Behind Neon Lights
“Behind Neon Lights” video still 2016
“Behind Neon Lights” juxtaposes two perspectives of Abdallah Guech's brothel in Tunis, capturing both its interior and exterior worlds. The video opens with a continuous sequence featuring the ritualistic sacrifice of a goat, followed by a series of still shots from inside the rooms of the prostitutes.
About Behind Neon Lights:
"Behind Neon Lights" is a film about crossing boundaries. It is, in part, the boundary of a young filmmaker daring to intrude into a space forbidden to both images and women, as it takes place in Sidi Abdallah Guech alley, a zone reserved for prostitution controlled by the Tunisian state. However, the film’s radicality does not rest on the overt boldness of this act, or on an excess of willpower, but rather on the unexpected nature of the gaze it presents.
One half of the image, the right side, is occupied by the ritual sacrifice of a goat. The actions are filmed, but the faces of the men, seen outside through the exit door, remain out of frame. The background is filled with the haunting voices of women. Throughout the film, the right side of the split screen shows the steady red flow, a pool of blood in the blue-patterned room, even after the animal has been removed from the shot.
The left screen offers a journey. The door to the alley is open, and what would typically be considered transitional or cutaway shots—without a central figure to focus on—follow one another. We see alleyways, a distant passerby, some hanging laundry. Most notably, a puddle of dirty water on the ground reflects the location, a portion of the walls, and a corner of the sky, its movement evoking a sense of "estrangement" and the "redemption of material reality," to borrow the seminal concept from Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film. It’s striking that unrestricted visibility, approached with a somewhat ironic sense of "redemption," in its deeply materialist conception, is introduced in Kracauer’s text through the trembling image of an ordinary alley reflected in a dirty puddle—a symbol of the German thinker’s fascination with anonymity and chance—which nearly culminates in the bloody imagery of Le Sang des bêtes (Georges Franju, 1948): "Pools of blood spread across the ground as horses and cows are systematically slaughtered (...). [...] The reflections of these horrors in the mirror are, in themselves, an end."
Without delving into Kracauer’s hypothesis that the cinema screen possesses the reflective qualities of Athena’s polished shield, it’s remarkable how, from one screen to another, Behind Neon Lights seems to open, perhaps unintentionally, Kracauer’s text both at its beginning and its conclusion, bridging the two extremes of the "camera-reality."
The film avoids making any overt metaphorical connection or symbolic link between the sacrificed animal and the prostitutes—who remain absent figures throughout. Instead, moving against such pitfalls, the film captures empty interiors and ownerless objects, bathed in a pink neon light, contributing to an intriguing assemblage of colors while avoiding any clear symbolic interpretation.
Belaid’s emerging cinema is not driven by will—whether noble or misguided—but by forces drawn from material reality that empty the contents and coherence of overly controlled discourses. Behind Neon Lights is a study, an essay infused with a restless attitude, free of apodictic certainty. In contrast to political cinema that always has something to declare, the filmmaker opts for silence to reveal, untying her images from declarations, promises, or discursive operations. Cinema, in this context, does not preach or appropriate; its intrusive images emerge from operations that deliberately avoid being primarily discursive. To be unsettled, to create: this is the redefinition of the utility of cinematic images.