Algerian national cinema

Guy Austin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526106872
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162694
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This topical and innovative study is the first book on Algerian cinema to be published in English since the 1970s. At a time when North African and Islamic cultures are of increasing political significance, Algerian National Cinema presents a dynamic, detailed and up to date analysis of how film has represented this often misunderstood nation. Algerian National Cinema explores key films from The Battle of Algiers (1966) to Mascarades (2007). Introductions to Algerian history and to the national film industry are followed by chapters on the essential genres and themes of filmmaking in Algeria, including films of anti-colonial struggle, representations of gender, Berber cinema, and filming the 'black decade' of the 1990s. This thoughtful and timely book will appeal to all interested in world cinemas, in North African and Islamic cultures, and in the role of cinema as a vehicle for the expression of contested identities. By the author of the critically-acclaimed Contemporary French Cinema.

1 An introduction to modern Algerian history and politics

Being Algerian has been described as ‘the most complicated history of citizenship in the world’ (Khanna 2008: 70). Algeria combines an ancient Berber culture with the historical influence of diverse invasions and colonial occupations (Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Arab, Byzantine, Egyptian, Spanish, Ottoman and French). For Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist who worked on Algeria throughout his career, this complex history plus the often dysfunctional relation between the state and the people makes what he calls the Algerian problem ‘la limite extrême de tous les problèmes sociaux et politiques’ [the extreme example of all social and political problems] (Bourdieu 1997: 21). Bourdieu identifies key issues in the recent history of Algeria as originating in the after-effects of colonialism and the war of liberation against the French (1954–62) – he calls the state’s position on both these matters an attempt to repress the repressions that resulted – as well as in the confusions and inconsistencies of a language policy which sought to expunge French from everyday use amongst the subordinate classes but kept it alive among the elites (Bourdieu 1997: 22). The complex inter relation of Arabic and French informs the very name of the territory, since the French term l’Algérie was itself derived from the Arabic El Djezaïr meaning ‘the islands’. The language question is just one of the repercussions of Algerian history that reverberate to this day. But the French colonial occupation of Algeria from 1830 onwards was far from the first, nor did Algerian history begin with the arrival of the French as some colonial discourse suggested. Previous attempts to control North African territories had been made by the Carthaginians (largely unsuccessful) and more successfully by the Romans, the Arabs and the Turks. Resistance was led by the indigenous Berber population, the oldest community in Algeria. As Kateb Yacine puts it in his novel Nedjma, the tree of the nation is rooted in an ancient tribal grave (Yacine 1996: 200). Berber figures such as Jugurtha, a Numidian king who fought the Romans, were subsequently venerated in the nationalist discourse of modern independent Algeria. Even in the Arab-dominated, officially Muslim independent Algeria, the Berber pagan Jugurtha was invoked in the 1976 National Charter as representing the origin of the nation (Evans and Phillips 2007: 15). A Berber presence has been a constant in Algerian history throughout the waves of invasion and occupation. Berbers now make up between 20 and 30 per cent of the current population of 35 million, with their most long-standing communities concentrated in particular regions including in the east Kabylia and the Aurès mountains, and to the south the Mzab and the nomadic Tuaregs of the Sahara Desert (see Change 2009: 19). Modern Algeria is however officially an Islamic state and its national language is Arabic: both legacies of the Arab invasion that began in 647.

Sunni Islam is the official religion of Algeria, and Muslims account for 99 per cent of the current population (see Change 2009: 35). Official nationalist discourse hence tends to portray the Arabisation and Islamisation of Algeria as central to the country’s history. Seen through this optic, the seventh-century defeat of the Berber resistance – led by the Jewish queen Dihaya Kahina – and the subsequent conversion of the Berber tribes to Islam ‘came to symbolize the inevitable triumph of Islam’ and ‘the formation of an Arabo-Islamic identity’ central to state discourse on nation formation (see Evans and Phillips 2007: 17). The adoption of Islam by the Berbers did not however unproblematically synthesise Arab and Berber identities, nor did Arab culture become strongly established in Algeria until the eleventh century. The earlier Arabisation of the Machrek (eastern North Africa) by invasion from the Middle East meant that pre-Arabic languages in that region disappeared very early. By contrast, the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) was only fully Arabised after the invasion of the Banu Hillal tribe in 1051; this saw the loss of Roman dialect, but the major pre-Arabic language, Berber and its variants, remained and have survived to the present day (see Niehoff 1997: 50). A resultant sense of rupture has been identified between the Arab majority in Algeria and Arab nations in the Middle East, whereby Algerian Arabs can feel cut off from the perceived centre of Arab-Islamic culture. Meanwhile the marginalisation of Berber languages and culture by the modern Algerian state remains a crucial issue, one reflected in the struggle to develop a Berber cinema within Algeria (see Chapter 5).

If Algeria during the medieval period was ruled by powerful religious dynasties, such as Islamic Berbers, the Almoravids and the Almohads, in the sixteenth century it was taken over by the Ottoman Empire, an occupation that saw the era of the so-called Barbary Pirates, operating out of Algiers. As Marnia Lazreg has noted, ‘Europeans referred to Algerian ship activity [. . .] as “piracy”, thereby obscuring the fact that it was initially a response to the Spanish reconquista with its attendant expulsion of Muslims to North Africa [. . .] and attempts at seizing Algerian ports’ (Lazreg 1994: 22). The country was administered as a regency, not from Constantinople but from Algiers, by the Turkish military elite headed by the dey or head of state. As a result, when the city ultimately surrendered to the French in 1830, the declaration was made not in Arabic or Berber, nor indeed in French – the language of the the future occupation – but in Turkish (see Djebar 2000: 228). Prior to the French invasion, Algiers had begun to suffer from impoverishment and depopulation. In fact, the diplomatic incident used as a partial justification for military action by France – the dey of Algiers striking the French consul-general with a fan in April 1827 – was an expression of frustration at France’s reluctance to pay debts owed to the Regency. A French blockade of three years followed, and ultimately the expedition of 14 June 1830 in which 37,000 French troops landed at Sidi-Ferruch. By 5 July Algiers had been captured. An ulterior motive for this action was provided by French domestic politics. Ahead of the elections due for July 1830, the Bourbon monarchists wished to shift attention from internal conflicts while bolstering their own popularity via a military success. Charles X mobilised the rhetoric of religious conflict along with nationalism in his address to parliament on 2 March 1830, when he contrasted the Barbary power of Algiers with a France aided by the Almighty and championing the triumph of Christianity (see Vigier 1991: 16). When the French colonial presence in Algeria was itself questioned in the twentieth century by Sheikh Ben Badis, then attacked and ultimately defeated in the 1954–62 war, religion was again to play a key part in the construction of a nationalist cause – in this case, a Muslim Algerian cause (see below and Chapter 3).

The fall of Algiers did not achieve all that the French had wished for. News reached Paris too late to prevent the defeat of the Bourbon faction in the elections and the turmoil of the July Revolution. Meanwhile, Algerian resistance remained. The coastal towns of Oran and Annaba were quickly occupied, but it took thirty years and hundreds of thousands of men before the territory of Algeria was ‘pacified’ by the French. The most successful resistance leader was Abd el-Kader, who inflicted defeats on the French during the 1830s and surrendered only in 1847. During this time not only did the size of the French military presence in Algeria increase (from 72,000 troops in 1841 to over 100,000 in 1846) but so did the brutality of their campaign. Led by Thomas Bugeaud, the army began to disrupt and control indigenous activites such as farming, following his order to ‘empêcher les Arabes de semer, de récolter, de pâturer sans notre permission’ [prevent the Arabs from sowing, harvesting, or feeding their animals without our permission] (cited in Michel 1991: 24). More infamously the French under Bugeaud also committed atrocities and massacres, notably by means of ‘enfumades’, when villagers were suffocated by smoke after being shut up in caves. Thanks to such tactics, by 1857 the conquest of Algeria was complete, although rebellions were to recur periodically.

As early as 1847, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed how France had plunged Algeria into darkness: ‘nous avons rendu la société musulmane beaucoup plus misérable, plus désordonnée, plus ignorante et plus barbare qu’elle n’était avant de nous connaître’ [we have made Muslim society much more wretched, wild, ignorant and barbarous than it was before it encountered us] (cited in Michel 1991: 25). The imposition of French colonialism on Algeria has been described by Bourdieu as a shock of such magnitude that it ruptured ‘not only the economic order but also the social, psychological, moral and ideological’ (cited in Silverstein and Goodman 2009: 15). The reduction of Algerians to second-class citizens in their own country, the removal of Algerian land (often tribally rather than individually owned) from Algerian hands, the placing of political, legal and economic power in the hands of European settlers and the brutal ‘pacification’ of Algerian rebellions were all part and parcel of the colonial system. But beyond these material depradations the Algerians also suffered, according to Bourdieu, the loss of ‘something that they could never recover: their cultural unity’ (cited in Silverstein and Goodman 2009: 16). Moreover, as Lazreg comments, ‘From now on, Algerians will be figments of the French imagination’ (Lazreg 1994: 36). As we shall see in the course of this book, an attempt to wrest Algerian identity away from colonial constructions, as well as a mythologising of lost national unity (and a critique of this nostalgic idea), is central to much Algerian cinema.

The French in Algeria were conscious of previous imperial structures notably those imposed by the Roman Empire. Indeed the French colonial project sought to emulate Rome’s ‘civilising’ discourse by establishing one European empire on the ruins of another, with which the French shared a Latin identity. This ideology found physical manifestation in the building of a new French bridge on the ruins of a collapsed Roman one at El-Kantara near Constantine, or in 1838 building from scratch – on the site of an ancient Roman port – the town of Philippeville, ‘the first entirely French town in Algeria’ (Zarobell 2010: 117). A certain amount of the French colonial system in Algeria was also calqued upon inherited Ottoman structures: hence the use of ‘compliant local leaders’ in the roles of caïds (tax collectors), cadis (judges) and bachagas (tribal leaders) (Evans and Phillips 2007: 30) – figures often represented as collaborators in Algerian cinema, as in Les Hors la loi or La Montagne de Baya (see Chapters 3 and 5). But whereas Constantinople had left Algeria to be administered at arm’s length, the ultimate phase of the French colonial project was to declare Algeria part of France itself: ‘With the advent of the Third Republic (1871), northern Algeria was divided into three French departments – Algiers, Oran and Constantine – that were in principle governed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyrights
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: An introduction to modern Algerian history and politics
• 2: A brief history of Algerian cinema
• 3: The war of liberation on screen: trauma, history, myth
• 4: Representing gender: tradition and taboo
• 5: Berber cinema, historical and ahistorical
• 6: After ‘Black October’: mourning and melancholia
• 7: Screening the ‘invisible war’
• 8: Memory and identity: from lost sites to reclaimed images
• 9: Conclusion: Algerian national cinemas
• Filmography
• Index