Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

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 wall.

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.

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.