La Nouba des Femmes, Reviews from US

Two welcome new expansions of North African cinema occurred in the 1970s. At the end of the decade, the first two films directed by women were completed by Selma Baccar and Assia Djebar respectively. Both films were to some extent marginalized, but they do signify a real breakthrough: each woman was able to make a further feature in the 1980s or 1990s, and each of the three subsequent decades would see at least three new women filmmakers emerge. – Roy Armes

“La Nouba is a film of rare intelligence.”
Ahmed Bedjaoui
Revue des 2 Ecrans

“Assia Djebar always listens as much as she watches and records, from the special, not to say privileged perspective of a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary woman. Her vision is therefore unique.”
David Wills
University at Albany-SUNY

“When she films La Nouba, Djebar views her appropriatiion of the camera as a challenge to colonial and patriarchal domination, an important political and symbolic event in the liberation and empowerment of Algerian women.”
Mimi Mortimer
University of Colorado, Boulder

Clarisse Zimra, « Afterword » of Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement :

When I met Assia Djebar for the first time in Algiers in 1976, she was preparing to shoot this film. In our first conversation, Djebar confided that she had presented the project solely as a documentary on the war, glorifying male heroism, in order to get past the censors. She promptly turned it into a semifictional record of women’s participation in, and retrospective comments on, the war, with plenty of harsh criticism about the human and social cost of such heroism.

Roy Armes, “Memory is a Woman’s Voice: La Nouba”, Post-Colonial Images, A Study in North African Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005: 114-122:

A Nouba, Djebar tells us, is a six-part ancient Andalusian urban dance form, which is not rigidly structured (there are regional variants), and where each part has its own distinctive rhythm – slow or fast or dreamlike, for instance. In a Nouba, musicians take turns to come to the forefront to perform. […]

There is a double dedication: to Bela Bartók, who researched Algerian music in and around Biskra in 1913, and to Zoulikha, killed in the maquis in 1959, whose story is told and retold by the women of the mountains. This indicates both the important of the sound track (music and voice) and the pattern of opposites brought together in the film: the sounds of the Nouba and the Western music of Bartók, the Arabic oral storytelling and the French-language commentary, the documentary shooting and the dramatic re-enactment.

The Nouba itself opens with a prelude (Istikhbar) in which Lila makes her first explorations, her voice-over making clear her motivation: “I’m not looking for anything. But I’m listening. Oh, how I love to listen.” First, she visits Djamila, who sings her a fragment of a song from the South of the country, and then Djamila’s mother, who tells the story of Chenoua’s saint, Abdel Rahman el Shamr, whose seventh wife opened the food jars feeding the village, releasing the doves they contained. The enactment of this story is accompanied by the music of Bartók, and here the choice is particularly apposite, since Bartók’s own sole opera is Bluebeard’s Castle, another tale of an over-inquisitive wife (in this case Duke Bluebeard’s fourth). Later, Lila retells the story to her daughter Aicha at bedtime, their loving interaction contrasting strongly with the coldness of her relationship with Ali. The sequence ends with the images of war, which haunt Lila, even in her sleep.

In the second sequence, adagio (Meceder), Lila continues her meetings with older women who can tell her about the past, and the recurring image is of her driving through a sparsely populated landscape in her jeep, accompanied on the sound track by Arab music. Her method, recorded in the voice-over, is simple: “Open the door, say hello, don’t say anything, just listen. Is it the past or the present that’s whispering?” […]

The fourth sequence (Derj), set in the mountains, moves to the heart of the film’s concerns. It begins with the testimony of three women, each of whom is, the narrator tells us, “the shadow of a living truth, submerged in the past.” After a brief re-enactment of a 13-year-old girl finding her dead brother, we move to Lila as a child, sitting in an ornate cage like bed with her grandmother, who tells her stories of her “tribe.” Within this framework are set enactments of the 1871 revolt led by Sidi Malek and scenes of the women who had to await the outcome of the battles, hidden within the mountain caves at Dahra. To the music of Bartók, the grandmother’s story is widened out to embrace a whole generation of older women: “So it was, in a silent Algeria, old women whispering by night and their stories becoming wonders in the dreams of children. And history revisited by the fireside, in broken words and voices seeking one another.” […]

The final (Khlass) opens with an image of the sea from which Lila emerges as she climbs up the cliff, passing a group of seated women as she enters the cemetery. The final song (with words by Djebar) is accompanied by a collage of shots or outtakes (mostly images of women) from scenes in earlier parts of the film. Her song, the singer tells us, always speaks of freedom. Women shall never return to the shadows, since now the sun of freedom has risen. Celebrating Zoulikha who “still lives in the mountains,” the poem ends on a note of total optimism: “All that was difficult will become easy… We’ll live in a dream of bounty and ease. We’ll reign in freedom and joy. […]

On the surface La Nouba is a formally structured fictional story about a woman, Lila, whose marriage is in crisis and who goes back to the scenes of her childhood, now scarred by war. By doing this she frees herself from the inhibiting male gaze (that of her husband), which attempts to pin her down. But on a deeper level this is a highly personal and indeed autobiographical work. Production stills taken during the shooting of the film show the close physical similarities between Assia Djebar and her chosen actress, Sawan Noweir. Djbar was born in Cherchell and the mountains explored in the second half of the film are where her mother’s family still lives. […] she was accepted and given the access she needed, not because of her fame as a French-language novelist but because she was part of her mother’s extended family and welcomed as such. As she has written, “Filming places in this way – preserving within me the litany of words murmured in my maternal language – was as much a ‘diary’ of myself and my family which I was beginning, as a return to the places spared from the destruction caused by so terrible a war.’ […]

A key to La Nouba, as to all of Djebar’s work, is the question of language. It is clear from all her writings that she is deeply aware of the contradictions involved in being, as she has put it, “a woman with a French education” but with “an Algerian or Arabo-Berber, or even Muslim sensibility.” […] Whereas a documentary filmmaker, an outsider, might have used the twenty hours of recorded interviews to give us direct access to these women who had survived war and grievous losses – using, say, long-held close-ups of gnarled faces and long passages filled with the hesitant cadences of people not accustomed to public speech – Djebar’s concerns are very different. Through the film we get only brief glimpses of the women’s faces and mere fragments of their testimony. The key to Djebar’s approach – what the film uniquely offers us – is the translation of this raw material through her own sensibility and through the French language (in which the commentary is spoken). It is this verbal text – supported by the densely edited sound track – which is the core element of the film, and it was her success in this act of translation of feeling – from the women’s spoken Arabic to literary French – that unblocked her creative inspiration as a novelist.

La Nouba is a complex work that begins as a formalized interior drama and ends as a celebratory song.”

“The question facing Djebar is … how to rehabilitate the feminine gaze. As we have seen, the French language, rather than allowing the author to escape the vicious circle, instead presents a further threat, that of alienation from the universe of the women’s quarters, and, by extension, the danger of violating the integrity of her own group:

“But that liberated eye, which could becom the sign of a conquest toward the light shared by other people, outside of the enclosure, is now in turn perceived as a threat, and the vicious circle closes itself back up again” …

Through the camera’s eye, the author will finally be able to see without being seen and to move through space anonymously. In her first film, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, the husband of the female protagnoist, Lila, is paralyzed as a result of falling from a horse. The accident also seems to have left him without the faculty of speech. The camera repeatedly shows him seated in his wheelchair, condemned to being cooped up inside the family house. The first shots of him are taken inside the house; later the camera takes up a position outside the house and shows the invalid looking out the window through the bars. The seer and the seen thus reverse roles: the man is condemned to seeing reality from interior space, while the woman’s gaze gradually repossesses external space.”

Returning to her native region 15 years after the end of the Algerian war, Lila is obsessed by memories of the war for independence that defined her childhood. In dialogue with other Algerian women, she reflects on the differences between her life and theirs. In lyrical footage she contemplates the power of grandmothers who pass down traditions of anti-colonial resistance to their heirs. Reading the history of her country as written in the stories of women’s lives, Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des Femmes du Mont-Chenoua is an engrossing portrait of speech and silence, memory and creation, and a tradition where the past and present coexist.

Widely hailed as one of the most important figures in francophone Maghrebian literature, Djebar is the author of more than a dozen books, including A Sister to Scheherezade and Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. She is currently Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at the Louisiana State University.

Shot in 16mm, distributed on Video.