La zerda et Les chants de l'oubli

LA ZERDA ET LES CHANTS DE L’OUBLI by Assia Djebar, one of the most familiar and widely read Arabic writers of her generation, was produced as part of her engagement for Algerian independence. She made two films around the end of the 1970s – LA NOUBA DES FEMMES DU MONT CHENOUA (1979) and LA ZERDA ET LES CHANTS DE L’OUBLI (1982) – which are highly significant in the context of anti-colonialist historiography, even if they have received relatively little attention. For LA ZERDA ET LES CHANTS DE L’OUBLI Assia Djebar and her co-author Malek Alloula spent half a year in the film archives of Pathé and Gaumont viewing films and footage that French documentary filmmakers had shot during the colonial period. By means of montage, these “images of a killing gaze” are in a certain sense scoured for the truth that they precisely do not show, for the resistance that had withdrawn “behind the mask.” This merciless inspection is mixed with a soundtrack on which militant poetry, recitative, and experimental music are linked together into a swansong to colonial power.