A symbolic overloading
This year's Tribute to Arab Women Directors leads Sonali Pahwa to wonder whether the time is not ripe for women filmmakers to be relieved of their responsibility for representing women's questions and allowed to expand the resources of their art
The first wave of women directors in Arab cinema opened a rich seam with their focus on women protagonists. The intimacy of the film medium lends itself to foregrounding the interior and unspoken aspects of women's lives and the directors featured in this tribute -- notably Moufida Tlatli and Yamina Bachir Chouikh -- make skillful use of women's worlds to offer perspectives with wider social and political resonances than the category might suggest. There is, however, a concomitant danger of reducing women to emblems of the marginalised. The fiction of nationalist and liberation movements (such as Mahmud Tahir Haqqi's The Maiden of Dinshway) has all too successfully built a mythology of woman as symbol of the nation, and this is regularly drawn upon by filmmakers when they broach political themes. The retrospective of films in the present tribute illustrates the opportunities and pitfalls of the category of women's cinema: if we consider these films, however arbitrarily, to constitute a first wave, they give us pause to consider where Arab women's cinema is headed.
Lebanese director Jocelyn Saab's A Suspended Life (1985) is of nearly 20 years' vintage and was probably chosen as a pioneering effort. Made during the Lebanese civil war, like many fictional accounts of the war it illuminates the surreally fragmented city of Beirut. The film revolves around the rather abstract conceit of a friendship between a despondent middle-aged artist and a teenage girl from a poor southern family. The meeting of youthful cynicism and disillusioned idealism is potentially intriguing though the characters are flattened by broad symbolism: the artist gazing at his enigmatic feminised country embodied by a young girl. Hala, the unyielding muse, fits the romantic stereotype with her long hair and graceful walk as she balances an antiquated water pitcher on her head. Nor does the conjunction of her lost virginity (reversed by a re-virginisation operation) with Beirut's ravage appear to be coincidental. While A Suspended Life departs from the convention of representing the nation as a wronged woman by refusing to idealise Hala's innocence, it does not quite develop a complex character.
Among the highlights of the tribute is Moufida Tlatli's classic The Silence of Palaces (1994). Although it is a historical drama set in a Tunisian palace in the final days of empire this coming-of- age story feels contemporary. Alia (Hind Sabri), the illegitimate daughter of a palace servant, struggles to come to terms with her feudal upbringing at a time of anti-colonial liberation rhetoric. Tlatli has a keen eye for the minutiae of becoming a woman: the unfamiliar new sexuality, the rebellious refusal to submit to what your mother's generation endured. The strategies of palace women, including Alia's mother, who vie for the favour of the powerful beys likewise retain their resonance.
The film explores the politics of intimacy from a personal viewpoint and the abstractions of gender politics are made tangible on a small scale. Slogans for the liberation of Tunisia and its women remain in the background. We are more engaged by Alia's familiarly contradictory determination to escape, on the one hand, and fear of leaving behind what is known, on the other. Her eventual escape with her revolutionary lover does not quite achieve the ends she had hoped for. The grown-up Alia is still haunted by her childhood, and the independent new Tunisia is not that different from the old. But Tlatli's film is a subtle work of art rather than an anthem to thwarted ideals, and it keeps its focus on the texture of women's hopes.
More recent films by Arab women directors featured in the retrospective include Waha Al- Raheb's Dreamy Visions (Syria, 2003), Yamina Bachir Chouikh's Rachida (Algeria, 2002) and Farida Benylazid's Women's Wiles (Morocco, 1999). Rachida stands out in this category and is particularly impressive for being a debut feature. Since the flight of the Algerian intelligentsia to France one rarely sees the country on film. Yamina Bachir Chouikh's film makes a further contribution in representing the Algerian landscape with its unpredictable rhythms of civil war.
The schoolteacher of the title, Rachida (Ibtissem Djouadi) has a ready smile and a fondness for make-up. She is unquenchably cheerful amid the grimness of war. But her life is upturned when a former student confronts her one day on the street, tells her to take a bomb into her class, and shoots her when she refuses. The film unfolds hereafter at the slow, jerky pace of Rachida's recovery from the trauma and her efforts to regain the balance of a normal life. Even when she flees with her mother to hide in a mountain village Rachida finds that terrorists have established themselves there. The wartime division between a lawless public domain and safe private space is accentuated. Rachida begins to look recognisably like a film about women's space confined by siege.
Rachida gradually becomes aware of the ways in which war intrudes upon women's lives. The everyday unease of being stared at in the market is heightened when guns are commonplace. One village woman is kidnapped and raped. The swagger of the militants (who appear in the film only as men) suggests that the war is at one level a masculine turf battle. But the mention of a woman captured for terrorist activities gives one pause to question this characterisation of the Algerian insurgency. Even if the gender divide of the war is over-emphasised, Rachida is resonant as a woman who refuses to become a victim. Her appeal is strengthened by the fact that she is not an idealised teacher of the sort purveyed by Hollywood. Her goal is simply to live normally and to safeguard the normalcy of school life. Childhood cannot be innocent in a time of war, but Rachida is determined to give her students the semblance of a normal childhood. Her fight for everyday freedoms is refreshingly free of iconic grandeur.
By contrast, the heroine of Waha Al-Raheb's ambitious and uneven Dreamy Visions is burdened with iconic expectations. Her father named her Jamila Bouhired, after the Algerian freedom fighter, for he cherishes the age of Arab revolutions. He is also an old-school autocrat. The film is a paean to the anguish of youth as well as women under the fist of patriarchal oppression. Its weighty political purpose somewhat hinders the film's exploration of its characters. Echoes of the Mahfouzian model are sounded in Jamila's family, but the film advances some daring innovations on its themes. It frankly broaches Jamila's sexuality, which is the source of the tortured dreams of the film's title. A childhood experience of sexual abuse, coupled with a fear of her father, have left her wary of men. Her fears extend to an irreproachable admirer as well as a professor of poetry whose interest in liberating her is clearly sexually motivated. The psychological burden of being a woman is constantly reinforced by the despair of Arab youth, giving the film a tortured intensity. This leads to a suitably melodramatic conclusion: Jamila leaves home to become a guerrilla fighter.
The scenes of dreams and fragmented memories in which reality and fantasy combine to besiege Jamila are creditably innovative. But Dreamy Visions suffers from an uneven mastery of its medium. Rather than using the camera to register gestures and fleeting expressions of violence, Raheb gives us tirades magnified at a painful volume on screen. However laudable her intent to reveal unspoken violence one wishes that the director had not crossed the line into melodrama.
At the other end of the spectrum, Farida Benlyazid's Women's Wiles is a lightweight tale with the flavour of the 1001 Nights. Some Arab feminists consider Scheherezade their founding mother because she used her wits to conquer power and Benlyazid would seem to be among them. Her film is based on a folk story affirming the power of women's wiles, and this folk tradition is itself presented as women's wisdom, related by a modern mother to her son and daughter who have been quarreling. It tells of a beautiful merchant's daughter, Lalla Aicha, with whom the king's son falls in love. Their verbal sparring centres on a single question: whether men are cleverer than women. Aicha refuses to acknowledge this even when the prince locks her in a cellar until she changes her mind. While Aicha soon finds a way to leave the cellar and play tricks on the prince, she returns each day to restate her defiance. It is difficult to translate this tale of a woman who seeks to win intellectual battles while living in captivity into a contemporary feminist story. Aicha's cleverness is that of a spirited child and the story barely resonates, then, beyond the world of children's games.
A glance at the retrospective as a whole reveals a certain weight upon women filmmakers in representing "women's questions". Need it be so? The spatialisation and unspoken givens of gender have engaged directors other than women in the cinemas of Iran, France and Tunisia, to name only a few. Ferid Boughedir (Halfaouine) and Nouri Bouzid (Man of Ashes) depict difficult transitions to manhood in the Arab world. Moreover, Bouzid's Bent Familia (1997) is evidence that Arab women's lives are not the exclusive concern of women directors.
