The fragmentary cinema of Hakim Belabbes

In this article, I explore the cinematic work of the Moroccan director Hakim Belabbes, with focus on his fragmentary practice most evident in his 2009 film, Ashlā' (In Pieces), made a few years after his father's death. I interrogate three interconnected and mutually constituting dimensions of this film: the fragmentary, the archival, and the citational, because Belabbes constructed this film from fragments of his previous films. By focusing on this strategy of gleaning, I attend to the ways in which Ashlā' enables us to reflect on the expansive feature of images as the film moves laterally to Belabbes' other films, recasting them by way of citation, while at the same time it links the life and death of the father to the vicissitudes of the history of cinema within shifting economic and social conditions.