You compose a frighteningly poetic fresco of contemporary Algeria. You started the project several years ago – can you tell us a little about how it all began?
After writing a script that I couldn’t wait to turn into something real, we started with a camera here and a boom there. The reasoning was simple: not enough money to shoot? Let’s just make it all up. If we needed kino flo, we’d make them. A forklift? We made it. We often worked with local craftsmen (turners, welders, etc.). The aim was to maintain the practice and craft of perspective through the act of filming.
Formally, the film had to combine various genres and become a kind of metaphysical thriller addressing concrete questions such as “What’s happening to us?” I wanted to follow people over several years across an Algeria of ghosts and evasiveness, not a geographical Algeria but a wild-eyed, distraught Algeria. We used about 11 or 12 different cameras, from the VHS-8 to the 4K via Super8 and VHS. We began filming in August 2010 with shots of building sites, and continued with documentary scenes in places where we’d spent years with the people we were filming, scenes of demonstrations and barricades from 2011 onwards. Between 2013 and 2016, we filmed the Saïd l’Evanoui sequences in Algeria and Corsica. In 2019, we shot the bit with the Archivist investigating the trafficking and the ‘S.K.’ mystery.
The film is punctuated with sequences of barricades and riots. Amsevrid is also an echo chamber for the traumas and struggles of the post-civil war period. Why was it important to avoid a historical approach?
The historical approach tends to leave out the realm of senses and emotions, constructing things that are fixed. History builds by ignoring the peripheries, the margins and the intimate processes that make up everyday life – the boredom, the love, the loss, the downward spiral… It has very little concern for the processes that cause someone to be bored, to love, to feel lost, or cold, or to throw stones, and therefore very little concern for reality. What we needed all those years, in Algeria, in the Mediterranean, in Africa or elsewhere, wasn’t a ‘historical approach’ but everything that escapes it, in other words ‘consent’ (in its original sense of empathy). The film aims to get closer to this ‘feeling with the other’, while distancing itself from historicism and scientism. My mother, my grandmother, the shepherds from my village, these weavers and poets, passed down a completely different world through oral language. This is a different way of documenting, a different historical approach. The world I come from (the world of harvests, of the smell of coffee) has little to do with the historical approach. It’s not its pay range. And vice versa. These worlds are mutually exclusive.
The film adopts a method that moves away from the chronological axis of events to focus on persistence, intensity and fragments of memory. It interweaves points of view to offer a kind of ‘cinematic orality’, giving space to ‘cinematic presences’ rather than a linear narration of facts and data. It’s an approach that documents a shared history in an off-centre, ghostly way.
The movie opens with a fictional thrust, a thriller revolving around several characters. It then breaks down into several layers, playing on mirrors and echoes. What were your thoughts on the architecture of Amsevrid?
The idea was to construct a film that leaves openings everywhere, all the time, with passages like walkways between its various compartments. It contains documentary, fictional and archival elements that rub shoulders and intermingle. The documentary aspects are sometimes filmed as fiction, using fiction’s imagery, and vice versa. And as for the archives, sometimes they appear as documents, sometimes as memories. They consolidate the whole like a support structure. This architecture allowed us to build a house haunted by reflections. What happened in Algeria for more than half a century can be summed up as follows: the chimera, in its original sense, has intensely documented reality. Algeria, in the film, is everything that’s created by the movements and encounters of elements such as spaces, buildings, demonstrations, guerrillas, lakes, meals, social contexts… It is consubstantial. It’s the film itself. It’s not insignificant to talk about substance or ‘consubstance’, because sometimes even sunlight seems to come from the substance of the things themselves.
In Amsevrid, we advance in slivers, fragments and deviations. How did you set about the editing?
Pierre Agoutin and I first removed the layers of complexity so that we had a better understanding of the raw materials. He had to understand the who, what and where. Then, we worked in intensive sessions, tightening up the film to create coherent atmospheres. The editing was done over several years and in different locations, exploring numerous versions. There were some fairly difficult moments. A phase where we were stuck on how to edit large blocks of sequences. It felt like we’d pored over every possibility. Some unexpected discoveries unblocked the situation. For example, when we were re-watching some of the footage we’d used, we came across shots of the mausoleum that I’d filmed myself. But the pictures from this footage had been taken 23 years earlier. This almost surreal discovery suddenly settled things, not only on the editing table, but in the very fact that I was relentlessly drawn to this mausoleum, making it a nerve centre, a lapse of memory… The movie is haunted by these moments, these unlikely encounters that shaped its final structure. We stopped editing when we felt that film had become a friend.
Twice we have scenes of women gathered round a loom. What can you tell us about them and about these scenes?
I’ve always loved the symbolism of the three pre-Islamic Fates, or Moirai, the Mother Goddesses with their different names depending on the mythology. These weaver-women we see in the film are the women from my village. I know these mothers, sisters and poets; they probably watched me growing up. And I grew up having forgotten how my history is woven. When I say my history, the ‘I’ here is impersonal.
In the film, these women tell each other about their worries, talk about current events, look after each other, recite old poems that crystallise the history of their small part of the world. They document memory as they weave. The loom is in some way their organic timeline. What’s more, I grew up in a space where two worlds overlap: the world of men, which is frontal, and the world of women, which is much more lateral. Whether it’s in space or in the history of struggle, where political arrangements write their narrative about us, there is a frontality and a laterality to history, to what we tell and how we pass it on.
Amsevrid is also a musical approach, from jazz to Einstürzende Neubauten. How did you decide on music’s role and its dialogue with the visual dimension?
It ranges from the music of Mauritania’s iggawin to German industrial music, spectral and free jazz. Even though it offers a kind of tomography using frames of the city and cavernous architecture, there’s very little that’s urban about the film. However, Alva Noto, Bargeld and Einsturzende Neubauten are very much rooted in the urban imaginary. In any case, it’s music about construction and collapse. And the poetic mental images conjured up by sounds such as ANBB’s Ret Marut Handshake – the title is a reference to B. Traven – are, I think, similar to those generated by the imaginary of 1990s Algeria.
The film is a sort of chant. The music gives it additional layers of meaning and sensation. Each chosen passage adds to the atmosphere and texture of the film, evoking specific images and emotions. The characters and places are musical and devised in the mode of harmony. The harmonic forms created by the arrangement of notes are not heard as directly as a melody; they are less like lines and more like topography. To me, harmony is multiple, it’s more remote than the melody; you listen to it rather than hear it. It has a more spectral behaviour. The characters in the film are thus erased, somewhat atmospheric, creating silence rather than being silent.
The film’s title has changed and is still changing depending on the language. First it was La Vache et le Pénalty, then Noésie, la langue du grand ailleurs in French, and The Outlandish in English. And Amsevrid… What does this word mean and what language does it come from? What does this variation symbolise?
La Vache et le Pénalty was an expression we used among friends to describe things that didn’t, at first, seem to have anything in common. Noésie is a word I used in something I wrote: something between a noema and poetry. Outlandish is an imaginary language invented by Melville to describe the language he wrote in: the language of the great elsewhere. It also means ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’. Amsevrid is a compound Kabyle word. ‘Avrid’ means ‘path’ and ‘Ams’ is a prefix. A literal translation would be the neologism ‘advancer’, the one who advances. He or she inaugurates the world, constantly discovering it. Along the same lines are the words by Cabral sung by Chavela Vargas and Jorge Cafrune: No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá, no tengo edad, ni porvenir y ser feliz es mi color de identidad. This is the only place I feel at home.
Interview by Claire Lasolle
