The New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance by Robert Lang (review)

In New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance, Robert Lang offers a timely and compelling analysis of the generation of Tunisian filmmakers active from 1986 to 2006, a group that includes the directors Nouri Bouzid, Férid Boughedir, Moncef Dhouib Nadia El Fani, Moufida Tlatli, and Mohamed Zran. Lang defines the New Tunisian Cinema movement as beginning with Bouzid’s Man of Ashes (1986) in the waning days of Habib Bourghiba’s presidency and continuing through the twenty-three-year dictatorship of Ben Ali. During this period Tunisian cineastes sought to engage the public in debates about national identity, to cultivate a vibrant space of resistance against the authoritarian state, and to define a cinematic aesthetics that departs from the prevailing Egyptian tradition of melodrama.

There is much to admire in Lang’s work: it is not only rigorously researched, but also eminently readable for both cinephiles with no expertise in North Africa and specialists. Published three years after the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution of January 2011 sparked the Arab Spring and catapulted the nation into the international spotlight, the work joins a growing body of criticism in English on North African film including What Moroccan Cinema? A Historical and Critical Study 1956–2006 (Sandra Gayle Carter, 2009), Screening Morocco: Contemporary Depictions in Film of a Changing Society (Valerie Orlando, 2011), Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema (Florence Martin, 2011), and Algerian National Cinema (Guy Austin, 2012). It is, notably, the first English language monograph on Tunisian film, despite the oft-acknowledged status of Tunisian cinema as “the most daring of all the Arab cinemas” (iv). Lang’s authority is appreciable; he lived in Tunisia at critical moments (first in 1993 at the time of the Oslo accords between Arafat and Rabin and then following the al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001), and conveys an intimate knowledge of the diverse languages of Tunisian cinema, as well as of local audiences and critics.

Throughout the book, Lang argues that the films of the New Tunisian Cinema movement constitute “allegories of resistance against the authoritarian state” (12). Drawing on Frederic Jameson’s assertion that Third-World writing inevitably functions as national allegory, Lang shows how, unlike the first generation of postindependence Tunisian filmmakers who focused on colonial or neocolonial oppression, directors from the mid-1980s on were more concerned with “oppressive/repressive structures within the society itself: the neopatriarchal family, government corruption, the authoritarianism of the state, the mafia-like activities of Ben Ali’s family, the growth of political Islam, and so on” (21). The emphasis on allegorical reading gives the study a coherent, overarching narrative often lacking in critical surveys; at the same time, Lang is careful to problematize the notion of allegory and each of the theoretical concepts (neopatriarchy, nostalgia, Third World, hybridity, etc.) he deploys. Lang positions Bouzid as the driving intellectual force behind the movement (and accordingly includes three of Bouzid’s films in his analysis, whereas he addresses only one film of each of the other directors considered). In a seminal lecture titled “Sources of Inspiration” at Villepreux in 1994, Bouzid laid out the six points he considered essential to his oeuvre: “memory as baggage, defeat as destiny, the filial relationship, the image of the body, pain as emotion, and the face and the veil” (36). Lang uses these points to structure his readings of other Tunisian auteurs, showing how they collectively wield film as “a particular kind of cultural strategy . . . that seeks not only to ‘imagine’ the nation, but to overcome the phenomenon of ‘subalternity’ (19).

In the opening chapter, Lang provides a fascinating overview of contemporary Tunisian history and its many contradictions: on one hand, the country has enjoyed a “public image as a safe and friendly tourist destination and as the most progressive society in the Arab world,” largely due to Bourghiba’s emphasis...