Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

She finds herself outside again, takes a few steps into the sunlight at the foot of the high wall; then, finally, a little farther along, like a little girl, she lets her silent tears slowly fall.

She will see nothing of the city; she returns directly to the station. She drinks a cafe au lait and eats a piece of fruitcake at the snack bar while she waits for the next train. It is almost night when she arrives in Strasbourg. And there, in the little hotel room near the station, she finally feels herself collapsing, there, lying on the narrow bed, she hears all over again the stir of the prison.

So she only saw her son for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and that was after a year and a half of waiting and several months of anxiety. All alone, huddled in the cold bed (she has stomach cramps because she hasn’t eaten, she was not brave enough to go into a restaurant alone so late), she turns out the light — she listens to the hubbub of the prison that follows her and suddenly reassures her. Does it not bring back the moment he was present, my little boy —suddenly she thinks of Salim in those words.

The light is out now, and completely dressed, in the dark, she cries: gently, with stifled sobs, then in gasps that tear at her for a long time, and again in floods of soft tears … The pain does not stop, glows like blood she is losing, or milk … Like sadness going away? No, enveloping her, invading the half-light of the anonymous room, mingling with the hubbub-memory of Metz …

Gasps, sobs that she still tries to hold back. Can’t let go. How long she has been standing up, such a long time, up and standing, and firm! But she is alone and lying down and lost in a strange city. Still no.

“Little boy,” she repeats. Then there is no more Salim, the noise of the prison in Metz has faded and the darkness of the hotel room, and her own goings and comings (the bus, the train, the boat) in this France of theirs, where the prisons are full of her son’s friends … No, everything goes, comes unraveled, recedes, but she cries, the tears flow, the moans now form one long, single, formless howl, and it is such a long sorrow, but one without origins. “My little boy,” she repeats, before sinking into loosely woven sleep where the spaces between the threads grow larger, bending and curving as if on a screen of beige and mauve, of many harmonious nuances intermingling.

She does not understand, she does not want to understand, that she is merely reliving another sorrow from the past, that she is pouring out other women’s tears that have never flowed. She knows it, she will know it, but no, she sinks, soft, weary, completely given over this time to smooth, unruffled sleep carrying her off to the shores of the next day.

THE FIRST SHOT: Lila is sleeping. A face with perfect features, a red scarf knotted over her forehead in the traditional manner … The actress, my friend, squatting on the carpet in front of the big copper mirror (brought for this purpose from my mother’s house — it had belonged to my grandmother in Caesarea), had earlier tied the scarf slowly over her forehead to hide her hair.

I took a wide-angle shot as she did so; lit by several candles, her blue-flowered Kabylian dress stood out against the half-light. I watched her gesture from behind — the gesture of all the women in the too-full houses of my childhood, in the midst of their brood, the shrieks, the steam from couscous cooking, and the sighs, my God, the sighs … The gesture of their raised arms to make the scarf as tight as possible across the brow. (“I bind up my head, I bind up my misfortune!” No use speaking. When one is out of patience, tightening this red cloth is like clenching one’s teeth.)

Now Lila sleeps in the bed, watched by Ali, her husband, who will try to get out of his wheelchair on crutches, will try to make it over the steps at the threshold, will fall back down into his chair …

The point of view has changed. At the other end of the room, the camera is now the voyeur following the man as he stands up at this impossible threshold. An actor from the theater, he mimes the muscular effort, he hoists himself, he rests his head on the cold doorframe, he … I tell him to fall back into his chair. And we do several takes: the first fall, the second …

Gradually I begin to come closer and closer to Ali’s body to direct his fall. Yes, with his crutch he has to feel for the best spot to support himself as he gets up … Yes, let him be figuring out where he will balance best as he tries to stand upright. In fact it is not with one’s features that suffering is expressed, but always with subtle movements of the shoulder, the torso, the way one holds one’s head. The actor who plays Ali is patient, I want to have all the patience in the world, as together we discover the way to map these gestures hidden in shadows.

Before this working dialogue begins, I am aware, as I reflect for a moment, that I am directing silently and humbly; I am happy to be working with a natural actor, and I direct him by being an accomplice.

Yes, for a moment, noticing this, I am happy and regal. I have a calm power that comes from my sense of being forty (the age when every day one lives all the ages; the age of political majority, according to the Romans; the age for verbal prophecy, thought the Arabs; and for me, as it happened, the age when I entered into filmmaking, “realizing” through image and sound). I “direct,” therefore the way that, in bed, I would show the motions of love to someone, whose inexperience I would pardon, happy to lead him because I feel secure in the kingdom of fluidity. What strange work, what peace!

All the technicians are on the set. The generators that power the projectors deafen us with their constant rumbling. Silence inside me. I seem cold, neutral; just barely friendly. In any case, the others think of me as an “intellectual.” I know they are disoriented, of course, because for the first time a woman is “boss.”

But that is not where the distance between them and me lies. There is no one here who suspects that, after the months of preparation as I thought about this work, now, at the moment of “filming”—that is, of creating some new space — I am working as a woman. My quest is immersed in my physical rhythm, and listens to my ever more subtle sensations. What does “filming” mean for me if not trying to look every time with the first look, listen with the first listening? “Filming”: that is, first closing the eyes to hear better in the dark, and then opening them again only for the flickering instant of birth.

Two or three months before starting this work, I heard the news of Pasolini’s death on the radio. I was getting ready for a voluptuous siesta one Sunday afternoon after an excursion into the Sahel of Algiers along the blue-gray November roads. Pasolini dead. Instantly this bed was a place of confinement.

Ax stroke in my personal history (admittedly, the previous few months had been lived in conjugal blur … No! I thought to myself, if only the man I loved so much, who loved me so much, had made some gesture, a word, an impulse: Yes, Pasolini is dead and I am going to love you , — if he had kissed my eyelids as he murmured, Yes, Pasolini is dead . Grief-stricken, I told myself again, Good Lord, even couples have brotherly shadows, or else, what is the use? We would just see ourselves turn into the two sides of an oyster that closes! No, not my personal history! Never again the dream that lets its light drain away .

It may seem ridiculous that an Arab woman, one in love and loved too long — alas beloved and cursed with loving — one day decides, No, I will no longer make love this way because I have just learned that Pasolini was murdered! I do not care, they can make fun, you can make fun of me and say, “An Italian homosexual filmmaker has been murdered and you think you have somehow been the one hit …” I went on: Because they are going to rush to spit on his corpse: they killed him and they will aim to smear him. The fine moral order spreading its display all over the world! …