Review Reviewed Work(s): Fi Rassi / Dans ma Tête un Rond-point [Roundabout in my Head] by Hassen Ferhani Review by: Marie-Pierre Ulloa Source: Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (November 2016), pp. 93-98 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jims.1.2.09 Accessed: 30-04-2017 13:59 UTC

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This content downloaded from 76.126.208.195 on Sun, 30 Apr 2017 13:59:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 filminghis 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 follows the lives of the laborers who live and work there, and Ferhani brilliantly 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

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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 approach of some documentaries, the filmmaker’s cinematic act does the work that seals the memory. Ferhani is doing the job of both filmmaker and archivist. He seeks to preserve the imprint of a living place before it is turned into a heritage site, a patrimonial icon, or worse, before it falls into oblivion. Like Camus before him, in his unfinished posthumous novel,Le Premier Homme,3 about the territories of his Algerian childhood, Ferhani bears witness to a vanishing world. And like Camus, he records the life of Algeria’s working class, its underclass, those who have neither the time nor the leisure to constitute a memory, who are

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unable to appropriate their own history, their own story, too busy with day-to- day survival. Camus did this work, capturing the memory of his kin, the poor whites of Algeria, while Ferhani deals with Algeria’s common man, whether Arab or Kabyle. Theirs is the land of forgetting, and as one of them says, only their mothers would mourn for them, should they die tomorrow. Were it not for Fi Rassi, they would survive only in maternal memory. And this is where the film takes on its moral dimension, and becomestheir personal realm of memory. Thanks toFi Rassi, this place and its people triumph over the negation of their lives by creating a visual memorial imprint, like a sepulcher to the slaughterhouse and its men.

Of the Camera in Camera If Fi Rassi establishes itself as a site of memory, it is especially by means of a sophisticated set of cinematographic devices that the filmmaker chooses to emphatically foreground, and ever more so as the film moves forward in time. The still camera is rewarded for its patience, recording the random poetry of daily life, such as when a cat and Ali suddenly emerge from off-camera into the frame, only to wander off again, seconds later. During the nighttime dialogue between Youcef and Hocine about love, the latter looks directly yet surreptitiously into the camera, as if to make sure it is recording everything being said between these two young men, sacrificial victims of the Arab Spring that is late to flower in Algeria. This “surplus of meaning” of the images, the expression used by cinema historian Agnès Devictor,4 further evolves in the second half of the film. The filmmaker, always off-camera, asks the men/characters pointed questions about their life at the slaughterhouse: the requisite but chaotic visit by the media on the feast of Eid with the cameraman getting lost in the meandering premises, a highly symbolic image if there ever was one, demonstrating the metaphysical contrast between Ferhani’s purpose and that of the journalist. Amou remarks that the journalists who make their annual front-page feature-story visit to the slaughterhouse, feel no obligation to come any other time outside the Eid calendar, as if the slaughterhouse and its denizens existed but one day out of the year. It is worth noting that the film has nothing to do with Islam, apart from this one cultural aspect involving the annual animal sacrifice. The camera never films the men praying, but simply shows them going about their daily lives, work and time off, playing dominos or soccer, and watching televised drama series in the evening, their French language link to the outside world (Algerian Arabic is the language of everyday interchange.) On more than one occasion, the viewer has the impression that the characters are co-directing the film along with the filmmaker and his sound engineer, Djamel Kerkar. They ask whether the camera is on, whether it is recording. They

This content downloaded from 76.126.208.195 on Sun, 30 Apr 2017 13:59:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 96 Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 1.2 are invited to think about the film’s title, as if their view counted as much as the filmmaker’s. Amou asks when the crew will be coming back. He declares that, next time, he’ll be prepared, he’ll be wearing his best, made-in-France clothes and shoes that you’ll hear resounding from a distance. Amou, the disillusioned poet, is like an untethered text that puts forward a long title, “we don’t lie, but we don’t fall into truth, either,” which sums up his philosophy of life spent in the slaughterhouse. He applies it to the other men, to himself, and even to the whole movie-making process. The camera does not lie, but does it fall into truth? If it does uncover a truth about the place, it is the truth of hospitality that the filmmaker cosigns with the men he is filming. The total-immersion shoot, taking place over a two-month period, was accomplished without any real advance location scouting. The filmmaker set up his camera until he became part of the furniture. There is one outstanding scene, one of the rare scenes that project the protagonists into the outside world thanks to their access to a dish antenna: the soccer match. Their escape from the daily grind of slaughtered animals is mediated by the TV screen, the only link that connects them to the world beyond their walls, the off-camera universe. If the spectacle is on the TV screen that the camera is filming, it is also beyond the confines of that screen but fully visible on the silver screen: at one and the same time, the men are attempting to get an uncooperative bull into the slaughterhouse chute, pulling it with ropes, while the image of the men leaning diagonally as they strain forward, recalls the position of a different sport, perhaps wrestling or rugby, but the same cinematic gesture.

From People to Characters Music and animals are characters in this story. Rai music soothes the men’s aches and pains, whether physical or mental. It is the soundtrack to their lives and allows them to purge any unease or qualms. The presence of other creatures, cats, caged birds, seagulls, all agile animals that are free to fly or scamper away, unlike the heavy, earthbound bodies of the animals condemned to the butcher’s knife for the pleasure of carnivorous humans, enliven the film with their discrete allure. At the end of film, the camera focuses on Youcef who sings a Cheb Hasni tune, a DVD box in his hands, like a kind of premonition: Youcef’s digital afterlife. And Youcef is not alone; he is filmed in tandem with Hocine, the Kabyle. Seeing them together on screen, one cannot help thinking of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They wait for love, and they get rain, but humor saves them from despair. In a magnificently poetic sequence, the rain is the answer to all their tortured questions. “The sky is weeping on us,” says one of them. The attention lavished on Youcef’s body by the camera, as well as Youcef’s

This content downloaded from 76.126.208.195 on Sun, 30 Apr 2017 13:59:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ulloa / Film Reviews 97 own attention to his body, clashes somehow with this place of carnage. The camera records him doing push-ups, washing himself. He’s mindful of his appearance, taking care of his look, his elaborate hairstyle. This investment in outward appearance contrasts sharply with the Kabyle’s neglect, his heavy, shapeless body, as the camera lingers on him wolfing down a sandwich. This night scene shows, both directly and discretely, all their accumulated existential frustration and fatigue. Youcef, twenty years old, “dreams of Tunisia.” Is he the only one with any glimmer of hope among the slaughterhouse men? He lists the options open to young men of his generation: suicide; joining the “living-dead,” those zombies who spend their youth blitzed on drugs and opiates; becoming one of the harraga, those who “burn” their way across the Mediterranean, an act that all too often amounts to a suicide mission; or drug dealer. In this sense, as he states loud and clear, “there’s a roundabout in my head, with a thousand roads pointing out in all directions” but none leads to where his desire dwells. Countless images will stay with the audience, but I find one particularly haunting: the one of a heart drawn in blood on one of the walls, and which, unlike the roundabout, does not flow into a thousand possibilities. If there is a color to this film, it is most certainly red, its most recurrent visual leitmotif, along with of fixed frame. The red of the dying animals’ blood, of the roof tiles, which we see only once, a throwback to the colonial times, and finally, the blood-red hearts that beat within the breasts of the men.The heart, the organ that necessarily conjures up the image of animal massacre, once the shank has been severed, is also the broken hearts, the pierced hearts of the men who bleed a little every day, but whose hearts never dry. Open-hearted, pierced through and through. If the roundabout is in the head, it is decidedly not in the hearts of the men being filmed, nor in that of the filmmaker who records their every pulse.

Marie-Pierre Ulloa Lecturer in the French and Italian Department at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, teaching Francophone literature, with a focus on North African cultures. She received her Ph.D. with highest distinctions at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). Her most recent publication is “Lost in Fire, Lost in Letters: Archives of the Algerian War” inDibur Literary Journal, Issue 3, Fall 2016. She is the author of Francis Jeanson, a Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War (Stanford University Press, 2008, published in French by Berg International, Paris, and in Arabic by Casbah Editions, Algiers). doi:10.2979/jims.1.2.09

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Endnotes 1. In 2014, there was some talk of the slaughterhouse becoming a national heritage site: http://www.maghrebemergent.com/politiques-publiques/algerie/36111-les-abattoirs-d-alger -vont-etre-classes-au-patrimoine-culturel-national.html 2. Les lieux de mémoire se sont d’abord des restes, [. . .] les buttes témoins d’un autre âge [. . .] [Ils] naissent et vivent du sentiment qu’il n’y a pas de mémoire spontanée.” Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, 1. Quarto-Gallimard, 1997, 28–29 [Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past, Columbia University, 1996]. 3. Albert Camus, Le Premier homme, Gallimard, 1994. [The First Man, Vintage, 1996]. 4. Agnès Devictor, “Massoud, le commandant à la camera”, Carnets du Bal 04, 2014, 39.

Field of Vision: is Not a Series

Experimental, 2015, 7 minutes, Directed by the “Arabian Street Artists”: Heba Y. Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl a.k.a. Stone

As we witness the days that could lead to Aleppo’s complete destruction, watching Homeland is Not a Series has a particularly painful resonance. In July 2015, three artists – calling themselves the Arabian Street Artists – “hacked” the popular television series, Homeland, by placing subversive graffiti on the walls of a set located on the outskirts of Berlin, which was built to represent an “authentic” refugee camp. The graffiti condemned and critiqued the political ideology of the show, which has gained a reputation in the popular press as Islamophobic, racist, and adhering to age-old orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims as homogenous and inherently violent.1 The short docu-film,Homeland is Not a Series, animates this critique by offering a covert view inside the set in order to document the artists’ process of undermining and challenging the set design concept. As a television series, Homeland reproduces unoriginal fictitious depictions of the Middle East and Muslims, which Edward Said has pointed to in Orientalism. Said thoroughly deconstructed the idea of the “Orient” by showing that it has been fashioned over centuries through Euro-American visions and depictions of an exotic and powerless people and region.2 What is new, however, is the medium through which Homeland repeats these tropes and entrenches them in minds of viewers. Nineteenth century orientalist paintings and literature were limited to audiences with physical access to the works. However, as Said, Jack Shaheen, and other scholars have shown, the tropes of orientalism have sustained themselves in popular television shows in recent decades, and the exponential increase in the circulation of new media is more

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