In many ways, the birth of cinema in the Arab world serves as the modern incarnation and continuation of the ancient tradition of oral storytelling. In particular, Maghrebi filmmakers have used cinema to convey the myths and dreams of antiquity to their audiences through the use of vibrant imagery and metaphor. The Tunisian director Nacer Khemir crafts intensely surreal, poetic dreamscapes that evoke the spiritual mythos of an Islamic golden age and explore the duality of human and divine. His Desert Trilogy films – Wanderers of the Desert (1984), The Dove’s Lost Necklace (1991), and Bab’Aziz: The Prince That Contemplated His Soul (2005) – take the viewer into fantastical realms where concepts of love, faith, and time take visual form. In all three films, the boundless Saharan landscape takes on its own unparalleled and mythical identity.
To understand Khemir’s impact on not only Tunisia’s national cinema, but Maghrebi filmmaking altogether, it is important to examine the historical identity of film within Africa’s northernmost country. Achieving its independence from French colonial rule on March 20, 1956, Tunisia’s initial interests in film existed primarily within the bounds of newsreels. Shot in Tunisia and then developed in France, these concise, informative clips were shown before films at ciné-clubs throughout the country. At this time Habib Bourguiba had just become president of the newly formed Republic of Tunisia. Following the “Bizerte Incidents” of 1961, where over 1,000 Tunisians were killed during a bloody confrontation with lingering French troops, all documentation of the events was subjected to international censorship. Subsequently, Bourguiba founded Tunisian Radio and Television, or ERIT, in order to combat such restrictions. This became the first step towards a Tunisian national cinema. Additionally, in 1964, Bourguiba created the Tunisian Production and Cinematographical Expansion Company, or SATPEC, which served as a state production company as well as an importation and distribution company, whose monopoly on foreign film lasted until 1981. Aware of the potential for film to be used as a means to spread propaganda throughout Tunisia and advertise abroad, Bourguiba (and to some extent his successor, Ben Ali) would deploy various cultural policies and legislature to bolster a national cinema. Thus, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage Preservation was established, which would go on to support three major Tunisian film institutions. With considerable government aid, the development of the Museum of Cinema, and the development of the National Agency for the Promotion of Audio-Visual Material, or ANPA, Tunisian film flourished in its first two decades.
Although SATPEC would lose control over Tunisian film production over time (and would eventually close in 1994), the government continued to support the production of state films. In 1981, a law was passed that aided film producers based on a box office levy, resulting in an array of foreign productions being shot in Tunisia as well as the development of several international co-productions. Férid Boughedir’s 1990 film Halfouine, which was shot in Tunisia and produced in France, would go on to become the highest-grossing film in Tunisian film history. While collaborating internationally strengthened the country’s involvement in the global film industry, the once-plentiful government aid given to Tunisian productions would gradually fade over time. Additionally, directors shied away from international projects as they felt as though they were given less control, and, ultimately losing touch with a Tunisian identity. In 1987, Habib Bourguiba was ousted by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s bloodless coup. Under Ben Ali’s rule, greater censorship was imposed upon filmmakers, stifling any apparent defamation of the Tunisian government. Perhaps a blessing in disguise, the state of film galvanized Tunisian directors to bury sentiments of political or religious expression within their films. From the mid-80’s onwards, the Tunisian cinescape became relatively independent, placing emphasis on the personal relationship between the filmmaker and their artistry. Directors like Boughedir, Tlatli, and specifically Nacer Khemir took full control over their movies, utilizing rich imagery and allegory to express an unbridled sense of self-expression within their works. In her text on the history of Tunisian cinema, Florence Martin addresses the use of “image writing” amongst contemporary Tunisian filmmakers, a concept which fellow film historian Stone McNeece refers to as “a tendency to exploit the ambiguity of connotation systems by putting on hold what the images and words refer to” (McNeece in Martin, 278). Simply put, these directors constructed nuanced meaning through shared references, communicative imagery, and imaginary worlds which shed light upon off-screen issues. Although, in the last thirty years, Tunisian directors have had greater control over their projects, the increasingly globalized state of film has stifled the growth of the industry at home. Following the successes of Halfouine and Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palaces (1994), the number of films produced in Tunisia plummeted. Consequently, the attendance rate of those films which did make it to the screen also rapidly declined. This can be attributed to the paradoxical effect of globalization on Tunisian cinema. On one hand, it has led to both the proliferation of non-Tunisian films in local theaters and a rise in film piracy, yet, on the other, has strengthened its presence internationally. Still, contemporary Tunisian cinema remains strong, giving a platform to the visions of its auteurs.
Nacer Khemir was born in 1948 in Korba, a seaside town in Tunisia’s eastern peninsula. A true polymath, Khemir’s talents extend far beyond film and video: he is a self-taught sculptor, graphic artist, illustrator, actor, performing storyteller, and has written several children’s books. Although working closely with members of the budding New Tunisian Film movement of the 1980’s and 1990’s, Khemir’s career exists separate from his contemporaries. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked primarily in Paris where he produced several animated shorts, televised works, and spent a great amount of time researching the development of children. Khemir was fascinated by the cultural and religious identity of Islamic youth, finding that, “at school a child’s identity is erased very early, the signs of a Western culture are imposed, and his or her own original culture is transformed into folklore” (Armes 70). He looked back at the fantastical, invisible worlds from the stories of his childhood, focusing primarily on those which his Andalusian grandmother regaled him with. Rather than simply beguiled by nostalgia for these stories, Khemir was interested more so in what storytelling and fantasy say about the human condition, and, more specifically, the Islamic condition. He came to understand that the stories that his grandmother recited to him – stories that passed down orally through generations – instead show:
a world where man respected his environment, without claiming supremacy over the animal, mineral or vegetable world. In those days, everything could be the home of a genie: a solitary tree in the desert could turn out to be a genie’s home; a prince of the underworld might be disguised as a passing black cat. So man had to live on good terms with his surroundings, as every attempt at hegemony could be fatal to him (Armes 71).
Khemir’s own children’s stories similarly blur the line between fantasy and reality and draw directly from Sufi storytelling. His first book, L’Ogresse, greatly influenced his stylistic approach towards filmmaking (the ‘Ogre’ even making an appearance in The Dove’s Lost Necklace). The story, both magical and grotesque, navigates seamlessly between the visible world and the ethereal dreamscape – this duality becoming an essentially thematic element within his films. Most influential to Khemir’s storytelling, however, is the Arabic folk tale The Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights, which has its origins in the Islamic Golden Age. Perhaps the most celebrated of Arabic lore, the story blends a rather gruesome account of a tyrannical king slaying women in droves with the tale of a central female character who cunningly beguiles the king with one thousand and one stories in order to prolong her inevitable execution. Just as the fable does, Khemir incorporates the interaction of dual narrative structures and the use of storytelling as a means of escapism in his films. In the Desert Trilogy, spirituality and temporality coexist within the sweeping mythos of the Sahara.
Khemir’s first feature film, The Wanderers of the Desert (Les Baliseurs du desert) (1984), abandons all notions of realism, instead blissfully destroying temporal coherency and logic through a structurally dissonant narrative. Beneath its visually stunning exterior, Khemir crafts a film that disorients as well as enchants the viewer. In examining the poetry of the great Sufi master Ibn al-Arabi, scholar Michael Sells observes that: “Each new passage reveals something and veils something. There is always an obscurity, an undefined term, a new paradox. The reader [viewer] is led from passage to passage, from one question to another. It is the moving image rather than any particular frame that is significant” (Sells, as cited in Gauch 54). Sells’ observation can be applied directly to the film’s basic structure – the momentum which he speaks to is what keeps the viewer from ever truly uncovering the film’s “essence.” The viewer’s experience in watching the film is much like that of the young school teacher Abdesslam (played by Nacer Khemir himself) as he quickly realizes that the conventions of the world outside the village are useless and submits to the abandonment of logic. As Gauch suggests in her analysis of the Desert Trilogy, “In keeping with the film’s Sufi intertexts, and with the mobile nature of film itself, the relationship of each sign, image, or scene to a larger whole is constantly dissolved and reconfigured… Wanderers does not so much show its audiences disparate worlds as induce a bewilderment that calls into question how we make sense of what we see in film and beyond” (Gauch 58-59). To truly understand Khemir’s film, one must forgo their search for definitive meaning. The vanishing of both Abdesslam and the police inspector who is sent to find him functions as one of the central allegories within Wanderers. The school teacher ultimately finds solace in unknowing, allowing himself to succumb to the ways of the village. Thus, he is led to the “garden of lovers”, which symbolizes both freedom and eternal bliss. However, the irreverent officer, who searches for an absolute truth, or “evidence,” is expulsed from the village and must ride on the back of a donkey into the Saharan abyss. The respective fates of Abdesslam and the officer serve as an allegory for the meaninglessness of modern epistemologies.
As Gauch points out in “Sand Castles”, The Wanderers of the Desert is the only film within the Desert Trilogy which is attached to a single, physical location. The entirety of the film takes place within the desert – from the very first scene where Abdesslam is transported to a village which “does not exist”, to the closing shot of Houcine resting on a dune before embarking on his journey to Cordoba. In an interview with writer Nawara Omarbacha, Khemir states that, “The desert is a literary field and a field of abstraction at the same time. It is one of the rare places where the infinitely small, that is a speck of sand, and the infinitely big, and that is billions of specks of sand, meet. It is also a place where one can have a true sense of the Universe and of its scale” (Khemir). On its surface, the desert serves a central, structural element for the film’s narrative, a topographical plane which both separates and connects the villagers and the wanderers. However, as Khemir addresses, the desert also becomes a metaphor for the abandonment of modern systems of temporal coherency and logic, closely adhering to ancient Sufi tradition and poetry. Thus, the desert exists as both a locale and character in Wanderers. Like “a solitary tree in the desert [which turns] out to be a genie’s home” (Khemir), the remote, windswept village turns out to be a mythical outpost enveloped by an infinite void. It is a place cut off from time and modernity, its people untouched by external forces. The initial scene where Abdesslam rides through the desert is purely transitional; it depicts the point at which all ties to reality are cut. As the bus journeys onward, he looks out of the window to see a mass of silhouetted wanderers hastily drifting along. At this point, the film truly begins, and, as the opening credits roll, Abdesslam himself becomes a wanderer, roaming the desert in search of a town he is told is nonexistent. Then, abruptly, he seemingly stumbles upon the villagers, who appear from behind large dunes to bring him into the medina. However, characters do not simply arrive at nor depart from the town. Instead, Khemir has created a settlement which exists as an extension of the vast desert landscape and whose inhabitants live mysteriously in a perpetual state of wonder. In her book on medieval Islamic art, Wonder Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam, Persis Berlekamp explains that ajab, or “wonder”, was defined in the thirteenth century as “the sense of bewilderment a person feels because of his inability to understand the cause of a thing” (Berlekamp ). Like the individual fables burrowed within The Arabian Nights, each character seems to be engrossed in their own individual quest for meaning inside a larger narrative. Led by Houcine, the young boys attempt at using shards of broken mirrors to simulate a garden – something they have never seen, but can only imagine. An old man continues a fifty-year-long search for buried treasure. Like the other villagers, Oum Salem endlessly scours the periphery of the village, in await of her wandering son. These inner-allegories are deliberately poetic and indicative of both Khemir’s propensity for storytelling, as well as of a central metaphor presented within the film. Just as how the town embodies a world within a world (the desert), so, too, do the stories of the villagers exist within a larger narrative.
In Wanderers, the desert is as much a universal spatial system as it is a direct extension of Sufi tradition. Although the exact origin of Sufism is uncertain, it is believed to have emerged during the Islamic Golden Age anywhere between the 9th and 10th centuries. As an Islamic discipline, it exists in both Sunni and Shia sects. However, Sufism itself is not a distinct sect, but a method for approaching or understanding Islam. Often defined as “Islamic mysticism”, Sufism is considered as the part of Islamic principle that deals with the refinement of the inner self. Thus, as both a mystic and ascetic aspect of Islam, Sufis strive to obtain direct experience of God by making use of “intuitive and emotional faculties that one must train to use” (Trimingham 1). In the 11th century, Sufism began to be placed into orders, or congregations formed around leaders who were believed to be direct descendants of the prophet Muhammad. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, Sufism became a widespread doctrine, its orders, traditions, and philosophy becoming ubiquitous aspects of Sunni Islamic life. Although its historical influence on Islamic civilization was undermined by modernism in the 20th century, Sufism remains popular across the Maghreb, and is still seen as an important, mystical expression of Islam. In recent years, Islamic writers, artists, and other intellectuals alike have reclaimed a sense of attachment to the Sufi traditions of their ancestors, drawing inspiration from its inherently poetic language. When asked about his fascination with Sufism and why he brings it into so much of his work, Khemir explained that, “Sufism is the Islam of the mystics; it is the tenderness of Islam… One could also say that Sufism is the pulsating heart of Islam. Far from being a marginal phenomenon, it is the esoteric dimension of the Islamic message” (Khemir ). Both on a structural and visual level, The Wanderers of the Desert was deliberately crafted to align with Sufi tradition. In his book, Sufism and Surrealism, Syrian poet Adonis reasons that, “Sufism sees poetical writing as a primary way of explaining its mysteries, and poetic language as a primary means to knowledge… In this language, Sufism creates a world inside a world, in which its creations are contained, which is born and grows, which comes and goes, which flares up and dies down. In this world the timeless is embraced in a living present” (Adonis 18). With Wanderers, Khemir invites the viewer to become lost within bewildering, yet intensely lyrical storytelling. Just as there are countless ways to get to God within Sufism, there are innumerable ways to interpret the film. The only absolute within both is that there is no ‘true’ meaning.
Released locally in 1991, The Dove’s Lost Necklace is the second film in Khemir’s Desert Trilogy. Like Wanderers, it closely follows the dissociative, multi-interpretive format of Sufi poetry. However, unlike the other two films in the Trilogy, it immerses the viewer within an insular, undecipherable world rather than one which is boundless. Situated within a heavily stylized, dreamlike world, The Dove’s Lost Necklace is completely detached from any localizable universe. In response to scholars of Arab cinema which accused Khemir of homogenizing the Arab world through a fairy-tale like narrative, he remarked that the film, “breaks with traditional Arab cinema, because it is fabricated like a miniature and does not represent a copy of reality” (Khemir ). Perhaps the only two elements which situate the piece within a temporal or spatial framework are the film’s title and it’s opening dedication – both of which refer to aspects of near-forgotten Andalusian past. The movie’s title derives from the beloved Ring of the Dove, a 10th century treatise on love written by the Andalusian polymath Ibn Hazm. In adding the word “loss”, Khemir is effectively implying that Hazm’s text (and all Andalusian culture) is, “almost lost, and suggests that only the near loss of the letter of the text enables the revival of the ideas it celebrates” ( ). Likewise, the film’s opening dedication, a quote by French Orientalist Jacques Berque, romantically addresses a long-lost Andalusian culture. Commenting on the historical or textual fidelity of the film, Khemir notes:
The film takes place in Moslem Andalusia of the 11th century. But it’s not a question of reconstituting a given time and place, but rather of summoning up the reflection of a forgotten garden, and out of a yearning for peace, so difficult to protect from barbarians and from destructive fanaticisms. Andalusia has been the meeting place of many cultures, a living dialog of the peoples and religions whose traces can still be deciphered in texts, music and gardens all the way from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. This is not an Andalusian love story, but Andalusia as the very essence of love, through its perfumes, poetry and gardens (Khemir ).
The Dove’s Lost Necklace is a piece deeply reminiscent of the Islamic Golden Age, its characters, costumes, and overall aesthetic a stylized homage to the period which Khemir was most influenced by.
In the very first scene, Khemir gives the viewer a sense of the dual-narrative which he employs in the film. We see both Zin and Hassan navigating through the medina. Hassan, the young apprentice of a master calligrapher searches for the meaning of love – a concept directly aligned with Sufi principle. Moreover, the film follows the narrative of the little boy Zin, who tirelessly scours the medina, a love-messenger who ultimately disappears throughout the course of the film. The narrative which serves to be the very backbone of the film, however, is that of the concepts of zâhir and bâtin, Islamic thought acts in the highest organizing order. In the very first scene of the film, Hassan is depicted going to his calligraphy master so that he can review a piece in which he just completed. The master, whose talk is reminiscent of Sufi mysticism – tells Hassan, “Calligraphy gives rhythm to the absolute and it is also the link between the visible and the invisible world. The “visible” and the “invisible”. Letters are our prayers, Hassan. At this level, calligraphy becomes a witness to divine beauty” (Dove 03:01 – 03:15). Perhaps one of the most important scenes in the film, Hassan’s teacher addresses the immense value of calligraphy, and its ability to link the zâhir (visible world) and bâtin (the invisible world). An integral theme of Dove’s Lost Necklace is the duality between these two principles. Much like the associative meanings hidden within sufi poetry, the bâtin has a hidden connotation in contrast to the exterior Zahir. Additionally, Sufis believe that individuals are inherently connected to the bâtin in the world of souls. The bâtin is the individual self and when cleansed with the light of one’s spiritual guide, it elevates a person spiritually. The duality between the bâtin and the zâhir translate directly into into the importance of the intersecting axes within the film – the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical exists on a purely spiritual level, whereas the horizontal has to do with the temporality in the film.
Unlike The Wanderers of the Desert, Khemir constructs his second Desert film entirely within the ecosystem of the medina. The film’s characters are constantly depicted within the boundaries of the medina, a society separated from the outside world. Like his depiction of an idyllic Andalusian antiquity, the town in Dove is immensely stylized – its characters fashioned in vibrant garb, its shops and mosques symbols of grandeur. In Gauch’s text, she describes:
The opening sequences depict an idyllic tranquility, an ordered world of learning and calligraphy, where everyone is safe. The master calligrapher is playing a game of chess, by pigeon post, with a Christian friend. The city is full of tiny shops selling books and luxury goods and alcoves of scholars instructing their followers. The men (and there are only men) on the streets are sumptuously dressed, and the perfume seller proclaims that three things were precious to the Prophet: perfume, women and prayer (Gauch ).
Khemir depicts a culture which embodies the Islamic Golden Age, its traditions and culture lost throughout time. In Dove, calligraphy becomes a way in which to access
both the human and the divine. The film’s idyllic, colorful depiction of a diverse, vivid society soon reaches its turning point after the announced death of the prince. Soon, religious wars, waged by false prophets, ensue and, much like the fate of the Andalus, society begins to crumble. However, throughout all this, Hassan continues his quest on the search for the meaning of love, which is ultimately realized through his dedication to calligraphy. In the middle of the film, Hassan realizes his destiny to follow in the footsteps of his master, attempting to become a mediator of beauty and spirituality. Both of these concepts give meaning to the letter waw, which the master describes as, “Unique and multi-layered like God… the letter of the traveler” (Dove 51:01). In his interview with Nawara Omarbacha, Khemir explains that, “Love has many shapes in the movie…the letter “Waw,” which in Arabic means “and.” The Sufis call it the letter Love, because without it, nothing can come together… It is also the letter of the traveler, because it gathers together things and beings” (Khemir ). The Dove’s Lost Necklace depicts the inherent dualities of things and beings in Islamic tradition. Love simply cannot exist without loss.
Khemir is perhaps best known for his final film in the Desert Trilogy, Bab’Aziz: The Prince That Contemplated His Soul. A visual poem of incomparable beauty,
Khemir once again uses the desert to convey the harmonious relationship between the human and the divine. Like Wanderers of the Desert, the Saharan desert serves not only as a backdrop for Bab’Aziz, but also as a central character. Ishtar, a young girl, accompanies her blind dervish grandfather Bab’