In 1982, on the 20th anniversary of Algerian independence, the Algerian author Assia Djebar released her second film, The Zerda, and the Songs of Forgetting, a film that digs deep into the French colonization of the Greater Maghreb  and the hauntings of anti-colonial struggles.

For over 130 years, the colonisers had carried out a scorched earth campaign against indigenous peoples, including exercising domination through representation; control of images circulated in the culture. Assia Djebar’s collaborative essay film undermines this violence, with particular attention paid also to its sound and music – disrupting the violent subjugation of colonial imagery.
 

On the centenary of the founding of the moving image, Sylvia Wynter gave a speech in which she built on V.Y. Mudimbe’s critical observation of the occident’s violent act of “submitt[ing] the world to its memory” through image-making. Assia Djebar, once Frantz Fanon’s collaborator at the FLN’s journal El Moudjahid, has been a rarely recognised force in reclaiming that memory through film. 

Part 4 of BFMAF Focus programme Ways of Seeing Fanon

The Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting – Dir. Assia Djebar | Algeria | 1982 | 58’| English Subtitles