Fi Rassi/Dans ma Tête un Rond-point [Roundabout in my Head] by Hassen Ferhani (review)

Film Reviews Fi Rassi / Dans ma Tête un Rond-point [Roundabout in my Head] Documentary, 2015, 100 minutes, Directed by Hassen Ferhani The filmmaker Hassen Ferhani is forever filming his Algiers. Beginning with his two short films, Baies d’Alger (2006) and Tarzan, Don Quichotte et Nous (2014) his camera introduces viewers to unique views within the city. With Fi Rassi, he captures the city’s slaughterhouses whose walls have borne witness to the history of Algeria since France’s violent colonial conquest, all the way to the bleak decade of the 1990s, marked by so much senseless slaughter. He focuses on a neighborhood, which he films the way Albert Camus describes his own in Le Premier Homme, where the writing itself saves society’s outcasts from oblivion. In a word, the filmmaker manages to achieve something like social poetry in the heart of a slaughterhouse and this is his true tour de force. The way Ferhani films Algiers’ meat district looks nothing like the horrifyingly violent depiction in Georges Franju’s Le Sang des Bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949), which showcased the Paris slaughterhouses with the clear purpose of denouncing their cruelty. The film takes no side on the animal rights issue. Fi Rassi is neither an ecology documentary nor an ethnographic exposé. The film is making a point about the fate of people, not animals. It followsthelivesofthelaborerswholiveandworkthere,andFerhanibrilliantly highlights cinema’s power as an archiver of the real. First and foremost a documentary about the men of the slaughterhouse, Fi Rassi lingers on a few key characters: Uncle Ali, Amou, Youcef and Hocine the Kabyle, all prisoners of the slaughterhouse, all poets in their spare time. They range in age from 94  Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 1.2 early adulthood to elderly, from twenty to seventy. The absence of women on the screen, though not from their minds, is one of the salient sociological features of this world of males and sacrificed animals. This cinematic eyewitness account of a self-contained place and those who inhabit it, out on the periphery of the city, was also undertaken in somewhat urgent circumstances, for the premises are facing permanent closure. The small barbecue restaurants in the immediate vicinity have already shut down without warning. Realizing that one of the city’s most fabled quarters, a vital part of Algiers’s collective memory, both colonial and post-colonial, had been issued a death warrant, the filmmaker picked up his camera and headed out to record a swath of life in the slaughterhouse whose future was anything but assured.1 The film opens under the sign of life and death, with the fable of the angels Gabriel and Azrael as told by Uncle Ali. The most senior occupant of the slaughterhouse, Ali is also one of the more poetic, and tragic, of the film’s cast of characters, and the camera locks onto the poetic wavelength of this place of butchery, where Azrael, the Angel of Death, is lurking. There is something almost painterly about visual power of the images, calling to mind the brush of Rembrandt in his Carcass of Beef (1657) as we gaze upon a row of severed heads or a line of visibly agonized cows going to the slaughter, recoiling from the inhuman fate that awaits them; but also the textural beauty of night scenes in films of Wim Wenders or Wong Kar-Wai. Slaughterhouses, Realm of Memory The Algiers slaughterhouses are located in the Ruisseau neighborhood, where the filmmaker plants his camera and films the workers as tightly as possible. He comes away with a record of this closed environment, this place of life and death that is indeed a double realm of memory. Their status as a place of memory is ascribed to both the mental geography of Algiers and to national Algerian patrimony. They clearly fit the definition formulated by historian Pierre Nora2 who refers to collective history, to what is meaningful for the community. But in addition, Ferhani’s camera takes the traditional realm of memory, colonial and post-colonial, and doubles it by making the film itself a further realm of memory. Without resorting to the didactic...