You construct a poetic form out of visual fragments. How and over what period did you collect this footage? What was your work methodology? Could you tell us about the genesis of the project?
Chants Fantômes is the fruition of several years of artistic research surrounding the consequences of colonial violence on the body - physical, social, spatial. It is the first time I am researching something that stems from a personal experience: my family, my history, my body, and the absences that have been handed down to me. The starting point was a phantom pain that I felt when listening to kabyle or to darija: the physical sensation that something was a part of me while also being missing. Since childhood, I have borne this linguistic trauma without ever having the words to define it. This “initial pain” launched the research. As the work progressed, it became clear that language was only a small part of the absences that had been transmitted. My body was carrying many more traces of violence, relating to the wounds present in the bodies around me, in the spaces where I live (or where I don’t) and that inhabit me. Yet Chants fantômes isn’t an autobiographical narrative: my experience is a starting point in order to connect these bodies to one another. This research, at first scattered and almost unconscious, progressively crystalised into the desire to make this film. I began the research in 2019 and started working on the film itself in 2022. At first, the idea was to make a “conventional documentary”. I conducted interviews, filmed sites, requested archival rights from the INA and the ANOM, and so on. But during the process I realised that it simply was not working, that I was talking about violence, rather than with it. An amputated limb does not grow back. Rather than trying to create prostheses, I needed to experience absence itself. I understood that I had to “throw the vase on the floor” and work with the broken pieces.
You structured the film in chapters. When did you decide on this structure? How did it guide the editing process?
I knew it would be impossible to repair the “vase” and that enabled me to consider every chapter as a separate “broken vase”. The metaphor of the vase isn’t a bad one, one can think of the chapters like containers, with holes in them. The editing process was guided by these holes: to work with absence.
The intertitles suggest etymological digressions, question the origin and the becoming of words. How does your work as a translator and a poet influence the writing of the film and your relationship to moving images?
Poetry and translation are not exact disciplines. Yet they can be very precise precisely because they are not exact. I think that it is because I am used to working with the “inexcat” that I understood the necessity of “throwing the vase” and finding myself amid a mountain of breakage.
There is something inherently violent in translation as well: a sentence, even a single word, can always be translated in multiple ways. To translate is therefore to decide. The verb to decide stems from the Latin decidere, from de-caedere, which means to cut, but also to strike, to kill. Translating is deciding on behalf of someone else, I choose my words - I cut away the others - in order to tell a story of which I am not the author.
Colonial violence cuts bodies apart - by killing living beings, humans, animals, plants - by destroying the bonds of life: communities, ways of living, relationships to space and to time; by demolishing living beings’ habitats, forests, fields, villages, towns. As I conscientised the reverberations of colonial violence, I realised that my approach to an image was no different to that of a word.
Could you tell us about the sound design that draws on multiple references - Slimane Azem, Bellemou Meassoud, Gana El Maghnaoui and collective singing practices? At what stage of the creative process did it come into play?
Once I realised that I needed to work with breakage, it became clear to me that I had to do the same with sound. How can one create a physical experience of breakage, that is, of violence, destruction, loss and grief? The latter is still to be achieved; we have not yet truly mourned because accepting loss is necessary to mourning. It is difficult to grieve whilst one is angry. And, living in the West, especially in France, it is almost impossible to not be angry. We tend to think of anger as something destructive. But anger is a tension. In most cases, it is a force that holds things together, that protects things from collapsing internally - a place where joy and tenderness persist despite everything. A song can transmit an entire inheritance without it being necessary to understand the lyrics. One can retain a song even after having everything taken away. Thus there was the idea of a kind of choir of breakage : Slimane Azem sings of the heartbreak of a man in exile ; the group of women from Djurdjura evokes hope and the necessity of another future; Messaouds’ trumpet speaks of things that words cannot. This is a sound that does not comment on the image, but passes through it, shifts it, lives within it, contradicts it. The real sound work started almost at the end of the editing process. In order to calibrate the relationship between the visible and the audible. There needed to be a rhythm, in order to work against it.
Did you conceive your film as a body? How does this notion of corporeality join that of territory in the making of the film?
I don’t use the term “territory”, but rather “spatial body”, to speak of the corporeality of the earth. Territory refers to cartography. One of the definitions of the word is “an area of land over which authority is exercised”. But the destruction of the bonds between bodies - physical, social, spatial - extends beyond the national borders. Palestinians say: “The land does not belong to us. We belong to the land”. Bodies are interconnected. The ways in which these connections are severed are connected as well. In German we do not say “sound box”, but resonance body. In this sense, Chants Fantômes is a body that works through echoes. Resonance occurs when the frequency of an emitted sound matches the frequency of a material, this produces its oscillation or its rupture. An echo is produced when the reflections of a sound wave are delayed enough for us to be able to perceive them as a distinct sonic event.
Interviewed by Claire Lasolle
