Le fait divers et sa contextualisation entre l’effacement et l’accentuation : « Rayyā et Sakīna et Landru »

Abstract

Female serail killers are rarely featured in Arabic police archives. Hence the singularity of the  Rayyã and Sakīna case. This article studies the classic Rayyã and Sakīna (1953, Salah Abou Seif), the first Egyptian film to tell the story of female serial killers. The film is compared to the historical narrative written by journalist and historian Salah Issa in The Henchmen of Rayyã and Sakīna. A Political and Social Account (1999). Both the Film and the book are compared to Landru (1963, Claude Chabrol), a film based on a screenplay by Françoise Sagan published in a book under the same title. The fil deals with the crimes of the infamously well-known French serial killer who was a contemporary of his Egyptian counterparts. Through a comparative study of both feature films and the books from which they are adapted, the article analyzes the absence/presence of the social and historical contexts of both crime stories in the two medias: the scriptural and the cinematic. First, we examine the presence and/or the erasure of those contexts, during the process of narrativization of both crime stories. Second, we study the serial killer as a social subject. A special attention is paid to the dynamics of speech and silence. Thus, the article sheds a light on the aesthetic and ideological choices made by the writers and filmmakers whose work is at the centre of this study.