![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
After obtaining independence in 1962, Algeria witnessed the emergence of a highly politicised cinema dedicated to visualising the often traumatic effects of conflict. Existing scholarship tends towards framing narratives produced in the aftermath of independence within their historical, political and cinematic context without offering any sustained textual analysis of individual films. With this in mind, this article aims to address this critical blind spot through close analysis of three key works of the period; Mohamed Lahkdar-Hamina's Le Vent des Aurès (The Winds of the Aurès 1966), Tewfik Farès's Les Hors-la-loi (The Outlaws 1969) and Ahmed Rachedi's L'Opium et le bâton (Opium and the Stick 1969). Drawing largely from historians, cultural historians, and film scholars, the main aim of this article is thus to explore how these films disavow the pervasive masculine sexual concerns that characterised the period, primarily by representing men as fearless warriors and martyrs.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Professor Guy Austin and Dr Sarah Leahy for offering helpful advice regarding the development of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Filmography
Algérie en flammes (Algeria in Flames). 1958. Produced and directed by René Vautier. Algeria/France, PA: unreleased.
La Bataille d'Alger (The Battle of Algiers). 1966. Produced and directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. France/Italy/Algeria, PA: Ritalo Films. DVD.
Les Hors-la-loi (The Outlaws). 1969. Produced and directed by Tewfik Farès. Algeria, PA: O.N.C.I.C.
Le Vent des Aurès (The Winds of the Aurès). 1966. Produced and directed by Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina. Algeria, PA: O.N.C.I.C.
L'Opium et le bâton (Opium and the Stick). 1969. Produced and directed by Ahmed Rachedi. Algeria, PA: O.N.C.I.C.
Patrouille à l'est (Eastern Patrol). 1971. Produced and directed by Amar Laskri. Algeria, PA: O.N.C.I.C.
Zone interdit (Forbidden Zone). 1972. Produced and directed by Ahmed Lallem. Algeria, PA: O.N.C.I.C.
Notes
1 With this in mind, MacMaster has described how ‘the most prominent female militants were largely restricted to symbolic acts of international solidarity that served the purposes of FLN propaganda such as attending various international women's conferences in Vienna, Copenhagen, Cairo and elsewhere’ (Citation2012, 333).
2 Author's translation: ‘Le moudjahid can be characterised in terms of a sense of sacrifice, of audacity and unbridled heroism.’
3 Imazighen represent around 20–30% of the Algerian population, and have their own cultural traditions, religion (a blend of Islam with Jewish and Christian elements), and languages (Kabyle, Chaouia, Mozabite).
4 Author's translation:
In a traditional society like Kabylia, it is obvious that tasks are assigned according to gender; small jobs (or seen as such) are for women (transporting water, wood, gardening, weaving, collecting manure, etc), in contrast to men's work (heavy, important, and above all visible).
5 Although undeniably influential, the ethnographic work of Pierre Bourdieu (conducted largely during the Algerian War in Algeria) has also been criticised for propagating an ahistorical version of Amazigh (Kabyle) culture (Lacoste-Dujardin Citation2008, 7). According to Paul Silverstein and Jane Goodman, Bourdieu established a ‘Kabyle myth’ that ‘served to justify and naturalize the French imperial presence in Algeria’ (Citation2009, 25). For this reason, I have attempted to use a number of different theorists in order to examine the sexual politics of the films.
6 Author's translation: ‘Erase the individual [ … ], suppress their subjectivity’.
7 Author's translation: ‘Emphatic masculine independence’ and ‘a stubborn dependence upon the mother’.
8 Author's translation: ‘We know that we can mould women to our own image, this is obvious. But show that you are the mother of a boy, this is also to express that we are as much the mothers of all men.’
9 Les ‘hors-la-loi’ was a colloquial term used by the French army to describe moudjahiddine, or, more specifically, ‘the army of the frontiers’ recruited from Algerian refugees in Tunisia or Morocco (see L'Opium et le bâton for an example of a French officer using the term to refer to an Algerian resistant).
10 Author's translation: ‘Men (in the Latin sense of vir) occupy a highly privileged position.’
11 The terms ‘harkis’ refers to Algerian nationals who fought for the French army during the conflict. The phrase is sometimes used derogatorily to describe all Algerian Muslims who supported colonial ideology.
12 Bourdieu identifies the colour white as a sign of the nif.
13 Author's translation: ‘measured, modest, and restrained in his words. He always weighs up the good and the bad’.
14 Author's translation: ‘The masculine gender [which is] perceived as [high and] active; in contrast to the female gender; placed in the background, hidden, understood as passive.’
15 Author's translation: ‘A game of defiance and retaliation’.
16 Author's translation: ‘The Kabyle hero as above all a guardian of his community’.
17 Author's translation: ‘It is a component of Algerian culture, it helps to enrich it, to diversify it, and I would like (as you should do with me) not only to maintain it but to expand it.’
18 Author's translation: ‘Decolonization coincides with the rise of the image of the archetypal moudjahid [freedom fighter], a figure bestowed with exemplary morals, nobility, generosity and pride.’
19 Ranjana Khanna has previously illustrated how La Bataille d'Alger purports to represent the conflict in accurate, ‘objective’ terms through a number of formal and narrative techniques (Citation2008, 17). Central to this observation is Pontecorvo's representation of the ‘milk bar’ bombings carried out by the three famous fidayate (‘fire carriers’), Djamila Bouhired, Samia Lakhdari and Zohra Drif, and the way in which Pontecorvo involved Yacef Saadi (an ex-FLN leader) in the writing and screenplay of the film. Pontecorvo also blurs the line between fiction and reality by using cinematographic techniques characteristic of newsreel footage (telephoto lenses, fluid/unstable handheld cameras, high levels of graininess/contrast).
20 Author's translation: ‘Attempted to suppress any demands associated with Berber culture’.
21 A katiba was a main mobile unit of the ALN, composed of either of a small company (approximately 100 men), or a section (about 30 men).
22 Author's translation: ‘The ultimate depersonalization of the nationalist fighter’.
23 The café wars were bouts of conflict that took places between the FLN and the MNA (mouvement national algérien) during the war. Their names derive from the fact that part of the fighting between these two nationalist groups took the form of bomb attacks and assassinations in cafés.
24 Author's translation: ‘The narrative of the Revolution is often inflected with a tone of poetic triumph, an homage to martyrs, hagiography rather than history.’
25 In Laskri's film, martyrdom is represented largely through the trope of a radio broadcast, which constantly reminds the ALN militants of their duty towards the nation.
26 Author's translation: ‘Dr. Lazrak appears in this film as an intellectual torn and shared between what he is; a bourgeois doctor living in a European quarter of the city, and what he is asked to be; a doctor belonging to the Revolution.’
27 As Kristin Ross claims, for the antihumanist Marxists who came to the forefront of the mid-1960s, ‘“man” is of course bad because it is nothing but an image that masks the conditions of bourgeois domination’ (Citation1995, 163).
28 Author's translation: ‘The Algerian nationalist seems to have learnt judo. Where?’
29 Author's translation: ‘Who can allow a woman to benefit from her life as a mother.’