Women (mis)reading Religious Texts in Karin Albou’s films La Petite Jérusalem and Le Chant des mariées

Filmmaking by women in France since the 2000s has been characterized by a multiplicity of stylistic and thematic approaches which challenge the normative canons of “women’s cinema,” narrowly defined as an anti-patriarchal visual narrative focused on women’s issues.¹ The production of a diverse body of cinematic narratives originates in part from the multicultural reality characterizing French society today. The presence of diasporas from other francophone countries has lead to an ongoing interrogation of issues related to personal, cultural, and religious identities within a transnational context. For this reason, some of the more significant examples of French women’s cinema originate from the directors’ desire to represent the relationship between gender and culture in the process of creation of women’s transnational or multicultural identities.²

Within this framework, addressing the role of religion in the construction of female subjectivity is particularly worthy of critical investigation. In most cultures, religion is a primary narrative of the system of gender underlying a society. In western religions, the male subject is the agent of moral and ethical law and the paradigm for identity and gender formation whereby the original male agent of life is God. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray points out the patriarchal nature of theological discourse and states: “man has been the subject of discourse, whether in theory, morality, or politics. And the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and every discourse is always masculine and paternal, in the West. To women are left the so-called minor arts: cooking, knitting, embroidering and sewing” (7). Women’s secondary role in the production of meaning, including in religious systems, is a cross-cultural and cross-national phenomenon, as demonstrated by the films of Jewish Franco-Algerian screenwriter and director Karin Albou.

In their critique of what constitutes the basis of gender formation in multicultural, multireligious societies, Albou’s films first and foremost raise the problematic issue of these societies’ insistence on defining a uniform feminine aesthetic. In Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen, Alison Butler acknowledges the difficulty of such a task and advocates the need to revisit and expand the binary debate on sexual difference, which limits woman to the role of “other” with respect to the paradigmatic dominant male.³ Within the French context, Catherine Portuges observes that recent cinematic endeavors by women in France have focused on broader questions of culture and identity in the female subject. With regards to representation of women’s selves through cinema, Portuges observes that, currently, “French women filmmakers are calling into question the validity of both national cinema and cultural identity as assumed or fixed representational concepts” (47). As examples, the author cites the new generation of culturally hybrid female directors and states that “a number of these bilingual and bicultural directors, themselves transnational products of Mediterranean and African contexts, trained in Western Universities and film schools, practice a form of filmmaking that resists authoritarian hegemonic discourses” (47–48). Given the fact that religious education plays a primary role in defining the concept and practice of gender relations, we can investigate this particular topic within a multiethnic cultural milieu to determine how the filmmakers perform their critique of female subjectivity.

Born in France to Algerian parents, Albou has been exploring the complex dynamic of women’s relationship to religious systems. Since her critically acclaimed 2005 debut feature film La Petite Jérusalem, she has focused on women’s historical exclusion from religious exegesis. Although Albou herself was raised in a secular environment, her own mixed ethnic and religious background has motivated her to voice her concerns through cross-cultural female characters that stay within male-dominated religious traditions and therefore cannot critically engage in the reading of sacred texts and derive meaning from them for their lives as their male counterparts do. Judaism and Islam are the two religious traditions closest to Albou’s personal history, and the ones she explores in her two major works: La Petite Jérusalem (2005), about Arab Jews who emigrated to and...