Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women's Cinema

4 Raja Amari’s Screen of the Haptic

113 Prelude At the end of The Nights, Shahrazad marries the Sultan, and Dunyazad marries his brother. The description of the marriage feast is replete with details on the various attires both brides wear. Shahrazad’s first dress is of a deep red: Presently they brought forward Shahrazad and displayed her, for the first dress, in a red suit; whereupon King Shahriyar rose to look upon her and the wits of all present, men and women, were bewitched for that she was even as saith of her one of her describers: – A sun on wand in knoll of sand she showed, Clad in her cramoisy-hued chemisette Of her lips’ honey-dew she gave me drink And with her rosy cheeks quench fire she set.1 In Raja Amari’s film, however, the bride does not wear red: her mother does. And the story is not about a fiancée’s long journey to marital bliss; rather, it is the story of a beautiful widow who marries off her daughter at the end of the film, yet who dances seductively, all clad in a fiery red dress. One could see the film as a different take on Shahrazad’s wedding to Shahriyar, or, better yet, as a new storytelling technique inspired by Shahrazad’s but taken in an entirely new direction. Amari as postmodern Shahrazad tells us a secret story by going against the grain of the viewer’s expectations. Raja Amari’s Screen of the Haptic: Red Satin (Tunisia, 2002) 4 114 Transvergent Screens At first sight,Red Satin seems to focus on the secret life of the widow Lilia, who becomes a cabaret dancer at night. As we know, however, one secret can hide another. Most incredibly, though, the secret it hides is actually in plain view: in this film, Amari reverses the gazing strategy to which we are accustomed and finally makes us rethink the very notion of screen. The latter, no longer the smooth surface we have understood it to be, becomes a space traversed by new forms of inquisitive gazing. Here the veil and the screen also divide and unite, also stop from seeing and allow to see. Amari’s Daring Choices Raja Amari, born in 1971 in Tunis, epitomizes the daring spirit of the younger generation of Maghrebi women directors unafraid of using cinema to test the limits of the permissible. Bicultural, Amari is the product of two elite cultures: she studied French literature at the University of Tunis, and then went to Paris to study cinema script writing at FEMIS (École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Image et du Son),2 from which she graduated in 1998. She then divided her time between filmmaking , shooting a few shorts in Paris or Tunis, and cinema writing, publishing a few critical pieces in Cinécrits,3 in Tunis. Her cinematic portfolio shows over a decade of diverse films in various formats. Her first short, Avril/April (30 min, 1998), the exploration of a claustrophobic triangular relationship between two neurotic older sisters and their new, very young, silent maid, reaped impressive international awards.4 Her second, Un Soir de juillet/One Evening in July (2001), told the story of a bride who has cold feet and confides in Saida, the old woman who has come to wax her body for her wedding night. This 23-minute short was selected to be part of the Mama Africa series.5 Red Satin is her first feature film, which was followed in 2004 by ’Ala khoutta al nessyan/Sur les traces de l’oubli/Seekers of Oblivion, a 52-minute-long documentary on writer and traveling free spirit Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), and the multiple images of herself that she left behind after her untimely death in a flash flood in Algeria in 1904. Amari teases out fragments of competing interpretations of a complex female character but offers no resolution. Her chosen subject in this film raised Raja Amari’s Screen of the Haptic 115 a few eyebrows on either side of the Mediterranean: today’s Algerian writers of history view Eberhardt as a spy for France; the French viewed her as a woman of questionable morality; her cross-dressing has been interpreted as a sign of bisexuality by some and as a travel precaution by others. In short, Eberhardt’s behavior outside the norms of nineteenthcentury European and Algerian societies fed all sorts...