North African cinema: different depths of field
This special issue of the Journal of North African Studies offers a second collection of essays in large part inspired by a summer institute held at Oregon State University in 2014, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The first collection appeared in the March 2016 issue of JNAS. It assembled nine essays on some of the forces and artists who helped shape or articulate post-independence North Africa.
The 2014 summer NEH institute brought together for three weeks university scholars and teachers in different fields attached to the humanities and social sciences. This issue is also indirectly tributary of an earlier NEH institute held on the significance of Berber culture which took place at OSU in 2007, and of other meetings and publications devoted to North African minorities.Footnote1 As editors of this issue, we had the privilege of co-directing both the 2007 and 2014 NEH institutes, two highly stimulating intellectual communities focused on the distinctiveness of North African civilisation.
If the first collection focused from a wide angle on the larger question of ‘Maghrebi Artistic and Literary Expressions in the 21st Century’, this volume is concerned almost exclusively with cinematography in North Africa in its post-independence evolution. Encompassing a period between 1956 to the present, these essays discuss a North African cinema that moves from uncertainty to maturity, a cinema all at once that accepts and refuses mimesis – imitation of post-colonial narratives and styles – and searches for some other composition, some other sense of accordance with its deeper Berber substrate with the scars that modernity or globalism have weighed on the Maghreb in the last six decades.
In still photography, just as in cinema, one question is persistent: how do you recount what you see? It is always a normative question: when you press the shutter or begin filming on a 16 mm Bolex camera (the standard tool for many low budget directors from the 1950s until the digital era) that took years of savings to acquire, how do you adapt or break out of your world? How do you focus and frame the lens and then begin your story? It is an ontological question that contains an ethical purpose: looking through the lens how do you compose, narrate, illuminate, give new substance to history in a way that is not a betrayal? In western cinema (to the extent that this notion is held by cultural expectations rather than geographical limits) these matters often have been of no consequence (Spike Lee’s cinema would radically change this). The important factor was to narrate visibly a story. Post-colonial cinema, however, has always contained within the material acetate of its film a deeper script of self-interrogation. Of disquietude, where lines of tension never find resolve in songs of harmony.
This means that the underlying directions of Maghrebi cinema since decolonisation have in large part been contradictory. Under the different regimes of the FLN, Hassan II, Bourguiba and Ben Ali, reality and memory were made visible, through different depths of field, with different levels of clarity. Yet, state-sponsored films, particularly in Algeria, would be quickly eclipsed by clandestine productions by a diaspora of creative directors based in France.
Among the many lines of tension stands the geography of the Mediterranean: the space between the new Africa and the politically wavering European Union; between the harragas (document burners) and an unwelcome continent whose politicians, intellectuals and media have, for the most part, either repudiated or failed to properly represent and protect. The articles in this edition, first by Angelica Maria De Angelis, and then by Amadou T. Fofana and M. Kathleen Madigan, examine these questions in the films of Mezrak Allouache, Harragas, Philippe Lioret, Welcome, and Moussa Touré, La Pirogue.
In great part North African cinema since independence is ever exposing its linguistic confusion to communicate within and beyond its cultural limits. Independence presented new ways of talking, of seeing and of lacerating reality because the limits had changed. Algeria went from three French administrative departments to an independent state with a diaspora, mostly in France, that would grow in size and complexity over time. And what emerged over several decades was a discourse on hybridisation, on alterity or on discussing otherness from different positions. On discussing the slowly and awkwardly forming relationships between national and transnational compass settings. On new understandings of territory and geography. Nabil Boudraa’s exchange with the renowned film expert, Ahmed Bedjaoui, contributes with a contextual background on Algerian cinema since independence.
Often overtly or suggestively present in Algerian cinema is the shadow of war. Of violent war; a tautology that sets the two Algerian cycles of brutality – the war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and, les années noires from 1992 to 2000 – apart from other struggles in the Maghreb (but certainly on par with the present atrocities in Syria). Bennet Shaber’s essay examines the violence of war in Argentina and Algeria through the lenses of different filmmakers to explain how representational formulae find solutions to, and perhaps justification for sustaining the collective burden of national atrocities. Marie-Pierre Baggett, in her part, examines the symbolic importance of the Mediterranean in three films that tackles the topics of ethnicity, crossings, and immigration.
The second decade of the new millennium is already approaching. The last twenty years have given new directions for North African cinema, particularly for artists with feminist horizons such as Yamina Benguigui and Moufida Tlatli. North African cinema is finding its idiom, its coding, financing in the larger international production markets. And, despite the political differences that separate the regimes of the Maghreb, its cinema has formed a stable anchoring. We hope that this issue of JNAS will make that clear.
Acknowledgements
The National Endowment for the Humanities in large part contributed to the possibility of this publication. The editors of the present issue again wish to thank the NEH for its support of both summer Institutes in 2007 and 2014 at Oregon State University devoted to Berber and North African cultures. Particular gratitude is extended to Barbara Ashbrook, Assistant Director, and Victoria Sams, Program Officer, in the Division of Education Programs at NEH.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Previous scholarship principally includes, Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause, Editors. North African Mosaic: A Cultural Re-Appraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2007; and Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause, Co-Organizers, ‘The Berbers and Other Minorities in North Africa. A Cultural Reappraisal’. International Conference, Portland, Oregon. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Oregon State University and the Middle-East Studies Center State University, Portland State University (May 2005).