Rekindling the Vividness of the Past: Assia Djebar's Films and Fiction
1996; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 70; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/40152317
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Social Issues
ResumoBy ANNE DONADEY The film La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua is a turning point in Assia Djebar's career. In 1969, when she already was a well-known novelist, she stopped publishing books for a period of about ten years and directed her first feature film, La nouba, in 1977-78. The film received the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1979 and was followed by La zerda ou les chants de Voubli, a 1982 documentary about Maghreb history between 1912 and 1942. In an interview, Djebar explained that it was her experience as a filmmaker that allowed her go back writing in French (Le Clezio, 242-43). In 1980 she published a collection of short stories, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, which was followed by Uamour, la fantasia in 1985. In that novel she set out for the first time write preparation a une autobiographic (interview with Mortimer, 203), whereas beforehand she had viewed writing as a way to keep as far away from my real self as possible (in Zimra, 168). To film La nouba, Djebar went back the mountains of her childhood, fifteen years after the war of national liberation from the French, in order interview her female relatives about their day-today wartime experiences. Both documentary and fiction, La nouba follows the filmmaker's alter ego, Lila, as she questions her relatives, thus reactivating her own memory of a war in which she lost many loved ones (Djebar, commentary in Montreal, 1994). Fantasia mixes the personal story of an unnamed female narrator and Algeria's history since the dawn of French colonization in 1830. The film's testimonies are incorporated into the third part of the novel. Many parallels can be drawn between the film and the novel, in the movement from soundimage the written word, especially with respect musical structure, the importance of the gaze, and the weight of history on the couple and on contemporary Algerian society. In this essay I will focus mainly on one aspect of the links between film and novel: namely, the importance of women's memory in the project of rewriting history. As Djebar herself explained in an interview in the Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid, Le sujet principal [du film] c'est le role des femmes dans la transmission orale de l'histoire nationale (the film's main topic is women's role in the oral transmission of the nation's history). The close links between the transmission of that his-
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