‘Will Movies Make Me Forget What I Saw?’ (Youcef, Mohamed Chouikh, 1993)

Abstract

Youcef (Mohamed Chouikh, 1993) is among the rare Algerian films whose narrative unfolds in the 1990s when Algeria was torn apart by violence. Chouikh's film looks at the past returning in the present, through the re-presentation of an Algerian combatant. It will be shown that the character of Youcef works as a metaphor of Algerian society, as well as of its cinema, since independence. Memories were subject to repression and cinema was under state control and censorship. Algeria is best understood as a culture of forgetting. With the civil war in the 1990s, the past seems about to return. Benjamin Stora suggests a ‘repetition’ of ‘the first war’ in the 1990s, which is illustrated cinematographically in Youcef with the screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966). These central images of/about the past can be interpreted as ‘haunting’—borrowing Jacques Derrida's terminology—current Algerian cinema. This study will thus aim to analyse the presence of a film within the film, focusing on how it addresses the question of memory through the Derridean notion of the ‘spectre’, understood as the unfinished past (of a social and economic liberation), but pointing towards a future (the liberation of Algerian cinema and nation).