Impasses of Algerian Cinema

Abstract

This article examines how Chouikh's groundbreaking trilogy of films – The Citadel (1988), Youssef (1993), The Ark of the Desert (1997) – critically comment on the deepening crisis of state-sponsored Algerian cinema. Situating them in a lineage of post-independence Algerian film-making, it traces how the films of Chouikh's trilogy depart from both the social realist and commercial conventions of state-sponsored Algerian cinema by borrowing from regional popular culture and Islamic artistic heritages. The article argues that Chouikh's films foreground the enduring influence of earlier Algerian cinema while seeking to defuse its often mythical articulations of Algerian citizenship in an era of both changing political engagements and new media proliferation. As such, Chouikh's films both foreshadow the five-year blackout of Algerian cinema from 1997 to 2002 and pave the way for its renewal in the hands of an innovative group of twenty-first century Algerian film-makers.