by Assia Djebar
When will we make films with blind people propelled by the fierce desire to see truly? Expecting to show what is there in the first lull, in this first pause that is, if not esthetic, then pagan! Lesson of space first, then lesson of colors.
In the beginning it was a matter of knowing how to get silence. Making one want to enter space the way mimes do, their hands in front, body slowly floating and imperceptibly resisting. Yes, I ask myself again, when are we going to use the blind, or people who have been blind, to make films? Then I smile, thinking there is some hope perhaps, hope for the next century, for the decade to come. When all the many women emerging from all the harems, whose eyes have been too cramped in the shadows of walls, will take flight into the blue and want to melt into the light they have won back.
Feeling in this way the brilliance of dawns, the blinding weight of middays, feeling the wantonness of freedom. Freedom is not necessarily a path, it is an ether into which one plunges, where one sleeps on one’s feet, where one dances either half bowing or scarcely bent without moving, where one merges with what was held back from ecstasy. Light fingering the whole body …
I will obtain none of this reality, not a trace, though it was not dreamed but intensely perceived. Must I be permanently saddened by this?
Full sunlight while we work on the location shots; in the picture this light ought to “develop” in the same way that Ali’s view of Lila develops, and Lila’s view of the places and faces that she discovers around her develops.
I turn now to this chain of seeing. Gradually I understand the constant presence of these gazes. In the beginning the story as it was written established the immobility of the husband in his wheelchair. Lila exists in relation to the gaze of the husband, a devouring gaze that is all the more so because it remains at a distance. This, then, was the first shot filmed on the first day: not a shot of the Arab woman but of the image of the woman for the Arab man. Almost a painting of a neutered man.
But this first point of view would have done nothing more than elaborate a path of alienation for the woman: shadow once again, turned into the pretext for anecdotes once again, as she is in almost all of masculine cinema, whether Arab or not.
Long afterward I discover what really sparked my search: Over and over again, a year before starting the film, I would lie in my bed, thinking alone. (Coming through a tight spot then, I did not speak, I mean I really did not speak to anyone, I did not confide in anyone, and moreover I did not write either for myself or for anyone else …) And, to myself, justifying a fierce desire for silence and enclosure, I would repeat this litany, always the same: I speak, I speak, I speak, I do not want them to see me …
I, the one not speaking, repeated to myself I speak three times; in the pride of I do not want I was setting myself free as if in complete refusal of some constraint. And always with this refrain the same image emerged: my head seen from the back against a white wall …
Feeling one’s forehead against the coolness of a wall, head nodding gently against the stone because it wakes you up and sets you on guard against some possible surrender, against the danger of a river of tears inside you overflowing … However, even if alone in the room, even if you are sure you are alone, in the event that someone might enter by surprise, you are reassured: Nothing, he would see nothing of you, absolutely nothing. What would a head seen from the back against a wall tell him, your body does not even move, your hands barely tremble spread out against the stone. Barely. Don’t worry, no one sees you. The film can begin, the camera can get started. Let it fix its huge eye, its venal eye. I murmur, “I speak, I speak, I speak … I do not want you to see me … truly!”
Of these shudders and of this refusal the camera will only have the brown hair barely swaying back and forth against a wall of dirty whitewash.
Firmly rooted in that time of my life, this was the beginning of the film for the character Lila. In shots 20, 21, 22, etc., filmed, it is known as the scene “of the bedroom.”
There is some point of darkness hidden in this film, so that gradually the gaze rolls back to make you look at yourself. Suffering wells up; and proliferates; it is wildly vivid, but no less subtly presented than a mere scratch.
Other eyes watch the couple: Lila looked at by Ali, who is immobilized, she herself trying to free herself graduallly from this gaze where, of course, she is stuck and from which she only frees herself by beginning to look at others … The story of Lila’s learning to look at others, at what is outside.
Throughout these months of groping after my character, I learned that looking at the outside in this way is simultaneously a return to memory, to oneself as a child, to earlier whispers, to the inner eye that has not moved from the heretofore hidden story, a gaze suffused with vague sounds, inaudible words and a mixture of various musics … This introspective, backward-looking gaze could make it possible to search the present, a future on the doorstep.
Learning to see, I found out, is indeed recalling. It is closing one’s eyes to hear again the earlier whispers, the earlier murmuring affection; it is hunting for shadows one believed had departed … then, opening one’s eyes in the watery light, questioning with an unflinching gaze, then bringing this gaze to rest, transparent and discrete, before the unknown; watching, finally, seeing the others move, live, suffer, or simply be, be in the most daily way, yes, be.
I remember certain moments in the film story. In sequence 2 Lila has walked the doctor back to his car. Before starting the engine he says to her, “Ali will get well quickly. But you, after this long absence, are you really here?”
She answers absent mindedly, surprised, “I am! Of course I am!”
The car drives off. Lila goes into the house, her head bowed. Maybe she is wondering, why this question?
We started by filming her return to the house at the end of the day, for the first time. She is seen from the back, arriving at the front of the house, noticing her daughter who is playing with the children next door, watching but not calling her, then entering the first room, the second … My only problem was the lighting of the rooms: the interior lights (a copper gong on the wall, a door opposite the first door and, in the same shot, a barred window with the sea behind it …).
I was going to ask that there be these numerous relations of halflight, of twilight: the brilliance of the gong, the fragmented gap of the bay, the almost imperceptible stripe of the sea, all these nuances, seen from where we stood—about fifteen feet from the façade in the spot where the doctor was talking before his car drove off.
I began to go around and around the house like one of the numerous village dogs constantly underfoot. I had chosen this house for its thick walls, for its bulk and its solid, earth-colored pillars, for its women inside, in the darkness.
Behind, approaching the black-barred window across from the bread oven, I made a decision. That was where Lila had to be seen from as she entered: catching her in the distance, from the front, with the two doors and behind her the road and the fields. Little by little Lila approaches; we see her leave the light, reach the first partial darkness, then the second … In the foreground, behind the bars, Ali dozes in his wheelchair.
The camera is no longer at her back, the shot no longer a gunshot. The camera waits for the far-away woman who is going to come closer. Then I wonder why such a shot is necessary. Who is looking? I think to myself, Who is the camera? A little girl stands there before me, twelve-year-old Zohra, the one who was just playing with Aicha and was now standing there against the hedge, watching us. She had only done walk-on parts once or twice, usually when Aichoucha suddenly found herself with too many ewes to tend … I called Zohra. “Look, go to the window and watch Lila come into the house … would you like to?”
Yes, she would like to.
When I called her she was far away. As she came closer, I noticed once again how gracefully she walked. (She was a natural dancer; I became more and more convinced of this later.) Coming toward me, she let her hand trail along the stone of the wal
l.
Long afterward I linger with the happiness of a new mother over the shot, beginning with a little girl next to a hedge; she has seen Lila in the distance, but we will only know this later. She bends down and begins to run furtively behind the façade. She goes to the window, her hand trailing along the rough stone; catlike, she presses herself to the bars; she does not move … Behind her we see Lila arriving at the first door, going into the first room, removing her cape and tossing it on the bed, appearing at the second threshold and stopping there.
A reverse angle, close-up: Zohra’s face with her ravenous eyes, a close-up probably from the point of view of Ali in his wheelchair. Then, a wide interior shot: Lila, who has stopped for a moment on the threshold of this second room, goes toward the window, wonders if Ali is asleep but catches sight of the child spying on her, who is intimidated and goes away. Lila closes the window blinds with her finger and moves toward Ali. He, very slowly, backs his wheelchair a few feet farther away. So is he asleep?
What is new is no longer the couple’s silence but the suddenly established solidarity between the little girl and the woman: Zohra’s curiosity watching the dreamy return of Lila as she enters the half darkness, stopping, then going closer to, Ali. Lila smiles at the child, who, intimidated, wants to leave. What connects these two are the worn wooden shutters still to be closed.
But though Zohra, who has been spying, goes away, she does not flee. Yes, I am sure of it, she is not frightened when she sees Lila: She recognizes her. They recognize each other for an imperceptible moment.
Up to now it has been Lila’s gaze upon the others … During the entire time that Lila searches, searching herself while contemplating the others, she is also being looked at. Looked at as part of a couple. This couple seems strange to so many unsophisticated witnesses who, of course, have seen city people before but not for any length of time. Seeing, moreover, an image of a couple in which the woman is very much on the move fascinates them, which explains the little girl’s staring. Zohra’s look questions the present before Lila’s does. I was generalizing: The eyes of all the children upon you, you, the couple who claim to constitute the “main characters” of the story. What gives you the right?
A film, a story, when all is said and done, ought to be this: characters gyrating slowly as they become “main characters”; during this entire time, multiple pressures, outside the frame at first, then gradually within the picture, challenging the roles granted a priori to the “heroes.” What gives them the right?
Each person is looked at in his or her solitude, in his or her proud solitude. The camera calls itself into question to make this felt: the constant process of reality against fiction, of reality ever more present.
In this film a woman walking alone rests her productive gaze on other women. Throughout, we, that is the others of the film, you, we, others, are watching her and trying to make her feel that she is us … that we begin with the curiosity of voyeurs but that very quickly it becomes something much more, that we are affected.
Is she indeed real? Is she not rather merely our dream transposed? … This doubt is made concrete by the watching eyes of Zohra, the little peasant girl who should have been a dancer but for the time being is still illiterate, who moves with regal grace through space that, in a year or two, when they shut her up, will become constrained. Zohra, in her role as witness, makes this concrete. Her silent appeal to Lila: No, don’t be a dream, you at least, win this freedom of movement, to question, to see, that we will all envy you for afterward, myself first of all! Trace a path before us. I watch you; I support you; I close the window; I seem to leave you in your individual story, but in fact you are living for us all. As we watch you, not leaving you, on the road, in the paths, along the ditches, in the courtyards and behind a half-open door, all of us, we demonstrate our solidarity with you. Thanks to you we are not condemned!
Thus the fiction, within the documentary, carries a symbol of hope.
SIXTH MOVEMENT:
OF DESIRE AND ITS DESERT
THE WOMAN WHO CONSOLES
So often during my childhood I saw the terrifying grandmother abandoned to her rages and her magical dances. Then, afterward, when she would reemerge from them, she was as much in cool control of herself as she was of her entire household.
I also saw her in the village when we lived there not far from the school. In the winter she would come visit us on her way to the capital to pursue her numerous lawsuits (disputes over land, allotments, inheritance). She used to come to consult her son-in-law, the only man in whom she had confidence. I would hear her muttering every evening across from my father, who was trying to temper the progress of her recriminations. I would end up falling asleep right there next to this hum. A virile grandmother with a bitter energy, whom I later begged for something, what exactly? Some “other thing,” maybe also some other voice!
But no. When she would come to the village, or when every summer I would return to her city and her house, I, who was ten or a little older at the time, without a veil, grown up too soon, really became something of a nuisance for her. Occasionally the old woman would examine my facial features close up and mutter caustically (why? about what? in any event with distrustful surprise and as if suddenly in the role of enemy), “Those eyes, ah, those eyes!” Then she would look away from me and declare, this time to my mother, “Well, so, are you perhaps going to make her be a boy?”
She was no longer talking to me but to her daughter, who smiled a little. And the little girl that I still was could see that her mother was somewhat ambiguous, almost embarrassed, because she was hesitating over what to do that would both avoid offending her own mother and at the same time defend her daughter.
As for me, I shrugged my shoulders, pretending indifference; then, without a veil, without a shawl, and sometimes even bare-armed, I went off to visit my paternal aunt. Ah! I only had to cross two tiny roads in the old city to find this green-eyed, sharp-faced aunt, tall and thin in a way that was both rustic and thoroughbred, and find all the love in the world! She embraced me, she welcomed me effusively, going on and on.
Above all, every other minute, she would start her sentences by calling me, “O daughter of my brother!” There was so much affection in the way she spoke that her voice still haunts me today, as if the secret vibration of the mother tongue, to reach me, had to pass through the love of a sister … “Mother tongue,” I call it, but it is the quaver of this sisterly echo that I should evoke!
THE WOMAN WHO GUIDES
I finally understand that the pure passion that I first revived through words aimed at oblivion was for me a second birth. This began, as is often the case, at least for women finally reaching maturity, when there is a strong sense of feminine solidarity, when my mother first came to talk to me: seeming, in a single scene, to bring closure to this move I was making in my life.
So I had taken refuge at my aunt’s house—this aunt was my mother’s half sister; hers was the jasmine on the balcony that accompanied my daydreams during these days of transition and torpor. I slept opposite the balcony and the sky, to the sounds of the working-class apartments across the street. My aunt served me in silence, spoke very little, prayed beside my bed. It was only as we sat together in the evening that she would talk: detailed anecdotes about the women who were her neighbors and whose nagging voices sometimes reached us. In the evening twilight, just on the verge of falling asleep, I would recall the past affection of my aunt in Caesarea. She had been so vociferous, but still the reserve of the aunt who was present made me think of her.
One morning my mother came to find me. She came alone by car to the place where I was staying; she had learned to drive in the early days of Algerian independence and liked to set herself up as my chauffeur. She thought I was having a breakdown; she ate with us. I watched how full of energy she was and understood that she was preparing for combat, but in what battle? I left the aunt to go with my driver. Once outside, after she had begun to drive, and as she was slowly
returning to center city, she asked briskly, “What are you going to do now with your life, your children, or …”
I was silent for a moment, then I forced myself to say what I was feeling: that my divorce was a repudiation on my part. She was startled by the Arab word, repudiation, that I had used!
“Irrevocable,” I added, “because it was pronounced three times! I know. I am the one who made the vow!”
She went on driving. How, I thought to myself, could my decision, hard and straight as steel, be transformed into words for the others? We went along for a good while in silence.
“All I know,” I said with difficulty, “is that I will not go back. Not at any price! If I did he might try to take away the children whom I would not give up! The children are growing up.”
“What do you wish to do … to defend your rights?” She repeated these words your rights. Then she assumed the position of official adviser: She proposed to take me right away to a lawyer, either someone close to the family or someone else. I would talk to him privately. She would wait outside. She added, “There are laws in this country! Defend yourself!”
The whole time she was taking me to her friend, a woman lawyer who was the one we had to have, my mother was not looking at me. In fact she never got over her amazement: So here was her eldest daughter, whom she thought was thoroughly clad in armor, paralyzed and unable to speak. In a totally traditional modesty that feared the brilliant light of the sun on intimate things, this daughter wants to struggle and release herself but would rather do so in a half-light, consequently in confusion.