When The Divas of Taquerabt, a short documentary by Karim Moussaoui, ended, I immediately streamed the film again. (It's on MUBI.) Haunting and dreamlike, the little movie is completely mysterious. The images in the film are very strange, but not in a showy or surrealistic way -- it's the mood, the ambience, the weirdly designed camera positions that create this effect: there are no establishing shots and nothing exotic -- it's like we're seeing a grainy video of the content of a very peculiar dream, oddly familiar but inexplicable.
The movie begins with a strange-looking woman removing a book from the upper-shelf of a rather rudimentary book case. The woman seems to be in her early fifties and has very dark skin under her eyes -- she looks like she's bruised or a racoon. An off-screen voice asks her about an opera house built in Algiers with the assistance of the Chinese. The opera house was constructed in 2016 but has not yet been used for a performance. The man off-screen asks the woman "What opera would look like in this place?" (What place? Is there no tradition of musical theater in Algiers?) She mentions a work unfamiliar to me (La Nouba) and remarks that the programs in the opera house have been more a matter of "installations" than opera. Then, she names a place and says that she was driven from the airport to a cave where women were singing. This was in the early 90's. The man asks if she thinks that these women (or their successors) are still singing. "Why not?" she replies. All of this is shot from about five feet from the oddly spectral woman. We never see the interlocutor. We don't know for sure what, if anything, the book has to do with the dialogue. The woman is looking for a quotation, apparently, but why and what sort of quotation is never established. The movie, then, cuts to very grainy images overexposed showing four or five men with sound equipment walking in the desert. The desert is a blur and the shot is jittery taken from close to the men who walk away from the camera. Next we see a man dressed in the turban and gowns of a Berber. The man is working with a primitive hoe in a mysterious-looking flooded field. The field is divided into little squares outlined in eight inch high embankments of wet sand. When the man cuts through an embankment water floods the tiny patchwork field. We see the man irrigate several patches of nondescript low-lying foliage in this curious garden. The man is asked if women sing in caves. (Again, it's the off-screen male interlocutor.) The man doesn't know anything about this but thinks it may have been a concert staged for tourists. The genre is described as Ahelli. "I'm a fan of Ahelli," the farmer says, but remarks that he has never heard of women singing in caves. Next, we see a man driving a Land Rover, filmed from very close. He says Ahelli songs are about "life, love, religion." He recalls that a man with a Land Rover came once and collected the songs, possibly recording them. The driver says that the women, who were supposed to sing, "are not available today." The men with the sound equipment stand shivering (it must be cold) in a totally barren desert. Again the camera is very close to the men, not figures in a landscape because the landscape is merely implied -- again it's like the setting of a dream in which it doesn't really matter where things are taking place because characters and plot and scenery are all inside the dreamer's head. A couple men are shown tightly compressed by door frames in some kind of structure, possibly a caravansarai. One of the men says that he's exhausted with "driving through nothing at all." His cell-phone rings. In the next shot, the crew is in some sort of underground location, a big grey roomy subterranean space, possibly something like a salt mine although who knows? Women are seated in an alcove eighty feet away, lit by flames and singing. The film ends with a five minute montage of fairly short shots showing the women from various angles. We have no idea why they are singing, what they are singing about, or what they are doing in this strange, gloomy cave? A rhythm is pounded out by a woman striking a two stones on a sort of flat metate. The women wear shawls and some of them have elaborate jewelry, bangles and big dangling necklaces. They all have their eyes shut. The music has a call-and-response flavor, a single voice performing the melody against a background of rhythmically chanting voices. The women clap their hands in time with the music. Some of the singers, in fact, are obviously old men. When the song is finished, the matron who has been leading the performance starts another song. The movie cuts to black.
The film is very fascinating, a bit like a documentary by Jean Rouch but without any commentary or explanatory material at all. The picture is made with the sponsorship of the Opera de Paris in was first screened in 2020 as part of a festival of short films commissioned by that institution. The picture to which the film obviously refers is Werner Herzog's unsettling Herdsmen of the Sun, about Tuareg singing contests conducted by young men in elaborate make-up. But this film is more pure, less about the performance and more about the difficulty of finding this music, buried, as it is, far underground. Herzog imposes a European context on his spectacle -- he films the Tuareg men, swaying and dancing, but with music on the soundtrack of the last Castrato in Italy singing a sentimental aria from a long forgotten opera. Here there is no implicit commentary of that kind. The aura of mystery surrounding the images and performance, which is remarkable, remains impenetrable.
Some internet research reveals that an allusion to La Nouba in the film's first sequence refers to a documentary movie made by an Algerian feminist and radical Assie Djebar (who is also mentioned). Djebar was born in 1936 and died in 2005. A "Nouba" is a five part song cycle performed by women in the Algerian desert. The woman in the first part of the film says that opera in Algiers would have to be based on something like La Nouba, the documentary showing women singers, according to Djebar, people repressed and made voiceless by colonialism. The off-screen male interlocutor has said that he doesn't exactly understand why the Chinese built an opera house in Algiers -- "it's not as if we're going to produce ten operas a year," he says. "Timimoun" where the women singing in the cave are said to be located is a sparsely populated desert territory in central Algeria. The people who live in this area are of mixed Sudanese, Berber, and Arabic origin. They speak a language called Gourara (sometimes spelled "Gurara"). A "Taquerabt" is apparently a three-part performance of Ahelli music. The performance customarily begins with a group sing-a-long that may feature as many as 100 people chanting and moving in a shuffling circle around the central singer who calls out the lyrics. (Sometimes, a flute is played.) The second part of the performance, which is customary at religious and civic festivals, is performed from late at night to dawn by more accomplished professional singers. At dawn, the best and most experienced singers perform. Apparently, this singing and chanting lasts for eight to twelve hours. UNESCO is attempting to protect this performance-style as one of the "intangible treasures of cultural heritage" but the Gourara language is dying out. The people associated with this tradition are oasis farmers called the Zanete. The man described as collecting these songs is apparently Mouloud Mammeri, a controversial anti-government figure who died in a car crash. The State opposed his public funeral but more than 200,000 people attended. The filmmaker Karim Massaoui was born in 1976. He is Algerian and has made one feature film and several shorts. The Divas of Taquerabt is 15 minutes and 30 seconds long. It's highly recommended.
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