Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema by Florence Martin (review)

fils, elle choisit le titre Polisse pour son film. S’entourant d’acteurs avec qui elle avait déjà travaillé, Maïwenn voulait des talents avec une certaine “franchouillardise” parisienne, qui ajouterait au réalisme du film créé en grande partie par le cadrage complexe et méticuleux et l’énorme travail de montage (plus de cent cinquante heures de rushes au total). De l’excellent jeu des acteurs (dont Maïwenn s’était déjà entourée dans Le bal des actrices) à l’intrigue, la bande-son signée Steven Warbeck ou la mise en scène, Polisse fascine et impressionne par sa qualité remarquable. Ce film juste ne tombe jamais dans le voyeurisme ou dans le sensationnel, mais il émeut et s’inscrit rapidement dans l’esprit du spectateur comme un film inoubliable qui marque une génération. Davidson College (NC) Caroline Beschea-Fache MARTIN, FLORENCE. Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-253-22341-8. Pp. 288. $24.95. Focusing on the construction of the images of Maghrebi women in seven feature films directed by female Maghrebi filmmakers who are situated in transcultural and transnational positions, Martin convincingly argues that Maghrebi women’s cinema constitutes a regional cinema. Furthermore, it can be read as a cinema of transvergence: “a cinema that traverses various cultures and both borrows from and resists the discourse that each of these cultures proposes” (2). The first two films examined are Assia Djebar’s The Nuba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (Algeria, 1978) and Farida Benlyazid’s A Door to the Sky (Morocco, 1988). In analyzing these films through the lens of the female narrative traditions of Shahrazad and Echo, Martin first highlights the complex framing narratives and non-linear structure used by Djebar to retell “the history of the Algerian independence struggle and the role of women in it from the margins to the center” (37–38), and then brings to the fore the ways in which Benlyazid’s film, through the use of specific cultural subtexts, “speaks to a dual audience that becomes united” (84). The readings of Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (Algeria, 2002), Raja Amari’s Red Satin (Tunisia, 2002), and Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (Tunisia, 2002) are informed by the interplay between the multiple meanings inherent in the word hijab. Rather unexpectedly, Martin’s analysis does not focus on the political and religious debates surrounding Muslim women and the veil or the manifestation of these questions in cinema; rather, it engages with the idea of the hijab as both a veil and a screen—“the point of both contact and difference between inside and outside, the point of concealment and of revelation” (107)—and uses this as a framework to consider how Maghrebi women filmmakers and the women they represent onscreen are involved in acts of negotiation, disobedience, or dissidence with regard to dominant patriarchal structures. Women challenge the traditional gendered separation of public and private spaces in Rachida, for example, while in Red Satin the politics of the gaze is reversed as men become the objects of the female protagonist’s gaze. In Bedwin Hacker, the manipulation of different kinds of screens—television, computer, and cinematic—“establishes a model for a transvergent form of dissidence challenging both French and Tunisian authorities and cultures” (39). The final chapters examine the formal tools used to construct transvergent audiences—both regional and global—and to represent new forms of female agency in Yasmine Kassari’s The Sleeping Child (Morocco, 2004) and Selma Reviews 375 Baccar’s Flower of Oblivion (Tunisia, 2006). While the construction of an analytical framework that draws on the critique of transvergence, metaphors of Shahrazad/ Echo, and the interplay between the notions of (cinematic) screens and (in many ways symbolic) veils leads to insightful readings of these films, this ambitious approach results in an overarching argument that at times feels disjointed. Martin aims to avoid “reduc[ing] each creative piece to a part of a regional uniform entity” (36) while establishing significant parallels between the films directed by Maghrebi women, and this is a successful endeavor. A significant contributing factor is that the analysis of each...