Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women's Cinema

7 Selma Baccar’s Transvergent Spectatorship

183 Prelude The site of Shahrazad’s storytelling performance in One Thousand and One Nights is the Sultan’s chamber. As we have seen before, her sister’s presence in the liminal space between the realms of Eros and Thanatos – the nuptial bedroom is also the antechamber of Shahrazad’s planned execution – is both a political and a survival stratagem, on the part of Shahrazad, who has enrolled her sister to help her resist the Sultan’s death threat and impose Eros (life). Through it all, the sisterly dyad defines the tone of the storytelling in intimate terms that refer to a past, shared sisterly history, while each narrative is (over)heard by the less familiar figure of power. Similarly, a Maghrebi woman director skillfully arranges her filmic tales, knowing the domestic forces in play: censorship, which is political – enforced by her nation’s overbearing leader – and cultural. As a result, the filmmaker’s cinematic discourse has to escape the watchful censor’s radar, while still sharing secrets with the local viewersand telling a story whose interest transcends the frontiers of her nation. Fortunately, it is possible–indeedcrucial–incinema,throughasemanticmontageofoffscreen and on-screen images, to say something by showing something else.1 Just as Shahrazad could refer to familiar tales and allusions with sister Dunyazad unbeknownst to the Sultan, today’s director can play with an off-screen shared reality and an on-screen fictitious narrative. Selma Baccar’s Transvergent Spectatorship: Flower of Oblivion (Tunisia, 2006) 7 184 From Dunyazad to Transvergent Audiences The multilayered narrative of Selma Beccar’s Khochkhach, Fleur d’oubli/Flower of Oblivion (Tunisia, 2006) features an individual emblematicstory (anopium-addictedwomaninternedinaFrench-directed psychiatric asylum in the 1940s remembers her past) that refers both to a crucial episode in the history of Tunisian consciousness (Moncef Bey’s reign in a Vichy-ruled protectorate) and, of course, to present-day Tunisia. Dependence andindependenceresonateinbothindividualand collective ways in this portrayal of a woman negotiating her own path out of addiction. Through the mise en abyme of its narrative, the film seems to also propose a way of telling a story that requires agile viewers to construct meaning across the various frames of the narrative, and even import information from a shared experience off-screen to complement what is offered on-screen. In that, it exemplifies a mode of viewing that qualifies as “transvergent,” as the director sets, within the fictitious diegesis, a mise en abyme of spectatorship. By the latter, I mean that intra-diegetic spectatorsareplantedinthenarrative,andactasagentstoextra-diegetic ones. (These characters on-screen are “agents” in all senses of the term: empoweredwithgazingauthority, theyarealsorepresentativeasimages or projections of viewers on-screen, and one could even say they spy for the viewer who is sitting off-screen!) It also stages a narrative gaze that leaps from the standpoint of one authority to that of another, refusing to adhere to any specific perspective for too long, but, rather, embracing them all serially. In that, Khochkhach constitutes a master class in spectatorial transvergence: the extra-diegetic spectator is invited to follow a gaze that changes standpoints within the filmic narrative, thus adopting a position as viewer that neither diverges from nor converges with the intra-diegetic perspectives on-screen, while at the same time producing meaning that relies on references shared off-screen. Selma Baccar: A Study in Pioneering Tunisian “Feminist” Cinema Selma Baccar’s career reads like a succession of groundbreaking steps for the women of her country. The first woman director and first woman producer in Tunisia, she has used her career to help other women film- Selma Baccar’s Transvergent Spectatorship 185 makersbyproducingtheirfilms.2 Bornin1945,sheisaproductoftheamateur cinema movement in Tunisia that was preponderant in the 1960s and 1970s. An avid cinephile from the start, Baccar was also part of the Hammam-Lif amateur cinema club, one of the most active and prolific clubs of the FTCA (Fédération Tunisienne des Cinéastes Amateurs/ TunisianFederationofAmateurCinemaDirectors),createdin1962.The latter played a democratizing role in the development of Tunisian cinema ,asitwasindependentofgovernmentalaid,incontrasttothecinema establishment supported by the Tunisian authorities, which was seen as having a propaganda role contributing to the national discourse around the state of Tunisia.3 Located outside the official national cinema, the FTCA was free to experiment in its forms and content. TheFTCA started as a dissident move away from the establishment – an open, democratic association of amateurs eager to shoot documentaries and fiction films (usuallyshorts),withfewtechnicalmeans,nonprofessionalactors,shoestring budgets...