Representations of space in Assia Djebar's La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua

Filmed in 1977, Assia Djebar's work, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua/The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua is the first Algerian feature film made by a female director. In particular, despite its often elliptical and disjointed structure, Djebar's film represents an important piece of post-colonial Algerian film-making in that, whilst hegemonic and commercial Arab cinema rarely represents narrative space in 'correspondence with the protagonist's subjective perceptions', Djebar's film instead establishes an intimate relationship between sociospatial loci and affective/psychological states. Expanding upon this hypothesis, this article will thus argue that through its subtle spatial grammar Djebar's film symbolically emancipates Algerian women from their state of subalternity within Orientalist/colonial discourse and the post-colonial imaginary.