The Algerian War in Film Fifty Years Later, 2004–2012 (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) 1793626642, 9781793626646

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The Algerian War in Film Fifty Years Later, 2004–2012

After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France Series Editor: Valérie K. Orlando, University of Maryland Advisory Board Robert Bernasconi, Memphis University; Claire H. Griffiths, University of Chester, UK; Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University; Chima Korieh, Rowan University; Mildred Mortimer, University of Colorado, Boulder; Obioma Nnaemeka, Indiana University; Alison Rice, University of Notre Dame; Kamal Salhi, University of Leeds; Tracy D. SharpleyWhiting, Vanderbilt University; Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Tulane University

Recent Titles The Algerian War in Film Fifty Years Later, 2004–2012 by Anne Donadey Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities by Mona El Khoury Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future edited by Rajeshwari S. Vallury Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness and Exile edited by Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears French Orientalist Literature in Algeria, 1845–1884: Colonial Hauntings by Sage Goellner Corporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women’s Literature by Julia L. Frengs Spaces of Creation: Transculturality and Feminine Expression in Francophone Literature by Allison Connolly Women Writers of Gabon: Literature and Herstory by Cheryl Toman Backwoodsmen as Ecocritical Motif in French Canadian Literature: Connecting Worlds in the Wilds by Anne Rehill Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women’s Writing: Heuristic Implications of the Recto-Verso Effect by Pamela A. Pears The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity by Jennifer Howell Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean edited by Ousseina D. Alidou and Renée Larrier State Power, Stigmatization, and Youth Resistance Culture in the French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship by Hervé Tchumkam Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood by Véronique Maisier

The Algerian War in Film Fifty Years Later, 2004–2012 Anne Donadey

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944013 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Françoise Lionnet, with gratitude. You are a true role model.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Algeria Syndrome and Hiccups of Memory

1

1 Un/Civil War Memories: L’Ennemi intime, Mon Colonel, Djinns, La Trahison, and Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961 27 2 From Screen Memories to Intertwined Lives: Caché, Michou d’Auber, Le premier homme, Je vous ai compris, and Le Choix de Myriam 65 3 From Nostalg(er)ic to Coalescing Memories: Un Balcon sur la mer, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, La Baie d’Alger, and Cartouches gauloises 111 4 Militant Memories: Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Zabana!, Sartre: L’Age des passions, Avant l’oubli, Voyage à Alger, and Pour Djamila 151 Conclusion: Difficult Anamnesis

199

Works Cited

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Index 223 About the Author

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vii

Acknowledgments

I thank San Diego State University (SDSU) for supporting my research and writing through a sabbatical leave in fall 2017 and two course releases (Critical Thinking Grants), one in spring 2018 and one in fall 2020. I am forever grateful to the always inspirational Joanna Brooks who, in her capacity as associate vice president for Faculty Advancement at SDSU, provided a wealth of mentoring resources to support faculty scholarly productivity. In particular, SDSU’s institutional membership in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, headed by Kerry Ann Rockquemore, has been invaluable in helping me make the best use of my time for writing and research. Any university interested in increasing its faculty research productivity should consider becoming a member institution. I am also indebted to Carla Calargé for taking the time to provide significant comments on chapter 1, to the press’s external reader for their helpful suggestions, to Daria Shembel for sharing her extensive film studies expertise with me, to Wissem Brinis for her linguistic and cultural help, to Mildred Mortimer for answering my questions, to Amira Jarmakani for sharing some of her writing with me, and to my graduate assistant Danielle Cervantes for her careful editing. I thank Ahmed Bedjaoui, Wissem Brinis, Elizabeth Colwill, Ryan Haynes, Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, and Kao Saechao for their help accessing some of the films. Thanks to my artistic relatives for their keen eye in selecting the book cover, to our Interlibrary Loan staff for finding specialized books and articles for me, and to the press’s editors for their enthusiasm and hard work on the book. Last but not least, I am most grateful to my partner, as always. An earlier version of part of the Introduction was published in French as “Postface: Les Soubresauts de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne en France” in Maya Boutaghou with Anne Donadey, eds., Représentations de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019, 203–11. ix

Introduction The Algeria Syndrome and Hiccups of Memory

The lengthy and brutal Algerian war of decolonization from the French (1954–1962) remains an open wound that has not been dealt with adequately in French cultural memory and continues to affect French politics and interethnic relations in a negative manner. As I and others have argued, there is a direct link between resentment over losing Algeria to a people whom the French saw through the lens of colonial racism and the increase and normalization of racism against populations of Maghrebian (North African) descent in France since the 1980s.1 The combined effects of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the ongoing war on terror that ensures continuing instability in the Middle East, and the upsurge in Islamic fundamentalist terrorist attacks in Europe in 2015 and 2016 have unfortunately given new power to anti-Arab racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and Islamophobia in France and elsewhere. The difficulty French society has in facing its colonial past leads to blockages in the present that have particularly negative outcomes for multicultural and transnational relations, for the reception of Middle Eastern and African migrants and refugees, as well as with respect to hopes for an end to terrorism. As historian Benjamin Stora has demonstrated, there is no consensus on the Algerian war in France among stakeholder groups such as Algerian immigrants in France and their children, former French soldiers, former Algerian fighters, former French settlers in Algeria (pieds-noirs), and Algerians who served under the French flag during the war (harkis) (Imaginaires 192, 247). The current state of remembering the Algerian war in France is thus constituted by a set of fragmented, painful, politicized, and “cloisonnées” (compartmentalized) memories (Imaginaires 190; Stora with Leclère 15). These memories are filtered through the prisms of groups that have opposing stakes in the past conflict and in its current interpretation and aftermath. To this day in France, cultural vectors of memory around the Algerian war in France 1

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Introduction

(such as literature and film) tend to become sites of replay of earlier war divisions—what Stora has called La Guerre des mémoires (a war of memories) (“Entre la France et l’Algérie” 332). This book examines the cultural, political, and aesthetic significance of narrative films made during the fiftieth-anniversary period of the Algerian war of independence, between 2004 and 2012. Why focus on cinema, and why this particular period? The presence of a relatively large corpus of thirty films made during this time provides a good foundation for an analysis of how far society has come (or not) in facing the scars of that conflict. I investigate the stakes and meanings of these representations of the war in a context of near silence about the war by the French state and assess to what extent these films go beyond the compartmentalization discussed by Stora. Films, like other cultural productions, both reflect aspects of their societies at a given time and make political and cultural interventions that can contribute to changing society. Stora points out that “les images . . . ne sont pas un simple reflet du réel, mais par leur puissance fabriquent un imaginaire historique” (“Entretien” n.p.) (images . . . do not simply reflect reality. Through their power, they create a historical imaginary). As Sylvie Durmelat similarly notes, “By circulating images that foster the acquisition of memories that are not necessarily one’s own, cinema and mass media contribute to reconfiguring the collective past of a nation . . . [and] make room for a (potentially critical) reassessment of the present” (96). They can also allow the audience to imagine a future different from the present and to connect memories that continue to remain siloed. In his book Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War, Jo McCormack explains that “it is largely through literature and cultural production [including film] that dominant narratives of the war are challenged and memories transmitted and contested” (180). Literature, which I studied in my previous book, and narrative film allow the spectator to identify with characters on the page or on screen through their points of view and internal struggles. Thanks to its ability to foster and enhance crossgroup identification and empathy, film—like literature—can offer thoughtful models for effective cross-cultural and sociopolitical relations. This book investigates a number of interrelated issues. It explores what kind of “imaginaire historique” (Stora, “Entretien” n.p.) (historical imaginary) the films create. It foregrounds what aspects of the war the films highlight or ignore, what their politics of memory and aesthetics of representation are, and which points of view are represented. I outline how some of the films propose a vision of the war that has the capacity to promote dialogue among groups with opposed memorial stakes in the war. Some films make connections between the war and the place of French citizens of Maghrebian descent and of people of Arab or Muslim backgrounds in France today; I analyze how these links are developed and to what extent the films perform cultural work

Introduction

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that could facilitate true societal integration. Finally, given the instrumentalist portrayals of Muslim women both in the West and in fundamentalist Islam and given the important participation of Algerian women in the revolutionary war, I examine what types of gendered representations emerge in these films. THE ALGERIA SYNDROME REVISITED Where are we today with respect to the memory of the Algerian war of independence? And what does this say about France’s ability to face its inglorious past in order to create a more equitable present and future for multicultural French society and for France’s relations with postcolonial nations? In his landmark book on the question of the difficult memory of World War II in France, Le Syndrome de Vichy, historian Henry Rousso theorized four stages in what he called the Vichy syndrome: a phase of mourning (1944–1954); repression (1954–1971), which included occasional replays due to the Algerian war; the return of the repressed and the shattering of war myths (1971–1974); and finally, a phase of obsession, which was still ongoing when the book was published in 1987 (20–21) and when the first edition of Eric Conan and Rousso’s book Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas came out in 1994. In a third edition of the latter book published in 2013, the authors noted in their afterword that by the turn of the century, the Vichy syndrome had ended thanks to a more complex and wide-ranging way of understanding this historical past. In my article “Une certaine idée de la France” and in my book Recasting Postcolonialism, I adapted Rousso’s ideas to develop a parallel concept of the Algeria syndrome, which refers to the difficulty French society has in facing and drawing lessons from its violent colonial and decolonial past in Algeria (6–9). I delineate four periods in France’s Algeria syndrome: mourning (1962–1964), repression (1964–1989), the return of the repressed (1990–1998), and difficult anamnesis (1999–present). The first short phase of mourning, starting in 1962, was quickly replaced with a second phase of repression. Beginning in 1964, this second phase was initiated through a series of amnesty laws for crimes committed in Algeria (Stora, Gangrène 215, 281–83). This long period lasted through the 1980s. Around the time of the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war and the opening of certain archives at the beginning of the 1990s, the work of historians such as Stora, Charles-Robert Ageron, Mohammed Harbi, Guy Pervillé, JeanPierre Rioux, Laurent Gervereau, Omar Carlier, and Jean-Luc Einaudi began to emerge and started shattering the French silence on the war and moving beyond the phase of repression, initiating a third stage of the return of the repressed. This does not mean that historians did not study the war before this period. In the 1960s and 1970s, important publications by Mohammed Harbi,

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Alistair Horne, Charles-Robert Ageron, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and the journalist Yves Courrière had already made significant interventions, but this memory had become somewhat dormant in the 1980s and resurfaced in the 1990s.2 At the time I was finishing Recasting Postcolonialism, only three stages of the Algeria syndrome had occurred. In 1999, the French Assemblée nationale finally recognized that the Algerian war had been a war. At that point, I interpreted it as a sign that France was fully embroiled in its phase of the return of the repressed. Subsequent events have led me to select this date as ushering in a fourth, ongoing stage of what I call difficult anamnesis. By 2000, explosive revelations about the systematic use of torture by the French military during the war reopened a public debate (MacMaster; Thénault, Histoire 9). Around the time of the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war at the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars such as Linda Amiri, Raphaëlle Branche, Gilbert Meynier, and Sylvie Thénault continued to enhance historical k­ nowledge on the war, which still remains a difficult topic in France (MacMaster 455). Stora credits the work of scholars, filmmakers, and the media for these advances of memory (“Entre la France et l’Algérie” 331). This fourth stage of difficult anamnesis continues to operate today in fits and starts, as hiccups of memory. Rousso has also made parallels between the weights of Vichy and of Algeria on French society. In 2002 and 2004, he outlined “quatre stades du souvenir” (four stages of memory) that are different from my own regarding the Algerian war in France (“Raisins” 134): “liquidation de la crise” (eliminating the crisis) and amnesty (1962–1968), amnesia (1970s), anamnesis and “retour de mémoire” (return of memory) (1980s), and “hypermnésie” (hypermnesia) since the 1990s (“Raisins” 135–40, “Guerre d’Algérie” 28). In Le Partage des mémoires, her book on representations of the Algerian war in literature, film, and on the web, Djemaa Maazouzi follows Rousso’s model (59–68). Based on my findings in this study, I contest Rousso’s periodization and characterization. The examples that Rousso and Maazouzi both provide to support their periodization of anamnesis in the 1980s and hypermnesia since the 1990s are not entirely convincing to me. For instance, they mention that President Mitterrand passed one last amnesty law in 1982 (Rousso, “Raisins” 138, Maazouzi 62). Amnesty laws are generally understood by historians, including Rousso himself, as promoting forgetting—amnesia rather than anamnesis (Stora, Gangrène 215, 281–83; Rousso, “Raisins” 135). This particular amnesty law contributed to the spread of the racist and fascist Front National (National Front) party in the 1980s and to a resurgence in colonial racism rather than to anamnesis (Stora, Gangrène 283, 289–90). Whereas Rousso sees the internal violence in Algeria in the 1990s as promoting hypermnesia in France (“Raisins” 139), I see it as simply encouraging the return of the repressed. In the 1990s, early 2000s, and up to today, the

Introduction

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Algerian war has been discussed more regularly than in the 1970s and 1980s in historical, literary, and filmic texts, as well as in the public sphere and the media, but never so much that the use of the term “hypermnesia” would be warranted. Although the facts of the war have been laid out by historians and other scholars since the 1960s, these facts seem to be periodically forgotten in French society and tend to resurface brutally at regular intervals. As McCormack explains, “the constant tension between remembering and forgetting continues” (24). That is why I use the term “hiccups of memory” to characterize the less than seamless way in which the war is partially remembered in France. France today appears to be in a period of difficult anamnesis about the war that is far from either hypermnesia or obsession. The term “hypermnesia” implies that there is too much memory. Yet, McCormack provides a detailed account of the uneven contributions of three specific vectors of memory—the educational system, the family, and the media—to the representation of the Algerian war of independence in France, demonstrating that silences about the war continue to exist. Maazouzi mentions that the fiftieth anniversary of the war was the occasion for a multiplicity of publications, conferences, and films on the topic (66). My study of films of this period demonstrates that the memory of the war still has difficulty expressing itself, even if the number of films on the topic became larger during that time. At best, we are experiencing a period of difficult anamnesis. VECTORS OF MEMORY How is historical memory maintained? Rousso outlines four ways in which memory circulates, which he calls vectors of memory: the first is official (national, legislative, and juridical commemorations, which are generally the outcome of compromises), the second is associational (from community organizations that tend to maintain partial memories belonging to groups with different stakes in the transmission of memory), the third is cultural (literature, film, and television), and the fourth is scholarly (Rousso focuses on historians, whose work eventually influences education) (Syndrome 235). As discussed above, scholarly work was central in the move from the second to the third phase of the Algeria syndrome. As for the official acknowledgment of this history, it can be said to operate sporadically, through hiccups. The most central date in this process of recognition is June 10, 1999, when the French National Assembly finally acknowledged that more than simple “events,” what occurred at the time was indeed a war (Stora, “1999–2003, guerre d’Algérie” 505). Official recognition of the negative effects of colonization has become more common in the twenty-first century. In 2005 and 2008,

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Introduction

France “officially acknowledge[d] responsibility for Setif.”3 Right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy and socialist president François Hollande both acknowledged the negative effects of French colonialism in Algeria in late 2007 and late 2012, respectively (Stora, “Entre la France” 339; Nadiras, “Le 8 mai”). Their speeches, as well as the February 2017 statement made in Algeria by the centrist then-presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron recognizing colonization as a crime against humanity, constitute major symbolic acts of acknowledgment of the broad historical context out of which the Algerian war, postcolonial migration, and the contemporary increase in terrorist acts arise. Although Macron soon backtracked, apologizing for any hurt he might have caused pieds-noirs a few days later in the right-wing city of Toulon, he persisted in September 2018 by apologizing to Maurice Audin’s widow for the systematic use of torture in Algeria by French authorities.4 These acknowledgments from three successive presidents belonging to different political parties provide what Stora called the beginning of a solution in La Guerre des mémoires: “reconnaissance et réparation. La reconnaissance se joue au plan scolaire, universitaire, intellectuel . . . [et] réparation symbolique” (recognition and reparations. Recognition occurs at the school, university, and intellectual levels [as well as through] symbolic reparations), which, for Stora, include the need for the president to critique French colonialism and its violence (93). Commentators have criticized Macron for only apologizing for the use of torture against a white French militant and not to former Algerian militants who were subjected to these practices in much larger numbers (Cheref). The limits of Macron’s apology also demonstrate the difficulty of state anamnesis with respect to what remains a very touchy topic in France. Yet, Macron seems to agree with Stora. He has been clear about the need for France to face its colonial past in general, and the realities of the Algerian war in particular, in order to “réconcilier les mémoires” (reconcile memories) and facilitate better relations with Algeria (Louet with Clarisse). McCormack adds three other vectors of memory to Rousso’s list: the media, the educational system, and the family (5). The media, especially newspapers and journalists, played an important part in the various revelations about some of the most inglorious aspects of French military and police conduct during the war. For example, disclosures regarding the October 17, 1961, massacre first came back to light in 1980 in the leftist newspaper Libération (Cole 32; Rousso, “Raisins” 138) and again in an article by historian Jean-Luc Einaudi in Le Monde in 1998 (“Octobre 1961”). Revelations of the rape of female Algerian fighters by the French military in Algeria were published by Le Monde in 2000 (Beaugé, “Tabou,” “Torturée”). The role of a sixth vector, education, also needs to be highlighted, especially since school curricula are set at the national level in France. The school system is thus also part of the process of national recognition. Although the Algerian war of

Introduction

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independence has supposedly been part of the French senior high school curriculum since 1983 (Branche, Guerre 32), in practice, the period of decolonization is rarely covered or is discussed very briefly at the end of the academic year, as McCormack has shown. For decades now, young people who happen to have access to cultural programming that deals with the Algerian war and who are then asked their opinion all repeat the same thing—regardless of their origin, even if they are children of former French colonists, people whose fathers were drafted to serve in Algeria, or children of Algerians who served on either the Algerian or the French side: I had never heard anything about it before, no one had talked to me about it. In his book, McCormack confirms that families, a seventh potential vector of memory, generally share very little information about the war, regardless of their background. Literature often stages this family silence, which leads young characters to ask questions and start looking for clues and answers, as exemplified in Leïla Sebbar’s beautiful short novel on the massacre, La Seine était rouge (1999). There are of course exceptions, especially among Algerian families (House and MacMaster, “Une Journée” 280). Only one film in my corpus, Le Choix de Meriem, presents an example of family and community transmission of history regarding the October 17, 1961, massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris. All of this supports the argument that we are far from hypermnesia or obsession with respect to that war. THE MEMORY OF THE OCTOBER 17, 1961, MASSACRE IN FRANCE An illustration of the Algeria syndrome can be found in the evolution of the memory of the October 17 massacre.5 In the 1960s and 1970s, this memory was repressed in France even though the facts were historically known. It was overshadowed by the memorialization of the deaths of anti-war French leftist demonstrators in front of the Charonne subway station on February 8, 1962. In the 1980s, after the Libération article mentioned above, the memory of the October 17, 1961, massacre was primarily carried in a small number of literary texts and written by authors from Maghrebian backgrounds such as Mehdi Lallaoui as well as by others like Didier Daeninckx. In 1990, Lallaoui and Anne Tristan participated in the creation of an association, Au nom de la mémoire (In the Name of Memory), whose purpose was the recognition and commemoration of this massacre (Branche, Guerre 45). This association organized a scholarly conference on the topic, and Lallaoui and Tristan worked on a related documentary titled Le silence du fleuve, in the early 1990s (Branche, Guerre 47). As Sebbar makes it clear in La Seine était rouge, Maurice Papon’s trial for crimes against humanity during World

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War II brought to light his role in the October 17 massacre in his capacity as Paris prefect of police at the time. One of her characters says, “C’est l’affaire Papon qui a remué tout ça” (103) (The Papon affair brought it all back).6 In 2001, Socialist mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë, who was born in Tunisia when it was under French protectorate, made an important gesture of official recognition of the occluded massacre of October 17, 1961, by having a plaque affixed to the Pont Saint Michel in a ceremony of memorialization that drew the ire of right-wing and pied-noir groups (Kathryn Jones 92; Eldridge 194, 249–50). This action was one of the events that helped France turn a corner in its Algeria syndrome, moving from the period of the return of the repressed to that of difficult anamnesis (see also Rice 100). The difficulty of this process of anamnesis is borne out by the fact that this recognition remains a contested one. Laila Amine mentions that the plaque bears “[t]races of vandalism and remnants of red paint” (164) and Kathryn Jones notes that it “has been repeatedly defaced and damaged, and has had to be replaced several times since its inauguration” (92). Since then, the memory of this massacre seems to have taken root as part of a process of anamnesis (Rice 91). It plays an important part in two feature films that were each seen by about half a million people in French cinemas, Caché by Michael Haneke in 2005 (a film that paradoxically functions as both a vector of memory and a screen memory) and Rachid Bouchareb’s beautiful film on the Algerian war of independence, Hors la loi (Outside the Law), in 2010. The October 17 massacre has also been the topic of several documentaries (see Brozgal, “Gros plan”). Didier Daeninckx, one of the first writers to bring October 17 into literature, published a graphic novel on the topic, Octobre noir, with illustrator Mako in 2011. In 2011 as well, two interactive web documentaries were created. One of these is sponsored by the newspaper Le Monde and is based in part on characters from Daeninckx and Mako’s graphic novel (see Brand). As Fiona Barclay notes about October 17 in her book Writing Postcolonial France, “from its initial position as an event excluded from official discourse, it has become a symbol invoked commonly not only by novelists and directors but . . . by young people demonstrating during the 2005 riots” (33; see also Schyns, La Mémoire 40). We are now at a point in which, in his preface to Dans l’ombre de Charonne, another graphic novel from 2012 on the brutal police repression of the Métro Charonne demonstration, Stora explains that this violent event, which had served as a screen memory hiding the October 17 massacre after the war, is now forgotten, in contrast with that of October 17, whose remembrance has been carried by many vectors of memory (9).7 Indeed, in my corpus, only one film (Sartre: L’Age des passions) alludes to Charonne, whereas six films center on or mention October 17 (Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961, Le Choix de Myriam, Hors la loi, Caché, Sartre, and Michou

Introduction

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d’Auber). For Alison Rice, since the late 1990s, “representations of October 17 . . . seem to be opening up a new chapter, one that effectively corresponds to the final phase of ‘obsession’ as defined by Rousso” (92–93). While (as discussed above) I do not think that obsession is necessarily the most accurate way of referring to the move toward anamnesis since the beginning of the twenty-first century regarding the Algerian war, it is clear that we have turned a corner with respect to representations of October 17 (Welch and McGonagle 86). Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner mentions that in 2011, a Nanterre street and a square in another suburb were named “17 octobre 1961” and that another plaque was installed on the Pont de Clichy to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre. She adds that in 2012, newly elected President Hollande officially acknowledged this police violence for the first time (183; see also Brozgal, “In the Absence” 49). Almost all vectors of memory (scholars, associations, the media, cultural productions, and the state) have contributed to giving the October 17 demonstration and its brutal repression pride of place in the memory of the Algerian war of independence. The evolution of the memory of the October 17 massacre illustrates the fact that the borders among the seven vectors of memory (official, educational, scholarly, journalistic, associational, familial, and cultural) are porous. Rousso puts the educational system in the scholarly category and the media might be included in his cultural category. Associations and cultural vectors generally receive state, regional, and/or local funding in France, and they often create pressure encouraging official vectors to finally take a stand. Also, associations have been increasingly making use of new media through an Internet and social media presence. Historians can become involved in associations or participate in documentaries, as Stora did by working with Au nom de la mémoire in the 1990s (Branche, Guerre 90), and contributing to several documentary films and to Le Monde’s web documentary on October 17, 1961. He also served as historical adviser for two of the films in my study, Le premier homme (Amelio 2011) and Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (Arcady 2012). Stora can be said to have been “un passeur privilégié” (Branche, Guerre 91) (a very special transmitter) since the beginning of the 1990s. This is actually his stated goal (Stora with Leclère 49). Through his work across several vectors of memory, Stora has played a vital role in the move from the second to the third and fourth phases of the Algeria syndrome, since the early 1990s and continuing today. VECTORS OF MEMORY IN DIFFERENT PERIODS Anniversaries tend to trigger returns of memory that generate new insights on landmark historical events, perhaps especially traumatic ones that are often

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repressed for a few decades following their unfolding (Sommer 179; Stora, “La Mémoire retrouvée”; Austin “Seeing”; MacMaster 451; Caruth 7–8). This has been true for the thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries of the Algerian war (especially through the work of historians and journalists) and, for the fiftieth anniversary, through a remarkable film catalog. The medium in which the Algerian war has been primarily represented has thus changed over time. As I analyzed in Recasting Postcolonialism, during the period of repression that led to an increase in colonial racism in France in the mid-1980s, representations of the Algerian war had taken place primarily through the literary medium and were authored in great part by writers from Algeria.8 Repression does not mean a total lack of coverage; for instance, important films such as Laurent Heynemann’s Meurtres pour mémoire and Mahmoud Zemmouri’s Les folles années du twist were made in the 1980s. The 1990s and turn of the century were primarily the time of historians and other scholars in France, thanks in part to the opening of French archives on the Algerian war thirty years after the end of the war and in part to the coming of age of historians with personal ties to Algeria.9 As discussed above, historians published works in the 1990s that had a major public impact and contributed to the return of the repressed about the war in France. These works served as a catalyst for the film production dealing with the war during the fiftieth-anniversary period. Since the turn of the century, in the period of difficult anamnesis, film has become a central medium through which representations of the Algerian war are being generated. Stora has demonstrated that part of the complexity of this war resides in the fact that it was not only a war between the French and the Algerians but also “une double guerre civile, à la fois algéro-algérienne, et franco-française” (Gangrène 187) (a double civil war within both Algeria and France). French films on the Algerian war tend to highlight divisions within French society at large or within the microcosm of the French military. In these representations, Algerians are either almost entirely absent, serving as passive background for the white French agents of the action, or they are represented as un-individuated victims and/or perpetrators of violence. Stora notes that in the 1960s, French films focused on what happened before and after, rather than during the war, thus creating a “blanc” (182) (blank). He also mentions that until the 1990s, French soldiers are presented as “antihéros” (anti-heroes) in rather Manichean terms, while Algerians are generally “absent” from the screen or only appear in secondary roles (186–87). Based on an in-depth study of twenty fiction films that focus on the war, with reference to seven additional films that use the war as background, and building on my prior work on Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, this book demonstrates that some films remain within the paradigm critiqued by Stora in that they center on the solipsistic point of view of only one stakeholding group such as French soldiers, French

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colonists in Algeria, or French intellectuals. In contrast, a number of films open up new opportunities for French audiences to envision the war through the eyes of Algerian characters for the first time. Other films bring memories from various groups together in thoughtful ways that represent the complexity of the situation. My study includes several Algerian feature films on the topic, providing a comparative analysis of how the war is represented on both sides of the Mediterranean and examining the different sets of discourses in which the films inscribe themselves. A number of films were also made by French-Algerian directors or directors who have migrated between the two countries; other films are the result of cross-cultural, binational collaborations. These films provide unique vantage points on the situation. The centrality of historical work in the 1990s and of film during the fiftieth-anniversary period do not mean that no important historical texts were published on the topic of the war before the early 1990s or that no iconic films were produced prior to the fiftieth anniversary, as evidenced by Alistair Horne’s major 1977 historical study, A Savage War of Peace, and the continuing relevance of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers. Similarly, writers did not stop producing meaningful texts about the war after the end of the 1980s. For instance, five of the films in my corpus (Regard d’enfant, Mon Colonel, La Trahison, La Baie d’Alger, and Ce que le jour doit à la nuit) are based on novels or autobiographical texts published in the late 1990s and 2000s. The 2006 film Harkis and the 2007 film Michou d’Auber both have a companion book version. In addition, two important texts were published by Algerian women writers in 2002. In Maïssa Bey’s beautiful short narrative, Entendez-vous dans les montagnes . . . , which appeared in both France and Algeria, three characters belonging to groups whose memories rarely intersect meet on a train: a Frenchman who served in Algeria during the war, the daughter of an Algerian freedom fighter who had been tortured by the Frenchman during the war, and a French teenage girl whose grandfather was a former French settler in Algeria and who had never been taught about the war but is eager to learn more. The novel’s staging of a difficult dialogue around memories that are hard to unearth provides one corrective to the continuing compartmentalizing of memories that Stora decries. Bey, as Sebbar did a few years earlier in La Seine était rouge, offers a model for encounters among memories coming from diverse groups. Such interconnections remain relatively rare in representations of the Algerian war of independence. These texts move memory forward by promoting difficult dialogues that may lead to partial reconciliation and more positive outcomes for living together in multicultural France. Assia Djebar’s 2002 La femme sans sépulture performed similar memory work in the Algerian context. The periodization in which film becomes a privileged medium of representing the Algerian war of independence at the beginning of the twenty-first

12

Introduction

century is only true of the French, as Algerians started to produce war-themed films much earlier. As Viola Shafik explains, “In Algeria until 1972 almost all feature films dealt with the war of liberation” (29). Postindependence, funding was made available as part of the nation-building project, and as a result, many Algerian films produced between 1965 and 1979 “dealt with the war of liberation” (Maherzi 263, quoted in Shafik 177). As Mani Sharpe and others have pointed out, this state funding of films ended up “resulting in the dominant post-war mode known as le cinéma moudjahid / freedomfighter cinema” (218), which was criticized as being somewhat simplistic and androcentric. In the 1970s, “with the emergence of le cinéma djidid / young cinema” more ambivalent films such as Tahia ya Didou (Zinet, 1971) and Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978) began to be made (218). Regarding the periodization of Algerian war films, Algerian film producer, critic, and scholar Ahmed Bedjaoui explains, “Chaque pays a eu sa période productive, mais pas au même moment” (Each country had its productive period, but not at the same time): it occurred in the 1960s and 1970s for Algeria, and at the turn of this century for France (Cinéma 13). Bedjaoui also notes that fiftieth-anniversary Algerian films celebrate independence, whereas French films focus more on events just prior to the end of the war (14, 267). This makes sense given that Algeria won the war and its independence, whereas the French still need to process the loss of France’s most important colony and the shame associated with the violent means it used during the war. In France, most fiftieth-anniversary films were produced and released between 2004 and 2012, the anniversary dates of the war. In Algeria, the films were primarily planned for 2012, the anniversary date of independence. Algerian films are mostly funded by various state institutions. Due to significant delays having to do in part with lack of funding and bureaucratic bottlenecks, most fiftieth-anniversary films that were planned in Algeria were actually completed after 2012 (see Bedjaoui, Cinéma 181, Guerre 357). Many of these films are biopics. CORPUS As far as I have been able to ascertain, a total of thirty fiction films (twentytwo films made for cinematic release and eight made-for-TV movies) in which the Algerian war plays a role—large or small—were completed during the fiftieth-anniversary period, between 2004 and 2012. To develop this list, I relied on films discussed or mentioned in scholarly works, Internet lists, and Ahmed Bedjaoui’s comprehensive works. Although a large number of documentaries were released during the period under study (and during all periods more generally), I consider documentary films to relate more to the scholarly

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vector of memory (especially given the heavy participation of historians of the Algerian war to these films) than to the cultural vector. As Bedjaoui argues, “la fiction influe plus sur l’imaginaire collectif et sur la mémoire que le documentaire” (Guerre 300) (fiction has more impact on the collective imaginary and on memory than documentary film does). This does not mean that documentary films do not have a cultural impact or that I somehow consider them to be more objective than feature films given that documentaries also use subjective framing and editing techniques to generate a certain point of view (Bordwell and Thompson). To select my 2004–2012 corpus, I have used the films’ copyright date if available or date of first screening rather than the dates of their first cinematic releases or first television showings because the latter can sometimes occur well after the films are completed (and some, especially Algerian films, are never released). This means, for instance, that Kamal Dehane’s first feature film, Les Suspects (based on the 1991 novel Les Vigiles by Algerian writer Tahar Djaout), which was completed and first screened in Algiers in 2003, shown in festivals in 2004 and 2005, and released in Belgium in 2005 but not in France, is not included (“Suspects”; Lumière database). Conversely, Frank Chiche’s graphic film, Je vous ai compris, whose copyright date is 2012 but which was first shown on television in 2013, is part of this study. Likewise, Gianni Amelio’s Le premier homme was first released in France in 2013; however, its copyright date is 2011 and it was first released in Italy in 2012. It is therefore included in this book. Some films—especially the Algerian ones—are difficult to access. Unlike Western films, Algerian productions do not benefit from distribution networks and are not readily available, even in specialized libraries and media centers. I am only able to briefly discuss Abdelkrim Bahloul’s beautiful Arabic-language film Voyage à Alger (2010) because I could not locate a version with subtitles and therefore cannot provide an extended treatment of this important film. Voyage à Alger takes place primarily after the war and stages an Algerian war widow’s journey to secure her family’s housing. In addition, there are two films that I was not able to access, including another Algerian film made during this period, Regard d’enfant (2005) by Lamine Merbah. Regard d’enfant focuses on an Algerian man who returns to his hometown thirty-five years after the war and remembers his traumatic childhood during the war. The film is based on the 2003 book Amin: Itinéraire d’un Algérien français by Yves-Marie Renard. Merbah has been making feature films since the late 1960s, many of which deal with French colonization in Algeria. The other film I was not able to access is the made-for-TV movie Le septième juré (Edouard Niermans, 2007), which is based on the novel of the same title by Francis Didelot. It is a reboot of a 1961 film by Georges Lautner, to which it adds the context of anti-Arab racism as it takes place at the end of the Algerian war. Finally, a central film of the Algerian war during this

14

Introduction

period is Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, which renewed my interest in this topic. As I have already analyzed this film in a series of articles, I do not discuss it extensively in this book. Looking at the corpus of films relating to the Algerian war since the 1950s, it is clear that the topic is almost only of interest to the French and the Algerians. Few foreign films or films by foreign filmmakers have been made on the war in sixty years. Among those, the first ever feature film to stage the war was Djamilah (Djamila l’Algérienne), a 1958 film on female Algerian freedom fighter Djamila Bouhired by famed Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine. Two famous films date from 1966, American Mark Robson’s Lost Command, based on the French novel Les Centurions by Jean Lartéguy, and Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s central Battle of Algiers, which was produced in Algeria. Three films in my corpus were directed by other European filmmakers, Caché by Austrian auteur Michael Haneke (2005), Sartre: L’Age des passions (2006) by Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta, and Le premier homme (2011) by Italian director Gianni Amelio. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (but not all) of the filmmakers interested in representing the war have direct ties to Algeria. In the period under study, five filmmakers are Algerian (Allouache, Bahloul, Merbah, OuldKhelifa, and Rachedi) and three are French-Algerian (Bouchareb, Chibane, and Charef). Durmelat argues that films made by French filmmakers of Maghrebian descent “invit[e] viewers to . . . see themselves in the faces of Algerian immigrants” in France (102). She further suggests “that the filmic representation of the war has entered a new phase that may encourage the inclusion of the memories and oral testimonies of Algerians themselves, not just that of their faces as extras” (108 n.8). This is certainly the case for their films of this period. Five directors of European descent (Arcady, Faucon, Garcia, Burger, and Chiche) were born and raised or partially raised in the Maghreb, Arcady and Chiche to Jewish families. Arcady’s Ce que le jour doit à la nuit and Chibane’s Le Choix de Myriam were cowritten by the directors and pied-noir writer Daniel Saint-Hamont (on whose novel Arcady’s earlier Coup de sirocco was based). Only four of all the films of this period were directed or codirected by women—all French of European descent (Delpy, Garcia, Huppert, and Sandra Martin). No female filmmaker who is Algerian or of Algerian descent directed a feature-length fiction film dealing with the war during the period studied in my corpus. Indeed, only four such films were made between 1958 and 2018. Assia Djebar’s 1978 La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua was the first by an Algerian female director. It was followed almost twenty years later by Rachida Krim’s 1997 Sous les pieds des femmes, the first film about the war made by a French filmmaker of Algerian descent. About fifteen years later, Narimane Mari’s 2013 Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans) (like La Nouba,

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an experimental film) and Rim Laredj’s 2015 Al Dhil wal kindil (Shadow and Light) were completed.10 However, two films from the fiftieth-anniversary period include scriptwriting by women of Algerian descent. Soraya Nini cowrote the script for La Trahison with Faucon and Claude Sales, on whose autobiographical novel of the same title the film is based.11 Alain Tasma’s 2006 made-for-TV film Harkis was written by Dalila Kerchouche. Kerchouche published Leïla, her 2006 novel on the same topic, “based on her sister’s experience of growing up in various camps” (Eldridge 231 n.44), at the same time the film aired. A number of the filmmakers of this period had previously made films dealing with the Algerian war (Rachedi, Arcady, Huppert, and Garcia as an actress) or with issues of immigration and/or people of Maghrebian descent (Allouache, Bouchareb, Chibane, Charef, Faucon, Gilou, and Bahloul as a screenwriter). Their interest in these issues has been long-standing. For example, Arcady’s Le Coup de sirocco (1979) was the first Algerian war film to reach a larger French audience, with over 400,000 spectators in Paris (Stora, Imaginaires 178). Films as different as Alain Tasma’s Nuit noire and Florent-Emilio Siri’s L’Ennemi intime were written or cowritten by Patrick Rotman, who had also made two earlier documentary films on the war, the acclaimed 1992 La Guerre sans nom with Bertrand Tavernier and the 2002 documentary L’Ennemi intime (not to be confused with Siri’s film). The comparatively larger number of fiction films produced between 2004 and 2012 that stage the Algerian war provides evidence of cinema’s contribution to the fourth phase of the Algeria syndrome. Another central issue, of course, is whether these films actually reach their intended audience and whether there has been a change in the number of people who go to the movies to see these films. Many scholars such as Stora have pointed out that Algerian war films have been produced all along but continue to face the perennial problem of not finding much of an audience in France (Imaginaires 193). For instance, the rerelease of The Battle of Algiers in 2004 did not yield a large audience; thus, Stora concludes that “The French still have difficulties dealing directly with the colonial period and the main problem Algerian War films face is public indifference, which consistently produces box office failures” (“Still Fighting” 369).12 The films—such as Hors la loi—can also generate angry demonstrations by right-wing and pro-colonialist groups— two “sites where today the past does not pass” (370). Once again, this reveals that we are still far from being in a period of hypermnesia concerning the Algerian war in France. Audience data for films released in France and in Europe are available through the online Lumière database. To provide some context for the figures discussed below, in any given year in France, a top-grossing French film can expect to yield around 3–4 million spectators, with a few (usually comedies)

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Introduction

occasionally yielding 10–20 million (see Higbee 28–38 for specifics). Some of the films from the fiftieth-anniversary period did generate decent audience numbers, but this has to be qualified. The only film in my corpus that came close to being top-grossing by this standard is Mesrine, l’instinct de mort (Jean-François Richet, 2008, Part One), which attracted almost 2.3 million spectators in France. This film includes the Algerian war as part of its background and possible explanation for the killer’s trajectory, but it does not center on the war. The other two most popular films, Mesrine, l’ennemi public numéro un (Jean-François Richet, 2008, Part Two) and La Guerre des boutons (Yann Samuell, 2011), yielded almost 1.5 million spectators in France. The latter is based on a beloved book and has been made into a film multiple times, including another version that same year (La nouvelle guerre des boutons by Christophe Barratier, whose background was World War II rather than the Algerian war, and which was slightly more popular). Audiences perennially love the well-drawn child characters and their interactions; also, La Guerre des boutons barely mentions the Algerian war, something that may have helped its success. The next two most popular films, Nicole Garcia’s 2010 Un Balcon sur la mer and Thomas Gilou’s 2007 Michou d’Auber, which generated around one million spectators each in movie theaters, played to their audiences by reinforcing a number of colonial stereotypes. In a sense, their popularity is symptomatic of the lack of readiness on the part of a large segment of the French population to actually face the realities of its colonial past. Made-for-TV movies can have a wide impact, as evidenced by Alain Tasma’s 2005 Nuit noire, seen by 800,000 spectators when it was first shown on Canal + (Tasma in Gillet; Mertz-Baumgartner 184; see also KealhoferKemp 107). In contrast, briefly out on the big screen in limited release, the film drew fewer than 1,000 spectators to that setting.13 The next four most popular films are very different from one another: Philippe Lioret’s L’Equipier (The Light, 2004), Michael Haneke’s 2005 Caché, Rachid Bouchareb’s 2010 Hors la loi, and Florent-Emilio Siri’s 2007 L’Ennemi intime, each garnered about half a million spectators. Except for La Guerre des boutons, what the highest-grossing films have in common is the considerable star power behind them: Jean Dujardin for Un Balcon sur la mer; Gérard Depardieu and Vincent Cassel for Mesrine; Depardieu and Nathalie Baye for Michou d’Auber; Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, and Denis Podalydès for Caché; Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila for Hors la loi; Sandrine Bonnaire for L’Equipier; and to a lesser extent, Benoît Magimel and Albert Dupontel for L’Ennemi intime. Alexandre Arcady’s sweeping 2012 epic Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, based on Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s 2008 novel of the same title, yielded close to 300,000 spectators in France and Julie Delpy’s 2011 Le Skylab yielded close to 260,000. Two other films made by seasoned filmmakers with expertise

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in the topic, Philippe Faucon’s La Trahison (2006) and Mehdi Charef’s Cartouches gauloises (2007), were seen by almost 100,000 spectators each. At the bottom of the spectatorial hierarchy are Laurent Herbiet’s 2006 Mon Colonel with slightly over 30,000 spectators; Djinns (2010), an unusual war/ fantasy film made by directorial team Hugues and Sandra Martin, with fewer than 10,000 spectators in France; and Augustin Burger’s 2005 film Avant l’oubli, which yielded under 1,000 spectators in France, the smallest audience for all films mentioned here. Discussing Algerian war films of the mid-2000s, Stora concludes, “Est-il si difficile de regarder la guerre d’Algérie sur un écran? Apparemment, oui. Il est toujours difficile de fabriquer un consensus national autour de la décolonisation et de la perte de l’Algérie française. Il reste comme une impossibilité à regarder cette guerre en face, à passer de l’expérience individuelle, traumatisante, au choc de la visualisation collective, par le cinéma. Cinquante ans après, les images sur les écrans n’arrivent toujours pas à rassembler les mémoires blessées . . .” (“Entre la France et l’Algérie” 332) (Is it that difficult to watch the Algerian war on screen? Evidently yes. Creating national consensus around decolonization and the loss of French Algeria remains difficult. It is still almost impossible to face this war, to move from an individual, traumatic experience to the shock of collective visualization provided by film. Fifty years later, on-screen images are still unable to bring wounded memories together). The current period of difficult anamnesis regarding the Algerian war in France continues to advance through fits and starts, demonstrating that we are far from hypermnesia. SCHOLARLY STUDIES Another interesting point to consider, besides audience numbers, is the extent to which these films are a topic of study by scholars. Here, an intersection between cultural and scholarly vectors of memory occurs. Since the 1990s, historians such as Stora have been including discussions of literature and cinema in their assessments of the state of memory regarding the war. For instance, Stora mentions that the famous French cast of Maghrebian descent in Bouchareb’s Algerian war film Hors la loi “sont à la fois les fruits et les passeurs de cette histoire commune” (“Une période”) (are both products and transmitters of this joint history). The majority of scholarly articles and book chapters focus on two films, Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and Haneke’s Caché. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a growing number of academic secondary sources on the topic of Algerian war films has been demonstrating an ongoing scholarly interest, to which this book contributes. Scholars all note the spike in films about the French-Algerian war, beginning in the mid-2000s and continuing until the early 2010s, and find them an

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Introduction

important topic of study. As will become clear in the rest of this study, however, a number of the films in my corpus have received little to no scholarly attention. The present book contributes to the critical conversation on the importance of the Algerian war to postcolonial society in France and Algeria, as refracted through the study of cultural production such as literature and film. Scholars have shown interest in the topic but have tended to focus on films from different periods. Stora’s Imaginaires de guerre (first published 1997) and Philip Dine’s Images of the Algerian War (1994) stop before the period I study, although their perspectives illuminate my own. Some broader-themed books have also been influential, even though they do not focus primarily or solely on refigurations of the Algerian war. Carrie Tarr’s Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France (2005) discusses a few earlier films dealing with the Algerian war. I start from a similar viewpoint as Tarr’s concerning the importance of filmmakers such as Bouchareb in promoting a multicultural vision of French identity that many white French people continue to resist today. Her insightful remark about the dilemma that filmmakers face “between the desire to confront and inflect eurocentric accounts . . . and the need to produce a sufficiently consensual version of history” that could draw a diverse audience resonates with the results of my own analysis in this book as well as with those of Will Higbee’s 2013 book Post-Beur Cinema on films made by Maghrebian directors and directors of Maghrebian descent in France in the early twenty-first century. Higbee argues that, in contrast to the period on which Tarr focused—the 1980s and 1990s—a number of male directors and actors of Maghrebian descent such as Bouchareb, Jamel Debbouze, and Roschdy Zem are now part of French mainstream cinema, which itself is becoming more transnational as a result. Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy’s outstanding 2011 edited book collection Screening Integration develops insights about how recent films “demonstrate that migrants and their offspring play an integral part in the construction of contemporary France” (8). Together with Vinay Swamy’s reframing of the French Republic in Interpreting the Republic, this volume informs my argument about the contemporary implications of representations of the Algerian war on interpretations of French identity. I am also in conversation with Jo McCormack’s 2007 Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War, Fiona Barclay’s 2011 Writing Postcolonial France, and Guy Austin’s 2012 Algerian National Cinema. The existence of a set of scholarly books that have been published regularly in the past decade on the topic of representations of the war of Algerian liberation from the French is evidence of the continuing significance of the topic in French and Algerian societies. Looking at the number of publications and the locations of the presses currently publishing in this area, the scholarly

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interest in the topic has been consistent in various parts of Europe, Algeria, and the United States. Recent works on film whose approaches complement my own include Nicole Beth Wallenbrock’s dissertation “The Algerian War Era through a Twenty-First Century Lens: French Films 2005–2007” (2012) and her book The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens: Film and History (2020); Ahmed Bedjaoui’s comprehensive study Cinéma et guerre de libération (2014); Maria Flood’s 2017 France, Algeria and the Moving Image; and the 2016 book edited by Irmgard Scharold, La Guerre d’indépendance algérienne à l’écran. Yet no book addresses the same corpus as my own. While my study is in dialogue with the works mentioned above, as well as others, my original angle of approach through my theorization of the Algeria syndrome and phases of memory moves the conversation forward by assessing how far we have come (or not) in terms of taking stock of this past. My analyses of many films that have not yet received any or only minimal scholarly attention add significantly to the literature on the topic. THE ALGERIAN WAR AS BACKGROUND IN FRENCH FILMS A number of the fiftieth-anniversary films that represent the Algerian war address it indirectly, as many of the French films did in the 1960s. During and soon after the Algerian war, films that dealt with this topic were subjected to official state censorship (Stora, “Still Fighting” 366). This meant that films such as Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) had to allude to the war indirectly (367). One thing I was not expecting when I began this study was that a large percentage of films in my corpus—eight out of thirty— continued to mention the war somewhat offhandedly or as background to the plot. The most well-known of these films is Caché (2005) by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. In some ways, the Algerian war is only a pre(-) text for Caché’s protracted meditation on white European guilt and refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the nation’s historical crimes and their contemporary repercussions, and I discuss it in chapter 2. Seven additional films that use the Algerian war as fleeting background are not discussed in depth in this book, but I briefly outline their relevance to my project here. All of these films feature at least one scene with a man who is serving or served in the French military during the war. In Yann Samuell’s La Guerre des boutons (2011), children from two neighboring French villages have been fighting for generations in a rivalry whose reasons are unknown. In the middle of the film, one character’s brother comes back for a week’s leave from Algeria, where he had been sent during the war. He talks about it briefly with the young protagonist Lebrac, who is

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Introduction

inspired by the talk of independence swirling around him. The striking war event the brother recounts is the death of a young man from the other village. In parallel with the internal rivalry between two French villages, the death resulted from friendly fire, not from anything Algerians did. The film takes place entirely in France and does not include any Algerian characters. Although the novel on which the film is based was published at the beginning of the twentieth century, most filmic versions have tended to use the World War II period as their background. This version is the only one set in the Algerian war period. In Nocturnes (2006), an experimental black and white film released on DVD and focusing on milestone events in a boy’s life by documentary filmmaker Henry Colomer, the Algerian war only indirectly impacts the child protagonist. The film functions through juxtapositions and the personal story takes place against the backdrop of the first Sputnik launch in fall 1957. The family lives in Catalonia, and most of the dialogues are in Catalan. The boy’s mother is French. Due to the mother’s illness, the father decides to join the French military so that his nursing studies will be paid. The family moves to southwestern France and the father is then sent to Algeria; he eventually returns after being wounded there, sometime in 1960. This evocative film treats the Algerian war as part of a larger meditation on technological and scientific advances and their applications in war. Also demonstrating the cultural impact of the Russian space program, among other things, is Le Skylab (Julie Delpy, 2011). The film is made up of a long flashback to an extended-family gathering in 1979, as seen through the eyes of protagonist Albertine who was eleven at the time. A slice of life, coming-of-age movie, Le Skylab addresses pell-mell a variety of sociopolitical issues: complex family relations; women’s issues; gender identity and sexuality; mental health issues; urban-rural divides; the development of consumer society; anxieties over technology, animal rights, World War II, and the May 1968 revolt; not to mention racism, colonialism, military violence during colonial wars (including the Algerian war), and the continuing violence resulting from these experiences. Two brothers in the film served in Algeria, and one of them, Roger, has a hard time readjusting to civilian life after letting loose his violent instincts in Algeria and elsewhere through raping and killing colonized people. Toward the end of the film, he tries to rape his brother Fredo’s wife. Fredo, who had also served in the Algerian war as a medic, interrupts the rape but covers for Roger by shockingly minimizing the incident to his wife and blaming it on the war (see Ruhe 205–7). Although powerful, the sequence only lasts five minutes in this hour and fifty-minute film. Like Le Skylab, Philippe Lioret’s L’Equipier (2004) treats the effect of the war on a returning French soldier, as seen through female eyes and as a

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smaller part of a larger domestic story. The film is also structured through a long flashback to after the end of the war, this time in 1963. In the present time of the film, a young woman, Camille, and her aunt have returned to sell the family’s home located on a small island off the coast of Brittany. As they arrive, they find a book that was mailed to the family and that had been written by Antoine, a man who worked with Camille’s father Yvon for a few months in 1963. As the aunt looks at the book’s back cover and Camille begins to read the book, the film flashes back to the events recounted in the book. After the war, Antoine, whose hand was damaged during his thirty-month military service in Kabylia, was given a job as lighthouse keeper through an affirmative action program for wounded veterans. As he slowly gains the villagers’ trust, he and Yvon’s wife Mabé start falling in love. There are a number of brief references to the war throughout L’Equipier. In one of the film’s climactic scenes toward its end, lasting about two minutes, sweet, cultured, and mild-mannered Antoine reveals his violent paratrooper past in Algeria. His job was to torture Algerian civilians by crushing their hands in a mill’s grindstone, earning him the nickname “Presse-bicot” (Wog Squeezer). When he refused to continue engaging in these acts of violence, some drunken French soldiers put his hand in the grindstone to punish him. Antoine eventually leaves Brittany, and we are made to understand that Camille is his daughter. Back in the film’s present, Camille’s aunt tells her, “on a oublié tout ça” (we forgot all of that). As a result of reading Antoine’s book, Camille decides not to sell the house, which can be understood to mean that reading Antoine’s story and its revelation of secrets has reconciled her with the past. Antoine is a much more sympathetic character than Le Skylab’s veterans, who are cardboard figures of a stereotypical psychopath and his enabler. In contrast, Antoine feels remorse and has been refusing to fight since his war experience. L’Equipier, Le Skylab, and La Guerre des boutons take place entirely in France. In these films, the Algerian war has only affected French soldiers and the French people around them, and there are no Algerians present. In each film, one scene lasting only a few minutes highlights the high cost of the war experience from the point of view of French soldiers. Jean-François Richet’s films Mesrine, l’instinct de mort and Mesrine, l’ennemi public numéro 1 (2008) use the Algerian war as a somewhat more important background to the story of their titular character. The films are based on famous French gangster Jacques Mesrine’s 1977 autobiography L’Instinct de mort and were written by Abdel Raouf Dafri, a French screenwriter and filmmaker of Algerian descent. After an innovative, multiple-frame credit scene showing Mesrine’s career about to end in a police shoot-out in 1979, the first film opens on a short, two-minute scene taking place in Algeria in 1959. French and harki soldiers are interrogating two Algerian militants to try to force them to tell them where a bomb has been placed. They bring

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Introduction

in one of the militants’ female relative and order Mesrine, whom we later learn had volunteered to serve in Algeria, to shoot her. Mesrine hesitates, then kills the younger male militant instead. Unlike in the rest of the film, the camera work is dizzying, relying on fast cuts, extreme close-ups, blurry and jumpy images created by the use of a handheld camera, and fast camera movements such as zooming in and out. The interrogators and the militants are screaming over one another. These visual and sound techniques create confusion as to what exactly is going on, rendering the disorienting nature of violent interrogation for all participants. In the next scene, the war is over and Mesrine is back in France, where he soon gets involved in criminal activities. Guido, his mob boss, twice mentions his own connection to the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète [Secret Army Organization], a violent pro-French Algeria faction created toward the end of the war). About thirty minutes into the film, Mesrine encounters Ahmed, a violent Arab pimp whom Mesrine and Guido dispatch even more violently. This sequence makes the anti-Arab racism of the European characters clear, as Mesrine and Guido tell racist jokes to Ahmed before Mesrine knifes him and the two men then bury him alive. The particularly horrendous death meted out to Ahmed is out of proportion to the violence enacted on other characters up to that point. The staging of the perpetrators’ racism implies that racism may be the reason for this increased violence; starting the film with the interrogation scene during the Algerian war similarly suggests that anti-Arab racism and the Algerian war are connected. Ahmed is killed not just because he hit and disfigured a prostitute who worked for him and whom Mesrine patronized and liked but also because he is an Arab. The contrast between Mesrine not being able to kill a young Algerian woman in the initial Algeria scene and his subsequent violent acts against many people in general and Ahmed in particular suggests that his experience serving in the French military in Algeria is related to his subsequent use of violence (Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War 115–21). As the film continues and Mesrine moves from France to North America, references to Algeria stop in the film’s last hour. However, the tortures to which he is subjected while in solitary confinement in a Quebec prison recall the treatment meted out to Algerian militants at the beginning of the film (Wallenbrock 122). In Mesrine, l’ennemi public numéro 1 (Part 2), references to the Algerian war are confined to two scenes taking place toward the end of Mesrine’s life in 1979. One involves one of Mesrine’s accomplices, left-wing revolutionary Charlie Bauer. The other scene features Jacques Dallier, an extreme rightwing, pied-noir journalist who interviewed Mesrine, was tortured by Mesrine for writing an uncomplimentary article on him, and almost died in the process.14 An hour and thirty-three minutes into the film, Charlie tells Mesrine, “Si on s’était rencontré pendant la guerre d’Algérie, on se serait pas retrouvé côte à côte mais face à face, calibre en main” (If we’d met during the Algerian

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war, you and I would not have been side by side but facing each other with guns in our hands). Unlike Mesrine, Bauer, who also served as an adviser to Richet’s film (Tourancheau), had sided during the war with the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération Nationale or National Liberation Front), the main independence party (“Charlie Bauer”). Ten minutes later, Dallier mentions to Mesrine that the French should not have left Algeria to the Algerians, a sentiment with which Mesrine disagrees. Dallier refers to the October 17, 1961, massacre admiringly, saying, “Putain, la police d’octobre 61, ça c’était quelque chose. Ils savaient les remettre à leur place, ces bougnoules. Mais bon, les flics de l’époque, ils avaient Papon; un bon patron, Papon” (Hell, the police in October ’61, now that was something else. They knew how to keep those wogs in their place. But hey, cops at the time had Papon. Now he was a good boss). Dallier’s gross colonial racism may be a way to make the subsequent torture scene a bit less difficult to stomach for the audience since he has been portrayed as approving of racist violence. Six minutes later, Mesrine announces to the tortured journalist that he plans to kill him: “J’vais t’montrer, moi, c’qu’on faisait en Algérie. . . . Tu vas crever, salope” (I’m gonna show you what we used to do in Algeria. . . . You’re gonna die, bitch). Once again, Mesrine’s extreme violence is related to his experience torturing Algerian militants during the war.15 His use of the expletive “salope” (bitch) to refer to his foe also indicates the part that sexism plays in his violence, many instances of which are seen throughout the films as he does not hesitate to hit his girlfriends. As in Le Skylab, connections are made between the Algerian war experience of men who volunteered to serve and their psychopathic tendencies, which include sexual or domestic violence. Finally, a very different kind of film, the made-for-TV movie Harkis (Alain Tasma, 2006), takes place in 1972, ten years after the end of the war, and focuses on the plight of Algerian soldiers who served in the French military and who were able to escape to France at the end of the war with their families. They were rounded up in camps and left there into the late 1970s and early 1980s. Camps were usually led by French military officers who had served in Algeria and the living conditions were quite difficult, isolating, and unsanitary. Harkis highlights the life of one family in a southeastern French camp, focusing on the revolt of eldest daughter Leïla, a teenager who does not accept the racism and poor treatment meted out to harkis.16 The film is at pains to point out that not all French people are racist, in particular through featuring neighbor farmer Juliette, who befriends Leïla and goes out of her way to help the family in many ways (see Ireland 190). The film thus provides an effective portrayal of an ally and encourages its multiethnic audience to identify with both Leïla and Juliette. Harkis includes five short scenes that reference the war. About twenty minutes into the film, the camp’s second-incommand, who is a harki, mentions to Leïla that the French camp captain was his commanding officer in Algeria. Referencing the violence committed by

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FLN militants on harkis, he tells her, “C’est lui qui m’a arraché aux mains des fellaghas” (He rescued me from the FLN terrorists’ clutches). About fifteen minutes later, the captain reminds Leïla’s father Saïd of the brutality the FLN used against the harkis during the war and their resulting psychological scars. About an hour into the film, Leïla has two separate encounters with each one of her parents, both of whom express that even ten years after the end of the war, they are still terrified by FLN fighters and feel protected in the camp. The film espouses the point of view of the harkis and does not mention even once the acts of violence that they had committed on various Algerian people suspected of working with the FLN during the war. However, Leïla does mention that “Baba, il a choisi le mauvais camp” (Papa picked the wrong side). Toward the end of the film, in a climactic scene, Saïd is finally able to talk back to the racist and paternalistic French camp director in front of Leïla, condemning the French military for betraying the majority of harkis by leaving them to face a violent death in Algeria at the end of the war. The film ends with a short text explaining historical facts about the harkis who were abandoned by the French military to be massacred by other Algerians at the end of the war. It is also mentioned that about 90,000 harkis and their families were relocated to French camps, some remaining there for more than twentyfive years. This made-for-TV movie is notable for its record-setting audience of “over 6.2 million” (Kealhofer-Kemp 109). All the films that only use the Algerian war as background take place primarily or solely in France. Of these, Harkis is the only one focusing primarily on Arab-Berber characters. ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK This book concentrates on twenty films (fourteen feature films and six madefor-TV movies) in which the Algerian war is an important part of the plot. Based on the theoretical interventions outlined in this introduction, ­chapter 1, “Un/Civil War Memories: L’Ennemi intime, Mon Colonel, Djinns, La Trahison, and Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961,” focuses on films that highlight the military and police aspects of the war, comparing and contrasting their representation of the conflict and of Algerian characters. I analyze the films’ varying politics, as perceptible in the aesthetic representation and thematic rendering of the use of violence by the French military, French police, and Algerian militants. Besides films focusing on the violence of the war, another set of films discussed in chapter 2, “From Screen Memories to Intertwined Lives: Caché, Michou d’Auber, Le premier homme, Je vous ai compris, and Le Choix de Myriam,” addresses the war in such indirect ways as to constitute screen memories that may hide more than they reveal. These films highlight how the war impacted civilians from different backgrounds. I also analyze what they

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reveal about conceptions of the nation. Le premier homme (based on Albert Camus’s eponymous book) tends to remain mired in a colonial imaginary. Together with Caché and Michou d’Auber, it offers ambivalent representations of the conflict. Je vous ai compris seeks to reflect the points of view of various communities and their internal divisions regarding the conflict. Le Choix de Myriam focuses on the impact of the war on Algerians in France and makes the “performative” (Rosello, France and the Maghreb) choice of portraying a multicultural French society based on learning how to live together in the face of historical and social divisions. Following on the representation of Camus’s uncomfortable position in chapter 2, chapter 3, “From Nostalg(er)ic to Coalescing Memories: Un Balcon sur la mer, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, La Baie d’Alger, and Cartouches gauloises,” features young French colonists’ experiences in Algeria during the war, their relationships with young Algerians, and/or their postindependence memories of the war as adults. I analyze to what extent the films showcase relations among communities and critique the colonial order, or to what extent they continue to produce compartmentalized memories and reactivate some aspects of colonial nostalgia. Chapter 4, “Militant Memories: Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Zabana!, Sartre: L’Age des passions, Avant l’oubli, Voyage à Alger, and Pour Djamila,” returns to the theater of operations discussed in chapter 1, focusing this time on the portrayal of militants for Algerian independence in three Algerian films made in Arabic and three French films. This chapter examines the varying gendered and raced representations of the militants and the stakes of these representations. The conclusion, “Difficult Anamnesis,” integrates insights from the different chapters, confirming that taken together as a corpus, these films substantiate the assessment that France remains in a phase of difficult anamnesis with respect to its Algeria syndrome. I summarize what the films reveal about the war and about contemporary intercultural relations and discuss issues around the representation of Algerian women or of women of Algerian descent. I end with a brief overview of new developments since 2012, as we approach the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war. In particular, I address the recrudescence of films made on the topic in Algeria in recent years (twenty between 2013 and 2018), as the French production tapers off. NOTES 1. See Stora, Gangrène and “1999–2003, guerre d’Algérie”; Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy; Donadey, “Une certaine idée” and Recasting Postcolonialism; Stora and Harbi, La Guerre d’Algérie 1954–2004; Stora with Leclère 50. 2. In this book, I do not provide a summary of the events of the war. For a definitive history of the war, see Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli.

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3. Marquand, “Cannes Film Festival’s ‘Hors la Loi’”; see also Stora, “Entre la France et l’Algérie” 338–41. In Setif and other Algerian cities on May 8, 1945, the day of French liberation from the German Occupation and the end of World War II, Algerians demonstrated for their own liberation from the French. The demonstration ended in violence and triggered large-scale killings of Algerians by French authorities over a period of several months. 4. For details, see “French Election,” “French Presidential Hopeful,” and Vergnol. Maurice Audin was a young Communist supporter of Algerian independence who was arrested, tortured, and killed by the French military in Algiers in 1957. His body was never found. 5. See House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, especially Chapters Eleven and Twelve. 6. See also Rice on the role historian Jean-Luc Einaudi played during the Papon trial (92) and Stora, “1999–2003, guerre d’Algérie,” 505. 7. See also Rousso, “Raisins,” 142. However, it should also be mentioned that as Paris mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, named a city plaza after Charonne in 2007, thus memorializing the people who died there (Stora, “Entre la France et l’Algérie,” 336). I thank Neil Doshi for bringing Dans l’ombre de Charonne to my attention. 8. Donadey, Recasting, 11–15; see also my essay “Retour sur mémoire.” 9. See Amiri, La Bataille de France; Amrane, Les Femmes algériennes; Branche, La Torture et l’Armée and La Guerre d’Algérie; Gervereau, Rioux, and Stora, La France en guerre d’Algérie; McCormack, Collective Memory; Meynier, Histoire intérieure; Stora, Gangrène and Imaginaires de guerre; Thénault, Une drôle de justice and Histoire. 10. For an analysis of Mari’s film, see Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War, 143–54. 11. Faucon and his wife Yasmina Nini-Faucon have been coproducing his films since 2005 through their production company Istiqlal Films. Istiqlal means independence in Arabic. Faucon has collaborated with Soraya Nini, the author of the autobiographical novel Ils disent que je suis une beurette (1993), since his 2000 film Samia, based on Soraya Nini’s book. Yasmina and Soraya are sisters (Kealhofer-Kemp, Muslim Women in French Cinema, 150). 12. Revealingly, Pontecorvo’s film, which had been screened in very few French theaters when it was first released, was only finally shown on French television in 2004 (on the French-German public channel Arte), almost forty years after it was made (Bedjaoui, Cinéma 99, 154). 13. Feature films that then appear on television often reach a much larger audience as well. For instance, Hors la loi has been shown on Canal + several times, drawing a viewing public numbering in the millions (Bedjaoui, Cinéma, 35). 14. The real-life journalist’s name is Jacques Tillier (“Jacques Mesrine”). 15. For more on this scene see Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War, 123–26. 16. For an analysis of the film, see Ireland, “Representations of the Harkis,” 188–91.

Chapter 1

Un/Civil War Memories L’Ennemi intime, Mon Colonel, Djinns, La Trahison, and Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961

As mentioned in the introduction, historian Benjamin Stora accurately characterized the Algerian war of liberation as a war on three fronts: not only was it a French-Algerian war, but it was also an internal war within both Algeria and France (Gangrène 187). Critics have long noted that many war films produced in the West, especially films about colonial wars such as the Vietnam and Algerian wars, do not focus so much on fighting the enemy as they do on the internal struggle within a military unit, presented in some way as representative of the conflicts generated within the nation by a long, violent, and divisive war. Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) remains the definitive exemplar of this trend (Corliss in Jeffords 1054). In this internally focused context, the enemy is often invisible or secondary. In “La Guerre d’Algérie: La Mémoire par le cinéma,” Stora mentions that before the fiftieth-anniversary period studied here, French films of the Algerian war generally did not actually represent Algerians at all (265) or continued to present them in the tradition of colonial cinema, as silent and exotic figures (266) or as extras and shadows (270). Clashes among stock military characters tend to appear in war films with such an internal focus: the inflexible, experienced commander, often giving orders from a more distant location; the fairly inexperienced commissioned officer, still somewhat idealistic about the rules of war, who leads the unit; his seasoned, hardened, hardheaded noncommissioned second-incommand who is ready to use violent methods at a moment’s notice; and the young, inexperienced recruit who witnesses everything and has to deal with his own scruples and ambivalence (see Robic-Diaz 193). The five films in my corpus that focus on military or police action during the war, and which I analyze in this chapter, provide variations on this model. In L’Ennemi intime, a film of which Platoon is a clear intertext (Temlali; Wallenbrock, “Apology” 91), the naive lieutenant faces off against 27

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his hardened sergeant, an Indochina war veteran, in ways that critics have found somewhat clichéd (Pinkerton; Saunders). The film includes a second character similar to the sergeant, an intelligence officer who tries to convince the lieutenant of the necessity of torture. A commander, ever ready to use the most violent means, rounds off the cast. In Mon Colonel, a young law student and lieutenant slowly becomes responsible for torture under the direction of an implacable colonel he initially admires. In Djinns, a somewhat inexperienced lieutenant clashes with his violent second-in-command as they both descend into madness, and a new recruit undergoes a life-changing supernatural experience. Nuit noire, a film that focuses on police rather than military action, features several violently racist officers, one officer who goes from being afraid to vengefully violent, a higherranking officer who tries unsuccessfully to stem the violence, and a ruthless prefect of police who orchestrates and covers up the violence. Finally, for the first time, in La Trahison, the ambivalent recruit is a young Algerian man conscripted into the French military; the film is also the lone exception in that it does not rely on an internal battle among military stock characters. This chapter analyzes to what extent French war films that focus on military or police actions fifty years after the Algerian war continue to rely on the trope of the war as an internal affair, and to what effect; whether the films address the colonial context that led to the war; and how Algerian characters and women are represented in the films. THE FLN VERSUS THE ALGERIAN PEOPLE: L’ENNEMI INTIME (FLORENT-EMILIO SIRI, 2007) L’Ennemi intime (The Intimate Enemy), a film directed by Florent-Emilio Siri and scripted by Algerian war expert Patrick Rotman, presents the Algerian war as a war fought on three fronts.1 L’Ennemi intime is one of few films that actually shows the war between the French military and the ALN (Armée de libération nationale, National Liberation Army), with a number of battle scenes with high production values and special effects that are, however, all filmed from the point of view of French (and to a lesser extent harki) soldiers, and in which we therefore do not see ALN combatants very much.2 Historian Yassin Temlali critiques this objectification of ALN fighters, who are represented “à la troisième personne” (in the third person) as savage terrorists, absent and invisible, dead, or tortured. Instead of filming the war as also causing divisions among Algerians (a historical reality), the film takes a more radical slant, presenting the war somewhat speciously as being waged by the FLN on the civilian Algerian population. This aspect of the film makes it veer close to anti-Algerian independence propaganda, as detailed below. As most French films on the war do, L’Ennemi highlights internal divisions within the French unit. The film’s title works at multiple levels. It refers to the fact that

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the war was considered by the French to be a domestic matter since Algeria was part and parcel of French territory at the time. It is also about a much closer enemy on both the French and Algerian sides. On the French side, we have the domestic enemy—pointing to divergences in perspectives regarding the use of torture within the French military—as well as the enemy within, or how the escalation of war violence slowly brings a man to using methods to which he initially objected (see the film’s “Dossier de presse” 11, 13). On the Algerian side, it is the FLN which is portrayed as the Algerian people’s intimate enemy. In her essay on the representation of torture in L’Ennemi, Nicole Wallenbrock meticulously demonstrates that while the film is unique in directly showing several scenes of torture by the French military during the Algerian war, it also tends to dehumanize its Algerian victims and focus on “perpetrator trauma” (“Apology” 97) by favoring the point of view of various French soldiers and justifying their actions through camera angles, lighting, and presenting their fate as “tragic” (Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 102). She makes her argument through thorough close readings of the film’s three main scenes of torture. Looking at the film overall also reveals that justifications for the French use of torture recur repeatedly throughout the narrative beyond these three scenes, and are produced by obsessively foregrounding the excessive violence exerted by the ALN on the civilian Algerian population. Such perspectives reflect dominant French military and pied-noir scripts about the Algerian war (Lazreg 20–25; Stora in Eldridge 241–42). Eleven minutes into the film, a French patrol is watching a village from afar through binoculars. Rachid (Abdelhafid Metalsi), one of the harki soldiers, mentions that the village’s watchman had his nose and lips cut off by the ALN for smoking because that practice was forbidden by the FLN; as a result, everyone in the village paid the FLN war tax out of terror. We then see this man’s mutilated face through the binoculars held by Lieutenant Terrien (Benoît Magimel)—literally, through Terrien’s eyes. The film repeatedly relies on shock value to make its point by rousing emotions in the audience. Although such punishment is historically accurate (Stora, Gangrène 166–68), its visual force at the beginning of the film creates a heightened sense of shock and disgust. From the beginning, the FLN is presented as using extremely violent methods against its own people. No context has been provided regarding French colonization of Algeria or why Algerians would seek liberation from the French. Up to now, all we have seen is a scene of friendly fire, in which two French units mistakenly open fire on one another thinking the others were ALN fighters. A lieutenant dies in the skirmish and is replaced by a new leader, Lieutenant Terrien. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, then, the French military is presented as being not particularly effective and the FLN as excessively determined to hurt even its own people in order to gain power over them.

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In contrast, a few scenes later, Terrien prevents Saïd (Lounes Tazairt), a longtime harki soldier, from taking Amar (the son of Rachid’s female cousin Zahra) from the village to question him because Amar’s brother has joined the ALN.3 This action signals Terrien’s adherence to the rules of war and honor. Soon afterward, the French unit returns to the village and finds that the ALN has killed Zahra by slitting her throat for previously giving information to Rachid the harki. Unlike Terrien who spares the child, the ALN is shown as having no qualms about killing women. This violent act is reinforced when Terrien uncovers the bodies of many villagers who had been rounded up and killed by the ALN by also having their throats slit, nineteen minutes into the film. The camera cuts between extreme close-ups of his eyes and extreme close-ups of their bloodied bodies. These point-of-view shots are reinforced by the sound of Terrien panting in horror as we view the bodies from his perspective. Visually and auditorily, the film calls for its audience to identify with his point of view and to be horrified at the FLN’s violence for the second time. Sergeant Dougnac (Albert Dupontel) then explains the FLN’s rationale to Terrien: “Faut pas croire que c’est de la sauvagerie gratuite. Ils ont voulu faire un exemple, pour foutre la trouille aux autres villages, vous comprenez?” (Don’t think that this is gratuitous savagery: they wanted to make an example of this village, to scare the hell out of the other ones. Get it?) This excess of violence on the part of the FLN is described as being part of a rational decision-making process, which dehumanizes ALN fighters by making them appear even more monstrous, and the word “savagery,” with all its colonial connotations, is used. Dougnac’s explanation also positions the FLN as being the enemy of the people rather than its representative. While it is historically true that villagers were often caught between fear of the French military and of FLN reprisals if they helped the French or did not side with the FLN, the film does not acknowledge the fact that most Algerians were in favor of independence—especially in the Kabylia region where the film takes place. As critic Thomas Sotinel correctly notes about L’Ennemi, “la façon dont est montrée l’emprise du FLN sur la population, qui repose entièrement sur la terreur, rend incompréhensible l’engagement des Algériens aux côtés des indépendantistes” (the way in which the grip of the FLN on the population is shown as relying entirely on terror makes it impossible to understand why Algerians would have aligned with the independence struggle). French colonialism and extreme exploitation of Algerians have been excluded from the film’s discussion so far (Temlali). At the very beginning of the film, a short text mentions “130 années de présence française” (130 years of French presence) in Algeria, using the neutral term “presence” instead of the more accurate “colonization.” Without any kind of historical and political context to understand the FLN’s fight, FLN fighters are easily demonized. The FLN

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used physical violence in response to the structural and institutional violence of colonialism and because earlier attempts at diplomatic solutions had been ignored by the French for decades. Siri’s film brackets this context and leads its audience to feel that the French military has no choice but to respond to FLN methods in kind. Terrien saves the boy Amar for the second time, creating once again a contrast with the FLN’s excessive violence, as opposed to Terrien’s humanitarian stance. Similarly, twenty-three minutes into the film, Dougnac has soldiers kill three Algerian women who were walking in the “zone interdite” (forbidden zone) (areas from which the French had expelled civilian populations in order to cut the FLN’s access to supplies). As it turns out, this violence is justified, since these were really male ALN operatives disguised as peasant women. Both the FLN and the French military exert violence on the Algerians, but the French violence is amply justified and remains within the bounds of war conventions in the first twenty-five minutes of the film, whereas the FLN violence is not. The FLN is shown as having attacked civilian Algerian populations, whereas so far, the French have only killed ALN soldiers. In the first twenty-five minutes of the film, repeated efforts are thus made to present an asymmetrical view of the violence used by the two camps and to put the blame squarely on the FLN rather than on the brutal French colonial system. That is the context for the first scene of torture that Wallenbrock has analyzed in detail, and which Terrien, shocked, interrupts. Even though this representation of torture by electricity (“la gégène”) is shocking, it is made less so in the context of the ALN violence to which we have been repeatedly subjected in the previous scenes. The film also activates the colonialist white savior trope, as Amar thanks Terrien for stopping the torture. As Wallenbrock notes, “the boy represents the Algeria many colonists and French imperialists envisioned, a helpless and ignorant child” (“Apology” 93). And as Terrien later morphs from humanitarianism to espousing a violently vengeful position, the boy who lost so much in the war escapes the military outpost to join the ranks of the ALN and ends up killing Terrien. The boy carries the weight of the Algerian national allegory, moving from an acted-upon to an agentic position by the film’s end. The harrowing scene of torture is followed by a lighter scene showing the men bonding, with a focus on Saïd, who proudly exhibits a long scar on his chest from the World War II Battle of Monte Cassino. Many colonial troops served in that battle, which is mentioned in several Algerian war films. Suddenly becoming more serious, Saïd explains that the FLN wanted him to join their ranks because he is an excellent soldier and that when he did not comply, “Ils ont égorgé ma femme et mes trois enfants” (They slit my wife’s and my three children’s throats). For the third time, FLN violence is evoked. Coming as it does right after the first scene of torture, this revelation serves

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to make spectators feel that the violence of the opponent against their own people justifies the French military amping up violence on their end. In this way, the film attempts to make the spectators ask themselves questions about whether Terrien was right to stop the torture and provides a preemptive justification for his change of heart later in the film. It also somewhat perversely implies that the French military is there to protect Algerian civilians against the bloodthirsty ALN fighters, or that the French forces are the lesser evil of the two. By now we are only thirty minutes into the film and have already been ideologically manipulated into taking the side of the French torturers. In the next scene, Terrien and Captain Berthaut (Marc Barbé), an intelligence officer, face off with arguments for and against torture. The captain begins his argument by referring to FLN savagery, first by showing Terrien pictures of Algerian civilians, including women, who had been killed by the ALN, and which the audience is shown. Berthaut then mentions that the ALN soldiers would cut the testicles of killed French soldiers and stuff them in the dead men’s mouths. These sexualized atrocities were regularly played up by the French military and media during the war, and it is unclear to what extent they were based on fact or on rumor and propaganda (Mauss-Copeaux 132, cited in Brun 143; Shepard 31). In L’Ennemi, both Terrien and the audience are spared that visual, but the imagery is strong enough to once again activate disgust and horror at the mention of excessive FLN violence, to which we are now being exposed for the fourth time. It recalls Sergeant Dougnac’s explanation about the FLN using savage methods with the rational purpose of instilling fear—this time in French soldiers. After these visual justifications based on exposing FLN violence, Berthaut also provides the official French political justification in a simple and straightforward way reminiscent of today’s sound bite: “Le FLN n’est qu’une minorité. Il déstabilise tout le pays. Il faut l’éliminer” (The FLN is a minority. It destabilizes the entire country. It must be eliminated). The film has already taken many pains to support Berthaut’s official French version by showing the ALN maiming and killing Algerians. Although both FLN and French violence are historically well-documented, Berthaut’s gloss elides the central fact that a majority of Algerians were in favor of independence, especially by 1959 when the film is taking place, five long years into the war. It is only in response to Berthaut’s official line, thirty-four minutes into the film, that the unjust nature of French colonialism is finally mentioned, as Terrien responds that France should “donner les mêmes droits à tout le monde” (give everyone the same rights). This is the only mention of colonial injustice in the entire film. Compared with the repetition of scenes highlighting the violence of the FLN, it does not weigh very strongly within the internal logic of the film. The captain’s response prophesizes Terrien’s change of heart, which is presented as inevitable. Terrien’s reversal is also foreshadowed by his physical placement in

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this scene. Whereas at the beginning he stands well above Berthaut, symbolically holding the moral high ground, the French flag floating behind him, he soon walks down to Berthaut’s level where he remains until the end of the scene while they discuss torture. After heavy losses during a skirmish with ALN fighters forty-three minutes into the film, French commander Vesoul (Aurélien Recoing) sends in a plane with “les bidons spéciaux” (the special drums)—that is, napalm bombs—the first time this historical reality of the Algerian war has been shown in a film (Stora, “La Guerre d’Algérie: La mémoire” 269). The entire countryside explodes into flames, ALN men are burned alive, and the French soldiers who are still on the ground cover their faces with their scarves—a protection we are bound to feel is illusory, and which positions them, like the Algerians, as victims of the high command’s decisions. The exponential increase in the French use of force is justified by repeated portrayals of an inhuman enemy against whom it is acceptable to defend oneself with inhuman means. Yet, as we see the charred landscape and human remains through the eyes of Terrien and his men, including the harkis, the audience is made to feel that this violence is too excessive. The scene ends with the harkis praying for the felled ALN men in a display of Muslim solidarity, as they had for their own dead at the beginning of the film, and then the film fades to black. The prayer and its placement at the end of this otherworldly scene may intimate that the French have gone too far and that they will not be victorious in Algeria. After this scene, Rachid disappears and is suspected of having joined the FLN, but the French unit soon finds him with his throat slit, covered in blood, dying. For the fifth time in fifty-two minutes of screen time, the FLN’s extreme violence is highlighted and the audience has been primed to expect it to justify any French actions in return. In this way, and by only barely referring to the colonial context (and that in the mildest of ways, as the need to eventually “give everyone the same rights” and without mentioning violent conquest, economic immiseration, land theft, cultural assaults, and institutional racism under the French colonial order), the FLN is presented as the aggressor not only of the French but of the Algerian people as well. Conversely, in this colonial narrative, the French military is perversely presented as bringing law and order back, even if sometimes it (understandably, it is implied) ends up making use of excessive force as well. The absence of Algerian voices from the film except for those of harki soldiers reinforces the colonialist message of the film. When three soldiers—Berthaut, Lefranc (Vincent Rottiers),4 and another man—are killed by the ALN (their throats slit, and, we are made to infer, their genitalia mutilated), this sixth instance of extreme FLN violence is used by Vesoul as a justification for the French military to make use of additional force, instead of being a critique of the high command abandoning its men in

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battle. The film thus repeatedly shows victims of the ALN having their throats slit. This is consistent with French wartime propaganda, which supplied many reports of such killings in order to justify and garner support for French military and police violence by providing strikingly abject imagery (Kraft in Bedjaoui, Cinéma 252; Brun 145). The practice of slitting the throats of Algerian prisoners after they were tortured was common among the French military as a way to terrorize Algerians (O’Riley 95), yet this fact is never brought up in the film. The ideologically motivated imagery of the knifewielding Arab has been vehiculated in the West since the Crusades (Branche in Brun 155). This time, as part of the reprisals, the French set fire to a village. The film justifies their action, as they find a gun and a young man with a gunshot wound—presumably an FLN fighter. As an old man kneels, begging for mercy, he leans forward to touch Terrien’s pants. Terrien pulls a gun on him, mumbling fiercely, “Tu me touches pas” (Do not touch me). French racism is justified here and the old Algerian man is dehumanized by it. Instead of showing the French as perpetrators of colonial exploitation and the French military being sent to protect French colonial interests, the Algerians are presented as savagely killing French soldiers and the French being understandably enraged about it, which supposedly justifies their own violence. While this may have been the frame of mind of many French conscripts and enlisted men, who knew very little about the Algerian colonial context, the film tendentiously ignores the colonial context necessary to understand why Algerians would have had to eventually turn to violent means to effect national liberation, after attempts at obtaining civil rights within the French system were ignored or violently repressed decade after decade. Vesoul then has the patrol shoot all the villagers, in a parallel with two previous instances of FLN violence against Algerian villages, the first of which Terrien witnessed at the beginning of the film and the second of which Berthaut had shown a picture to Terrien. Although the violence on both sides is similar, these scenes are presented in asymmetrical ways. The responsibility for two mass killings is attributed to the FLN, whereas one is perpetrated by the French. Further, while we are shown extreme close-ups of the dead when the FLN is the perpetrator, we are spared any vision or description of what occurs when the French resort to similar ends. We see an extreme close-up of a soldier in front of a machine gun, and then the film cuts to an extreme long shot of the village. We hear machine gun sounds and see dust rising from the village. The murders of the civilian Algerian population committed by the French military, although clearly not following the rules of war, are visually minimized compared to FLN killings as the spectator is literally distanced from them. About this film, critic Christopher Saunders notes that “aside from some token harkis, Algerians are faceless villains or cowering victims: they don’t really matter, with torture and executions taking a backseat to Terrien’s

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disillusionment.” While his assessment is generally correct, it should also be noted, as scholar Susan Ireland does, that the two harkis who are represented are fuller characters than in most Algerian war films, in which they tend to be background figures of little importance to the plot (184–85). The first closeup at the very beginning of the film, after some airplane landscape shots, is of Rachid, moving through the countryside at dusk or dawn. He is wearing a traditional headdress and the audience may assume he is an FLN fighter, until it is revealed that he is part of the French patrol. Soon afterward, the patrol starts mistakenly exchanging fire with another French unit. From the very beginning, neither the soldiers nor the audience know friend from foe. This inaugural scene sets up the ambiguities that will be raised later in the film: Who is the adversary, and who is on whose side? Who is right and who is wrong? One of the only two explanations that the film provides for the FLN actions is given by World War II veteran Saïd, who explains that the FLN fighters see themselves as part of the resistance, as French fighters did during the Nazi occupation of France. Lest the audience be tempted to be sutured to this parallel, in the next scene, halfway through the film, the French unit finds Rachid dying at the hands of the FLN. The portrayal of harki soldiers Rachid and Saïd does not simply humanize a group that has been silenced, objectified, and demonized in most representations of the Algerian war. It is also used to once again serve as a foil to highlight the FLN’s use of excessive violence, since the two harkis who have been given some amount of agency and screen time in the film are presented as having their lives unfairly destroyed by the FLN. One scene in the film does highlight the complexity of the situation in a nuanced and powerful manner. Around the film’s halfway point, Dougnac and some of the men are supposed to kill an ALN prisoner, Idir, played by Mohamed Fellag, an actor with a powerful and calm presence. Idir and Saïd begin talking and discover that they both fought at Monte Cassino on the side of the French, after which Idir tells Saïd, “tu as perdu d’avance” (You are fighting a losing battle). He puts on his French war medal before being shot, which sways Dougnac who decides to let him go and orders all to salute him. However, Saïd ends up killing Idir anyway, enraged at the loss of his family to the FLN. The camera lingers for a few seconds on a close-up of Idir’s dead face and the medal on his jacket. Algerians in the French military suffered heavy losses during World War II and other wars, as portrayed in Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes, a very popular film that was released a year prior to L’Ennemi. These men’s varied trajectories during the Algerian war of independence from the French are powerfully articulated in this short scene in which former co-combatants under the same flag are now fighting on opposite sides (and we learned at the beginning of the film that Slimane, the local ALN leader whom we never see in the film, is also a World War II veteran like Saïd

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and Idir). An ALN fighter is humanized for the first time, fifty-six minutes into the film, but Idir is quickly dispatched, not by the sergeant but by a harki soldier. Saïd loses control and acts out of anger, recalling the Orientalist stereotype of the vengeful Arab man. About five minutes into the film, another short but powerful scene, lasting less than a minute, does portray the differential treatment of harkis within the French military and hints at the presence of a racist hierarchy within its ranks. After the scene of friendly fire, Commander Vesoul is leading a ceremony honoring a fallen lieutenant, whose casket is wrapped in the French flag and who is awarded a posthumous medal. All of the French soldiers surround the casket, memorializing his sacrifice. The camera cuts to the harkis, slightly to the side, burying their dead and praying, without any officer participating or any military honors being given. Significantly, the French soldiers have their backs turned to the harki burial, but one young man turns around to look at the harkis. This point-of-view shot draws attention to the differential treatment and provides a subtle critique of it by suturing the audience’s point of view to that of the young soldier and making us aware of the difference. In spite of these attempts at providing a more balanced view of the war context, the general insistence on FLN violence does skew the film toward justifying the French violence (Temlali). Many critics have discussed the extreme violence shown in L’Ennemi, which is arguably the most violent film in my corpus. In “La Guerre d’Algérie: La Mémoire,” Stora refers to this film’s “hyperviolence” (268). As Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle note regarding the continued circulation of photographic images of the October 17, 1961, French police violence against demonstrating Algerians in Paris (the topic of the film Nuit noire), showing such violence is both necessary and “risks reinscribing transcolonial power relations by prioritising Algerian corporeal vulnerability at the expense of the colonial subjects’ agency” (184). This is even more true of L’Ennemi, which represents Algerian agency in a very limited manner—through the points of view of two harki soldiers and briefly through young Amar’s. With the exception of short scenes with Amar’s mother Zahra, Algerian women are represented primarily as scared or dead villagers, and there are a couple of brief shots of Terrien’s wife when he goes back to France during a leave but is too disconnected to reunite with his family. Women are also present in pictures, such as the photograph of village women and elderly men killed by the ALN. The first picture we see in the film is a poster of a naked white woman in the canteen toward the beginning of the film. Someone has torn parts of the poster off, so that what remains visible is primarily the woman’s torso. As the men are engaged in heavy drinking, yelling, and physical posturing, one French soldier is using the poster as a dart board, throwing knives at the picture of the woman’s body. This rowdy scene of

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violently sexualized masculine prowess is chilling from a feminist perspective but appears casually, as part of the way in which homosocial camaraderie is established on the bodies of objectified women in all-male spaces such as the military. Toward the end of the film, as the unit is watching a film within the film, the only image that does not represent the men in the unit is of a naked white dancer making her breasts move around as she dances. This portion of the film draws laughter and joyful screams from the men. Once again, homosocial camaraderie is established through this sexualized female representation, ensuring homosocial bonding while warding off the specter of homosexuality (see Sedgwick; Jeffords 1061). In the scenes in which the ALN has killed villagers, some of the dead women are bare-breasted, implying that they were raped (historically, French soldiers were more likely to rape Algerian women than ALN fighters were). The presence of these images and the symbolic violence casually visited on the female poster reinforce Wallenbrock’s argument about the sexualized nature of torture (“Apology” 95–96, based on Lazreg 123–30, 143) and the imbrications between objectification of women and violence. Yet, the French soldiers’ gendered violence is only symbolic here (exercised on a poster), and it is contrasted with the images of Algerian civilians (women, old men, and children) killed by the ALN. Here again, the ALN’s use of gendered violence is presented as worse than the French military’s. Repetition is a central structuring device of the film, as we have seen through the increasingly violent scenes of killings and torture discussed above. At the beginning of the film, friendly fire results in the death of the unit’s lieutenant. Terrien arrives during the ceremony honoring the fallen officer. Commander Vesoul tells him, “Vous allez remplacer un mort” (You are going to replace a dead man), intimating that he may suffer the same fate—which he does. We see him taking up residence in the previous lieutenant’s room—literally taking his place, in life and later in death. By the end of the film, Terrien is dead, Dougnac has deserted, and a new lieutenant is probably on his way, highlighting both the length of the war and its cycle of violence. Indochina is mentioned at least five times in the film (three times during its first thirty-five minutes), and we learn that Dougnac saved Berthaut’s life during that war. A short scene in which Terrien experiences a blurred dream or vision of possibly a group of ALN fighters running toward the screen in slow motion recurs three times. Whereas the first confusing vision seems like a drunken dream, we finally understand its prophetic nature after Terrien has been shot toward the end of the film. This time, the image slowly turns from blurred to sharp, confirming that the group of running men are indeed ALN fighters. The camera focuses on their machine guns in a fifteen-second long take. Terrien smiles, and the camera then cuts to a closeup of Amar, whom we discover is one of the gun-holding fighters, making

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us realize that he killed Terrien. Terrien and Amar have become intimate enemies who were both radicalized into killing by witnessing the excessive violence exerted by the other side, thus creating a certain parallelism between the two sides of the conflict. Repetition is also incorporated into the film’s title, which has been used three times. L’Ennemi intime is the title of a 2002 book and a three-part documentary by Rotman, based on testimonies of former French soldiers who served in Algeria (see Rosello, Reparative 68–69). Siri’s fictional film is based on these two productions and retains the same title. Rotman is also famous for another book and lengthy four-hour documentary combination bringing together former French soldiers’ testimonies, La Guerre sans nom, codirected by Bertrand Tavernier and released in 1992.5 Over the years, Rotman has made it his mission to bring French soldiers’ experiences to light and to try to understand what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil” in her book about the Holocaust, published soon after the end of the Algerian war. For Rotman, the burning question is how average young French men could have engaged in atrocities in Algeria or have allowed them to happen (see also Calargé, “Saint Michel”). Whereas all other Rotman productions focus on the French soldiers’ inner struggle and sense of guilt in facing their horribly violent past as either actors or passive bystanders, Siri’s film, while showing some scenes of torture and killings by the French, repeatedly seeks to justify them through demonization of the FLN and privileging the French soldiers’ point of view. This is highly problematic, especially in a context of increasing anti-Arab racism in France. Indeed, as Wallenbrock points out, a major reason for the banality of evil is racism, which has already created conditions favorable to dehumanizing the “ethnic Other” (“Apology” 100, 103). In L’Ennemi, the naive lieutenant’s trajectory from liberal humanist to torturer is inversely parallel to the hardened sergeant’s, who goes from experienced soldier disliking the extreme methods used in Algeria to deserter. The two higher officers, the commander and the intelligence officer, remain steady in their unflinching commitment to victory by any means necessary. Of the two experienced harkis portrayed, one has gone back and forth from the ALN to the French military back to the ALN, and one has remained faithful to the French military from World War II to the colonial wars. By the end of the film, three of these soldiers—as well as scores of other people, both Algerian and French—have been killed, and orphaned Amar has gone from scared villager to active ALN fighter. Although the film repeatedly insists on the FLN’s violent methods against the very people it purports to liberate from the French colonialist yoke, it also shows the process by which the occupying force’s use of similarly violent methods and dehumanizing treatment will move people to join liberation struggles.

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INTERNAL AFFAIRS: MON COLONEL (LAURENT HERBIET, 2006) Mon Colonel (The Colonel), director Laurent Herbiet’s only feature film to date, is based on a 1999 novel of the same title by pied-noir journalist Francis Zamponi, who specializes in military and police matters (Zamponi 1).6 In this film as in L’Ennemi, a naive lieutenant goes from liberal humanist to torturer, but he ends up following a different trajectory from Terrien’s. The film opens with the murder of Colonel Duplan (Olivier Gourmet) in 1993 France (this time frame is made explicit in the film’s credits). As both police and the military investigate the crime, the military starts receiving a series of letters that Lieutenant Guy Rossi (Robinson Stévenin), who is missing in action, had written in 1956 Algeria. The letters are read in 1993 by a woman, Lieutenant Galois (Cécile de France), and they generate narrative flashbacks (filmed in black and white) to the events Rossi describes. The film follows the book’s story faithfully, relying on its dual time structure and making liberal use of its dialogues. The main difference lies in the presence of Galois. The novel is written as a series of police and military reports intercut with Rossi’s letters/ diary. As Wallenbrock notes, producer Costa-Gavras added the character of Galois, the reader-spectator-investigator, to the film’s script (“The Algerian War Era” 93 n.115). Like the novel, the film follows Rossi’s internal trajectory and changing perspective from democratic intellectual with vague political ideas, to perpetrator convinced by his colonel of the necessity of torture, to missing person when his final refusal to kill an ALN fighter and betray a friend results in his disappearance. The title of the film, Mon Colonel, with its first-person possessive adjective rather than a more general definite or indefinite article, implies a subjective point of view. The colonel’s importance to the story is related by someone under his command, Rossi, but the title also refers more broadly to the expression one uses when saluting or acknowledging such an officer in France. This indicates that we should expect (at least in part) a point of view coming from within the military structure. As Stora notes about this film, “Les scènes de guerre, les débats de l’époque au sein de l’armée ou l’attitude des pouvoirs politiques sont remarquablement restitués” (“La Guerre d’Algérie: La Mémoire” 268) (The war scenes, the debates of the day within the military, and the attitude of political authorities are rendered remarkably well). Although Mon Colonel provides its audience with a variety of points of view regarding the war, the perspective is that of the French and focuses not on the trauma of the tortured but instead on the perpetrator trauma experienced by the torturers, as in L’Ennemi intime (Barclay, “Derrida’s Virtual Space” 93; Calargé, “Un passé” 105 n.23; Wallenbrock, “Awakening” 99 n.12). However, unlike L’Ennemi, Mon Colonel provides ample references to the

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French colonial system and its injustices, starting with the mass murders committed by French captain Saint Arnaud during the nineteenth-century colonial conquest (Austin, “Seeing” 124; Calargé, “Un passé” 101–2) and mentioning the 1945 Setif rebellion and its violent repression. It also provides the audience with different models of how Europeans could respond to the situation, including joining forces with the FLN. One scene toward the beginning of the film, during the first flashback to 1956, exposes in effective ways the colonial context for the war and the propaganda used to justify it. One of the first actions in which Rossi is involved is an elaborate car trip to Djemila, a site of Roman ruins that was dear to Albert Camus, for a picnic involving pied-noir, French, and Algerian dignitaries who collaborate with the French power structure. This scene is set up as theatrics and highlights the propaganda aspect of this event. As one of the Kaids (local Algerian leaders) greets the colonel and then the French prefect, the French flag is proudly flying to the right of the screen. Long tables are set in the middle of the Roman ruins. The traces of this Roman presence were historically used as part of the colonialist argument that Algeria had had a European presence since Antiquity, thus justifying French colonialism as part of a long legacy rather than as an alien imposition (Barclay, “Derrida’s Virtual Space” 104; Dine in Calargé, “Un passé” 94; Eldridge 19; Austin, Algerian National Cinema 5). The scene’s artificially festive atmosphere in the midst of war is belied by Rossi’s worry that the civilian convoy represents an easy target through canyons and open spaces (Austin, “Seeing” 123). As Colonel Duplan makes a speech among the ruins about positive aspects of colonialism and France’s “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission), a soldier films the proceedings, highlighting the way in which the media was used in this war as an instrument of propaganda. Mon Colonel underscores the colonialist setting by including a number of uninvited Algerians gathered around the scene, scowling. The colonel quickly orders tables and chairs to be set up for them in a separate area as an afterthought, but they leave in protest, an action that was not in the novel. It is made quietly clear from the beginning of the film that Algerians are not happy about this colonial spectacle, or about French colonization, which is shown as being bound to crumble into ruins, as the Roman Empire did. The picnic scene is also the first in a series in which the military officers—especially Duplan—consistently dismiss civilian government officials and politicians. Scholars Delphine Robic-Diaz and Alain Ruscio mention that French films about colonial wars often perform this move, which is used to “légitimer des comportements moralement condammables” (191) (legitimate morally reprehensible behavior) on the part of the military. L’Ennemi, Djinns, and La Trahison all take place in rural parts of Algeria, where the French military is portrayed as fairly isolated except for contact

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with Algerian villagers. In contrast, both Mon Colonel and Nuit noire take place in cities and as such, pied-noir and French civilian characters round off the military and police casts. In Mon Colonel, there are two important and somewhat well-rounded pied-noir characters, police chief Reidacher (Bruno Solo) and teacher René Ascencio (Eric Caravaca). As in other films in my corpus, their last names hint at the diversity of origins of the pied-noir population—in this case, from the Alsace region of France and from Spain and Italy, respectively. This film is the only one that discusses French military relations with pieds-noirs. Like Duplan, Reidacher has no qualms about using torture but neither is portrayed as sadistic. Unlike Duplan, Reidacher expresses racist stereotypes of Algerians and colonialist ideology, but he is also shown as being friendly and helpful to Rossi, humorous, and honest. Ascencio is a character rarely seen in Algerian war films, a handsome pied-noir intellectual who sympathizes with the cause of the FLN and whose anti-colonialist discourse serves as a rejoinder to the colonel’s justification of the use of violent methods. When the FLN has a grenade explode in the city center during the French national July 14 celebrations, Ascencio’s arm is blown off. Whereas this is a turning point for Rossi, who is more inclined to use torture after seeing the civilian casualties and his friend’s loss of an arm, Ascencio’s commitment to Algerian independence is not lessened by his physical loss. Unlike French military men (in both this film and in L’Ennemi) who view violent FLN actions as inexplicable aggressions that must be stopped at all costs, including by using violent methods, Ascencio has a clear understanding of the colonial context, explaining to Rossi that “Ici, on est des occupants” (here, we are the occupiers). In the French context, the term “occupant” connotes the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. Ascencio’s explanation places FLN resistance on the same level as French Resistance to the Nazi occupier, which allows him to understand the FLN actions for liberation even if he must physically suffer in the process. The audience is invited to identify with Rossi, a narrator who, at the beginning of the film, arrives with vague leftist leanings and wants to make up his own mind about what is going on in Algeria. This may represent the film’s intended audience. Like L’Ennemi, Mon Colonel probes how one could be led to make use of violence in extreme circumstances. We see Duplan slowly worming his arguments about the necessity of the use of torture into Rossi’s ear and mind, finally convincing him to set up an intelligence system based on the use of torture. By the middle of the film, Rossi supervises several scenes of torture but significantly is not the one actually doing the torturing. This allows him to imagine himself to be a bystander rather than a perpetrator (in the torture scenes, we see him often looking away or taking notes to avoid seeing the torture being conducted in front of him). Rossi’s other role model is Ascencio. Rossi parrots Duplan’s arguments when first talking to Ascencio,

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who offers him another framework. Noticing Rossi’s qualms, Ascencio provides him with arguments in favor of Algerian independence. However, it is only when Duplan asks Rossi to become a direct perpetrator by killing an FLN fighter who had given information under torture that Rossi—unlike Terrien in L’Ennemi—draws the line. He also refuses to give Ascencio false information to feed the FLN and risk exposing his friend. Toward the end of the film, an FLN bomb explodes in a French café, killing and wounding some young pied-noir women who had been flirting with Rossi, after which the colonel tries to convince Rossi again to kill the FLN fighter and set up Ascencio and the FLN. Rossi’s inner thoughts are shared with the audience: “Comment peut-il croire que l’attentat me fera changer d’avis?” (How can he believe that the attack will change my mind?) In this way, it is made clear that Rossi is now following Ascencio’s model, having severed his allegiance to his colonel and to the dishonorable methods used by the French to maintain their colonial power. Rossi’s refusal to become a direct perpetrator ends up causing his own disappearance, which it is implied was ordered by the colonel. Ironically perhaps, the FLN’s primary mouthpiece in this film is a piednoir character. No Algerian character expresses any such political convictions. Almost all of the Algerians in the film are portrayed as being caught between the French and the FLN (Rechniewski 93). For instance, Omar (Rabah Loucif), a World War II and Indochina war veteran who owns a restaurant that caters to the French, turns out to have been involved with the FLN as well. The Algerian shopkeepers who are gathered by the French military are forcibly recruited into being held responsible for order in their area of town, yet they also pay the FLN revolutionary tax out of fear. All Algerian characters are acted upon in this film and display no agency, nor do any of them move the action forward. This includes one unnamed harki sergeant (Mosbah Baiben), whose role is that of an extra, chauffeuring the white officers around and occasionally translating between the military and the population. In the present time of the film, only one minor character (one of the investigating police inspectors, played by Abdelmalek Kadi) is of Maghrebian descent. As for the representation of FLN fighters in Mon Colonel, Robic-Diaz and Ruscio’s analysis of French military films about colonial wars is particularly apposite: the anti-colonial fighters are anonymous shadows, and “les corps des membres du FLN ne s’inscrivent le plus souvent à l’écran qu’en tant que (futurs) cadavres ou prisonniers” (190) (the bodies of FLN members are visible on the screen primarily as (future) corpses or prisoners). Even though, historically, Algerians were the creators and actors of their revolutionary war, in this film Algerians remain extras and the agency, except for Algerians’ participation in the cycle of violence, is solely on the side of the French and pieds-noirs. What Stora says about most French films on the Algerian war applies very well to Mon Colonel: “les Algériens

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n’apparaissent pas réellement comme acteurs de cette histoire, y compris dans les films de dénonciation du système colonial” (“La Guerre d’Algérie: La Mémoire” 269) (Algerians never really appear as historical actors, including in films that denounce the colonial system). The film’s main characters are male (with one exception) and French. Algerian women are present only as background figures in the city streets and lined up to be forcibly photographed for identity papers, in a scene reminiscent of a similar one in La Trahison. Only one Algerian woman, Ascencio’s maid Zouina (Fatima Soufi), is named. Pied-noir women are primarily present as young women who repeatedly smile at Rossi and make advances to him, perhaps attracted by his youth and uniform (this aspect was not in the novel). Only one pied-noir woman, Françoise (Olga Grumberg)—Ascencio’s female counterpart—expresses political viewpoints. Her first name positions her as carrying the weight of the French national allegory. She and Ascencio represent a third way that might have been possible had the French faced and remedied the structural injustices of the colonial situation sooner. Françoise is a member of a mixed couple. Yet, even within this couple that represents a more egalitarian potentiality for France and Algeria (Rechniewski 90), only Françoise is given a voice. She makes the speeches, while her husband Ali (Samir Guesmi) stands by her, silent, listening to her wisdom (whereas he did speak in the novel). Perhaps as a way to signal their acculturation, in the few lines Ali and Zouina speak in the film, both mention the need for wine (a colonial product forbidden in Islam). In the present time of the film, one character, Lieutenant Galois—Rossi’s female counterpart and mirror image in the present—represents the intended reader-spectator (Calargé, “Un passé” 95, 98–99; Wallenbrock, “Awakening” 95). We are encouraged to be sutured to her reactions to Rossi’s letters, as the camera focuses on her emotional reactions to what she is reading, which is what we are viewing. The audience is invited to proceed with its own inquiry into this occluded part of French-Algerian history. Rossi and Galois, as two representatives of the French nation, must choose between two possible role models, Duplan and Ascencio—and in turn, the audience is invited to make its own choice.7 As Rossi slowly moves from an identification with Duplan to one with Ascencio, Galois is reassured that Rossi has rescinded his acceptance of torture. However, unlike Rossi, Galois remains within the military power structure by continuing to ally with it and with her own commander at the very end of the film (Calargé, “Un passé” 100). The film guides its audience toward identifying with Galois, the spectator-investigator within the film, a representative of French law and order who will seek the truth but will not rebel. The film also provides us with an alternative identification in the person of Rossi, the narrator, who ends up sacrificing himself for what he believes to be just. In this way, Mon Colonel, like La Trahison, makes

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its audience ask itself difficult questions about law and justice (Barclay, “Derrida’s Virtual Spaces” 100–105). Several of the films in my corpus, such as Caché and Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, are split between two time frames, the Algerian war past and the present. Both Un Balcon sur la mer (discussed in chapter 3) and Mon Colonel put an interesting spin on this double narrative time. The past events take place during the war (the early 1960s for Un Balcon and 1956 for Mon Colonel), but the present of the films takes place well before they were made—in 1987 for Un Balcon and 1993 for Mon Colonel. The present time of the films is thus in the films’ past, since they were released in 2010 and 2006, respectively. This narrative present which is in our past highlights France’s belatedness in dealing with the war, as well as a certain recognition of the importance of the late 1980s (the end of the period of repression) and early 1990s (the beginning of the period of the return of the repressed) in France’s Algeria syndrome. At the very beginning of Mon Colonel, as the opening credits are rolling, we see a closed French window from inside, its drawn muslin curtains preventing us from seeing what lies outside. This can be seen as symbolic of a war on which the French had drawn the curtains for a long time. The French door is then revealed to be that of Duplan’s office. As the killer opens the French door in the film’s first shot, the draft from the open door lifts some papers up on the colonel’s desk. The killer’s act literally opens the door back onto the past and brings it back to light, as old documents that reveal what happened during the war come back up from where they had been piled and forgotten for decades. Mon Colonel also stages the role of the media—television and newspapers—as an important vector of memory in ushering in the third phase of the Algeria syndrome. Rossi’s disappearance, like the Algerian war, had been forgotten by all except for Rossi’s father (Charles Aznavour). Duplan’s controversial participation in a television program to discuss the early 1990s fundamentalist Islamist violence in Algeria is what brings the war back into the public sphere and sets the present time events in motion. In this way, the film points to the role of the internal violence in 1990s Algeria in bringing back memories of the Algerian war (see Austin, “Seeing” 119; Rousso, “Raisins” 139; Thénault, Histoire 13). Duplan’s interview, in which he maintained that France should have kept Algeria French, moves Ascencio to publish a public response to him in a newspaper and reminds Ascencio of the package that Rossi had entrusted him to give to his father. Representative of French forgetting during the second phase of the Algeria syndrome, Ascencio, after two years spent in prison for helping the FLN before the general amnesty for Algerian wartime crimes, had lost and then forgotten about these (now archival) documents.8 Duplan’s television interview triggers the memory and puts the letters back in circulation. Rossi’s father finally learns what happened to his son decades later and goes to confront Duplan.

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Of Rossi’s two father figures, both World War II and Indochina war veterans, one (his real father) kills the other (the colonel) because he continues to defend his wartime actions. With this murder, light will finally have to be publicly shed on this obscured past. As Rossi’s father explains, his goal was to have present-day French people, especially those in the military, ask themselves questions about the war. The end of the film invites its present-day audience to identify with Rossi’s father—Rossi’s intended reader (Wallenbrock, “Awakening” 96)—and to lay to rest the colonialist and military ideologies that justify the use of violence, whether it be in 1956, 1993, 2006, or further in the past or in the future. Rossi’s father is played by French singer and international star Charles Aznavour, whose Armenian descent also evokes the 1915–1916 Turkish genocide of Armenians. This genocide had been formally acknowledged by a 2001 French law, which French audiences would probably still remember five years later when Mon Colonel was released. Finally, in a scene in which Rossi shares a meal with Ascencio, Françoise, and Ali in a Jewish restaurant—a peaceful interlude before Rossi has to go back to his daily experiences of violence—Françoise mentions the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This film is one of a few in my corpus in which “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg) goes beyond World War II, the Indochina war (which is mentioned many times in Zamponi’s novel and several times in the film), and the Algerian war, to other contexts that include fundamentalist and state violence in 1990s Algeria, the Armenian genocide, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Mon Colonel thus warns its audience to remain vigilant at all times for signs of totalitarian tendencies, at home and abroad, and including within democracies such as France. PLOT TWIST AND REVERSAL IN DJINNS (HUGUES MARTIN AND SANDRA MARTIN, 2010) The first feature film directed by husband and wife team Hugues Martin and Sandra Martin, Djinns (Stranded) is unique among Algerian war films in that it mixes the genres of fantasy/horror/supernatural thriller and war film. In southern Algeria in 1960, a French unit is sent to find a military plane that crashed in the desert and bring back a mysterious briefcase. As they engage in their mission, something lurks, making the men mad and turning them against one another. Only one man returns with the briefcase to tell the tale. The film ends with a final, explosive revelation that both explains the stakes of the men’s experience and forces the audience to reevaluate everything about the events we have just witnessed. With its claustrophobic, dark setting (the desert, paradoxically, as well as the fortress village in which the spirits start mentally torturing the men), Djinns makes use of stock characters: Lieutenant

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Durieux (Stéphane Debac) comes from a prestigious military school but has little combat experience; Vacard (Thierry Frémont) is his seasoned, hardheaded second-in-command; and Michel (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) is a young and inexperienced soldier. Other characters fit in with these stock characters: soldiers Saria (Aurélien Wiik) and Malovitch (Matthias Van Khache) have only slightly more experience than Michel, and Ballant (Emmanuel Bonami) is a soldier similar to Vacard, with a lot of experience and violent tendencies. The time of the storytelling is manipulated with precision by the filmmakers through the use of a framing device, a series of premonitory dreams, and a final revelation. The film opens with an extreme long shot of the desert, with shots becoming closer until we see a man stumbling on a road, wounded, a briefcase chained to him. We cannot see his face, wrapped in a headdress, and his torn-up uniform is hard to identify. As with shots of Rachid at the beginning of L’Ennemi intime, the headdress might make us think he is an ALN fighter, but this turns out to be false. From the beginning, the film is hinting that things might not be as we may assume. Right before the man falls to the ground, exhausted, the camera cuts to a long shot of him, filmed from a shimmering distance that recalls a mirage, making us wonder if he is even quite real. The soldier, who was part of a French unit that had been missing for a week, is found by a French patrol and brought back to headquarters. The young man’s flashback narrative becomes the film we are watching. The bulk of the film is thus made up of a long flashback. It is only toward the end of the film, when the soldier is done telling his story, that we find out who he is. The flashback portion is filmed primarily through the point of view of Michel, leading the audience to assume that he is the soldier telling the story but once again, that turns out not to be the case. Like Terrien in L’Ennemi, Michel starts having dreams that are revealed to be visions of the future. Eleven minutes into the film, he thinks/dreams that he is meeting a young Algerian boy (Zakaria Lahouissi) who is holding his camera, and that the two of them witness a bright flash of light followed by some kind of a sandstorm. Twenty-seven minutes into the film, the unit encounters that very same boy. Michel tells another soldier, Saria, that he had seen that boy the night before, to which Saria reassures him that it must have been a dream, and Michel asks him, “Tu crois que je deviens fou?” (You think I’m going crazy?) The theme of madness becomes repeated as the men are thrown back into traumatic events of their past and start killing one another until only Michel and Malovitch remain. Michel’s visions are sometimes explanatory flashbacks, sometimes premonitory flash-forwards. They are generally jumbled enough to maintain suspense. Visually, the film relies on Orientalist imagery, especially through landscape: from its very first image as described above, the beautifully dangerous

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desert is omnipresent. The film also relies on the white savior trope. Daouia (Raouia Harandi), a village woman who speaks French, first introduces herself to Michel as “la gardienne” (the guardian) of the village and later says that she might be seen as a “sorcière” (witch). Like Michel, she has been having visions. An hour and five minutes into the film she tells him, “Tu seras le prochain gardien. C’est toi qui va me remplacer” (You will be the next guardian. You will take my place). Michel ends up assuming this role and remains in the village after Daouia is killed by crazed Saria. The Algerian woman has to die for the white French man to take her place. The film thus somewhat perversely positions him as guardian of the Algerian village (rather than its colonial occupier), and his legitimacy in this role is paradoxically vouched for by Daouia (see also Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War 85). Djinns is one of seven films in my corpus that cast an Algerian woman as important to the narrative. However, Daouia is not an FLN fighter or supporter, as one may initially expect. Further, the film intimates that the Algerian village and its inhabitants, including Daouia and the boy, may be a hallucination caused by the djinns. She explains to Michel that the haunting presence the men have been experiencing are “des djinns, des habitants du désert. . . . Ils essaient de te parler. Eux aussi ils ont peur” (desert-dwelling djinns. . . . They are trying to speak to you. They too are afraid) and later “Ils manipulent les esprits des hommes pour les rendre fous” (they manipulate men’s minds to make them crazy). The etymology of djinn means “invisible, unseen, or hidden” (El-Zein xvi; see also Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War 76) and it is related to the Arabic word majnun, crazy (possessed) (El-Zein 74). We only find out at the end of the film that the reason why the djinns are trying to conceal the briefcase from the French leadership’s view by playing on the French soldiers’ fears, making them hallucinate and turn on one another, is to protect the land. In this film, the agency is more with the djinns who enter the French soldiers’ minds than with Daouia or with ALN fighters. The djinns, not the ALN fighters, are responsible for most of the French men’s deaths. The ALN fighters are initially presented as the enemy, as they engage in skirmishes with the French unit and are eventually taken prisoner. After the first skirmish, eighteen minutes into the film, we see the French soldiers huddling, the camera filming them from behind. In the next shot, we see them from a different angle, and part of the lens is masked to create a shape that looks like we are seeing the soldiers through binoculars; in the center of the shot is Vacard, looking back through his own binoculars. The withholding of the establishing shot creates uncertainty as to who is looking at the French soldiers and whom Vacard is looking at. In the next shot, the camera focuses on an extreme close-up of ALN captain Aroui (Saïd Taghmaoui) looking through binoculars. This reestablishing shot allows the audience to

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understand that the first shot was from Aroui’s perspective. Djinns includes many close-ups of Aroui, which allows the audience to be privy to his feelings of sadness, fear, concern, or uncertainty. Little by little, the djinns who possess the French soldiers push these men to become their own internal enemy, and Aroui even helps two French soldiers defend themselves from a third, possessed one. Although Djinns does not provide any information regarding the French colonial context in Algeria and although the ALN unit is not central to its narrative, the film does provide some brief scenes shot from their point of view. The djinns reactivate aspects of the past that the French men have repressed, the actions of which they are most ashamed, or things that they irrationally fear. For instance, Lieutenant Durieux hates scorpions. He kills one 58 minutes into the film, and ends up stabbing himself to death as the djinns make him hallucinate and see scorpions crawling all over his body.9 An animal that is believed to be able to kill itself, the scorpion may symbolize a war that could not be won, one in which France stabbed itself and its young men, thus highlighting its civil war aspect. One of the actions of which the men are ashamed is their participation in the war in Indochina, which is mentioned repeatedly. Vacard, the seasoned second-in-command, fought in Indochina, as did the ALN unit leader, Captain Aroui. The film suggests that the French are haunted by repressed memories of other wars of decolonization and not just the Algerian war. In Vacard’s hallucinations, he is back in Vietnam as a prisoner, reliving his darkest act, when he brutally killed another soldier who was moaning from hurt after torture, because he could not bear these sounds of pain and just wanted “silence.” His likely killings of Vietnamese soldiers are not mentioned, implying that he has no qualms about them. Durieux (his superior in Algeria) appears in his Vietnam hallucination, telling him, “Le silence, ça n’existe pas” (Silence doesn’t exist), after which the film comes back to the Algerian present. This superimposition of two colonial wars supports sociologist Marnia Lazreg’s observation that “in combat zones, Algeria merged with Vietnam” in the minds of many Vietnam War veterans stationed in Algeria (176). Further, if France is now in the fourth phase of its Algeria syndrome, that of difficult anamnesis, Djinns represents the Indochinese war as the repressed of the repressed, suggesting that behind memories of the Algerian war lurks the specter of the Indochinese war (see Robic-Diaz 16–17; McCormack 14). There is also a reference to World War II (in which Vacard had served) and to anti-Semitism (one crazed soldier is evidently going after Malovitch because he is Jewish). With this film—like L’Ennemi and Mon Colonel— connecting “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg) from World War II, to Indochina, to Algeria, one may wonder whether Djinns is also warning its audience about present and future wars, especially imperial ones; the

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spirits are haunting the French soldiers in order to protect the present and the future. It is only in the last two minutes of the film that we find out what was in the briefcase: an official letter from President de Gaulle authorizing France’s first nuclear test in the region. The film then cuts to Michel and the Algerian boy (carrying Michel’s camera), standing outside as in Michel’s initial vision, a bit ahead of the rest of the villagers. We see a very bright explosion, after which the boy pulls up the camera and starts filming the mushroom cloud that is forming. There is no music; Michel and the boy are barely moving as they are filmed from the back, to the left of the screen, with the mushroom cloud growing bigger to the right of the screen. This is a powerful sixteensecond-long take, made even more effective due to the image’s perfectly balanced composition and to the fact that it contrasts with the generally short shots used throughout the film.10 The film ends with a historical reference: “12 février 1960: Première explosion nucléaire atmosphérique française dans le sud de l’Algérie” (February 12, 1960: First French atmospheric nuclear explosion in southern Algeria).11 In the last two minutes of the film, the audience is led to reevaluate everything we thought we had understood about the film, in particular, the role of the djinns, who turned out to have been trying to save the land by preventing de Gaulle’s letter from being delivered to its recipient. The film ultimately undermines the white savior trope it had initially set up since Michel is unable to protect the village, and everyone who managed to survive up to this point in the film will suffer the consequences of radiation for the rest of their lives. France’s atomic explosions in the Sahara from 1960 to 1966 were in the news in late 2007, as the French government was discussing reparations for these actions and the possibility of finally providing medical care to the tens of thousands of people who were exposed to the radiation (Stora, “Entre la France et l’Algérie” 340). In 2008, the French government did provide financial compensation to former French soldiers in that situation (Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War 79). In a 2008 interview, Djinns’ directors explain that they had wanted to make this film for eight or nine years (CloneWeb). Djinns, on the surface an Orientalist film inwardly focused on the selfdestruction of French soldiers, actually deals with nuclear tests in one of France’s colonies, an aspect of the Algerian war that is rarely present in fiction films about the war (see Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War 77). The fact that we must wait for more than ninety minutes to get to the final illumination in the last two minutes of the film makes the revelation that closes the film even more striking. Ending with images that inevitably remind us of Hiroshima, the film stages the haunting return of this longhidden history and makes a powerful argument for a nuclear-weapon-free future.

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Like Caché (discussed in the next chapter), Djinns relies on a violent illumination or gesture that blinds just as much as it reveals. Both Djinns and La Trahison shake certainties and make the audience ask itself questions about the war, but they do so in different ways. Djinns does this by ending with a spectacular plot twist, while La Trahison uses a variety of film techniques to establish several points of view that generate a certain level of ambiguity. MAKING THE AUDIENCE ASK ITSELF DIFFICULT QUESTIONS: LA TRAHISON (PHILIPPE FAUCON, 2006) For Stora, La Trahison (The Betrayal) provides a new vision of the Algerian war of independence in significant ways: first, and most importantly, the four drafted Algerian characters are complex subjects and agents rather than objects of the narrative: “La vraie rupture se situe là, dans cette émergence de la figure du colonisé” (“La Guerre d’Algérie: La Mémoire” 270) (The real break with the past lies precisely in the emergence of the figure of the colonized). He adds that La Trahison “montre un aspect de la guerre qui a été peu filmé: une guerre faite d’attente, de tension quotidienne dans des postes isolés, avec de brusques explosions de violence. Ce film donne aussi à voir une réalité dont on a peu parlé, celle du déplacement des populations paysannes par l’armée française” (“Entre la France et l’Algérie” 331) (shows a seldom filmed aspect of the war: the daily waiting and tension in isolated outposts, with some sudden explosions of violence. This film also represents a rarely talked about reality, that of the displacement of rural populations by the French military). Civilian internment camps are also visible in Cartouches gauloises (discussed in chapter 3). These latter two aspects had been previously represented in literature about the war and in documentaries such as Tavernier and Rotman’s La Guerre sans nom, if not in fiction film form. In both historical and fictional representations of the war, harkis (enlisted Algerian soldiers) are mentioned, but the fact that young Algerian men, considered French subjects, were drafted into the French military and paradoxically served in Algeria during the war of national liberation from the French is not as well-known.12 La Trahison focuses on four such young appelés (conscripts) in a French military unit led by young lieutenant Roque (Vincent Martinez). It takes place in a rural area of Algeria during a two-week period in March 1960. It is based on an autobiographical text of the same title by Claude Sales, a respected French journalist who had led a similar patrol in an Algerian town in 1959 and found out that the Algerian appelés under his command had planned to kill him.13 Roque is warned of this betrayal exactly halfway (forty minutes) into the film, and the rest of the film is spent in uncertainty, with Roque trying to figure out whether the conscripts are guilty or

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not. The film follows the text fairly closely, including its dialogue. However, the book is more directly critical of the racist colonial order and of the war than the film. The other main difference lies in the order of events. The book begins with the intelligence officer informing the narrator of the probable betrayal of the Algerian conscripts, who are taken away two-thirds of the way into the narrative instead of at the end of the film. These organizational changes allow the film’s audience to learn about the four men before any suspicion is raised, which helps establish a connection with them. Waiting until the end to reveal that they are eventually taken into custody heightens the sense that their fate is tragic. Although La Trahison is a war film centering on an army unit, it does not follow the war film genre formulas, as Wallenbrock notes.14 Instead of focusing on epic or gritty violent battle scenes with the enemy, or, as in L’Ennemi intime, Mon Colonel, and Djinns, on stock military characters’ infighting, this film forces the audience to ask itself difficult questions about the war by highlighting the ambiguous positions it created. Instead of the fast cutting typical of action and war films today, La Trahison relies on long takes that follow characters’ physical trajectories through the landscape and village streets. Instead of using a rousing or suspense-creating musical score à la Spielberg, it includes almost no musical score.15 More than half of the film has neither dialogue nor music. The film relies on silence, as well as on diegetic sounds of three primary types: military sounds (jeeps and trucks, helicopters and planes, machine guns); animal sounds (dogs barking, farm animal sounds, and bird songs); and noises from the village serving as an internment camp for Algerian civilians, who have to build their own shacks (e.g., we hear repeated hammering noises). Even though this is the shortest film in my corpus at eighty minutes, the use of long takes, lack of a didactic score, sparse dialogues, substantial use of silence and of characters exhibiting what Wallenbrock calls “pensive looks” (“The Algerian War Era” 161) all slow the film down, making it feel longer than it actually is. These cinematic techniques contribute to creating a meditative atmosphere conducive to thought. The film does not provide easy answers or closure, and its ambiguities stay with the audience long after its last image has disappeared from the screen, a close-up of Taïeb’s face (the central Algerian conscript, played by Ahmed Berrahma). For Steven Ungar, the film’s “irresolution” reflects a similar state of mind in early twenty-first-century France with respect to the memory of the war (285). The long take has become more and more unusual in mainstream film, due to the increasing use of small viewing screens such as television, tablets, and cell phones, and the influence of commercials, video clips, and music videos (Bordwell and Thompson 248–49). Many films today rely on a majority of very short shots of two seconds or less. In contrast, La Trahison makes

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liberal use of 6–7, 15–17, and even 20–22-second-long shots. The long takes become longer and more numerous in the second half of the film, with a few of them even lasting a minute or more.16 Bordwell and Thompson note that “most long takes . . . rely on camera movement. Panning, tracking, craning, or zooming can be used to present continually changing vantage points that are comparable in some ways to the shifts of view supplied by editing” (212–13), and that “long takes tend to be framed in medium or long shots rather than close-ups” (214). The use of medium and long shots also allows the filmmaker to focus on groups rather than individuals and to highlight relationships among the characters through the composition of the shots (see Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 177). The prevalence of medium and long shots makes the use of close-ups more remarkable. The close-ups and medium close-ups are primarily of Roque’s and Taïeb’s faces, looking uncertain or introspective. The close-ups of Taïeb’s face, in particular, allow the film to suggest his emotions (from uncertainty and confusion to becoming upset or angry). Wallenbrock notes that “the audience is increasingly invested in the Muslim characters, especially in Taïeb, whose strong presence is enhanced with abundant camera time” (169). La Trahison does not center on any FLN fighters; as per Robic-Diaz and Ruscio in the quotation above, most of the ones we see are dead. It also does not provide much information on the colonial context for the war, as only a few mentions are made of the poverty in which Algerians live and of French colonial racism. However, the film does show the violence used by the French military during the war and provides an important twist on the theme of the internal conflict among soldiers in the occupying army. In general, in war films that focus on the green recruit’s inner conflict, that character is usually a member of the dominant group with little prior political understanding of the conflict. For the first time in Algerian war films, the character of the young recruit is an Algerian man conscripted into the French military during a war fought against his own people by the French. Further, the film generally refuses to fulfill audience expectations based on stock characters. The captains featured in the film are all thoughtful and calm (not inflexible as in Mon Colonel), as is the sergeant, unlike the crazed Vacard from Djinns. Finally, the film does not rely on violent, dominant white masculine military posturing or hierarchy. The naive lieutenant Roque does not clash with either his superiors or subordinates, and the point of view is shared between him and the Algerian conscripts, especially Taïeb (Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 135). The film does not only center the perspectives of the Algerian conscripts. As Wallenbrock demonstrates, it also highlights the villagers who have been displaced and interned, focusing on their gaze as they look back at the French soldiers. The film includes many long takes of women and children silently looking or staring at them as a silent form of resistance (Wallenbrock 171–73).

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As a filmmaker, Faucon has demonstrated an ongoing interest in female characters, whose names are often the titles of his films: Sabine (1992), Muriel fait le désespoir de ses parents (1997), Samia (2000), and Fatima (2015). The war film genre tends to trigger a focus on male characters, and that is the case here, even though critics have noted that Algerian women are more present in this film than in most films on that war (Wallenbrock 171). However, in spite of their returning the colonial gaze, women in La Trahison are not agents of the action in any way. Although Faucon does not follow the war film genre formula in other respects, he is not able to include Algerian women in a prominent way as active or speaking protagonists (only three of the women speak any lines). The importance of silence in La Trahison is evidenced by the fact that dialogues in French occur in about 30 percent of the film and dialogues in Arabic in less than 15 percent. As critics have noted, in La Trahison, the main job of Taïeb and of the other Algerians in the French military, both the conscripts and the harki, is to serve as interpreters between the French military and the Algerian civil population.17 As the well-known Italian phrase goes, “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor). Wallenbrock notes that “the military dependence on Algerian soldiers is apparent; the villagers claim to speak no French, and the French soldiers do not speak Arabic. Without translators communication is impossible, though communication can never be verified by the military leaders.” She also correctly notes that this aspect of the film is not raised in the book on which it is based (“The Algerian War Era” 160). She analyzes the play of subtitles and translation in the film, remarking that “the subtitles in these sequences warn of perjury, and underscore the larger question of colonial bilingualism, all while including the audience in the Arabic dialogue from which the French characters are excluded. This increases the public’s bond with the appelés. As the public increasingly suspects him, Taïeb’s translations falter from the original spoken Arabic” (180–81). Not only does the film push its audience to ask itself difficult questions, it also raises questions about its own status as representation. Inevitable questions about whether the Algerian interpreters are translating faithfully or not seem to be questions that the director and scriptwriters want the audience to ask itself about the film: Does it translate the war experience effectively, does it betray its stakeholders, or—perhaps inevitably—a bit of both? More broadly, how can one maintain historical truth and take a political position? The stakes of films about the Algerian war are in part about how to translate history into the fiction film medium in ways that do not continue to promote colonial myths. Like the photographic images that the French soldiers took (in the film and in real life) to identify the Algerian population in order to make it harder for FLN operatives to hide in villages, filmic images can be marshaled in the service of colonization or

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against it. La Trahison highlights this double potential of photography and of film (Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 172), making us reflect not just about the complexity of the war it is representing but also about the film’s own status as a representation. The film provides a balanced point of view between Roque and Taïeb. The lack of dialogue in over half of the film can be seen as a way to insert a space for reflection on the part of the audience, who is, like Roque and the four Algerian men, invited to ponder the situation and draw its own conclusions. The book’s author, Claude Sales, explains its title in an interview: “Dans cette guerre, tout le monde est trahi: les pieds-noirs, la population algérienne, les soldats. . . . La trahison était inévitable, et réciproque. . . . L’ambiguïté était permanente” (Lindgaard) (In this war, everyone is betrayed: the piedsnoirs, the Algerian population, the soldiers. . . . Betrayal was both inevitable and reciprocal. . . . We were in a permanent state of ambiguity) (see also Ireland 186). To illustrate this uncertainty, the film stages several scenes that take place in the dark (see Le Toux-Lungo; Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 158). Besides the lack of lighting, sound techniques are also used in the film’s opening scene to make the audience experience the characters’ uncertainty. Film music is often didactic, especially in action scenes. In its absence, we have no musical indication of whether we are supposed to be afraid or excited. There is twice as much silence as there is dialogue in this scene, and the diegetic sounds do not tell us exactly what is going on, thus compounding the uncertainty. The film in general makes the audience understand and identify with the impossible situation in which the Algerian conscripts were placed. They are made to serve against their people in an occupation army, and the FLN wants them to use their position to destroy the French patrol. We learn that Taïeb had twice delayed the execution of this mission, and while he does not explain himself, the audience is led to infer that he had misgivings about killing the lieutenant and the rest of the patrol. We can now understand better why Taïeb had asked Roque to be transferred to another unit earlier. Taïeb’s internal conflict humanizes him for the audience, who can tell that he is faced with no viable choice. Instead of quickly arresting the four Algerian men and perhaps having them tortured, Roque and the French captains give them the benefit of the doubt and conduct their investigations quietly. When the suspicion is confirmed and Roque finally tricks the four Algerian men into being taken into custody at the end of the film, the audience is made to feel that this action is a betrayal of these men, yet Roque had no other viable option either. The film does not provide much information on the colonial context of exploitation that led to the war of independence, with the result that audiences may infer that its message is that whether French or Algerian, good men are faced with impossible choices in wartime.

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The film was scripted by three French people from different backgrounds: the French book’s author, the pied-noir director, and a female writer of Algerian descent, Soraya Nini (Faucon’s sister in law). La Trahison leads its spectators to ask themselves hard questions about the impossible position in which wars place all characters, especially colonized recruits drafted to serve on the side of the dominant. Although it does not have much to say about the problematic nature of colonization, it does center on the gaze of Algerian characters in ways that show that they are critical of the war and of French racism, and it raises questions about its own representative status. As Bedjaoui notes regarding the importance of this film, “Pour la première fois dans le cinéma français des Algériens sont montrés non pas comme des ombres, mais comme des êtres humains confrontés à un choix. . . . Philippe Faucon réussit . . . [à] inverser les regards et donc décoloniser le récit cinématographique” (Cinéma 160) (For the first time in French cinema, Algerians are shown not as shadows but as human beings facing a choice. . . . Philippe Faucon has succeeded . . . [in] returning the gaze, thereby decolonizing film narrative). In a sense, the Algerian characters who translate between the soldiers and the villagers can also be interpreted as having something to say about children and grandchildren of Algerians in France today, who in many ways serve as cultural translators between their parents’ and grandparents’ generations and the rest of French society. At the center of the film is a dialogue between Roque and Taïeb in which Taïeb’s words are relevant not only for the Algerian conscripts but also for today’s multicultural French people: “On reste des Arabes, et vous des Français. . . . Les gens ici n’ont pas l’habitude qu’on les appelle des Français. . . . Ils ont plus l’habitude qu’on les appelle bicots, bougnoules, ratons, crouillats. . . . S’ils sont des Français, il faut les traiter comme les autres Français . . . Français total” (We’re still Arabs and you’re still French. . . . People here are not used to being called French. . . . They’re more used to being called sand jockeys, towelheads, rats, wogs. . . . If they are French, then they should be treated like other French people— fully French). For Faucon and his coscriptwriters, this is the central stake in representing the Algerian war today. In an interview, Faucon remarks, “c’est quand même une histoire qui continue à avoir des échos aujourd’hui” (This history still keeps on reverberating today).18 The fact that the racist past is still present today is attested to by the fact that the first three of the four racist insults listed by Taïeb continue to be used in French to refer to people of Maghrebian descent and Arabs today. If France cannot let go of its racist and colonial past, it is betraying its contemporary citizens and setting them—and itself—up for an impossible internal conflict that may jeopardize its future. The reverberations of this history on the present are similarly important to Nuit noire, a film that centers on female points of view.

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AN UNUSUALLY GENDERED POINT OF VIEW: NUIT NOIRE 17 OCTOBRE 1961 (ALAIN TASMA, 2005) Nuit noire is a made-for-TV movie that was released in theaters for the fortyfourth anniversary of the massacre (Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 2; Kathryn Jones 104 n.27). Director Alain Tasma collaborated with Patrick Rotman and others to cowrite the film, which provides a strikingly contrasting perspective to that of L’Ennemi intime. The film recounts in fictional form the events leading up to and occurring during and after the large demonstration of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961, and its subsequent violent police repression. Instead of portraying the massacre as an isolated incident, the demonstration begins one hour into the film and only takes up about fifteen minutes of screen time. It is preceded by repeated incidents that point to systemic racist police violence against Algerians in Paris, as well as FLN killings of policemen in precincts known to torture or exert violence against Algerians. This tense situation leads to FLN leaders’ decision to organize a peaceful demonstration on October 17, which forever changes the lives of the characters we have come to know. The film personalizes the situation by focusing on a number of characters, each of whom symbolizes one group and its specific position in the conflict. Nuit noire presents their various points of view, allowing the audience to experience each perspective, while making it clear that some viewpoints are more problematic than others. Characters are presented through crosscut vignettes that reveal something important about their lives. Some characters never change, while others experience a change in perspective with which the audience is sometimes invited to identify, sometimes not. Nuit noire focuses on police rather than military units and takes place in Paris rather than Algeria, but it is included in this chapter because it follows similar patterns as the four films previously analyzed. In particular, it highlights the use of violence and presents the war as a three-pronged conflict between French and FLN forces, among the French, and among the Algerians. The use of stock characters in the police parallels the variations on the use of stock military characters in the other films. The main difference between Nuit noire and the previously discussed films is that it focuses in part on Algerian civilian characters, as well as some FLN leaders. The first character we meet at the beginning of the film is one of its protagonists, Martin (Jean-Michel Portal), a police officer who served in Algeria as a conscript and who is initially afraid of being gunned down by FLN operatives (who know where he lives), to the point that he is considering leaving the police force. The war is rumored to be ending soon and the FLN is amping up killings of policemen suspected of torturing Algerians. Crosscut with scenes of Martin with his family and friends are scenes in the lives of two Algerian immigrant

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workers, Tarek (Atmen Kelif) and his nephew Abde (Ouassini Embarek). Both are presented as peaceful men having to deal with unmotivated police violence. Abde has hopes for a better future and goes to night school, where his young, blond French teacher Marie-Hélène (Vahina Giocante) is very supportive. Prefect of police Maurice Papon (Thierry Fortineau), a real-life historical figure who sent Jewish families to death camps during World War II and ordered the racist profiling and massacre of Algerians during the October 17 demonstration, is also a character in the film.19 Each of his interventions makes it clear that the violence against Algerians was not simply perpetrated by racist French individuals on the force but that it was covered up and sometimes orchestrated “at the highest level.”20 Minor characters include Abde’s boss Lucien Hirsch (Bruno AbrahamKremer), a (possibly Jewish) former Resistance fighter, and a police brigadier (Serge Riaboukine), both of whom are against racist profiling and violence against Algerians (called ratonnades in French at the time). The brigadier is contrasted with a couple of policemen, such as Martin’s colleague Delmas (Philippe Bas), who takes the lead in a number of unmotivated racist beatings of Algerians. In her analysis of Nuit noire, Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner notes that the film takes great care not to demonize the police and to show a “hétérogénéité” (heterogeneity) of perspectives within this group and among Algerians as well (189). As in La Trahison, the film plays on the stock characters responsible for enforcing the law. Although there is no naive recruit or lieutenant, Martin’s trajectory, like Terrien’s in L’Ennemi, leads him to racially motivated violence. The commander ready to systematically order violence is present in the chillingly calm figure of Papon. Instead of a similarly hardened captain, the brigadier cuts a fairly humanitarian figure, like Terrien at the beginning of L’Ennemi. Unlike Terrien, however, the brigadier maintains this position throughout the film. Several racist and violence-prone police officers (similar to the sergeant’s stock character in military films) are present in Nuit noire and exemplified by Delmas. Nuit noire also highlights the role of French civilians who sided with the FLN, like Ascencio in Mon Colonel. One porteuse de valises (French people who helped the FLN), Nathalie (Florence Thomassin), involves her friend Sabine (Clotilde Courau) in her illegal activities by asking her to first hide a suitcase and then FLN leader Maurice (Jalil Naciri), who appears to be Nathalie’s boyfriend as well.21 We also meet a few other FLN leaders based in Nanterre, where many Algerians lived in shacks at the time. The two Algerian everymen with whom the audience was invited to identify, Tarek and Abde, are both killed at the hands of the French police. Most characters (the FLN leaders, Nathalie, Papon, Delmas, the brigadier, Tarek, and Abde’s boss Lucien) maintain the same perspective throughout the film. Four characters—Martin, Abde, Marie-Hélène, and Sabine—undergo

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life-changing events that modify their points of view and actions. When Martin’s best friend on the force is shot and killed by the FLN in front of him, his fear turns to anger and a desire for revenge, as in L’Ennemi and Mon Colonel. As discussed above, this reaction was typical of that of many soldiers in Algeria, who obeyed orders, had no understanding that they were fighting a colonial war, and did not initially feel particularly affected by what was going on in Algeria. Once they saw a comrade get killed, many of them would start taking the war personally and become more violent toward Algerians because they felt attacked and needed to defend themselves and their fellow soldiers. Those who had a sense that the French colonial presence in Algeria was an attack against which Algerians were defending themselves were in a better position to understand the situation and not react with angry violence, although that is not the case for Martin, who becomes representative of many French people. In a subsequent scene, Martin has decided to remain on the force and first becomes a bystander in the racially motivated police violence by letting his cop buddies, led by Delmas, beat up, choke, and kill innocent Tarek. During the demonstration, the camera lingers on Martin’s face in a close-up, leading the audience to wonder what action he will choose to take (see Mertz-Baumgartner on the film’s use of close-ups, especially in this scene 189). He ends up being the first policeman who starts shooting Algerians at random. The film shows the inexorable spiral of violence during the war, which gives it a tragic aspect, as The Battle of Algiers and Hors la loi do as well. The scenes of violent clubbing, beating, and drowning of Algerians are historically accurate and filmed realistically, highlighting both their violence and large scale. When Abde tells Marie-Hélène before the demonstration that his uncle has disappeared, she convinces him to go to the police station to report his disappearance. This is a logical move for a white French person sheltered from racist violence. Abde, who has wanted to believe all along in the possibility of integration and social mobility through education, follows her lead. Their racist, sexist, and dehumanizing treatment at the hand of the police, which the film had led the audience to expect through previous exposure to several ratonnades, comes as a horribly shocking blow to Marie-Hélène and ends their potential, incipient romance as they leave the police station separately. In spite of having fallen victim to police violence and having dealt with everyday French racism before, Abde, until this moment, still held some hope for acceptance. When he sees that even a white French woman will be disrespected if she supports an Algerian person, he loses all hope for integration and becomes radicalized. He stands on the front line of the peaceful demonstration, during which he is shot by a policeman. His death is hinted at but not explicit, as he becomes one of possibly around 200 or more disappeared victims of the massacre. When Marie-Hélène gets over her shock and goes

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to see him, his neighbor tells her that Abde never came back from the demonstration. Marie-Hélène does not appear to be aware of the demonstration and its violent police repression, which is not surprising given the censorship of the press exerted at the time, which the film also foregrounds. We find out that ironically, Abde had passed his certificat d’études (the elementary school exit exam for which he had been studying in Marie-Hélène’s class). This potential passport to upward social mobility and integration will be of no use to him now that agents of the imperial French Republic have dispatched him. Finally, Sabine, who happened to be out during the evening of October 17, witnesses Abde’s shooting, which a colleague of hers films. This is a turning point for her. However, her press boss will not air the footage because he does not want to inflame things as the war is drawing to a close. Sabine then decides to show the film with Nathalie, but the film is stolen under orders from the French authorities. This type of censorship happened to many photographers and filmmakers in real life (see Mertz-Baumgartner 182 and her analysis of this scene 186–87). Nuit noire ends with the list of names of disappeared and expelled men being read by one of the FLN leaders in a ceremony in the Nanterre shantytown from which many demonstrators had come. This commemoration of the disappeared without the presence of their bodies also reflects their disappearance from French state memory, which went on for decades. The film’s intended audience is clearly white and French. Of the four characters who experience a change of heart in the film, only one, Abde, is Algerian, and he is also the only one who dies. There is very little dialogue in Arabic or in Tamazight in the film.22 Even when Algerian characters are speaking among themselves, they use mostly French. Most of the characters with dynamic perspectives are French, and, as in Mon Colonel, the audience is expected to relate to the French questioners and dissenters. In particular, Nuit noire is almost unique in my corpus in that it invites the audience to identify with the point of view of progressive French women. Mon Colonel and Hors la loi do this to a much lesser extent with the characters of Françoise and Hélène. In Nuit noire, when Abde and Marie-Hélène go to the police to report Tarek’s disappearance, the camera focuses on her face more than on his, using many close-ups. She experiences a profound shock at losing her status as a citizen worthy of protection just because she cares about Algerians, and at the experience of the police insulting her and Abde sexually. While Abde’s reaction is more subdued since he had experienced unmotivated police violence before and is fully aware of the dangers of dissenting, her emotional reaction is so strong (and focused on through the use of close-ups) that the viewers are sutured to her point of view. Close-ups are also used to make the audience identify with Sabine. Whereas the film had begun with a focalization on Martin, by the end he has

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been replaced with Sabine, who started as a rather silent and passive character but is moved to action after witnessing Abde’s shooting and the press’s refusal to reveal it. As in L’Ennemi with Terrien and Dougnac, Martin and Sabine follow opposite trajectories. Martin is presented as a clear example of what not to do. His change of heart is contrasted both with the point of view of the brigadier and with that of Sabine, whose righteous desire to bear witness invites the viewer to identify with her by the end of the film. Sabine represents the majority of the French population, as at the beginning of the film, she is neither very aware of the Algerian context nor moved to care. After witnessing violence against the Algerians, however, her attitude changes. When she testifies to the violence she saw, the camera focuses on her teary-eyed face in a close-up that sutures us to her point of view. When she tells her boss, who says that a couple hundred dead are not much at the macro political level, that “C’est pour ces deux cents-là qu’il faut témoigner” (it is precisely for those 200 people that we must bear witness), she both expresses the rationale for the film and provides a model for the audience, who is also invited to take up the chain of transmission and to interrupt racist violence. The close-ups on her face, restraining her anger and speaking with quiet assurance, invite us to identify with her character and her newly found commitment. She becomes the model bystander who gets involved instead of turning away from the knowledge of the wrong that was perpetrated. To an extent, then, the point of view of sympathetic white French women is privileged in Nuit noire. In contrast, Algerian women are only a fleeting presence in the film, whose main Algerian characters are all men. A few Algerian women are present in the Nanterre shantytown and during the demonstration, where we hear their cries. We see unnamed, silent Algerian women mourning their disappeared family members in Nanterre, but, as in all of the films in this chapter, not one of them is an agent of the action. Compared to most of the films discussed in this and the next chapters, however, Nuit noire does present the point of view of Algerians, including that of FLN fighters. Closeups of Abde’s, Tarek’s, and other Algerian men’s faces invite the audience to identify with their fear, simmering anger, and unbelief at their violent, thuglike treatment at the hands of racist policemen. As in Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, the FLN is portrayed accurately as seeking independence through violent action and as exerting power inflexibly on the mass of Algerians. FLN leaders do not always agree with one another on what actions to undertake but fall into line with orders from above. The divisions in French society are portrayed at great length. While the film makes it clear that the French police forces operated through systemic racist violence that was sanctioned at the highest levels, half of the French characters we meet (three of whom women) are sympathetic to the Algerians, whereas in reality this group represented a much smaller percentage of the French population (Stora, Gangrène 239).

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This points once again to the film’s intended French audience, which is expected to find ways to identify with the brigadier’s and the three women’s points of view, especially Sabine’s. In an interview, Tasma commented that “On parle de la France d’aujourd’hui en faisant ce film” (Gillet) (we are talking about today’s France by making this film). Even if few French people took on a perspective sympathetic to Algerians during the war, the film is making an intervention in today’s France, hoping that, taking a cue from Sabine, learning about the events of October 17, 1961, will propel more French people to take a stand against ongoing and systemic anti-Arab racism. Mertz-Baumgartner mentions that “Les ponts sont particulièrement présents dans Nuit noire et figurent comme lieux symboliques de confrontation entre manifestants et police parisienne” (188 n.20) (bridges are very present in Nuit noire and represent symbolic sites of confrontation between the demonstrators and the Paris police). On October 17, 1961, liminal spaces of transit, mobility, and interaction such as bridges, metro stations, streets, and buses turned into sites of colonial violence and death. By representing this violence but also by choosing to highlight a number of French and Algerian characters of good will, Nuit noire seeks to make a positive intervention into contemporary France by encouraging French people to learn about and acknowledge their violent colonial history, take on anti-racist positions, and build memory bridges among various constituent groups. CHAPTER CONCLUSION The question of how to represent the violence of the Algerian war is a complex one that several critics have raised in important ways. Writing about the most violent film in this corpus, L’Ennemi intime, Stora perceptively points out that its “juxtaposition de cruautés . . . construit une clé de lecture—le cycle perpétuel de la vengeance—qui ne peut sans doute pas constituer la seule explication possible à ce conflit . . . sans ligne historique cohérente” (“La Guerre d’Algérie: La mémoire” 269) (juxtaposition of cruelties . . . provides an interpretive framework based on a permanent cycle of revenge, which cannot possibly constitute the only possible explanation for this conflict . . . since it does not provide a meaningful historical thread). A metaphor that is used recurrently to describe the increase in violence during the war is that of “être pris dans un engrenage” (being on a slippery slope) of everincreasing violence (the word is used by Lieutenant Rossi in Mon Colonel and recurs in many French texts on the war, especially those written by former conscripts and officers—see Rechniewski 91–92). Many Algerian war films are built on the trope of violence begetting violence, which has its filmic origins in Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. Such representations carry

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the danger of depoliticizing the war by representing it as a Greek tragedy in which there are only victims. As Wallenbrock notes regarding L’Ennemi intime, “This subtle element of fatalism . . . absolve[s] the [French] protagonist of responsibility for his actions” (“The Algerian War Era” 149; see also Leroux 138). He becomes a cog in a machine that will crush him. In this metaphor, the perpetrator of colonial violence or bystander becomes its victim, and the victims of his violence are set aside. Only films that include a critique of French colonial exploitation or systemic racism, such as Mon Colonel and Nuit noire, or which focalize the perspectives of Algerian characters, such as La Trahison and Nuit noire, are able to ethically represent both the tragic and the political aspects of the war. The critique of colonial exploitation is almost entirely absent from L’Ennemi intime, which repeatedly sets up the FLN as a savage aggressor by recycling elements of French wartime propaganda such as presenting ALN fighters as throat slitters with no Algerian civilian support (see Bedjaoui, Cinéma 252, 257). The critique of colonialism is present in Mon Colonel primarily through the character of Ascencio, the pied-noir intellectual, who provides Rossi with a different model that causes Rossi’s disappearance. Although Mon Colonel, like L’Ennemi, focuses on French viewpoints, it does provide an anti-colonialist perspective that moves the film’s action forward. While L’Ennemi, Mon Colonel, and Djinns rely on the well-worn trope of the war of decolonization as an internal affair for the colonizing troops, La Trahison and Nuit noire humanize Algerian characters and encourage audiences to reflect on the complexities of the war. The harkis’ paradoxical situation is made most evident in L’Ennemi. La Trahison is unique in that the internal conflict centers on Algerian characters drafted into the French military, perhaps making a point about contemporary France being a postcolonial multicultural nation. However, FLN fighters are barely present in La Trahison—most prominently as corpses exhibited in front of Algerian civilians. In L’Ennemi, FLN fighters are mostly invisible as people, but the results of their violent actions are repeatedly shown and discussed in ways that dehumanize them; as Wallenbrock insightfully notes, L’Ennemi “only briefly considers the two Algerians who suffer in the torture chamber, as accessories in a complicated French drama” (“The Algerian War Era” 154). FLN fighters are similarly almost absent or dead in Mon Colonel, which, like L’Ennemi, repeatedly portrays Algerians as being caught between the French and the FLN and not having deep political convictions. Djinns does stage a small group of ALN fighters (as well as one Algerian woman), but they end up being secondary characters rather than plot antagonists or agents of the action. Only in Nuit noire is the agency of FLN leaders staged. French women’s role is foregrounded in Nuit noire and in Mon Colonel. Whereas Algerian men’s and French women’s anti-colonial agency is present in some

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of the films, that of Algerian women is missing. All of these films represent interventions into both the past and the present. L’Ennemi’s critique of violent wars ends up somewhat problematically making a spectacle of violence; Mon Colonel presents us with a warning against totalitarian tendencies in two time frames; a critique of the use of nuclear weapons in Djinns relies on Orientalist tropes and plot reversal to tell its story; and La Trahison and Nuit noire both imply that French people need to reject anti-Arab racism in order to create a positive future for all members of the nation.

NOTES 1. Siri specializes in action films and thrillers and codirected the video game Splinter Cell. 2. The ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale [National Liberation Army]) was the branch of the FLN responsible for military action. 3. Amar is played by Lounes Machene and Zahra by Gigi Terkemani. 4. Lefranc’s name positions him as the French everyman, a representative of the thousands of young drafted men who lost their lives in Algeria. Terrien’s last name, which translates as “earthling,” can be seen as a way to highlight the fact that the Algerian war is outside the bounds of normal experience—an alien encounter against an alien enemy, in a landscape rendered alien and unrecognizable by the effects of the napalm. The alien, horror aspect of the war is foregrounded in Djinns, a film that relies on the genres of fantasy and horror to depict the war as experienced by French soldiers. On Djinns as part of the military-horror film subgenre, see Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War, 82–83. 5. Rotman and Tavernier had selected the Grenoble region as the geographical focus for that film. In L’Ennemi, Terrien comes from Grenoble as well. A clear continuity of preoccupations is evinced in both films. 6. Herbiet’s father had served in Algeria during the war (Wallenbrock, “Awakening,” 93). 7. Critics have pointed to the symbolism of some of the characters’ names: Galois is one letter away from Gaulois (Gallic), an indication of the national allegory at play here (Calargé, “Un passé,” 100, 105 n.16), which is reinforced by the last name of the actress portraying her, de France. Duplan plans everything methodically (Wallenbrock, “Awakening,” 94). Another symbolic name is Ascencio, indicating a certain (Christian) transcendence and pointing to this character’s role as a model. Christian imagery is present in a few scenes. Notably, after one FLN militant has broken down after being tortured for ten hours, his body hanging from chains holding his wrists suggests the imagery of Christ on the cross. He holds his legs at an angle, hiding his nudity, which hints at the sexual torture to which he may have been subjected. This image places the French military—and Duplan, who uses far-fetched Christian arguments to justify torture—in the position of torturers of Christ, in a very strong visual critique.

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8. Fiona Barclay points to the connection made in the film between political amnesty and national forgetting (“Derrida’s Virtual Space,” 94). 9. In L’Ennemi intime, two scorpions are shown fighting toward the beginning of the film, symbolizing a view of the Algerian war as a war between intimate enemies. 10. The directors come from the video clip world (Croiset). 11. The correct date (actually written in de Gaulle’s letter that we see in the film) is February 13. 12. See Ungar, “Two Films and Two Wars,” 281. The most well-known Algerian filmmaker, Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, was drafted in this way but “deserted after two months and fled to Tunis” where he was involved with the FLN (Armes, “Cinema in the Maghreb,” 464). 13. A historical reason for moving the film’s story time from 1959 to 1960 may be that whereas in 1959, the French military was winning the war, 1960 was a more confusing time when secret peace negotiations had started between General de Gaulle and the FLN political leaders. That generally confusing time amplifies and provides a fitting backdrop to the confusion within the French unit as to which side the four Algerian conscripts (and the rest of the Algerian population more broadly) are on. See also Ungar, “Two Films and Two Wars,” 282. 14. “The Algerian War Era,” 158; see also Ungar, “Two Films and Two Wars,” 280. 15. The presence of diegetic music in one scene to cover the screams of a tortured man suspected of belonging to the FLN is analyzed in detail by Wallenbrock (“The Algerian War Era,” 165–67). 16. Sophie Mandonnet has edited Faucon’s films since 2000. 17. Stora, “Entre la France et l’Algérie,” 331; Ungar, “Two Films and Two Wars,” 281. 18. Tournage; see also Ungar, “Two Films and Two Wars,” 285–87. 19. The film hints at Papon’s sordid World War II past. The character himself elliptically references his actions in World War II Bordeaux at the beginning of the film. During the demonstration, the police stop a bus and force Algerian-looking people to get off the bus. As the bus drives by, we can see that its final destination is Drancy. During World War II, the Jewish people whom Papon had rounded up (including children) were sent to the French internment camp of Drancy, and from there to concentration camps such as Auschwitz. The film has no need to linger on these hints of a clear lineage from Jewish to Algerian victims through Papon. His much-publicized 1998 trial and conviction for complicity in World War II crimes against humanity, at which his responsibility for the October 17 massacre was also brought up (but could not be legally pursued because of a general amnesty for Algerian war crimes), would still have been fresh in French memories seven years later. For more on Papon, see House and MacMaster, Paris 1961. 20. House and MacMaster, “Une Journée,” 272. Carla Calargé makes a similar point about the use of violence by the French military in Algeria (“Saint Michel or Lucifer?” 115, 121–22). 21. The actual leader of the FLN in Paris went by the moniker Maurice (MacMaster and House, “Fédération,” 128, 132–33). 22. Tamazight is the name of the languages spoken by the Imazighen, or Berbers, the indigenous peoples of the Maghreb.

Chapter 2

From Screen Memories to Intertwined Lives Caché, Michou d’Auber, Le premier homme, Je vous ai compris, and Le Choix de Myriam

Besides movies focusing on military and police violence, another set of films focuses on civilians and addresses the war in such indirect ways as to constitute screen memories that hide as much as they reveal. The first three films discussed in this chapter represent this ambivalent trend. The last two provide a contrasting position in which the lives of civilian characters from different backgrounds and political positions come together in various ways. REMOTE CONTROL: CACHÉ (MICHAEL HANEKE, 2005) AS CRITIQUE AND SYMPTOM Although it was not the highest grossing of all the films in my corpus, Caché (Hidden) has garnered by far the most scholarly interest, with well over 100 articles and book chapters and even an entire book devoted to its analysis. This is due in part to France-based Austrian director Michael Haneke’s reputation as a complex avant-garde auteur and in part to the film’s formal intricacy, shock value, suspense, and lack of closure, which continually keep the audience guessing until the very end and elude any easy interpretation. A variation on the bourgeois couple at the center of many of Haneke’s films, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) live wealthy and comfortable if stilted and disconnected lives. They begin receiving tapes showing that they are under surveillance. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that the tapes are related to something Georges did as a six-year-old boy. When Algerian workers on Georges’s parents’ farm do not return from participating in the October 65

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17, 1961, peaceful demonstration of Algerians in Paris, Georges’s parents decide to adopt the workers’ young son Majid (Malik Nait Djoudi). Jealous and unwilling to share his parents and large home with Majid, young Georges (Hugo Flamigni) lies to Majid, telling him that Georges’s father wants Majid to kill a rooster. As Majid complies, his face becomes symbolically smeared with the rooster’s blood. Young Georges then lies to his parents, saying that Majid killed the rooster to scare him. As a result, Majid is sent away. As the adult Georges later embarks in a quest to find out who is sending the tapes and why, he is led to the HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré; housing projects) where Majid (Maurice Bénichou) now lives. During Georges’s last visit to Majid’s apartment, Majid unexpectedly slits his own throat in front of Georges. The film ends cryptically with Majid’s symbolically unnamed son (Walid Afkir) and Georges and Anne’s son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) talking in front of Pierrot’s school, although we cannot hear their dialogue. This analysis focuses on the ways in which the film can be said to both expose and reproduce an oppressive colonial imaginary, at the levels of both themes and form. I demonstrate that Caché functions as both representation and symptom of France’s Algeria syndrome, enacting repression at the same time as it exposes it. Sylvie Durmelat notes that Caché’s “manipulative plot powerfully revolves around the haunting concealment rather than the (re)presentation of October 17, 1961” (“Re-visions” 109 n.14). Similarly, critic Alison Rice notes that Caché uses the October 17, 1961, massacre as “a crucial backdrop” yet only mentions it once in the entire film (98; see also Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 124; Flood, France, Algeria 11, 16). For Paul Gilroy in his searing critique of the film, Caché occludes the October 17, 1961 massacre more than it reveals it (233). Many critics have also pointed out the “multidirectional” memories evoked by the film, from World War II and the fate of hidden Jewish children (Rothberg 288–93) to the post-9/11 so-called war on terror being waged by the United States and its allies in the Middle East at the time (Gibson 36; Seshadri 32; Kline 558, 560; Burris 160–61). Haneke himself has insisted that the film is not primarily about the Algerian war but has a broader purview (Haneke in Crowley 267). However, since the film has generated so much scholarly and popular commentary, it is fitting to include a discussion of it in this book. Whereas most commentators see Haneke as engaging in a critique of bourgeois Western solipsism (e.g., Burris 153; Wheatley, Caché 85), “Paul Gilroy argues that the film does not expose complicity but rather it acts as its conduit” (Ezra and Sillers, “Introduction” 212). Many critics interpret the film as being about spectatorship (Herzog 27). Like Djinns, Caché relies on audience assumptions that are systematically undercut through editing. Establishing shots are either absent or last for an excessive amount of time, thus creating confusion as to the point of view and

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time of the action (Brunette 116). This leads the audience to ask ourselves questions about the status of the images we are watching as well as about our own frames of reference and the origin of our perspectives on any given issue (Yacowar 229–30). The French couple Georges and Anne is placed in the film in the position of the spectator. More specifically, the kind of viewer that they become is actually closer to the position of the film scholar, who watches a film intently and repeatedly, rewinding it, watching a scene over and over again to catch all the details of its mise-en-scène, sound, composition, and other aspects. We often freeze the image and come closer to the screen to try to decipher something that is hard to read, just as Georges and Anne do when trying to discover the location of Majid’s housing projects in one of the videos they have been sent.1 A number of critics have also noted that Caché is about the process of filmmaking (Grossvogel 41, 43; Freedman 23; McGill 149) and that only Haneke himself is in a position to have been able to create and “send” the tapes.2 In other words, the film stages the director’s literal remote control of every aspect of the film, and of its multiple filmic mises en abyme, through recurring use of remote controls as props and by repeatedly revealing that images we initially take as being contemporary scenes are actually previously recorded footage or representations of Georges’s dreams, nightmares, or memories. Critics have also noted that the contents of the videotapes sent to Georges by his unidentified stalker are shot from “impossible” angles in the sense that the filming camera would have had to have been visible to Georges.3 While some critics view this as evidence that the tapes reflect Georges’s inner positionality (Herzog 30; Levin 82–83; Burris 153, 159; Jørholt 95, 100), this interpretation only functions metaphorically, as it is unlikely, for instance, that Georges could have had initial access to Majid’s apartment to install a camera that should be visible to the audience in some of the shots but is not. Although Georges is seen editing his own television show and holding the remote control,4 the only likely possibility is that the videotaping camera is also the self-reflexive camera of the filmmaker, who is known for keeping tight control over all aspects of his films. As Catherine Wheatley puts it, the videos stage the “Director as stalker” (“Secrets” 35; see also Grossvogel 39; Yacowar 229). In this sense, the name of the street that runs perpendicular to the one where the couple lives and where the hidden camera is presumably located, Rue des Iris, is another hint at the self-reflexivity of Haneke’s camera’s eye (see Ezra and Sillars, “Hidden” 218–19; Herzog 31; Peucker 29; Virtue 289). As Haneke holds up a mirror to his intended white European, bourgeois intellectual audience (Gibson 36; Niessen 192; Laine in Flood, France, Algeria 22), he is also holding up a mirror to his own positionality as a member of that very same group. He is of course entirely conscious of this

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and points to this awareness through the film’s emphasis on self-reflexivity and on its status as a film. As Jørholt notes, Haneke’s “fusion of enunciatory positions” through his use of stylistic “free indirect subjectivity,” which aligns Georges’s point of view with that of Haneke’s camera, erodes “the classical distinction between a diegetic and a non- or extra-diegetic level” (96; see also Flood, France, Algeria 21–23). The absence of any music in the film, diegetic or not, enhances its ambiguity, since spectators familiar with mainstream cinematic conventions are very adept at distinguishing diegetic from non-diegetic music and at using non-diegetic music to help guide our interpretation. Haneke likes to punish both his bourgeois protagonists and his bourgeois audience (Wheatley, “Secrets” 35–36). However, in the process of being so cleverly self-reflexive, he also reenacts a new form of violence onto the postcolonial characters in his films and onto postcolonial audiences as well: although European nations (and therefore film audiences) are becoming more and more multicultural, Haneke’s intended audience remains solipsistically white and upper class. The gap between Haneke’s intended audience (someone like him) and his real audience (which may include people more like Majid) is reflected in Gilroy’s viscerally negative response to the film. In contrast with Gilroy, some critics have taken up an identificatory position with Georges (e.g., Gibson 33, 36–37). The film puts the audience in an ambivalent position vis-à-vis this protagonist: we learn not to identify with Georges as he is slowly revealed to be jealous, self-centered, slightly paranoid, and in denial (Jørholt 101), yet much of the film centers his subjectivity even as it interrogates it. In many ways, this is exactly the position Camus gives his narrator, Meursault, in L’Etranger. T. Jefferson Kline has insightfully noted Caché’s hidden Camusian intertext (554–55), toward which Gilroy also gestured (234). Over sixty years after Camus’s book appeared in print, Caché demonstrates that the French and European imaginary has not made much progress in terms of its readiness to stage the killing of a Maghrebian man within a narrative in which little else actually occurs, while at the same time obscuring the significance of this shocking act. But Haneke one-ups Camus, since Georges does not need to kill the Arab character, who conveniently dispatches himself instead (see Rosello, Reparative 116). Whereas most critics discuss the uneasiness with which audiences are left with as a function of their identification with Georges’s subject position and his perpetrator guilt or trauma, as well as the film’s unflinching refusal to provide any kind of easy closure, Gilroy (234) is one of a handful of critics who have pointed out that in critiquing the French and more broadly European lack of caring about the postcolonial Other, Caché also repeats that very lack of caring by having Majid unceremoniously off himself for the shocking benefit of the audience—the diegetic audience (Georges) and the film’s audience. Other scholars—with whom I also align—agree. For Eva

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Jørholt, Majid’s suicide “represent[s] a kind of wishful thinking in which the source of Georges’s fear eliminates himself without Georges getting his own hands dirty” (100). Ipek Celik concurs, asking, “Is it necessary to produce one more Algerian victim?” (75) She adds that the film “successfully represents the absence of the Algerian from collective memory or guilt but, in doing so, reproduces this absence” (79). Similarly, for Guy Austin, the “structuring absence at the heart of the film, is the trauma suffered by Majid” (“Drawing Trauma” 534; see also Pages 18). Instead of showing the violence done to Algerians by the French forces of repression—the police or the military— or highlighting the violent means by which Algerians overthrew French colonialism, the only agency that Haneke problematically gives Majid is to destroy himself. In this way, the violence of the Algerian war is not dealt with but covered over. For Patrick Crowley, the film both “evokes” and “entombs” the October 17, 1961, massacre (269; see also Schyns, “‘Caché’ de Haneke” 12). For Celik, it also “buries what it successfully captures—the perpetuation of historical injustice in present-day France” (69). Wheatley notes that the scene of Majid’s suicide is anomalous in Haneke’s oeuvre, as the director does not usually show on-screen violence done to human characters (Caché 80). Libby Saxton and Michael Lawrence have insightfully discussed how the violence to humans that is not shown on screen contrasts with the actual violence directly done to animals in many of Haneke’s films, as in Caché where we witness the killing of a rooster (Saxton 11–12; Lawrence 63; see also Niessen 196–97). We may ask ourselves a number of questions, such as how many animals were killed in the making of this movie, especially given Haneke’s tight control of every aspect of his films. Lawrence’s moving essay highlights how problematic it is to rely on killing a real animal to make a statement about societal violence (70; see also Niessen 196–97). Also, what are we to make of the fact that the one human death Haneke films in his oeuvre is the self-immolation of an Algerian character, a member of a group that is regularly animalized and scapegoated by many white French people?5 At worst, it reinforces Gilroy’s critique of the lack of value placed on the postcolonial subject not just by Georges or the French or European people he represents but also by the filmmaker insofar as he is a member of the group he is critiquing. At best, one could possibly see a metaphoric connection being drawn between the rooster and Majid. As Wheatley notes in her book Caché, in the drawings that were sent to Georges with the tapes, a red streak of blood comes out of a human figure’s mouth and a chicken’s neck. As Majid slits his own throat and the blood unexpectedly spurts on the wall behind him, the drawings are revealed “to be as prophetic as they were historical” (80; see also Niessen 190). A number of critics have noted the cultural association of the rooster with France and have seen the rooster killed by Majid as a child as a representation of Georges and his fear

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of the postcolonial other in his home, linking it to white French people’s difficulty in accepting the presence of immigrants and French people of colonial origins within France.6 It is unclear how much Haneke knows about the Algerian war context, but for a French audience, the throat-slitting Algerian character may recall what the French once called “le sourire kabyle” (the Kabyle smile). The phrase refers to one of the ways in which Algerian liberation fighters would kill their French and Algerian foes in order to operate quietly, because they only had access to relatively few firearms and bullets, and to strike fear into the hearts of their opponents (see also Schyns, “‘Caché’ de Haneke” 20 n.5; Flood, “Brutal Visibility” 86). Further, T. Jefferson Kline has noted that Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers serves as an intertext for Caché (553, 556, 558). Majid’s manner of death may thus also recall the fact that the French used the guillotine to execute Algerian political prisoners (see my discussion of Zabana! in chapter 4), as shown in an iconic scene in Pontecorvo’s film.7 Majid’s slitting his own throat thus appears as both the return of the repressed Algerian war and a reversal of historical reality, especially since, as Ranjana Khanna notes, it is Georges who holds “the power of cutting (whether film, a throat, or a spectacle)” (“From Rue Morgue” 243; see also Silverman 246 and Rothberg 281). Another possible interpretation, then, which to my knowledge has not yet been pursued by critics, would be to align Majid with the rooster, not just in the sense of Majid being animalized but perhaps through asking the question of what it would mean for Majid to be seen as representing France. Neil Christian Pages notes the similarity in the filming of the scenes of Majid killing the rooster and of him being taken away by social service workers: “Instead of the f[l]oundering rooster, in this repetition Majid flops about” (10). After Majid has been removed, the camera continues to film the yard, in which the hens remain but the rooster is gone. Both the rooster and Majid end up with their throats slit, and Lawrence points to the graphic match between the spurts of blood in the two scenes (73–74). While Majid is in both cases the agent of the action, it is clear that both times, it is Georges who has pushed him to act. Perhaps one solution to the film’s conundrum would be for Majid and his son—citizens of postcolonial origin—to be seen as being just as symbolic of today’s France as Georges and Pierrot might be. Saad Chakali notes that Majid is played by a pied-noir actor, not an actor of Maghrebian descent, commenting that “Il y a là une façon intelligente de montrer par le seul emploi des acteurs et de leurs rôles la réversibilité des catégorisations ‘Arabe’ et ‘Français’” (n.25) (this is a smart way of showing—through the mere casting of actors—that the categories “Arab” and “French” can easily be reversed). And just as Gérard Depardieu is a national symbol of France (Wallenbrock, “Ideal Immigrant” 127, see below), so is Daniel Auteuil, if in a very different way. In an intersection of reality and

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fiction that would probably delight Haneke, Auteuil himself has an interesting connection with Algeria. His paternal great grandfather was—like Majid— taken in by the local social services, in Algiers. The family grew up in Algeria but their origin is unknown, and Auteuil himself was born in Algiers and grew up in the south of France (McFadden, 127 n.16; “Daniel Auteuil”). So Majid the Algerian is played by a pied-noir actor and Georges the clueless Frenchman is played by an actor of indeterminate ethnicity and with familial connections to Algeria. The casting of Caché thus supports Chakali’s insight regarding a generally inclusive definition of French identity. Yet, it must be noted that in this national allegory, the participants remain male. The mother of Majid’s son is not only physically absent, she is never even mentioned, and there is no sign of a female presence in Majid’s apartment. With the exception of one token Black friend at a dinner party, there are no women from postcolonial backgrounds in the film. By the end of the film, the future (if there is one) clearly belongs to the two adolescent males. Lineage is male—literally (fathers have sons) and metaphorically (the rooster), while mothers are absent, ill, or, in the case of Anne, somewhat peripheral; women of Algerian descent are not even an afterthought in the film. Scholars have commented on the timeliness of Caché, a film that was made in 2004 but opened in France a few weeks before the October 2005 riots of multicultural young French people from poor neighborhoods protesting chronic police violence and lack of economic opportunity (e.g., Celik 65; Pages 12). As Haneke was holding a mirror to French society, drawing attention on screen to what France had repressed, the repressed returned with full force on the streets. Haneke shows that even when Georges, and by extension French or European people, are given to see the damage they have caused, they may not be able to truly see any of the horrors for which they and their nations are responsible and which they are made to witness. Before slitting his throat, Majid tells Georges, “Je t’ai demandé de venir parce que je voulais que tu sois présent” (I asked you to come because I wanted you to be present).8 Caché raises the question of what it would take for Georges and the French or European people he stands for to be fully present with—to truly see—the Majids of the world instead of remaining forever self-involved, as Georges continues to be (Flood, “Brutal Visibility” 97 and France, Algeria 27; Gilroy 234). Haneke is not particularly optimistic about the likelihood of becoming fully present, as indicated by the fact that Majid’s son is not even named in the film. Both Majid and his son fall prey to Georges’s—and Haneke’s—“epistemic violence” (Spivak 266). As Georges reflects on the past events that resulted in the loss of Majid’s parents and the Algerian boy’s removal from the French farm, he hesitates between two interpretations of these events: “intermède” (interlude) or “tragédie” (tragedy). Calling such life and death events an interlude calls to mind the French understatements

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used to refer to the Algerian war in the 1950s and 1960s, such as “les événements d’Algérie” (the Algerian events) or “actions de maintien de l’ordre” (actions to maintain order) (Virtue 286). And although the term “tragedy” is much stronger, it conveniently occludes the agent of the tragic events and makes these events appear preordained instead of having resulted from French actions that could have been prevented. A sophisticated art film that seeks to train its audience to become ever suspicious of the truth claims behind any kind of representation, especially visual and media representations, Caché has been primarily interpreted as an effective critique of French and European bourgeois hypocrisy writ large, especially with respect to the continent’s colonial past and postcolonial present, both including and going beyond the Algerian war. At the same time, however, the film does center the subjectivity of the white male French character in similar ways as Camus’s narrative voice in L’Etranger did with Meursault over sixty years prior. The only agency Haneke leaves Majid is to go out with a bang and off himself. Although it is possible to read the visual parallels established between Majid and the rooster as part of a recasting of the national allegory in which people from postcolonial backgrounds could be seen as fully French, this recasting is limited to male members of the group. It is thus much more than “Georges’s childhood memories as represented in the flashbacks [that] are inaccessible screen memories” (Pages 14, emphasis in the original): Caché itself ultimately emerges as screen memory that continues to enact the repression of colonial and postcolonial subjects, as well as staging the fourth phase of the Algeria syndrome, difficult anamnesis. As such, it serves both as timely revelation and as symptom of the state of France’s Algeria syndrome around 2005. For critic Arne De Boever, “The problem of what came after 1961 is presented in the film as a problem of adoption: will France ‘adopt’ the children of those whom it massacred in ’61?  . . . Moreover, if France decides to adopt, to what extent will it ask those whom it adopts to adapt, i.e., to assimilate to the French way of life? What degree of adaptation will be required in order for them to be able to take up their ‘rightful place in French society’?” (176). The nexus between adoption and assimilation is at the heart of the next film discussed in this chapter, Michou d’Auber. DEEP UNDERCOVER: MICHOU D’AUBER (THOMAS GILOU, 2007) Michou d’Auber is a successful mainstream dramedy by white French filmmaker Thomas Gilou, whose films often focus on the lives of multicultural French people. Based on events in Messaoud Hattou’s childhood, the film was cowritten by Gilou and Hattou. The photographs used in the opening

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credits are photographs belonging to Hattou’s actual French foster family, and they are also used in the autobiographical novel of the same title that Hattou and Gilou published around the same time.9 The film covers a shorter period than the book. Hattou also cowrote the script for Gilou’s Raï (1995). He has bit parts in both films (he plays the Kabyle man who kisses Michou in Châteauroux). He was also cast in a more important role (as Mok, one of the two cousins) in Salut cousin! (1996) by France-based Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache. Akli El Matten (Mohamed Fellag), an Algerian worker living in Aubervilliers (a suburb north of Paris) with his sons Abdel (Medy Kerouani) and Messaoud (Samy Seghir), has to hand the children over to social services due to his wife’s illness. The boys are each placed with a different foster family in the rural region of Berry, in the center of France. The film focuses on Messaoud’s experience of being whitened in order to be accepted by his foster parents, Georges and Gisèle Duvailly (Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye), and by the mostly racist villagers. It ends with Akli returning to take his children back to Aubervilliers as he has married again after the boys’ mother died. Whereas Messaoud was initially unhappy about the foster arrangement, by the end of the film he has integrated into the village and his foster family and is sad to have to leave. The book continues the story, following Messaoud back with his father and brother in Aubervilliers, where he grows up into a young man. The book ends with Akli’s death and Messaoud traveling to Algeria for Akli’s burial. Overall, the book focuses more on Messaoud’s and his foster parents’ growing attachment to one another and foregoes the melodrama and racism of the villagers that are present in a number of the film’s scenes. As critic George Poe indicates, the time frames of the film and the book are somewhat different (200). Messaoud is nine years old in 1960 in the film and seven in 1963 in the book (Hattou and Gilou, Michou 19). This modification allows the film to reference a number of Algerian war events (Welch and McGonagle 100–101, 108). In the first minute of the film, right after the opening credits, Akli and the children are walking through Paris to the social services office. A mention of the Algerian war is overheard. The family pass by a ratonnade (policemen beating up men of Maghrebian descent), a délit de faciès (racist profiling), and graffiti reading “Algérie française” (French Algeria), “FLN dehors” (FLN out), and “Mort aux Arabes” (Death to Arabs). This short scene provides a striking condensation of the war that serves as the context for Messaoud’s story. In October 1960, the village school teacher (Mathieu Almaric) mentions to Gisèle a demonstration of Algerians in Paris that ended with a massacre (the film thus places this massacre a year earlier than its historical occurrence). Georges’s racist drinking buddies are veterans of colonial wars. One of them, Duval (Robert Plagnol), a rabidly racist Algerian war veteran, owns a necklace made of Algerian people’s ears that

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Messaoud sees him wearing once when Duval is out on the prowl with his OAS buddies.10 The film references the April 1961 putsch des généraux, a failed coup to keep Algeria French, led by French military generals in Algeria (this coup serves as the backdrop for Je vous ai compris, discussed below). Symbolically, that date coincides with Duval’s birthday, as we learn from a banner the men have tacked in their usual meeting place, the bar, where they gather to celebrate. On the banner, we can see that Duval’s nickname is “Coupe-coupe” (Machete), another reference to his violent past in Algeria. Toward the end of the film, Algerian independence is mentioned on the radio as Georges, Gisèle, and Messaoud are on an idyllic picnic. Other references to the war are made throughout the film. Children buy firecrackers called “bombes algériennes” (Algerian bombs) (one of which symbolically hurts Messaoud) and play “paras” (paratroopers) and “Arabes” (Arabs). When Messaoud and another child are chosen to play the Arabs, Messaoud comments, “de toute façon, entre les cowboys et les Indiens, j’ai toujours préféré les Indiens” (anyway, between cowboys and Indians, I’ve always preferred the Indians), highlighting the parallel colonial situations between the two historical and geographical contexts. A sheep-raising villager had a son who was doing his military service in Algeria, and Georges has to bring him news of his son’s death; most of the villagers attend the burial. Toward the end of the film, when Georges breaks away from his racist drinking buddies for good, he asks Duval if he engaged in a number of violent acts known to have been committed by the French military in Algeria. The group of racist men is ever eager to participate in ratonnades; they paint OAS graffiti on a town wall and attack Messaoud when he catches them in the act. Overall, the film shows that the Algerian war affected people living in rural France in an indirect way for most, except for soldiers, former soldiers, their families and friends, and people of Algerian descent (Welch and McGonagle 107–9). Like many other films of the Algerian war, Michou also refers to the two wars that came before it, World War II and the Indochinese war. Toward the beginning of the film, Georges had explained to Messaoud that the racist villagers’ leader, Viguier (Chick Ortega), collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. When the group catches Messaoud, Viguier is the one who drops Messaoud’s pants to see if he is circumcised, an action of sexualized violence that he may have had prior experience committing on Jewish boys during the previous war. Viguier, not Duval with his necklace made of Algerian ears, is the one who paints Messaoud’s rear end white to scare him, in a literal enactment of the sexualized whitening process to which Messaoud has been subjected (Welch and McGonagle 106). This scene is not present in the book. Beside World War II, another war is inevitably mentioned several times: Georges served in Indochina as a petty officer, from which we learn

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that he came back with physical and mental symptoms—malaria and shame over having been ordered to kill women, children, and old people. He also served in Algeria before the war. The film’s politics are primarily based on a neo-assimilationist discourse of so-called “intégration” (integration) that Nicole Wallenbrock (“Ideal Immigrant” 125–29) has shown was prevalent in France at the time the film was released.11 Messaoud has a French identity card in which he is classified by religious belonging as “Français musulman” (French Muslim). Such a classification goes against the French Republic’s commitment to the separation of church and state, which, in France, is usually taken to mean that religion should have no place in the public sphere and should not be used as a basis for categorizing groups. This highlights the contradictions of democracies when embroiled in colonialist ventures (see Stora, Gangrène 22–23). At the beginning of the film, Messaoud’s own sense of identity is multicultural. He identifies as being from “Auber” (Aubervilliers), a multicultural, working class Parisian suburb; he tells his foster mother Gisèle that his name is Messaoud, explaining, “C’est ma mère qui m’a donné ce nom. Ca veut dire le bienheureux, le chanceux” (My mother gave me that name. It means fortunate, lucky). Wallenbrock carefully details the relentless erasure of the Maghrebian and Muslim parts of Messaoud. Like Madeleine in Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (discussed in the next chapter), Gisèle begins by renaming Messaoud with a more French-sounding name, Michel, soon shortened to the affectionate nickname Michou. She then undertakes to whiten him out, literally bleaching his hair blond, hiding his social services records, and making him pretend that he is Catholic and comes from northern France rather than from its southern colonies. In the book, Messaoud is renamed Michel Le Franc, making the national allegory explicit (79). In the film, he becomes Michel Daubert or Michou d’Auber, a reference to Aubervilliers. His foster father Georges is rather racist, so Gisèle justifies her whitening of Messaoud because of his (and the other villagers’) racism rather than her own. As Wallenbrock demonstrates, the villagers’ combined insistence in assimilating him results in an about-face from his early proclamation that his name is Messaoud to his claim that “J’suis français, moi, j’suis catholique!” (but I’m French, I’m a Catholic!) when Akli comes back to claim him after the end of the war toward the end of the film. Wallenbrock correctly notes that Gérard Depardieu, who plays Georges, is a national symbol of France (“Ideal Immigrant” 127). Georges is a faithful follower of President de Gaulle, who also symbolized Frenchness. “Georges is the disguised protagonist” of the film (128) and “Michou’s integration is primarily important because it alters a French man’s view of the world” (125). The film presents Georges as the type of racist and sexist boorish brute Depardieu excels at portraying, as well as a benevolent father figure to

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Messaoud, even after he finds out about the boy’s ethnic origins (127). His perhaps too seamless acceptance of Messaoud is not entirely convincing (see Welch and McGonagle 104–5), but it is probably meant in a performative manner, as a way to try to convince a white French audience that they, too, can change their attitudes toward French people of non-French descent. In this way, the “film utilizes an epoch known for discrimination and the death of the French empire, to portray current French debates on racial and cultural difference” (Wallenbrock, “Ideal Immigrant” 125). Michou provides a representation of French benevolence through the evolution of Georges’s character. Although racist (something that was not emphasized in the book), Georges generally tries to calm his drinking buddies down when they talk of going on ratonnades. Toward the end of the film (but not in the book), he marks his final separation from his racist buddies, placing himself on the side of multiculturalism in a very simplistic manner that is most likely meant as a feel-good entreaty to white French people: “De toute façon vous êtes tous des étrangers. . . . J’suis un arabe, et puis j’suis un juif aussi” (Anyway, you are all foreigners. . . . I’m an Arab, and I’m a Jew, too). While placing oneself on the side of oppressed groups is important in the fight against human domination and helps deconstruct artificial distinctions between national origins, religions, and ethnicities, Georges’s statement also refers back to French universalist values that often end up ignoring cultural or religious difference and can easily turn into cooptation and assimilation (see Welch and McGonagle 103–4). Georges’s position can allow many white French people to be comforted in seeing their own “center right” neo-assimilationist positions as being entirely opposed to “extreme-right” beliefs (Wallenbrock, “Ideal Immigrant” 128–29), when in fact the difference between the two is arguably only a matter of degree. Although I generally agree with Wallenbrock’s searing critique of the film’s neo-assimilationist ideology, my interpretation differs from hers slightly in that I also see the film as highlighting some non-rationalist aspects of French culture and generally unacknowledged similarities between traditional French and Maghrebian cultural and religious practices. For instance, what kind of meat one eats becomes a litmus test of cultural and religious difference. Gisèle is able to partially accept Messaoud’s difference, agreeing to serve him meat other than pork. Because Georges does not know that Messaoud is Muslim, he tries to force him to eat pork sausage thirty-four minutes into the film, which causes Messaoud to throw up. In two scenes that are not present in the book, the film also interestingly highlights the similarity in meat preparation practices. About one hour and five minutes into the film, Georges is helping a villager deliver sheep for the Eid celebration to a friendly and welcoming Maghrebian community living in apartment buildings on the outskirts of Châteauroux, a larger town in the region (Depardieu’s

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actual birthplace). The villager depends on this community for most of his sheep business, showing how intertwined the Muslim and Catholic characters are even though strict separations have been created through racism (see Wallenbrock, “Ideal Immigrant” 143 n.4). Georges, the town mail carrier, is comically and illegally using his postal service van to deliver the sheep and make some extra money. A state vehicle is thus used to support a religious custom that is seen as barbaric by many French people of non-Muslim backgrounds. Messaoud has tagged along, and Georges, jealous of the community members’ friendly overtures toward the boy, mentions to him the stereotypical French belief that Muslims slaughter sheep in bathroom tubs: “Tu sais ce qu’ils font avec ces jolis moutons? Hé bien, ils les égorgent dans le lavabo, ou dans la baignoire. Après, t’as tout le sang qui gicle” (Do you know what they do with these pretty sheep? Well, they slit their throats [he mimes the gesture, moving his thumb across his own neck] in the sink or the bathtub. Afterward, there is blood spurting everywhere). The audience is not privy to the slaughtering of the sheep. However, eight minutes after this speech, we witness Georges and other villagers, including Duval, slaughter a pig. The annual slaughter of the pig was a major event in rural France in the first part of the twentieth century. Before France became a consumer society, many rural families like Georges’s would buy a piglet that they would fatten up during the year and then kill once it had grown large enough to provide access to salted, cured, and preserved meat for the rest of the year. The annual slaughter of the pig was a memorable event that was seared into impressionable children’s memory. The film stages this scene in a fairly realistic way (except for the fact that the pig is clearly a fake one). We hear the pig scream as Georges hoists him up, then see Duval pulling out his own knife, speaking for the first time in the film, saying “J’vais enterrer un Arabe dans la peau du cochon” (I’m gonna wrap an Arab in the pig’s skin and bury him). As Duval violently slashes the pig to kill him, some of the blood symbolically splatters on Messaoud, who is repulsed and throws up for the second time. In the scene just preceding the slaughter of the pig, his brother Abdel wanted Messaoud to steal money from his foster family so they could escape, and Messaoud expressed fear at being caught by Georges. Abdel replied, “T’inquiète, il va pas t’égorger” (Don’t worry, he isn’t gonna slaughter you). We later see Georges cutting up and gutting the dead pig. Thus, Messaoud is overwhelmed by the multiplying effects from his disgust at the physical contact with the pig’s blood, his fear of Georges’s possible punishment, and the terror of Duval potentially killing him if he knew his true identity. One cannot help but wonder if Duval used his slaughtering skills with his big knife on Algerians during the war. When Messaoud throws up, it is the racist violence of the French veteran of the Algerian war that he expels as much as it is the blood of an animal considered to be impure by his religion. Further, the spurting

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blood Georges had announced as part of the ritual killing of the sheep for the Muslim Eid is made visible and tangible in the scene of the annual secular killing of the pig in traditional rural France, highlighting the similarity in practices, down to the bleeding of the animal if for different reasons (to make pig blood sausage vs. for religious and health reasons). Nicole Wallenbrock has carefully analyzed animal symbolism in early twenty-first-century French culture, with the pig connoting Franco-Frenchness and the sheep French-Muslim-Maghrebian identities (“Almost but not Quite” 122). She also notes the crystallization of extreme right-wing identity politics in France at the time through a certain “pork obsession” (108), in which eating pork products becomes a litmus test of French identity. As she discusses, a version of this type of porcine politics is enacted somewhat humoristically in Michou d’Auber. In the extreme right-wing context in France, pork is being politically instrumentalized as “a French unifier against immigrants” (109; see also 115) with the purpose of making a French Muslim identity inconceivable. In contrast, Michou d’Auber’s parallel positioning of sheep and pig slaughters goes against this political instrumentalization. The film is edited using a J-cut to join the end of the pig slaughter scene, in which Georges is gutting the pig, and the beginning of the next one, in which the drinking buddies are gathered to celebrate Duval’s birthday and watch de Gaulle’s speech on television: the audio from the next scene—the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” playing to announce the president’s speech—starts before images from the next scene and overlaps with images of Georges gutting the pig. Slaughtering and gutting an animal are thus underscored as being part of a proud French national, Republican tradition. The film deconstructs the French stereotype about Muslim immigrants’ slaughter of the sheep by demonstrating that what French people tend to see as an expression of inferior difference actually represents a similarity between French and Maghrebian traditions. The film also goes against the colonial French stereotype of the knife-wielding Arab discussed in the previous chapter. The Franco-French characters are changed by Messaoud’s presence among them and come to rely on aspects of his culture and religion as well. For instance, Messaoud has a kteb, an amulet containing a Qur’anic verse that his father gave him before leaving the two boys, and which Messaoud uses to calm Georges down during his bout with malaria. Here again, as with the slaughter of the pig, the film creates a parallel between cultural practices that are viewed by many French people as backward and irrational and are often represented as being the purview of immigrant populations even though they also exist among people of French origin. For example, Gisèle initially brings in a local female healer and exorcist, who prays to Jesus but is unable to calm Georges down. Seeing this, Messaoud uses his amulet and says a prayer to Allah in Arabic, then puts the amulet in

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Georges’s hand, after which Georges calms down. The healer concludes, “C’est l’petit qui va l’guérir” (The kid’s the one that’ll heal him). Here it is clearly signs of Messaoud’s religious and cultural difference that bring healing to a Frenchman inwardly tortured by the atrocities he presumably committed under orders during his participation in colonial wars. In this sense, Messaoud’s assimilation is not complete and the Franco-French characters are shown to need not just his assimilation but also his difference. Later, it is the combined powers of church and amulet that reunite Georges and Gisèle through Messaoud’s intercession.12 Michou insists on the important fact that in the interpersonal collisions caused by colonialism, participants from both sides are changed by the encounter. In the malaria scene analyzed above, it is the passing of Messaoud’s amulet from his Algerian biological father to his French foster father that helps the latter overcome his illness. In the framework of national allegory, this scene can be interpreted to mean that France can only heal from its colonial past if it welcomes its postcolonial children as well as the culture and at least some of the religious practices they have inherited from their biological fathers—that indeed, France needs them if it is to thrive. However, these important correctives to a colonialist perspective can be lost within the film’s generally neo-assimilationist ideology. Messaoud’s amulet, and thus his religion, are only acceptable when the French characters absolutely need them to heal, and provided that Messaoud does not bring them into the public sphere but instead maintains a pretense of Catholicism. Toward the end of the film, the family has become a perfect union, and the film has manipulated its audience into being sutured to this happy ending and then feeling sorry for Messaoud’s having to return to his original family. The film portrays Messaoud’s biological father as a parenthesis or framing device, present only at the beginning and at the end, whereas their relationship is more developed in the book. Even though the film makes it clear that Messaoud belongs in Aubervilliers with his Algerian father, it also implies that he may have been better off remaining Michou of Berry with French national symbol Gérard Depardieu as his Papa. Michou d’Auber ambivalently maps out the difficulties in French acknowledgment of the impact of the Algerian war and debates over French identity, not just in the 1960s but today as well. Ultimately, it can be read as an appeal for white French people to recognize, accept, and even love what has become a reality: that postcolonial French people are part and parcel of the national body. Unfortunately, this appeal is done in such a way as to reinforce a neo-assimilationist, pseudo-universalist message that arguably forecloses an actual coming together and reconciliation of French people from various origins. Such a foreclosure is also enacted, but on Algerian soil, through Le premier homme’s solipsistic vision.

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TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: CENTERING ALBERT CAMUS IN LE PREMIER HOMME (IL PRIMO UOMO, GIANNI AMELIO, 2011) Italian director Gianni Amelio’s film was coproduced by Italy, France, the Algerian Ministry of Culture, and the AARC (Agence algérienne pour le rayonnement culturel or Algerian Agency for Cultural Outreach, a national organization that supports the arts). It was filmed in Algeria (Amelio in Gili) and is based on Albert Camus’s 1994 posthumous autobiographical novel of the same title. Amelio also wrote the film’s script. Like Un Balcon sur la mer (discussed in the next chapter), Le premier homme (The First Man) is structured through a back-and-forth movement between the present time of the narration (1957 here) and flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood in colonial Algeria. Instead of opening on Jacques’s eventful birth as the novel did, the film begins with the adult Jacques Cormery (Jacques Gamblin) in a cemetery, looking for his father’s grave. The loss of the father to World War I when he was an infant weighs on the protagonist’s life and represents an early trauma, hinted at by the fact that this scene takes place before the opening credits. The first post-credits scene establishes the time and place of the film—Algiers in 1957. The war going on at the time is referenced through the presence of soldiers and military trucks on the road. This visual manifestation of war is repeated several times throughout the film, often as a way to indicate the end of a flashback and the return to wartime Algeria. In 1957, Jacques has been invited to speak at the university. He listens to the previous pied-noir speaker (Franck Marcadal) concluding that the settler population should “répondre aux assassins avec leurs propres armes” (turn the murderers’ own weapons against them). In this version of the Algerian situation, the violence and injustice of the colonial world are erased entirely; the FLN is presented as the aggressor and the settlers as victims, in a convenient reversal of reality. The settler audience noisily shows its approval. In contrast, Jacques’s talk calls for a third way out of the war, “une Algérie nouvelle” (A new Algeria), “une juste co-existence entre gens libres et égaux” (a just coexistence between free and equal people), which for him is “la seule solution” (the only solution). Such a political outcome would have been viable in the 1930s and 1940s, when many Algerians and some of their political leaders such as Ferhat Abbas were demanding equal rights, supported by Camus. Unfortunately, these demands were rejected time and time again by various French governments (see Stora and Daoud 32). For instance, in 1936, the proposed Blum-Viollette law would have given a minority of Algerian men the right to vote, but it was defeated in France. By 1957, three years into the war, power sharing of the kind Cormery (and Camus) was proposing had simply become too little too late, as the FLN and many Algerians were

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determined to obtain national independence from the French colonizers. For most pieds-noirs, Cormery’s proposal is unappealing as well, as they appear determined not to cede an inch to Algerians. They are shown in the film as being angry with Cormery, with one man calling him a traitor, and the film establishes that it is dangerous for Cormery to be in Algiers. By 1957, Cormery’s middle-of-the-road position satisfies no one. A few Algerians are fleetingly portrayed in the film. For the most part, they appear as incidental to its proceedings. For instance, looking for his mother after his university speech, Cormery bumps into M. Saïd, an Algerian who is friendly toward him and whom he has evidently known for a long time. Saïd tells him where to find his mother, who is the main character in his life. At the end of the long first flashback, Cormery is similarly looking for his old history teacher and father figure, M. Bernard (Denis Podalydès). In a parallel setup, a teenage Algerian girl (Roumayca Abbou) tells him where to find Bernard. These Algerian characters are portrayed as messengers whose only role is to help the settler protagonist connect with the important people in his life. Sixteen minutes into the film, a graphic match of adult Jacques laying down in bed in his mother’s house, soon followed by a shot of him as a child (Nino Jouglet) in the same position, ushers in a long flashback to 1924 (another graphic match indicates the end of the flashback about half an hour later). Several scenes demonstrate that Cormery’s childhood was spent within the confines of his sad and hemmed-in family life, rendered traumatic by their extreme poverty. The loss of the father means that the family has to fend for itself in the absence of social services. The family is headed with an iron fist by Jacques’s hardened grandmother (Ulla Baugué) and is made up of his mother (Maya Sansa), his simpleminded uncle Etienne (Nicolas Giraud), and himself. In one scene, Jacques and his buddies free stray dogs that an Arab dogcatcher (Mohammed Boubkar) had locked up in his truck. The boys taunt the dogcatcher, who runs after them, calling them dogs (a common Arabic insult) in uncaptioned Arabic. He manages to grab Jacques and locks him up in his truck, making the insult “dog” literal as Jacques is made to take their place for hours (one hour per dog freed) to teach him a lesson.13 The dogcatcher’s son (Mohammed Boubkar Jr.) then frees Jacques in exchange for his sandals, which results in his grandmother beating him up for losing them upon his return home. In this scene, the two Algerian characters are represented as unfriendly rivals. The tall and skinny dogcatcher’s repeated staccato movements make him appear as a slightly comic and dehumanized figure. He is the scene’s “bad guy,” as dogcatchers are generally seen in film as oppressors of stray dogs who should all live in good homes. This allows the film to position the settler boys as literally trying to free the underdog from a slightly comic and scary Arab villain, in a reversal of the actual colonial hierarchies.

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In Camus’s novel, there is mention of an Arab dogcatcher whom everyone also tries to foil by preventing him from catching dogs (157–60). However, the subsequent scenes of the capture of the young settler boy and the loss of the sandals are not in Camus’s text. Besides young Jacques’s mother and his uncle, the other adult who is supportive of him is his history teacher, who holds anti-colonialist viewpoints and who has been a father figure to him. In the first school scene, as the children file into the classroom, we see a map of Africa prominently positioned on the wall, titled “Possessions françaises” (French possessions). The film thus highlights the colonial context of Jacques’s childhood, also reinforced by the fact that there are few Algerian pupils—noticeable in part because they are dressed differently from the European boys—in Jacques’s entire class. With two exceptions, these boys sit at the back of the class, thus reinforcing Algerians’ second-class status, in school as well as in the broader society. Jacques, the best student in his class, is positioned in the first row. The camera cuts to one of the two Algerian boys sitting at a desk close to the front a few times. Before the second flashback, Jacques is speaking with his now-elderly former teacher, who mentions that he understands the need for decolonial violence as a response to the violence of colonization. This comment positions M. Bernard as supportive of the FLN and provides a contrasting position to that of the first university speaker at the beginning of the film. It also serves to contextualize the events of the second flashback, which lasts only a few minutes. The Algerian boy, Hamoud (Djamel Saïd), picks a fight with Jacques in school and is punished for it. The apparent reason for the fight is that Hamoud questions Jacques’s manhood by calling him teacher’s pet, brownnoser, little girl, and “Jacqueline,” the female version of his name. The young Arab boy is thus cast as repeating patriarchal views of femaleness as an insult, implying homosexuality, and threatening the settler boy’s masculinity and the piednoir boy as reacting to this attack on his masculinity. As Michael Kimmel has demonstrated, within a patriarchal framework, such assault on one’s masculinity (which relies on sexism and homophobia to be successful) can only be wiped clean through recourse to physical violence, and the boys predictably follow that scenario. In this scene, even though it was framed by the teacher explaining about the violence of colonization, Hamoud is portrayed as the attacker and Jacques as the victim. Thus, in the first hour of the film, the three Algerian characters who intervene briefly in Jacques’s childhood are all depicted as negative actors who try to take something from him, be it his freedom, his shoes, or his manhood, and the two Algerian characters we encounter in Jacques’s adult life are portrayed as incidental messengers. The presence of the colonized in the life of the settler is thus experienced as either threatening or inessential. None of these Algerian characters is present in

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Camus’s book, which evinces an even more solipsistic representation of the colonial world. The novel is entirely oblivious to the lives of Algerians, who are always referred to as “the Arabs” and rarely named. The character who picks a fight with Jacques in the book is named Munoz and is characterized as being blond (170). His Spanish last name points to the diversity of European origins among pieds-noirs (see Stora, Gangrène 259). The filmmaker’s choice to change Munoz into Hamoud creates for young Jacques an Algerian antagonist who did not exist in Camus’s novel, thus allowing Amelio to focus more on the war (Gili). Amelio points out in an interview that the 1950s were only mentioned in about 10 percent of Camus’s book, whereas half of his film takes place during this period (Gili). It is at this point that the war takes center stage in the narrative, in contrast to Camus’s book, in which it never does. Although he had been a childhood antagonist, adult Hamoud (Abdelkarim Benhabboucha) reaches out to now well-known Jacques to intervene on behalf of his son Aziz (Hachemi Abdelmalek), who was arrested by the French for his involvement with the FLN. During Jacques’s visit to Hamoud, Hamoud refers to Jacques as “Français” (French), prompting Jacques to quickly retort, “Je suis algérien comme toi” (I’m an Algerian like yourself). Jacques then reminds Hamoud, “Tu m’appelais fillette” (You called me a little girl), thus highlighting the power of insults to one’s masculinity, the main thing Jacques remembers about Hamoud more than thirty years later. Hamoud replies humbly, “Je te demande pardon. Mon fils va mourir” (Please forgive me. My son is about to die). Accused of hiding bombs and explosives for the FLN when he was eighteen years old, Aziz has been sentenced to death by the French. Hamoud must humble himself and apologize for a thirty-plus-year event in order to move Jacques to help them. Jacques thus wins the fight over colonial masculinity in that instant. After Jacques goes to see a French official to intervene on Aziz’s behalf, an Algerian beggar (Zoubir Moumni) orders Jacques, “Donne-moi un peu de l’argent si tu es un homme” (Gimme some money if you’re a man). Of course, Jacques complies. This short scene demonstrates the power that threats over his masculinity hold over Jacques. It also illustrates Kimmel’s argument that men fear other men (131) and his uncovering of a major “paradox in men’s lives, a paradox in which men [as a group] have virtually all the power and yet do not feel powerful [as individuals]” (135). Even one of the most marginalized people in this society at war, an Algerian beggar, can exercise power over a famous member of the settler group in this way and get him to act according to the beggar’s desire. Showcasing his generosity after Hamoud’s apology, Jacques has also agreed to write an appeal to the French Minister of Justice. In the next scene, Jacques is writing in his notebook in a café, watching a young European woman dancing. This peaceful scene is interrupted by a bomb going off

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outside, reminiscent of a famous sequence from The Battle of Algiers. We see soldiers swarming the area, a destroyed bus, and dead bodies. The violence of the war is thus shown to be directed against Europeans more than against Algerians. Since the film focuses on a pied-noir childhood lived in extreme poverty and does not show in any way how the French and European settlers profited from colonization, it does not provide any indication of why Algerians would want to gain their independence or why they would have to resort to force. For instance, in the first long flashback to 1924, when young Jacques asks his mother, “C’est qui, les pauvres?” (Who are the poor?), she answers, “C’est nous” (We are). Although the film has made this fact abundantly clear, most Algerians were also living in extremely poor conditions. Le premier homme does not show Algerian poverty, however, making the fate of the majority of the population irrelevant and revealing the continuing influence of the colonial imaginary in early twenty-first-century Europe. The colonial history that is hinted at in the film focuses primarily on settler perspectives. For instance, in the third flashback, we see students reciting history lessons about France’s Maghrebian colonies by rote during an end-of-year school ceremony. One child mentions that “indigènes” (natives) were saved from Maghrebian pirates through “l’intervention providentielle des Français” (the providential intervention of the French). The term “providential” places French colonization in a religious framework that naturalizes and justifies it instead of interpreting it as a political decision, and the understatement—the rhetoric of intervention—glosses over the violent military conquest that inaugurated colonial imposition. History is also turned on its head, since Algiers pirates were plundering European ships more than the “natives” in the nineteenth century, and retrieving their presumed lost pirate treasures was one of the reasons for French colonization of Algeria. Another child recites in a monotone the list of achievements credited to colonials, such as developing infrastructure, the economy, and schools. The boys’ monotone, the contrast between this list and the poor conditions in which Jacques’s family lives, and the fact that we have seen few Algerian boys in school create some dissonance with respect to this performance of history. When one Algerian boy starts reciting about “la France, notre mère patrie” (France, our motherland), the cognitive dissonance increases. Jacques is positioned as somewhat outside this process, as he gets to recite a poem under his mother’s proud eyes instead of colonial propaganda in the guise of history. Most of the film showcases the point of view of Jacques. There are only two scenes in which the point of view of Algerians is highlighted. In one, when Jacques is visiting Hamoud and Hamoud is explaining Aziz’s situation, the film cuts to a thirty-five-second scene in which there is no sound except for water dripping. The scene takes place in the dark, and a flashlight is directed at the faces and bodies of a group of imprisoned and shackled

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Algerian men who are laying on the floor. They have been beaten, as we can see cuts and bruises on their faces and bodies. The sound of water dripping may hint at the fact that they are being kept in a damp cellar, or at water torture (or at both, as it is well-known that the French used to torture Algerian prisoners in the cellars of local villas). While it is likely that the scene is a representation of what Hamoud may be describing to Jacques, the power of the scene is reinforced by its lack of voice-over narration. As the flashlight blinds the men, they avert their eyes, except for the last man, Aziz, who looks back with determination and strength as the camera lingers on a close-up of his face. In the second scene, Hamoud goes to visit his son in prison, and Aziz admits to him that he is guilty. It is unlikely that Hamoud would share that information with Jacques, so this scene is the only one in the film that does not rely on Jacques’s point of view. Aziz’s quiet determination is contrasted with Hamoud’s sadness as he unsuccessfully attempts to convince Aziz to give information to the French in order to be spared. Toward the end of the film, we learn that Aziz was executed by the French. In a speech made by Jacques that is broadcast on the radio, he mentions that the young, twenty-year-old FLN supporter was guillotined. Unlike in Zabana!, Hors la loi, or The Battle of Algiers, there is no visual rendition of this event since Jacques would not have been present and the film is generally narrated through his point of view. Jacques then speaks the words that caused so much negative feedback when Camus himself made a similar statement in real life: “j’ai toujours désapprouvé la terreur . . . et je dis aux Arabes, je vous défendrai à tout prix, mais jamais contre ma mère . . . et si dans votre rage vous lui faites du mal, je serai votre ennemi” (I’ve always disapproved of terror . . . and I am telling Arabs, I will defend you at all costs, but never against my mother . . . and if in your rage you hurt her, I will be you enemy).14 The use of the word “rage” in the film takes away from the political dimension of the liberation struggle, whittling it down to a matter of personal anger or terrorism rather than as a response to a situation in which political solutions to the conflict, which had been sought since around the time of Jacques’s childhood by a number of Algerian political parties, had been ignored time and time again by various French governments. The film ends with Jacques’s mother (Catherine Sola) refusing to move to France with him because “y’a pas les Arabes” (Arabs aren’t there), a somewhat unexpected comment given the lack of the family’s connection with anyone non-related. The film thus ends on an explicit expression of cross-ethnic connection that is belied by what the film has shown us so far, as well as by the mother’s final gesture before the end credits roll, closing the shutters in her apartment. Le premier homme appears to have difficulty casting Algerian characters as agents, although it does a somewhat better job than Camus’s novel did. The actions of the one FLN militant in the film (hiding explosives) are juxtaposed

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with the explosion of a bus in which pieds-noirs are killed and wounded. The FLN acts are not explained politically since there are no references to the violence of colonization and since Jacques’s childhood is portrayed as having been so miserable. The protagonist is depicted as a middle-of-the-road person who pursues a compromise solution, but the film does not mention that this compromise solution was initially demanded by Algerians and repeatedly refused by the French during the period of Jacques’s childhood and adolescence. This decontextualization of Jacques’s story is all the more surprising as Benjamin Stora, the preeminent historian of the Algerian war, is listed in the end credits as a consultant. As the film tells its story through Jacques’s eyes, its audience is expected to identify with his middle-of-the-road position and to similarly condemn the use of violence in the process of decolonization without being given the backstory that would explain how the war slowly became the only possible outcome for national liberation. Although Le premier homme is the only film in my corpus to focus on the fictionalized figure of Camus, direct or indirect reference to him or his works recur in a number of films.15 Contrasting with Jacques’s solipsistic view of the world as rendered by Amelio, Je vous ai compris seeks to account for the points of views of various communities regarding the war. INTERWOVEN MEMORIES: JE VOUS AI COMPRIS (FRANK CHICHE, 2012) Je vous ai compris is unique in my corpus in that it is a graphic film, shot with actors and using special makeup and special paint on clothing and sets. The film was then graphically and digitally processed to give it a partially animated, hand-drawn look. Director, co-scriptwriter, and coeditor Frank Chiche is from a pied-noir family from Tunisia (Constantinesco). The film was made in 2012 and shown on the Arte television channel (similar to PBS) in early 2013. Most of the action occurs over the span of a few days, right after the “putsch des généraux” (French military generals’ coup) of April 1961 in Algeria. The film masterfully relies on the editing technique of crosscutting. The separate stories of three young people, Jacquot (François Deblock), Malika (Karyll Elgrichi), and Thomas (Damien Zanoly), as well as those of the secondary characters around them, told in short crosscut scenes, slowly come together into a larger narrative tapestry in which we learn little by little that the different characters’ lives are all interrelated. The technique of crosscutting is effective in maintaining suspense, as the audience initially wonders how these people and their stories could be connected. The first character we encounter is Jacquot Zeitoun. In the film’s first scene (as in L’Ennemi intime), we initially see a landscape that appears empty of

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people, until a French platoon that was hiding silently appears. What had seemed to be a peaceful, bucolic scene with a butterfly flying around soon becomes the setting for a war scene. Zeitoun, a pied-noir appelé, is shown as being polite to an old Algerian man they encounter in a village, saluting him in Arabic. Contrasting with his politeness is his commander, who tells him not to bother. In a short dialogue with another pied-noir conscript, we learn that Zeitoun’s knowledge of Arabic is not widely shared. The Zeitoun family is Jewish and Jacquot’s knowledge of Arabic may be linked to this, as many Jews had been in Algeria for centuries and spoke Arabic. It may also be connected to his father’s broad-mindedness. Jacquot’s generally friendly demeanor contrasts with his enraged reaction after ALN militants kill one of his comrades and attempt to kill other French soldiers during a skirmish. Freezing at first, Jacquot ends up killing an attacker at knifepoint and empties his gun’s charger into another, screaming like a demented person. As in L’Ennemi intime, the beginning of Compris highlights the change of heart experienced by many soldiers after losing a comrade in battle. The scene ends with the camera focusing on a medium close-up of Jacquot screaming, making us wonder if he will ever recover from this experience. Later in the film, it becomes clear that he suffers from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and that his main goal and desire are for the war to end. Compris is one of a handful of films in my corpus to include Jewish characters, although their religion is only explicitly mentioned toward the end of the film.16 The second character to whom we are introduced is Malika Ouamza, a young, female Algerian FLN supporter who lives on the large Kirschner farm, where her father Hakim (Mohamed Fellag) works as the overseer. It is mentioned in passing that they are Kabyle, a minoritized ethnic group in Algeria whose members participated heavily in the independence war. Like the Kirschners, Hakim, whose economic situation is better than that of most Algerians under colonization, is for French Algeria. The film thus showcases the way in which family members were often on different sides of the conflict, including among Algerians. Because of his political position and in spite of his daughter’s, Hakim receives a threatening letter from the ALN that makes him initially decide to relocate to France with Malika. Malika’s boyfriend, Ali Ben Chedli (Mourad Karoui), is also her FLN handler. The third main character we are presented with is Thomas, whom we later find out is the Kirschners’ son. Their German-sounding last name is a reference to the fact that many pieds-noirs came from Alsace. A supporter of French Algeria, Thomas is a photographer who infiltrates the OAS in order to bring information to his friend Henri (Luc Clémentin), a major journalist for the newspaper L’Echo d’Alger. Thomas has a limp, and most other men, whether soldiers or OAS members, are generally fairly rough with him. He is shy and likes Janine (Chloé Stéphani), who develops his rolls of photograph

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negatives and is the one who initiates a relationship with him. The connections among the characters are slowly revealed. Thomas and Malika grew up on the same property and Malika’s father works for Thomas’s. Jacquot’s father is a pro-de Gaulle, anti-OAS intellectual and writer. Jacquot’s sister Sarah (Laura Chiche) was cut off from the family because she once placed a bomb in a public place as part of her FLN activism. It is implied that Thomas’s leg wound is from Sarah’s bomb. Finally, Ali is not only Malika’s handler but also Sarah’s. Chiche explained the goal of his film in an interview: “Nous voulions ne pas prendre parti, en posant le même regard de compréhension sur tous nos héros, de façon à mettre en avant ce qu’ils ont d’humain avant d’être les uns et les autres ennemis, victimes ou tortionnaires, ni pour les excuser ou absoudre leurs actions, mais au contraire pour essayer de comprendre quelle folie a pu les amener à agir de la sorte” (Berthelon) (We wanted to not take sides, to try to understand each one of our protagonists in order to highlight their humanity before they become enemies, victims or torturers. This was done neither to justify nor to absolve their actions. On the contrary, we sought to understand what crazy impetus could have moved them to act in this way). The film is at pains to present the Algerians and the French as both victims and perpetrators, but with important if subtle differences. When the three characters finally come together in the long climactic scene of the demonstration toward the end the film, their bodies’ presence in the same location proves deadly for two of them. Malika, who had participated earlier in the kidnapping of Sarah’s Algerian boyfriend, winds up killing Jacquot; she ends up raped and killed by two members of the OAS who force a traumatized Thomas to take pictures of the rape. Sarah’s father and Thomas are physically disabled, Thomas from the bomb placed by Sarah and her father by a beating inflicted by members of the OAS. Parallels are created among the three protagonists, who slowly develop relatively similar ambivalent responses to the violence of the war. Jacquot had to kill ALN fighters at the beginning of the film but later only wants the war to end and peace to return; Malika is reluctantly drawn into the spiral of violence and ends up killing Jacquot; and Thomas, who was initially excited at the thought of joining the OAS, then refuses violence and saves Sarah’s father from OAS member Claude (Xavier Guerlin), yet he is also indirectly responsible for Malika’s rape and death. The two FLN men and the OAS men are presented as similarly using any violent means necessary to win the war. They are ready to kill and pressure others into hurting or killing others. For instance, Ali forces Sarah to make another bomb by kidnapping her Algerian boyfriend and showing him to her wounded, tied up, and hanging by his wrists. His posture recalls that of tortured Algerians in other war films, yet here the perpetrators are the FLN men, not French soldiers. Claude beats up Jacquot’s father, who was already

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using a cane, so badly that he ends up having to use a wheelchair. The parallel between FLN and OAS violence is reinforced through editing, as scenes of violence taking place during the same evening are juxtaposed. Claude offers Thomas the opportunity to go on an OAS-related action with him. The film cuts to the next scene, in which an Algerian man is walking down the street at night. Given the principle of continuity in film, the audience assumes that Claude and Thomas are after him, until we hear Malika’s voice. Ali and his unnamed FLN comrade knock out and abduct this man (whom we later find out is Sarah’s boyfriend) and Malika serves as the getaway driver. In the subsequent scene, Claude beats up Jacquot’s father. The parallel between these scenes of violence is reinforced by the use of graphic continuity in the crosscutting. The transition between these two scenes is operated through a ten-second shot of Malika driving the getaway car, followed by a descending crane shot of Thomas’s car being parked on a curb. Although the two cars are different, the graphic continuity and the fact that several bird’s-eye shots were used in the previous scene may initially make the audience think that the car being parked is the one driven by Malika, until the camera cuts to Claude and Thomas in it. The parallels created by the use of crosscutting, camera movement, and the mixture of graphic continuity and spatial discontinuity also highlight the civil war aspect of the Algerian conflict. While in both cases the audience is led to expect the OAS men to attack the Algerian man and the FLN agents to attack the pied-noir man, the film reveals otherwise, illustrating the internal political dissensions within each group. Through a masterful use of the techniques of crosscutting, editing, and sound, the film highlights both similarities and differences among the conflicting groups. In particular, it creates a qualitative and quantitative difference in the rendering of FLN and OAS violence. For instance, two other scenes are juxtaposed through editing. In the first one, Ali slides a gun in his belt and in the next one, the OAS men receive crates of machine guns. The juxtaposition of these two scenes creates a parallel between both sides’ readiness to use violence but also highlights the unevenness of their access to weaponry, an issue that Ali explicitly voices later in the film when explaining to Malika why they need to resort to planting a bomb. The film is thus careful not to equalize the two sides, while at the same time seeking to provide an insider’s view of each. Further, the FLN violence is never shown directly: Thomas has already been disabled by Sarah’s initial bomb, which exploded before the film started, and Sarah’s second bomb is defused by the OAS men who rape Malika; when the three FLN operatives abduct Sarah’s boyfriend, we do not see them hitting him—we only hear the sound of one off-screen punch. The camera focuses on Malika’s horrified face and then cuts to a shot of the two men putting the unconscious man in the car’s trunk; we later see this man’s cut chest but do not witness the FLN men hurting him. Ali symbolically runs

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his switchblade across the man’s belly to scare Sarah but does not actually cut him in that scene. However, this FLN violence is chilling because it is never shown as being done out of anger, simply as part of a broader commitment to armed struggle. In contrast, the film directly shows scenes of violence committed by the OAS, such as the relatively long scene of Claude beating up Sarah’s father and especially the rape of Malika by two OAS men. The OAS violence is chilling in a different way, because it is shown on screen directly, is motivated by anger, and is sexualized. The main area in which FLN and OAS violence is differentiated in Compris is, importantly, with respect to sexual violence, which is only shown as being perpetrated by the OAS, not the FLN. As mentioned above, we are given a hint of this early in the film, when the OAS men taunt Thomas because of his limp, implying that he is not manly enough to join them. The one primarily engaging in the poor treatment of Thomas, Claude, is overweight, and the film implies that his mockery of and violence against Thomas may be a way for him to prove his manhood and worth to the other OAS men. In one scene, he has a hard time climbing in the back of the OAS truck and two men are needed to help him get in; soon afterward, Claude pretends to help Thomas climb into the back of the truck but then lets go of him, causing Thomas to fall in the street, which makes the OAS men laugh. Instead of helping Thomas in the same way he had been helped, Claude chooses to hurt and exclude Thomas and to use a mocking term to refer to Thomas’s limp in order to be accepted into the all-male OAS group. In this context, the fact that his first name, Claude, is gender-neutral may highlight his need to overcompensate through exhibiting high levels of aggression and violence. He is also the one who beats up Jacquot’s father. His aggression is primarily directed against targets that are less powerful than he is. In the first scenes in which we encounter him, he wears a chechia (a traditional Maghrebian hat), thus also creating some uncertainty as to what his ethnicity is supposed to be. He counters his ambiguous gender and ethnic statuses through embracing what feminist scholars have called hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt; Kimmel). Hegemonic masculinity usually involves a perception that women and homosexuals are inferior, something that the film suggests as well. One of the soldiers in Jacquot’s unit, Thierry (Jonathan Devred), once beats him up when Jacquot is vulnerably naked under the shower. While the reason for his violence is unclear, it may be because Jacquot froze earlier before fighting back against the ALN soldiers who were attacking his comrades. As he is hitting Jacquot, Thierry directs a homophobic slur at him. Another example of a gendered and racialized term used in the film is the nickname that supporters of French Algeria gave General de Gaulle toward the end of the Algerian war, “la grande Zohra” (Big Zohra). Zohra is a relatively common Algerian

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woman’s name. In order to diminish de Gaulle’s stature, both physical (he was unusually tall, large, and very masculine-looking) and figurative (he was a consummate politician and a hero of the French Resistance during World War II), his political enemies gave him a female Algerian nickname, the assumption being that this group would be inferior to French men. The film illustrates how hegemonic masculinity relies on strategies of gender, racial, and sexual dehumanization that include violence. The OAS men’s hegemonic masculinity culminates in their rape of Malika, rendered unconscious after one of them hit her several times. Like Claude, they bolster their masculinity by attacking women and physically weaker men. The two OAS men who rape Malika justify their crime by referring to the fact that she was carrying a bomb, reminding the audience that rape was regularly used against Algerian women during the war (this may be an implicit reference to the well-known Djamila Boupacha case, which is discussed in chapter 4). The OAS men’s hegemonic masculinity is negatively contrasted with Thomas’s shyness with women and refusal of violence (he once saves Claude from paratroopers and Jacquot’s father from Claude), and with Jacquot’s inner struggle and thoughtful engagement with a number of other characters. The main victim of sexual violence in the film is Malika. About thirty minutes into the film, four pieds-noirs stop her on the street and want to force her to sing the French national anthem. Through sound, this early scene is set up as a prefiguration of the later rape. As Malika is riding her scooter through the streets of Algiers, the sound of the first verse to the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” grows louder and louder until she encounters their source, the four pied-noir men. The verse they are singing contains the words, “Allons enfants de la Patrie / le jour de gloire est arrivé / contre nous de la tyrannie / l’étendard sanglant est levé” (Let us go, children of the Fatherland / the day of glory has arrived / up against us is raised / the bloody banner of tyranny). Chiche cleverly and subversively recontextualizes the anthem in order to give it an ironic and condemnatory meaning. Whereas the song refers to enemies of France potentially attacking the nation and calls its children to defend it, here the attackers are French pieds-noirs and their target is a young Algerian woman. One of the men wraps her in the French tricolor flag and they try to force her to sing the French national anthem. In the contrast between the meaning of the anthem in the French context and the images on the screen, Chiche resignifies “La Marseillaise” from a French to an Algerian perspective in which the “bloody banner of tyranny” now refers to the French flag being used against Malika as a shroud-like wrap—a French mockery of traditional female Muslim garb, which she does not wear—that prefigures her death. Instead of a day of glory, what we are seeing is a day of shame—a cowardly attack by four men on one lone Algerian woman during a time when four French military generals in Algeria rose up in an attempted

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coup against the French Republic. This subversive use of the French national anthem positions Malika and her FLN comrades as being justified in fighting against France’s and its generals’ “tyranny.” The scene ends before we find out how Malika extricates herself, but in the next scene she arrives in Ali’s hotel room, crying. Through the use of ellipsis, the film does not show the violence that could have been done to her at this point, but it does raise its specter as a possible outcome. A parallel is thus created between this early scene and the later scene of her beating, rape, and death at the hands of two OAS men. The parallel is made explicit through sound, as “La Marseillaise” is also heard in that later scene, being sung by the demonstrating crowd in the background as the two men grab Malika, beat, and rape her. Through this double use of “La Marseillaise” during the two parts of the film in which Malika is being attacked, the film strongly condemns the violence (including the sexual violence) committed by pieds-noirs against Algerians during the war. Instead of personalizing the violence by solely blaming it on individual men, the use of the French national anthem importantly also places the blame at a broader—structural and institutional—state level.17 Compris is one of a handful of films in my corpus to feature a female Algerian militant.18 In this film, women play a more important role than in most films of the Algerian war. Sarah is an FLN member who knows how to make bombs. To my knowledge, this is the only Algerian war film in which a bomb maker is portrayed as female. (In Pour Djamila, Boupacha is accused of planting a bomb, not making it.) Guilt-ridden at the pain and death she had caused in the past, Sarah has to be forced by Ali to make another bomb. Although a member of the pied-noir world, she supports the FLN, just as Malika’s father Hakim supports French Algeria. These two characters, together with journalists and intellectuals Henri and Sarah’s father, demonstrate that political positions during the war did not always align with ethnic or religious group membership. Malika is a round character who wants to be more active in the FLN struggle but balks at the use of violence. (Thomas is in a parallel situation with respect to the OAS.) Like Sarah, Malika ends up having Ali forcing her hand into placing a bomb in the plaza of Algiers where pieds-noirs are demonstrating in favor of French Algeria. Sarah and Malika are major agents of the action in the film, as are Djamila in Pour Djamila and Maghnia in Voyage à Alger (and unlike Zoubida in La Baie d’Alger). This is visually shown during the demonstration scene toward the end of the film, in which the two women are the ones carrying the bomb while the two FLN men are following behind them, watching without being able to intervene when the women are stopped. However, as in almost all representations of female militants in my corpus except for Djamila Boupacha, Sarah and Malika’s political commitment is linked to their personal connections to the men in their lives. They both agree to place the bomb to save a man they love,

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Sarah’s boyfriend and Malika’s father (since Ali has convinced Malika that if she gave the FLN this proof of her loyalty, she would be seen as a war heroine and her father would be safe from FLN reprisals). In contrast, Ali’s political engagement in the FLN is unrelated to his relationships with women. In my corpus, no Algerian war film that portrays female FLN militants, except Pour Djamila, is able to depict the women’s dedication as being primarily political. Instead, women’s involvement is intimately connected to their personal links to specific men, thus somewhat diminishing the political aspect of their commitment (Leroux 138). This continues to reflect the way in which women’s involvement in the conflict was presented by the French media during the war. As Charlotte Gobin noted in her study of the role of French women who supported the FLN independence efforts, proportionately many French supporters were women, in part because the 1950s ideology of women in the home made the police tend to suspect them less (115–19). Although these women’s engagement was primarily political, French newspapers at the time tended to overwhelmingly deny their political engagement by representing it as being based on emotions (119–22). The war that is taking place on the streets is very clearly also taking place in the media, as is revealed in Pour Djamila as well. Characters learn about the putsch and its failure by listening to radio reports. The use of the media to influence opinion is confirmed by the film’s repeated use of recordings of Generals Challe’s (one of the putsch’s leaders) and de Gaulle’s speeches. De Gaulle masterfully used televised speeches as a way to reach French voters. The film’s title is a reference to his (in)famous 1958 speech that precipitated his return to office. While most people interpreted his “Je vous ai compris” (I have understood you) as expressing support for French Algeria, in reality de Gaulle started preparing for negotiations with the FLN soon after coming back to power. As a result, most proponents of French Algeria continue to see him as having betrayed their cause, even to this day. The film also uses recordings of Challe’s and de Gaulle’s speeches to create sound bridges between scenes featuring the different characters, thus bringing these separate characters together through sound before they all appear in the same location in the big demonstration scene toward the end of the film. Jacquot’s father had been listening to the radio broadcast of de Gaulle’s speech condemning the putsch as Claude and Thomas came in and Claude beat him up. The speech continues as the film cuts to a scene of Jacquot’s military unit watching the same speech on television. A few seconds later, Malika’s father and Thomas’s parents are shown watching de Gaulle’s continuing speech on the Kirschners’ television (the film uses an archival television recording of the speech). In that scene, significantly, the Kirschners are seated on their love seat and Hakim is standing to the side, slightly behind them, thus spatially highlighting the social hierarchy between them through

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mise-en-scène. De Gaulle’s speech is used as a device to bring Jacquot, Thomas, Malika, and their families together through sound even when they are in different locations, highlighting the importance of that speech since it ended up averting a full-blown rebellion. Similarly, toward the beginning of the film, a sound recording of one of Challe’s speeches explaining the reason for the putsch is heard at the end of a scene between Thomas and Henri and continues during the beginning of a scene between Hakim and Malika. About ten minutes later, a recording of another of Challe’s speeches creates a sound bridge between the end of a scene with Jacquot and other soldiers in the barracks and the beginning of another scene with Thomas and the OAS men. The repeated use of official speeches as sound bridges underscores that the political events of wartime affected members of each group and contributes to weaving the characters’ fates together early on. As a mise en abyme, it also highlights the fact that the film we are watching is addressing itself to all these multiple audiences. The film’s title re-signifies de Gaulle’s words to mean that it seeks to understand all sides of the conflict. The interweaving of separate characters’ lives is also reinforced through the film’s repeated use of graphic matches and match cuts to link scenes featuring the three protagonists. For instance, the same right-to-left tracking shot is used across two different landscapes, at the end of a scene featuring Thomas and Janine at the beach and at the beginning of the next scene with Malika and Ali meeting on a terrace overlooking the bay of Algiers. Similarly, Hakim is seen banging on Malika’s door at the end of one scene, and Janine is then shown opening the door to Thomas at the beginning of the next one. Another scene ends with Malika and Ali laying on his bed at night and the next scene begins with Thomas in bed being woken up by his mother in the morning. This match cut relies on ellipsis as well, which allows the film to leave open the question of whether something happened between Ali and Malika that night or not. Overall, these repeated visual matches and sound bridges bind together the three separate, crosscut stories. Finally, the film’s graphic look never lets the audience forget that we are watching a representation of the war, thus creating the visual distance that Chiche sought to establish in order for the audience to be better able to appreciate the various points of view expressed in the film (Making of). In contrast with L’Ennemi intime in particular, the visual distance created through Compris’s graphic filtering look helps make scenes of violence (such as the beating of the father, the Algerian man’s cut chest, and the rape of Malika) more bearable and avoids the potential voyeuristic danger of such representation (Chiche in Berthelon). For instance, blood looks significantly less realistic in this graphic mode. In particular, the visual distance effected by the film’s graphic look allows the director to show more sexual violence than any other film in my corpus (a double rape), yet the visual distance created by these techniques helps make

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the film still be appropriate viewing for the young adult audience that tends to be more attracted to graphic films than mature audiences. The film’s linguistic choices are interesting as well. Only a few sentences in Arabic are exchanged between the characters, such as Jacquot’s brief greeting at the beginning of the film and short dialogues between the two FLN men. Hakim and Ali say a few things to Malika in Arabic. Except for the fact that she uses the Arabic word for father, Baba, instead of the French Papa, Malika always answers in French. The few Arabic sentences exchanged between the ALN fighters in the film’s inaugural scene are not subtitled. The minor presence of Arabic makes sense since Compris features a majority of pied-noir characters and it was made for a French television audience. The film is also unusual in that it incorporates pataouète, the hybrid French spoken by pieds-noirs. Both vocabulary and syntax are included. For instance, one of the OAS men refers to the bomb that Malika was carrying as “la strounga,” a very specific term that the audience understands from the context in which it is used. Claude uses the expression “faire fissa” (to hurry), which is derived from Arabic. Whereas “faire fissa” has become part of French slang to some extent, “la strounga” places the film in a very specific historical and geographical context. When Claude makes Thomas fall from the truck, Thomas yells “La putain de ta mère!” (which could be loosely rendered in English as “Son of a bitch!”). In that phrase, it is the syntax (the inclusion of the definite article) rather than the vocabulary that makes the expression specifically pied-noir. While the characters (except for Hakim) do not speak French with any noticeably non-hexagonal accent (the film was made in France and a number of the actors have a somewhat Parisian accent), the specificity of pied-noir vocabulary and syntax is included. Compris is also unusual in that it includes a sentence in Hebrew. We find out that Jacquot and his family are Jewish because Jacquot’s dying words are the common Jewish prayer “Shema Israel, Adonai Elohenu” (Listen Israel, the Lord is our God). Together with the fact that one of the film’s protagonists and two of its secondary characters are Jewish, this is an important way for Chiche to underscore the presence of this oft-hidden third term in the Algerian colonial context. Since the 1870 Crémieux decree, Algerian Jews had been French citizens, yet they tended to live in separate neighborhoods and retained a certain specificity. In a society divided along the lines between European settlers (who were primarily Catholic) and Arab-Berber indigenous people (who were primarily Muslim), the status of Algerian Jews was ambiguous, as Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida have noted in several works (see Scharfman). Although the film is primarily in French, it does give a sense of the plurality of cultures in Algeria by including a smattering of Arabic, pataouète, and Hebrew and by featuring protagonists who are ArabBerber, Jewish, and Alsatian pied-noir.

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The last scene of the film is of Sarah and her father leaving Algiers for France by boat, going into exile. Against Sarah’s expressed desire to forget Algeria’s ghosts, her father delivers the message of the film: “Oublier? C’est ce qui pourrait nous arriver de pire. . . . Faisons en sorte que cette guerre qui se termine ne devienne pas un jour la leur” (Forgetting? That’s the worst thing that could happen to us. . . . Let’s make sure that the war that’s ending does not one day become theirs) (referring to the next, not-yet-born generation). Compris thus points to the continuing reverberating effects of this war on the present time and offers a solution based on remembering and talking about the past, which can also be seen as a self-reflexive comment on the film itself. The director’s goal was to help bridge the gap “entre les différentes communautés” (between the different communities) in France today in the hopes “d’avancer plus tranquillement vers une aventure commune plutôt que de s’opposer ou de s’affronter au travers de cette histoire” (Making of) (to move more serenely toward a shared adventure rather than to oppose or clash with one another through this history). The generally silenced third term in the colonizer-colonized Algerian dyad, Jewish people, are here given the last word in the film, which is both important and unusual. It is implied that Sarah and her father, as well as photographer Thomas, will be responsible for passing on the history. Perhaps symptomatically, we do not find out what happened to Ali or to his unnamed FLN comrade, so it remains unclear whether any Algerian character will also be transmitting this history. The film ends on Edith Piaf’s iconic song “Non je ne regrette rien” in Rachid Taha’s rendition. The song is about forgetting the past and moving forward (significantly matching Sarah’s position and seeming to counter her father’s), as the boat taking Sarah and her father to France is moving across the sea and the screen. The song and Edith Piaf are known worldwide as perhaps representing the essence of France. France’s general attitude toward the Algerian war has certainly been one of trying to close the door on the past and forgetting about it, which in a way has precluded a true moving forward. The fact that the song is performed by Rachid Taha, a French-Algerian singer, adds a multicultural element to its performance. His rendition is also less theatrical and more intimate and raw, almost whispered. Taha is wellknown for his earlier cover of another Franco-French song, Charles Trénet’s “Douce France,” also sung in a very different tone. Music critic Jody Rosen comments, “In 1986, [Taha] caused a national uproar when [his band] Carte de Séjour released a sneering punk-rock cover of ‘Douce France,’ Charles Trénet’s sentimental war-era ode to the French heartland, an unmistakable protest against the nation’s treatment of its immigrant underclass.” Taha sang Trénet’s patriotic 1940s classic “with such furious irony [that t]he song was banned from radio” (Denselow). French-Algerian director Malik Chibane later titled his 1995 film exposing the situation of young people from this

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social group Douce France, in an ironic nod to Trénet’s song and a reference to Taha’s rendition, which similarly inserted young people of Maghrebian descent into French history and culture (Sherzer 161). Piaf’s song was released in 1960, and its history has a connection with the Algerian war. According to James Cooke, Piaf dedicated the song to the French Foreign Legion, which was fighting in Algeria at the time (Cooke 162; “Non, je ne regrette rien”). After the failure of the generals’ putsch, foreign paratroopers who had supported the putsch started singing the song and still occasionally sing it (“Non, je ne regrette rien”). As was done earlier with the use of “La Marseillaise,” here Taha and Chiche signify on this colonial history by placing the song in a more ambivalent context. Instead of a rousing anthem glorifying a defeated colonial endeavor, here the song reflects both Sarah’s desire to forget the ghosts she created (the people who were killed by her bomb) and Taha’s long-standing exhortations to Arab audiences to move away from “Arab nostalgia and attachment to ancient grievances” (Rosen) in songs like “Lli Fat Mat!” (What Is Past Is Dead and Gone!) in his 2004 solo album Tékitoi (Who’re ya?). These songs call his Maghrebian and Middle Eastern audiences to “leave the past to the past!” and “turn the page!” because “the last [sic] have been buried!” (Rosen). The presence of Taha’s rendition of Piaf’s song in the film thus creates a layering of contexts, audiences, and political positions that makes the song more ambiguous than it initially was. The lyrics of “Je ne regrette rien” include reference to forgetting the past and starting over. They contrast with Sarah’s father’s insistence on the need to remember and to pass on this history as the message on which the film closes, demonstrating once again Chiche’s desire to let every viewpoint be expressed. The father had warned Jacquot earlier that if he did not find a way to forgive his sister Sarah for placing the initial bomb, “à force de ruminer ta colère, j’ai bien peur qu’un jour elle te ronge” (if you don’t let go of your anger, I’m afraid that it might destroy you someday). This seemingly contradictory message to both forget and remember may represent a complex call to let go of certain things while retaining other memories, to face certain unacknowledged aspects of this past, as well as to let go of immobilizing, rigidified memories and political positions. In its effort to portray different viewpoints on the war, the film thus evinces a certain ambivalence. For instance, although it seeks to provide Algerian perspectives, the pro-French Algeria supporters and the European characters outnumber the supporters of Algerian independence and the Algerian characters. In many Algerian war films from France, Algerians are often only background characters, and the main action and moral questioning are provided by the European characters. In contrast, in Compris, three Algerian characters are foregrounded as either protagonists (the lone Algerian woman, Malika) or secondary characters (Hakim and Ali). Of the other two protagonists, one is

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Jewish, and most of the secondary characters—Sarah and her father, Claude and the OAS lieutenant, Janine, and Thomas’s parents—are pied-noir. As in most Algerian war films, the reasons for the FLN’s struggle are not explained very much in Compris. Of the five Algerian characters we encounter in the film, none appear to suffer the wretched economic conditions that were the lot of most Algerians impoverished by the colonial system. The attention paid to all sides means that the goal of keeping Algeria French is placed on the same level as that of gaining Algerian independence, thereby generally occluding the exploitative nature of the colonial system. We do learn that Malika’s mother died while giving birth to her because a racist European doctor would not come during the night for “une bougnoule” (a wog), and we witness Ali’s encounter with a racist doorman. Many pieds-noirs voice strong support for French Algeria and make violent comments about both FLN fighters and General de Gaulle, who by then was negotiating with FLN leaders. The film generally tends to focus more on the Franco-French aspect of the war (de Gaulle vs. the OAS, the internal divisions within the French military, and the various political positions taken by the pied-noir characters); yet, Compris does address the colonizer-colonized war (the French vs. the FLN) and also briefly mentions the internal divisions among Algerians, not all of whom aligned with the FLN. It highlights the racism and hegemonic masculinity of the OAS as well as criticizes the violent methods used by the FLN. It is also notable as one of few Algerian war films to have cast Jewish characters and women, including Algerian women, in central positions and as the agents of the action, even if the women’s activism is shown as being as influenced by their personal relationships with men as by their political commitment. INTERTWINED LIVES: LE CHOIX DE MYRIAM (MALIK CHIBANE, 2008) Although Le Choix de Myriam by well-known French-Algerian filmmaker Malik Chibane does not highlight the role of female Algerian militants in the war, it provides a view of the war from multicultural perspectives while centering the lives of Algerian immigrants—including women—in France. Chibane’s two-part made-for-TV movie focuses on the Baccouche couple, Kader (Mehdi Nebbou) and Myriam (Leïla Bekhti). They are portrayed as being representative of the situation of Algerians in France. In a performative way, the film also proposes solutions to that situation for our times. The first episode takes place primarily in the early 1960s. Kader, who is Kabyle, has been working in Paris as a construction worker. His brother-in-law Mustapha (Abel Jafri) works as a doorman in a fancy Parisian hotel, and brings Kader’s wife Myriam from Algeria to join Kader in the shantytown where he lives.19

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The war is going on at the time, and the film insists on the danger of living in France for Algerians and the daily instances of racism they encounter. The second episode takes place in the late 1970s and focuses on how Kader and Myriam adjust to living in French society and become less and less likely to go back to Algeria as the years go by. It also addresses how the family negotiates the generational divide between the parents and their teenage children, especially around issues of women’s rights. Chibane is notable for being among a select number of male filmmakers who always include women’s issues (Tarr 112; Sherzer 168). He and pied-noir writer Daniel Saint-Hamont (who also collaborated with Alexandre Arcady on Ce que le jour doit à la nuit) cowrote the film. The war is ever-present in Kader’s and his relatives’ lives. At the beginning of the film, Mustapha explains that the reason why he wants Kader to bring Myriam to Paris is that she could be raped by a paratrooper in Algeria, to which Kader answers, “Ici aussi c’est la guerre” (The war is here too). Kader supports the FLN and Mustapha the MNA (Mouvement national algérien, Algerian National Movement), in a brief reference to the internecine struggles between the two independence movements. FLN leader Miloud (Samir Boltard) comes by several times to collect the FLN tax, which Kader pays for himself and for Mustapha because the latter refuses to do so. Kader once helps Miloud escape from the cops in a scene that is both scary and funny and that showcases Kader’s quick thinking. Mustapha uses his relatively high economic status, as seen through his nice clothing, to pass himself off as Latin American if he must go out at night, as there is a curfew in place against Algerians. The film insists on the heavy policing to which people of Maghrebian descent are being subjected. When Mustapha goes to the train station to pick up Myriam, they end up having to drive at night because her train was late. A police officer who had stopped them tells them: “Pas de bougnoules dans les rues, c’est clair, non?” (No wogs on the streets, isn’t that clear?) Even though the curfew was supposed to apply only to Algerians because of their independence struggle, the fact that the officer uses a derogatory slang term that refers to Arabs in general highlights the curfew’s racist aspect. In actuality, it was applied indiscriminately to anyone who looked Arab, including people from the recently independent nations of Morocco and Tunisia (see Einaudi, Bataille 79; Thénault, Histoire 265). Later, as Miloud is giving the shantytown inhabitants instructions for the October 17, 1961, demonstration, he mentions that southern Europeans (Italian and Portuguese) had been detained (but then released) due to the curfew, making it clear that its implementation relied on délit de faciès (racist profiling). In the film, state surveillance of Maghrebian workers is relentless. The police are stationed outside the shantytown at night at the beginning of the film, and when the laborers return

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home in the evening, officers check their papers before letting them in. Kader is warned by Miloud, with whom he works on the construction site, not to talk to another man who evidently works for “la police de Papon” (Papon’s police). Luis (Marc Andréoni), the Portuguese foreman on Kader’s construction site, tries to force Kader to reveal which Algerian workers are involved with the FLN, but Kader refuses and loses his job as a result.20 Several years after the end of the war, Kader’s experience with racism becomes even more violent. He is wounded at knifepoint by a white French man who had grabbed Myriam by the buttocks twice at a trade union party and whom Kader had hit as a result. Just before thrusting the knife, the man calls out to Kader, “hé bougnoule!” (hey you wog!). The use of this epithet clearly marks the man’s escalation of violence as being linked to his racist perception that Kader’s life is less valuable and his racist and sexist assessment of an Algerian woman as being fair game for harassment. The first episode ends on this scene and the audience does not know whether Kader is dead, but we thankfully find him recovering in the family’s apartment at the beginning of the next episode. As many films in my corpus taking place in Paris do, Le Choix de Myriam highlights the importance of the demonstration and massacre of October 17, 1961, to Maghrebian-French history. The demonstration happens to take place on the evening in which Myriam is delivering her first child. Doctor Bismut (Denis Sebbah) tells Kader that they must go to the hospital due to complications with the delivery. Although Kader knows that joining the demonstrators is his “devoir” (duty), he asks Miloud for permission not to participate in order to take his wife to the hospital, but Miloud inflexibly refuses unless Mustapha takes Kader’s place. Mustapha protests but agrees and leaves with the others, forty-three minutes into the film. The film then cuts to Kader seeing his newborn daughter for the first time. Although it is clear that he is disappointed not to have a son, he starts smiling when he notices that “[e]lle a les yeux de sa mère” (she has her mother’s eyes). A few minutes later, the film cuts to a picture of Mustapha on a wall. The camera then zooms out to reveal many other black-and-white pictures of men, women, and children surrounding Mustapha’s on the neighborhood café’s wall. We also see a close-up of Kader with tears in his eyes, the pictures visible behind him as the camera zooms out. With pain, anger, and determination in his voice, Miloud explains that there are “trente martyrs ici, quarante à Nanterre. Nous évaluons les victimes à trois cents. M. Papon, lui, parle de quatre morts” (thirty martyrs here, forty in Nanterre. We estimate the death toll at three hundred. As for Mr. Papon, he’s only talking about four dead people). The way in which these deaths are announced right after Yasmina’s birth creates shock, as life and death are superimposed through ellipsis, without any visual rendition of the massacre. Both Yasmina and the Algerian nation are being born painfully on

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the same evening, and Yasmina carries with her all the hopes of the nation being birthed. As Kader and Myriam throw a bouquet of white daisies into the Seine to commemorate the loss of Mustapha a few days later (since many Algerian demonstrators were thrown by the police into the Seine to drown), Kader, who is holding Yasmina, says, “C’est lui qui devrait être vivant et moi mort. . . . C’est ma fille qui m’a sauvé la vie” (He should be alive and I dead. . . . My daughter saved my life). Mustapha is remembered throughout the film. For instance, as Kader and Myriam move into their new apartment soon afterward, one of the first things that Myriam does is hang up a framed picture of her brother on the wall (the same shot as the one in the café). Later, as the family has been able to purchase furniture, the framed picture of Mustapha is prominently featured on the dining room credenza, where it is visible in the background in many scenes. Scenes taking place in their friend Hassan’s café often tend to be filmed in such a way as to show the pictures of the October 17 dead still on the wall in the background. After Hassan (Abdelhafid Metalsi) has had the café remodeled years later, these pictures have been assembled inside a large frame hanging on the café wall. Kader also names their first son Mustapha. Toward the beginning of the film’s second episode, the family is celebrating Myriam’s and Yasmina’s birthdays sixteen years later, and Myriam remembers her brother in her short speech. Similarly, toward the end of the second episode, as family and friends are gathered to celebrate Yasmina’s successful high school graduation, Kader also mentions Mustapha in his brief remarks. Naming, pictures, and ritual remembrances create new unofficial archives in the absence of official ones. Mustapha’s absence is made present repeatedly in the film, as the losses of the war are commemorated by the family and community on a regular basis, even though they are not accounted for in the wider society. The second episode also directly stages the silencing of the history of October 17, 1961, in French society at the time. The year is 1977, and Yasmina (Nailia Harzoune) is in her next to last year of high school. Needless to say, the Algerian war is not on the program in her history class, as the second phase of the Algeria syndrome, that of repression, is in full swing. About fifteen minutes into the second episode, Yasmina is giving an oral presentation in history class on what we presume is a topic of her choice, the October 17 massacre. The French name for the oral presentation, a common student assignment, is “exposé.” The term’s English meaning, a journalistic report making public a shocking hidden truth, is particularly apposite here. The camera twice cuts to the handwritten presentation that Yasmina holds in her hands, and which includes pictures that look like the few official pictures to have survived state censorship after the massacre. The scene starts as Yasmina is ending her presentation, which she concludes

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by repeating a version of Kader’s earlier statement: “Ce 17 octobre 1961, je peux dire qu’en naissant à l’hôpital, j’ai sauvé la vie de mon père” (On October 17, 1961, I can say that by being born in the hospital, I saved my father’s life). Although this type of inquiry combining research and personal testimony is now considered legitimate scholarship, Yasmina’s Franco-French teacher (Patrice Saunier) is eminently unhappy and counters her version at every turn. He first demands “un exposé . . . pas un roman” (a presentation . . . not a novel) and “des faits précis et objectifs” (specific and objective facts). He relies on definitions of history as a science in which the historian supposedly records facts objectively, which one could argue is exactly what Yasmina has done. Yet, her reliance on the personal testimony of everyday people and on the few archival materials still available is interpreted by the teacher as her offering up fiction rather than fact. As the two verbally spar, it becomes clear that her instructor is following the French government’s official story that only four people died during the demonstration (that authorized estimate has gone up since). The stark contrast between French and FLN official estimates (voiced by Miloud earlier) is repeated in this exchange. Yasmina counters with her insider knowledge, mentioning her dead uncle and the thirty disappeared people from their shantytown, whose pictures remained on the café’s wall as a constant reminder as she was growing up. The teacher dismisses her community’s archives by saying contemptuously, “Les archives ne sont pas classées dans les cafés” (Archives are not filed in cafés) and by further delegitimating her sources as “les souvenirs des alcooliques” (memories of alcoholics). Yasmina calmly but strongly holds her ground as the class (the diegetic audience that is a representation en abyme of the film’s audience) listens carefully, modeling that attitude for the film’s actual audience. Even if the film’s spectators are unfamiliar with the history of October 17, 1961 (we now know historically that Yasmina’s version is more factually true than her teacher’s), the audience “knows” from the film’s diegesis that she is right and that the instructor is only repeating the official French cover-up. When a historical event has been censured and occluded by the dominant group, what becomes necessary in order to move from fiction to truth is both history from below (reflecting the standpoint of marginalized groups) and new research methods (relying on unconventional archives that reflect the knowledge of the oppressed such as oral histories) (see Brozgal, “In the Absence” 46). As it turns out, archives can be filed in cafés, and Yasmina’s parents’ passing on this history to their children does not represent unreliable memories of alcoholics but invaluable testimony from family and community as important vectors of memory. Teacher and pupil switch roles, as Yasmina provides a master class in both history and historiography, illustrating the film’s didactic purpose.

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Right after this short (under two minute), powerful pedagogical scene, Yasmina’s brother Mustapha (Bensaïd Adnan), his uncle’s namesake, wonders why his mother “[n’a] pas la haine contre les Français” “[doesn’t] just hate the French” for killing her brother. Just as Yasmina had provided a powerful message to her Franco-French teacher and her mixed-origin classmates (none of whom had ever heard about October 17), Myriam spells out the lesson that young French-Maghrebian generations are expected to draw: “Il faut pas rester dans la haine comme ça, il faut advancer. Justement, pour ton oncle” (We mustn’t keep hate in our hearts like that. We have to move forward—for your uncle, as a matter of fact). Remembering the past must involve not staying stuck in that past, but taking stock of it in order to draw lessons from it and honor its victims, so as to be able to move toward healing and toward creating more egalitarian multicultural relations. Whereas Yasmina represents the child of immigrants who is able to succeed in French society through excelling in school, her younger brother Mustapha represents the alienated teen who is at risk of dropping out of school and getting involved in petty crime, and Le Choix has a message for both. The film showcases instances of daily French anti-Arab racism as well as developing connections among various people, especially once Kader and Myriam move from the Maghrebian shantytown to the housing projects whose population is mixed. Their neighbors include their family doctor and friend Doctor Bismut, who moves his practice from the shantytown to the project, one floor up from them. He mentions being from Tunisia, and the film implies that he is Jewish. Myriam befriends Franco-French single mother Cécile (Delphine Rollin) after Cécile calls a merchant out for taking advantage of Myriam. Neither Myriam nor Kader know how to read the alphabet or numbers, so Myriam did not know that she should have been given change. After this, the women become fast friends, as do their daughters. Cécile and her daughter Valérie also live one floor up from the Baccouches. Myriam and Kader’s next-door neighbor, older Simone (Anémone), is initially very racist toward them, and her son Robert (Pascal Demolon) even more so. Robert is one of the most negative characters in the film. The stereotype of the French beauf (an Archie Bunker type), he is a racist, angry white man who votes for the far right because of their anti-immigrant platform and who physically abuses his mother repeatedly when drunk. Myriam is portrayed as being courageous and resourceful. For instance, after Robert has hit his mother and she lays unconscious in her living room, pregnant Myriam does not hesitate to climb over their two balconies to rescue Simone in spite of that family’s poor behavior toward them. Racism and the growing pains of living together through intercultural difference are sometimes treated in a humoristic mode. The recourse to an effective mixture of humor and pathos is linked to the double goal of showcasing

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the difficult situations of Algerian laborers and their families in France while avoiding the “misérabilisme” (pessimistic sordidness) of nineteenth-century French realist and naturalist literature. As with Azouz Begag’s and Leïla Sebbar’s literary works, the generally realistic presentation of Algerians’ lives is counterbalanced by a desire to model possible solutions that rely on ingenuity and relationality and that evince a hopeful belief in the capacity of the human spirit to rise above stereotyping and close-mindedness. By relying in part on the comedic mode, the tragic conditions of Algerian immigrants are transformed into opportunities for agency and relationality, as Le Choix performs its post-Algerian war politics of “convivialité” (harmonious living together), the cross-cultural, human-to-human relations that it seeks to bring about in French society. Almost all characters are redeemable and given a second chance. For instance, when Denise (Carole Richert), the French prostitute who worked on the outskirts of the shantytown, catering to its male population, decides to change jobs, Hassan gives her a second chance as a waitress in his café, telling his all-male patrons (many of whom used to be her clients) that if they disrespect her, they disrespect him since she now works for him. Hassan and Denise later become a couple. While this may appear impossibly idealistic, I read it as performative rather than naively unrealistic: as Sebbar did through literature, Chibane is providing his audience with a road map for positive relations across ethnic and gendered difference. Similarly, Luis, who was initially portrayed as racist, turns out to have been between a rock and a hard place during the war, as the police were pressuring him to find out which of his workers were involved with the FLN by threatening to expel him from France if he did not provide this information to them. After the war, he gives Kader a job again, and they become friendly. Simone, who repeatedly gives the cold shoulder to the family, ends up becoming their friend after they save her from Robert’s violence twice at great risk to themselves. Even Robert eventually comes around, and he and Kader become reluctant friends. Here again, the film relies on the comedic mode to treat the budding friendship. After Kader is injured on the job, he needs a blood transfusion but no blood is available. Myriam mentions to Simone his unusual blood type, at which Simone smiles. In the next scene, we see Kader receiving blood, looking very unhappy about it. As the camera pans along the blood tubes that link the recipient to the donor, we expect to see Simone but are surprised to discover that Robert, looking equally unhappy, is the donor. The two men have thus become reluctant blood brothers. This brotherhood is also to be understood metaphorically to mean that people from various origins in France are all members of the same human group and need to find ways to slowly learn to relate to one another as being part of a community instead of relying on scapegoating and violence, even if a violent past is part of their common history.

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The repeated treatment of racism in a humoristic mode helps prevent the film’s message from becoming too heavy or preachy, while inviting a Franco-French audience that may not necessarily be positively predisposed toward people of Maghrebian descent to open their minds and their hearts. For instance, the film briefly portrays extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant political parties as being steeped in ignorance. When Robert is putting up one of their electoral posters, the poster has the word immigrant—a major part of their platform—misspelled as “emmigrant.” Humor is used here to make the party, its platform, and its supporters (symbolized by Robert the beauf) appear ridiculous. Later in the second episode, as Kader wants to take the French government’s offer of money to immigrant workers in exchange for going back to their home countries, Myriam and the children are dead set against it and will not fill out the form for him. By now, Myriam has learned how to read thanks to Cécile’s literacy classes and Simone’s tutoring, but Kader has only learned to read numbers with Yasmina’s help. Ironically, Robert the racist is the only one who is more than willing to help his Maghrebian neighbor go back home. Unfortunately for him and for Kader, Robert discovers by reading the form that “on a un gros gros gros problème, là” (we have a big, big, big problem here), which is that although Kader and Myriam are Algerian, their children, born on French soil, are French and can therefore not be taken “back” to Algeria. The two men’s similarly disappointed facial expressions are funny because each one is disappointed for opposite reasons. The film counters stereotypes in many ways: although there exists a longstanding French stereotype of the knife-wielding Arab man, it is a FrancoFrench man who knifes Kader and not the other way round; Denise—not just Kader and Myriam—is illiterate, and the anti-immigrant political poster includes a misspelling; the Maghrebian family is not trying to take advantage of French welfare benefits, it is some French characters who try to take advantage of them. Whereas Muslim women are often seen in the West as exemplars of female submission and oppression, Le Choix highlights the agency of each character, with a focus on Myriam’s and her daughter Yasmina’s. From the beginning of the film, Yasmina speaks back to Kader in a self-assured way. After he tells her twice not to leave their shack in the shantytown, she does go out to fetch water. She makes her own decisions, such as finding a part-time job and getting on the pill, all unbeknownst to him. Whereas Kader names their first three children without consulting her, by the fourth she is the one who selects the name. Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp discusses the centrality of Myriam’s agency, “a point that is underscored by the title of the film” (141), as being related by Chibane to the powerful feminist movement at the time: “Myriam’s demonstrations of agency are thus set within a larger framework, and at a time during which many French women were also working at making changes in their own lives and taking control

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of their bodies” (137). While Kader and Myriam often clash, more often than not, he eventually comes around to her way of thinking, in great part because of his love for her. Their relationship is one of few positive portrayals of a Maghrebian couple in literature or film. The depiction is not idealistic, however, as it focuses on growing pains and Kader’s slow realization that his wife and daughter deserve to make their own choices. Avoiding the pitfalls of having the friendly Franco-French characters play savior to the immigrant family, the film is at pains to develop egalitarian relations among them. For instance, early in the film, after Denise has been beaten up by two men in the shantytown because they do not want a prostitute in the neighborhood, Myriam takes her into her home and comforts her. Much later, Denise brings Myriam groceries and helps her escape from a French man who had sicked his ferocious German shepherd on her. As discussed above, Simone is saved by Myriam and Kader, who is later saved by her son Robert. Similarly, the illiterate characters include not just Kader and Myriam but also Denise, and while Cécile and Simone help Myriam learn how to read, it is Yasmina as a child (Inès Sagula) who helps Kader and Denise learn to read numbers. Later, Myriam, who quickly takes to reading, is able to teach Denise how to read, as well as help her own children with schoolwork. The film performatively portrays cross-cultural and crossgender relationships as moving from oppositional to intertwined. It shows that a multicultural community has established itself, in which members from various origins are able to return favors, help one another, and create new kinship. However, once the Baccouche family has moved away from the shantytown into the housing projects, their connections to other Maghrebian immigrants are severed. (The exception is Hassan, who lives with Denise and with whom he has no children.) For instance, we never again see Halima, a woman who had befriended and helped Myriam. Most of the Baccouches’ friends are Franco-French, so Chibane has been criticized for promoting a view of Maghrebian integration into French society that relies too much on assimilation to French cultural norms (Kealhofer-Kemp 141–42). In this respect, it is to be noted that while Myriam comes into her own as a woman, she does not participate in the Algerian war struggle, even though she appears somewhat sympathetic to the goal of independence (she and Kader are shown smiling proudly when Miloud gives instructions regarding the October 17 demonstration). However, Le Choix also showcases the need for French society to come to terms with its occluded war and racist violence, especially with respect to state surveillance (which has increased again since the terrorist attacks of 2015) and to the October 17, 1961, massacre and its remembrance, as staged by Yasmina. Only through this reckoning will a multicultural French society be able to move forward in a more harmonious, less divisive manner.

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CHAPTER CONCLUSION The three films that take place on French soil and that are discussed in this chapter all make statements about the place of Algerians and people of Algerian descent in France today. Though very different types of films (art house vs. popular), Caché and Michou d’Auber both offer an ambivalent message. In Caché, the partial perspective of the white French male protagonist drives the film and his identity reflects that of the director’s targeted audience. The film attempts to critique white European solipsism and colonial racism, while also replicating them. In Michou, the young French boy of Algerian descent must assimilate in order to be part of the village and the French national body, and he becomes the conduit for the white male Frenchman’s somewhat cringe-worthy change of heart. While the film’s message—like that of Caché’s—is meant to resonate with a white European audience, it also effectively deconstructs a number of stereotypes of people of Algerian descent and suggests that France must also adapt and change to account for its contemporary multicultural identity. Le Choix de Myriam makes that point much more forcefully by focusing on the point of view of an immigrant family and the relationships they carve out with a variety of neighbors. The need for several generations to face their history of violence and war is highlighted in this film. Through film techniques, Compris, like Cartouches gauloises (discussed in the next chapter), intertwines memories that have generally been compartmentalized. In contrast, Le premier homme remains largely within a settler colonial paradigm that cannot figure Algerians as other than supporting figures in a white male, European drama in which decolonization is experienced as a personal tragedy. However, unlike many pied-noir texts and some of the films discussed in the next chapter, Le premier homme is not filmed in the nostalgic mode, primarily because of the low socioeconomic background and grim circumstances in which its protagonist grows up. NOTES 1. See Wheatley, Caché, 88 n.4; Saxton, “Secrets and Revelations,” 14–15; Niessen, “The Staged Realism of Michael Haneke’s Caché,” 186, 190; Brunette, Michael Haneke, 115; Frey, “The Message and the Medium,” 160; Levin, “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams,” 83; Rosello, Reparative, 125, 131. 2. Wheatley, “Secrets,” 35; see also Chakali, “Le spectre du colonialisme”; Kline, “The Intertextual and Discursive Origins,” 560; Lykidis, “Multicultural Encounters,” 470; Niessen, “The Staged Realism of Michael Haneke’s Caché,” 185; Brunette, Michael Haneke, 116, 127; Peucker, “Games Haneke Plays,” 29; Speck, Funny Frames, 38; Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era,” 105 n.133, among others.

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3. Wheatley, “Secrets,” 35; Cousins, “After the End,” 226; Saxton, “Secrets and Revelations,” 11; Herzog, “The Banality of Surveillance,” 29–30; Pages, “What’s Hidden in Caché,” 5, 13; Frey, “The Message and the Medium,” 162; Speck, Funny Frames, 194; Burris, “Surveillance and the Indifferent Gaze,” 153; Jørholt, “White Paranoia,” 95. 4. See Wheatley, “Secrets,” 32; Khanna, “From Rue Morgue,” 243; Kline, “The Intertextual and Discursive Origins,” 559; Levin, “Five Tapes, Four Halls,” 81–82; Speck, Funny Frames, 175; Jørholt, “White Paranoia,” 95. 5. See Flood, France, Algeria, 15, 21, 27 and Khanna, “From Rue Morgue,” 239. 6. McFadden, “Franco-Algerian Transcultural,” 117–18; see also Niessen, “The Staged Realism of Michael Haneke’s Caché,” 196–97; Celik, “‘I Wanted You to Be Present’,” 68; Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era,” 117 n.146; O’Riley, Cinema in an Age of Terror, 91–96; Jørholt, “White Paranoia,” 103. 7. This scene is quoted in Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, as discussed in my article “Gender, Genre and Intertextuality.” 8. Majid’s words may recall another famous French film, Hiroshima mon amour, in which the Japanese lover repeatedly tells his French lover, “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima” (You saw nothing in Hiroshima). See Flood, “Brutal Visibility,” 87 n.18. Oliver Speck points to other—thematic and aesthetic—similarities between the two films (186). 9. George Poe notes that the book was written after the film was made (200). 10. The OAS was a paramilitary organization composed of pieds-noirs and French soldiers that used violent means to try to prevent Algerian independence toward the end of the war. Lest we think that Duval is a stereotypical representation of an Algerian war veteran, Depardieu mentioned in an interview that the character is actually based on a real person with whom he was acquainted in Berry (Borde). 11. See Vincent Geisser for a history of (both left-wing and right-wing) French politicians’ rhetorical use of the term “integration” to really mean the cultural and linguistic assimilation of colonial and postcolonial migrants, from World War II to the mid-2000s. 12. Wallenbrock views that later scene (which is not in the book) as showcasing the power of the Catholic Church, which for her “negates the charm’s Algerian, superstitious, residue” (“Ideal Immigrant,” 132). She also downplays the importance of the amulet in healing Georges, only mentioning it in a footnote (145 n.25). 13. I thank Wissem Brinis for her help with the dialogues in Arabic. 14. Regarding Camus’s exact words, see “Citations” and “Rencontre.” 15. Camus’s works, especially L’Etranger, recur as intertexts in a number of films. This ranges from implicit references made in passing (Caché, Michou d’Auber—in which the school teacher loans L’Etranger to Gisèle— Un Balcon sur la mer, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit) to full rewriting (Le premier homme, La Baie d’Alger). 16. At the end of a scene in which Jacquot and his father have a phone conversation, about thirty-seven minutes into the film, the camera zooms out and up to reveal part of a menorah in the father’s apartment, in the foreground on the right side of the screen. The shot is held for a few seconds, but if the viewers are still focusing on the father at the center of the screen, they may not notice the menorah. Zeitoun,

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the Arabic word for olive, implies that the family may be part of the group of Jewish people who had been living in Algeria for centuries, thus differentiating them from the people who came to the region as part of the French settler colonization process. The name may also be meant as a reference to the biblical olive branch and Jacquot’s desire for peace. 17. “La Marseillaise” is heard on two other occasions in the film. About ten minutes into the film, Malika’s father Hakim and his boss Jules (Anthony Vienne) drink to French Algeria after finding out about the putsch and start singing “La Marseillaise.” Malika interrupts them, shocked. It is ironic that the French national anthem would be sung to support a military coup against the French Republic, a treasonous act. We also hear the anthem being played after de Gaulle’s speech against the putsch. This is the only time in which the anthem is used in a non-ironic, non-resignifying manner, since that is how French presidential addresses usually end. 18. With respect to these other films, La Baie d’Alger is discussed in chapter 3. For Voyage à Alger and Pour Djamila, see chapter 4. 19. Chibane himself is of Kabyle descent (Sherzer, “Cinematic Representations,” 160). The Kabyle population is the largest of the Amazigh group, the original inhabitants of the Maghreb, who have had difficulty having their cultural and linguistic specificity recognized by postindependence Algerian governments. 20. Kader and Myriam are characterized as people with a strong sense of honor. For instance, when Kader loses his job for refusing to become an informer, Myriam agrees with his action even though it means a temporary loss of income. When Hassan, the Moroccan owner of the shantytown’s makeshift café, wants to open a legitimate café on the outskirts of the shantytown during the war, French law does not allow it because he is a foreigner. Because Algeria was still considered part of France, Kader would be allowed to do so, and he agrees to help Hassan by signing the papers. When Mustapha, who is an expert at gaming the system, tells Kader that he could have asked Hassan to pay for his services, Kader retorts, “tout ce que j’ai, c’est mon honneur et ma parole. Ca, pas besoin qu’il l’achète, je le lui donne” (All I have is my honor and my word, and he doesn’t need to buy that, I give it to him).

Chapter 3

From Nostalg(er)ic to Coalescing Memories Un Balcon sur la mer, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, La Baie d’Alger, and Cartouches gauloises

Pied-noir representations of Algeria, with some significant exceptions, largely focus on their positive memories of prewar French Algeria (see Eldridge 106–13). In Recasting Postcolonialism, I found in their obsessive return to a prelapsarian universe, coupled with an almost universal difficulty in representing the war itself, “a striking illustration of the role that nostalgia plays in the constitution of screen memories” (14). To what extent have things changed decades later? Over time, some important pieds-noirs have been able to face this history, beginning with some who supported independence during the war. Writers such as Jean Pélégri and Marie Cardinal and filmmaker Brigitte Roüan honestly faced the exploitative nature of the colonial system from which they benefited in works such as Pélégri’s Les Oliviers de la justice (1959, which was made into a film of the same title in 1962) and his Ma mère l’Algérie (1990), Cardinal’s Les Mots pour le dire (1975) and Au pays de mes racines (1980), and Roüan’s Outremer (1990). They expressed their ambivalent location, between their visceral love for the lost land and their efforts to take stock of their families’ implication in a history of colonialism and racism. Historian Benjamin Stora, as mentioned in the introduction, has devoted his career to an honest scholarly reassessment of the period of the war and its aftermath, often at great personal cost (Eldridge 193). Six films in my corpus highlight pied-noir memories, four of which are discussed in this chapter: Un Balcon sur la mer (Nicole Garcia, 2010), Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (Alexandre Arcady, 2012), La Baie d’Alger (Merzak Allouache, 2011), and Cartouches gauloises (Mehdi Charef, 2007). The other two films, Le premier homme (Amelio, 2011) and Je vous ai 111

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compris (Frank Chiche, 2012), were treated in the previous chapter. Three of the directors—Garcia, Arcady, and Chiche—are pieds-noirs; Arcady and Chiche are also Jewish, as is Stora. Charef is Algerian but has been based in France since childhood. Allouache is Algerian, has been living in France since the early 1990s, and shoots most of his films in Algeria (Allouache in Jones, “Un Cinéma”). Like Garcia, one of her co-scriptwriters and longtime colleague, Jacques Fieschi, is an Oran-born pied-noir and like Arcady, one of his co-scriptwriters and frequent collaborator, Daniel Saint-Hamont, was also born in Algeria. Saint-Hamont also cowrote Le Choix de Myriam (2008) with its director Malik Chibane. Two films in this chapter are the fruit of a collaboration between pieds-noirs and Algerians: Ce que le jour doit à la nuit is a successful 2008 novel published by well-known Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra that was made into a film by famous filmmaker Arcady, and Allouache’s film is based on pied-noir Louis Gardel’s 2007 autobiographical novel of the same title. The focus of both Arcady’s and Charef’s films is on one Algerian boy who happens to have a rather unusual access to the European colonial world and develops friendships that are put to the test as the war intensifies. Garcia, Arcady, and Allouache channel colonial nostalgia to a greater or lesser extent, and Charef brings pied-noir and Algerian memories together in a thoughtful manner. COLONIAL MELANCHOLIA AND SOLIPSISM IN UN BALCON SUR LA MER (NICOLE GARCIA, 2010) Nicole Garcia’s feature film Un Balcon sur la mer (A View of Love) thematizes pied-noir loss, memory, forgetting, and melancholia. The film, released in 2010, takes place in southern France in 1987 and includes eleven short flashbacks to early 1960s Oran. Marc Palestro (Jean Dujardin), on the surface a successful high-end realtor with a picture-perfect family, lives in a state of unexplained malaise that comes to a head when he meets a woman whom he initially misrecognizes as Cathy, a neighbor with whom he experienced a deep love in Oran when they were preteens. About halfway through the film, he realizes that the woman is actually MarieJeanne Fuentes (Marie-Josée Croze), the daughter of the former neighborhood drugstore owner, whose love for him was not reciprocated.1 The last flashback, from Marie-Jeanne’s perspective, provides the key to the secret that had been hidden from Marc by his family for twenty-five years: Cathy (Solène Forveille), whose parents were Communists who sympathized with the Algerian struggle for independence, was killed with her father in a bombing presumably perpetrated by the OAS after Marc and his family had left Algeria.

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From the very beginning of the film, forgetting is set up as a central concern. Marc, his wife, and their daughter Emmanuelle, nicknamed Manouche (Pauline Bélier), have just moved from their old city apartment to a beautiful, modern, clean-slate house in the countryside. Manouche, who is eleven— about the age Marc was in early 1960s Oran—misses their old apartment in the city, saying, “J’ai peur de l’oublier, l’autre” (I’m afraid I’ll forget the other one). In the next scene, Marc is trying to convince an elderly lady (Michelle Marquais) to put her run-down, pre-French Revolution mansion up for sale. Her reluctance comes from the fact that she also connects the past to this place and says that if she sold the house, it would be like getting rid of the past, “comme si rien n’avait jamais existé” (as if none of it ever existed). In contrast with Manouche, who has spent her formative years in one place, and the old lady, whose family history over centuries is contained in the mansion, for pieds-noirs, physical sites of memory are not available, since most of them left Algeria and almost all of their possessions behind, never to return (Stora, Gangrène 261). Without anything to remind him of his childhood past (no physical spaces and no blood relatives close by), Marc has seemingly forgotten everything that occurred before he came to France. When the old lady asks him “Vous êtes d’Aix, M. Palestro?” (Are you from Aix, Mr. Palestro?), he mentions that he came there as a child but does not indicate where he was born. This is symptomatic of the phase of repression in the Algeria syndrome, in which metropolitan French people did not really want to know much about pieds-noirs or about the Algerian past. As a result, Marc learned not to mention from where he came. However, Marc’s forgetting of his past is shot through by memory traces of that past, a double geographical and historical marker of which is contained in his last name. The Palestro canyon in Algeria is a famous French and piednoir site of memory of the war. That region had a long history of anti-colonial activism going back to the nineteenth century. Toward the beginning of the war, on May 18, 1956, twenty French conscripts were ambushed, killed, and their corpses mutilated in the canyon by Algerians, an event that sent shock waves throughout France and Algeria. The name of the area also points to the Italian origin of many pieds-noirs, as Palestro is a Northern Italian city. To add another multidirectional layer to this history, Palestro, Italy, is known as the site of a historic battle for independence, which paved the way for Italian unification in the nineteenth century.2 Another memory trace is visible at the very beginning of the film, as the credits roll: Un Balcon opens on eerily beautiful shots of the Oran harbor and the French section of the city at dawn, strangely emptied out of all its inhabitants. The city seems suspended in space as well as in time, since unless one is already familiar with Oran, the city could be any Mediterranean location.3 Nine minutes into the film, soon after the scenes with his young daughter and the old lady, Marc’s first brief

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flashback, after he meets the prospective buyer who reminds him of Cathy, is of a tank rolling through the same deserted streets, hinting that the opening images were either a dream or a memory. As he and “Cathy” chat, he says, “J’y pense jamais, à l’Algérie . . . personne n’en parlait” (I never think about Algeria . . . nobody would talk about it), to which she answers, “Ca vous rattrappe” (It catches up with you). His wife later points out to him, “T’en parles jamais” (You never talk about it), to which he explains, “C’était interdit” (It was forbidden). Since Marc had no geographical reminder of the past and since the familial vector of memory refused to address it, Marc’s memories were buried in a corner of his mind, like his boxes of books, photos, and other items, which he has not moved from the family’s old apartment to their new house because he has decided to get rid of them. Meeting the woman who reminds him of his old love triggers his journey back to the past. That the first flashback is of a tank rolling through the empty city streets, filmed with jump cuts and overlapping editing that signal an interruption in the normal order of things and create a jarring effect, is significant. The war is a topic pieds-noirs have had a difficult time addressing, generally preferring to linger on happier prelapsarian memories. In contrast, here the first memory of Algeria is of the war, indicating a desire to address this difficult topic. This difficulty is thematized in the film’s structure. Part of Marc’s trauma has to do with lack of closure. As his family decided to leave, he was never able to say goodbye to his love and never heard anything about her again. Cathy can thus be seen as an allegory of the vanished French Algeria, whose unexplained loss causes trauma. Soon after the flashback in which we learn that Marc never got to say a proper goodbye, thirty-five minutes into the film, the family goes to visit his mother (Claudia Cardinale), who lives in the coastal city of Marbella in southern Spain.4 This is where Marc finds out from his mother that Cathy “a été tuée dans un attentat” (was killed in an attack) in Algeria, soon after they left. He cannot bring himself to believe it, wondering why he was not told, to which his mother replies, “Tu l’aimais beaucoup. On ne voulait pas te faire de la peine” (You liked her a lot. We didn’t want you to be hurt). This family silence, which was meant as protection, relates to the belatedness of trauma. Young Marc had lost his beloved in the early 1960s, forgot all about it, only to find out as he thinks he found her again twenty-five years later that she is actually gone for good, even though her body could not be buried and there are therefore no traces, no absolute proof of what occurred. Trauma often resurfaces through triggers and flashbacks about thirty years later, and the film thematizes this process. Marc has been living a suspended life, disconnected from his past and his deeper self and entirely uprooted and exiled (doubly so, since he lost the land of his childhood and since his mother lives in a different country). As he tries to ascertain the truth about the woman’s identity—Cathy or Marie-Jeanne—he

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goes back to his old boxes where he kept mementos of his past and finds a picture of the two girls. He recognizes Marie-Jeanne from a similar picture that he had seen at her father’s place and is therefore able to confirm her identity. Toward the end of the film, Marie-Jeanne explains to him how Cathy died, which is then reenacted through a flashback from Marie-Jeanne’s perspective. The repetition of this event allows Marc to finally return to his past, symbolized by a trip to Algeria, the site of memory. Marie-Jeanne’s father’s drugstore is still there, and an Algerian man (Mustapha Ziraoui) in front of the building smiles at Marc, telling him in French that he is welcome to go up. Back on the terrace where he used to find refuge with Cathy, he is finally able to reconnect with his past and begin to mourn for it, breaking down crying. The film ends with Marc and Marie-Jeanne finding each other again. She tells him, “Je te cherchais” (I was looking for you), to which he answers, “Je me suis perdu” (I was lost), after which the credits roll. Marc has found himself and his past again, and the film intimates that the two protagonists may have a future together. French Algeria may be lost for good, but there is hope for pieds-noirs if they can reconnect with their past and with one another. But nothing is quite as it initially seems in this film, and all characters appear to play roles. Marc’s picture-perfect bourgeois life turns out to be only a screen covering his sense of emptiness. He does not communicate with his supportive wife (Sandrine Kiberlain), and his father-in-law (Michel Aumont) calls him the perfect son-in-law just after Marc has begun an affair with the woman he believes to be Cathy. “Cathy” is really Marie-Jeanne, who is involved in some kind of undetermined, high-end real-estate scam with a colleague of Marc’s (Toni Servillo). Marc’s mother and his father-in-law put up a good front, but there are hints in the film that both of their health is failing. Marie-Jeanne, an actress whose job is to play roles, wants nothing more than to be seen for who she is. During one rehearsal, she obsessively repeats the line “Il n’a pas encore remarqué mes yeux, mais quand il les regardera il sera ébloui” (He has not noticed my eyes yet, but when he looks at them he will be dazzled) and soon afterward, after confirming that she is not Cathy, she asks him, “Mon nom. Est-ce que tu te souviens de mon nom? Est-ce que tu m’as jamais vue?” (My name. Do you remember my name? Did you ever see me?) The later flashbacks make it clear that she had been around during the scenes in which Marc was remembering being with Cathy, but that she was (sometimes literally) outside the frame of his memories. The school play in which the three of them were cast recurs in the flashbacks and the classic play itself, Racine’s Iphigénie, is mentioned by both Marc and Marie-Jeanne. Iphigenia, the daughter of Greek mythology whose father must sacrifice her so his ship can sail, can be seen as a metaphor for the pieds-noirs, tragically sacrificed by de Gaulle for France to sail into the twenty-first century. Using the intellectual framework of ancient tragedy, in which gods play with the

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fates of humans, serves to evacuate the colonial context and political dimension of the Algerian war of liberation. Un Balcon stages pied-noir viewpoints exclusively. As a result, the losses of Algerians to French colonialism, as well as their agency in seeking their independence, are entirely absent from Un Balcon’s national allegory. The film charts the process from melancholia to mourning. It represents various events of the war: the French military presence in the streets and on terraces; citywide alerts with sirens, gunshots, and evacuations; the mention of an Arab man being “lynché” (lynched) by Europeans for being on the wrong beach (reminiscent of the plot of Camus’s L’Etranger); the fact that some of the French colonials supported independence; and the OAS’s lastditch attempt at fighting for French Algeria through violent guerrilla tactics. This leads the director to say, in the film’s “Dossier de presse,” that “tous les agents de cette histoire algérienne sont présents dans le film: le père de Cathy enseignant communiste indépendantiste; le terroriste de l’OAS; les Fuentes et Palestro, ces gens qui sentaient que cette guerre allait fatalement les arracher à une terre où ils avaient fait leur vie” (all of the agents of this Algerian story/history are present in the film: Cathy’s father is a Communist teacher in favor of independence, the terrorist is from the OAS, and the Fuentes and Palestros are people who felt that this war would fatally wrench them from a land where they had built a life for themselves) (my emphasis). Yet this list is obviously far from inclusive and points to the fact that even fifty years later, Algerians continue to remain entirely invisible as agents of their own history in this film of pied-noir memory. Commenting on Un Balcon, Ahmed Bedjaoui sees the stories it tells as being “toujours marquées par le syndrome de L’Etranger de Camus” (still part of the syndrome of Camus’s The Stranger) (Cinéma 145). In the U.S. context, Adrienne Rich defined white solipsism as “a tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant” (306). In the colonial context, the colonized are precisely not seen by the colonizers, as Charef poignantly notes in his autobiographical novel A bras-le-coeur: “Là-bas ils ne nous envisageaient pas, ici ils nous dévisagent . . .” (Over there [in Algeria] they did not see us, here [in France] they stare at us) (187).5 A symptomatic version of this tunnel vision that privileges colonial experiences is displayed in both Un Balcon and in Garcia’s gloss. Before directing Un Balcon, Garcia starred in a number of films that dealt with the Algerian war from a variety of perspectives, from Laurent Heynemann’s progressive anti-torture film La Question (1976) to Pierre Schoendoerffer’s conservative, pro-French military L’Honneur d’un capitaine (1982). She also starred in Brigitte Roüan’s 1990 Outremer, a film that attempted to work through this history of colonization and decolonization by focusing on three pied-noir sisters’ differing positions. In Un Balcon, Garcia

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remains at the same colonial solipsistic level as the character she portrayed in Outremer twenty years earlier. The loss of Algeria remains a wound that only involves former French colonials, who are seeking to be fully recognized in French society. There are no Algerians at all in the film’s flashbacks (which Garcia [“Dossier”] explains by saying that Oran was segregated at the time), and only one Algerian character says one short line when Marc goes back to Oran at the end of the film. The fact that the man is welcoming to Marc symbolizes that Algerians recognize him and through him the pieds-noirs. However, no such recognition comes back to him from Marc. The question that Marie-Jeanne asked Marc, “Est-ce que tu m’as jamais vue?” (Did you ever see me?), is a question Algerians could rightly ask the filmmaker. Marc is able to find himself again through acknowledging the loss of Cathy, recognizing Marie-Jeanne, and returning to the place of his childhood, but Algerians do not figure in his worldview at all. In contrast to the deserted Oran at the beginning of the film, local extras serve as colorful background figures with whom Marc does not engage in the bustling Oran street scenes at the end of the film. These scenes are filmed with extreme long shots and bird’s-eye shots, which create a distance between the people and the audience and may be seen as a filmic rendition of what Albert Memmi called “la marque du pluriel” (106) (the mark of the plural) (85), referring to the collective anonymity through which colonizers tend to figure colonized people. Garcia highlights the contrast between past and present Oran in Orientalist terms in the “Dossier de presse”: “Pour tourner la séquence où Marc revient à Oran à la rencontre de son passé, ce qui m’intéressait alors, au contraire des premières images, c’est de montrer la population oranaise d’aujourd’hui. Son débordement, sa musique, ses couleurs. Passer d’un Oran de rêve, voilé, à un Oran qui se dévoile, haute en couleurs et en bruits” (When shooting the scenes in which Marc comes back to Oran to find his past, what I wanted to do, in contrast with the first images, was to show the population of Oran today, with its overflowing excess, its music, its colors. To go from a dreamy and veiled Oran to an Oran unveiled, colorful and noisy). In these comments, the city is feminized and Orientalized through the metaphor of the veil. Its inhabitants are referred to with the objectifying term “population” rather than the more humanizing term “people” (Mies and Shiva) and presented as disorderly and noisy, in contrast with Marc’s orderly life and the eerily empty Oran of the film’s opening. Algerians are also characterized as colorful, as the natives always are in Orientalist settings. A beautiful film of pied-noir loss, Un Balcon is a perfect example of Stora’s theorization of compartmentalized memories. Unlike Charef’s Cartouches gauloises, which brings pied-noir and Algerian memories together, Un Balcon—even when highlighting different points of view—has nothing to say about or to Algerians (or people of Algerian descent in France), who

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remain invisible in the film. As such, the film represents a continuing colonial solipsism, fifty years after the events depicted in its flashbacks and twentyfive years after the present time of the film. Marc Palestro may have moved from melancholia to mourning Cathy and the lost French Algeria, but the film itself has not. The present of the film takes place in 1987; a reference to professional tennis at the beginning of the film—so brief as to easily pass unnoticed—helps establish the time frame. However, very little beyond the absence of cell phones actually points to a noncontemporary time period in the film, since the fashions and furniture are not particularly typical of the 1980s. This adds a temporal layer of uncertainty because 1987 looks a lot like 2009, when the film was shot. If the 1980s were a time of repression about the Algerian war in France and the decade of the 2000s a time of the return of the repressed, the visual similarities between these two periods in the film, coupled with its total inability to represent Algerians, point to a continuing repression of the reality of French colonialism and an ongoing colonial melancholia in some pied-noir memories, whether it be twenty-five or fifty years later. Un Balcon sur la mer uses film techniques such as unmarked shots of various Mediterranean locales, flashbacks with shifting points of view, and miseen-scène to create confusion in space, place, and time and to highlight issues of uncertain belonging. This ambiguity regarding space, place, and time is representative of Marc’s exilic confusion and melancholia. Although Marc is able to finally return to Oran to begin the mourning process and reconnects with Marie-Jeanne, the film itself creates an experience of othering by remaining anchored in colonial nostalgia, focusing only on the drama of former French settlers, and presenting reductive Orientalist images of Algerians as either absent or background figures in their own country. In contrast, other films in this chapter blend colonial nostalgia and melancholia with colonial critique, and initiate a long-awaited dialogue between pied-noir and Algerian characters. COLONIAL NOSTALGIA AND COLONIAL CRITIQUE: CE QUE LE JOUR DOIT À LA NUIT (ALEXANDRE ARCADY, 2012) In “Re-voir le paradis perdu,” a perceptive study of a documentary film full of nostalgia for French Algeria, literary and film scholar Carla Calargé outlines various aspects of colonial nostalgia: a focus on the lives of the wealthiest class—a numerical minority—that sutures the viewer to their points of view and incites identification with them while denying any causal link between their wealth and the poverty of the majority of people; beautiful shots of ideal,

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exotic, prelapsarian locales that do not include many poor colonial subjects, who are presented as having created their own negative situation and are not individually named; and tokenization of a minute portion of the native population—the assimilated ones, with whom the audience is invited to identify as well. Alexandre Arcady’s sweeping historical romance Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (What the Day Owes the Night) fits the pattern identified by Calargé, with a few important differences. The novel and film plots follow the trajectory of an Algerian boy, Younes (Iyad Bouchi), from his childhood in 1939 when he is about ten, to his youth just before and during the war of Algerian independence. His family, which was initially doing quite well due to his father Issa (Tayeb Belmihoub) owning a fertile plot of land, loses everything when a covetous and devious Kaid (a man to whom Issa owed money and who wanted to buy his property, played by Ahcene Benzerari) has Issa’s crops burned, throwing the entire family into abject poverty and forcing them to relocate to a very poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Oran. Whereas historically, dispossession of fertile lands was done by the French government, which then opened up the lands to European settlers (and unlike the situation Bouchareb and Charef set up in their films), in Le Jour the agent of the dispossession is another Algerian. Historically, the French often used local leaders like the Kaid to support their colonial efforts. In Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, the Kaid is the man who tells the family that they have to vacate their land; however, the film foregrounds the French responsibility for the expropriation: the family is told that the land will be given to a French settler. In Arcady’s film, it is the Kaid’s agency and profit that are made clear. Issa’s enormous pride then prevents him from accepting financial help from his brother Mohamed (Mohamed Fellag), a well-established pharmacist who lives in Oran with his Catholic, pied-noir wife Madeleine (Anne Consigny). Arcady departs from Khadra’s novel, in which it is implied that a covetous person may have set fire to the father’s crop but the agent of the family’s immiseration is not named. The novel leaves the reader unclear as to whether French colonialism, Algerian greed, or God’s will was the cause of the family’s situation (16–19, 27). Although in Arcady’s film, representatives of French law and order—not the Kaid—come to have Issa sign his land away, the film does problematically position Algerian men’s envy and pride—instead of French colonization—as the primary reason for the fall. Khadra’s book was very popular and went on to be translated into Arabic, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, and other languages. Like Charef, Khadra mentioned in an interview that he had been thinking about writing this novel of reconciliation for a long time (since the 1980s) but only felt up to it much later (Khelfaoui 26). The poetic title of the book reflects this goal of reconciliation, acknowledging that the bright days of independence paradoxically owe something to “la nuit coloniale” (the

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colonial night) (Khelfaoui 46). An interesting aspect of Khadra’s novel—and therefore of the film as well—is that it presents a clear intertext with Kateb Yacine’s foundational Algerian novel Nedjma, published toward the beginning of the war of independence, in 1956.6 Nedjma’s highly complex narration focuses on four Algerian close friends and cousins, two of whom turn out to be brothers and Nedjma’s cousins, and who all feel an impossible love for the married Nedjma. As many scholars have noted, Nedjma, the illegitimate daughter of an Algerian man and a Jewish French woman (who herself had been abducted at different times by four different men), functions as a national allegory of Algeria. Questions of identity, incest, and illegitimacy permeate Nedjma and are taken up in Le Jour. Whereas Nedjma announces the war of independence and focuses primarily on Algerian characters caught in the violent repression of the May 8, 1945, demonstrations, Le Jour sets the bulk of its narrative among the pied-noir population and, like Charef’s Cartouches gauloises, it highlights their diversity. Le Jour’s main character, Younes/Jonas (Fu’ad Aït Aattou), is Algerian and his three best friends are European. One, Simon Benyamin (Matthias Van Khache), is Jewish and the other two, Jean-Christophe Lamy (Olivier Barthélémy) and Fabrice Scamaroni (Nicolas Giraud), are Catholic—one of French and one of Italian origin. A fifth young man, André (Dédé) Rucillio (Mathieu Boujenah), is of Spanish origin. There are three French love interests—primarily Emilie (Nora Arnezeder), who loves Jonas and is loved by all four friends, and to whom one reviewer (Yacine) refers as Nedjma—and Isabelle (Marine Vacth), the daughter of a wealthy landowner and Dédé’s sister. Emilie’s mother, Madame Cazenave (Anne Parillaud), is the reason why Younes and Emilie must remain apart: she seduced Younes once and makes him promise never to act on his love for her daughter as that would be incestuous. In Le Jour, the weight of the national allegory is borne by several characters. For Trudy Agar, Younes/Jonas, with his bicultural upbringing, is an allegory of Algeria under French colonization in Khadra’s book (23). Khadra himself has supported this interpretation, saying in an interview that “Jonas symbolise un petit peu l’Algérien de l’époque, qui était partagé entre deux cultures, deux tiraillements, une quête permanente de l’identité” (Khadra, “Pourquoi?”) (Jonas is somewhat symbolic of Algerians at the time, who were split between two cultures in a push and pull motion, a permanent identity quest). When, broken by his fate, Younes’s father entrusts his young son to his successful, acculturated brother, who has no children of his own, Younes is given the opportunity to grow up in relative wealth and love, but he has to leave part of himself and his nuclear family behind in the process. Like Gisèle in Michou d’Auber, his surrogate French mother renames him (as Jonas) so he can be better accepted in pied-noir society by passing, which is facilitated by his light skin and blue eyes. While Younes’s new name implies

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a Christian tradition and a whitewashing of his Algerian identity, Jonas and Younes are also versions of the same name and refer to the same scriptural person, Jonah, who is mentioned in both the Bible and the Qur’an. The double name thus refers to and brings together a triple religious tradition of the People of the Book—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—a triple tradition that is also present in the film through the character of Simon, the other pied-noir characters, and Younes and his family.7 Le Jour focuses on the temptation of assimilation for Younes, which becomes less and less possible as the war goes on and demands binary commitments. Film critic Nicolas Didier notes that Younes and Emilie “sont, pour le cinéaste, la métaphore de l’amour impossible entre l’Algérie et la France” (are, for the filmmaker, a metaphor for the impossible love between Algeria and France). Arcady has also supported this interpretation, saying that the relationship between Younes and Emilie is about “cet amour démesuré qu’il y a eu, et qu’il y a encore, entre l’Algérie et la France, un amour impossible, c’est pour ça que cet amour n’aboutit pas” (Making of) (the enormous love that existed and still remains between Algeria and France, an impossible love, and that’s why their love doesn’t succeed). Even as a young adult, Younes/ Jonas, as the representative of an Algeria divided within and against itself, is generally passive and often acted upon by the other characters—Emilie and her mother in particular. His paralysis in front of these two generations of pied-noir women may be seen as reflecting the power imbalance in colonial Algeria. Whereas Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma is mostly passive and acted upon by the male characters who abduct or defend her at will, female characters in Le Jour are more numerous and have more agency. However, they are all pied-noir women. Algerian women are almost entirely absent from Le Jour, except for Younes’s mother and sister who play very minor roles, disappear early in the narrative, and are never the agents of the action in either the novel or the film. Whereas Nedjma highlighted the violent birth of the nation through an exploded narrative style and structure, Le Jour’s narration follows the rather conventional genre of the historical romance, to the point that one critic has compared the film to Gone with the Wind (Luciani). While Le Jour’s ideology is not racist—unlike Gone with the Wind’s—a certain nostalgia for the carefree world of the wealthy colonists is palpable through the film’s costumes, lighting, and especially its gorgeous sets (the beaches, outdoors landscapes, the Cazenave palace, and the vast Rucillio estate—reminiscent of Western movies). The film also renders the American mystique of the 1950s extremely well, through the lovingly detailed set of Dédé’s American diner-style bar and the glamorous American cars he drives. Whereas in Hors la loi the use of American style bolsters the status of the Algerian characters, in Le Jour it contributes to creating an almost mythical image of the pieds-noirs in Algeria.

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Stora compellingly explains that both the U.S. and French Algeria were settler colonies and that pieds-noirs were explicitly identifying with pioneers in the wide-open spaces of the American Frontier and, to a lesser extent, with plantation owners and poor whites in the U.S. South (“La Guerre d’Algérie dans les mémoires françaises” 8–11). This pied-noir “imaginaire sudiste” (9) (Southern imaginary) was influenced by Hollywood movies, especially by the plethora of Westerns exported by the United States’ film industry in the twentieth century. Interestingly, in Le Jour, the adult friends and Emilie go to see a B movie that carries the same colonial imaginary delineated by Stora, La Trahison du Capitaine Porter (Thunder over the Plains, 1953). In the wide-open spaces of Texas during the Reconstruction period after the end of the Civil War, a Texan captain in the U.S. military is part of the Federal “army of occupation” (Thunder). Although Captain Porter is supposed to enforce martial law and to protect Northern profiteers (tax collectors and carpetbaggers), his loyalties are divided as he identifies with the courageous Texan rebels who fight what they consider to be their unjust oppression at the hands of the profit-driven Northerners. Thunder’s Southern ideology is particularly clear in the “heavy-handed voice-over narration at the film’s beginning and end” (Scheer). Slavery is never mentioned as a cause of the war. A few silent Black extras (Scheer) are present in the background in three of the scenes, and Native Americans are invisible. When the two Yankee profiteers get their comeuppance in once scene, all Texans laugh and cheer, including two Black men, who are thus shown as siding with former slaveholding white Texans. The conflict is between the caricatured Northerners and the exalted Texans. This struggle is symbolized by the love triangle between Porter, his wife, and another federal captain who seeks to defeat the Texan rebels. It would have been very easy for pieds-noirs to identify with the heroic Texans and righteous captain Porter and to see the Northerners as similar to the French in this type of film. Western frontier and Southern plantation ideologies mix in Texas in ways similar to the pied-noir imaginary described by Stora. Thunder’s representation of Texans as oppressed for no reason would reinforce the colonial ideology of French Algeria, providing settlers with a heroic sense of self-worth and justifying their actions as morally superior by entirely denying the reality of slavery and colonial oppression. The selection of this film in Le Jour represents a particularly apposite cultural reference that echoes Stora’s argument.8 Arcady’s film focuses on wealthy characters. Historically, the majority of Europeans in Algeria were working-class or lower-middle class (like Fabrice’s family, whose home is never shown in the film) (Thénault, Histoire 36). However, the lives of pied-noir characters displayed in the film—especially the Cazenave and Rucillio palatial sets—are clearly those of what we would call “the 1 percent” today. The audience is invited to imagine itself being part

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of such a glamorous setting. In contrast, the poverty-stricken world of the majority of Algerians is shown to a much lesser extent, whereas it is much more present and described in detail in Khadra’s novel. The film does represent some French economic exploitation of Algerians, as when Younes’s father Issa works a backbreaking job only to be paid half of what he had been promised. After Younes’s first racist encounter at school, his uncle voices a critique of the system, saying, “Il faut que ça s’arrête, le mépris, les humiliations!” (Their contempt, the humiliations—it all has to stop!) This anticolonial message is stronger in the novel. Younes’s nuclear family disappears from the film after the first half hour, and from then on, poor Algerians are only shown as background figures traversing the city or working the vineyards in extreme long shots. Some of these background images do reveal something about the nature of the colonial system, such as two brief shots of an Algerian shoeshine boy about Younes’s age working on the sidewalk next to the pharmacy. There are also many pans and tracking shots of vehicles driving by in the film, usually contrasting the fancy cars driven by the protagonists with Algerians walking, using wheelbarrows, donkeys, or other rudimentary means of transportation. One visual match in particular provides a brief criticism of colonial society by contrasting the wealth of the colonials with the poverty of the Algerians: we first see Madame Cazenave’s impossibly large American car drive by, followed by a shot of an Algerian man on a donkey-drawn carriage, driving by in a similar way. However, these scenes are very brief and the Algerians in these short scenes are not named characters but background figures. Further, since the film has not set up explicit causal relations between the general Algerian poverty and the incredible wealth of the colonials, the critique is somewhat muted (and these images could therefore even be understood as simply contrasting traditional Algerian ways with pied-noir modernity). Beyond most of Jonas’s pied-noir friends and their families, who are unaware of the economic and political reasons for the war, Le Jour presents a variety of characters with different levels of political commitment. Like the three brothers in Hors la loi, the four friends take different sides in the war. For instance, Fabrice, Younes’s friend from a working-class background, is the most aware pied-noir character. He becomes a journalist who writes articles that are somewhat critical of French Algeria, trying to get his reading public to understand that the end of the colonial period is near. In contrast, Jean-Christophe volunteers to serve in Indochina during the war and ends up as a local OAS leader. Younes’s uncle is the only Algerian in the film who has achieved an economic status that is somewhat equivalent to that of the colonials and interacts with them regularly. Systems of human domination usually use tokenism—“a promise of mobility which is severely restricted in quantity”—to mask the

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exploitative nature of the system (Judith Long Laws, quoted in Russ 103), and Mohamed is the only well-to-do Algerian in the wealthy pied-noir community represented in the film. His commitment in favor of a peaceful political end to colonialism means that he is harassed and even arrested once by French police. This arrest has grave and durable psychological consequences for him in the book, which are not present in the film.9 Mohamed is presented as a model Algerian man. He is a pharmacist like real-life moderate Algerian politician Ferhat Abbas, who was also married to a pied-noir woman with whom he raised one of his nephews as their own (Stora and Daoud 163); another nephew of his was also a pharmacist (231). Abbas worked to gain equal rights for Algerians under the colonial system until it became clear to him that the French would not relent, and he then began agitating for independence.10 Mohamed is involved in the various independence movements led by Messali Hadj over the years, and his pied-noir wife supports his efforts (as Abbas’s wife did). Whereas the official Algerian version of the war of independence focused on the role of the FLN (Stora, Gangrène 188), the role of other older parties is thus hinted at in Le Jour, which is an important corrective. Significantly, Mohamed’s last name is Mahieddine, which was part of Emir Abdelkader’s name (Abdelkader ibn Mahieddine el-Djazairi). The leader of the anti-colonial fight against the French during the nineteenthcentury French military conquest of Algeria, Abdelkader united Berber and Arab tribes against the French between 1830 and 1847 and is widely considered by historians as the first leader to have had a national vision for Algeria. Younes’s uncle’s commitment to independence is given a powerful historical lineage from Abdelkader to Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj, thus making him one of the carriers of the national allegory.11 The nurturing mixed couple Mohamed-Madeleine is presented as somewhat exemplary. Unlike most fictional mixed French-Algerian couples, they are happy and loving toward one another and other people (Khelfaoui 96–97). In a sense, they provide a model for peaceful French-Algerian relations today. The difficulty in following this model, however, is highlighted by their unique status in the film, since their union is not one that Younes or any other character is able to replicate. The character of Mohamed also represents a certain after the fact nostalgia for a compromise political solution that may be seen by some as optimal in hindsight. This wistful longing is also expressed in Je vous ai compris and Le premier homme. In fact, a large majority of pieds-noirs had strenuously opposed any reforms in favor of Algerians since the end of the nineteenth century. This stark rejection of any improvements to the status of Algerians on the part of successive French governments was one reason for the shift from demanding basic civil rights to full-blown independence by some Algerian political leaders such as Abbas (see Stora and Daoud 32).

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Younes’s occasional experiences of racism (a pied-noir child in school saying that Arabs are lazy, little Isabelle [Ilana Ferreira] telling him that she could never love an Arab, and French police searching his uncle and aunt’s house) are reinforced by his repeatedly witnessing the racist and violent ways in which young adult Dédé treats his Algerian servant Djelloul (Salim Kechiouche), who is roughly the same age as they are. Daily colonial racism is shown primarily through the character of Dédé, with whom the audience is not invited to identify (all the other pied-noir characters rebuff his racist words and actions) and who can therefore be dismissed as one problematic racist individual (instead of the film indicting the colonial system).12 Eventually, having been subjected to one too many mistreatments, Djelloul joins the independence struggle. By the end of the war, he has become an important FLN leader who helps Younes in his search for Emilie. It is primarily through the character of Djelloul that the film portrays some of the reasons for the violent struggle for decolonization and in this sense, his character can be said to also represent the Algerian nation allegorically. Le Jour focuses on four periods. It begins and ends with the framing device of old Younes (Jean-François Poron) going to France almost fifty years after the end of the war, because of Emilie’s death. This initial short presentday scene is followed by a flashback to 1970, when Younes briefly went to Marseille to see Emilie. Then, the film moves back in time to 1939, spending about an hour on Younes’s childhood and his encounters with the major players in his life. In this portion of the film taking place during World War II, the May 8, 1945, massacre of Algerians in Setif and other cities is only mentioned once in passing (whereas in Khadra’s novel, it causes Mohamed’s heart attack 183–4). The film then flashes forward to 1953, focusing on the young men’s charmed lives and their love tragedies. Symbolically in the film, Mohamed suffers a heart attack on July 14 (Bastille Day, the national celebration of the French Republic), and, like Moses who would never see the Promised Land, Mohamed dies the day before November 1, 1954 (the first day of the Algerian war of independence), two hours into the film. The hopes for a peaceful solution to French colonization of Algeria, led by Algerian men integrated into French colonial society, die on that day, both literally and symbolically. Le Jour shows very little of the war itself, except from a brief scene in which Djelloul recruits some men for the fight, two scenes in which he involves Younes into helping them medically, and a couple of short scenes of Europeans lining up to leave the country under heavy military escort. When Younes is arrested for helping the FLN, Isabelle’s father, Juan Rucillio (Vincent Perez) nobly springs him from jail unscathed by providing him with a false alibi.13 Rucillio then gives Younes the colonial line about pieds-noirs making Algeria fertile, to which Younes counters, “Cette terre n’est pas à

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vous” (This land isn’t yours). The main war event depicted in the film—a couple of scenes later—is when Younes finds Simon, his throat slit and the house set ablaze, followed by a brief scene in which Jean-Christophe and other OAS members shoot Algerians at a café. The order of these scenes suggests that the OAS is retaliating against the FLN violence. Even though Younes had provided an explanation for the liberation struggle before these scenes, the impact of seeing sweet Simon killed is more visually stunning, especially given that the film had not insisted on the violence of colonial exploitation prior to Younes’s exchange with Rucillio. The audience is thus generally sutured to a point of view that highlights the FLN’s initial violence and does not connect it effectively to French colonial violence. The war period only takes up twenty minutes of this very long film (two hours and forty minutes). After the scene in which the beginning of the war is mentioned, the film jumps to events toward the end of the war in 1961. Fifty years later, the bulk of the war period thus appears as a blank or an ellipsis, although this is also due to the genre of the film, which is a historical romance rather than a war film. Toward the end of the film, however, important scenes of asking for forgiveness and of coming together and partial reconciliation are staged. Both Madame Cazenave (before she leaves for France toward the end of the war) and her daughter Emilie (in a postmortem letter), ask Younes for forgiveness. In terms of national allegory, this can be seen to represent pieds-noirs asking Algerians for forgiveness. At the end of Khadra’s novel, Younes and pied-noir and harki acquaintances, including Dédé and Younes’s old friend Fabrice (but not Jean-Christophe), reunite over a shared meal in Aix-en-Provence, in a display of masculine reconciliation (women are not present). In the film, Younes refuses to meet the group and Arcady replaces this perhaps too-neat scene of reconciliation with a symbolic scene in which Younes and Jean-Christophe (Jacques Frantz) reconcile over Emilie’s grave (rather than in the liminal and neutral space of the airport in the novel) and reiterate their childhood pledge to remain friends for life. Unlike the novel, which ends with Jean-Christophe promising to come visit Younes in Algeria, in the film the scene does not idealistically brush aside the wounds of war, as Jean-Christophe makes it clear that he will never go back to Algeria and does not invite Younes to his place. The last scene of the film is of youthful Younes and Emilie finally united and holding hands in prewar Algeria, looking straight ahead—as if into the future—and then at each other, smiling. This scene, coming from old Younes’s mind’s eye, is not a memory but a past conditional representation of what might have been, had history taken a different path. These images, which are not in the novel, can be interpreted analeptically as pied-noir and French wishful thinking for the very peaceful resolution to the Algerian conflict that they themselves had so strenuously

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fought against, which led to the war. It can also be interpreted proleptically as a hope for future Algerian-French relations and for more peaceful relations within multicultural France today. Arcady’s film participates in some aspects of colonial nostalgia as defined by Calargé (Re-voir): it focuses on the lives of the wealthiest settler class in French Algeria, does not make the link between their wealth and the poverty of colonial subjects explicit, films the landscape as a gorgeous open space that does not include many poor colonial subjects, presents colonized men as being primarily responsible for their situation, highlights the token portion of the colonized population that was upper-middle class, and generally invites the audience to identify with the wealthier characters. However, it also presents a somewhat muted critique of the colonial order through the characters of Mohamed, Djelloul, and Dédé in particular, through intertextual reference to a classic of Algerian literature, Nedjma, and through camera movements and specific shots. In its final scenes, it takes stock of the continuing wounds of the past and sets up the conditions of possibility for facing the past together and moving into the future in a healing manner. Perhaps this is why Yasmina Khadra had a positive reaction to the film, finding it very moving (Culturebox). At the end of the credits, the film’s dedication from Arcady reads, “A mes enfants, un héritage du coeur et de la mémoire” (To my children, this inheritance of heart and memory). Both writer and filmmaker’s goal was one of reconciliation, moving into the future for the sake of the next generations. Khadra also sought to tell a story about Algerian history “dans toute sa diversité” (in its full diversity) and inclusive of the French presence (Khadra, “Pourquoi?”). In the film, the focus tends to be more on the piednoir world than in the novel. For Arcady, Le Jour is about the need to “ne rien oublier, mais aller de l’avant” (Making of) (forget nothing but move forward). Moving forward has been generally difficult for most pieds-noirs, but the film stages this important step in its last scenes. True reconciliation and “apaisement” (Arcady, “Making of”) (healing) can only occur when not just everyone’s pain but also the responsibility for colonial exploitation is faced squarely, something that begins to be hinted at in Arcady’s and Allouache’s films. FROM THE STRANGER TO DIALOGUE: LA BAIE D’ALGER (MERZAK ALLOUACHE, 2011) In La Baie d’Alger, a made-for-TV movie, Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache brings to the screen pied-noir Louis Gardel’s 2007 autobiographical novel of the same title (they cowrote the film’s script). Allouache, whose oeuvre spans a forty-year period, is one of the most acclaimed Algerian

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filmmakers. His first film, Omar Gatlato (1976), made its mark on Algerian cinema, capturing the disillusionment of postindependence Algerians in the 1970s. Allouache is also recognized for Bab el-Oued City (1994), a critique of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria at the time. More recently, his Le Repenti (2012) provides a meditation on that dark decade in Algeria and its aftermath. In these two films, Allouache condemns both Islamic fundamentalism and the Algerian government that allowed its rise. He is also famous for the popular comedies Salut Cousin! (1996) and Chouchou (2003). Co-screenwriter Louis Gardel, for his part, is most well-known for the 1980 colonial novel Fort Saganne, made into a film of the same title by Alain Corneau in 1983. Gardel coscripted that film as well, along with another famous French colonial film, Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992), both of which star Catherine Deneuve. La Baie d’Alger focuses on fifteen-year-old pied-noir Louis (Solal Forte), who is from a well-connected and well-off family. He lives in Algiers with his nonconformist and pragmatic grandmother, Zoé (Catherine Jacob, who was also cast in L’Adieu, a 2003 made-for-TV movie by François Luciani that similarly deals with the war). They often spend time in their beach house in Surcouf, on the outskirts of Algiers. The story takes place toward the beginning of the war, in 1955, and is narrated by an older Louis (Jacques Spiesser) more than fifty years later. Events of the war puncture Louis’s otherwise rather carefree world, in which he primarily spends his time in high school, swimming with buddies, attending parties, and developing crushes on girls. Since Louis is generally personally shielded from the violence of the war, which was more sporadic in early 1955 than it became later on, “scenes of atrocities and bloodshed are sanitized” in this film, unlike what young Ali witnesses on the streets of his city in 1961 in Charef’s film Cartouches gauloises (Jones, “Turning” 68). La Baie also points to the anti-Semitism of the colonial society. As in Cartouches where the pool is off limits to the Algerian boy Ali, in La Baie, Louis’s best friend Solal (Anthony Sonigo), who is Jewish, mentions that neither Jews nor Arabs are allowed in the pool. In many ways, the atmosphere of La Baie recalls that of Albert Camus’s Algeria. Louis admires Camus (Julien Testard) and is awed at having the chance to meet the writer briefly. During a heated debate between pied-noir characters with differing opinions on colonial Algeria, Camus’s real-life attempts at bringing together representatives from pied-noir and FLN camps are brought up. Like Camus, Louis’s beloved high school French teacher Marco (Michaël Abiteboul) evinces leftist politics and is killed in a car accident. There are also several intertextual references, direct and indirect, to Camus’s L’Etranger. At one point, as Louis is talking with Christine (Rosa Bursztejn), the Paris-raised daughter of two pied-noir characters, he sees an Algerian man walking on the beach and tells her, “Regardez, c’est comme

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dans L’Etranger . . . Lui, là-bas, c’est comme dans le roman de Camus . . . la scène où Meursault tue un Arabe sur la plage” (It’s like The Stranger . . . Look at him over there, just like in Camus’s novel . . . the scene where Meursault kills an Arab on the beach). In this self-reflexive scene of the portrait of the writer as a young man, the peaceful presence of an Algerian man on a beach that is perceived as a pied-noir space symptomatically triggers violent thoughts in Louis. These thoughts are mediated through reference to L’Etranger, a fictional text that was itself inspired in part by actual events in Oran and Algiers (Kaplan 43–44, 54–55, 212). Camus’s novel, which objectifies its Algerian secondary characters (none of whom are ever named) while focusing on the sense of alienation experienced by its male pied-noir narrator-protagonist, is thus shown in La Baie as both having been shaped by and influencing the colonial ethos. It also permeates the imaginary of subsequent writers. La Baie also rewrites L’Etranger’s plot. Just after Louis mentions Camus’s novel, Christine’s father Xavier (David Marchal) returns from a boat ride, horrified, as he has just unintentionally killed an Algerian man who was diving under his boat to fish and got caught in the boat’s propeller. The motive, response, and ultimate outcome are different from what occurs in Camus’s novel. This is an accident and not a murder. Whereas Meursault talks about killing an Arab, Xavier says that he killed “un homme” (a man), whom we only later find out is Algerian. In Gardel’s book, the dead man’s ethnic origins are not mentioned. From Camus’s colonial novel to Allouache’s postcolonial film, the humanity of Algerians is now named and acknowledged. Unlike in L’Etranger, in which the actual plight of the Arab man and his family is of little concern to anyone, both Xavier and Louis feel horrible about the accident. Xavier turns himself in to the authorities, but he is not charged with anything because he is related to the powerful Dédé Steiger (a wealthy pied-noir who rides around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, played by Jean Benguigui), because Xavier will provide the dead man’s family with funding for their children’s schooling, and because the victim is Algerian and not European. Whereas in Gardel’s book the death of the diver occurs well before the reference to L’Etranger made by Louis, the film joins the two scenes and reverses their order so that viewers can catch the allusion more easily. In the film’s rewriting of Camus’s novel, a more ethical individual response is both modeled and used to critique the colonial system. The adult narrator remarks on “l’injustice qui permettait à Xavier de ne pas être condamné pour la mort d’un Arabe” (the injustice that allowed Xavier not to be convicted for the death of an Arab). This sentence refers not just to Xavier’s situation but also back to Camus’s novel in which, although Meursault is convicted and receives the death penalty, the text makes it clear that he is punished for not fitting in his society’s conventional expectations—symbolized by his not

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showing the proper emotion at his mother’s death and funeral—and thus for his perceived character, rather than for his act of killing an Algerian man. The text provides other alternate ethical responses to L’Etranger. The piednoir priest, Father Sintès (Rodolphe Dana), who is an early FLN supporter and the most politically committed of all the pied-noir characters in the film, ironically shares a last name with Raymond (L’Etranger 47), Meursault’s pimp neighbor, who had an Algerian mistress he abused; it is her brother that Meursault ends up killing. This intertextual reference thus provides a clear contrast between the ethical and political positions modeled by both characters.14 Finally, there is a brief mention of Louis’s grandmother Zoé preventing the killing of an Arab man by an angry pied-noir during Dédé’s funeral (Dédé had been killed by FLN operatives). Zoé intervenes by using her umbrella, a household item, to hit the man’s arm and prevent him from shooting, thus modeling courageous bystander engagement that de-escalates the conflict. The film follows Gardel’s book’s events and dialogues fairly closely, with some important modifications. It significantly reorganizes the order in which events occur (as we have just seen), reduces the importance placed on some of the pied-noir characters such as Solal and Dédé, and increases the role played by some of the Algerian characters. As a result, the film provides a somewhat less imbalanced characterization than the book. Although (especially in contrast with Cartouches gauloises) the film still only “briefly hint[s] at the suffering of the Algerians, but remain[s] focused on the European settlers’ war experiences” (Jones, “Turning” 71), it is less solipsistically engrossed in the pied-noir characters than the book is. For instance, there are a few fleeting scenes showing the poverty of Algerians, only the first one of which occurs in the book. Less than fourteen minutes into the film, the high school gym coach tells young Algerian boys who are watching the pied-noir boys run track in their expensive-looking matching track suits to scram. The Algerian and pied-noir boys are symbolically separated by a wire fence that keeps the pied-noir boys inside and the Algerian ones outside. In another scene, just after Xavier has told Louis about killing the Arab diver, Louis and Solal are meeting at a café. A young Algerian boy, like Ali in Cartouches, who must work to make a living, comes into the café not to have a drink but to sell the pied-noir patrons peanuts. In Surcouf, Louis occasionally hangs out with Omar (Khalid Berkouz), a young man about his age who does odd jobs for the family. Toward the end of the film, when Louis visits Omar’s house to eat some of the Eid pastries Omar’s mother is making, the poor shacks where they and other Algerian families live contrast with the nice pied-noir beach houses close by. Louis realizes their poverty for the first time, remarking that they live in “un autre monde” (another world). La Baie depicts pieds-noirs as being unusually aware of the need for a change in the colonial system in Algeria. Louis’s relatives and friends,

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especially Zoé’s cousin Suzanne (Michèle Moretti) and Louis’s Jewish classmate Solal, tend to be left leaning and understand why Algerians would be seeking their independence. The priest and the school teacher, to whom the boys look up, both support FLN efforts. Through their influence, Louis begins to develop some awareness of the unfairness of the colonial situation. Less central characters such as Dédé and Louis’s classmate Granger (Arthur Orcier) occasionally represent the colonialist discourse that was espoused by the majority of pieds-noirs at the time but is given less air time in the film and less influence on Louis. On the one hand, it is perhaps good for today’s audience to be spared the repetition of the most egregious racist and colonialist discourse, but on the other hand, it is also symptomatic that, in La Baie as in Mon Colonel, liberal and anti-colonial positions are expounded by pied-noir characters and not by Algerians themselves, who are not given much opportunity to have a voice. Early on (less than eight minutes into the film and on the first page of the book), Louis has an epiphany that leads him to understand that the world he has always known is about to end. He repeats several times, “C’est fini” (It’s over), then adds, “l’Algérie, c’est fini” (Algeria is over). One cannot overstate how unusual this awareness is in a pied-noir character, especially at the beginning of the war. In a sense, the story begins with the end, with an anticipatory declaration of mourning before the pied-noir world has collapsed. In contrast with most pied-noir narratives that have difficulty representing the war period, La Baie begins with an announcement of a death foretold. However, that announcement of mourning is symptomatic in that both the film and the book announce not the death of French Algeria but that of Algeria itself. In the swallowing or erasure of the word “French,” one can see the solipsistic impossibility for the colonial mentality to conceptualize the existence of Algeria as an entity independent from the French and of Algerians as citizens. An atmosphere of melancholia pervades the film, as Louis regularly has trouble understanding what is going on around him, both politically and with respect to the girls he likes (see Jones, “Turning” 69). Lacking important information about political and personal/sexual/relational contexts, he flounders and slowly finds elements of response to his questions through his interactions with and observation of other characters. The narrative begins at the end for the pied-noir characters in more ways than one, since the film, unlike the book, opens with a sequence taking place after independence in 1962. When Zoé arrives at the beach house, symbolically wearing a scarf with prints of the Eiffel Tower, she encounters a group of ALN soldiers, one of whom turns out to be Omar. Omar initially acts as if he does not know Zoé and is rude to her in front of his ALN comrades, but he eventually acknowledges her in private and asks how Louis is doing. This inaugural scene gives the impression that both characters and the groups they represent—one with her allegiance to the Eiffel Tower and the other reciting

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the FLN party line like a lesson poorly assimilated—are caught in a situation not entirely of their own making. Although an actual reunion between both sides is an impossible event in 1962, Omar’s 1962 query regarding Louis is what triggers the older narrator’s flashback to 1955, in a triple superimposition of time frames. In Gardel’s book as in L’Etranger, significantly, the Arab character is not named. Omar is called “Yeux-Bleus” (Blue Eyes) by the pied-noir characters, for whom he performs odd jobs. In the film, he is not portrayed as having unusual blue eyes, appears in several scenes and, perhaps as a response to Camus, is given both a name and a voice. In the film but not Gardel’s book, Louis visits his home and meets his mother twice. As in Cartouches gauloises, “the pieds-noirs [sic] children in La Baie d’Alger do not live in a parallel society, but do socialize with their Algerian counterparts” (Jones, “Turning” 67). The imbalance of power is made clear in both films, since the young Algerian characters such as Omar and Zoubida (Lisa Masker, who does needlepoint for Zoé) work and the pied-noir ones only go to school. Allouache’s film importantly adds to a scene in which Michelle (Margaux Chatelier), a young pied-noir woman Louis pines after, invites Louis to a party, seventeen minutes into the film. Omar is standing behind Louis and Michelle entirely ignores him, addressing Louis and never once looking at Omar, as if he were not there at all. Omar identifies and names this colonial objectification, remarking to Louis, “Moi elle m’invite pas, j’existe pas . . . ou alors, j’suis invisible. Tu t’en fous, hein?” (She didn’t invite me. I don’t exist . . . or else I’m invisible. You couldn’t care less, right?) Louis significantly has no idea what he could do to change this. The divisions of the colonial society are so entrenched that Louis cannot even imagine the possibility of asking Michelle if Omar could come, or at least declining the invitation out of solidarity with Omar. Michelle’s invitation, with its potential promise of sexual fulfillment within the colonial group, thus acts as another layer separating Louis and Omar. Earlier in the film, the two boys had snuck around to watch Michelle take a shower. Even though she knew they were there, the fact that they were hidden made it somewhat acceptable (we see her smiling). The boys’ potential friendship is not allowed in public, nor is it even thinkable to give Omar access to a space full of white French colonial girls. In a parallel and contrasting scene fifty-five minutes into the film, Louis and Solal are on the beach when Michelle walks by with her boyfriend Jacky. Unlike Omar who is visibly ethnically different, Solal is included this time, although he makes it clear in several scenes that Jews are often discriminated against in colonial society. Louis, who earlier had not introduced Omar to Michelle, introduces Solal, and Michelle invites both boys to the party. The divisions of colonial society are thus made clear in these parallel scenes, with Jewish people being in an intermediary position in the colonizer-colonized hierarchy. This middle

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position is also symbolized in a scene on the jetty in which Solal briefly speaks to Algerian characters in Arabic and Louis speaks to them in French. Besides Omar, another Algerian character is important to Louis. Bouarab (Benaïssa Ahaouari), an older fisherman who has known Zoé for thirty years, acts as a bit of a father figure to Louis. Toward the end of the film, he warns Louis to avoid a certain section of the beachfront area that evening, revealing his fondness for the pied-noir teen and his resolve not to place young pied-noir civilians in danger even though he is involved in independence activism. Bouarab is killed during a skirmish with the French military on the beach that evening and Louis screams and cries in pain when he sees the body of an older man he looked up to lying lifeless on the beach. Thus, an Arab man is killed on the beach in La Baie, but in a very different context from L’Etranger—for having taken part in the organized Algerian resistance to the French. The intertextual reference to L’Etranger is reinforced by his name: in La Baie’s rewriting, the nameless “Arabe” (Arab) of Camus’s narrative is included in the character’s name, Bouarab. With this named individual who was important to Louis and who had been characterized as wise, hardworking, simple, honest, and fair, the film casts doubt on the merit of the French military involvement. At the same time, the fact that his proper name includes the general common name used to refer to Algerians in French Algeria points to the fact that Bouarab remains a second-class citizen—an Arab within a colonial system that was based on never giving him a fair place in society.15 In La Baie, the beach, as the place of Bouarab’s death, represents an important liminal space—not only a space from life to death but one that is also both raced and gendered—a place of both mixing and danger. The beach is a space that is usually connoted in pied-noir and travel literature and film as a location for rest and relaxation, enjoyable physical exertion and lounging with a promise of potential sexual exertion (the slight clothing, diving into the crashing waves, etc.). This aspect is present in the film through Louis’s repeated beach encounters with Michelle and Christine, as discussed above. The beach is also the place where a death twice foretold eventually occurs. The beach is where Louis, influenced by Camus’s fiction, imagines the death of an Algerian man, where Xavier tells Louis about having unwittingly killed a man, where French military soldiers regularly appear in the background, and where Bouarab is killed. Death progressively invades this space of leisure and celebration of life. Other locations in the film are primarily segregated, racially or by gender: in Algiers, we see only pieds-noirs, with a few exceptions such as Dédé’s servants, café workers, and Zoubida embroidering with Zoé once. In Louis’s high school, we see only boys and men since French schooling was single-sex at the time. There do not appear to be any Algerian boys in the school and, as discussed above, Algerian boys are kept outside the school’s fence. The beach area (including the beach houses, the beach itself,

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and the sea) is the primary space for ethnic, religious, and gender mixing. Whereas the pieds-noirs on the beachfront are engaged primarily in leisure activities (we see them sunning themselves, playing, and swimming), the Algerian characters are there primarily to work (we see Bouarab selling fish to pied-noir and Algerian women). Omar and Zoubida inhabit the space as one of both work (Zoubida embroiders for Zoé and Omar does odd jobs for her) and rest (Omar goes swimming with Louis and we see Zoubida drinking coffee and attending Zoé’s party as a guest, something that would have been unusual at the time). Solal, Louis’s Jewish friend, is also included in two of the beach house parties. The beachfront is an ambivalent liminal space that encompasses both a promise of an end to ethnic, religious, and gender segregation and announces further divisions and death. Women are more important in La Baie than in many other films in my corpus (except for Voyage à Alger, Pour Djamila, Le Choix de Myriam, and Je vous ai compris). As in Le Jour, they are primarily pied-noir women of all ages. Louis is surrounded by female relatives and is attracted to two young women. La Baie also importantly includes one female Algerian character, Zoubida, who is initially a shadow figure but becomes significant at the end of the narrative. As with Omar, one scene with her highlights the objectification of Algerians by even friendly French colonials. Zoé speaks of Zoubida in the third person in front of her, saying, “elle est comme ma fille. Va savoir ce qui se mijote dans sa petite tête” (she’s like my daughter. Go figure what goes on inside her little head). The unequal work situation of servants—especially servants of color—is often hidden by their employers through the use of comparison with family relations (Childress). The colonizer’s feeling of never quite knowing what the colonized are thinking is expressed here, as is the belittling of the colonized young woman through reference to her “little” head. Zoubida, who has had to learn dissimulation as a survival tactic in the colonial world, provides the expected answer, “quand j’travaille, je pense à rien” (when I’m working I’m not thinking), which is belied at the end of the film. Zoé and her cousin Suzanne are both aware that “les gens sont rarement ce qu’on croit” (people are rarely the way we think they are). Indeed, that is true of the three Algerians with whom Louis’s family interacts the most (Omar, Bouarab, and Zoubida), all of whom turn out to have been involved in the independence struggle. It is two Algerian characters who trigger the inaugural flashback (Omar) and the concluding flashforward (Zoubida), in two brief scenes whose positioning structurally demonstrates these characters’ importance to the film’s narrative.16 These framing scenes are built symmetrically. They each include an encounter between an Algerian and a pied-noir character, a woman and a man. They both take place near a body of water, the Surcouf beachfront property and the banks of the Seine. The older Louis mentions that the latter

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setting reminds him of Surcouf, a strange remark given the lack of similarity between the two locations except for the presence of water, the Paris rainy setting contrasting with the bright and sunny Algeria beach scenes. It is possible that Zoubida’s presence is what makes him see a connection. The older Zoubida (Fettouma Ousliha Bouamari) counters that the two settings are different, perhaps highlighting the impossibility for the former colonizer to ever return to the past colonial setting. In the inaugural scene, which takes place after the end of the war in 1962, Zoé recognizes Omar, who initially pretends not to recognize her, perhaps symbolizing the necessary break from the former colonizer at the end of a long battle for independence. In the flashforward, it is Zoubida, the former colonized subject, who recognizes the older, former colonial Louis, who has just given a talk on his book La Baie d’Alger. Whereas in the book Louis’s encounter with Zoubida occurs in Algeria in 2003, in the film it takes place in Paris, where both are now exiled, almost fifty years after the end of the war, in 2011. In the film but not in the book, Zoubida explains that she had joined the FLN with Omar after Bouarab’s death and married Omar after independence. However, Omar was killed by Islamic fundamentalists in 1995. This evocation of Algeria’s dark decade, which was not present in the book, may be viewed as reinforcing a French colonial belief that Algeria would have been better off remaining French (Soltane). However, knowing Allouache’s own difficult experience at that time, this brief denunciation of Islamic fundamentalism, which is developed in many other of his films, could also be interpreted as Allouache inserting his own palimpsestic layer of postcolonial Algerian history onto Gardel’s story. As in Arcady’s Le Jour, Allouache ends his film with a dialogue and mutual acknowledgment between a pied-noir and an Algerian character about fifty years later, but here this reunion includes a dialogue with an Algerian female speaking subject. As critic Christa Jones notes, this ending “points to the existence of a potentially completely different account of childhood as seen through Zoubida’s eyes, a childhood experienced by the other side, that of the Algerian population” (“Turning” 69). Zoubida does not tell Louis about her childhood, which remains inaccessible to the film’s viewers and the book’s readers. Instead, she chooses to reveal information about her and Omar’s active participation in the war of independence rather than about her past as an acted-upon colonized child. The last image of the film is of the adult Louis’s face in a freeze-frame. The end of the film thus both highlights visually the way in which pieds-noirs are still to an extent frozen in a melancholic past and the need for recognition and dialogue between pieds-noirs and Algerians. This ending scene stages an example of what critic Mireille Rosello has called “performative encounters” (France and the Maghreb 1), that is, “imaginative protocols of encounters between historically estranged identities” (48). Like Cartouches, La Baie is an

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important film because it acknowledges both pied-noir loss and the need for Algerian independence, as well as ending on a performative encounter between Zoubida and Louis that provides a vision for moving forward into the future in a more healing manner in order to begin to resolve the Algeria syndrome, fifty years later. BRINGING ALGERIAN AND PIED-NOIR MEMORIES TOGETHER: CARTOUCHES GAULOISES (MEHDI CHAREF, 2007) Of all the films in this chapter, Cartouches gauloises (Summer of ’62) mounts the strongest critique of French colonialism. In doing so, Charef presents Algerian independence as necessary while at the same time portraying the pied-noir community in complex and nuanced ways. That Charef had to wait forty-five years to make this semiautobiographical film attests to the traumatic aftereffects of the war and the long period of latency that was necessary for him to be able to begin to work through the trauma, whose different aspects I analyze in this section. I also demonstrate how the mise en abyme of the process of filmmaking in Cartouches gauloises points to the role of art in working through trauma. In his book Post-Beur Cinema, Will Higbee highlights the “conciliatory nature” of Charef’s film which, “while in no way eliding the violence and trauma caused by the conflict, nonetheless attempts to find common ground between its protagonists.” In his excellent analysis, Higbee correctly notes that “Ali’s job delivering newspapers allows him to move between all areas of a divided society” (76)17 and “permits the film to present the final days of the Algerian war from all perspectives: FLN fighters and supporters, harkis, pieds-noirs, even French soldiers. Cartouches gauloises is highly unusual in that it refuses to take sides and is thus diametrically opposed to the fragmented, contested ‘war of memories’ that has typically characterised the memorialisation of the Algerian war” (77; see also Ireland 187). Examples given by Higbee to support this assertion include the film’s focus on both the violence and the helpfulness of the French military, and on the violence exacted both by the French military against Algerians and by FLN fighters against French colonists. Higbee claims that “Ali’s youthful and relatively innocent perspective also permits access to these various viewpoints in a non-judgemental way” (77). Similarly, Sylvie Durmelat highlights that “Cartouches strives to provide a compassionate and balanced view of each group, to recreate the multicultural fabric of colonial Algeria, at the risk of producing a somewhat flattening and unrealistic succession of vignettes” in which “Ali is the one and only element of cohesion between scenes. Yet no

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interpretation of the war emerges clearly, and the film seems to shy away from taking a stance by hiding behind Ali’s recording gaze” (106). While I concur with Durmelat’s and Higbee’s contention that the film brings disparate memories of the war together, a closer analysis of the film demonstrates that its somewhat “conciliatory” goal does not mean that it “refuses to take sides” or that Ali’s “innocent perspective” is necessarily “non-judgemental” (Higbee 76–77). I agree with Nicole Wallenbrock, who views Cartouches’ perspective as having an Algerian nationalist bent (The Algerian War Era” 223; 244–48). A variety of techniques are used in the film to mount a critique of French colonialism that highlights the necessity for Algerian independence while at the same time portraying the complexities of a colonial situation that was never entirely Manichean. This is accomplished primarily through editing and film structure, specifically, the order in which events are portrayed as well as their repetition. Almost every scene is filtered through Ali’s eyes. He does not have full knowledge of the sociopolitical context of the war, and looking and listening provide him with ways to learn more about the situation. Accordingly, Charef makes ample use of eyeline matches to create point-of-view shots: the camera shifts regularly between a shot of Ali (Hamada), half-hidden, looking and listening, and shots of what he is observing (Maazouzi 243). As Ali moves in and out of various locations iteratively, this point-of-view pattern reinforces the impression that the film is made up of a series of disconnected vignettes. Wallenbrock also notes this “centering” of “Ali’s perspective” and adds that “in many shots Ali peers through windows and doors, further mirroring the public looking through the square screen” (“The Algerian War Era” 238). As I discuss below and as Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle have noted, these multiple frames also mirror the filmmaker looking through the camera’s eye, thus providing a self-reflexive mise en abyme of the filmmaking process (98–99; see also Maazouzi 249). The film takes a pro-independence stance that is critical of French colonial racism in a number of initial short scenes. One of the first things we find out is that Ali’s father (Amara Abdelhamid) is fighting in the Algerian resistance to the French, and that even as a young boy, Ali has to work long hours at various odd jobs, including selling newspapers. The first comments we hear from French colonial speakers in positions of power and authority, the train station master and the school headmaster, are racist and colonialist clichés. We also note that Ali appears to be one of very few boys of Algerian descent to be included in the French school. After a few scenes introducing Ali’s French buddies and his uncle (Diboun Benamar), the latter, who was part of the resistance, is killed by French soldiers; we also learn that Ali’s mother Aïcha (Zahia Saïd) and a female relative (whom Charef has explained elsewhere represents his aunt, played by Nadia Samir) help the resistance.

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In the first fourteen expository minutes of the film, five of eleven vignettes presented to the audience justify the Algerian engagement in the anti-colonial struggle because French colonial racism, violence, and—unlike in the other films discussed in this chapter—the impoverishment of Algerians at the hands of the French are shown from the very beginning. It is only once this anti-colonial critique has been established that Charef begins to present a more positive picture of the pied-noir community as the audience is introduced to an elderly Jewish couple, Rachel (Betty Krestinsky) and Norbert (Jean Nehr), for whom Ali does odd jobs and who give him food for him and his mother. The anti-colonial critique then resumes through three additional scenes in which Ali’s French friend from school, Nico (Thomas Millet), tells him, “Ton père est un terroriste” (Your father is a terrorist); in a subsequent scene, Ali is coming home late from his jobs past the curfew, and he witnesses French soldiers killing two Algerian farmers who had done nothing other than be out late; finally, we see Ali looking enviously at French children and families swimming in a nice city pool that is off limits to Algerians. After these three scenes critical of French colonial society, Charef switches to a second scene that presents a more positive picture of that society through establishing Ali’s friendship with the unnamed projectionist (Didier Bourguignon) in the city’s cinema. The film continues to juxtapose several scenes of French violence with one scene of friendship with French colonials such as his school buddies, the projectionist, and the train station master (Bonnafet Tarbouriech), who becomes a more and more positive figure as the film unfolds. Through editing and film structure, Charef creates a contrast between the violent scenes (featuring primarily French military violence against Algerians but also two scenes of Algerian violence against the French) and the scenes of friendship. This contrast renders the violent scenes even more shocking, which explains the disorientation of the boy, who does not entirely comprehend these experiences. This brief analysis of editing and film structure in the first third of the film leads me to qualify Higbee’s assertion that the film “depicts the violence of the French army against indigenous civilians and the FLN at the same time as it portrays the bloody reprisals of the moudjahidins (Algerian freedom fighters) against the pieds-noirs landowners. Similarly, the French army is portrayed as a marauding presence (raiding villages, randomly killing suspected ‘terrorists,’ raping villagers) as well as a force for good (offering health checks and medicine to Algerian children)” (77). These two types of depiction are precisely not placed on the same level by Chareb through editing, structure, and repetition. In contrast with L’Ennemi intime, the French violence is presented first, and it occurs much more frequently than the Algerian response to it, thus creating a justificatory pattern for the Algerian fight for independence. The film shows the horrors of the war through the accumulation of killings

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without equalizing the two sides. It is only after we have witnessed the killing of the uncle and of two other innocent Algerians in the first eighteen minutes of the film that the Algerians retaliate by blowing up a bust of Marianne (a gendered symbol of France). The Algerian violence is thus not only justified but shown as being on a much smaller scale (symbolic rather than physical). Soon afterward, we see another two Algerians killed in reprisal. The scene that provides a positive depiction of the French military mentioned by Higbee is the only such scene in the film. All other representations of the French military in the film highlight their violence and make it clear that access to health checks does not make up for murder, torture, and rape. Indeed, the health check scene is followed by an equally short scene in which Ali’s female relative, who was supporting the armed struggle against the French, is killed with the Algerian fighters she was sheltering. Charef has mentioned in a number of venues that French soldiers killed his aunt in the village, which was very traumatic for him. The benefits of the French military presence through health checks become trivial when juxtaposed with the scene of trauma. The traumatic killing of the aunt and of the Algerian fighters she was hiding thirty-eight minutes into the film is followed by a scene in which an Algerian fighter places a bomb in a pro-French Algeria bar. We hear the explosion and see the scene through Ali’s perspective (we only see his feet) before the cut. Unlike in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, we are never shown the bodies of the pro-French Algeria pieds-noirs who had been dancing just before the bomb went off. Later, fifty-one minutes into the film, we witness Ali’s father’s tortured body and those of two other fighters, a scene in which a young woman (Fatima Mesli) is taken to be raped by French soldiers in spite of Ali’s mother bravely trying to protect her, and a scene in which the body of a young Algerian boy who played soccer with Ali and his friends is thrown from a helicopter in front of them. After this accumulation of French violence, Ali and Nico find the dead bodies of a pied-noir family of four in their backyard. It is only after we have seen a number of Algerian casualties of war that Charef finally shows us dead French people, sixty-one minutes into the film. While we witness the French military shooting people, we never witness Algerian fighters killing the French, as the French civilians are already dead by the time the children arrive on the scene. Higbee notes how unusual it is for a film made by a filmmaker of Algerian descent to portray pieds-noirs in a somewhat positive light, given the traumatic effects of colonization and of the war of independence: “Particularly striking is the agency given to the pied noir community in the narrative . . . that in some cases even suggests genuine friendship and empathy between the coloniser and colonised” (79). Charef has always been noticeable for his empathy, being for example the first fiction writer to have published a sympathetic portrayal of a harki and his family, long before anyone else did

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so, in his second novel Le Harki de Meriem from 1989. Charef’s similarly sympathetic treatment of the pieds-noirs in the film includes his depiction of their actual diversity (Maazouzi 242; this is also visible in many of the films in my corpus): the community includes several Jewish characters (with one brief critique of French anti-Semitism) and a family of Italian descent as well as French-descended characters. Ali and Nico are very close, yet Nico keeps on repeating racist and hurtful things he heard from his parents and the pied-noir adults around him. Charef also references that not all Europeans in Algeria were seen as equals when Nico uses a derogatory term for Italians and mentions to Ali that their friend of Italian descent, Gino (Tolga Cayir), would never be invited to his house. At the same time, the film occasionally points to the respect that existed between the settler and indigenous communities. At one point, Nico brings sandwiches for the two of them. Ali inspects his own cautiously, which causes Nico to comment, “T’inquiète pas, ma mère te mettra jamais de cochon” (Don’t worry, my mom will never give you pork). Charef has indicated the autobiographical nature of this anecdote (Dossier de presse: Mehdi Charef). Similarly, elderly Rachel gives Ali fish to take home and share with his mother. The first time Ali goes to the neighboring camp de regroupement (civilian internment camp) with his French friends, Nico appears to mock a young Algerian girl (Sabrina Senoussi) who is making a necklace out of plastic bottle caps. On a repeat visit, however, he brings her imitation pearls so she can make a prettier one, which appears to make her very happy. While the film repeatedly highlights various racist beliefs the pieds-noirs hold and contrasts their comfortable economic status with the poverty of Algerians through set design (Maazouzi 245), pointing to a structural imbalance inherent to the colonial setting, Charef also represents individual pieds-noirs and Algerians having friendly relations even in the middle of this striking inequality and war context. In this way, the film makes it clear that decolonization was necessary, all the while providing a balanced portrayal of the European settler community. One of the central traumas of the film is Ali’s gradual loss of his European school friends, since their families decide one by one to exile themselves to France as Algerian independence draws near. Even before Nico’s final departure, the film shows the boys slowly being torn apart by the war as they inevitably must choose sides. Eventually, the two main sites of bonding that remain for the boys across both sides of the divide are interests in soccer and in sex. Both are portrayed as male activities. Ali’s soccer team is made up of his French classmates, and they play against Algerian boys living in the impoverished camp de regroupement, a location that is rarely shown in Algerian war fiction films (Stora, “La Guerre d’Algérie: La Mémoire” 270). Soccer is an important symbolic site not just in the film but also in French and Algerian societies more generally. When the French and Algerian soccer

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teams play against one another, the victory or defeat is felt at the national level. More than any other institution perhaps, the French national soccer team reflects the country’s postcolonial multiculturalism, and FrenchAlgerian star Zinedine Zidane has served as a model and beacon of hope for many French boys of Maghrebian descent (Swamy 10–11). While Ali’s participation in the “French” team against the “Algerian” team in the film could be viewed as treasonous alignment with the enemy in wartime from an Algerian perspective, from the perspective of French people of Algerian descent, it is a reflection of their current reality on the ground. The fact that Ali was born on July 14, the French national holiday, and that his friends give him a soccer jersey from their favorite team as a present, is a way of asserting that French identity can and must include French people of postcolonial descent. This inclusive symbol is also gendered. Only boys play soccer in the film, and we learn that, symbolically, Nico’s and Ali’s fathers also used to play soccer together. Although there are many female fans worldwide, many more men than women are players and fans. Toward the end of the film, after Nico’s family’s departure, Ali goes into Nico’s bedroom. Even though earlier in the film Nico had told Ali that he would leave him nothing when his family would have to go to France, one thing—the soccer ball—remains in the room, and Ali understands that Nico left it for him as a present. Soccer is marked as a site of, albeit primarily male, reconciliation and the soccer ball as an object that will preserve the memory of friendship beyond the separation. Unlike other pieds-noirs (such as Dédé and his father in Le Jour) who destroyed the possessions they could not take with them so that Algerians would not benefit from them, Nico leaves his friend the precious soccer ball, which impoverished Algerian children could not afford to buy. The film’s intended audience is clearly a broad French one that includes former French colonials and children of Maghrebian immigrants (see also Maazouzi 236, 240). While Charef and critics have pointed out that the shack lovingly built by the boys is a symbol of Algeria, in a sense it is also a symbol of multicultural France as it is there that Ali receives his jersey present from his friends on July 14. More than any other Algerian war film of the fiftieth-anniversary period perhaps, Cartouches makes connections between the war and the legitimate place of French citizens of Maghrebian descent and of people of Arab or Muslim backgrounds in France today (see also Maazouzi 247–49). As such, it marks an important cultural intervention into the ever-increasing levels of French anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. Unfortunately, like most films of the Algerian war, Charef’s film did not really find an audience in France, since fewer than 100,000 spectators went to see it (Lumière). If a French audience was not yet ready to see a film attempting to heal the trauma of the Algerian war, for its author, the film was long in coming

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(Jones, “Turning” 63, 75). In interviews, Charef has explained that he should have made this film much earlier, but instead he kept making other films due to the difficulty of facing this traumatic past (Chemin, Gramard, and Mam; “Dossier”). Claude-Marie Trémois points out that immediately preceding Cartouches, Charef created two different cultural productions dealing with this period in his childhood before he could finally make this film: 1962, a 2005 play that takes place in a train station as pieds-noirs are leaving the country, and A bras-le-coeur, an autobiographical novel published in 2006 that mines some of the same terrain (241). These delays, detours, and repetitions are typical of traumatic experiences (see Donadey, “L’expression littéraire). A bras-le-coeur traces the child’s experiences in Algeria during and soon after the war, as well as in France after the war, and does not focus on the war quite as much as the film does (e.g., it includes the child’s first sexual experiences, something that may be easier to put in writing than to show in a film). The book highlights a source of trauma unrelated to the war, opening as it does on the death of an older sister who drowned after falling in the family well. An additional trauma mentioned in the book but not in the film has to do with having to leave the sister’s body behind when going to France (149). This experience parallels that of pieds-noirs, one of whose traumas was having to leave their dead behind (and not knowing if their cemeteries would be maintained postindependence) (see Eldridge 124). In the book, the narrator mentions one Algerian school friend but no pied-noir ones, and none of the film’s adult pied-noir characters are featured (the French friends of diverse origins are friends he makes in France, including one whose mother always makes sure she does not feed him pork products, 171–72). There is, however, one nice and thoughtful female bartender who is not included in the film (95–96). The influence of cinema is mentioned but there is no friendly projectionist (48–51, 84–87). The book highlights the divisions of colonial society much more than the film does (92). Yet, it does not dwell on the violence of the war quite as much as the film does, although kidnappings of young women by the French military in order to rape them are mentioned (42), as are the deaths of the aunt and uncle at the hands of the French military. The film features multiple sites of trauma. Charef has made it clear in multiple interviews and on the DVD commentary track that many of his experiences in the war were traumatic. In the commentary, he says, “le jour où ils ont tué la tante, . . . alors là c’était l’horreur, parce que j’étais vraiment tout près tout près tout près” (The day they killed my aunt, . . . that was horrible, because I was so very, so very, so very close). Trauma is often characterized by a long silence interrupted by repetitions. Finally able to talk about this trauma, in his commentary Charef insists on his physical closeness to the scene of trauma three times. He also mentions elsewhere that blood had splattered and that his mother cleaned it off later on (Chemin, Gramard, and

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Mam). Making the film allows him to continue to work through the trauma, forty-five years later, by taking control over its representation. In the film, Ali and the spectators see the aunt being shot through a hole in the wall. Ali and the spectators are physically much farther away from the scene, and the fact that we are seeing it on screen is highlighted by the framing of the hole in the wall, a stand-in for the camera’s eye through which the filmmaker films “Charef’s alter-ego” (Higbee 76) watching the killing of the aunt. The artfulness of the mise-en-scène and the mise en abyme of the process of filmmaking provide the distance necessary for Charef to be able to film the trauma. He said explicitly, “Il fallait dépasser la réalité, sinon je n’aurais jamais pu tourner cette scène” (Cited in Trémois 243) (I had to go beyond the real, otherwise I would never have been able to shoot that scene). Highlighting the mediated representation of the killing provides some amount of distance. Yet, the killing is still shocking to the audience, which does not expect to see a woman summarily gunned down by the French military, even though the bloodless representation is far from the gore that currently characterizes Hollywood films. In A bras-le-coeur, the event is also somewhat modified: the aunt was either hung (38) or had her throat slit, and it is mentioned that the boy’s mother cleaned the blood from the wall (52–55). Ten years after that autobiographical novel, Charef was still working through the trauma. In his 2016 autobiographical short story “Karima,” he names the aunt and retells the aftermath of her murder by the French soldiers. This time, the aunt was hung (97) and the mother cleaned her body (99). Charef also uses mise-en-scène to create artistic distance elsewhere in the film. In the scene in which we see a pied-noir family that had been killed by Algerians, although the killing is not shown, the scene of discovery is filmed in such a way as to make it one of the most cinematically striking sequences of the film through mise-en-scène, editing, music, and camera placement. Charef has commented on the distancing aspect of the scene’s artfulness: “Cela nous éloigne du meurtre que nous venons de voir. La scène est écrite dans un style, une histoire nous est racontée par des effets musicaux. Parfois, je préfère largement la forme aux faits. Il faut amener ces derniers et il faut que ce soit beau” (It moves us away from the murder we have just seen. The scene is written with a certain style, we are told a story through musical effects. Sometimes I much prefer form to facts. Facts have to be brought forth in a beautiful manner). Wallenbrock analyzes the cinematic aspect of this scene in detail (The Algerian War Era” 240–44). At the end of the scene, the camera focuses on the family’s then state-of-the-art automatic record player, which keeps playing the same tune over and over. For Wallenbrock, “The children . . . resemble the record player in their repetitiveness” (241). I find the image of the popular song playing like a broken record to be a particularly apposite one to not only signify the end of the pied-noir presence in Algeria

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but also to refer to the blocked memory of some pieds-noirs in France who focus repetitively on their nostalgeria, refusing to acknowledge the oppressive nature of colonial society. In a sense, Charef’s film, with its tenderness for pied-noir characters from all walks of life, can be seen as a gentle nudge to pied-noir and other French audiences to finally face that history instead of continuing to listen over and over again to the same broken record of nostalgeria and anti-Arab racism. In their otherwise excellent discussion of Cartouches, Welch and McGonagle find the children’s lack of emotional response to witnessing multiple scenes of violence strangely surprising and somewhat implausible (97–99). In contrast, Wallenbrock clearly identifies that “the film’s overt and excessive violence conveys the daily trauma of living in warfare” (“The Algerian War Era” 223) and that “the violence Ali witnesses [is] simultaneously extraordinary and banal” (248) in the sense that it has become part and parcel of everyday life in the city by the end of the war (249). In the film’s commentary track, Charef explains, “J’pouvais pas avoir de réaction. J’pouvais pas en parler à ma mère” (I couldn’t react. I couldn’t talk to my mother about it). He then discusses his experience in terms that describe trauma. A lack of an expected emotional reaction to violent events is common in traumatic experiences, precisely because they are not entirely comprehended or apprehended at the time of occurrence. It is only later that the violence of the event returns in the form of various symptoms. Charef mentions in particular experiencing chronic anxiety and fear without specific cause in his adult life and relates these symptoms to his inability to tell his trauma (DVD commentary track; see also Jones, “Turning” 74). Durmelat reveals one traumatic autobiographical aspect that is significantly not included in the film, the fact that unlike Ali, Charef had to leave for France “soon after independence, to join his immigrant father” (106). This may explain why the film’s perspective seems so understanding of the French colonists’ deep attachment to Algeria and of their traumatic loss at having to leave, since Charef himself experienced a similar loss (perhaps heightened by the fact that, unlike French colonials, he loses his country as it literally becomes his). Welch and McGonagle refer to “Yedes’s observation that the particular trauma for many pieds-noirs lies in being uprooted not just from their homeland but also from their childhood. To be wrenched from French Algeria is to be cut off from that childhood” (Welch and McGonagle 25). This disconnection is central to Marc’s sense of alienation in Un Balcon sur la mer, as discussed above. The fact that Charef was similarly severed from his own childhood by having to move with his family to the infamous Nanterre shantytown outside Paris, a traumatic break portrayed in A bras-lecoeur, allows him to express empathy for pieds-noirs and, to a much lesser extent in Cartouches, harkis.18 In the autobiographical novel, the first-person

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narrator says, “On m’arrache à mon enfance” (I am torn from my childhood), when the family leaves Algeria to join the father in France (148). Later, he repeats in Fanonian terms, “L’arrachement à l’enfance a été violent. J’ai la peau à vif, j’attends que la mue s’achève” (170) (I was violently torn from my childhood. My skin has been flayed; I am waiting for the molting process to come to an end). The absence of the father, due in real life to his low status as an immigrant worker in France, is transformed in the film into his more heroic status as a freedom fighter (Bedjaoui, Cinéma 225). Instead of delving into the personal trauma of exile to France, the film ends with the promised return of the Algerian fighters from the mountains. Ali runs toward them, calling out to his father, but significantly, we do not actually witness the men returning or the reunion with the father.19 Although the filmmaker’s trauma due to the loss of his childhood’s homeland is not represented in the film, the protagonist’s reunion with his father—who had left in the first scene and was only seen once in the rest of the film—significantly remains suspended, and we never find out whether Ali’s father returns or if he lost his life in the struggle. The film’s ending is thus open, containing the possible trace of a further trauma that is not explicitly mentioned. Charef’s multiple comments in interviews and in the film’s commentary track point to another site of trauma, a postwar one. He repeatedly mentions fears concerning the reception of the film in France—specifically, concerns over being discounted as seeking to settle old scores with France—and attributes his waiting so long to make the film as much to that anxiety as to his war trauma. Charef is keenly aware of the war of memories in France. He also discusses a fear that Algerians would not approve of Ali not wanting his French friends to leave (see Chemin, Gramard, and Mam; Nuevo; Durmelat 105; Higbee 78). The sheer number of interviews he gave on the film reflects his anxiety and desire to explain his motivations repeatedly in various forums. Charef’s concerns over a negative reception in France may explain why the film is so intent on showing the devastating effects of the war not just on Algerians but also on pieds-noirs, as well as the protagonist’s sense of connection to them. Higbee sees the film as suggesting “genuine friendship” (79), mostly between Algerian and European boys. If, like Higbee, we consider Ali to be “Charef’s alter-ego” (76), we can see that two other male relationships are also privileged in the film, as the pied-noir projectionist and station master become father figures (Welch and McGonagle 118) to the future filmmaker. The film becomes a portrait of the filmmaker as a young boy, and the multiple shots of half-hidden Ali watching, used to establish point of view, are also self-referential images of the director in the making, highlighting the constructed nature of the otherwise rather socially realistic film we are watching. Sonia Lee has noted the “présence en abyme du cinéma” (the presence of cinematic mise en abyme) in Charef’s first film, also a feature of New Wave

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cinema (190). The projectionist allows Ali to watch a variety of films, including Egyptian and avant-garde cinema, and to learn about film art from this experience. Ali watches the films through the projectionist’s window, foreshadowing the time when the filmmaker will be able to view (and shape) the world through the camera’s eye. Ali is a repeat film spectator, and his favorite film is Luis Buñuel’s 1950 Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned), a film that portrays a band of street children in Mexico City. Ali knows one of the children’s lines by heart. He identifies with Pedro, a boy whose father told him to wait for him but never returned.20 The train station master is equally important to the boy’s development as a filmmaker. As Welch and McGonagle also note, in the last scene featuring the train master, right before he has to leave the newly independent country, he enacts his last day at the station in terms of how it would be shot in a film (99). It is in this scene that he tells Ali, “Faut pas nous oublier, petit, sinon on est mort. Y’a que vous qui nous avez connus” (Mustn’t forget us, little one, otherwise we’re dead. Only you all knew us). Not only is this a plea to avoid letting pieds-noirs fall between the cracks of both Algerian and French history, as Higbee notes (79), it can also be seen as the mission that will propel the young boy to become a filmmaker and eventually film that scene and the film we are watching, even if it took almost fifty years for that duty of memory to be accomplished. Charef became one of the first filmmakers of Maghrebian descent in France with his 1985 Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, the film version of his first autobiographical novel. He remains one of the major “Beur” filmmakers, having written and directed eight feature films over a thirty-year period.21 Charef is not the only director in my corpus to include self-referential scenes in which characters are making films and taking pictures (Djinns, Mon Colonel) or participating in plays (Un Balcon sur la mer), but it is one of the two in which the self-referential aspect is the most meaningful (the other one is of course Caché). Whether the projectionist and train station master are biographically real French colonial men who helped birth the filmmaker or whether the filmmaker made them up in this film is not particularly important to this argument (the projectionist appears to be biographically based while the train station master may not). What matters is that Charef chooses to make these two father figures to his art inhabit the position of pieds-noirs, people who were blamed for Algerian colonization from all sides at the end of the Algerian war of independence. While the film establishes Algerian men and women as the ones who birthed the new nation, and is somewhat unusual in this corpus in its portrayal of Algerian women’s agency (especially through the character of the mother, who is courageously ready to sacrifice herself to prevent a young Algerian girl from being raped by French soldiers), the people who birth Ali as filmmaker are significantly pied-noir men. This could

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be seen as politically problematic and perhaps too “conciliatory” (Higbee 76), but in a sense it is also a realistic comment on the fact that the French presence can never be undone in Algeria and that, while in no way justifying colonialism, it contributed to an extent to shaping what Algeria and people of Algerian descent in France are today. It should also be noted that the way in which Ali saves a young Algerian prostitute (Noura Attaba) from Algerian fighters (who want to kill her toward the end of the film because she worked in a brothel that catered to the French military) is by passing her off as his mother. Ali thus has two sets of filiations: his courageous birth parents as well as marginal parental figures that were excluded from the new nation. The title of Buñuel’s filmic intertext literally translates as “The Forgotten Ones.” In Charef’s film, the memories of the forgotten ones of the war—pieds-noirs, harkis, Algerian prostitutes, everyday freedom fighters (including women), and children caught in the war—are finally brought together. In this way, the film can be seen as a lieu de mémoire (site of memory) for the “forgotten ones” of the Algerian war of independence. As Charef has made it clear in various interviews and in the running DVD commentary track, he includes the child that he was—through the semiautobiographical character of Ali—among the forgotten ones. What Higbee says about Rachid Bouchareb’s 2006 film Indigènes also applies to Cartouches gauloises: “The real risk taken by Bouchareb in Indigènes, then, was to attempt to make a film that was both militant in its political objectives and consensual in its desire to engage a crossover, majority French audience in the question of memorialising France’s colonial history” (84). Through the device of the little boy who goes everywhere and witnesses everything, Charef provides a bird’s-eye view of the war that both foregrounds the point of view of a young Algerian boy and refracts and honors many other memories of the war. What makes the richness of the film is its ability to make the audience feel the complexity of the situation without ever losing sight of the need for an end to colonial oppression. Charef’s film represents the war in ways that attempt to deal with the trauma it continues to generate and to bring compartmentalized memories together, all the while providing a necessary critique of French colonization and military violence. The lack of closure at the end also points to the potential difficulties of the postindependence world for people who lived through the colonial and decolonial periods. Charef’s refraction of many points of view about the war is also a self-referential comment on the role of the filmmaker, whose lens refracts light from various angles. CHAPTER CONCLUSION Fifty years after the war, it appears that films focusing on pied-noir memories are beginning to deal with and to represent the fault line that the Algerian war

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constituted for French colonials, instead of focusing only on their prelapsarian memories of colonial Algeria or their difficult exile to France after the war. However, these representations generally fluctuate between mourning and melancholia, colonial nostalgia and critique, and solipsism and dialogue. La Baie and Cartouches are both structured in such a way as to create parallels and contrasts in order to mount a critique of the colonial order, a critique that is more direct in the latter than in the former film. These films also make important connections between the colonial and decolonial past and contemporary multicultural French society. NOTES 1. Marie-Jeanne Fuentes’s background is similar to Garcia’s. Garcia’s father, who was Spanish and a naturalized French citizen, owned a drugstore in Oran. Like Marie-Jeanne, Garcia began her career as a theater actress (Nicole Garcia). 2. For more on Palestro, see Nadiras, “Palestro, 18 mai 1956” and “Palestro, Algérie.” See also historian Raphaëlle Branche’s book L’Embuscade de Palestro (2010) and Rémi Lainé’s 2012 documentary film cowritten with Branche, Palestro, Algérie, histoire d’une embuscade. During the May 1859 Battle of Palestro, the Piedmontese (Northern Italian) and French militaries defeated the Austrian army (Schneid, The Second War of Italian Unification, 42–43). Italian unification occurred in 1861. 3. In Arcady’s famous first film Le Coup de sirocco (1979), a film about a Jewish pied-noir family forced to relocate to France after the end of the Algerian war, the visual—geographical and architectural—similarity between Marseille and Algerian cities such as Oran and Algiers was already mentioned by the narrator. In Oran, a short film contained in the BluRay version of Un Balcon, scriptwriter Jacques Fieschi mentions that Oran is a Mediterranean city that looks like Marseille and Nice. Un Balcon was shot in the south of France, in Oran, Algeria and in Casablanca, Morocco. The visual similarities between, say, Oran and Marseille are reinforced by the fact that the film’s initial shots do not feature the iconic fort of Santa Cruz in Oran, which is only shown later in the film. These visual similarities create an oneiric Mediterranean cityscape that reflects Marc’s loss of memory. They also recall the Mediterranean imaginary developed by French settlers to naturalize and justify their colonial presence in Algeria (Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 19). In this ideology as in Un Balcon, actual Algerians were either excluded or tokenized. 4. Famed Italian actress Cardinale was previously cast as an FLN agent in two important Algerian war films, Mark Robson’s 1966 Lost Command and Rachida Krim’s 1997 Sous les pieds des femmes. In Un Balcon’s “Dossier de presse,” Garcia explains that the title, a balcony over the sea, “est synonyme de ‘Là-bas,’ le lieu de la mémoire, celui de l’enfance à jamais perdue” (is a synonym for ‘over there,’ the site of memory, of childhood forever lost). “Là-bas” (Over there) is the common way by which pieds-noirs in France reference the lost past and land. That loss is symbolized by the fact that no balcony over the sea is seen in any of the French locations

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in the film. Marc’s new house has a pool that goes to the edge of the property and is surrounded by a thick hedge on top of a stone wall, giving the impression that he is trapped in a gilded cage. This impression is reinforced by the presence of bird cages and caged birds in several scenes. Marc is also filmed in a long shot, looking at a toy sailboat in the pool that reflects the shrinking of his world from the wide-open Mediterranean to a claustrophobic if glamorous environment. The high-end property where Marc meets Marie-Jeanne at the beginning of the film has a reflecting pool surrounded by a balcony that gives onto the forest below. The only place with a balcony that gives out onto the sea is Marc’s mother’s house in Spain, perhaps symbolic of the fact that his mother has been his only tenuous connection to the lost French Algeria. 5. Maazouzi notes that a somewhat different version of this formulation was initially Jean Cocteau’s (219). 6. Khadra’s 2014 novel Qu’attendent les singes also goes back to the same foundational intertext. 7. Many of Arcady’s films focus on Jewish and/or pied-noir characters. 8. Stora is listed as historical adviser in Le Jour’s credits. 9. For a comparison of the book and the film in which the authors argue that Khadra places Younes’s story within its historical parameters whereas Arcady focuses more on the personal story, see Sarra and Benchehida. Arcady’s film also includes a self-referential wink. When Mohamed and his family move from their beautiful villa in Oran to Rio Salado, a smaller town (in which Younes will grow up) after Mohamed is released by the French police about thirty-five minutes into the film, we can see in a brief shot that their Oran house was called “Villa Sirocco.” The name is an intertextual reference to Arcady’s film Le Coup de sirocco, which focuses on another displacement, that of Jewish pieds-noirs at the end of the war. 10. Thénault, Histoire, 27–29. In an interview, Arcady notes that actor Mohamed Fellag was cast to play Younes’s uncle in part because he looks a bit like Abbas, thus demonstrating that Arcady was conscious of the parallel created by Khadra (Alexandre Arcady). 11. An Algerian audience would be more likely to recognize the reference to Emir Abdelkader in the name Mahieddine than a French audience would. In Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, one of the brothers and FLN leader is named Adbelkader, in a more direct reference to the Emir (Durmelat, “Re-visions of the Algerian War of Independence,” 104). 12. Dédé also once expresses anti-Semitic sentiment toward Simon. Historically, many pieds-noirs harbored anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic feelings and beliefs. 13. In contrast, the novel describes Younes being tortured by Krimo, a harki, before his release (349). 14. Interestingly, Sintès was Camus’s mother’s last name (Kaplan, Looking for the Stranger, 66). 15. This ambivalent naming and unnaming recalls the ambiguous way in which novelist Kamel Daoud deals with the lack of the “Arab” character’s name in Meursault, contre-enquête, his celebrated rewriting of Camus’s classic text. See Lia

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Brozgal, “Critical Pulse” for a detailed analysis of the politics of naming in Daoud’s book (38–40). I thank the press’s anonymous reviewer for making this connection. 16. The novel is organized differently. It begins with Louis’s prophetic sense of the end of his world (as mentioned above) and ends with Zoé’s death, the severing of his last personal and emotional link to his Algerian past. It includes a number of flashforwards to the narrator’s postindependence life in France and his encounters with various people he knew in Algeria such as his two adolescent crushes, Michelle and Christine. Allouache’s attempt to give more importance to the Algerian characters is visible in his restructuring of the plot and deleting all but one of the post-1962 flashforwards. 17. See also Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 241–42. 18. On the portrayal of harkis in the film, see Ireland, “Representations of the Harkis,” 187–88. 19. Interestingly, critics assume the father will be returning—a happy ending— something the film invites us to hope for but does not actually show (Durmelat, “Re-visions of the Algerian War of Independence,” 106; Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era,” 251–53; Welch and McGonagle, Contesting Views, 118). 20. See Welch and McGonagle, Contesting Views, 99 and Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era,” 235–37 for analyses of this intertext. 21. Subha Xavier mentions that Charef’s 1983 book Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed was the first “Beur” novel. She explains that “Beur,” a term used in the late twentieth century to refer to children of Maghrebian immigrants in France, is no longer in use for a variety of reasons, but Charef continues to use it nonetheless (205 n.8).

Chapter 4

Militant Memories Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Zabana!, Sartre: L’Age des passions, Avant l’oubli, Voyage à Alger, and Pour Djamila

As discussed in this book’s introduction, Algeria follows a different time frame than France when it comes to films about the Algerian revolution; therefore, in the fiftieth-anniversary period (2004–2012), only three feature films dealing with the war were made in Algeria by Algerian filmmakers: Mostefa Ben Boulaïd (Ahmed Rachedi, 2008), Voyage à Alger (Abdelkrim Bahloul, 2010), and Zabana! (Saïd Ould-Khelifa, 2012) all mark the beginning of a renewal of interest in the topic in Algeria. Twenty additional feature films were then produced between 2013 and 2018. It is my hope that scholars who are speakers of Algerian Arabic will undertake an analysis of this new corpus, most of which falls beyond the scope of this book. Mostefa Ben Boulaïd and Zabana!, along with three later Algerian films— Krim Belkacem (Rachedi, 2014), Lotfi (Rachedi, 2015, on FLN leader Ben Ali Boudghene), and Larbi Ben M’hidi (Bachir Derrais, 2017)—focus on revolutionary leaders. A sixth film, Opération Maillot (Okacha Touita, 2015), pays similar homage to Communist pied-noir Henri Maillot, who joined the ALN and was killed in action in 1956. All four of Rachedi’s films between 2008 and 2018 feature the Algerian war. Three of them—Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Lotfi, and Krim Belkacem—focus on bringing the stories of FLN leaders to the screen, and two of these—Mostefa Ben Boulaïd and Lotfi—were written by the same screenwriter, Sadek Bakhouche. Many of the Algerian films on the war were produced by the AARC and sponsored by various Algerian ministries. For decades, successive Algerian government leaders based their legitimacy on their participation in the war of national liberation from the French through their FLN activism. Official Algerian historiography claimed that the 151

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Algerian people rose up united against the French colonizer in 1954 and that the FLN was therefore the logical representative of the people’s will. “Un seul héros: le peuple” (a single hero: the people) was to be shown (Stora, Gangrène 162, 230–31; Austin, Algerian National Cinema 31, 45; Bedjaoui, Cinéma 100, 115). As a result, the role of individual leaders in the liberation struggle was downplayed by the successive Algerian governments, official Algerian historiography (Stora, Gangrène 229–30), and what has been called cinéma moudjahid (freedom fighter cinema). This erasure of the historical leaders applies both to leaders of other independence movements such as the MNA, and to main FLN figures. As demonstrated in Benjamin Stora’s authoritative Dictionnaire biographique de militants nationalistes algériens, many of the FLN leaders had been politically involved as militants in these earlier independence parties, even though subsequent Algerian governments were not keen on recognizing this fact. Critics have outlined the major characteristics of cinéma moudjahid. The films are rather formulaic and do not generally include “the role of female fighters” that was such a defining feature of the war of national liberation (Austin, Algerian 22–23; see also Shafik 177 and Maherzi 263, 290). They convey the official ideology of the FLN-led state governments, such as a focus on the “glowing official martyrdom” (Austin, Algerian 22) of the male freedom fighters who gave all for their nation to be born (Austin 33, 54). The films use “the independence epic” form (Austin 35). They also represent a monolithic version of a “unitary, Arab-speaking, patriarchal Algerian identity” that excludes or minimizes Amazigh (Berber) identities and Tamazight languages (Austin 23). They tend to cover over the centrality of earlier independence parties, especially the FLN’s main rival, Messali Hadj’s MNA (Austin 23, 35). The silence around the role of individual leaders of the revolution began to be lifted in the 1990s and early 2000s, and many important locations in Algeria now bear their names.1 In Algerian filmmaking, Rachedi inaugurated this new trend of highlighting the role of revolutionary leaders through biopics with Mostefa Ben Boulaïd in 2008 (Bedjaoui, Cinéma 115–16). In this chapter on pro-independence militant memories, I begin by discussing two of the three films about the war made in Algeria during the fiftiethanniversary period. Studying these films is more difficult than examining the films made in France for a number of reasons. As mentioned in the introduction, unlike most French films, Algerian films do not benefit from distribution networks and are therefore not readily available either within or outside the country (Austin, Algerian 30–31). Little information is accessible on them. Mostefa Ben Boulaïd and Zabana! do not appear to have been released in France, as they are listed neither in the Lumière nor the CBO databases (Rachedi, one of the most prolific Algerian filmmakers, is not listed at all). However, these films have been shown at some French film

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festivals. For instance, like Hors la loi in 2010, Zabana! was screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 2012. Another limitation of this chapter is that my knowledge of Arabic is minimal, and I had to rely on the films’ English-language subtitles for their Arabic-language dialogues. Mostefa Ben Boulaïd is primarily in Arabic. Zabana! is not a dialogue-heavy film and also includes more French dialogues. Further, the only copy of Mostefa Ben Boulaïd that I was able to access was lacking in visual quality. In this chapter, I contrast these two films with two others that focus on the importance of French/European supporters of Algerian independence (Sartre: L’Age des passions and Avant l’oubli) and a final set of two films that highlight Algerian women’s points of view (Voyage à Alger and Pour Djamila). HAGIOGRAPHIC MEMORIES: MOSTEFA BEN BOULAÏD (AHMED RACHEDI, 2008) Mostefa Ben Boulaïd is a film made with the support of the Algerian government, “under the patronage” of Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and produced by Algeria’s Ministry of Mujahidin. It is the longest of all the films in my corpus, clocking in at two hours and fifty minutes (Rachedi’s films tend to be very long). This epic focuses on major public events in the life of Mostefa Ben Boulaïd (Hassan Kachach), one of the initial historic leaders of the FLN, who was from the Aures region and was killed by the French in 1956. Ahmed Rachedi is a major Algerian filmmaker of the cinéma moudjahid persuasion—that is, he has made a number of films focusing on the Algerian people uniting to fight against the French oppressor during the war of national liberation. They include documentaries in the 1960s, madefor-TV films or series in the 1980s and 1990s, and fiction films. He is most well-known for his first feature film, L’Opium et le bâton (filmed in 1969 and released in 1971), based on Kabyle writer Mouloud Mammeri’s famous 1965 novel of the same title. Rachedi’s early films such as L’Opium contributed to the creation of the genre of cinéma moudjahid, which was the main mode of Algerian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (Maherzi 263). Ben Boulaïd marks a return to feature filmmaking and the beginning of an increase in production for Rachedi, who had not directed a feature film since 1993. In this section, I analyze in what ways Ben Boulaïd remains bound to many aspects of cinéma moudjahid and in what ways it departs from it. The film opens during a battle in an undetermined time and location. The audience may assume that the war of national liberation has already started. However, it soon becomes clear that we are witnessing World War II events. We are introduced to Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, who is from the Aures mountains, and his wounded friend Kaci, who is from Kabylia. From the

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very beginning, the film recognizes the importance of Amazigh groups to Algerian identity. In the second scene, which we are informed takes place in Algiers in 1945, both men have been demobilized. As they speak to each other, French and American flags are flying in the background, pointing to the colonial status of the country. The two men part ways to each return to their home regions. They were both wounded during the war and served as courageous soldiers; we learn later in the film that Ben Boulaïd had been conscripted into the French army in 1939 and in 1943. Like many leaders of the independence struggle, Ben Boulaïd served in the French military during World War II, but this service was not rewarded by the French. His Amazigh identity is foregrounded, something unusual in FLN ideology, which focused on the Arabness of Algerians, even though many of the independence leaders and fighters were Amazigh. Since the turn of this century, Imazighen cultures and Tamazight languages have become more recognized in Algeria after decades of Amazigh activism, and the film reflects this relative acceptance. Rachedi’s first film, L’Opium et le bâton, also focused on characters in an Amazigh village (Kabyle in that case), showing for example recognizably Amazigh patterns on a wall curtain in the family’s house. That film was a simplification of a major novel by famous Algerian writer and Kabyle rights activist Mouloud Mammeri. For instance, in the novel, an entire section takes place in an Amazigh village in Morocco, highlighting transnational Amazigh identities, something that was cut out of the film’s more nationalist scope (see Berrichi, especially 176). As was the case with cinéma moudjahid in general and L’Opium in particular, the language spoken in Ben Boulaïd is primarily Arabic and includes some French (Austin, Algerian 52, 104). However, in contrast with these earlier films, it also importantly includes a few dialogues, songs, and words in Chaoui (the local Tamazight language of northeastern Algeria), as well as Chaoui-style clothing.2 As soon as he returns home, our hero resumes his resistance activities in “the party.” As in Zabana!, Ben Boulaïd makes it clear that the resistance to French colonization was already very active post–World War II in various parts of Algeria and did not begin in 1954. In a short scene toward the beginning of the film, the focus is on the existence of several political parties that do not always agree on what actions to undertake. The name of Ferhat Abbas, a moderate political independence leader, is mentioned. The film also depicts a demonstration taking place on the iconic Constantine Bridge standing over an impressive canyon. In contrast with official Algerian historiography and earlier cinéma moudjahid, which denied the existence of other movements for national liberation before the FLN in 1954, Ben Boulaïd shows not just the people’s readiness for independence, even back in 1945, as the Algerian flag is flying but also the names of earlier independence parties and their leader. Some of the signs held by Algerians during the demonstration read “Vive

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Messali” (Long Live Messali), “Votez MTLD” (Vote MTLD [Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques, Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties]) (Messali Hadj’s independence party), “Yahia Djezair” (Long live Algeria), “Algérie libre” (Free Algeria), and “L’Algérie aux Algériens” (Algeria to Algerians). Most of the signs are in French, and one, “Istiqlal” (Independence) is in Arabic. Women as well as men are demonstrating. Many French troops are present, and when the French military opens fire, an old man and a young woman are killed. It is unclear if this protest and its violent repression are part of the demonstrations of May 8, 1945, such as the famous ones in Setif and Guelma, but later in the film, one of the militants mentions the official FLN number of Algerians who fell victim to the 1945 repression: 45,000, a number since contested by many historians. The next scenes focus on Ben Boulaïd’s post–World War II political engagement. As critic Nedjib Sidi Moussa notes, the importance of this film is that Messali Hadj, whose role in the liberation struggle was long occluded in Algeria, is present as a character (126). In this section of the film, Mostefa meets Messali (Slimane Ben Aissa) for the first time and clashes with him. While Messali wants to proceed slowly, Mostefa is ready for more radical action. Other political parties such as the Ulema and the Communist parties are mentioned. After the film has set the post–World War II context for the war of liberation, it shifts to July 1954 (after twenty-two minutes) and what Ben Boulaïd solemnly notes is the day of “the birth of the Algerian revolution.” On that day, a historic meeting of many political leaders occurs. They decide to move toward more radical action since peaceful actions have yielded no results. The failure of peaceful efforts is mentioned later in the film as well, highlighting that the political struggle for independence has a long history in Algeria and justifying the move from political to military struggle against the French colonizer. Interestingly, as the men secretly vote for a coordinator for the revolution, Mostefa, who is reading the ballots, says Mohamed Boudiaf’s name when his own is listed. Although Mostefa is ready for the revolution and has emerged as a natural leader who brings men together, he is not eager to become the official head of the group. The film does not explain his reasons but contrasts his modest countenance with a critique of Messali Hadj’s growing “cult of personality” and authoritarian attitude toward the younger dissenters, as is made evident in the next two scenes. The movement is shown to have pan-Arab aspects, as struggles in Morocco and Tunisia and the support of Egypt are mentioned a few times in the film. A subsequent scene taking place in October 1954 has us witnessing the birth of the new organization for independence, its naming as FLN, and the date of November 1 being selected as the beginning of the revolutionary action by six historical leaders, including Ben Boulaïd. They take a picture of the group, and we are first shown that black-and-white picture with the actors

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in it, and then, very briefly, the famous original black-and-white picture with the actual leaders. This image marks the end of the first part of the film, fifty minutes that focus on the political beginnings of the liberation struggle. Unlike the French productions in my corpus and like Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, the importance of post–World War II independence activism is highlighted in Ben Boulaïd. In the second part of the film, we witness the first military operations undertaken simultaneously by the FLN in various parts of the country on November 1, 1954, including Ben Boulaïd’s military leadership in the Aures region. The men then listen to the news on French radio, which is how they learn that the movement was successful. This both recalls Fanon’s insights about the role of the radio in the struggle (“Ici”) and foreshadows the way in which Ben Boulaïd died. The film shows the swift and powerful reaction from French authorities, as Algerian civilians are killed or violently rounded up into internment camps by French troops. Ben Boulaïd decides to go to the Tunisian border to find out why weapons have not been arriving, and he is eventually arrested. This second part of the film lasts about twenty minutes. The film is careful not to overplay French violence, although it does show a young girl being shot in the back during the French military repression. It also gestures toward rape in wartime. One French soldier grabs an Algerian woman, goes into her house with her, and closes the door on the two of them. When two European civilians beat and try to rape two Algerian women inside a church, a priest arrives and puts a stop to it. Rape and torture are evoked but not shown in the film, and in the battle scenes, the French are presented as powerful adversaries but not as being especially out for blood. Ahmed Bedjaoui notes that Algerian films about the war that feature European characters do not characterize them in particularly negative or hateful ways (Guerre 311), which is true of Rachedi’s film.3 The battle scenes are filmed in a fairly classical manner, with none of the extremely fast editing, dizzying camera moves, or gory visions that currently characterize Hollywood action cinema and war films. Instead of focusing on individual instances of French cruelty, the film highlights the structural power differential between the two armies. As the fight continues into 1955, the militants are shown to be poorly equipped and exhausted, in contrast with the French military’s repeatedly featured planes, helicopters, trucks, jeeps, machine guns, and soldiers. The film also uses French dialogue to make a statement on contemporary French racist politics. A French leader tells the soldiers rounding up Algerian civilians, “Embarquez-moi cette racaille!” (Round up all this scum!) In October 2005, then-interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy had infamously used this same vocabulary to refer to disaffected people living in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris. Sarkozy’s racially inflected comments created a storm of controversy, especially as they occurred just two days before the beginning

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of riots of young multicultural French people from such neighborhoods, angry at police brutality. The film’s placement of this term in the mouth of a French military leader during the Algerian war serves to point to the colonial origins of contemporary French racism. Like many films on the Algerian war, Ben Boulaïd is not just about history but also relates to the war’s contemporary aftermath. The longest section of the film, inaugurated by a somewhat old-fashioned fade to black and lasting about seventy minutes, highlights Ben Boulaïd’s imprisonment, his continuing political resolve, and the daring escape of prisoners led by him from the El Koudia prison in Constantine. It is in this third part of the film that its hagiographic aspect takes over. At the Tunisian-Libyan border, Ben Boulaïd kills a harki who tried to stop him, but he is eventually caught and taken first to a Tunisian prison in 1955, where he meets a leader of the Tunisian independence movement.4 The film thus highlights again the transnational aspect of struggles for national liberation, as the Tunisian leader is familiar with Ben Boulaïd’s name and reputation. From now on in the film, his reputation continually precedes him. In a significant scene in which Ben Boulaïd interacts with French scholar, officer, and diplomat Vincent Monteil, their dialogue—as was the case earlier between Ben Boulaïd and Messali Hadj—clearly stakes out their profoundly divergent views on the situation in Algeria. What is for Monteil “un mouvement de révolte” (a rebel movement) is “une vraie révolution” (a true revolution) for Ben Boulaïd. While Monteil reduces it to a struggle limited to the Aures region, Ben Boulaïd highlights the national aspect of the revolution, retorting that “Toute l’Algérie s’est soulevée!” (all of Algeria rose up!) When the Frenchman promises reforms, Ben Boulaïd tells him that “C’est trop tard” (it’s too late). Their back-andforth dialogue casts each man as a spokesperson for his group and rhetorically highlights their opposing views on colonization and decolonization. Ben Boulaïd ends the dialogue by promising allegiance to Algeria to the death: “J’accepte d’être fusillé si ma mort doit sauver l’Algérie” (I will take the firing squad if my death can save Algeria). With these strong words, Ben Boulaïd both tells his French interlocutor that nothing will stop the struggle and presents himself as a willing martyr to the cause. For the second time, the use of French in the dialogues serves to bring home the anti-colonial message of the film and to justify the Algerian revolution. Ben Boulaïd then speaks in Arabic to the other prisoners who share a cell with him, heroically telling them, “If we must die, we’ll die as martyrs.” When Ben Boulaïd is moved to the Constantine prison where he shares a large cell with over twenty other inmates, most of whom are death row political prisoners, he becomes the natural leader of the group. He organizes a daring escape attempt that involves unsealing a stone slab and digging out a seven-yard-long tunnel with makeshift tools. The film takes its time to show the Herculean task in which the men engage, in a twenty-minute-long

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sequence that also demonstrates that it is through unity, discipline, ingenuity, hard work, sacrifice, patience, fairness, and faith in the impossible that the men manage to achieve their escape. The fact that the film spends such an inordinate amount of time on the details of the escape highlights the importance of this sequence for Rachedi. It is meant to be seen as a synecdoche for the revolution as a whole. Ben Boulaïd’s talent for leadership is shown again, as he is able to bring the men together in unity and defuse tensions. Once the tunnel is completed, a decision must be made regarding in what order the men will escape, given that the first ones to escape will be most likely to be successful. Ben Boulaïd leads by example and with ethical purity. He decides that all—including himself—will draw lots. When another man says that as a leader, Ben Boulaïd should not have to draw lots, he replies, “What applies to you, applies to me.” Once again, he is willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good and does not value his own life over that of his companions. As film critic Lotfi Maherzi notes, the ALN militant in cinéma moudjahid is often presented as noble, morally superior, generous, heroic, audacious, and with a strong sense of sacrifice (247), all characteristics that apply to Ben Boulaïd in this film (Shafik 317). When Ben Boulaïd draws number eight, one man on crutches due to a broken foot had drawn a better number and gives his to his leader saying that he would only hinder the escape, at which point Ben Boulaïd accepts the offer. After a very well planned, well executed, complex, and suspenseful escape, filled with epic music, ladders, ropes, and German shepherd guard dogs,5 the men finally manage to escape on November 10, 1955. Ben Boulaïd and one of his cellmates, Mohamed El Aifa (Rachid Fares), manage to avoid the full force of the French military. The camera keeps cutting between the two unarmed, poorly equipped men and the French military structure. Mohamed’s feet are bleeding as his shoes are falling apart, whereas in contrast the French are well equipped, wellarmed, and numerous. The point of view clearly aligns with that of the two Algerian men, and the film makes the audience identify with them, fear for their lives, and hope for their successful escape. The people are shown to support them, as they find refuge with an old man who shares food and clothing with them. He knows of Ben Boulaïd, who is rumored to have escaped with “fifty” men (i.e., double the actual number), thus indicating that Ben Boulaïd already is a mythical figure. In the last part of the film (lasting over forty minutes and focusing on the struggle in the mountains), Ben Boulaïd is back in the Aures, where his relative Cherif shelters him and shows him a French newspaper, through which Ben Boulaïd and the audience both learn that almost half (eleven) escapees are still free. Cherif also tells him, “The news of your escape rallied the whole population.” Ben Boulaïd is thus positioned again as a charismatic and mythical leader whose presence unites Algerians, in keeping with the tradition of

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cinéma moudjahid (Maherzi 248). The film generally downplays the internal divisions among Algerians during the war, with only one brief mention of the village’s Kaid who had brought the French to the village to search for FLN fighters. Divisions between the FLN and the MNA are not brought up, making it appear as if only the FLN remains as a political party, which was not yet the case. Ben Boulaïd goes back to the mountains and continues to take part in the struggle. His mythical status is foregrounded, as he is referred to as “Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, the man of the Revolution!” His ethical leadership is highlighted again as well, demonstrating that the man lives up to the myth. One of the rules he had enacted was that when a leader returned after capture, he could not serve in a leadership position for six months in case he was now working for the French. The men argue over whether he should be subjected to this rule. In particular, one of his lieutenants, Adjel Adjoul (Ahmed Rezzagui), is shown as emerging as a rival to Ben Boulaïd, who decides for himself that he is not above the law and that the rule should apply to him as well. However, we do see Ben Boulaïd giving orders in subsequent scenes, and all the men listen to him, again highlighting his natural leadership ability. The French have sent more and more men, including paratroopers, to the region. After the Algerian fighters escape from a skirmish with the French, they dance and celebrate, singing a song to the glory of Ben Boulaïd and El Haouès, another FLN leader in the region. This short moment of happiness also serves to highlight Ben Boulaïd’s status as a living legend. The last ten minutes of the film, taking place in early 1956, highlight his commitment to the revolution. He gives what ends up being his last speech to his troops, telling them, “We’ll continue our struggle with perseverance. . . . Remember, trust in God, love your country, and venerate the martyrs.” Perhaps more than a message from Ben Boulaïd to his troops, this sentence—which is in keeping with cinéma moudjahid ideology—seems to be an admonition from Rachedi to his contemporary Algerian audience. It summarizes the message conveyed by the film itself. Sensing that death is near, Ben Boulaïd looks at his notebook in which he has written names of “glorious martyrs” and adds his own name. The solemnity of the moment is highlighted by the lack of musical accompaniment in this scene. He then dies a martyr for the revolution not through a fair-and-square battle but through trickery when the French let the Algerians intercept a radio in which a bomb had been hidden.6 There has been some controversy in Algeria regarding Ben Boulaïd’s death, with some suspecting internal betrayal (perhaps from Adjoul) instead of French deception (Adli). Although the film directly implicates the French military, it leaves other options open by referring to Adjoul’s rivalry with Ben Boulaïd and clearly showing Adjoul leaving the area before Ben Boulaïd goes to look at the radio-bomb. After the bomb explodes, killing Ben Boulaïd and some of the men, their comrades melodramatically cry out, “My brother!”

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and “Mostefa is dead!” Elegiac music plays as the men scream “Allahou Akbar!” (God is the greatest!) The camera dramatically pans out from a bird’s-eye shot that ends in a white fadeout, and the credits start rolling over shots of the mountains in which the struggle had been waged. The mountains are a central symbol for Algerian nationalism since much of the fighting occurred there, and a famous song of the war of national liberation was titled “Min Djibalina” (From Our Mountains). For Guy Austin, “the crucible where the discourse of martyrdom was forged is the cinéma moudjahid” (Algerian 54). Ben Boulaïd thus continues to participate in the hagiographic shahid (martyr of the revolution) discourse that has been a hallmark of FLN and official government ideology (Stora, Gangrène 303; Shafik 317). The religious aspect of the Algerian revolution is reflected throughout the film. Beside the cultural use of religious exclamations such as “Bismillah” (In the name of God), the men often cry out “Allahou Akbar!” (God is the greatest!) together with “Yahia Djezair” (Long Live Algeria), thus linking religion and the liberation struggle. Before a skirmish with the French about an hour into the film, Ben Boulaïd and his men recite the Shahada (profession of faith). While in prison, other inmates (and the audience) see him reciting the Qur’an in his sleep, something that he mentions “often happens.” This takes place right after the scene where he swears allegiance to the Algerian revolution to the death. The film thus positions him as saintly and inspired by both nationalist and spiritual goals. He is shown praying several times. When the men decide to try to escape from the Constantine prison, he makes them swear on the Qur’an not to say a word. Before they escape, he leads them in prayer, establishing his position as spiritual, political, and military leader. Whereas films made primarily for a France-based audience do not highlight religious elements of the revolution, this film is intended for an Algerian audience and includes the religious aspect of Algerian nationalism. This imbrication of Islam and nationalism was already a feature of the first cinéma moudjahid (Maherzi 247, 350). One of the critiques generally made of cinéma moudjahid is that the films focus almost entirely on male protagonists. This continues to be true for Ben Boulaïd, almost to a stereotypical extent. Women appear for only a few minutes in this almost three-hour-long film. They primarily serve food when men order them to do so. We briefly see one pants-wearing woman, Fatma, hunting with men toward the beginning of the film, in 1945, but she disappears from the narrative. About half an hour before the end of the film, Ben Boulaïd is briefly reunited with his family in the middle of the night. His relative Cherif asks if he wants to see his wife and children, and Ben Boulaïd answers, “No, not now. Let them sleep. I’ll see them later.” There is only a two-minute scene with his wife Aldjia, with a rather stilted dialogue in which he explains his duty and although she is sad, she understands. He

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looks at his sleeping boy but does not wake him up, in a scene reminiscent of the beginning of Cartouches gauloises. Whereas Cartouches focused on the boy’s feelings, in Ben Boulaïd the focus is on the father as a political and military leader. As the men leave to return to the resistance in the mountains, the women go back inside the house. In real life, Ben Boulaïd’s wife was involved in supporting the independence struggle, but her engagement is not represented in the film (“Veuve”). This stereotypical representation of women is surprising in 2008. Both the leaders and the rank and file of the war of national liberation—the agents of the struggle—are represented as being solely male. It is not that Rachedi is unaware of women’s participation in the war, since his son Amine made a documentary film, Femme courage (2003), whose script Rachedi himself cowrote on mujahida (female freedom fighter) Louisette Ighilahriz, based on her 2001 autobiographical book, Algérienne. Yet in 2008, Rachedi’s film of the Algerian revolution only features male agents. Overall, Ben Boulaïd can be generally said to be a late incarnation of Algeria’s cinéma moudjahid in its use of the epic genre, its hagiographic approach to rendering the life of a martyred militant, and its focus on a protagonist embodying a male national ideal. However, it departs from freedom fighter cinema in that it presents pre-1954 Algerian political debates and highlights the importance of Messali Hadj, internal dissensions among the fighters, and individual FLN leaders such as Ben Boulaïd. It also provides some space for Imazighen identities and Tamazight languages. MILITANT MEMORIES: ZABANA! (SAÏD OULD-KHELIFA, 2012) Unlike Rachedi’s sprawling epic, Ould-Khelifa’s Zabana! is noticeable for its reliance on a series of short scenes, many lasting around one minute. As with Mehdi Charef’s Cartouches gauloises, this vignette-like construction allows the film to present various aspects of the war, political and activist, and to hint at the complexities of people’s positions on both sides during the war. Saïd Ould-Khelifa is an Algerian filmmaker who was born in Tunis. He has also worked as a film critic and journalist and, like Merzak Allouache, has lived in both Algeria and France. He has been making feature films since 1991 and is perhaps most well-known for Le Thé d’Ania (2004). Zabana! is his fourth film. It focuses on the first FLN militant guillotined by the French on June 19, 1956, Ahmed (Hamida) Zabana (or Zahana)7 (played by the charismatic Imad Benchenni, who was also cast in Rachedi’s Krim Belkacem and in Touita’s Opération Maillot). The film was produced through the AARC, with support from Algeria’s Ministry of Mujahidin, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry

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of Culture. Some of the real-life militants and Zabana’s lawyer Mahmoud Zertal, who helped in the making of the film, are thanked in the end credits. Like Ben Boulaïd and Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, Zabana! begins before the war, this time in 1949 Oran, depicting a major robbery at the main post office there and explaining that the money was used to fund the inaugural November 1, 1954, FLN actions. Unlike Hors la loi’s Hollywood-inspired fight scenes, the film does not show us the actual robbery, only the men waiting outside, filmed to a suspenseful musical score. Within the first few minutes of the film, it is established that Algerian anti-colonial activism existed well before the beginning of the war and, as in Ben Boulaïd and Hors la loi, that the revolution had been a longtime coming. A bit later in the film, the names of those who held up the post office are mentioned, and they include major FLN leaders such as Hocine Aït Ahmed, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Mohamed Khider, confirming the political aspect of the robbery and refuting the French interpretation that the robbery was executed by “bandits” and “gangsters.” Zabana was involved in the robbery when he was just seventeen years old. The film thus highlights his early militant activism and shows him as having already been jailed in 1950. The “events of 8th May 1945” are mentioned. The link between the 1945 massacres and the war of national liberation is recognized by historians and is staged in Hors la loi (see Donadey, “Wars of Memory”). Before engaging in the actions of November 1, 1954, the militants share a typed-up, photocopied essay by left-leaning French journalist Claude Bourdet: “Y-a-t-il une Gestapo algérienne?” (Is There an Algerian Gestapo?) The article denounced the use of torture against members of the Organisation spéciale—the armed branch of the MTLD, of which Zabana and Ben Boulaïd were both members in the early 1950s (Stora, Dictionnaire 249, 272). The presence of this essay in the film fulfills several functions. It is a way to hint at the role of Messali Hadj and of older independence parties before the FLN, although in a much more indirect way than in Ben Boulaïd. It demonstrates that the French police were already using torture against Algerian independence militants before 1954, a fact that historians have established (Branche, La Torture; Thénault, Histoire 148–49). It also briefly shows that a small number of French people criticized these abuses and held anti-colonialist views, and that Algerian militants were aware of this support. About thirty-one minutes into the film, for instance, a brief scene features a French Communist male nurse (Serge Requet-Braville) who supports the FLN militants. Bourdet’s comparison of French and Nazi atrocities was not a shallow one, since he had been a French resistant and had himself been sent to concentration camps during World War II (Van Gelder).8 Thus, the first fifteen minutes of the film set the larger political stage for the story of the militant Zabana, doing so with recourse to very little dialogue and a succession of short scenes.

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Like Ben Boulaïd, the film uses local newspaper clippings to provide information about historical events such as the post office robbery. The articles demonstrate both the papers’ biased standpoint, evident in the rhetoric used, and the effectiveness of FLN actions. The 1949 article refers to the post office robbers as “bandits” and “gangsters,” and the 1954 one already uses language that became dominant on the French side during the war: “fellaghas” (highwaymen), “les hors-la-loi” (outlaws), and “le mouvement terroriste naissant” (the emerging terrorist movement).9 In Zabana!, the November 1, 1954, actions are represented geographically through the use of a newspaper map that shows all the areas where attacks occurred, thus highlighting that they were a coordinated, effective campaign. A newspaper mention of a famous 1954 statement by François Mitterrand, “L’Algérie c’est la France” (Algeria is France), reminds the audience that French Socialist governments were just as colonialist as right-wing ones in the mid-1950s. The second fifteen minutes of the film focus on Zabana’s FLN activism and also rely on short scenes with very little dialogue. A scene (slightly over one minute long) portrays the event that led to Zabana being given the death penalty by French courts, the killing of a pied-noir garde champêtre (rural policeman, played by Yves Buchin) in Western Algeria. The FLN men have come to give the policeman a warning regarding that man’s mishandling of the local Algerian civilian (male and female) population, but when the policeman fights back, he is killed in the scuffle. This short scene establishes that the FLN men are not cold-blooded killers and that the killing was not premeditated. A series of other short vignettes showcases Zabana’s thoughtful, forward-thinking leadership of his small group, demonstrating that he is aware that “this will be a long war”; as a result, he only wants to engage in meaningful actions that will not bring overwhelming French military repression to other Algerians. Unlike Ben Boulaïd, the film does not focus very much on military actions. We see the militants marching through the forest, exchanging information and money with Algerian civilian supporters, and making do with a very limited supply of food and weapons. As in Ben Boulaïd, the militants’ lack of supplies and weapons is contrasted with the power of the French military machine with its many soldiers, weapons, and planes. French racism is highlighted in a vignette in which the rural policeman’s widow (Anne Richard) is unable to identify Zabana as her husband’s killer, and the military officer accompanying her casually voices the stereotype that “les Arabes se ressemblent presque tous” (almost all Arabs look alike). Torture looms large in this section of the film. Zabana once mentions, “I mustn’t be taken alive. I’m afraid of talking under torture.” This explains his suicide attempt when the French military, who had been tipped off, surprise the militants in the cave in which they had established their headquarters on

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November 8, 1954, only a week after the beginning of the revolution. In a subsequent minute-long scene, we see two militants who have been arrested and tortured by several French soldiers. As in The Battle of Algiers, the scene starts after the first man has been tortured and has perhaps spoken. He is chained to a table. The camera first reveals his pants reddened with blood, then his bruised chest. A second man is brought in, and we are made to witness the preliminaries to torture, as electrodes are being attached to one of the man’s ears and most likely his genitals as well (which are hidden from view). The film then cuts to Zabana recovering in the hospital. In this first representation of the use of torture by the French military, we do not see the actual torture taking place, but as in The Battle of Algiers, its intimation is very powerful. Soon afterward, another militant mentions having had electrodes placed in his mouth. The filmmaker is careful to insert a short scene with the supportive nurse who outfits Zabana with a glass eye at this point, to ensure Zabana! is not seen as Manichean or anti-French, before launching into a five-minute-long coverage of Zabana’s trial for murdering the rural police officer and for “actes de terrorisme” (terrorist acts). One of Zabana’s French lawyers rejects this characterization by establishing parallels between World War II French Resistance and Algerian revolutionary activism on the one hand, and between Pétain’s collaboration government and the French in Algeria on the other hand, asking rhetorically whether Zabana’s act was “Terrorisme” (Terrorism) or “Résistance” (Resistance). The film also makes it clear that the judge is far from impartial. When another of Zabana’s French lawyers refers to the “massacres du 8 mai 1945” (massacres of May 8, 1945), the judge calls these mass killings of thousands of Algerian civilians “un rappel à l’ordre” (a call to order). Historians have demonstrated that the truth lies on the side of Zabana’s lawyer rather than with the judge’s shocking understatement. As in the dialogue between Ben Boulaïd and Monteil discussed earlier, the terms used by each party highlight the gulf separating the two political points of view. The longest section of the film, lasting about fifty minutes, focuses on Zabana’s imprisonment, with the addition of scenes of his multiple appeal trials and discussions between Mr. Casabianca, the prison warden (Nicolas Pignon), and the unnamed executioner (Laurent Gernigon). As in Ben Boulaïd, the supportive atmosphere among the political prisoners, especially the death row ones, who have a “V” on the backs of their shirts, is highlighted. One of the imprisoned men is FLN leader Moh Touil (played by actor Embarek Menad, who is also a filmmaker). Si Moh Touil’s real name was Hocine Hammouche. Like Zabana, he was arrested very soon after November 1, 1954, but unlike Zabana, he spent the entire war period in prison (Stora, Dictionnaire 177). A militant since the late 1940s, Moh calls himself a former “boar hunter,” a reference to his fighting against the (famously pork

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aficionado) French. When he is taken away to be tortured, he insults his jailers in French, calling them a “Bande de sangliers!” (Bunch of boars!) This may also be an intertext with L’Opium et le bâton, in which the word “sanglier” (boar) often recurs. The term is used as code for the French, especially French soldiers (as in the password “Il y a des sangliers par ici?” [Are there boars around here?]), in both that book (85) and film. As in Ben Boulaïd, the transnational dimension of the independence struggle is referred to in Zabana! through the presence of Moroccan and Tunisian political prisoners. Ali Zamoum (Khaled Benaissa), another real-life militant and the Kabyle intellectual leader of the imprisoned men in spite of his young age, makes the link explicit, saying, “C’est le Grand Maghreb des condamnés à mort!” (It’s the Great Maghreb on death row!) He articulates their common struggle against the French colonial power and their similar treatment at the hands of the French. As in Ben Boulaïd, some of the film’s dialogues and a song are in Tamazight, and in a scene taking place in Ali’s village, a woman’s outfit is Amazigh.10 Ali’s village, with the recognizably Kabyle name of Ighil Imoula, is featured in the film. Moh Touil, Ali’s brother Si Salah (another war leader), and other major FLN figures such as Krim Belkacem were also based in Ighil Imoula, where anti-colonial activism went back to the nineteenth century (“Village”; Zamoum 166). The village is also important to the struggle for national liberation because thousands of copies of the FLN’s November 1, 1954, statement announcing the beginning of the war were mimeographed there (Zamoum 160–61; Ouramdane). After the film has referred to torture several times, at its halfway point, we are made to witness two short scenes of torture lasting slightly more than one minute. Ould-Khelifa follows the structure of The Battle of Algiers to show torture incrementally, starting with scenes taking place before and after but not during torture, and later showing the audience direct visual renditions of torture. Moh has been taken to the infamous Villa Sésini in Algiers and is tortured. The first scene begins with a slightly out-of-focus close-up on part of a machinery, which turns out to be the handle of a crank connected to a generator. An out-of-focus body is visible in the background. As we see a French soldier turning the crank, we realize that the infamous “gégène” (electrocution) is being used on Moh. The camera focuses on his torso and part of his face in a close-up. As in the previous torture scene, he is chained to a table. His body starts to jump under the effect of the electric jolts, and he cries out. The camera cuts from shots of the French soldier impassively operating the generator to Moh’s tortured body. We see two electrical wires, one going toward his face (probably his ear) and the other going under his shorts, implying that he is also being sexually tortured, like the militant in the previous torture scene. Another French torturer strolls out into an adjacent room, smoking. As he stands there taking a puff, two other soldiers walk by in front

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of him, dragging a woman who appears unconscious. The film thus implies that women were tortured as well, which is historically true but is rarely shown on film. The camera shows another man to the right of the French soldier, hung by his wrists, head down, slightly in the background, with a large bucket next to him. Calmly, the French soldier casually moves toward him and begins to water board him. The scene ends abruptly with a cut. The power of these scenes is enhanced by the fact that the audience was already familiar with Moh and feels for or identifies with him. For an Algerian audience aware of the real-life militant’s trajectory, this scene would be even more shocking. The lack of music or dialogue heightens the immediacy of torture and makes its treatment more realistic. Other than Moh’s cries and the other man’s gurgling sounds, there is no dialogue. The French soldier does not ask the men any questions. In this way, the film silently questions the usual rationale for torture, which is to make people speak. These scenes of torture are brief but intensely powerful. They are realistic without being gory or over the top, which allows the audience to identify with the tortured men, even more so since the French torturer is shown going about his business in a calm and collected way, as if he were engaged in a normal activity and not inflicting unbearable violence on other human beings. Part of the film’s artistry resides in its editing. Right after the low point of torture, the film cuts to a gathering of the French Socialist government’s cabinet in Paris, voting on whether to execute FLN leaders on death row. OuldKhelifa names names. Guy Mollet, Gaston Deferre, and Pierre Mendès France vote against execution, whereas François Mitterrand and Félix HouphouëtBoigny vote for execution. Like Mon Colonel, Zabana! reminds audiences of Mitterrand’s colonialist past. It also points to the fact that African unity was never a given, since Houphouët-Boigny, a convert to Christianity and political moderate who went on to become president of newly independent Ivory Coast, voted for the execution of Algerian independence militants. The affect in this scene is very calm and collected, showing the French ministers voting dispassionately to kill Algerian political prisoners. Their calm and the beautiful surroundings in which they are voting contrast starkly with Moh crying out in pain under torture in the previous scene. They also recall the French torturers’ similarly calm and collected affect, thus showing that they are all part of the same institutional machinery. About forty-five minutes into the film, the warden and a French military officer, Captain Jean-Pierre (Jérémie Covillaut), are discussing Zabana’s case, and the warden happens to mention torture. Angered, the captain retorts, “L’armée française ne torture jamais, M. le Directeur!” (The French military never tortures, sir!) The placement of this scene, occurring fifteen minutes after the first scene of torture and eight minutes before Moh’s torture, gives the lie to the French official version as conveyed by the captain. Even though the captain sounds self-righteous, the

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fact that his high and mighty response is flanked by two scenes in which torture and its effects are visually shown highlights the hypocritical nature of his cover up. Zabana! focuses on FLN militants and their (primarily) French antagonists. It only includes one brief reference to the MNA. One prisoner counters Zabana’s discourse, calling it “FLN propaganda,” after which another inmate complains about the “Messalists of the MNA.” Zabana sagely reminds the MNA militant that “FLN or MNA, we all have a V on our backs.” As Ben Boulaïd did, Zabana also emphasizes the need for unity, although to a lesser extent than in Rachedi’s film, perhaps because Zabana was never a major leader like Ben Boulaïd. However, the brief presence of a Messalist and the naming of the MNA are meaningful elements in that they occur in a scene taking place in 1956. Whereas Rachedi’s film focuses on the importance of Messali Hadj and of other independence parties pre-November 1, 1954, it no longer refers to them once the war of independence has started. Ould-Khelifa does mention the continuing existence of political dissensions among militants a year and a half into the war, even if only briefly. As for the French antagonists, they include French politicians in Paris, French judges in the Paris and Algiers courts who reveal themselves as anything but impartial, and the prison warden and executioner. The latter two are recurring characters in the second half of the film. The warden is a particularly distasteful character who symbolically keeps a caged bird in his office. He is repeatedly shown as spying on the political prisoners from his office window above the prison yard and trying to break their resolve. There are also a number of characters with shifting or uncertain allegiances. Only one French guard is particularly unpleasant, and the few harki prison guards are not generally unfriendly toward the prisoners. One of the French guards, Fernand (Sébastien Tavel), seems to understand their predicament and smuggles in books. One harki guard, Boualem (Boubaker Benaïssa), agrees to give Zabana’s final letter to his mother at the end of the film.11 In this way, the film highlights the validity of Zabana’s and the FLN’s cause, showing that it was respected even in unexpected places. This is also a way of avoiding demonizing the opponents of Algerian independence. The last hour of the film juxtaposes prison scenes, scenes with the warden, and court scenes (as Zabana’s case winds its way through various appeals). The men are held in the infamous Barberousse (Serkadji) prison in Algiers, where their living conditions are harsh. They are shown to be poorly fed, beaten, sent to solitary confinement, and having access to very little. Instead of weakening them, this poor treatment only strengthens their resolve. There is a brief mention of one prisoner, Mohamed-Saïd Mazouzi, a real-life militant who was known as the Algerian Mandela because he was jailed for seventeen years, between 1945 and 1962, and continued his activism from

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prison. In this way, Zabana! highlights again that the 1954 uprising was part of a longer history of anti-colonial resistance. Meaningful details of prison life are showcased. For instance, an hour and eighteen minutes into the film, in a short and emotionally poignant scene, Ali notices that his nails have grown too long and Zabana shares with him a trick he learned from another prisoner, to file his nails against the wall.12 This small detail about deprivation in prison and the imaginative ways in which prisoners maintain their dignity in desperate circumstances is as powerful as the earlier, impactful scenes of torture in bringing the audience to share their point of view and identify with their predicament. The men are also repeatedly shown to use humor, laughter, and talking back to counter the warden’s psychological manipulations, to present a united front against him, and to deal with their situation. For instance, as Zabana and Ali discuss Zabana’s final request for “grâce” (pardon), Ali adds jokingly, “Grace Kelly.” Humor is not a common feature of Algerian war films, and it is important here as a tactic used by the prisoners to maintain their sense of self and humanity. The detail also demonstrates the fact that word of the outside world would come to the prisoners, perhaps through the reading materials some of the guards smuggled in, since the April 1956 wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco was big news at the time. It also highlights the stark contrast between the fate of the prisoners and the glamorous lives of Western princes and celebrities. The film’s focus on the French use of the guillotine to carry out death sentences in Algeria is revealing in many ways, besides being based on fact. The guillotine is historically associated with the French Revolution, which beheaded thousands of aristocrats and people considered to be enemies of the revolution, especially during the period referred to as the Terror in 1793– 1794. The use of the guillotine is generally considered to be barbaric today, as many anecdotes circulate regarding occurrences of malfunctioning in which people’s death was protracted and painful. When the guillotine is mentioned as a potential outcome during Zabana’s first trial, the film score becomes very discordant, stressing the horrific nature of this prospect. The film ends with the written sentence, “From 1956 to 1962, 222 Algerians militants were guillotined,” highlighting the generalized use by the French of an antiquated way of carrying out the death penalty against Algerian revolutionaries. This film is the only one in my corpus to focus on the use of the guillotine. In doing so, it provides a rejoinder to L’Ennemi intime’s insistence on ALN fighters’ use of knives to slit throats, demonstrating that the French also made use of the blade. Both films rely on the visually striking use of the blade to make their points. However, whereas L’Ennemi intime uses this as a jumping-off point to make a somewhat biased argument about FLN savagery, Zabana! focuses on the institutional aspect of the guillotine as a technology of state power and on the cold manner in which it is implemented. Zabana! highlights

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disagreements between the warden and the executioner. The executioner has second thoughts about executing political prisoners, and the warden convinces him to carry out the sentences. An hour and twenty-three minutes into the film, they discuss the gory mechanics of the execution process, such as the amount of blood involved and the cost of the executions, as if they were talking about something other than taking a human life. When the executioner gets worked up about not wanting to proceed, the warden promises him “une prime de tête” (a per head bonus) (something he reneges on later). Right after this nauseating scene, we see a prison guard raising the French flag in the prison yard. The sun is gloriously shining through the flag. The presence of the flag serves to criticize French actions. The juxtaposition of these two scenes creates a stark contrast, since there is nothing glorious in what is about to be done in the name of the French state, as the two men have just discussed it. In this way, the French repressive structure—of which the police, court, prison, warden, and executioner are a part—is shown by the film as being the true cold-blooded killer, not Zabana or the other FLN militants. The film thus highlights the institutional, rather than simply individual, aspect of the war on the French side. The film makes increasingly important references to the role of Islam in the movement. Like Ben Boulaïd, toward the beginning it includes prayers before political meetings and swearing on the Qur’an to support the revolution. About forty-five minutes into the film, we see Zabana reading the Qur’an in prison. Zabana is presented as a generous man who shares his bread with another prisoner. The prisoners are only shown being given soup and bread as meals, so the film makes it clear that Zabana is sharing from his meager portions, highlighting his selflessness and solidarity with his comrades. Before being executed, he prays and leaves his Qur’an and his notebook detailing all his trials since 1950 to his comrade Ali.13 Zabana is scheduled to be executed together with another man, Abdelkader Farradj (Abel Jafri). At the end of the film, in the scenes preceding the two men’s beheadings, Zabana’s irreproachable conduct is contrasted with that of Farradj. We learn that Farradj was a harki who had been accused of killing Europeans. His defense was that he had acted under duress (presumably from the FLN). Unlike Zabana, he is not a pure independence militant, and their reactions when facing news of their impending deaths are contrasted. While Farradj resists, Zabana has made his peace with his fate. In his last letter to his parents and siblings, he states that he is dying for God and country, once again highlighting the link between religion and the struggle for national liberation. Whereas Ben Boulaïd insisted on the saintly aspect of the FLN leader throughout the film, Zabana! only does that in its last fifteen minutes, in the section leading to the militant’s execution. He is shown praying, crying out repeatedly, “I die, but Algeria will live!” and exhibiting a peaceful calm (see also Zamoum 227). When the

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imam (Mustapha Ayad) and Zertal, Zabana’s lawyer (Abdelkader Djeriou), request that he be granted one last prayer, Zabana makes the imam pray next to him and Farradj and not in front of them, highlighting his leadership and perhaps implying the precedence of nationalism over religion. Strikingly, the guillotine blade twice did not release, at which point the sentence would normally not be carried out. Zertal cries out, “C’est la volonté de Dieu! C’est une grâce divine!” (It’s God’s will! It’s divine grace!), but the French leadership is unmoved. The third time, the blade falls as the film cuts to black, the end of the film stylistically reflecting the end of Zabana’s life. Women are slightly better represented qualitatively in Zabana! than in Ben Boulaïd, although they are entirely absent from most of the film. A brief scene (reminiscent of a similar one in Hors la loi) in which Zabana’s mother (Fadila Bouhanna) is allowed to visit him in prison highlights both of their quiet dignity in hard circumstances, symbolized by their being separated by two sets of bars with a guard patrolling between them during a very short visit. Ali’s Kabyle wife is briefly shown as remaining faithful to her imprisoned husband (see also Zamoum 216–17). These are common representations of women in Algerian films. The one European woman shown is the rural policeman’s widow, who appears as a witness in the investigation and trials. More importantly, toward the end of the film, as Zabana’s lawyer tries to gather support against Zabana’s execution, he meets with FLN militants in a scene lasting slightly over a minute. Although brief, this scene is one of too few in my corpus to actually present female Algerian militants. The four FLN activists include two young Algerian women wearing Western clothing, one of whom provides the lawyer with an update on the current situation. The women, like the men, are portrayed as committed and effective co-militants. They all part with a firm handshake, indicating militant solidarity across genders. The three killed militants who are mentioned by name in the text at the end of the film, right before the credits, are Zabana, “the 1st Algerian militant to be guillotined (19-06-1956)”; “Fernand Yveton, the first European-born Algerian militant to be guillotined (11-02-1957)”; and “Yamina Zoulikha Oudaï, the first woman to be shot (25-10-1957).” The film also honors the “222 Algerian militants . . . guillotined” “[f]rom 1956 to 1962.” It thus positions itself as a monument to the martyrs of the revolution, male and female, Algerian and pied-noir. Zoulikha Oudaï’s story was previously mentioned in Assia Djebar’s film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978), which was co-dedicated to her, and developed in Djebar’s 2002 novel La Femme sans sépulture. Fernand Iveton (the correct spelling) was an anti-colonialist, Communist and FLN militant, and the only activist of European descent to be executed during the war (Thénault, Drôle de justice 89). Like Zabana, he was guillotined in the Barberousse prison yard.14 In singling out these three militants, Ould-Khelifa reminds his audience that women and some

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French/pieds-noirs participated in the liberation movement and made the ultimate sacrifice. Although Oudaï, unlike all the other militants mentioned in the film, was not guillotined, she is most likely included in the film’s emblematic list because of her gender. Iveton is significantly described as a “Europeanborn Algerian militant” rather than a pied-noir. Ould-Khelifa thus awards him Algerian nationality posthumously. In this selection of militants and their identity descriptors, the film offers a vision of national Algerian identity that is more expansive than the official focus on masculinity, Arabness, and Islam that we find reflected in cinéma moudjahid and in Ben Boulaïd. The film also includes Tamazight languages and Kabyle locations. THE ALGERIAN WAR (ALMOST) WITHOUT ALGERIANS: SARTRE: L’AGE DES PASSIONS (CLAUDE GORETTA, 2006) In contrast with the previous two films, the two-episode made-for-TV movie Sartre: L’Age des passions brings the war of national independence to France. The film was directed by Claude Goretta, a Swiss filmmaker who has been making feature films since the early 1970s. His most famous film is arguably La Dentellière (1976, The Lacemaker), which catapulted Isabelle Huppert to stardom. Goretta’s journalist brother Jean-Pierre had covered the Algerian war in the early 1960s (“Peur en Algérie”). Goretta’s last film, Sartre, focuses on the political engagement and love lives of Jean-Paul Sartre (Denis Podalydès) and Simone de Beauvoir (Anne Alvaro), primarily refracted through the point of view of another, younger fictional couple, graduate students Frédéric Buchez (Frédéric Gorny) and his Italian girlfriend Carla Chiaromonte (Maya Sansa).15 This younger couple can be seen as a mirror image of Sartre and de Beauvoir, both similar and opposed to them. For instance, Frédéric and Carla are two intellectuals who attempt to follow Sartre and de Beauvoir’s open relationship but realize that it will not work for them. Perhaps more importantly, all four (especially the two men) are shown in the film as engaged in supporting the Algerian struggle for national liberation, but in different ways. Sartre does so through public speeches, interviews, newspaper articles, and participation in demonstrations, whereas Frédéric becomes involved in the Jeanson network as a porteur de valises (French activists supporting the FLN). The first episode begins before the credits roll with archival images of riots in 1958 in Algeria. The Algerian war caused the fall of the Fourth Republic and the return of de Gaulle to head the country, and the film opens on this transitional period. These images are narrated in a first-person voice-over by Frédéric, a philosophy graduate student whose two mentors are Sartre and

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Raymond Aron (Aurélien Recoing). In general, the film’s two episodes focus on Sartre’s international political commitments, from supporting Algerian and Cuban independence to visiting the Soviet Union. The political scenes are intercut with scenes in the personal lives of Sartre and de Beauvoir, highlighting the latter’s increasing sadness and malaise with respect to their open relationship and the constant presence of Sartre’s many mistresses. As Frédéric wrangles with Sartre over the use of violence in the revolutionary war, his girlfriend Carla develops a fuller feminist perspective over the course of the film. Whereas she begins by almost falling for Sartre, by the end of the film she has aligned with de Beauvoir, chosen her studies over Sartre, and calls the philosopher out on what she terms his “macho” behavior. De Beauvoir is incorrectly (Khanna, Algeria Cuts 80–81) depicted in this film as simply following Sartre in his political engagement, and the focus on the scenes featuring her is primarily personal. She rarely speaks publicly in the film and the camera often cuts to her proudly watching Sartre during his public speeches. In contrast, Pour Djamila (discussed below) highlights de Beauvoir’s separate political commitment to supporting the Algerian struggle for independence. In a feminist reversal of the focus on Sartre in Goretta’s film, in Pour Djamila, the main reason Sartre’s name comes up is in connection with Djamila Boupacha’s lawyer Gisèle Halimi, whose husband Claude Faux worked as Sartre’s assistant. Perhaps because of its focus on the Franco-French aspect of the war, Algerians are almost entirely absent in Sartre, except for a handful of short scenes. This could be interpreted either as a representation of the ways in which the struggle was so compartmentalized that French supporters had little contact with Algerian militants, or as symptomatic of the difficulty French society continues to have in casting Algerians as agents of their own history. There are four short scenes that include Algerians in the first episode and two in the second one. About seven minutes into the first episode, Frédéric and Carla are walking in the evening and they witness police rounding up Arab men into their van. Although the lovers do not intervene, Carla expresses anger to Frédéric at this racist practice. Carla and Frédéric are standing on a bridge, looking down at the scene below them. The scene is very short and provides a bird’s-eye view of the events as the two protagonists see them. Metaphorically, this also indicates that the two European students are not yet actively engaged politically on the side of the Algerians in the struggle, watching from above and being physically detached from the scene they are observing, even though they are involved emotionally on the side of the Arab men being rounded up. The next forty minutes of the film include scenes showcasing Sartre’s involvement on the side of the FLN. For instance, he is shown speaking out publicly against torture at a press conference of the Comité Maurice Audin,

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where he compares the French torture of Algerian nationalist militants to Nazi atrocities during World War II.16 We also see de Beauvoir, Frédéric, and Carla participating in an anti-de Gaulle demonstration. The film follows Frédéric as he becomes more involved in the Algerian struggle. He begins with selling college students a newsletter against torture in Algeria and is then recruited into the Jeanson network by a French militant. Sartre’s focus is clearly on the various forms of French engagement alongside the FLN, from public speeches and press conferences to demonstrations and transporting funds for the revolution. French divisions with respect to how to decolonize are also highlighted through the different positions taken by Frédéric’s two mentors, Sartre and Aron. Whereas Sartre fully supports revolutionary struggle and the inevitable violence it entails, Aron is staunchly against the use of violence and supports decolonization done through political institutions, not violently as the FLN is doing.17 It is only fifty minutes into the film that we briefly encounter Algerian militants. Frédéric is sent to an Algerian café to retrieve a suitcase full of money and pass it on to another militant to finance the struggle. He is led into a back room where the audience sees things through his eyes. Using subjective framing and point-of-view cutting, the camera focuses first on Frédéric, standing, then cuts to what he is looking at—a table full of banknotes, shot from a high angle meant to reflect Frédéric’s position. Two male and one female Algerian militants are counting the money and placing it in a suitcase. The camera lingers on the crumpled banknotes. Frédéric then takes the suitcase to an anonymous female supporter who leaves with it in her car. The entire scene lasts about one minute and only one Algerian character, the café owner (Ahmed Belbachir), says one brief sentence during the scene. About an hour and seven minutes into the film’s first episode, Frédéric has a conversation with Mourad (Noureddine Maamar), an FLN militant whom he is hiding at his place. This is the first time that an Algerian has more than one line in the film, although instead of discussing the war, they talk about Frédéric and Carla’s relationship as well as the FLN Socialist platform, which Mourad says owes more to the Israeli kibbutz model than to the USSR. Mourad also mentions that he was born in Marseilles and has French citizenship. The theme of the Algerian war being also a Franco-French war (Stora, Gangrène 187) is thus present in this film, not just because of the many white French people we have seen supporting the Algerian independence struggle in different ways but also because the Algerian militant is a French citizen. This short, two-minute scene briefly deconstructs a number of stereotypes. An FLN militant is shown providing relationship advice to a French supporter and upholding an Israeli sociocultural organization as a model for the future Algerian nation.

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Soon afterward, about an hour and eleven minutes into the film, Frédéric drives Mourad to a café at night. We hear two shots being fired and see an Algerian man fall. Mourad rushes back to the car and tells Frédéric to drive off quickly. Frédéric, who had not expected to be involved in an assassination, is angry and Mourad explains that the man was “un traître à la Révolution” (a traitor to the Revolution). Shocked, Frédéric retorts, “Vous tuez des Algériens et après vous vous appelez frères!” (You kill other Algerians and then you call yourselves brothers?) In his explanation, Mourad draws a parallel with World War II France and the struggle that pitted the Resistance against the Nazi regime and its French collaborators. Once again, the civil war aspect of the struggle is emphasized in the film, this time among Algerians. However, the nature of the divisions among Algerians remains vague, and we never find out what made the murdered man a traitor. The focus on French perspectives is reinforced by the comparison with World War II that is now made for the third time. Like the previous vignettes involving Algerian militants, this scene is very short, under two minutes. Its violence is shocking for the audience, both because we had just seen Mourad and Frédéric have a friendly conversation and because events are presented from Frédéric’s point of view. Like him, we were not aware of the purpose of the evening drive and are therefore shaken at the shooting. Even in a scene showcasing an Algerian militant as the agent of the action, the perspective is that of the French supporter. Mourad then disappears from the film, which continues to focus on Frédéric’s soul-searching regarding this event. As a result of their differing experience supporting the nationalist struggle, Frédéric and Sartre disagree on the use of violence for purposes of liberation. Sartre is philosophically convinced of the necessity of violence. In contrast, Frédéric feels guilty for unwittingly aiding and abetting a murder and bases his refusal of violence on this personal and concrete experience. His qualms with respect to the use of violence are similar to female Algerian FLN operative Malika’s in Je vous ai compris (discussed in chapter 2). Frédéric is arrested by the police at the end of the first episode, which ends on a fifteen-second close-up of his face in a long take as he is sitting in the police van, looking dejected. The long take turns into a freeze-frame of Frédéric’s face, which slowly becomes blurred. In this way, the film insists on the centrality of Frédéric’s standpoint and situation. About ten minutes into the second episode, Frédéric is being questioned at the police station and denies everything. This scene is intercut with longer scenes of Sartre and de Beauvoir visiting Cuba, meeting with Fidel Castro (Jamil Jaled) and Che Guevara (Julio A. Quesada). Frédéric is being threatened by a police inspector (Michel Voïta) and hit several times, including with a book twice. The weapon of choice of the committed writer such as Sartre, writing, becomes here a literal weapon inflicting pain on intellectual Frédéric. When he is

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finally released, his face bears the marks of police brutality. As Carla hugs him, he winces, which lets the audience know that he was badly beaten while in custody. In keeping with the film’s focus on French characters, the dangers of pro-Algerian independence activism are shown primarily with respect to the Franco-French and European characters (for instance, Frédéric mentions to Carla that she should not get involved as she would risk expulsion if found). The second episode highlights the price Sartre pays for his engagement, from being insulted when out in public to receiving death threats and having his apartment bombed by the pro-French Algeria OAS; he escapes serious harm only because he had moved out temporarily after being warned about the impending attack. As a result of the film’s continuing focus on Franco-French points of view, the second episode only includes two brief representations of Algerians. The first occurs nearly forty minutes into the film and takes place in fall 1961. After the demonstration and massacre of October 17, 1961, photographer Elie Kagan (Gilles Gaston-Dreyfus), one of the few real-life people to have taken pictures of the roundup of thousands of Algerian demonstrators and the police brutality against Algerians, is showing Sartre and de Beauvoir his photographs. Kagan relates the events to the philosophers, providing a historical summary for the audience. The film incorporates these archival photographs and the courageous journalist who took them into its narrative. Sartre thus contributes to what scholars Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle have called “the increasing prominence afforded to the work of Elie Kagan” in memorializing October 17, 1961 (87). This scene allows for a fourth parallel with World War II. De Beauvoir compares the roundup of Algerians to that of thousands of Jewish people in the Vel d’Hiv in 1942. Kagan concurs, adding, “Y’a vingt ans c’était nous, les Juifs, aujourd’hui c’est les Arabes” (Twenty years ago it was us Jews, today it’s Arabs). These parallels contribute to what Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memories.” The scene featuring Kagan also reminds the audience that some Jewish French people saw the parallel and were supportive of Algerians. It should be noted that, since Sartre and de Beauvoir were not present at that demonstration, the representation of Algerian resistance is once removed here. Unlike other films that highlight October 17, 1961, such as Nuit noire, in Sartre the demonstration is not staged but filtered through the presence of archival photographs from that day. The point of view is that of leftist French people, including one Jewish historical figure. The connection between World War II and the Algerian war that recurs in Sartre is also made through visual filmic references. Prominently featured next to the front door in Frédéric’s small studio apartment is a movie poster of Brigitte Bardot’s succès de scandale, Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (Roger Vadim, 1956). About eight minutes into the first episode, Frédéric and Carla

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are going back to his place. The camera is positioned inside the room. As the door opens and the lovers walk in, the poster is visible to the right of the front door. Carla stares at it, laughing, and mutters in Italian “adolescente” (adolescent). Soon after October 17 and the parallels made with World War II, about forty minutes into the second episode, we see Frédéric pinning a different movie poster to that wall while listening to radio reports of various attacks in Paris. Scantily clad Bardot is now being replaced by a poster of Roberto Rossellini’s World War II-era masterpiece Rome, Open City (1945). The poster features actress Anna Magnani and a small boy who plays her son in the film facing a Nazi soldier, looming menacingly on the left side of the image. In one hand, the soldier is holding a rifle that is prominently placed diagonally across the poster, dividing it in half, occupying a central position and coming close to the woman’s cheek. Her arm is above her head, possibly to protect herself or to strike back at the armed soldier. His other hand is on her arm, perhaps ready to push her back. The position and size of the characters and of the weapon highlight the power differential between the two sides. Yet, the face we see fully is the woman’s. She is staring up at the soldier, whose face is only partially visible as they face one another. The poster thus encourages the viewer to identify with the woman’s point of view. The reference to Rossellini’s Rome, Open City is in line with Sartre’s beliefs about politics and art and highlights cinema’s potential for political engagement, in a self-referential reflection on the film we are watching. Rossellini’s film featured Italian members of the Resistance who came together to fight Nazism even though they belonged to generally opposing ideological sides, Communist and Catholic. In Rome, Open City, Pina, the character played by Magnani, is shot dead by the Nazis. Frédéric’s move from Bardot to Magnani—from sex to political engagement, even to the death—signals his coming of age from adolescent to man. Like other anticolonial French people at the time, including Sartre, Frédéric, now fighting against the colonial and racist French police and military state, identifies with World War II resisters against Nazi oppression. As he moves away from the wall, his shadow falls over the woman and the boy on the poster, thus superimposing the two times and contexts of resistance to tyranny. The parallel between World War II and the Algerian war emphasizes a French-European perspective on the war. The “multidirectional memories” between World War II and decolonial wars that Rothberg analyses in his book are mediated here through a third space, that of Italy, and through a cinematic reference. Rome is mentioned several times in the film as Carla is from Rome.18 The international aspect of this film, made by a Swiss director whose family was affected by the Algerian war, includes not just Sartre’s Communist support of the USSR and of Fidel Castro’s Cuba but also a reminder of both World War II’s and the Algerian war’s transnational impacts.

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Besides photographs and film, Sartre also highlights the role that various media played in the transmission of information regarding the Algerian war in France. Characters are filmed listening to the radio or reading newspapers for information on the independence struggle. Carla lives in her wealthy parents’ Paris apartment, which features art pieces as well as the new state of the art technology, a television, on which we see her watching news about events related to the war. At one point, we are shown archival television footage and hear radio reports of various attacks on French soil. Surprisingly, the perpetrator of these attacks, the OAS, is not mentioned. The film then cuts to an anti-OAS demonstration in which the police intervene violently to disperse the demonstrators but protect Sartre and one of his mistresses as it would be bad publicity for the famous intellectual to be physically attacked. Whereas October 17 was represented indirectly, through staging Kagan showing his photographs to Sartre and de Beauvoir and talking about the massacre in a safe interior, the demonstration of primarily Franco-French people is filmed directly. In the next scene, Carla and de Beauvoir are watching a television report of the funeral of the victims of police violence during this demonstration, which it is mentioned occurred on February 8. Although the name is not revealed, the date allows us to determine that the demonstration in question was that of Métro Charonne in 1962, in which nine fleeing leftist demonstrators were killed against the subway gates that had been locked by the police (House and MacMaster, “Une Journée” 277–78). This event had profoundly shocked French public opinion at the time and unlike October 17, which was heavily censored by the government, as seen in Nuit noire, Charonne was publicized extensively by the media and left-wing intellectuals. The difference in the representation of the two bloody demonstrations—indirect through the few photographs to have survived censorship for October 17 and direct through a reconstitution of the scene and use of archival sources for February 8—highlights both the differential use of censorship depending on whether the victims were Algerian or French and the film’s alignment with leftist Franco-French actors and perspectives. French state censorship is exposed through visuals of Kagan’s smuggled photographs and through references to the seizing of newspapers and journals in which Sartre was publishing articles. As discussed in the introduction, whereas for a long time the victims of Charonne were remembered and those of October 17 forgotten, the opposite has been true since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Sartre is the only film in my corpus to bring up Charonne, reminding us of this important war event but without naming it. As Carla and de Beauvoir are watching the Charonne funeral on television, the film highlights their emotional response to the event. Right after that scene, about forty-three minutes into the second episode, Sartre and Frédéric are seen debating again the use of violence in the liberation struggle. The

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placement of that scene provides a subtle critique of Sartre’s point of view because he is the only one to take a solely theoretical position. Whereas the three other characters’ response to violence is both intellectual and emotional and seems more fully human, Sartre appears to intellectualize everything and to be somewhat disconnected from the reality on the ground as a result. The film’s editing is thus used to create a distance from Sartre’s theoretical position and to encourage the audience to align with the perspective of the other three characters. Soon after the Charonne funeral scenes, forty-five minutes into the second episode, the last Algerian characters are briefly shown. The cease-fire in Algeria is official, and we see a group of Algerian men celebrating. The camera pans away from them to French supporters on the other side of the room. Sartre and Frédéric are present but no women are, and the film focuses on the French men’s conversation. They are talking not about Algerian independence, which is already a past issue for them, but about the future of the left-wing parties in France, confirming once more the film’s focus on a French—if leftist—point of view. The last section of the film forgets Algeria, switches to Sartre’s travels to the USSR, and ends on Sartre’s turning down the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. Unlike Sartre, Avant l’oubli, which also takes place on French soil, focuses more on Algerian militants. Instead of emphasizing the perspective of a young French man, the point of view in Avant l’oubli is primarily that of a southern European woman. MELODRAMATIC MEMORIES: AVANT L’OUBLI (AUGUSTIN BURGER, 2005) A film coproduced by France, Great Britain, Belgium, and Spain, Avant l’oubli was written and directed by Augustin Burger in 2004 and released in France in 2005. It appears to be Burger’s sole feature film. Burger grew up between Algeria, Corsica, and Marseilles (Allociné). Like Sartre: L’Age des passions, Avant l’oubli takes place in France during the war and features a young, foreign European woman. The film, based on a true story told by a woman named Jeanne to the director (Allociné), follows a character also named Jeanne (Nieve de Medina), whose parents had come to France from Spain with her when she was in her teens to escape the Franco regime.19 She lives in Marseilles with her husband Pierre (Frédéric Pierrot), a French school teacher, and their daughter. In 1957, Jeanne is a worker at the famous Marseilles soap company, where most of the male workers are from the Maghreb. Her best friend and coworker, Marie-Louise (Marie Vialle), has started to date one of these men, Salah (Zakarya Gouram), who, like Jeanne, is a French citizen of non-French descent. Jeanne meets an Algerian man

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who hangs around the neighborhood, Ali Redjala (Sami Bouajila). He enlists her help as a porteuse de valises (field support person) for the FLN and they begin an affair. The film focuses on the internecine struggles between the FLN and the MNA, with violence shown as equally distributed between both organizations. Eventually, MNA militants kill Ali and Jeanne goes back to Pierre. Avant l’oubli ends on a dedication, “A la mémoire de Michèle Firk” (To the Memory of Michèle Firk), a former Jewish porteuse de valise, journalist, film critic, and anti-colonial militant whose political and cinematic engagement may have inspired the director and screenwriter. Even though most of the film is shot from the point of view of Jeanne, a twominute pre-credits scene features a shoot-out in which Ali and another FLN militant, Abdallah (Abel Jafri, who was also cast as Mustapha in Le Choix and as Farradj in Zabana!), are among the killers and an Algerian woman is shot and perhaps killed. The scene is filmed in ways similar to Hollywood gangster movies and to Hors la loi, using dark surroundings and quick cuts, creating an atmosphere of confusion that is reinforced for a non-Arabic-speaking audience by the fact that the few lines of dialogue are in Arabic and are not subtitled.20 Pour Djamila (discussed below) also opens with a scene of violence shot with similar types of techniques. Whereas in Pour Djamila, it is the French military that causes the inaugural violence, we are made to understand later in Avant l’oubli that here, it is FLN militants, led by Ali, who have slain their MNA rivals. This inaugural scene suggests that the infighting among Algerians will be more of a focus than the anti-colonial struggle itself. There are a number of other scenes in which we witness French police violence later on but none in which militants are killed. All Algerian deaths in the film are the direct result of the FLN-MNA rivalry, which is historically inaccurate. This also contrasts with the downplaying of the FLN-MNA divisions in Zabana! Jeanne, like her friend Marie-Louise, is portrayed as generally open to her Maghrebian coworkers and politically left-leaning. Her engagement in the FLN alongside Ali, however, is also represented through the formula of the love story between them. The French media tended to depict the political engagement of porteuses de valises as being motivated more by sentiment than by political commitment and would insinuate that FLN militants had played on the women’s feelings. This rendition diminished these French women’s politics by reducing it to what Abdelkader in Hors la loi would call “personal passions” and presented FLN militants as profiting from these women’s weaknesses.21 Avant l’oubli unfortunately follows such stereotypes. About seventeen minutes into the film, as Ali is trying to recruit Jeanne to help the FLN, they go to the seaside. She begins to evoke positive childhood memories with her father there, telling Ali that “Après, il n’y a plus rien. C’est le bout du monde. C’est comme si la route se perdait dans les rochers dans la mer” (after this, there’s nothing. It’s the end of the world. It’s as if the

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road got lost in the boulders in the sea). Of course, what lies beyond this area of France, across the Mediterranean, is precisely Algeria, which was “rien” (nothing) for most French people at the time but represents everything to Ali. He retorts by briefly telling her about his unhappy childhood due to poverty, an outcome of colonization, and French “mépris” (contempt) for Algerians. He adds that he heard from his grandmother, the vector of the family’s oral transmission, “des histoires d’oliviers coupés, de récoltes brûlées, de bétail confisqué. Des histoires ténébreuses dans un pays gorgé de soleil” (stories about olive trees cut down, burned harvests, seized cattle. Dark stories in a sun-drenched country). This sentence recalls the dramatic cutting down of the village’s olive trees (which constituted its livelihood) in L’Opium et le bâton, as well as Camus’s focus on the Algerian sun in his texts. This, coupled with several instances of French anti-Arab racism and one mention of the Setif massacres on May 8, 1945, is the only contextualization that is provided for the Algerian liberation struggle in the film. The camera, which had shot the two characters’ faces in close-ups to facilitate audience identification with them, then shows them in a long shot, as Ali awkwardly approaches Jeanne. They start struggling, and he forcibly kisses her in a strange, unmotivated scene that repeats the stereotypical representation of sexually violent Arab men linked to the colonial context (André 255–57; Shepard 46). In a subsequent scene, Ali feels the need to ascertain his power over her by telling her “Je sais tout de vous” (I know everything about you) and telling her details of her life in a somewhat disturbing way. In contrast, Jeanne knows very little about Ali, although she does learn from Bouziane, the grocery butcher and FLN militant (Hammou Graïa), that Ali is possibly descended from Abdelkader, the nineteenth-century leader of the anti-colonial resistance against French colonization. With this comment, the film demonstrates the continuity in Algerian anti-colonial activism against France. However, in line with the melodrama genre, the film focuses more on its racialized sexual politics than on the struggle for national liberation. Love scenes are intercut with activism scenes. There is no explanation for why Jeanne would decide to help a man who just tried to force himself on her by carrying secret documents for him and distributing FLN flyers to other workers. Even in the Maghrebian worker community, Ali is not necessarily trusted. Salah, Marie-Louise’s boyfriend, warns Jeanne about him: “Tu le connais pas, Redjala . . . le sentiment, c’est sa tactique. Il veut te mettre dans son lit pour mieux t’utiliser” (You don’t know Redjala. . . . He uses feelings as a tactic. He wants to put you in his bed so he can use you more easily). Ali’s last name, Redjala, means “men” in Arabic. Algerian freedom fighters have been seen as paradigmatically manly (Donadey and Brinis 182; TalahiteMoodley 64–65), both during the struggle in Algeria and as represented in cinéma moudjahid postindependence. The rhetorical equation of regaining

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manhood with liberation from racial or colonial domination was also used in other contexts such as the Black liberation struggle in the United States in the 1970s, with the effect of positioning men as principal actors in the struggle and women in secondary positions as helpmates and lovers (hooks). Here, this view of Ali as representative of Algerian manliness and valor (redjla) is overlaid with stereotypes of the dark, brooding, mysterious, slightly violent, powerful male love interest of Harlequin-type romance novels, especially of the Arab sheik variety (see Jarmakani). Predictably, in the next scene, Ali manhandles Jeanne a bit, telling her, “Je t’interdis de mettre les pieds dans les cafés à bougnoules! . . . Tu sais ce que c’est, un bougnoule? . . . C’est quelqu’un qui me ressemble. . . une Française au milieu des Arabes, ça se voit de loin” (I forbid you to set foot in wog cafés! . . . You know what’s a wog? . . . It’s someone who looks like me . . . a French woman around Arabs becomes very visible). While it is understandable that Ali would want Jeanne to not endanger the struggle, his anger and violence appear somewhat exaggerated and play into the stereotype of the violent, possessive, and jealous Arab man. In contrast, Jeanne’s French husband Pierre is portrayed as a generally mild-mannered man, except in one scene when he hits her after briefly leaving her because he found out she was cheating on him. An elementary school teacher—a man in a profession that today is highly feminized—we first see Pierre reading poetry to Jeanne. At least at the beginning of the film, he is contrasted with Ali in terms of their gender associations. As for Jeanne, she is presented as an independent woman who makes her own decisions. For instance, in the film’s first two sex scenes (one with Pierre and one with Ali), she is the one who initiates the sex. Another militant included in the film is Bouziane, a thoughtful and openminded butcher who learned his trade in Algeria from a Jewish butcher. The voice of reason, Bouziane is contrasted with Abdallah, a narrow-minded militant who wants to kill Salah, Marie-Louise’s boyfriend, when he comes to the FLN for help after having had an encounter with the French police. Bouziane tells Abdallah to shut up, saying of Salah, “S’il est pas avec nous, il est pas contre nous non plus. On doit l’aider. . . . Les mains de Bouziane, elles tuent le mouton. Elles trempent pas dans le sang de ses frères” (If he’s not with us, he’s not against us either. We have to help him. . . . Bouziane’s hands kill sheep. They don’t soak in his brothers’ blood). A committed militant, Bouziane, unlike Abdallah, is friendly to Jeanne and to other characters he encounters. As for Abdallah, he once warns Ali that he should stop drinking and smoking and tells him in Arabic at one point that “Il faut . . . éliminer les messalistes de la ville” (we must . . . eradicate Messali supporters from this city).22 Demonstrating his long-term vision, Ali replies sadly in French, “Et quel sera le prix à payer, mon frère, quand nous serons chez nous? Plus tard” (And what price will we have to pay, brother, when we have our own

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country, later?) This question is probably to be taken as a critical commentary made on Algeria’s dark decade, the 1990s, in which internal violence was unleashed between the government and religious fundamentalist forces. Ali presciently connects the FLN purges of MNA members with the subsequent violence in postcolonial Algeria, implying cause and effect between the two. Soon afterward, as Abdallah and Ali disagree, Abdallah warns him, saying, “Tout ça, c’est la faute au sang kabyle qui coule dans tes veines. Méfie-toi” (It’s all the fault of the Kabyle blood running through your veins. Watch out). In this exchange, the film hints at later problems in postcolonial Algeria that were due to the government’s refusal to recognize Amazigh identities, which resulted in a number of Amazigh (especially Kabyle) uprisings. Abdallah represents what ended up being the dominant strand of FLN ideology, which eliminated members of other liberation groups when they refused to join the FLN and promoted a monolithic, Arab-only version of Algerian identity. In this sense, it is notable that while Abdallah speaks to Ali in Arabic, Ali chooses to reply in French, as some Kabyles do for linguistically political reasons. Later, Ali comments to Jeanne about Abdallah’s close-mindedness, saying, “Des types comme lui, moralement faibles et qui haïssent tous ceux qui savent lire et écrire, il y en a des centaines dans les rangs du Front” (In the Front’s rank and file, there are hundreds of guys like him, who are morally weak and hate all of those who know how to read and write). Here as well, Ali voices a fear for the future of the nation, if its intellectual leaders are eliminated before independence and the remaining militants kill easily even with no reason to do so. The film appears to hint again at the violence that was unleashed in the 1990s in Algeria, connecting it to the earlier infighting among Algerians during the war of independence. Another issue that has beset postcolonial Algeria has been that of women’s rights. On this count, in contrast, the film has nothing to say. Very few Algerian women are seen in the film. Their presence is only fleeting, and their voices are absent. All the female militants in the film are French porteuses de valises, and the group to which Jeanne belongs is made up primarily of women. Consistent with his monolithic vision, Abdallah is not happy that Ali recruited Jeanne. He tells her twice that he does not trust her. Abdallah also does not hesitate to attack the shantytown’s religious leader, Cheikh Boumani (Djafer Chibani), who had been trying to keep the peace among the different factions. Abdallah and a young militant, Tayeb (Ichem Boukrouche), take Boumani away and shoot him in cold blood. He is killed because he told the FLN militants not to come back to the shantytown, and because he collaborated with the French to try to protect the Algerians who were caught between conflicting forces. As Abdallah and Tayeb are taking the Cheikh away to kill him, the camera focuses on him, praying. When Tayeb finally shoots him, the camera films the scene in an extreme long shot and at a high angle,

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creating a distance between the men’s action and the spectators. The scene is not filmed from the point of view of the FLN militants. Its violence is also enhanced through its placement in the film, just after a love scene between Jeanne and Ali when she finally gets him to tell her he loves her. In turn, the fact that the religious leader was killed by the FLN militants hints that Ali and Jeanne’s relationship—a Muslim Algerian man and a Catholic European woman—may also not survive. This is confirmed soon afterward, when Ali tells Jeanne that he is supposed to be sent to another town by the FLN. Further, after a scene in which Ali is planning their postindependence future in Algeria, Jeanne goes home to her husband and daughter. She and Pierre dance to Dalida’s famous song “Bambino,” and Jeanne initiates a kiss.23 Her motivation remains unclear throughout the film. Soon after kissing Pierre, she goes back to Ali, perhaps for a last tryst before leaving him. As she is walking away from Ali, two men—the MNA militants with whom the FLN fighters had previously clashed—barge in violently. One of them tells Ali in Arabic, “Rappelle-toi Melouza. Quatre cents habitants massacrés par des chiens de ton espèce” (Remember Melouza. Four hundred people massacred by dogs like yourself). In Melouza in 1957, the ALN had killed members of the entire village because they supported the MNA. This shocking event of internal violence was given much publicity in France to discredit the FLN by insisting on its violence. The MNA militant slits Ali’s throat in front of Jeanne, and the men leave as Ali is dying. Jeanne cries, the handheld camera following her as she leaves and sees Abdallah dead on the staircase, his throat similarly slit. Subsequently, Jeanne is arrested by the French police in her apartment. Although we see the police hitting Pierre and Jeanne and we later see that they had hit Bouziane, their violence is less striking than the throat-slitting we have just witnessed. The film thus positions Algerian militants from both the FLN and the MNA as being more violent than the French, perhaps seeking to make the audience wonder whether Jeanne was right to get involved with the FLN. By the end of the film, Ali and Abdallah have been killed by the MNA, Cheikh Boumani by the FLN, Salah has had to escape to Morocco, and Bouziane is in jail, having been beaten up badly by the French police. In the film’s last sequence, Jeanne is out of jail, and she, her husband, and her daughter are happy together again. As Pierre and Jeanne walk in the woods, holding hands, they get to the sea front. They look out to the sea together as Jeanne had previously done with Ali, gazing at the sun shining through the clouds in the distance. The film thus hints that the couple has weathered a difficult storm but that they are now moving toward a happier future. The Algerian political situation is behind them, as if it had never existed. The French family is back together, the Algerian workers are once again invisible, and the war is a thing of the past. After the credits, we see a few shots of the shantytown, empty of its people. The role of these shots is

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somewhat unclear, but given that French people of Algerian descent are part and parcel of France today, the end of the film, together with these final shots, contributes to presenting a France strangely emptied out of its Algerian element. The end of the film could very well represent the second phase of the Algeria syndrome, that of silence and the forgetting about the war announced in the film’s title. Overall, Avant l’oubli’s focus on Jeanne’s point of view positions the Algerian war as a sad and violent, if somewhat exciting, parenthesis within the life of the French national body, and the political context is instrumentalized in the service of melodrama. In contrast with the films discussed in this chapter thus far, Voyage à Alger and Pour Djamila, discussed below, are part of a small number of films in my corpus that include a female Algerian militant in an important role. THE FEMALE ALGERIAN MILITANT AS AGENT AND MOTHER OF THE NATION: VOYAGE À ALGER (ABDELKRIM BAHLOUL, 2010) Voyage à Alger (A Trip to Algiers, 2010), a beautiful film based on the story of Bahloul’s mother, focuses on a former female Algerian militant (“Voyage à Alger”).24 Bahloul (who also wrote the film’s script) has demonstrated an unusual ability to include the perspectives of people from underrepresented groups such as Algerian women in Voyage and gay pied-noir poet Jean Sénac in Le Soleil assassiné (2004). Bahloul also cowrote Rachid Bouchareb’s early film Cheb (1991) with the filmmaker. In Voyage, only the film’s introductory section takes place during the war: the father of Kadirou, a young Algerian boy, is killed by the French, who initially do not allow the family to bury his body. After independence, the former French mayor of Saïda, who had stayed for six months to help with the transition, tells Kadirou’s uncle Kader that he has arranged to officially leave his beautiful apartment to Kadirou’s mother Maghnia and her children (Bahloul was born in Saïda, a city in Western Algeria). Brigadier Derbech, whom we are made to understand collaborated with the French and only joined the Algerian resistance at the very last minute, tries to dispossess Maghnia of her new place. This type of situation did happen historically. Last-minute combatants who joined the Algerian side around March 1962 (around the time of the cease-fire) are referred to as “marsiens” (Stora, Gangrène 176, 202) (Marchans). The postindependence dispossession of widows of dead combatants and of female supporters of the revolution is an issue Assia Djebar addressed in her film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978) and in some of her fiction. Voyage is a fable about how mostly good people come together to create the right outcome. Only one character, Derbech the former harki, appears unredeemable but is

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eventually forgiven after he has lost the apartment to Maghnia. While most of the film takes place postindependence, there are many references to the war. Throughout the film, Maghnia reveals herself to be a strong woman who knows her rights and is willing to fight for her family. Her struggle to keep her apartment, which takes up the bulk of the film, demonstrates her determination against all odds and her powers of persuasion. No shrinking violet, Maghnia speaks truth to power consistently, in particular using her status as the widow of a revolutionary to directly accuse her compatriots who may have collaborated with the French during the war. When it looks like she may lose the apartment, she decides to travel to Algiers with eleven-year-old Kadirou and a young woman to appeal to Algerian president Ben Bella directly, because he is considered to be the father of war orphans. She is presented as a good Muslim (she prays during her trip). On the way, she befriends a man named Boubaker, a soldier who turns out to be an enforcer for the state. At the presidential palace, she argues her case with the guards, explaining her situation clearly and connecting with one of the guards emotionally. Noticing his partially burned face, she recognizes the mark of napalm burns. The French military had used napalm against Algerian militants during the war, a traumatizing experience we see from the French soldiers’ point of view in L’Ennemi intime. Maghnia touches the guard’s face and explains that during the war, she nursed wounded fighters on her husband’s farm and put honey on their burns to soothe them. Shaken up, the guard accepts to help her and brokers her meeting with an important official, whom we find out later is the Minister of Defense. Maghnia explains her situation clearly again, and specifies that she cooked for the militants, thus revealing another aspect of her own involvement as an active participant in the revolution. As scholar-activist Djamila Amrane has demonstrated, many Algerian women served in these types of supportive roles during the war (115, 119, 252). Although there are no flashbacks that could allow us to see Maghnia in action during the war, the film highlights her point of view through many close-ups of her face. Eventually, through her steadfastness of purpose and persuasiveness, together with her ability to gain and use male support (the French mayor, her brother Kader, Boubaker, soldiers and officials), Maghnia is victorious and gets to keep the apartment. By the end of the film, the audience is able to enjoy the fable’s reversal of fortune, with Derbech being forced to beg her to forgive him (and a man who had been mean to Kadirou at the beginning of the film getting his comeuppance as well). Boubaker tells Kadirou at the end of the film, “Your mother is worth a hundred or two hundred men.” Maghnia is thus presented as an admirable Algerian woman with full agency, who travels freely throughout the country (albeit with one of her male offspring to guarantee respect), participated in the war of liberation, speaks her mind, and is able to be successful in her

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endeavors through her own skills, smarts, and ability to connect to others. However, that agency is presented within proper parameters. For instance, whenever she is arguing her case to keep the apartment, she repeatedly refers to her six children.25 Her activism is thus on behalf of her family, as a mother, and not simply for herself. The fact that she is named Maghnia, which also happens to be the name of an Algerian city (where writer and filmmaker Mehdi Charef is from, incidentally), points to the national allegory at work in the film. Her son witnesses her committed activism, and she is shown repeatedly sheltering him under her haïk (long head covering). Maghnia represents the proud Algerian nation fighting to claim its due postindependence and working with committed citizens to restore justice and order for the next generation. The film’s beginning credits roll over an image of a large tree, under which we learn later that Maghnia’s husband was buried. This image calls to mind the repeated importance of shots of a large tree in Djebar’s film La Nouba. Whereas in La Nouba, the tree alluded to a time in which a young girl had to spend the night on one of its branches, hiding from French soldiers during the war, in Voyage the tree is hallowed ground that centers the absent presence of the husband and father. The film ends with the family gathered under the tree, in front of his grave, thus placing Maghnia’s activism within the realm of family and nation. And although the film foregrounds her agency, the narration is presented through the point of view of Kadirou, her son, rather than through her own eyes (which makes sense given the partly autobiographical nature of the film). Maghnia is the film’s main protagonist, has the most compelling dialogues, and is the main agent of the action. However, and unlike the last film discussed in this book, Maghnia’s activism remains firmly framed by traditional boundaries of motherhood and nation. GENDER AND THE COSTS OF MILITANCY: POUR DJAMILA (CAROLINE HUPPERT, 2011) A 2011 made-for-TV movie shown in 2012, Pour Djamila is an adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi’s 1962 succès de scandale testimonial book, Djamila Boupacha, which has been regularly reissued since.26 Boupacha was a twenty-two-year-old FLN supporter who was suspected of having placed a bomb in a café in Algiers. Arrested and beaten up in 1960, she confessed under torture and then recanted.27 The book and the film retrace the various strategies used by her lawyer, Halimi, to save her life. Pour Djamila highlights the connection that developed between the two women during that time. As Bedjaoui notes, the film’s focus is more on Halimi than on Boupacha herself (Cinéma 203). The title itself reveals this perspective, since it is for Djamila, not by Djamila. The film’s title also echoes that of Simone de

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Beauvoir’s famous op-ed in the French newspaper Le Monde, “Pour Djamila Boupacha.” The title thus refers to Halimi’s, de Beauvoir’s, other French people’s activism on behalf of Boupacha, and is a way for Huppert to dedicate her film to the FLN militant. In spite of this focus on Boupacha’s French supporters, the film is also notable for its portrayal of Boupacha’s courage, voice, and agency. As well, it is the only film in my corpus that directly shows torture done to female militants during the war. Director Caroline Huppert is the sister of famed French actress Isabelle Huppert and the wife of Laurent Heynemann, a director who made two earlier films about the war. Huppert had also directed another made-for-TV movie dealing with the war, Le Porteur de cartable (2002), written by Akli Tadjer and based on his 2002 novel of the same name. That film focuses on a friendship between an Algerian boy and a pied-noir boy in France toward the end of the war. These two films demonstrate Huppert’s interest in providing representations of the war that promote respectful connections among people on both sides of the conflict and privilege the points of view of women and children. As in the two Algerian films discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the FLN heroine spends most of the film’s time in prison. However, in the other two films the point of view was primarily that of men’s and many scenes presented details of daily life in prison. Here, because the narrative thread is woven primarily through Halimi’s (Marina Hands) point of view, most scenes do not feature relationships among the female inmates. This is unfortunate, as Boupacha was transferred to the women’s prison in Pau, France, where some of her cellmates, whom we briefly see in one scene, included other major FLN militants and causes célèbres such as Djamila Bouhired and Jacqueline Guerroudj.28 The primary goal of Halimi’s book is to sensitize public opinion to the horrific, systematic practice of torture against independence supporters by the French military. As a result, the film also focuses on torture but does so in somewhat different ways than the other films discussed in this study (especially those in chapter 1). Even though most of Pour Djamila is filtered through the point of view of Halimi, it opens in Boupacha’s parents’ house, beginning with French soldiers bursting in at night, screaming, scaring, and beating up Boupacha (Hafsia Herzi), her seventy-year-old father Abdelaziz (Salah Teskouk), and her pregnant sister Nefissa (Sophia Marzouk), who will eventually miscarry due to violent treatment by the military. The French military destroy the family’s possessions and take Djamila, her father, and her brother-in-law prisoner. This violent opening puts the audience on the side of Djamila and her family. We have not been provided any context for the violent scene and therefore experience the family’s fear, confusion, and pain through their eyes. The soldiers’ violence against young women and old people—kicking a pregnant woman, punching another woman, and beating up an older man—goes

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against the codes of war and puts the audience on the side of the abused civilians. The film techniques used here—fast cuts, jump cuts, jumpy images from a handheld camera, close-ups, zooming in and out and other fast camera movements, among others—enhance the confusing aspect of the scene. This three-minute scene closes on a fade to black. In contrast, Halimi’s book started with her initial involvement with Boupacha’s case, and the arrest was briefly described on the first page of chapter 2. Beginning the film with the violent arrest is a way for Huppert to open with a focus on Boupacha’s rather than Halimi’s perspective. It also reinforces the scene’s shocking effect on the viewers, since the context and reason for Djamila’s arrest are only provided after this inaugural violence. As Halimi, who has just arrived from Paris to Algiers, reads Boupacha’s slim file, she finds a letter from Boupacha protesting the use of torture against her by paratroopers led by their captain, six minutes into the film. The film thus directly introduces its main topic, the use of torture by the French military, at the very beginning, and in Djamila’s own public voice. The violent scene of her arrest with which the film opened has prepared the audience to believe Boupacha’s testimony regarding her experience of torture. When the two women meet in prison for the first time, Djamila begins to describe to Gisèle the kinds of torture to which she was subjected. She begins by calling her aggressors “Des barbares” (Barbarians). This is an important rhetorical move since many white French people, as demonstrated in my analysis of L’Ennemi intime in chapter 1, have tended to view and represent colonized people in general and FLN fighters in particular as barbarians. Djamila reverses the terms usually used in France, recalling Aimé Césaire’s famous argument in his 1955 Discours sur le colonialisme, in which he linked the barbarism of Nazism to that of Western colonialism (12). As we learn in Halimi’s book, Césaire was a member of the committee supporting Djamila (69). Like Sartre, Halimi’s book and the film Pour Djamila make repeated parallels between the tortures inflicted on Algerian prisoners by the French and Nazi atrocities against the French, an effective rhetorical move some fifteen years after the end of World War II. Djamila’s first description of the tortures to which she was subjected is chaotic and disorganized, which is consistent with the trauma she experienced. She mentions the use of electricity and expresses her difficulty in telling what happened to her. Before talking about it, she twice says that she cannot speak about it. She starts talking about beatings and shows Gisèle cigarette burns on her chest. She is initially only able to allude to the sexual torture to which she was subjected, mentioning that electrical wires were placed “Partout, vous comprenez?” (everywhere, you understand?) and that the soldiers made use of a bottle. As she tells her story, the film relies on close-ups of Djamila’s face and dispenses with music, giving pride of place to her voice. The film

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also sutures the audience to Halimi’s point of view, since we are placed in the same position as her, facing Djamila and listening to her testimony. We are thus encouraged by the camera work to identify with both women and to reflect upon what we would have done in their place. Both the film and Halimi’s book make clear that what happened to Boupacha was not an isolated event. About twelve to thirteen minutes into the film, we find out that Djamila’s torturers kept her illegally for over a month before she was turned over to the justice system, and that her seventy-yearold father was also tortured. There is mention of another tortured Algerian female prisoner, and Djamila’s sister Nefissa also reports that her husband was tortured. Before Boupacha testifies in front of an investigating judge, Halimi meets Djamila’s father for the first time, and his torture is brought up again. Father and daughter, who have not seen each other in a year, get to briefly hug in a very moving short scene. The film also places Algerian activism for independence in its colonial context in order to justify it. Halfway through the film, Djamila tells Gisèle, “Les Algériens . . . ils veulent être libres. C’est pour ça qu’on se bat” (Algerians . . . wanna be free. That’s what we’re fighting for). Several instances of institutional racism and segregation are present early on in the film. At one point, for example, Halimi has to meet Boupacha’s sister and mother (Zohra Mouffok) outside the fancy hotel where she is staying in Algiers because Muslims are not allowed inside the hotel. Boupacha also mentions that she had wanted to become a nurse but this occupation was not open to Algerians. During this conversation, Halimi reveals that in Tunisia (another French colony where she was born and raised), she experienced religious segregation as well: “je suis juive . . . et française . . . mais on nous faisait bien sentir la différence . . .. Ca m’a toujours révoltée que les gens ne soient pas tous égaux, hommes ou femmes, chrétiens ou musulmans” (I am Jewish . . . and French . . . but they made us feel the difference constantly. . . . I was always outraged that people were not all equal, men or women, Christians or Muslims). In this speech, Halimi explains her political commitment on the side of members of oppressed groups—whether the oppression is based on colonial racism, religion, or gender—as being steeped in her childhood experience. Like Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, growing up Jewish, the excluded third term in a binary and hierarchical colonial world divided between Christians and Muslims in the Maghreb, raised her consciousness at an early age of the arbitrariness of these divides and later propelled her into social justice activism on many levels. The film highlights Halimi’s professional, no-nonsense effectiveness as a female lawyer who has learned to navigate a man’s world with strength and determination. She plays hardball, threatening to go to the press to reveal the unfairness of Boupacha’s situation in order to force the male members of the justice system to cave into her demands for a fair trial. The film (as did

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Halimi’s book) makes it clear that proponents of French Algeria were rigging the trial, only allowing Halimi to stay in Algeria for two days, and later forcing her to leave before the trial was to start. Thanks to her determination and ability to gain the support of other lawyers, she is successful in pushing back the trial date to be able to prepare her case, about half an hour into the film. Beyond saving Boupacha from a possible death penalty, Halimi’s goal is to ensure that the French are aware of the use of torture against Algerian militants. Working to free Boupacha, Halimi initiated the use of a threepronged strategy that she later drew upon in all of her social justice and antioppression work (such as fighting for the right for women to have abortions in the 1970s): the judicial system (trials), public associations (Boupacha’s defense committee), and writing (books and media articles). All three aspects are present in the film. While the first half hour of the film focuses on the judicial system, the second half hour highlights Halimi’s public sphere activism on behalf of Boupacha, showing her using the press very effectively to spread her message and leveraging her connections to get famous public intellectual Simone de Beauvoir (Dominique Reymond) to support the cause. De Beauvoir’s op-ed about Boupacha’s torture, written at Halimi’s request and published in Le Monde, made Boupacha into an overnight cause célèbre. Publicizing the plight of independence militants through the French media was a common strategy used by their lawyers, initiated by Jacques Vergès in 1957 (Thénault, Drôle de justice 87–88). As people wanting to support the cause are pouring in, Halimi decides to create an association to support Boupacha and asks de Beauvoir to helm the committee.29 Halimi’s goal is clearly to bring Boupacha’s trial into the court of public opinion in order to increase her chances of winning her trial. As the government is trying to sweep the issue under the rug, the committee increases its public pressure. Rank-and-file people as well as public intellectuals such as publisher René Juillard, author Françoise Sagan, and anthropologist Germaine Tillion wish to participate, and there is even interest from abroad. In her book, Halimi names other prominent committee members, such as Jean Amrouche, Edouard Glissant, Michel Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre (69–70), André Schwarz-Bart, Charles-André Jullien, Jacques Lacan, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Elsa Triolet, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jules Roy, and Vercors (95). More than the book did, the film highlights the large number of women involved in advocacy on behalf of Boupacha, something unusual at a time when political activism was primarily men’s preserve. The film explains that women were moved by the rape aspect of Boupacha’s case, showcasing the interconnections between decolonial and gender struggles and anticipating Halimi’s later feminist engagement. The leaders of Boupacha’s defense committee are repeatedly shown to be women, which is historically accurate (Thénault, Drôle de justice 252; Khanna, Algeria Cuts 90).

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The film (more than the book) also focuses on the connection that develops between Djamila and Gisèle. It subtly shows how Djamila acts as an equal to Gisèle, who was a decade older and an established lawyer. For instance, when Gisèle switches from the formal to the informal form of address (tu), Djamila quickly responds in kind. As Halimi asks her questions to prepare the trial, Boupacha starts also asking her lawyer personal questions about life and her children. When Halimi expresses her surprise, Boupacha explains that they are speaking “d’égale à égale” (to one another as equals). In the film, Boupacha thus positions herself as someone with a decolonized mind, aware of her own worth and importance. Another way in which the film departs from Halimi’s book is that the book insists on Djamila’s childishness at least half a dozen times. While this infantilization may have been a strategy used to insist on her youth in order to make her more sympathetic to a French public by highlighting her innocence, it also comes dangerously close to repeating a basic colonial, Orientalist stereotype (Brown 84, 91). In contrast, the film steers clear of such representations, insisting instead on Boupacha’s gravitas and profound honesty. As in the book, Djamila repeatedly worries about whether she lost her virginity when she was sodomized with a bottle as part of the tortures to which she was subjected. When she asks Halimi for her opinion on the matter, Halimi remains silent or tries to change the topic of conversation, as nothing she could say would help the situation. As in Ben Boulaïd and Zabana!, one scene highlights the dizzyingly opposed points of view expressed on both sides of the conflict through the rhetoric used by the characters. At one point, about an hour into the film, members of Boupacha’s defense committee meet and try to influence Maurice Patin (Henry Courseaux), a French judge who was tasked with watching out for human rights abuses in Algeria. By now, the audience is thoroughly familiar with Boupacha’s case and the extreme atrocities she suffered at the hands of the French military. The French judge downplays committee members’ references to “torture” by calling it “quelques excès” (some excesses). Whereas the committee insisted on systematic torture in Algeria as a means of gathering intelligence, Patin blames it on some “jeunes militaires” (young soldiers) losing their way out of sight of officers. He thus negates the responsibility of the military command structure, insisting that officers “sont très bien élevés” (have good manners) and are “gentils” (nice). He thus turns an institutional problem necessitating a government intervention at the highest level into an individual issue only concerning a few bad apples.30 This minimizing move is a common rhetorical tactic used by people in power to cover up systemic military and police abuses of force against oppressed group members. The placement of this scene, one hour into the film, means that by now, the audience has repeatedly heard about many examples of the use of torture and has witnessed Boupacha’s brutal arrest and other miscarriages of

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justice. Since Halimi had also mentioned to the judge that the men’s captain was part of the torturers, the audience is completely primed to experience anger and disgust at Patin’s response. In another, even more shocking move, he minimizes deflowering through sodomy as a weapon of war by comparing it to what the French did in Vietnam, in which the sodomizing was so brutal that it caused death. As Heidi Brown notes, “[h]ere, Patin creates a hierarchy of suffering wherein rape is recognized as torture in regards to men, but not women. His reference to Indochina is an attempt to normalize and minimize the gravity of Boupacha’s experiences” (88). In her preface to Halimi’s book, de Beauvoir points to Patin’s horrific logic and bad faith, through which he is implying that if the treatment to which Boupacha was subjected was that bad, she would not be alive to testify to it (1). In the film’s third half hour, the case slowly winds its way through the justice system. Boupacha is finally deposed by an objective French investigating judge, Philippe Chausserie-Laprée (Arnaud Bedouët). As she begins to testify about the torture, an hour and twenty-one minutes into the film, the camera gets closer to her face in a slow zoom. A fade to white then introduces a flashback to the scenes of torture. Djamila’s testimony, which we had previously heard her give to her lawyer and which we had heard her defense committee discuss, is now shown to the audience visually. There are five short flashback scenes that are intercut with equally short scenes of Djamila testifying, as we are made to watch the events she is recounting. The flashback scenes are cinematically very different way from the rest of Pour Djamila, except for its inaugural scene. Most of Pour Djamila is filmed in a rather classical manner as a judicial procedural heavy on dialogue, testimony, and argumentation. Unlike the rest of the film, the flashbacks make use of desaturated colors to signal their status as flashbacks. The editing becomes much faster, each shot lasting only a few seconds and making use of many reframings as well as a fast-paced mixture of high- and low-angle shots. The camera movements, which are smooth in the rest of the film except for its beginning, become fast and bumpy through the use of a handheld camera. Staccato camera movements include extreme close-ups and fast zooming in and out, resulting in blurred images. This sequence often shows haphazard body parts, many out of focus. These techniques were also used to film the opening arrest scene. The contrasting techniques between the arrest and flashback scenes, on the one hand, and the rest of the film, on the other, are very effective at rendering formally the shockingly traumatic experience of military violence. The flashbacks also include a progression in horror. In the first and second flashbacks, Boupacha is pushed around and punched by the French soldiers as they interrogate her. In the second one, we first see an Algerian man who has just been tortured, and as Boupacha is being interrogated, we can hear another man being hit and crying out, showing that her situation was not

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an isolated one. After the second flashback, she explains that she was hit in front of her wounded father, something reminiscent of two of the torture scenes in Pontecorvo’s iconic Battle of Algiers, in which an Algerian woman sheds a tear as she watches a male relative being tortured. For the first time in film, the roles are reversed, as the person primarily being hurt is female. When Boupacha mentions being tortured with electricity, the judge produces a “gégène,” the hand cranked generator used to torture Algerian prisoners. Boupacha’s immediate, fearful reaction shows him that she is not lying. He makes her demonstrate how the machine works, which she does, once again proving the reality of torture. Halimi initially balks at this, but the judge explains that it must be done in order to provide irrefutable proof of the veracity of Boupacha’s testimony. This part of the scene points to the ways in which the judicial system can replicate the traumatic event even as it seeks to make reparations for it. In the third flashback, the characters’ voices are distorted and almost muted and we hear non-diegetic, discordant noises as Boupacha, bound and gagged, is being tortured with electricity, including on her breasts (and, as she then tells the judge, on her vagina as well). One man puts out his cigarette on her chest. As one soldier operates the generator, we hear a strange whirring sound that contributes to the nightmarish aspect of the scene. Boupacha then explains to the judge that nine men under the command of a paratrooper captain were her torturers, giving the lie once again to the French judge’s earlier statement that military officers were not involved. In the fourth flashback, the discordant sounds are louder. They resemble distorted cries heard underwater, as Boupacha is being water boarded in a tub. These sounds recall the discordant music from Djinns, and they once again heighten the nightmarish nature of the experience. At this point this eerie sound has replaced all diegetic sound, and we can no longer hear anyone’s voice. One of the men is laughing, a shocking sight during such a harrowing scene, which helps prevent any kind of audience identification with the French torturers. The fifth flashback dares to reveal what had never been shown on camera before, an Algerian woman being raped and deflowered with a bottle as part of her torture. As Boupacha begins to recount this most traumatic of all tortures, the discordant music resumes before the flashback starts, in an effective J-cut that propels the audience along with the teller back into this traumatic past. The camera first shows the men forcing her legs apart, drinking beer, and spitting it on her. Brown remarks that the use of beer is also a way to attack “Boupacha’s identity as a Muslim” since the religion forbids using alcohol (85). As one of the men brings the bottle down toward her legs, laughing as she tries desperately to fight them off, the camera cuts to a medium shot of her writhing in pain, and then to a close-up of her contorted face. This focus on her face allows the film to both avoid voyeurism and

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make the audience identify with her ordeal. The flashback ends with a fade to black, a formal representation of Boupacha losing consciousness. The next sequence begins with a shock cut to Halimi driving away. We are abruptly brought back to the present of the film, and it takes a few seconds for the audience to reconnect with the film’s normal rhythm. This cut represents another effective technique to have the audience experience in some small way the confusion, sense of disconnection, and difficulty going back to everyday life after a traumatic experience. This sequence of the deposition and flashbacks lasts about eight minutes and is placed toward the end of the film. Its duration, together with the repetition and increase in the tortures being experienced by Boupacha, renders the length of her illegal imprisonment (over a month) and the horror of her experience to some extent. The film’s amplified repetition of the tortures to which Boupacha was subjected, first mentioned in her letter, then told hesitantly to her lawyer, then mentioned by the committee in various contexts, culminating in this testimonial and flashback sequence, highlights the repetitive aspect of trauma in that it takes a long time to be able to finally talk about it directly. The repetitions also enhance the film’s message for the audience. Hafsia Herzi’s physical intensity as a performer—she became famous for her fierce performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) in 2007—adds significant emotional power to the film’s message. Right after this sequence, Halimi decides that the appeal to public opinion must be enlarged through writing a book about Boupacha’s experience. She asks de Beauvoir to write it, and de Beauvoir suggests that Halimi do it herself. In this way, de Beauvoir launches Halimi on her path as a writer of many books, including other political books such as La Cause des femmes and a number of autobiographies in the 1990s and early 2000s. As Halimi protests that “mais je ne suis pas écrivain!” (but I’m not a writer!), de Beauvoir prophetically retorts, “Vous allez peut-être le devenir” (You may well become one). The film also explains why de Beauvoir’s name appears on the book as a coauthor, even though she did not contribute to it beyond her well-known preface: this was done to share the risks due to having revealed secret information from the investigation and court proceedings, as well as to ward off censorship thanks to de Beauvoir’s celebrity status. The book, which had a large impact on the French public, was published a few months before the end of the war. Boupacha was finally freed, not because her legal proceedings had resulted in her torturers’ arrest, but because the war was over. The film ends with a critique of French governments for never officially acknowledging their use of torture during the Algerian war, explaining that Boupacha’s trial contributed to making this knowledge public and to putting an end to the use of torture. We learn that Boupacha and Halimi stayed in touch, even though the FLN made Boupacha return to Algeria and Halimi remained in France.

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Pour Djamila intimates that the FLN did not really take Boupacha’s wishes into account, which may hint at subsequent Algerian governments’ less-thanstellar stance on women’s rights.31 The film’s last image is a still shot of the two women, smiling and looking out in the same direction, symbolizing their continuing connection and solidarity, even beyond borders. Pour Djamila’s focus on women’s political agency, on the experiences of a female Algerian FLN militant, and on the support she received from her Jewish, female lawyer and a number of other French women—including prominent feminist philosopher and social justice activist Simone de Beauvoir—makes it unique in this corpus (see Boutaghou, “Trois puissantes femmes” 9–10). In highlighting this transcultural female solidarity, however, the film separates Boupacha from other Algerian militants. CHAPTER CONCLUSION Mostefa Ben Boulaïd and Zabana!, which could be seen as inaugurating what one may call the new cinéma moudjahid, are similar to the first cinéma moudjahid in that they are epics that focus on male martyrs of the revolution, give short shrift to female engagement, feature the importance of Islam in the struggle for national liberation, and are coproduced by various Algerian ministries and governmental cultural organizations. They differ from the first cinéma moudjahid by highlighting militants who were either historical leaders or well-known figures of the revolution, including other independence movements in the narrative (especially the MTLD and its leader Messali Hadj), and representing Algerian identity as inclusive of Imazighen people and Tamazight languages. Neither Mostefa Ben Boulaïd nor Zabana! spends much time explaining why the revolution was needed, perhaps because French colonial oppression would be a known fact to an Algerian audience. Both films begin with pre1954 anticolonial activism, demonstrating that the November 1, 1954, uprising did not happen by accident but had been a long time in the making. Both focus on early independence leaders and fighters from the FLN who died in 1956, toward the beginning of the war. Harki soldiers are a shadowy presence in both, as well as in Pour Djamila, in which some of the female prison guards are Algerian. Their existence is acknowledged but not remarked upon. Occasionally, one harki provides information to the prisoners in the two Algerian films, showing that the situation was not entirely Manichean. Harkis are not shown as engaging in atrocities, simply as being part of the French repressive structure. Because these films focus on the work of active militants and their imprisonment, they introduce very few European civilians, such as Vincent Monteil in Ben Boulaïd and the prison warden and the executioner

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in Zabana! Except for Pour Djamila, none of the other films in my corpus take place in prison to this extent; many scenes of these two Algerian films (over forty minutes of Ben Boulaïd and over half an hour of Zabana!) show life in prison. They feature few Algerian civilians, primarily members of Ben Boulaïd’s family and Zabana’s lawyer. Rank-and-file soldiers in the mountains, whether FLN or French, are generally represented as a group with few individual characters surfacing, whereas there is slightly more development of Algerian characters in the prison sequences that make up the majority of both films. Unlike the French films discussed in this chapter, these two Algerian films also highlight the role of Islam in the FLN and the strong Muslim beliefs of the two male heroes of the revolution. There is certainly a didactic function to these films, a felt desire to let the public know more about important leaders of the struggle. As well, one may wonder to what extent there is not also a certain regret that the most principled and unifying leaders of the revolution were killed early. As in The Battle of Algiers, L’Opium et le bâton, and Hors la loi, these two films end in death and defeat, but we know that although Algeria may have lost these battles, it ultimately did win the war. These two films allude to the existence of other liberation parties besides the FLN. The FLN-MNA divisions are foregrounded in Avant l’oubli, a film that spends more time on these internal divisions than on the French-Algerian conflict itself and that problematically portrays the internal violence in more visually striking ways than that of the French forces. Internal divisions within France are highlighted in Sartre, where Algerian militants are almost invisible. As in most films on the Algerian war of independence, the role of Algerian women is minimal in the majority of films discussed in this chapter. Whereas Rachedi’s 1969/1971 L’Opium et le bâton featured an important female character, Ferroudja (Marie-José Nat), forty years later, not a single Algerian woman is a point of focus in two of the three Algerian war films in my corpus, consistent with the majority of French and French-Algerian representations as well. Unlike Rachedi, Ould-Khelifa briefly points to the contributions of female Algerian militants. Women are more important in Sartre and Avant l’oubli, but they are all European allies. Voyage and Pour Djamila are the only films in my corpus that center on female Algerian militants. While Voyage brings a welcome gender corrective to the new cinéma moudjahid, it still frames its protagonist’s agency through her role as literal mother of a boy and metaphorical mother of the nation. Je vous ai compris (discussed in chapter 2) features two female militants, a Jewish and an Arab-Berber one, in somewhat smaller roles as part of an ensemble cast. Finally, Pour Djamila focuses squarely on the role of women from different cultural and religious backgrounds in the struggle for national liberation, but in doing so, it leaves behind the community of Algerian militants.

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NOTES 1. Stora, “Algérie,” 463; House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 321. These locations include Messali El Hadj Airport in Tlemcen, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd Airport in Batna, Ahmed Zabana National Museum in Oran, Ahmed Zabana High School in Algiers, Soummam-Abane Ramdane Airport in Bejaia, Mohamed Khider Airport in Biskra, Boudghene Ben Ali Lotfi Airport in Bechar, Krim Belkacem Airport in Hassi Messaoud, Ferhat Abbas University in Setif, Ferhat Abbas Airport in Jijel, Larbi Ben M’hidi University in Oum el Bouaghithe, and Hassiba Ben Bouali University in Chlef. 2. I thank Wissem Brinis for this insight. 3. Similarly, in Voyage à Alger, there is only one pied-noir character, the former mayor, who, although he would probably prefer for Algeria to remain French, helps out for six months postindependence before leaving. The French characters are more negative in Zabana! 4. Ben Boulaïd was arrested on February 11, 1955 (Stora, Gangrène, 139). 5. War films from Algeria repeatedly show the French military use of German shepherds in Algeria—from La Voie (Mohamed Slim Riad, 1968) to L’Opium et le bâton and beyond—something that is not featured in the French films. In his memoirs, former FLN leader Ali Zamoum also mentions the use of these dogs (177, 179). 6. The bomb had been placed by the French intelligence service, the “Deuxième Bureau.” Ben Boulaïd was killed in late March 1956 (Stora, Gangrène, 174), less than a year and a half after the beginning of the war. 7. See Zamoum 211 (footnote). 8. Bourdet also denounced the Papon-led massacre of October 17, 1961 (Cole, “Remembering the Battle of Paris,” 26). 9. For a discussion of this rhetoric in Hors la loi, see Donadey, “Wars of Memory.” 10. I thank Wissem Brinis for this information. 11. These guards are mentioned by Ali Zamoum in his memoirs (212–13). 12. In his memoirs, Zamoum mentions this trick to file one’s nails, which he actually learned before he met Zabana (195). 13. Zamoum mentions this detail in his book, adding that these became so precious to him that he kept them with him constantly during his prison years (225–26, 250). 14. A documentary film on his engagement, Fernand Iveton, guillotiné pour l’exemple, was made by Daniel Edinger (2004). 15. TV critic Aude Dassonville explains that the younger couple is fictional. 16. Audin, a Communist intellectual and supporter of Algerian independence, was arrested, tortured, and killed by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers in 1957. 17. For a brief discussion of Sartre and Aron’s differing views, see Slama. 18. Dassonville mentions that Carla’s presence in Sartre reflects the fact that the Italian TV channel RAI coproduced the film. 19. There is a brief mention of a camp in Argelès in southwestern France in which Spaniards fleeing the regime—including Jeanne and her parents—were initially sent upon arrival. This brief mention recalls Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional

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memories, which here include Spanish migratory fluxes to France. As with Algerians in Algeria during the war and harkis in France after the war, temporary camps have been used in France for various groups, including the Spanish in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This may be a way for the film to allude to the continuing use of supposedly temporary camps to house migrants from various parts of Africa and the Middle East in Europe today. 20. Several scenes are shot in the style of Hollywood Western movies. In one, the FLN and MNA militants are facing one another in the shantytown’s main street, with religious leader Cheikh Boumani in the middle, trying to keep the peace as the two groups insult one another. We then see a bird’s-eye shot of the scene, reminiscent of a duel in the West. After this scene, Ali briefly explains the FLN-MNA division to Jeanne. 21. See Gobin, “Les Femmes dans les réseaux de soutien au FLN,” 119–22. For an analysis of how this plays out in Hors la loi, see Donadey, “Gender, Genre,” 54. Historian Marc André also reports that French women arrested for supporting the FLN and their lawyers would often hide their political involvement by claiming they only acted out of love for an Algerian man in order to get lighter sentences, thus reinforcing the stereotype (260–62). 22. The version of the film to which I had access had French subtitles. 23. This iconic song is present in a number of films in my corpus: Avant l’oubli, Michou d’Auber, Je vous ai compris, Le Skylab, and Cartouches gauloises (on the importance of the song’s use in the latter film, see Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era,” 241–44). The song is generally included to create a contrast between the bloody political events of the war and the individual sad love story of the song, played with an upbeat tempo (Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era,” 242). Megastar Dalida herself, like many pieds-noirs, was a European (Italian) who grew up in an Arabicspeaking country (Egypt). 24. This film deserves more extensive treatment, which I unfortunately cannot provide as I was only able to locate a copy of the film in Arabic with no subtitles. I thank Wissem Brinis for summarizing and helping me understand the dialogues. 25. I thank Wissem Brinis for this insight. 26. Although the book lists both de Beauvoir and Halimi as coauthors, only the preface was penned by de Beauvoir. In what follows, I thus refer to the text more accurately as Halimi’s book. 27. Much later, Boupacha publicly acknowledged having placed the bomb in the café (Tahri in Brown 83). 28. Guerroudj’s daughter, Djamila Amrane (Danièle Minne), even befriended Boupacha (Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 147) and went on later to write a major scholarly book on Algerian women’s engagement during the war, Les Femmes algériennes dans la guerre. 29. In Halimi’s book, de Beauvoir is mentioned as the person who decided to create the committee (68). 30. This shocking scene comes directly from Halimi’s book (101–6). 31. The details of Boupacha’s return to Algeria are based on Halimi’s autobiography, Le Lait de l’oranger, 352–57. See also Boutaghou, “Trois puissantes femmes,” 12, 17–19.

Conclusion Difficult Anamnesis

What do the films in this study reveal about the status of France’s Algeria syndrome fifty years after the war? Jo McCormack’s 2007 conclusion still resonates today: “the Algerian War continues to be highly relevant to an understanding of contemporary French society due to its difficulty legacy” (168). While some films in my corpus such as Un Balcon sur la mer, Caché, L’Ennemi intime, and Le premier homme remain solipsistically focused on French or pied-noir points of view, many others make important interventions into ongoing debates about the war. Hors la loi, Cartouches gauloises, and Pour Djamila represent the war from the perspective of Algerians, all the while making space for French or pied-noir characters. For Ahmed Bedjaoui, “Trois films importants ont été coproduits . . . et tournés en Algérie, à savoir La Trahison, Mon Colonel et . . . Cartouches gauloises. Ces trois films marquent un tournant capital dans le traitement de l’histoire contemporaine franco-algérienne. Et il est heureux que le Ministère algérien de la culture ait soutenu ces films. Ils bousculent un certain nombre de tabous liés aux méthodes des forces coloniales” (Cinéma 224) (Three important films were coproduced . . . and filmed in Algeria, to wit, La Trahison, Mon Colonel and . . . Cartouches gauloises. These three films represent a major shift in the treatment of contemporary French-Algerian history. It is good that the Algerian Ministry of Culture supported these films. They challenge a certain number of taboos related to the methods used by the colonial powers). Five of the films in my corpus (Cartouches gauloises, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, Le Choix de Myriam, Je vous ai compris, and Nuit noire) make bringing together compartmentalized memories a central concern of their projects. A sixth film, La Baie d’Alger, stages this process in its ultimate scene. Sylvie Durmelat points to “the central role played by directors of Algerian immigrant descent in the continued construction of a shared cinematic memory of 199

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the war” (109 n.15), which has been true since the late 1990s. Some of the films that bring memories together were made by these directors (Charef and Chibane), some through cross-country collaborations (Arcady and Khadra, Allouache and Gardel), and some by Jewish people from the Maghreb (Arcady, Chiche). In her book The Franco-Algerian War through a TwentyFirst Century Lens, Nicole Wallenbrock argues that current films’ transnational production networks, as well as the presence of French-Algerian filmmakers, have contributed to shifting the perspective of Algerian war films in this time period from a nationalist to a transnational framework (3–5). Many of the films (Le Jour, Mon Colonel, La Trahison, Nuit noire, Compris, La Baie d’Alger, Caché, Michou d’Auber, Cartouches, Le Choix de Myriam, and Hors la loi) also make the links between the past French (de)colonial violence and its contemporary consequences explicit. Other aspects that are just now becoming central in French films were present in Algerian films from the very beginning, such as images of children in the war (Maherzi 269; Armes 425). Critics note that a focus on children both recalls the presence of the character of Omar in The Battle of Algiers and constitutes a new feature in French films (Wallenbrock, “The Algerian War Era” 186; Welch and McGonagle 95). A number of films in my corpus focus on children’s perspectives (La Baie d’Alger, Cartouches, Michou d’Auber), pivoting between a childhood during the war and adult characters either remembering (Le Jour) or trying not to remember the past (Un Balcon, Caché); other films include a child character (L’Ennemi intime, Djinns, Voyage). In La Baie, Le Jour, and Cartouches, the main character is a boy with an absent father (Jones, “Turning” 72). In almost all cases the child is a boy, although a few girls are present (Le Jour, Un Balcon). Films made in the period under study tend to represent additional aspects of the war that have not been shown previously (or not very much) in feature films. In terms of location, Welch and McGonagle point out that Michou d’Auber is one of the rare films to show the impact of the war in rural France, outside of Paris (107–8). Hors la loi brings the war to Paris, highlighting the important role that Algerians based in France played in the conflict, as well as the violent internecine struggles between the FLN and the initially more solidly implanted MNA independence party, something that Algerian governments had sought to minimize. Okacha Touita’s 1982 film Les Sacrifiés is a precursor to Hors la loi in this regard. In keeping with the current French focus on the massacre of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961, four films— Nuit noire, Hors la loi, Le Choix de Myriam, and Caché—make this event a focal point in very different ways, and other films such as Sartre and Michou d’Auber refer to it more obliquely. Harkis, La Trahison, and Cartouches bring up the situation of Algerian men in the French military, an aspect that had been discussed in literature

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previously in books such as Saïd Ferdi’s memorable 1981 memoir Un Enfant dans la guerre and Charef’s 1989 novel Le Harki de Meriem. More recently, beautiful autobiographical literary texts by daughters of harkis, like Zahia Rahmani, Dalila Kerchouche, and Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, as well as moving novels such as Hadjila Kemoum’s 2003 Mohand le harki and Alice Zeniter’s 2017 L’Art de perdre, have shed light on these men’s and their families’ perspectives. Besnaci-Lancou, Kemoum, and Kerchouche have also been involved in harki activism (Eldridge 209–10, 215, 245). As I and others have argued, pied-noir memories tend to focus on before and after the war but have had difficulty broaching the theme of the war itself. A handful of films—Un Balcon, Cartouches, La Baie d’Alger, Compris, Le premier homme, and Le Jour—attempt to deal with the war partially from this perspective, something that Brigitte Roüan’s 1990 Outremer had also done previously. Building on the work of Arcady since the 1970s, a number of French and French-Algerian films in my corpus acknowledge Jewish identities in Algeria or the Maghreb more generally and provide brief critiques of the antiSemitism that was part and parcel of colonial society in French Algeria. Two films in particular—Compris and Pour Djamila—feature important Jewish characters. A handful of other films (Le Jour, La Baie d’Alger, Le Choix de Myriam, Sartre, Djinns, and Nuit noire) include a male Jewish character. With the exception of Compris and Cartouches, films that include a Jewish presence only feature one such character; Compris is the only film in my corpus to center the importance of the Jewish presence in Algeria. In both Le Jour and Djinns, the one Jewish character does not survive. In Pour Djamila, there is a brief mention that Boupacha’s lawyer Gisèle Halimi is Jewish and French from Tunisia, which explains why she understands Arabic. Although the mention of Judaism is fleeting, Halimi is the main character in that film. The films that focus on the military aspect of the war include scenes of torture, and this to a generally greater extent than in previous periods. Whereas in L’Ennemi intime torture is presented as a response to FLN violence in ways that partially justify its use, Mon Colonel provides a more ambivalent approach by charting the protagonist’s trajectory—beginning with an abstract denunciation of torture, then moving to engaging with the practice, and ending with a rejection that will ultimately cost him his life. Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Zabana!, and Pour Djamila all provide the strongest critique of the use of torture by the French military in ways that are reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers. That classic portrayal of anticolonial resistance remains generative for contemporary films at the level of both content and form. What many of the films in my corpus also have in common—even though there was no space in this study to analyze this in detail except for Caché and Cartouches—is their self-reflexivity, or how they point to their own

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status as representations. This can range from the use of photographs, plays, newspaper articles, television interviews, and archival media materials (Un Balcon, La Trahison, Mon Colonel, Compris, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Sartre, and Zabana!) to the staging of filmmakers, films, or filmic intertexts (Caché, Djinns, Cartouches, Le Jour, L’Ennemi intime, Hors la loi, and Nuit noire). In terms of representations of Algerians as agents, the number of speaking parts given Algerian characters and the differing volume of Arabic spoken in the films provide some elements for analysis. The three films made in Algeria by Algerian filmmakers, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Zabana!, and Voyage à Alger, are geared toward an Algerian audience and are therefore primarily in Arabic. Among the French-Algerian or French films, the one that incorporates the largest amount of Arabic by far is Bouchareb’s Hors la loi, followed by Faucon’s La Trahison.1 Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Zabana!, Voyage à Alger, Hors la loi, Cartouches, and Le Choix de Myriam—all directed by Algerian or French-Algerian filmmakers—center primarily on Algerian agents of the action (the latter two do not focus on Algerian militants). Other films such as Pour Djamila, Compris, and Avant l’oubli depict Algerian militants in key roles. Films that present Algerian militants in secondary roles include Le Jour, Le premier homme, Sartre, Djinns, and La Baie d’Alger. Other films in which Algerian characters are important are Michou d’Auber, La Trahison, Nuit noire, and Caché. Fifty years later, French cinematic representations are beginning to stage Algerians as agents of their own history, something that the three Algerian films unsurprisingly foreground. Female Algerian militants in the war numbered around ten thousand. Their active participation yielded important debates within the FLN, was lauded by Frantz Fanon, and was iconically represented in The Battle of Algiers. Yet, regarding films dealing with the Algerian war of independence, Viola Shafik refers to Lotfi Maherzi’s comment that only two Algerian films from the 1960s and 1970s that focused on the war had female main characters (177). The French films generally evinced a similar orientation. Fifty years later, some films stand apart by featuring female Algerian characters prominently (Voyage à Alger, Pour Djamila, Le Choix de Myriam, and Compris) or in secondary yet important roles (Cartouches, La Baie d’Alger, Djinns). Only three of these films—Voyage à Alger, Pour Djamila, and Compris—focus on the agency of female Algerian militants. Compris and Pour Djamila also include female Jewish characters who are supportive of the struggle for Algerian liberation. Le Jour, La Baie d’Alger, Le premier homme, and Un Balcon primarily highlight the role of pied-noir women. Avant l’oubli, Nuit noire, and Mon Colonel focus in part on the point of view of European women. It is interesting to note that almost all of the made-for-TV movies and contrastingly few of the feature films include women’s experiences in

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the war. While the reason for this is unclear, gendered assumptions regarding spectatorship may be at play here, given that men may be thought of as the primary cinema audience and women in the home as the primary television audience (Donadey, “Postcolonial Feminism” 205). Overall, the period around the fiftieth anniversary of the war— 2004–2012—has proven to be a fruitful one for French and French-Algerian cinema, as analyzed in this book. The film production during this period is quantitatively and qualitatively significant. This study demonstrates that this narrative film production has contributed to France’s move from a period of the return of the repressed to one of difficult anamnesis. While many films continue to provide ambivalent representations, others are able to go beyond compartmentalized memories and to critique French violence against Algerians. After 2012, this production tapers off in France and picks up in Algeria, where twenty films on the topic were produced between 2013 and 2018. Together with the three Algerian films studied in this book, we now have a 2008–2018 Algerian corpus of twenty-three films dealing with the war, which could be termed the new cinéma moudjahid and could be interestingly compared to its 1960s–1970s predecessor. An analysis of the new cinéma moudjahid by a speaker of Algerian Arabic would be a welcome addition to the scholarship on the war of liberation. In particular, the three Algerian films analyzed here appear to demonstrate some movement toward more inclusive representations of the war in terms of internal dissensions, ethnicity, language, and gender. It would be interesting to consider whether the post-2012 Algerian corpus confirms this preliminary assessment. At the end of her 2001 book Une drôle de justice, historian Sylvie Thénault reminded us that although a number of French archives on the war were opened thirty years after the end of war, many others would remain inaccessible to scholars for an additional thirty years (321). As the sixtieth anniversary of the end of war approaches and most archives are opened to researchers, it is likely that the coming decade will see an increase in historical works on the topic in France.2 It is possible that this scholarship may eventually lead to the end of the Algeria syndrome and to what historian Raphaëlle Branche called “une histoire apaisée” (La Guerre) (a healing history)—a necessary first step toward positive multicultural relations within France as well as between France and Algeria.

NOTES 1. For a detailed study of multilingualism in Hors la loi, see Donadey and Brinis. 2. A harbinger of this is the opening of files held in the French Archives nationales (National Archives) concerning people who disappeared during the war. Ironically,

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access to the documents was officially announced on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020 (“La France ouvre des archives”), a day in which few people would be likely to be paying much attention. Further, this opening occurred in the middle of a national lockdown that had already shuttered government buildings, including the Archives themselves, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This surreptitious opening which could not yet physically take place illustrates the continuing difficulty of the process of anamnesis with respect to the war of Algerian independence in France.

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FILM CORPUS Avant l’oubli. Dir. Augustin Burger. 2005. 1 h 40 mins. VOD. La Baie d’Alger. Dir. Merzak Allouache. 2011. 1 h 30 mins. DVD. Un Balcon sur la mer (A View of Love). Dir. Nicole Garcia. 2010. 1 h 45 mins. Blu Ray. Caché (Hidden). Dir. Michael Haneke. 2005. 1 h 57 mins. DVD. Cartouches gauloises (Summer of ’62). Dir. Mehdi Charef. 2007. 1 h 32 mins. DVD. Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (What the Day Owes the Night). Dir. Alexandre Arcady. 2012. 2 h 39 mins. Blu Ray. Le Choix de Myriam. Dir. Malik Chibane. 2008. 2 × 1 h 40 mins. DVD. Djinns (Stranded). Dir. Hugues Martin and Sandra Martin. 2010. 1 h 40 mins. Blu Ray. L’Ennemi intime (The Intimate Enemy). Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. 2007. 1 h 48 mins. DVD. Hors la loi (Outside the Law). Dir. Rachid Bouchareb. 2010. 2 h 19 mins. DVD. Je vous ai compris. Dir. Frank Chiche. 2012. 1 h 25 mins. DVD. Michou d’Auber. Dir. Thomas Gilou. 2007. 2 h 04 mins. DVD. Mon Colonel (The Colonel). Dir. Laurent Herbiet. 2006. 1 h 41 mins. DVD. Mostefa Ben Boulaïd. Dir. Ahmed Rachedi. 2008. 2 h 50 mins. Film. Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961. Dir. Alain Tasma. 2005. 1 h 48 mins. DVD. Pour Djamila. Dir. Caroline Huppert. 2011. 1 h 43 mins. YouTube. Le premier homme (The First Man). Dir. Gianni Amelio. 2011. 1 h 41 mins. DVD. Sartre, l’âge des passions. Dir. Claude Goretta. 2006. 2 × 1 h 35 mins. DVD. La Trahison (The Betrayal). Dir. Philippe Faucon. 2006. 1 h 20 mins. DVD. Voyage à Alger (A Trip to Algiers). Dir. Abdelkrim Bahloul. 2010. 1 h 37 mins. YouTube. Zabana! Dir. Saïd Ould-Khelifa. 2012. 1 h 45 mins. Film.

OTHER FILMS L’Adieu. Dir. François Luciani. 2003. DVD. Bab el-Oued City. Dir. Merzak Allouache. 1994. Film. The Battle of Algiers. Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. 1966. Film.

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Cheb. Dir. Rachid Bouchareb. 1991. Film. Chouchou. Dir. Merzak Allouache. 2003. Film. Le Coup de sirocco. Dir. Alexandre Arcady. 1979. Film. La Dentellière. Dir. Claude Goretta. 1976. Film. Al Dhil wal kindil. Dir. Rim Laredj. 2015. Film. Djamilah. Dir. Youssef Chahine. 1958. Film. Douce France. Dir. Malik Chibane. 1995. Film. L’Ennemi intime. Dir. Patrick Rotman. 2002. DVD. L’Equipier. Dir. Philippe Lioret. 2004. DVD. Et Dieu . . . créa la femme. Dir. Roger Vadim. 1956. Film. Fatima. Dir. Philippe Faucon. 2015. Film. Femme courage. Dir. Amine Rachedi. 2003. DVD. Fernand Iveton, guillotiné pour l’exemple. Dir. Daniel Edinger. 2004. Film. Les folles années du twist. Dir. Mahmoud Zemmouri. 1983/1986. Film. Fort Saganne. Dir. Alain Corneau. 1983. Film. La Graine et le mulet. Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche. 2007. DVD. La Guerre des boutons. Dir. Yann Samuell. 2011. DVD. La Guerre sans nom. Dir. Bertrand Tavernier and Patrick Rotman. 1992. VHS. Harkis. Dir. Alain Tasma. 2006. DVD. Hiroshima mon amour. Dir. Alain Resnais. Screenplay by Marguerite Duras. 1959. Film. L’Honneur d’un capitaine. Dir. Pierre Schoendoerffer. 1982. Film. Indigènes. Dir. Rachid Bouchareb. 2006. DVD. Indochine. Dir. Régis Warnier. 1992. Film. Krim Belkacem. Dir. Ahmed Rachedi. 2014. Film. Larbi Ben M’hidi. Dir. Bachir Derrais. 2017. Film. Lost Command. Dir. Mark Robson. 1966. Film. Lotfi. Dir. Ahmed Rachedi. 2015. Film. Loubia Hamra. Dir. Narimane Mari. 2013. Film. Making of Ce que le jour doit à la nuit. Dir. Renaud Lefèvre. 2012. DVD. Making of Je vous ai compris. No information listed. DVD. Mesrine, l’ennemi public numéro 1. Dir. Jean-François Richet. 2008. Part 2. DVD. Mesrine, l’instinct de mort. Dir. Jean-François Richet. 2008. Part 1. DVD. Meurtres pour mémoire. Dir. Laurent Heynemann. 1985. Film. Muriel fait le désespoir de ses parents. Dir. Philippe Faucon. 1997. Film. Muriel ou le temps d’un retour. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1962/1963. Film. Nicole Garcia. Dir. Anne Wiazemsky. 2009. Blu Ray. Nocturnes. Dir. Henry Colomer. 2006. DVD. La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua. Dir. Assia Djebar. 1978. VHS. La nouvelle guerre des boutons. Dir. Christophe Barratier. 2011. Film. Les Oliviers de la justice. Dir. James Blue. 1962. Film. Los Olvidados. Dir. Luis Buñuel. 1950. Film. Omar Gatlato. Dir. Merzak Allouache. 1976. Film. Opération Maillot. Dir. Okacha Touita. 2015. Film. L’Opium et le bâton. Dir. Ahmed Rachedi. 1969/1971. Film.

222

Works Cited

Oran. No information listed. Blu Ray. Outremer. Dir. Brigitte Roüan. 1990. VHS. Palestro, Algérie, histoire d’une embuscade. Dir. Rémi Lainé. Co-written with Raphaëlle Branche, 2012. DVD. Platoon. Dir. Oliver Stone. 1986. DVD. Le Porteur de cartable. Dir. Caroline Huppert. 2002. Film. La Question. Dir. Laurent Heynemann. 1976. Film. Raï. Dir. Thomas Gilou. 1995. Film. Regard d’enfant. Dir. Lamine Merbah. 2005. Film. Le Repenti. Dir. Merzak Allouache. 2012. Film. Rome, Open City. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1945. Film. Sabine. Dir. Philippe Faucon. 1992. Film. Les Sacrifiés. Dir. Okacha Touita. 1982. Film. Salut Cousin! Dir. Merzak Allouache. 1996. Film. Samia. Dir. Philippe Faucon. 2000. Film. Le septième juré. Dir. Georges Lautner. 1961. Film. Le septième juré. Dir. Edouard Niermans. 2007. Film. Le Silence du fleuve: 17 octobre 1961. Dir. Mehdi Lallaoui and Agnès Denis. 1991. Film. Le Skylab. Dir. Julie Delpy. 2011. DVD. Le Soleil assassiné. Dir. Abdelkrim Bahloul. 2004. Film. Sous les pieds des femmes. Dir. Rachida Krim. 1997. Film. Les Suspects. Dir. Kamel Dehane. 2003. Film. Tahia ya Didou. Dir. Mohamed Zinet. 1971. Film. Le Thé au harem d’Archimède. Dir. Mehdi Charef. 1985. Film. Le Thé d’Ania. Dir. Saïd Ould-Khelifa. 2004. Film. Thunder over the Plains. Dir. André de Toth. 1953. DVD. Un Tournage à Boussaada. Dir. Christian Argentino. 2006. DVD. La Voie. Dir. Mohamed Slim Riad. 1968. Film.

Index

Abbas, Ferhat, 80, 124, 149n10, 154, 197n1 Abdelkader, Emir, 124, 149n11, 180 A bras-le-coeur, 116, 142–44 Adjoul, Adjel, 159 Agar, Trudy, 120 Agence algérienne pour le rayonnement culturel (AARC), 80, 151, 161 agency, 35–36, 42, 47, 62, 69, 72, 104, 116, 119, 121, 139; Algerian women’s, 105, 146, 185–87, 195–96, 202 Ageron, Charles-Robert, 3–4 Algeria syndrome. See syndrome allegory, national, 31, 43, 63n7, 71–72, 75, 79, 114, 116, 120, 124, 126, 186 Allouache, Merzak, 14–15, 73, 111–12, 127–29, 132, 135, 150n16, 161, 200 Amazigh/Imazighen, 64n22, 109n19, 152, 154, 161, 165, 182, 195. See also Berber; Kabyle; Tamazight Amelio, Gianni, 9, 13–14, 80, 83, 84, 111 Amine, Laila, 8 Amin: Itinéraire d’un Algérien français, 13 Amiri, Linda, 4, 26n9 amnesia, 4 Amrane, Djamila, 26n9, 185, 198n28 amulet, 78–79, 108n12

anamnesis, difficult, 3–6, 8–10, 17, 25, 48, 72, 199, 203, 204n2 André, Marc, 180, 198n21 angle, camera, 29, 47, 67, 147, 173, 182, 192 animal, 20, 48, 51, 69, 77–78. See also boar; dog; German shepherd; pig; rooster; scorpion; sheep anniversary, 3–4, 25, 56; fiftieth, 2, 5, 9–12, 15–16, 19, 27, 141, 151–52, 203 anthem, French national. See La Marseillaise anti-Semitism, 48, 128, 140, 201 Arabic, 13, 25, 26n11, 47, 53, 59, 78, 81, 87, 95, 108n13, 109, 119, 133, 151, 153–55, 157, 179–83, 198nn23– 24, 201–3 Arcady, Alexandre, 9, 14–16, 99, 111– 12, 118–19, 121–22, 126–27, 135, 148n3, 149nn7–10, 200–201 archives, 3, 10, 101–2, 203–4 Arendt, Hannah, 38 Armes, Roy, 64n12, 200 Aron, Raymond, 172–73, 197n17 Arte, television channel, 26n12, 86 assimilation, 72, 75–76, 79, 106, 108n11, 121. See also integration Audin, Maurice, 6, 26n4, 197n16; Comité, 172 223

224

Index

Au nom de la mémoire, 7, 9 Aures, 153, 156–58 Austin, Guy, 10, 18, 40, 44, 69, 152, 154, 160 Auteuil, Daniel, 16, 65, 70–71 Avant l’oubli, 17, 25, 151, 153, 178–84, 196, 198n23, 202 Aznavour, Charles, 44–45 Bahloul, Abdelkrim, 13–15, 151, 184 La Baie d’Alger, 11, 25, 92, 108n15, 109n18, 111, 127–36, 148, 199–202 Un Balcon sur la mer, 16, 25, 44, 80, 108n15, 111–18, 144, 146, 148nn3– 4, 199–202 Barclay, Fiona, 8, 18, 39–40, 44, 64n8 Barratier, Christophe, 16 The Battle of Algiers, 11, 14–15, 17, 58, 61, 70, 84–85, 139, 164–65, 193, 196, 200–202 Bauer, Charlie, 22–23 beach, 94, 116, 121, 128–35 Beaugé, Florence, 6 Beauvoir, Simone de, 171–75, 177, 186– 87, 190, 192, 194–95, 198nn26–29 Bedjaoui, Ahmed, 12–13, 19, 26nn12– 13, 34, 55, 62, 116, 145, 152, 156, 186, 199 Belkacem, Krim, 165, 197n1 Benchehida, Mansour, 149n9 Berber, 64n22, 124, 152; Arab-Berber, 24, 95, 196. See also Amazigh/ Imazighen; Kabyle; Tamazight Berrichi, Boussad, 154 Berthelon, Thomas, 88, 94 Bey, Maïssa, 11 blood, 33, 66, 69–70, 77–78, 94, 104, 142–43, 156, 164, 169, 181–82 boar, 164–65 Boever, Arne De, 72 bomb, 21, 33, 42, 74, 83, 88–89, 91–92, 95, 97, 139, 159, 186, 197n6, 198n27 Borde, Dominique, 108n10 Bordwell, David, 13, 51–52

Bouchareb, Rachid, 8, 10, 14–18, 35, 60, 108n7, 119, 147, 149n11, 156, 162, 184, 202. See also Hors la loi Bouhired, Djamila, 14, 187 Boupacha, Djamila. See Pour Djamila Bourdet, Claude, 162, 197n8 Boutaghou, Maya, 195, 198n31 Branche, Raphaëlle, 4, 7, 9, 34, 148n2, 162, 203 Brand, Philippe, 8 bridge, 61, 154, 172 Brinis, Wissem, 108n13, 180, 197n2, 197n10, 198nn24–25, 203n1 Brown, Heidi, 191–93, 198n27 Brozgal, Lia, 8–9, 102, 150n15 Brun, Catherine, 32, 34 Brunette, Peter, 67 Buñuel, Luis, 146–47 Burger, Augustin, 14, 17, 178 Burris, Jennifer, 66–67 bystander, 38, 41, 58, 60, 62, 130 Caché, 8, 14, 16–17, 19, 24–25, 44, 50, 65–72, 107, 108n15, 146, 199–202 Calargé, Carla, 38–40, 43, 63n7, 64n20, 118–19, 127 camp, 197–98n19; concentration, 57, 64n19, 162; for harkis, 15, 23–24; internment, 50–51, 64n19, 140, 156 Camus, Albert, 25, 40, 68, 72, 80–86, 108nn14–15, 116, 128–29, 132–33, 149nn14–15, 180 Cardinal, Marie, 111 Cardinale, Claudia, 114, 148n4 Cartouches gauloises, 17, 25, 50, 107, 111, 117, 120, 128, 130, 132, 135– 48, 161, 198n23, 199–202 Caruth, Cathy, 10 Catholic, 75, 77, 79, 95, 108n12, 119– 20, 176, 183. See also Christian Celik, Ipek A., 69, 71 censorship, 19, 59, 101, 177, 194 Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, 9, 11, 14, 16, 25, 44, 75, 99, 108n15, 111–12,

Index

118–27, 134–35, 141–42, 149n8, 199–202 Césaire, Aimé, 188 Chahine, Youssef, 14 Chakali, Saad, 70–71 Challe, General, 93–94 Charef, Mehdi, 14–15, 17, 111–12, 116–17, 119–20, 128, 136–47, 150n21, 161, 186, 200–201 Charonne, 7–8, 26n7, 177–78 Cheb, 184 Cheref, Abdelkader, 6 Chibane, Malik, 14–15, 96, 98–106, 109n19, 112, 200 Chiche, Frank, 13–14, 86–97, 112, 200 childhood, 13, 72, 80–86, 112–14, 117, 119, 125–26, 135, 142, 144–45, 148, 179–80, 189, 200 Childress, Alice, 134 choice, 25, 43, 55, 83, 95, 101, 106, 174; lack of, 31, 54 Le Choix de Myriam, 7–8, 14, 24–25, 98–107, 112, 134, 199–202 Christian, 63n7, 121, 166, 189. See also Catholic cinéma moudjahid, 12, 152–54, 158–61, 171, 180; new, 185, 195–96, 203 citizen, 2, 55, 59, 70, 95, 131, 133, 141, 148n1, 173, 178, 186 civilian, Algerian, 21, 28–29, 31–32, 34, 37, 51, 56, 62, 138, 156, 163–64, 188, 196 Cixous, Hélène, 95, 189 close-up, 35, 48, 51–52, 58–60, 85, 87, 100, 165, 174, 180, 185, 188, 193; extreme, 22, 30, 34, 47, 192 closure, lack of, 51, 65, 68, 114, 147 Cole, Joshua, 6, 197n8 Colomer, Henry, 20 colonialism, 20, 31, 62, 79, 111, 124, 147, 188; French, 6, 30, 32, 40, 69, 116, 118–19, 136–37 colonization, 5–7, 53, 55, 82, 86–87, 116, 139, 146, 157; French, 13, 29–30, 40, 84, 109n16, 119–20,

225

125, 147, 154, 180. See also decolonization commitment, 38, 41, 60, 75, 90, 93, 121, 124, 159; political, 92, 98, 123, 172, 179, 189. See also engagement Communist, 26n4, 112, 116, 151, 155, 162, 170, 176, 197n16 community, 7, 76–77, 101–2, 104, 106, 124, 136, 138–40, 180, 196 Conan, Eric, 3 confusion, 22, 52, 64n13, 66, 118, 179, 187, 194 connection, 2, 22–23, 51, 64n8, 69, 71, 85, 88, 92, 97, 103, 106, 135, 141, 144–45, 148, 149n4, 150n15, 172, 175, 186–87, 190–91, 195 Connell, R. W., 90 conscript, 34, 50–56, 61, 64n13, 87, 113 Constantinesco, Laure, 86 control, 36, 65, 67, 69, 105, 143 Cooke, James J., 97 Corneau, Alain, 128 Le Coup de sirocco, 14–15, 148n3, 149n9 couple, 43, 65, 67, 98, 104, 106, 124, 138, 171, 183, 197n15 Courrière, Yves, 4 court, 163, 167, 169, 190, 194 Cousins, Mark, 108n3 Croiset, Laure, 64n10 crosscutting, 56, 86, 89, 94 Crowley, Patrick, 66, 69 curfew, 99, 138 Daeninckx, Didier, 7–8 Dalida, 183, 198n23 danger, 59, 62, 94, 99, 133, 175 Daoud, Kamel, 149–50n15 Daoud, Zakya, 80, 124 Dassonville, Aude, 197nn15–18 death penalty, 129, 163, 168, 190 death row, 157, 164–66 decolonization, 1, 7, 17, 48, 62, 86, 107, 116, 125, 140, 157, 173 Dehane, Kamel, 13

226

Index

Delanoë, Bertrand, 8, 26n7 Delpy, Julie, 14, 16, 20 demonstration, 8–9, 15, 26n3, 56–60, 64n19, 66, 73, 88, 92–93, 99–100, 102, 106, 120, 154–55, 171, 173, 175, 177 Denselow, Robin, 96 La Dentellière, 171 Depardieu, Gérard, 16, 70, 73, 75–76, 79, 108n10 Derrais, Bachir, 151 Derrida, Jacques, 95, 189 Al Dhil wal kindil, 15 dialogue, 2, 11, 19–20, 39, 51, 53–55, 59, 66, 87, 95, 118, 127, 130, 135, 148, 153–54, 156–57, 160, 162–66, 179, 186, 192. See also Arabic Didier, Nicolas, 121 Dine, Philip, 18, 40 dissensions, 89, 161, 167, 203. See also division distance, 46, 94, 117, 143, 178, 183 division, 2, 132, 134, 142; internal, 10, 25, 28, 60, 98, 159, 173–74, 179, 196, 198n20. See also dissensions Djamilah, 14 Djebar, Assia, 11–12, 14, 170, 184, 186 Djinns, 17, 24, 27–28, 40, 45–52, 62– 63, 63n4, 66, 146, 193, 200–202 dog, 51, 81–82, 158, 183, 197n5. See also German shepherd Donadey, Anne, 25n1, 26n8, 142, 162, 180, 197n9, 198n21, 203 Douce France, 96–97 dream, 37, 46, 67, 114 Durmelat, Sylvie, 2, 14, 18, 66, 136–37, 144–45, 149n11, 150n19, 199 editing, 13, 52, 66–67, 86, 89, 114, 137–38, 143, 156, 166, 178, 192 Egypt, 155, 198n23 Einaudi, Jean-Luc, 3, 6, 26n6, 99 Eldridge, Claire, 8, 15, 29, 40, 111, 142, 148, 201 electricity, 31, 188, 193. See also gégène; torture

El-Zein, Amira, 47 empathy, 2, 139, 144 engagement, 30, 91, 93, 130, 138, 155, 173, 197n14; Sartre’s, 171–72, 175– 76; women’s, 93, 161, 179, 190, 195, 198n28. See also commitment L’Ennemi intime, 15–16, 24, 27–42, 46, 48, 51, 56–58, 60–63, 63n5, 64n9, 86–87, 94, 138, 168, 185, 188, 199–202 epic, 16, 51, 152–53, 158, 161, 195 L’Equipier, 16, 20–21 L’Etranger, 68, 72, 108n15, 116, 127– 30, 132–33, 149n14 executioner, 164, 167, 169, 195. See also guillotine exploitation, colonial, 30, 34, 54, 62, 123, 126–27 explosion, 49–50, 86, 139 eye, 11, 20, 29–30, 33, 84–86, 100, 115, 120, 132, 135, 137, 173, 186–87; bird’s, 89, 117, 147, 160, 172, 198n20; camera’s, 67, 137, 143, 146 Ezra, Elizabeth, 66–67 Fanon, Frantz, 145, 156, 202 Farradj, Abdelkader, 169–70, 179 fate, 29, 37, 51, 66, 84, 94, 116, 120, 168–69. See also tragedy Faucon, Philippe, 14–15, 17, 26n11, 50, 53, 55, 64n16, 202 Fellag, Mohamed, 35, 73, 87, 119, 149n10 Ferdi, Saïd, 201 Fieschi, Jacques, 112, 148n3 filmmaking, process, 67, 136–37, 143 flag, 154; French, 1, 33, 35–36, 40, 91, 154, 169 flashback, 20–21, 39–40, 46, 72, 80–82, 84, 112, 114–15, 117–18, 125, 132, 134, 185, 192–94 flashforward, 134–35, 150n16 Flood, Maria, 19, 66–68, 70–71, 108n5 Les folles années du twist, 10 forgetting, 4–5, 44, 64n8, 96–97, 112– 13, 184

Index

framing, 13, 46, 79, 125, 134, 143, 173, 192 Freedman, Carl, 67 freedom fighter, 11, 14, 138, 145, 147, 152, 161, 180 Frey, Mattias, 107n1, 108n3 friendship, 104, 112, 132, 138–39, 141, 145, 187 Garcia, Nicole, 14–16, 111–12, 116–17, 148nn1–4 Gardel, Louis, 112, 127–30, 132, 135, 200 Gaulle, Charles de, 49, 64nn11–13, 75, 78, 88, 90–91, 93–94, 98, 109n17, 115, 171, 173 gaze, 52–53, 55, 137 gégène, 31, 165, 193. See also electricity; torture Geisser, Vincent, 108n11 Gelder, Lawrence Van, 162 gender, 20, 90–91, 106, 133–34, 170– 71, 181, 186, 189–90, 196, 203 generator. See gégène genocide, Armenian, 45 genre, 45, 51, 53, 63n4, 121, 126, 153, 161, 180 German shepherd, 106, 158, 197n5. See also dog Gervereau, Laurent, 3 Gibson, Brian, 66–68 Gili, Jean A., 80, 83 Gillet, Sandy, 16, 61 Gilou, Thomas, 15–16, 72–73 Gilroy, Paul, 66, 68–69, 71 Gobin, Charlotte, 93, 198n21 God, 95, 115, 119, 159–60, 169–70 Goretta, Claude, 14, 171–72 government, 40; Algerian, 109n19, 128, 151–53, 160, 182, 200; French, 49, 80, 85, 102, 105, 119, 124, 163–64, 166, 177, 190–91, 194 La Graine et le mulet, 194 Grossvogel, D. I., 67 guard, 167–70, 185, 195, 197n11. See also prison; warden

227

La Guerre des boutons, 16, 19, 21 La Guerre sans nom, 15, 38, 50 guillotine, 70, 85, 161, 168, 170–71. See also executioner Halimi, Gisèle, 172, 186–94, 198nn26– 31, 201 Haneke, Michael, 8, 14, 16–17, 19, 65–72 Harbi, Mohammed, 3, 25n1 harki, 1, 21, 28–30, 33–36, 38, 42, 50, 53, 62, 126, 136, 139, 144, 147, 149n13, 150n18, 157, 167, 169, 184, 195, 198n19, 201; Le Harki de Meriem, 140, 201; Harkis (film), 11, 15, 23–24, 26n16, 200 Hattou, Messaoud, 72–73 healing, 79, 103, 108n12, 127, 136, 203 Hebrew, 95 Herbiet, Laurent, 17, 39, 63n6 hero, 88, 91, 152, 154, 196; anti-hero, 10; heroine, 93, 187 Herzog, Todd, 66–67 Heynemann, Laurent, 10, 116, 187 Higbee, Will, 16, 18, 136–39, 143, 145–47 Hiroshima mon amour, 108n8 historiography, 102, 151–52, 154 history, colonial, 61, 84, 97, 147 Hollande, François, 6, 9 Hollywood, 122, 143, 156, 162, 179, 198n20 hooks, bell, 181 Horne, Alistair, 4, 11 Hors la loi, 8, 10, 14–17, 26n13, 58–60, 85, 108n7, 119, 121, 123, 149n11, 153, 156, 162, 170, 179, 196, 197n9, 198n21, 199–200, 202, 203n1 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 166 House, Jim, 7, 26n5, 64nn19–21, 177, 197n1 humor, 103, 105, 168 Huppert, Caroline, 14–15, 186–88 Huppert, Isabelle, 171, 187 hypermnesia, 4–5, 7, 15, 17 identification, 2, 43, 68, 118, 180, 193

228

Index

identity: Algerian, 121, 152, 154, 171, 182, 195; French, 18, 71, 75, 78–79, 141 ideology, 41, 45, 76, 79, 93, 121–22, 148n3, 152, 154, 159–60, 182 Ighilahriz, Louisette, 161 Ighil Imoula, 165 imaginary, colonial, 25, 66, 84, 122 immigrant, 1, 14, 56, 70, 78, 96, 98, 103–7, 141, 144–45, 150n21, 199 Indigènes, 35, 147 Indochina, 28, 37, 42, 45, 48, 74, 123, 192. See also Vietnam injustice, 32, 40, 43, 69, 80, 129. See also justice integration, 3, 58–59, 75, 106, 108n11. See also assimilation intellectual, 11, 39, 41, 62, 67, 88, 92, 165, 171, 174, 177–78, 182, 190, 197n16 intertext, 27, 147, 149n9, 150n20, 165, 202; with The Battle of Algiers, 70; with Camus, 68, 108n15, 128, 130, 133, 147; with Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, 120, 149n6 intervention, 2, 4, 24, 57, 61, 63, 84, 141, 191, 199 Ireland, Susan, 23, 26, 35, 54, 136, 150 Islam, 3, 43, 160, 169, 171, 195–96. See also Muslim Islamophobia, 1, 141 Italy, 13, 41, 80, 113, 176 Iveton, Fernand, 170–71, 197 Jarmakani, Amira, 181 Jeanson network, 171, 173. See also porteur/porteuse de valises Jeffords, Susan, 27, 37 Je vous ai compris, 13, 24–25, 74, 86– 98, 107, 111–12, 124, 134, 174, 196, 198n23, 199–202 Jew, 14, 45, 48, 57, 64n19, 66, 74, 76, 87, 95–96, 98, 103, 109, 112, 120–21, 128, 131–32, 134, 138, 140, 148n3, 149nn7–9, 175, 179, 181, 189, 195–96, 200–202

Jones, Christa, 128, 130–32, 135, 142, 144, 200 Jones, Kathryn, 8, 56 journalist, 4, 6, 10, 22–23, 26n14, 39, 50, 87, 92, 123, 161–62, 171, 175, 179 Jørholt, Eva, 67–69 judge, 164, 167, 189, 191–93 July 14, 41, 125, 141 justice, 44, 186, 189–90, 192, 195. See also injustice justification, 29, 32–33, 41 Kabyle, 70, 73, 87, 98, 109n19, 153–54, 165, 170–71, 182. See also Amazigh/ Imazighen; Berber; Tamazight Kabylia, 21, 30, 153 Kagan, Elie, 175, 177 Kaid, 40, 119, 159 Kaplan, Alice Yeager, 129, 149n14 Kateb Yacine, 120–21 Kealhofer-Kemp, Leslie, 16, 24, 26n11, 105–6 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 194 Kemoum, Hadjila, 201 Kerchouche, Dalila, 15, 201 Khadra, Yasmina, 16, 112, 119–20, 123, 125–27, 149nn6–10, 200 Khanna, Ranjana, 70, 172, 190 Khelfaoui, Benaoumeur, 119–20, 124 Kimmel, Michael S., 82–83, 90 Kline, T. Jefferson, 66, 68, 70 knife, 22, 34, 77–78, 87, 100, 105. See also throat, slit Krim, Rachida, 14, 148 Krim Belkacem, 151, 161 Lainé, Rémi, 148n2 Lallaoui, Mehdi, 7 land, 33, 47, 49, 111, 114, 116, 119, 125–26, 148n4 landscape, 33, 35, 46, 51, 63n4, 86, 94, 121, 127 language. See Arabic; Tamazight Larbi Ben M’hidi, 151, 197n1 Laredj, Rim, 15

Index

Lawrence, Michael, 69–70 lawyer, 162, 164, 170, 172, 186, 189– 92, 194–96, 198n21, 201 Lazreg, Marnia, 29, 37, 48 Lee, Sonia, 145 Leïla: Avoir dix-sept ans dans un camp de harkis, 15, 23–24 Leroux, Denis, 62, 93 Le Toux-Lungo, Raphaël, 54 Levin, Thomas Y., 67 lieu de mémoire. See site of memory Lindgaard, Jade, 54 Lioret, Philippe, 16, 20 long take, 37, 49, 51–52, 174 loss, 12, 17, 33, 35, 41, 71, 80–82, 101, 109n20, 112, 114, 116–17, 136, 140, 144–45, 148nn3–4 Lost Command, 14, 148n4 Lotfi, 151 Loubia Hamra, 14 Louet, Sophie, 6 love, 106, 111–12, 114, 120–22, 125, 171, 179–81, 183, 198nn21–23 Luciani, François, 128 Luciani, Noémie, 121 Lumière, database, 13, 15, 141, 152 Lykidis, Alex, 107n2 Maazouzi, Djemaa, 4–5, 137, 140–41, 149n5, 150n17 MacMaster, Neil, 4, 7, 10, 26n5, 64nn19–21, 177, 197n1 Macron, Emmanuel, 6 Maghreb, 14, 64n22, 109n19, 165, 178, 189, 200–201 Maherzi, Lotfi, 12, 152–53, 158–60, 200, 202 Mako, 8 Ma mère l’Algérie, 111 Mammeri, Mouloud, 153–54 manhood, 82, 90, 181. See also masculinity; redjla Mari, Narimane, 14, 26n10 Marquand, Robert, 26n3 La Marseillaise, 78, 91–92, 97, 109n17 Martin, Hugues, 47

229

Martin, Sandra, 14, 17, 45 martyr, 100, 152, 157, 159–61, 170, 195 masculinity, 82–83, 171; hegemonic, 90–91, 98. See also manhood; redjla match: cut, 94; eyeline, 137; graphic, 70, 81, 94; visual, 94, 123 Mauss-Copeaux, Claire, 32 May 8, 1945 (massacre), 26n3, 120, 125, 155, 162, 164, 180. See also Setif McCormack, Jo, 2, 5–7, 18, 48, 199 McFadden, Cybelle H., 71 McGill, Justine, 67 McGonagle, Joseph, 9, 36, 73–74, 76, 137, 144–46, 150nn19–20, 175, 200 media, 2, 4–6, 9, 13, 32, 40, 44, 72, 93, 177, 179, 190, 202. See also journalist; newspaper; radio; television Mediterranean, 11, 113, 118, 148n3, 149n4, 180. See also sea melancholia, 112, 116, 118, 131, 148. See also mourning melodrama, 73, 180, 184 Melouza (massacre), 183 Memmi, Albert, 117 memory: compartmentalized, 1–2, 11, 25, 107, 117, 147, 199, 203; hiccups of, 1, 4–5; multidirectional, 45, 48, 66, 113, 175–76, 197–98n19; screen, 8, 24, 65, 72, 111; vector of, 1, 5–9, 13, 17, 44, 102, 114, 180; war of, 2, 136, 145 Merbah, Lamine, 13–14 Mertz-Baumgartner, Birgit, 9, 16, 57–59, 61 Mesrine, Jacques, 16, 21–23 Mesrine, l’ennemi public numéro 1, 16, 21–23 Mesrine, l’instinct de mort, 16, 21–22 Messali Hadj, 124, 152, 155, 157, 161– 62, 167, 181, 195, 197n1 Messerschmidt, James W., 90 metaphor, 61–62, 115, 117, 121 Meursault, contre-enquête, 149n15 Meurtres pour mémoire, 10

230

Index

Meynier, Gilbert, 4 Michou d’Auber, 8–9, 11, 16, 24–25, 65, 72–79, 107, 108n15, 120, 198n23, 200, 202 Mies, Maria, 117 militant: Algerian, 6, 21–24, 162, 170– 74, 178, 183, 185, 190, 195–96, 202; female, 92, 98, 170, 173, 182, 184, 187, 196, 202 mise en abyme, 67, 94, 102, 136–37, 143, 145 mise-en-scène, 67, 94, 143 Mitterrand, François, 4, 163, 166 Mon Colonel, 11, 17, 24, 27–28, 39–45, 48, 51–52, 57–59, 61–63, 131, 146, 166, 199–202 money, 77, 83, 105, 119, 162–63, 173 Morocco, 99, 148n3, 154–55, 183 Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, 25, 151–65, 169– 71, 191, 195–96, 201–2 mountains, 145, 153, 158–61, 196 mourning, 3, 60, 116, 118, 131, 148. See also melancholia Mouvement national algérien (MNA), 99, 152, 159, 167, 179, 182–83, 196, 198n20, 200 Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (MTLD), 155, 162, 195 multicultural, 1, 68, 75–76, 96, 98, 103, 136, 203; France, 3, 11, 18, 25, 55, 62, 71–72, 106–7, 127, 141, 148, 156 murder, 34, 39–40, 45, 129, 139, 143, 174 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, 19 music, 54, 64n15, 117, 143, 158, 160, 162, 193; lack of, 49, 51, 68, 159, 166, 168, 188. See also sound Muslim, 2–3, 33, 52, 75–78, 91, 95, 105, 121, 141, 149n12, 183, 185, 189, 193, 196. See also Islam Nadiras, François, 6, 148n2 Nanterre, 9, 57, 59–60, 100, 144. See also shantytown napalm, 33, 63n4, 185

nationalism, 160, 170 Nazi, 35, 41, 74, 162, 173–74, 176, 188. See also resistance; World War II Nedjma, 120–21, 127 neighborhood, 71, 95, 100, 106, 112, 119, 156–57, 179 newspaper, 6, 8, 44, 87, 93, 136–37, 158, 163, 171, 177, 187, 202 Niermans, Edouard, 13 Niessen, Niels, 67, 69 Nocturnes, 20 “Non, je ne regrette rien,” 96–97 nostalgeria, 144 nostalgia, 3, 97, 111, 124; colonial, 25, 112, 118, 121, 127, 148 La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, 12, 14, 170, 184, 186 La nouvelle guerre des boutons, 16 November 1, 1954, 125, 155–56, 162– 65, 167, 195 Nuevo, Eric, 145 Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961, 8, 15–16, 24, 27–28, 36, 41, 55–63, 175, 177, 199–202 obsession, 3, 5, 7, 9, 78 October 17, 1961 (massacre), 6–9, 23, 36, 56–57, 59, 61, 64n19, 66, 69, 73, 99–103, 106, 175–77, 197n8, 200 olive, 109n16, 180 Les Oliviers de la justice, 111 Los Olvidados, 146 Opération Maillot, 151, 161 L’Opium et le bâton, 153–54, 165, 180, 196, 197n5 oppression, 105, 122, 147, 176, 189–90, 195 Oran, 112–13, 117–19, 129, 148nn1–3, 149n9, 162, 197n1 Organisation armée secrète (OAS), 22, 74, 87–92, 94–95, 98, 108, 112, 116, 123, 126, 175, 177 O’Riley, Michael, 34, 108n6 Oudaï, Yamina Zoulikha, 170–71 Ould-Khelifa, Saïd, 14, 151, 161, 165– 67, 170–71, 196

Index

Ouramdane, Amar, 165 Outremer, 111, 116–17, 201 Pages, Neil Christian, 69–72 Palestro, 112–13, 148n2 Papon, Maurice, 7–8, 23, 26n6, 57, 64n19, 100, 197n8 paratrooper, 21, 74, 91, 97, 99, 159, 188, 193, 197n16 pataouète, 95 Pélégri, Jean, 111 performative, 25, 76, 98, 104, 106, 135–36 periodization, 4, 11–12 perpetrator, 10, 22, 29, 34, 39, 41–42, 62, 68, 88, 177. See also victim Peucker, Brigitte, 67 photograph, 36, 53–54, 72–73, 87, 114, 175, 177, 202. See also picture picture, 32, 34, 36, 88, 100–102, 115, 146, 155, 175. See also photograph pig, 77–78. See also pork; sheep Pinkerton, Nick, 28 Platoon, 27 Poe, George, 73, 108n9 police, French, 24, 36, 57, 60, 124–25, 149n9, 162, 176, 179, 181, 183 politics, 1–2, 24, 75, 78, 104, 128, 150n15, 156, 176, 179–80 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 11, 14, 17, 26n12, 61, 70, 139, 193 pork, 76, 78, 140, 142, 164. See also pig; sheep porteur/porteuse de valises, 57, 171, 179, 182. See also Jeanson network Pour Djamila, 25, 92–93, 109n18, 134, 151, 153, 172, 179, 184, 186–96, 198nn26–31, 199, 201–2 poverty, 52, 81, 84, 118–19, 123, 127, 130, 140, 180 power, 1–2, 16, 29, 36, 40, 43, 60, 70, 79–80, 83, 85, 93, 108n12, 137, 166, 168, 180, 185, 191, 194; colonial, 42, 165, 199; imbalance, 121, 132, 156, 163, 176 prayer, 33, 78, 95, 160, 169–70

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Le premier homme, 9, 13–14, 24–25, 79–86, 107, 108n15, 111, 124, 199, 201–2 prison, 22, 44, 85, 157, 160, 164, 167– 70, 187–88, 195–96, 197n13. See also guard; warden prisoner, Algerian, 34–35, 42, 47, 70, 85, 157, 164–69, 187–89, 193, 195 profiling, racist, 57, 73, 99. See also ratonnade propaganda, 28, 32, 34, 40, 62, 84, 167 prostitute, 22, 104, 106, 147 putsch, 74, 86, 93–94, 97, 109n17 Qur’an, 78, 121, 160, 169 Rachedi, Ahmed, 14–15, 151–54, 156, 158–59, 161, 167, 196 Rachedi, Amine, 161 racism, 20, 23, 73, 75, 77, 98–100, 103, 105, 111; anti-Arab, 1, 13, 22, 38, 61, 63, 103, 141, 144, 180; colonial, 1, 4, 10, 23, 52, 107, 125, 137–38, 189; French, 34, 55, 58, 157, 163; institutional, 33, 189; systemic, 56, 60–62 radio, 74, 85, 93, 96, 156, 159, 176–77 Raï, 73 rape, 6, 20, 37, 88–92, 94, 99, 139, 142, 146, 156, 190, 192–93 ratonnade, 57–58, 73–74, 76. See also profiling Rechniewski, Elizabeth, 42–43, 61 reconciliation, 11, 79, 119, 126–27, 141 redjla, 181. See also manhood; masculinity Regard d’enfant, 13 relations, 1–3, 6, 20, 25, 36, 41, 103–4, 106, 123–24, 127, 134, 140, 203. See also relationship relationship, 25, 52, 79, 88, 93, 98, 106–7, 121, 145, 171–73, 183, 187. See also relations religion, 75–79, 87, 160, 169–70, 189, 193. See also Catholic; Christian; Islam; Jew; Muslim; prayer

232

Index

Renard, Yves-Marie, 13 reparations, 6, 49, 193 repetition, 32, 37–38, 70, 115, 131, 137–38, 142, 194 repression, 3, 8–10, 40, 44, 56, 59, 66, 69, 72, 101, 113, 118, 120, 155–56, 163 Republic, French, 18, 59, 75, 92, 109n17, 125, 171 resistance, 35, 41, 52, 133, 137, 154, 161, 164, 168, 175–76, 180, 184, 201; French, 35, 41, 57, 91, 164, 174. See also Nazi; World War II Resnais, Alain, 19 responsibility, 6, 19, 34, 62, 64n19, 119, 127, 191 return of the repressed, 3–4, 8–10, 44, 48, 70–71, 118, 203 revelation, 4, 6, 21, 31, 45–46, 49, 72 Riad, Mohamed Slim, 197n5 Rice, Alison, 8–9, 26n6, 66 Rich, Adrienne, 116 Richet, Jean-François, 16, 21, 23 rights, 20, 32–33, 154, 185, 191; civil, 34, 124; equal, 80, 124; women’s, 99, 182, 190, 195 riots, 2005, 8, 71, 156–57 Rioux, Jean-Pierre, 3 Robic-Diaz, Delphine, 27, 40, 42, 48, 52 Robson, Mark, 14, 148n4 Rome, Open City, 176 rooster, 66, 69–72 Rosello, Mireille, 25, 38, 68, 135 Rosen, Jody, 96–97 Rossellini, Roberto, 176 Rothberg, Michael, 45, 48, 66, 70, 175–76, 197n19 Rotman, Patrick, 15, 28, 38, 50, 56, 63n5 Roüan, Brigitte, 111, 116, 201 Rousso, Henry, 3–6, 9, 26n7, 44 Ruhe, Cornelia, 20 Ruscio, Alain, 40, 42, 52 Russ, Joanna, 124 sacrifice, 36, 115, 146, 158, 171

Les Sacrifiés, 200 Saint-Hamont, Daniel, 14, 99, 112 Sales, Claude, 15, 50, 54 Salut Cousin!, 73, 128 Samia, 26n11, 53 Samuell, Yann, 16, 19 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 6, 156 Sarra, Boukhatem, 149n9 Sartre, l’âge des passions, 8, 14, 25, 153, 171–78, 188, 196, 197nn15–18, 200–202 Saunders, Christopher, 28, 34 Saxton, Libby, 69 Scharfman, Ronnie, 95 Scharold, Irmgard, 19 Scheer, Ron, 122 Schneid, Frederick C., 148n2 Schoendoerffer, Pierre, 116 school, 6, 46, 57, 59, 66, 82, 84, 103, 115, 123, 125, 132, 137–38, 140, 142; high, 7, 101, 128, 130, 133, 197n1. See also teacher Schyns, Desirée, 8, 69–70 score. See music scorpion, 48, 64 sea, 96, 134, 148–49n4, 179–80, 183. See also Mediterranean Sebbar, Leïla, 7, 11, 104 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 37 Seine, 101, 134 La Seine était rouge, 7, 11 Le septième juré, 13 Seshadri, Kalpana Rahita, 66 Setif, 6, 26n3, 40, 125, 155, 180, 197n1. See also May 8, 1945 (massacre) Shafik, Viola, 12, 152, 158, 160, 202 shantytown, 59–60, 98–99, 102–6, 109, 144, 182–83, 198n20. See also Nanterre Sharpe, Mani, 12 sheep, 74, 76–78, 181. See also pig; pork Shepard, Todd, 32, 180 Sherzer, Dina, 97, 99, 109n19 Shiva, Vandana, 117 Sidi Moussa, Nedjib, 155

Index

silence, 2–3, 5, 7, 48, 51, 53–54, 114, 142, 152, 184 Le Silence du fleuve: 17 octobre 1961, 7 Sillars, Jane, 67 Silverman, Max, 70 Siri, Florent-Emilio, 15–16, 28, 31, 38, 63n1 site of memory, 113, 115, 147–48 Le Skylab, 16, 20–21, 23, 198n23 Slama, Alain-Gérard, 197n17 soccer, 139–41 Socialist, 6, 8, 163, 166, 173 Le Soleil assassiné, 184 solidarity, 33, 132, 169–70, 195 solipsism, 66, 107, 112, 116, 118, 148 Soltane, Amira, 135 Sommer, Doris, 10 Sotinel, Thomas, 30 sound, 30, 34, 48, 67, 84–85, 89, 91–94, 166, 193; bridge, 93–94; diegetic, 51, 54; techniques, 22, 54, 89. See also music Sous les pieds des femmes, 14, 148n4 space, 20, 37, 40, 54, 61, 113, 118, 122, 126–27, 129, 132–34, 161, 176, 199, 201 Spain, 41, 114, 149n4, 178 Speck, Oliver C., 108n8 Speech, 6, 40, 43, 77–78, 81, 85, 93–94, 101, 109n17, 159, 171–73, 189 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 71 stereotype, 16, 36, 41, 78, 103, 105, 107, 163, 173, 179, 181, 191, 198n21 Stone, Oliver, 27 Stora, Benjamin, 1–6, 8–11, 15, 17–19, 25nn1–3, 26nn6–9, 27, 29, 33, 36, 39, 42, 49–50, 60–61, 75, 80, 83, 86, 111–13, 117, 122, 124, 140, 149n8, 152, 160, 162, 164, 173, 184, 197n1, 197nn4–6 structure: film, 114, 137–38; French military, 39, 43, 158, 191; French repressive, 169, 195 subtitles, 13, 53, 95, 153, 179, 198nn22–24 sun, 135, 169, 180, 183

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Les Suspects, 13 Swamy, Vinay, 18, 141 symbol: of Algeria, 141, 160; of France, 139, 141; national, 70, 75, 79, 141 symptom, 65–66, 72, 75, 144 syndrome: Algeria, 1, 3–5, 7–9, 15, 19, 25, 44, 48, 66, 72, 101, 113, 136, 184, 199, 203; Vichy, 3 system: colonial, 31, 40, 43, 98, 111, 123–25, 129–30, 133; educational, 5–6, 9; judicial, 190, 193; justice, 189, 192 Taha, Rachid, 96–97 Tahia ya Didou, 12 Tahri, Hamid, 198n27 Talahite-Moodley, Anissa, 180 Tamazight, 59, 64n22, 152, 154, 161, 165, 171, 195. See also Amazigh/ Imazighen; Berber; Kabyle Tarr, Carrie, 18, 99 Tasma, Alain, 15–16, 23, 56, 61 Tavernier, Bertrand, 15, 38, 50, 63n5 teacher, 41, 57, 73, 81–82, 102–3, 108n15, 116, 128, 131, 178, 181. See also school television, 5, 13, 26nn12–13, 44, 51, 67, 78, 86, 93, 95, 177, 202–3 Temlali, Yassin, 27–28, 30, 36 testimony, 14, 38, 102, 186, 188–89, 192–94 Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, 146, 150n21 Le Thé d’Ania, 161 Thénault, Sylvie, 4, 44, 99, 122, 149n10, 162, 170, 190, 203 Thompson, Kristin, 13, 51–52 throat, slit, 30–31, 33–34, 62, 66, 69–71, 77, 126, 143, 168, 183. See also knife Thunder over the Plains, 122 time frame, 39, 44, 63, 73, 118, 132, 151 token, 34, 71, 119, 123, 127, 148 torture, 4, 6, 11, 21–23, 26n4, 28, 48, 56, 64n15, 85, 88, 116, 139,

234

Index

149n13, 156, 172–73, 197n16, 201; in L’Ennemi intime, 28–29, 31–34, 37–38, 62; in Mon Colonel, 39, 41–43, 63n7; in Pour Djamila, 186– 94; in Zabana!, 162–68. See also electricity; gégène Touil, Moh, 164–65 Touita, Okacha, 151, 161, 200 tragedy, 62, 71–72, 107, 115, 125. See also fate La Trahison, 11, 15, 17, 24, 27–28, 40, 43, 50–55, 57, 62–63, 199–200, 202 transmission, 5, 7, 60, 177, 180 trauma, 29, 39, 68–69, 80, 114, 136, 139–45, 147, 188, 194 Trémois, Claude-Marie, 142–43 trial, 7, 26n6, 64n19, 164, 168–70, 189–91, 194 trope, 28, 61–63; white savior, 31, 47, 49 Tunisia, 8, 86, 99, 103, 155, 189, 201 uncertainty, 47–48, 50, 52, 54, 90, 118 Ungar, Steven, 51, 64nn12–18 Vergès, Jacques, 190 Vergnol, Maud, 26n4 veteran, 21, 28, 35, 42, 45, 48, 73, 77, 108n10 victim, 10, 29, 33–34, 58, 62, 64n19, 69, 80, 82, 88, 91, 100, 103, 129, 155, 177. See also perpetrator Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 4 Vietnam, 27, 48, 192. See also Indochina vignette, 56, 136–38, 161, 163, 174 Virtue, Nancy E., 67, 72 voice, 33, 43, 72, 89, 100, 131–32, 181–82, 187–88, 193; voice-over, 85, 122, 171 La Voie, 197n5 Voyage à Alger, 13, 25, 92, 109n18, 134, 151, 153, 184–86, 196, 197n3, 200, 202 Wallenbrock, Nicole Beth, 19, 22, 26n10, 26n15, 47, 49, 56, 63nn4–7,

66, 198n23, 200; on Cartouches gauloises, 137, 143–44, 150nn19–20; on L’Ennemi intime, 27, 29, 31, 37–38, 62; on Michou d’Auber, 70, 75–78, 108n12; on Mon Colonel, 39, 43, 45; on La Trahison, 51–54, 64n15 warden, 164, 166–69, 195. See also guard; prison weapon, 49, 63, 80, 89, 156, 163, 174, 176, 192 Welch, Edward, 9, 36, 73–74, 76, 137, 144–46, 150nn19–20, 175, 200 Western movies, 121–22, 198n20 Wheatley, Catherine, 66–69 women: Algerian, 3, 11, 22, 25, 31, 36–37, 43, 47, 53, 60, 62–63, 91, 97–98, 100, 121, 134, 146, 153, 156, 170, 179, 182, 184–85, 193, 196, 198n28; European, 83, 170, 178, 183, 202; French, 58–60, 62, 93, 105, 120, 179, 181, 195, 198n21; pied-noir, 42–43, 121, 124, 132, 134, 202 worker, 57, 65–66, 70, 73, 98–100, 104–5, 133, 145, 178–80, 183 World War II, 3, 16, 20, 26n3, 31, 35, 38, 41–42, 45, 48, 57, 64n19, 66, 74, 91, 108n11, 125, 153–56, 162, 164, 173–76, 188. See also Nazi; resistance Xavier, Subha, 150n21 Yacine, Rémi, 120 Yacowar, Maurice, 67 Yveton, Fernand. See Iveton, Fernand Zabana!, 25, 70, 85, 151–54, 161–71, 179, 191, 195–96, 197n3, 201–2 Zamoum, Ali, 165, 169–70, 197nn5– 13 Zamponi, Francis, 39, 45 Zemmouri, Mahmoud, 10 Zeniter, Alice, 201 Zertal, Mahmoud, 162, 170 Zinet, Mohamed, 12

About the Author

Anne Donadey is professor of French and women’s studies at San Diego State University. She is the author of Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing between Worlds (2001) and of about thirty journal articles and book chapters. Among others, she has also edited or coedited the scholarly ­volumes Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies (2005) and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar (2017).

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