MESA Banner
Tunisia’s Post-Revolutionary Cinematic Landscapes
Abstract
This paper mounts an ecocritical investigation into representations of landscape in Tunisian cinema since the Arab uprisings. While scholars have begun to take stock of the changes in Tunisian and Arab cinema since 2011 (Gugler 2015; Taha 2021; Miller 2021; Shafik 2022), depictions of the physical environment have not received much attention. By attending to the cinematic depiction of Tunisian landscapes, this paper considers the way in which more-than-human ecologies have figured in the political dreams and disappointments of the past twelve years. It contributes to the growing body of work both on cinematic ecocriticism (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010; Rust, Monani, and Cubitt 2012; Birks 2021), and on art and media after the Arab uprisings. I will focus in particular on three films by Ala Eddine Slim, Akher Wahed Fina (The Last of Us) (2016), Tlamess (2019), and the documentary Babylon (2012), co-directed with Youssef Chebi and Ismaël. In these films, we see Tunisia’s dominant political concerns of the past twelve years transformed into explicitly environmental issues: a refugee camp arising from the desert on the Libyan border; empty construction sites; soldiers fighting a terrorist insurgency in the country’s forested northwest; a migrant alone in a fishing boat, floating on the Mediterranean Sea. Deploying little to no dialogue, extreme long shots, and long takes, Slim’s films foreground the physical environment over plot or character development. Two of his films, Akher Wahed Fina and Tlamess, end with the protagonists adopting a new life in the forest. I argue that these scenes constitute what Foucault calls a “heterotopia,” in that the forest acts as “a counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which…all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” In these mythic, quasi-unreal scenes, the protagonists’ intimate, even intersubjective contact with the forest gives rise to a sensation of freedom. This suggests that in the postrevolutionary era, freedom is defined not only by one’s relationship to the political landscape, but to the natural landscape as well.
Discipline
Geography
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Maghreb
Tunisia
Sub Area
None