Review Reviewed Work(S): Fi Rassi / Dans Ma Tête Un Rond-Point

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 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 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 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 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 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 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 95 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.

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