"New Tunisian Cinema," by Robert Lang

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Preface

Tunisian cinema is often described as the most daring of all the Arab cinemas, reflecting the country’s widely perceived status as the most “open” and “tolerant” of the twenty-two Arab states, the one in which Western modernity has been consciously but not indiscriminately embraced, and where the secular and liberal ideas of its first president, Habib Bourguiba, have taken root and flourished. The social and economic success of Tunisia since it gained its independence from France in 1956—a few periods of stagnation notwithstanding—and its relatively peaceful relations with its neighbors and with the world generally, are thought to be the very proof and reward of Tunisia’s commitment to its national motto, inscribed in the Constitution: “Liberty, Order, Justice.”1 For many, especially in the West and among non-Muslims, Tunisia appears to be a model of equipoise between “East” and “West,” and of how to be a small and sovereign nation in a large and globalized world.

And yet, during Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s presidency, from the coup that brought Ben Ali to power in 1987 to his ouster in 2011, Tunisia would supersede Morocco under the rule of King Hassan II (1961–1999) as the most repressive state in the Maghreb.2 There was no freedom of political expression whatsoever, and the state’s record of human rights abuses contrasted

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starkly with the country’s public image as a safe and friendly tourist destination and as the most progressive society in the Arab world. Against these considerable odds, a generation of Tunisia’s filmmakers emerged in the mid-1980s to make films that are to a greater or lesser degree allegories of resistance to the increasingly illiberal trends marking their society and which explore what it means, and how, to be Tunisian in the contemporary world. These directors of what I call the New Tunisian Cinema have kept the cinema alive as a form of public pedagogy and as a unique site of cultural politics that tries to influence the debate about national identity, a debate to which I endeavor to contribute here, through an analysis of a handful of their films dating from 1986 to 2006.

During my two extended stays in Tunisia under the auspices of the Fulbright Scholar Program—my arrival in Tunis the first time coinciding with the day on which Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn in Washington (an event I witnessed on Rai Uno, the only European-language channel with tolerable reception on the television in my room at the venerable Hotel Majestic on the Avenue de la Liberté); and my arrival the second time, on 11 September 2001, coinciding with the al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense in Virginia (my first knowledge of which I derived from the grainy images that came into view, as my landlord’s son, communicating to me by cell phone from the roof of my villa, turned the satellite dish in the direction that would give me the best “bouquet” of channels from the hundreds now available in Tunisia)—the debate about national identity was on everyone’s lips, or so it seemed to me in my milieu, which centered on the University of Tunis. As Fredric Jameson wrote in 1986: “Judging from recent conversations among third-world intellectuals, there is now an obsessive return of the national situation itself, the name of the country that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention to ‘us’ and what we have to do and how we do it, to what we can’t do and what we do better than this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short, to the level of the ‘people.’”3 Obsessive or not, this question of “the national situation” interests me, and interests me now more than ever, not only as it pertains to Tunisia, but as it bears on my own American citizenship. As an immigrant teenager to the United States from war-torn, white Rhodesia, I was already familiar with the rhetoric of national identity—the “what we do better than this or x

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that nationality, our unique characteristics,” and so on—and as an opponent of the racist regime in the country of my birth, I had been forced early to learn about the hypocrisies of power. I had yet to read Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, but I knew its lessons by heart, especially the one about “the colonizer who refuses.”

It was many years before I came to understand that the United States is fully implicated as well in “the colonial relationship” described by Memmi in his book. Carefully disguised for the most part, and operating globally in neocolonial modes that make the identification of villains and victims more difficult, American participation in concrete oppression is nevertheless revealed in all its sordid reality by the massive political and material support we give to the state of Israel, while turning a blind eye toward its morally repugnant ethnic-cleansing policies and occupation of Palestinian territories.4 In Connecticut, at my university, I am back in Rhodesia; like the majority of Americans, most of my colleagues are publicly silent about IDF atrocities and Israeli war crimes, even when these are being exposed by the mainstream media for all to see and read about; and my most vocal students only want to talk about Palestinian “terrorists” and how “Israel has a right to defend itself.”5 This is the context in which New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance was written. The debate about who we are as Americans—especially after the Bush–Cheney administration between 2001 and 2009 managed to subvert or dismantle nearly everything I thought the United States stood for6—continues to rage; only now, significant numbers of Americans seem to think we are engaged in a “clash of civilizations” that is threatening our “American way of life.” That “other” civilization is vaguely (or not so vaguely) thought by many to be the Muslim world. The example of Tunisia, then, is of great interest to those of us who care about liberty, equality, and fraternity both within and among nations. Tunisian society really is poised between “East” and “West,” in a way that has much to teach us about the world we live in, and about the world we should want to live in.

This book is not a comprehensive survey of the New Tunisian Cinema.

Nor is it primarily concerned with periodization or identifying this cinema’s masterpieces and most representative filmmakers. If I say the films are those of a generation and of an era, it is because most of the filmmakers were born during the ten years before Bourguiba became their country’s first president, and they (still) believe in Bourguiba’s vision of a modern, xi

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liberal, secular society that, while remaining true to its essentially Arab and Muslim roots, might, in Bourguiba’s phrase, successfully embrace “the best of the West.”7 Postcolonial Tunisia only partially realized Bourguiba’s early dream of building a modern, liberal, secular state—like France, or more realistically, Turkey—for Bourguiba would become a dictator long before his residence in the presidential palace in Carthage was brought to an end, and he had laid the foundations of the police state that his successor went on to expand and intensify. In retrospect, we can clearly see what the continuities between the two regimes would be, for Bourguiba’s ouster occurred only months after the first film of the New Tunisian Cinema burst onto the scene, Nouri Bouzid’s Man of Ashes (1986). There are wide differences of opinion about how long the New Tunisian Cinema lasted, and which films belong under its rubric, and even some question about why we should call a group of films the “New Tunisian Cinema.” For my purposes, it is the cinema of a generation making films during the Ben Ali era, where “era” is understood to refer to the authoritarian regime of Bourguiba’s last days and the twentythree years of Ben Ali’s dictatorship that followed.8 Although Ben Ali fled the country on 14 January 2011, providing a definitive end to the era that gave rise to the films I discuss in this study, I designate Bouzid’s Making Of, le dernier film (2006) the last film of the New Tunisian Cinema (for reasons I explain in my final chapter). My concern, as I have said, is not to provide the last word on which films may be included under the rubric and which not (as we hear, for example, in the kind of argument that insists: “The first film noir is John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon [1941], and the last is Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil [1958]”).

Rather, it is to identify and examine some important factors, themes, and key moments in Tunisia’s developing narrative about its national identity during a crucial period in the country’s history. It is a period when the filmmakers who came of age during Bourguiba’s heyday saw and understood that their shared vision of the Tunisia they believed in was embattled.

Unlike the films made before Man of Ashes—which tended to locate the causes of oppression or injustice somewhere outside the society, or which implied that the stagnation of Tunisian society, such as there might be, was owed to a cycle of foreign domination—the films of the New Tunisian Cinema would be characterized by a certain intimacy and psychological realism of character development and would acknowledge that the sources of xi i

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oppression, or causes of malaise, were (or are) within the society, which is a way of acknowledging that Ben Ali’s police state was in a sense a symptom of social, historical, and cultural factors that all play parts in defining contemporary Tunisia and Tunisians.

In Man of Ashes, Bouzid tells a story in which we see a character resisting the tyranny of the Tunisian neopatriarchal family. “In our society the individual is nothing,” the filmmaker has said. “It’s the family that counts, the group. Our cinema is trying to destroy the edifice of the family and liberate the individual.”9 The film’s principal character, Hachemi, shows a disinclination to marry, which his uncomprehending family takes as an intolerable affront to societal expectations. Bouzid suggests that the pressure on individuals in his society to conform to the values and dictates of Muslim tradition and Arab neopatriarchy (symbolized on the one hand by the tradition of circumcision, and on the other by neopatriarchal society’s insistence on heterosexuality and marriage for all its adult members) is nothing less than a form of rape, which he believes occurs at every level of socialization and experience.

In Férid Boughedir’s first feature-length film, Halfaouine (1990), the director offers an allegory of the Tunisian police state’s metastasizing reach into nearly every corner of social life, as the spaces of liberty for the film’s young hero Noura are threatened, one after the other. While the real police state can be seen penetrating his neighborhood (in the form of the police agent, “Columbo,” or the volunteer police informant, Khemaïs), Noura’s authoritarian father is the film’s chief agent of repression in the private sphere. Along with the neighborhood’s self-appointed guardian of morality, the local sheikh, Noura’s (hypocritical) father represents a pervasive climate of interdiction that Boughedir fears has become the hallmark of postcolonial Tunisia. As an allegory that privileges a dialectical relationship between the public and private spheres—in which police violence and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment by the state are scarcely distinguishable in character from the father’s style of governance at home—Halfaouine implies that the Tunisian police state is inscribed in neopatriarchal structures that derive from a patriarchy that has outlived its useful and proper functions and lost its legitimacy. As a boy who in the course of the film grows into adulthood, and who will remember his childhood with a keen sense of nostalgia, Noura would appear to represent a “lost” Tunisia that, in Boughedir’s wistful phrase, was once “a Mediterranean society, exuberant xiii

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and affectionate, where humor and eroticism always have their place, along with tolerance.”10 Five years after Man of Ashes, and following The Golden Horseshoes in 1989 (a tragedy about political repression and Bourguiba’s betrayal of the dream—at least for its artists and intellectuals—of a modern and bilingual/ bicultural Tunisia), Bouzid made Bezness (1992), which attempts to comprehend the impact on ordinary Tunisians of the burgeoning international tourist industry in their country. The three films form a kind of trilogy, in which we see that, as Bouzid wrote: The [Arab] male is not [as] strong as he is traditionally portrayed. On the contrary, he is lost and confused and is plagued with a set of dilemmas that shake him to the core. . . . The projected image of a constantly victorious and honorable Arab hero has been abandoned. Admitting defeat, the new realism proceeds to expose it and make the awareness of its causes and roots a point of departure.11

The dilemmas experienced by Roufa, the protagonist of Bezness, are those of the would-be capitalist whose only commodity is his body. The young hustler becomes increasingly angry and despondent, as he tries to maintain his sense of masculine honor and dignity in a rapidly changing economy that is undermining his sense of agency. The film is fully aware of the “causes and roots” of his malaise, such that it becomes impossible not to read his feelings of subalternity and response to his condition as an allegory of postcolonial Tunisia’s struggles to resist neocolonial domination in a context of Western-led globalization.

Alia, the protagonist of Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace (1994), is similarly plagued by a sense of malaise. The narrative is organized as a series of flashbacks, giving it, if not a sense of nostalgia for a happier past, then a feeling that Alia, who grew up in the eponymous palace as the illegitimate daughter of one of the servants, is doomed to suffer a perpetual melancholy. (Alia is never told who her father is, but she infers—and the viewer is in no doubt—that it is Sidi Ali, one of the resident princes.) In a boldly melodramatic and allegorical stroke, Tlatli has her heroine leave the beylical palace at the same historical moment that Tunisia frees itself from colonial domination by the French. It is also the moment that Alia truly becomes an orphan, for it coincides with her mother Khedija’s death, which is caused xi v

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by the botched abortion of the pregnancy resulting from her rape by Sidi Ali’s brother, Sidi Bechir. Alia’s departure from the palace—the only world she has known—is both an expulsion and an attempt at self-liberation, following an act of resistance that displeases her royal masters. She is inspired to perform her act of resistance by Lotfi, a young revolutionary temporarily hiding out in the servants’ quarters; and she will live with him when she leaves. But he will not marry her (because she is a singer and is illegitimate), even though she is now pregnant with his child; and Alia’s future—like that of Tunisia itself in the allegory—remains uncertain at the end of the film.

In Mohamed Zran’s Essaïda (1996), the discourse on social class so eloquently articulated by Tlatli in The Silences of the Palace is reprised as a persistent postcolonial problem that has been exacerbated by the so-called “economic miracle” that transformed Tunisia’s social landscape under Ben Ali. With the departure of the beys and the establishment of a republic in Tunisia, the plight of the poor and politically powerless (as we see them represented by the servants in Tlatli’s film) is not alleviated. The social class to which Khedija’s rapist belongs in The Silences of the Palace has left its palaces in Tunis and Le Bardo and moved to the northern suburbs (Carthage, Sidi Bou Saïd, La Marsa), where Amine, the protagonist of Essaïda, lives. Amine (Hichem Rostom, who plays Sidi Bechir in The Silences of the Palace), an artist and aristocrat—in a society that cares little about art, or about what Amine’s social class has to offer, but cares a great deal about amassing personal wealth—appears to be undergoing some kind of identity crisis. His (unconscious) search for a muse leads him to befriend Nidhal, a boy from Essaïda, one of the poorest neighborhoods of Tunis. In its depiction of their friendship, and of the consequent tensions between Amine and his upwardly mobile, middle-class girlfriend Sonia, and of Nidhal’s spiraling descent into increasingly criminal behavior, the film suggests that the gap between rich and poor in Tunisia has become dangerously wide.

The poverty of Nidhal’s milieu contrasts with Amine’s easeful existence and solipsistic character. And when Nidhal is recruited by Hatem (who in the allegorical reading represents Ben Ali’s kleptocratic family and corrupt cronies), the film in effect offers an explanation of the dialectical relationship that exists between the desperation of Tunisia’s growing poor and the rapine of the newly rich.

The global revolution in communications technologies that occurred in the 1990s would bring about profound changes in the Tunisian public xv

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sphere during the two decades of Ben Ali’s presidency. The spread in Tunisia of new media such as satellite television and the Internet would dramatically redefine the relationships of Tunisians to authority, each other, and the world—especially after the 9/11 attacks, which Ben Ali, like many other authoritarian leaders and dictators, would use as a pretext to reinforce his suppression of oppositional voices—and it would eventually lead to Ben Ali’s ouster. The youngest of the New Tunisian Cinema’s filmmakers, Nadia El Fani, offers an allegorical representation of the impact of this new media revolution on Tunisian society in her quite remarkably prescient film, Bedwin Hacker (2002), which protests the surveillance-obsessed state that Tunisia became under Ben Ali, while celebrating the media literacy and technological savvy of ordinary Tunisians confronting the dead hand of censorship.

With the filmmakers of the New Tunisian Cinema engaged in both a kind of national-cultural historiography and what documentary filmmaker Hichem Ben Ammar describes as “a revolt against the injustice of society,”12 it would be only a matter of time before one of them would make a selfreflexive satire about the state’s own role in writing the national narrative.

The French historian Pierre Nora has observed that “history [now] belongs to everyone and to no one and therefore has a universal vocation”13—but in a dictatorship with an image problem, this is not quite true, as we see in Moncef Dhouib’s The TV Is Coming (2006). The principal characters of the film are members of a village cultural committee engaged in the organization of a pageant representing three thousand years of Tunisian history; and in keeping with Tunisia’s status as a country that depends to some considerable extent for its hard currency on attracting international tourists to its shores, the committee seeks to project an image of Tunisian society as one that is stable, tolerant, and open, with a rich history and a long tradition of hospitality. The film takes an amused look at the fraught politics of representation in a state that is not as progressive as it claims to be, offering insights into what is at stake for Tunisians as they attempt to (re)write their history as a streamlined narrative about a people with a “Mediterranean” identity.

In many ways, The TV Is Coming summarizes the project of the New Tunisian Cinema, as the filmmaker and his characters on the one hand try to highlight and celebrate the best of Bourguiba’s legacy (equal rights for women, a commitment to family planning, an inclusive notion of national xv i

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identity, religious tolerance, and so on), and on the other hand critique that legacy’s betrayal (the descent into authoritarian, single-party rule, corruption at the highest levels of government, the routine abuse of human rights).

The film is an example and illustration of the role played by the filmmakers of the New Tunisian Cinema in the writing of national history and shaping of national consciousness. As we see throughout this study, they seek to construct narratives that, in Nora’s phrase, will serve the civic as well as intellectual needs of their time; whereas the objectives of the state, despite the similarity of the discourse and rhetoric it uses, are above all to keep the president and his party in power.

What I attempt in the following pages is an analysis of the efforts of the New Tunisian filmmakers to help define Tunisian collective consciousness and reinterpret Tunisia’s past and present in symbolic terms.

A Note about Transliteration and Names In my attempt to address the inherent problems of rendering written and spoken Arabic in the Latin alphabet, I have not used a consistent transliteration system, such as the one provided by the IJMES Transliteration Guide, nor have I taken a purist approach with a phonetic transcription system. My system for romanizing Arabic is idiosyncratic: while not entirely ignoring the ideologically motivated trend to get rid of the colonial transliterations that are in common use (where Koran becomes Qur’an, for example), I normally go with the most common local usage in Tunisia, however frenchified, that is, the usage most Tunisians would recognize and use themselves, the usage we would most likely find in Tunisian newspapers (for example: chechia, rather than sheshia; or Zitouna, rather than the classical Arabic Zaytuna, or Al-Zaytuna). This rule of thumb goes for individuals’ names as well, especially when the individual’s own preference is unknown to me, as in the case of Aboulkacem Chebbi (‫)أبو القاسم الشايب‬, which is variously rendered as: Abou-Al-kacem El-chebbi; Abou el Kacem Chebbi; Aboul Kacem Chabbi; Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi; Abul-Qasim Al Shabi; Aboul-Qacem Echebbi; or (as I am told his mother in Tozeur most certainly would have called him) Belgacem (or Belgassem) Chebbi.

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