 Consumer choice, 124 Corruption, 14, 173 Counterculture, 116 Cultural essentialism, 116 Cyberfeminism, 122, 124, 209n17 Cyberthrillers, 114, 116 Dabashi, Hamid, 193n3 Daniels, Jessie, 209n17 Death for Sale (Bensaïdi), 213n9 Dehumanization, 137 Deleuze, Gilles, 214n17 Destiny (Chahine), 202n29 Dialogue, 6, 25, 41, 53, 65, 97, 137–138. See also Language The Dictatorship of Truth (Pontecorvo), 199n5 Didacticism, 6, 35 Digital media, 135 Dima Labess (television show), 216n3 Directionality, 167 Disillusionment, 113 Division of labor, 46–47, 124, 182 Divorce, fear of, 85 Djebar, Assia, 33 Djurdjurassique Bled (Fellag), 194n10 Domestic violence, 18 A Door to the Sky (Benlyazid), 3, 10, 13, 15–31, 17–18f, 23f, 25f, 29–30f, 114 The Dove’s Neckring (Ibn Hazm), 67 Dwyer, Kevin, 196n5 Earnhart, Brady, 216n2 Eastwood, Clint, 172, 174 École Polytechnique, Paris, 115, 120

Index Edsell, Heidi, 197n13 Education, 119, 120 Egypt, 1–2 Elben, Hanan, 183, 186 El Fani, Nadia, 3, 6, 8, 10, 73, 114–130, 208n6 English language, 107 Enlightenment, 58 Espinosa, Julio Garcia, 65 Ethno-aesthetic readings, 65 Europe/European Union: expulsion from, 181; free trade agreements with, 218n25; as immigration destination, 138; migration to, 178 Everybody Loves Raymond (sitcom), 96 Exceptionalism, 51, 127 Exclusion, 76, 85, 89, 183, 187 Exile, 18, 151 Exoticization, 183 Factory work, 182 Family values, 99, 116, 128, 173 Fanon, Frantz, 141 Farce, 38 Farsi language, 53, 71 Fascism, 165, 167 Faux pas, 96 Fayad, Mona, 16, 20, 198n20 February 20th (Mamfakinch) Movement, 193n4 Fellag, Mohand Said, 194n10 Fellini, Federico, 165, 166, 167, 215n24 Female space, 105. See also Women Feminism: in A Door to the Sky, 27; and gendered division of labor, 124; in Maghreb, 127; and Mektoub’s feminine victimization, 78; in Morocco, 196n4, 197n7; and stereotypes of Arab women, 183; in Tunisia, 119, 209n15; on women as objects traded to cement ties between men, 102 Ferhati, Jilali, 196n1 Ferroukhi, Ismaël, 197n13 Feudalism, 36 Fez, 17, 19, 20, 24, 31, 197n14 al-Fihri, Fatima, 30, 31 al-Fihri, Mohammad, 30 Filial duty, 75, 85 Film noir, 156, 168, 169 Film production: in Algeria, 50; divergence across Maghreb, 6; funding for, 4–5, 8 FIS. See Front Islamique du Salut Foreshadowing, 164 The Forgotten Hillside (Bouguermouh), 211n4

229 Fourest, Caroline, 210n23 France: citizenship in, 120; and civilizational discourse, 122, 123; and colonialism in Maghreb, 6; identity in, 127; immigration laws in, 27, 35, 123, 136; labor migration to, 211n9; racism in, 27; women’s rights in, 31. See also French language François, Habib, 177, 188 Frankenstein Kahlouchien, Not for the Under Thirties (Kahloucha), 174 Freedom, 29 Free trade, 218n25 French language, 107, 159 French New Wave, 133 Friedberg, Anne, 194n7 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), 33, 42, 199n4 Gabbla (Teguia), 211n4 Gabriel, Teshome, 185, 206n5, 217n18 Gana, Nouri, 216n10 Gender politics, 151, 174 Gender roles, 104, 116. See also Feminism Genre conventions, 87, 106 Getino, Octavio, 6, 48 Ghorba, 177 Global cinema, 156–157, 178 Globalization: cultural, 9, 137, 151, 186; effects on Maghreb, 3; of media, 7, 74, 128; and mobility, 9, 103, 137, 187, 189, 190; and national identity, 147, 149; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 161, 167. See also Neoliberal economic globalization Gondry, Michel, 188 Goupil, Romain, 208n6 Le Grand Voyage (Ferroukhi), 197n13 Great African Films Collection, 46 Greek tragedies, 46 Grewal, Inderpal, 127 Guerrilla warfare, 48 Gunning, Tom, 218n32 Haddad, Moussa, 33 Hadjadj, Belkacem, 211n4 al-Hakim, Tawfiq, 41 al-Hallaj, 59 Hamina, Mohammed Lakhdar, 33, 42, 134 Hardt, Michael, 214n13 Hardy, Paula, 197n13 Harraga. See Undocumented immigration Harragas (Allouache), 212n19 Hasni, Cheb, 145, 152, 212n18

Index

230 Hassan II (King), 90, 196n4, 205n24 Hassan Terro (Hamina), 33 Hatem, Mervat, 21 Himes, Chester, 140–141, 212n12 Hodgson, Marshall, 202n22 Hogra, 100, 101, 103, 147, 151–152 Homosexuality, 119, 209n20 Honeymooners (sitcom), 96 Honicker, Nancy, 211n3, 212n17 Horror films, 84, 85, 86 Horses of God (Ayouch), 204n7 Hostility, 89 Human rights, 90, 115, 120 Huntington, Samuel P., 208n5, 209n15 Hypermasculinity, 174 Hypervisibility, 11 Ibn Hazm, 62, 63, 66, 67, 154, 170, 213n4 Ibn Khaldun, 118, 119 Identity: in Bedwin Hacker, 115, 121, 127; in A Door to the Sky, 22; and globalization, 147; legally and socially imposed, 19; search for, 16 I Had No Money and Now I’m Loaded (Kahloucha), 174, 185 Ilahiane, Hsain, 214n12, 215n26 Immigration: aspirations of, 124–125, 136, 145; expulsion from Europe, 181; to France, 27, 35, 123; in Moroccan cinema, 166; and Schengen Agreement, 217n19; in VHS Kahloucha, 177 Independence movements, 33, 44 Individualism, 20, 21 Inheritance rights, 18, 19 Intellectual property, 187 Interior self, 142 Internationalism, 32, 151 International law, 183 Internet: and Arab Spring protests, 1; cultural norms affected by, 163; limitations and exclusions of, 118; speed of communication via, 135; as tool of peace, 117; in VHS Kahloucha, 178; war and terrorism rendered via, 45–46, 117 Invisibility, 77 Iran: in Baba Aziz, 54; cinema in, 70 Islam and Islamist movements, 15, 16, 143, 146, 209n15. See also Muslims; Quran; Sufism

Islamic Salvation Front. See Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) Italy, 177, 217n19 Jarmusch, Jim, 213n23 Jihad, 143 Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, 208n4 Judell, Brandon, 212n20 Jurca, Catherine, 215n1 Justice: in Mektoub, 85, 88, 90–91; social justice, 2, 89, 141; in VHS Kahloucha, 180 Kafka, Franz, 148, 213n22 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 120 Karawiyyin Mosque, 30, 31 Keid Ensa (Benlyazid), 205n25 Khalil, Joe F., 194n12 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali, 68 Khemir, Nacer, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 52–72, 201n6 Kill Everyone and Come Back Alone (Kahloucha), 174 Kitano, Takeshi, 154 Koehler, Robert, 212n20 Kowalski, Stanley, 112 Kraidy, Marwan, 194n12 Kühn, Heike, 213n8 Labor, division of, 46–47, 124, 182 Labor migration, 211n9 La Main rouge (organization), 201n18 Lang, Robert, 207n2 Language: Arabic, 53, 71, 107, 159, 163; English, 107; Farsi, 53, 71; French, 107, 159 Laughter, 177, 178 Lawrence, D. H., 151 Lazarus, Emma, 148 Liberalism, 141 Libya: and Arab Spring movements, 1, 2; in Maghreb, 193n2; in Maghreb Union, 195n19 Lola/Whatever Lola Wants (Ayouch), 204n7 The Lonely Planet Guidebook, 16–17, 197n13 Loss, themes of, 56, 65–66 The Lost Neckring of the Dove (Khemir), 3, 10, 13, 52, 62–68, 63–64f, 68f Love: in Bedwin Hacker, 119, 126; in Masquerades, 96, 112; in Ring of the Dove, 56; in Rome Rather than You, 145; transgressive, 75; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 153, 154, 161, 163, 167

Index Machaho (Hadjadj), 211n4 Maghreb: defined, 1, 6, 193n2; divergence of film production trajectories across, 6. See also specific countries Maghreb News Round-up (Al Jazeera), 193n2 Maghreb Union, 7, 193n2, 195n19 Magical realism, 13, 26 Mahgour, 101 Mahmood, Saba, 23, 198n23 "Ma Kayn Walou Kima Lamor" (Sidi Cheikh Bémol), 207n13 Making Of (Bouzid), 174 Mambety, Djibril Diop, 136 Market liberalization, 160. See also Neoliberal economic globalization Marock (Marrakchi), 154 Maroc Télécom, 215n26 Marrakchi, Laila, 154 Marriage: polygamy, 36; social norms on, 112 Martin, Florence, 118, 208n8 Marxism, 15, 36, 44, 196n4, 209n15 Masculinity, 100, 173, 174, 175, 183, 205n1 Masquerades (Salem), 3, 11, 73–74, 95–113, 98f, 101f, 105–106f, 108f, 111f Massad, Joseph, 209n20 Mauritania, 193n2, 195n19 Meddour, Azzedine, 211n4 Medina Azahara, 66 Megarama Marrakech, 203n1 Mektoub (Ayouch), 3, 10–11, 73–94, 80–81f, 88f, 90f, 92–93f Melodrama, 75, 76, 113, 170 Même pas mal (El Fani), 210n23 Mental illness, 18 Mernissi, Fatima, 205n19 Microentrepreneurs, 158, 165 Middle class, 21 Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), 194n11 Miniature painting, 65 Minoritarian thinking, 112, 214n17 Mise en scène, 137 Mna, Khalti, 183–184, 185, 186, Mobile telephones, 135 Mobility: as agency, 128; in Bedwin Hacker, 114; cinematic and personal, 172; desires for, 153; and female vs. male spaces, 105; and globalization, 9, 103, 137, 187, 189, 190; imaginative, 185; moving images’ relationship to, 130; in postindependence period, 10, 51, 115; and realism, 9, 13; and sexuality, 115;

231 social, 93, 103, 162, 174, 187, 189, 190; and sociopolitical exclusion, 76; transformative power of, 135, 191; in VHS Kahloucha, 178; of women, 76, 115 Mockumentary overtones, 173 Modernity, 10, 24, 37, 58, 174 Mohammed V (King), 205n24 Moheb, Yasser, 201n10, 202n34 Mokneche, Nadir, 206n2 A Moment of Darkness (Ayouch), 204n7 Monstrosity, themes of, 84 Morality, 114, 163, 173 Moroccan Center for Cinematography, 132 Morocco: bourgeoisie in, 82; cinema in, 74; culture of, 26; French colonial past of, 6; globalization’s impact on, 3; justice system in, 85, 91; in Maghreb, 1, 195n19; national identity in, 10; press freedoms in, 6; social collectivity in, 21; socioeconomic stratification in, 93; telecommunications industry in, 215n26; Titanic’s popularity in, 75; women’s rights in, 18, 19–20, 31. See also specific films and filmmakers Mosque of Cordoba, 64 Moussem, 70–71 Mudawwana (code of personal status), 19, 196–197n6, 197n15 Music: in Baba Aziz, 54; in Bedwin Hacker, 117; in A Door to the Sky, 22; in Mektoub, 91–92; in Rome Rather than You, 145, 150, 152; use of, 8, 10; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 161, 168, 170; in in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 159 Muslims: Shia, 54, 71; Sunni, 53–54, 71. See also Islam and Islamist movements; Sufism al-Mutanabbi, Abu Tayyib Ahmad ibn al-Husayn, 48 My Land (Ayoub), 204n7 Naceri, Said, 214n14 Nakamura, Lisa, 210n22 Nationalism, 9, 116, 136, 147, 149 Negri, Antonio, 214n13 Neoimperialism, 93

Index

232 Neoliberal economic globalization: effects of, 3, 135; Mektoub’s critique of, 93; and minority rights, 112; narratives of, 73; progress defined by, 74; resistance to, 121; Rome Rather than You’s critique of, 141; and social mobility, 103, 187, 189, 190; symbols of, 159. See also Globalization Neoplatonism, 58 Neorealism, 32, 135 Nessma television, 195n25 New cinema movement, 207n2 New Tunisian Cinema, 52 Ni Allah, ni Maître (El Fani), 210n23 Nos seins, nos armes (El Fani), 210n23 La Nouba des femmes de Mont Cheneoua (Djebar), 33 Nourchka, Mourad, 179 Nuclear power, 117, 118 Nudity, 125 Occupy Wall Street, 193n3 Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographique (ONCIC, Algeria), 34, 199n8 Omarbacha, Nawara, 54 Omar Gatlato (Allouache), 33, 133, 206n3 113 (rappers), 195n19, 207n10 Orientalism, 6, 26, 35, 65, 200–201n5 Otherness, 11. See also Social exclusion Oufkir, General, 89, 90, 205n24 Oufkir, Malika, 89, 90 Ouled Lenine (El Fani), 210n23 Palacios, Asín, 198n19 Parody, 172 “Partir Loin” (Taliani & 113), 195n19, 207n10 Patriarchal systems, 103 The People of the Cave (legend), 41 Perfumed Nightmare (Tahimik), 188–189 Personhood, 103 Pietists, 23, 198n23 Pirate radio, 123 Pisters, Patricia, 163, 214n17 "Poem of the Atoms" (Rumi), 68–69 Poetry, 8, 10, 21, 22, 35, 46, 48 Polanski, Roman, 208n6 Political representation, 6 Polygamy, 36 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 4, 32–33, 123, 141, 146, 199n5 Pornography, 79 Postorientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (Dabashi), 193n3

Poverty, 89, 94, 161–162, 183 Power, 40 Press freedoms, 6 Primitive Passions (Chow), 194n13 Private space, 83 Propaganda, 4, 16 Propaganda Productions, 216n3 Public shame, 79–80 Public space, 83 Public works, 31 Quran, 22, 41, 49, 101 Rachida (Bachir-Chouikh), 199n10, 211n4 Radio, 123 Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérien (RTA), 34 Rai music, 145, 150, 152, 212n18 Rakha, Youssef, 53 Rape, 81–82, 85, 90 Realism: in The Battle of Algiers, 42; cinematic, 9, 60, 62; in A Door to the Sky, 19; magical, 13, 26; and mobility, 9, 13; neorealism, 32, 135; in Rome Rather Than You, 132; social, 4, 15, 21, 35, 37, 76, 81, 84, 135, 157; in VHS Kahloucha, 172, 175; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 159 Reed Dolls (Ferhati), 196n1 Religious heritage, 48–49 Representational authority, 9, 40 Resourcefulness, 164 Revenge, 90, 91, 180 Reversals of fortune, 96 Revolutionary theory, 42 Road movies, 84, 138 Rocca, Fiammeta, 203n4 Romantic comedies, 98, 103, 104, 109, 113 Romanticism, 6 Romantic love. See Love Rome Rather Than You (Teguia), 3, 11, 131, 132, 133–152, 134f, 139–140f, 144f, 148–149f "Rosen aus dem Suden" (Strauss), 164 Rotterdam Film festivals, 208n4 Rouge, Lasaad, 179 Rumi, Jalal al-Din, 69, 202n33 Sacred spaces, 175 Said, Edward, 199n5 Salem, Lyès, 3, 6, 8, 10, 73, 95–113, 206n6 Salvation, 51 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 207–208n3 Satellite television, 4, 135 Satire, 37, 38

Index Schatz, Thomas, 205n26 Schengen Agreement, 217n19 Sebbar, Leila, 213n23 Secularism, 23, 71, 120, 210n23 Self-awareness, 160, 180 Self-fulfillment, 124 Self-reliance, 182 Self-representation, 29, 75, 93, 128, 174 Sells, Michael, 54 Sembene, Ousmane, 194n13 Senegal, 136 Sensationalism, 76 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 55 Septième Art, 203n1 Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (legend), 41 Sexism, 79, 173, 174 Sexuality: in Bedwin Hacker, 119, 125, 126, 127; in Mektoub, 75–76; and mobility, 115 Shafik, Viola, 16, 30, 33, 36, 53, 194n9, 197n7 Shame, 79–80, 85 Sheehan, Steven, 205n1 Shepp, Archie, 141, 145 Sherazade (Sebbar), 213n23 Shia Muslims, 54, 71 Shohat, Ella, 16, 30, 44, 193n1, 193n5, 194n9 Sidi Cheikh Bémol (group), 207n13 Sinha, Mrinalini, 196n2 Sitcoms, 96, 104 Slapstick, 96, 97, 101, 108 Smolin, Jonathan, 76, 203n5, 204n6, 204n14 Social capital, 106 Social class: criminalization of lower classes, 182; in Masquerades, 99; and mobility, 93, 103, 162, 174, 187, 189, 190; and neoliberal globalization, 93; in VHS Kahloucha, 173; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 160 Social collectivity, 21, 22 Social consciousness, 128 Social criticism, 96 Social exclusion, 76, 85, 89, 183 Socialism, 16, 135, 136, 151 Social justice, 2, 89, 141 Social media, 1, 191 Social norms, 79, 112, 114, 116 Social realism: in The Citadel, 37; in A Door to the Sky, 15, 21; in Mektoub, 76, 81, 84; in postindependence films, 4; in Rome Rather Than You, 135; state-sponsored, 35; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 157 Social reform, 34 Socratic dialogue, 41

233 Solanas, Fernando, 6, 48 Sound: in Bedwin Hacker, 116–117; in The Citadel, 36, 38; in A Door to the Sky, 22, 24; in Masquerades, 96; in Mektoub, 81; in Rome Rather than You, 137, 145; in WWW: What a Wonderful World, 164. See also Music Soviet Union, 34 Spirituality, 28 Spirituality and Practice (journal), 54 Spivak, Gayatri, 6, 7 Stam, Robert, 16, 193n1, 193n5, 194n9 State-owned television stations, 4, 6, 34 Statue of Liberty, 148 Stereotypes, 4, 47, 55, 71, 118, 126, 174 Stolen Lives (Oufkir), 89 Stollery, Martin, 216n10 Storytelling, 65 Stranger Than Paradise (Jarmusch), 213n23 Strauss, Johann, 164 A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan), 110 Sufism: in A Door to the Sky, 18, 21, 26, 29; in Khemir’s works, 52, 53, 54, 55, 68, 70–71; in Morocco, 197–198n19; political influence of, 200n5 Suleiman, Elia, 154 Sunni Muslims, 53–54, 71 Superficiality, 162 Surveillance, 73, 151, 155 Tabet, Haj Mohamed Mustapha, 76, 79, 85, 203n4 Taboos, 76, 79, 109, 119, 120, 128 Tahimik, Kidlat, 188–189 Tahiri, Sidi Larbi, 31 Tahiri, Zakia, 31 Taiech, Saleh Chem Ou, 186 Tailoring, 65 Taliani, Réda, 195n19, 207n10 Tarzan films, 171, 175 Tarzan of the Arabs (Kahloucha), 174, 177, 185, 186, 188 Tarzan the Ape Man (MGM), 216n2 Tati, Jacques, 154 Teguia, Tariq, 3, 6, 8, 11, 131, 133–152 Temlali, Yassin, 211n4 Temporal changes, 26–27, 31, 137 Terrorism, 47, 55, 140 Third World cinema, 48, 185, 217n18 Third World Film-makers Meeting (1973), 34 A Thousand Months (Bensaïdi), 154, 157 Thrillers, 84 Titanic (Cameron), 75, 166

Index

234 Tlatli, Moufida, 14 Touki Bouki (Mambety), 136 Transnationalism, 27, 115 Tribalism, 36, 49 Trickster-hacker persona, 161 Truman, Harry, 116, 117, 208n9 Tunisia: and Arab Spring movements, 2; censorship in, 6, 74; cinema in, 74; French colonial past of, 6; globalization’s impact on, 3; in Maghreb, 1, 195n19; national identity in, 10; repression of dissidents and critics in, 217n24; textile industries in, 218n25. See also specific films and filmmakers Tunisian New Cinema, 114 Tunisie Telecom, 217n15 Turkey, 71 Twin towers (Casablanca), 159 Um Kalthum, 119 Undocumented immigration, 136, 139, 177, 211n9 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 209n14, 216n9 University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, 214n16 Les Vacances d’Inspecteur Tahar (Haddad), 33 Van Cleef, Lee, 174 Vanity, 40 Veiling, 23, 24, 26, 71, 128, 198n23 Vengeance, 90, 91, 180 Venice Film Festival, 210n2 VHS Kahloucha (Belkadhi), 3, 8, 11, 131, 132, 171–189, 172f, 176f, 179f, 182f, 184f, 189f Victimization, 36, 78, 100 Victim shaming, 85 La Vida perra de Juanita Narboni (Benlyazid), 196n1 Vigilantism, 91 Violence, 168–169 Virginity, 109 Virilio, Paul, 45 Viva Laldgerie (Mokneche), 206n2 Vivendi International, 215n26 Vorhees, Mara, 197n13 Voyeurism, 73, 81, 83 Wai, Wong Kar, 154 The Wanderers of the Desert (Khemir), 3, 10, 13, 52–62, 57f, 60–61f Weissberg, Jay, 156 What a Wonderful World (Armstrong), 153 WikiLeaks, 129

Williams, Linda, 78 Women: family roles of, 173; and female space of beauty salon, 105; and gender politics, 151; and gender roles, 104; and inheritance laws, 18; and interior self, 142; in labor force, 182; marginalization of, 31, 183, 185; mobility of, 76, 115; in Morocco, 18, 19–20; and mudawwana (code of personal status), 19, 196–197n6, 197n15; as objects, 102; pietists, 23; public sphere power of, 173; and rape, 81–82, 85; in Rome Rather than You, 140; social exclusion of, 187; social victimization of, 36; spectacle of victimization of, 78; status tied to nation-building, 15; stereotypes of, 126; in Tunisia, 114, 119; UNDP report on women’s rights, 209n14, 216n9; and veiling, 23, 24, 26, 71, 128, 198n23; violation and manipulation of by authorities, 76–77; and virginity taboo, 109; westernization of, 125. See also Feminism Women’s Wiles (Benlyazid), 196n1 Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (Berlekamp), 58 Wonders-of-creation stories, 58–59 Wood, Robin, 84, 205n21 Working-class films and sitcoms, 96, 97 World Trade Center, New York, 161 WWW: What a Wonderful World (Bensaïdi), 3, 11, 131, 153–170, 155f, 158f, 160f, 162f, 164f, 168f Yacef, Saadi, 32, 193n1, 198n2 Yahr, Harriette, 175 Yemen, 1–2 You Have No Place to Go / Misery to Get Rid of the Bottle (Kahloucha), 174, 185 Youssef (Chouikh), 3, 10, 13, 32, 41–46, 43–45f YouTube, 194n10, 217n15 Zanj Revolution (Teguia), 212n10 Zawiya, 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, 27, 28–29, 31 Zeffirelli, Franco, 208n6 Zniber, Moahmed, 195n13 Z’Yeux Noirs Movies, 115