The Algerian Novel, chapter 3

In an extended panoramic view—an "audioscopy" of Algiers—the camera’s eye scrutinizes various buildings and city-center neighborhoods with an intimate approach. "I want to show Algerian society’s openness to the world and to modern means... as well as its contradictions regarding tradition." One might think that filming is merely about capturing images; yet for Hassen Ferhani, filming is first and foremost about welcoming presences—allowing the world to emerge with all its density, fragility, and silences. He does not frame to confine, but to liberate; he frames to offer a space where people, gestures, and voices can find their true rhythm. This kind of cinema dictates nothing: it stands back—attentive and open—allowing itself to be surprised by the most unpredictable aspects of reality, and it is in this act of letting go that beauty is born.

Nouba plays on the aesthetics of video clips and evokes a remote and exotic reality, further displaced by an unterritorialized music. The word "nouba" is borrowed from Maghrebi Arabic "nuba", which in classical Arabic is sais "nawba" meaning «in turns» or «to succeed each other». This word has integrated the French language through Algeria’s colonial army describing the Algerian infantrymen’s music before shifting again to become a synonym of partying. This title is also a hommage to Assi Djebar’s film La Nouba du Mont-Chenoua (1977), the first algerian feature film made by a female director which key protagonist is an emancipated Algerian woman.

This video takes a particular viewpoint, with the camera placed behind a zone of blur. Slowly, we experience the perception of an expanded time. An expectation is created and resolved in the observation of the passage of boats that dissolve into the nebulousness, disappearing from our sight like a mirage.

In Larbi Ben M’Hidi street, in Algiers, Farouk Azzoug and his son own a nomad kiosk where they sell old postcards and reproduction of archival photographs. Many different images constitute this fund, going from the late 18th century until the 1980’s. There can be found original postcards, of genre scene or architecture, art deco commercials for the railways, and also photographic reproductions of important political figures from or coming to Algeria. This eclectic collection - good neighborly displayed under plastic - brings us into a colonial and postcolonial iconography. It appears to be classified randomly but it allows many associations, as a kind of Algerian Atlas Mnemosyne. Over the images of the kiosk and different locations in the city, we can hear the voices of inhabitants of Algiers, historians, writers, students, who explain their connection to these images and to the history of their country.

In Algerian Novel - chapter 2, French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain reinterprets Algerian Novel - chapter 1. The film’s nested structure is a way to keep images and their symbolic load at a distance. It opens a new space of negotiation wherein new associations can be shaped. They function as a starting point for the writing of a history in movement and produce narratives which then become touchstones for a new kind of historicisation. In the second part of this second chapter, Mondzain analyses another visual material: that of the rushes recorded during the shooting of the first chapter. These rushes could have been left invisible, or rather 'unseen'- the same way some of the Algerian’s historical figures are not represented on the pictures of the kiosk. In her book, L’image peut-elle tuer? [Can the image kill?], Mondzain defines the 'unseen' as what is waiting for meaning in the community debate. The unseen would then be a sort of unexploited archive, waiting for the gaze to expand.

Throughout the video, image, sound and language (spoken, sung or written – on street signs or in the subtitles) are combined, and re-combined, to reveal ‘Algeria’ as a site of competing discourses, a culture in the constant process of ‘becoming’ (Stuart Hall 1990). We are presented with fragments of individual yet intersecting micro- narratives – alternative, partial, local perspectives, which together counter the persistently reductive, totalising images of Algeria in certain Western media.

Starting from a small kiosk of old postcards as a derisory memorial of Algerian history, the visual artist questions the role of images - or the absence of images - in the representation of the colonial heritage of Algeria, of decolonization and the dark years… in short, in the construction of his national novel. In three separate chapters, Katia Kameli delivers a reflection on the making of images or symbols (the flag!). In the enlightened company of the philosopher Marie-José Mondzain and extracts from films by Assia Djebar, she begins a critique that goes beyond the Algerian framework on our relationship to the stories, ideologies and images that shape them.