History and untold memories
New historical realism in Assia Djebar’s cinema
Assia Djebar’s films represent the complex cultural memory of the Maghreb region in opposition to the official historical narrative promoted by a post-colonial authoritarian regime. Inspired by traditional Maghrebi musical genres, in La Nouba des femmes du Mont-Chenoua (1977) and La Zerda et les chants de l’oubli (1982) Djebar uses mixed techniques of assemblage, collage and citation. These films are all about the reconstruction of memory – mainly the oral traditions transmitted by women – and seek to recover the repressed collective past of the colonial and postcolonial periods. Situating the aesthetics of Djebar’s films within the modern political and cultural context of Algeria, as well as the broader Maghrebi context, this case study asks such questions as: How can cinema translate the complexity of oral memory? And how can it contribute to a representation of the past that wants to decolonize the nationalized history of the Maghreb? Through a close analysis of the two films, this essay shows how Djebar’s cinematic project suggests answers to those questions by constructing a new historical realism that provides an entry point to the experience of a silenced past.
Article outline
- 1.Contextualizing Assia Djebar’s films
- 2.History and aesthetics
- 2.1History and film
- 2.2Djebar’s aesthetic strategy
- 3.The Nouba of the Women from Mount Chenoua
- 3.1Overlapping narratives
- 3.2Overlapping soundscapes
- 4.The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetfulness
- 4.1Narrative strategies in The Zerda
- 4.2Photos in motion
- 4.3Women and landscapes
- 5.A new historical realism
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Notes
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Works cited