Constrained Militants: Algerian Women ‘in-between’ in Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Bourlem Guerdjou's Living in Paradise

Abstract

Beur filmmaker Bourlem Guerdjou's 1998 film Living in Paradise follows the divergent trajectories of a young Algeria couple (Nora and Lakhdar) living in the Nanterre shantytown during the Franco-Algerian war. Although the focus on Nora may seem on the surface to subvert the film's male-centred narrative as her growing political conscience leads her to harbour FLN militants from the French police, the film's gender politics are in fact complex and even problematic. Drawing on theories of women and nation in Algerian literature and film (Woodhull and Hadj-Moussa), this paper argues that Guerdjou is working within a stock set of images of women in Algerian society during the Franco-Algeria war, inherited from newsreels, documentaries and film classics such as Gillo Pontocorvo's The Battle of Algiers. Women of Living in Paradise embody contemporary Algeria's irreducibly contradictory identity. Expected to be both courageous militant and guarantor of traditional national culture, they are, in fact, asked to negotiate the ‘betweenness’ (Woodhull) of Algerian society in ways that have proved disastrous for them immediately after liberation and that continue to haunt contemporary gender relations in their country.