After completing Les Alouettes naïves, Djebar temporarily stopped writing and remained silent for twelve years, before publishing one of her most famous collections, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement. The reasons for this silence are evidently manifold and testify to the difficulties associated with locating and describing a position in the aftermath of the upheavals of the war. Having struggled to create a meaningful narrative reconstructing her characters' experiences in the maquis in Les Alouettes, Djebar temporarily abandoned the use of written language as a means of making sense of colonial violence and instead experimented with film. After battling with the disjunctions of writing in French, Djebar turned to cinema in order to search for an alternative to the obfuscation of written language, and to explore the contrasting potential of visual imagery while reassessing the implications of her novel-writing practice. Written francophone narrative perhaps seemed insufficient as a tool for expressing both the traumas experienced by war victims and the unstable position in which they found themselves after decolonisation, and Djebar chose to investigate the potential of both filmic dramatisation and documentary to access her forgotten subjects. This medium also allowed her to include directly the voices of the women interviewed without the influence of transcription or translation. I shall not investigate the subtlety of Djebar's filmic techniques here, however, since her experimentation both with live witnesses and with camera work in La Nouba and La Zerda lies beyond my primary concern with the writing process.