Les Mots qu’elles eurent un jour

In 1962, Yann Le Masson films the words of Algerian activists upon their release from prison in France. Over 50 years later, as the soundtrack has disappeared, I set out to find these women.
An inquiry upon their silent story. An essay on cinema, that depicts their disappearance and keeps them alive forever.

A film and a scar, The Words Women Spoke One Day examines loss without ever claiming to replenish it. When two deaf people set about lip-reading the women filmed by Yann Le Masson, they decipher snippets of sentences, remarks amputated by sudden camera moves. The inquiry to reconstitute the lost soundtrack remains in limbo, no happy ending comes to absorb the absence and cancel out the ferocious workings of time. Most of the women that Raphaël Pillosio would have liked to meet are already dead, but another and equally cruel form of loss weighs on his inquiry: tortured and imprisoned by the French, these Algerian women who planted bombs or acted as liaison agents were subsequently reminded of what was judged to be their place—most of them returned to the shadow of domestic life, far-removed from the public side of politics. The passage of time was not to prove synonymous with progress: emancipation came to an abrupt end as soon as the women had no further utility. The inquiry then begins to look like a pretext: although the words spoken in the film are definitively lost, the journey to find them is an opportunity to have these women talk today and to measure a gap in time, a change of epoch, and the stumbling advance of societies. Rather than reaching a destination, it was important to retrace this path into the past. Yann Le Masson suspected that his soundtrack was deliberately destroyed in order to gag women with too much freedom: history always benefits from being rewritten.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian