Column
documentary that brings Karim’s sociological research into film? In a key scene we see Karim watching TV, stumbling by chance onto an interview with writer Abdellah Taia, a renowned and controversial gay writer from Morocco. Taia recounts an ancient tradition that survived until the mid 20th century in the oasis of Siwa in Egypt. There, men from the lower social classes were allowed to marry a woman only after their 40th birthday. Before that age they could still marry, but only another man. Their bond was celebrated openly and festively. Dances
accompanied the ritual and their love was consummated in the open, in a nearby palm forest. Intrigued by Taia’s answer to the Orientalist’s interpellation of a problematic Arabic gay identity, Karim appropriates the same format to carry out interviews with other, less famous, Maghrebi gays he finds through personal announcements. 16
Karim takes his camera and (conceptually) rebuilds it from a recording device of countless summer vacations spent with family to a knowledge-producing medium, behind which he hides his scrutinizing gaze: the Maghrebi gay man is enabled to account for his own condition, but only after the meticulous framing by the scientist’s off-screen presence and questions. Yet the film ridicules the attempts at maintaining a “neutral” observing distance when the researching subject and the object of research find themselves within the reach of a caress. The touch destabilizes the grammatical split of subject and object that structures the way knowledge is usually produced by scientific disciplines. It subverts a knowledge whose goal is to unveil his object and to master it. Instead of expropriating a discourse from the body that produced it, the encounter between Karim and Farid short-circuits the disembodying mechanism of the recording medium and re-fleshes the scientist’s disincarnated subjectivity. Farid’s words, if taken literally, do not reveal any hidden meaning. They are just empty signifiers. His account combines the texture of his voice together with the choreography of muscles that instantiate a body in his act
Gianluca Turricchia