Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Even today all that I seek, far from “salvation” and for want of “grace,” is the feel of passages — sometimes they are too slight, but even then, at least, they may be too narrow, but then, at least, they let my searching gaze arrive ahead of me.

THE FIFTH DAY OF FILMING. The sun has returned; the light is delicate. I am not sure that the photography director can feel how it shimmers, like some questioning iridescence … How — seeing certain dim blues, with hints of gray in them, the flat green of leaves on Barbary figs that bring out sudden, overlapping nuances — one wants to cover up and at the same time to float, eyelids half closed in this winter radiance.

Early January in my country on the Mediterranean coast. Sensation of light on my body, a purely feminine sensation. As if I believed, in mid-winter, that I had left winter behind, this light felt like emerging from the darkness of the harem each time I felt it … I resign myself to the thought that the technical crew, being men, imposing their bodies on space, have not the slightest idea that one can slip through it softly and stealthily as if breaking and entering.

I stroll among them; I have pointed out a specific way to frame the landscape; I am going to lapse into sadness. I would have liked to tell them that this morning more than ever the space is not empty; something rare is happening here that one could try to look at really, densely. Nature this morning seems young; the shepherd children, now used to us, run freely around in the distance or among us — the biblical freshness of these images.

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 …).