Battle Of Algiers Research Articles

Algerian cinema and its accompaniment of the war of national liberation...The film "The Battle of Algiers" as a model

Algerian cinema and its accompaniment of the war of national liberation...The film "The Battle of Algiers" as a model

Memory in action: Reflections on multidirectionality’s possibilities in the classroom

Our essay examines the use of multidirectional memory in three different classrooms and institutions. It reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a multidirectional framework for Europeanists seeking to teach students how to identify and/or commemorate historical linkages between minoritized groups, encourage students to develop bonds of solidarity among themselves, and diversify and globalize their syllabi. Reading authors such as W.E.B Du Bois, Amié Césaire, and William Gardener Smith through a multidirectional lens helped students place events such as the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Algerian Revolution in conversation with one another while staying attuned to the spaces between particularist and universalist readings of the past. Discussing media sources such as films La Haine and Battle of Algiers within this larger multidirectional context give students a frame with which to imagine alternative trajectories of memory and solidarity in Europe. Finally, by applying their understanding of multidirectional memory to a real-life scenario in a commemorative proposal, students attempt to grasp the never-finished complexities of creating liberatory, solidarity-based historical commemorations. We argue that the concept of multidirectional memory helps students to develop a stronger sense of investment in learning about the complex historical legacies of persecution of violence and to engage more critically with the competitive memory frameworks that remain dominant in contemporary political discourse about antisemitism and racism.

The Implied Who

This analysis applies theories of recognition explicated by Frantz Fanon, Nancy Fraser, and Pierre Bourdieu towards the semiotic analysis of Le Joli Mai (1963), The Battle of Algiers (1966), and La Haine (1995). This article argues that embodied affective histories (constituting the habitus) seek to be validated and recognised at the level of the individual, the collective group identity, and the nation-state. The films analysed constitute attempts at recognition within the global Bourdieusian field of cinema through means of semiotic communication. In doing so, this project hopes to analyse film from a social action perspective, focusing on the effects of the film with audience interaction in mind, and how toexplain the role audiences and publics have within the conceptualisation and execution of semiotic communication within the context of a postcolonial film.

Algerians in Rome, Italians in Algiers: Before and after The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Algerians in Rome, Italians in Algiers: Before and after The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Affect and Empathy

Our summer issue begins with a three-part special section on phenomenologies of perception in screen media. These articles focus on novel technological means of representing embodied, lived experience, as well as ways that visual media can impact embodied spectatorship. Each examines media artworks that attempt to represent the seemingly intangible, such as loss, decay, and temporality. The authors in this section offer nuanced and ethically oriented phenomenologies of vision, motion, and time. In “Projecting the Colors of Vision,” Wendy Haslem discusses how artists working in animation, cinema, and virtual reality use visual media to represent the lived experience of sight loss. Haslem analyzes the “haptic optics” of Yoav Brill's Ishihara (2010), Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), and James Spinney and Peter Middleton's Notes on Blindness (2016) to show how these artists use technological tools and experiments with color to represent diverse, embodied experiences of visual disability, and to encourage “empathic awareness” in viewers. In his article, Yifei Sun critiques the analog-contingent theories of movement put forward by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Sun modifies aspects of Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image to offer a theory that accommodates the qualities of digital film. Sun considers the possibilities for software art to produce what he calls “voyeuristic authorship” and applies his “ontology of decay” to Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin's The Battle of Algiers (2006). In “Aesthetics of Slowness, Aesthetics of Boredom,” Giulia Tronconi examines slow cinema's phenomenology of time. Tronconi offers an incisive reading of Tsai Ming-liang's films I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020) that reveals how the filmmaker uses “felt duration” as a strategy to cultivate “empathic contemplation” and “respectful observation” in viewers. The author engages with the work of Schopenhauer and Heidegger and with Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image to explain the political and ethical potential of delaying movement in film.

Looking back on a nation’s struggle: women’s reflections on the Algerian War of liberation

ABSTRACT This article examines the memoirs of three former militants who, in the later years of their lives, reflect on the significance of their participation in the anticolonial struggle: Louisette Ighilahriz at 64, Zohra Drif at 79, Yamina Cherrad Bennaceur at 81. I choose these three memoirs because each recounts a remarkable journey to empowerment and when brought together they emphasize the collective nature of the liberation struggle. Drif played a prominent role in the war as a ‘poseuse de bombes’ during the Battle of Algiers, Ighilahriz was a courier for the FLN, Bennaceur a nurse in the maquis. My intent in this article is to study their memoirs as historical artefacts that depict a collective anticolonial struggle and as chronicles of personal struggle in time of war. I test the premise that the three chroniclers looking back on the past confirm that their participation in the liberation struggle was transformative. Their courage and resilience tested, the young women emerged empowered. Yet, the war experience was traumatic, and each memoir reveals the trauma endured, and by articulating that trauma, hopefully helps heal psychological wounds.

The Remarkable Power of Language in The Battle of Algiers

The bilingualism of The Battle of Algiers is one of the film’s most salient characteristics, yet it is mostly absent from the literature. The use of two languages within the film creates disjuncture in its textual fabric, disjuncture in places that do not always align with neat French/Algerian fault-lines. The alternating use of French and Algerian Arabic exists in productive tension with a unity of perspective that the film offers the viewer, revealing the difficulty of holding together and making narrative sense of the historical moment that constitutes its subject matter, the eponymous Battle of Algiers, at the time at which the film was produced, in the newly independent Algeria of the mid-1960s. The representation of the FLN’s unity and legitimacy as the sole representative of the will of the people paints over historical divisions, but the irrepressible force of the Algerian masses frequently de-centres the FLN, a fact revealed in the film’s linguistic make-up.

Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter by Zohra Drif

Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter by Zohra Drif

Algeria, Antifascism, and Third Worldism: An Anticolonial Genealogy of the Western European New Left (Algeria, France, Italy, 1957–1975)

ABSTRACT This article explores the hypothesis that the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) occupies a core position in the genealogy of the New Left, having set the political and conceptual framework – namely the ‘global civil war’ – by which the victory of Castro and Guevara or the triumph of the Vietcong would later be understood. The aim is to set out fresh approaches to understanding the emergence of the New Left as a complex process encompassing local, national and transnational dynamics; a process shaped by, but also shaping, decolonisation. The goal is to contribute – at least – to complicating the Western narrative of the global 1960s, by shifting the focus from Berkeley and Paris to Algiers. In this sense, it is useful to look at the anticolonial networks in and among Italy, France, and of course Algeria. The periodisation, necessarily loose, takes as terminus post quem the ‘Battle of Algiers’ (1957) and as terminus ad quem the fall/liberation of Saigon (1975): for the transnational public of the New Left, the first marks a short circuit between the Algerian War and the memory of the Resistance and the Second World War, while the second marks the end of Third Worldism as a political project.

One Man's Freedom Fighter on Film is Another Man's Terrorist During the Classroom Discussion: The Advantages and Unintended Consequences of Using Film to Teach Terrorism

People are often startled that I teach a course on terrorism. They half jokingly ask if I teach students how to commit it. Yet, the interdisciplinary study of terrorism has grown over the last decade and will continue to do so. Colleges and Universities have expanded their offerings on the subject. Terrorism is often cross listed with criminal justice, and intelligence studies. However, a constant challenge of teaching terrorism is the mixed audience of students and differing expectations of course content. The online course at Penn State is made up of traditional students, returning adults, active and retired military, and once I had an FBI agent who specialized in counter terrorism. Such a diverse audience begs the question of how are we to teach the course? Is there a difference between the academic studies and theoretical discussions on one side and the practitioner on the other? This problem has been exacerbated both online, and in the classroom by a generation of visual learners. Think about how powerful it is for students to watch news coverage of 9/11, or have students with combat experience in Afghanistan. These experiences are far more powerful than reading a quantitative study of terrorist activities and then finding the flaws in its methodologies. It behooves the teacher to find new ways to mix up the curriculum.This paper examines the pedagogical strategies of using fictional films in a course on terrorism (both in residence and online). It is the hope that these films can bring life to the abstract concepts that students wrestle with in their readings. In this paper I examine the use of three particular films: First, is the famous Battle of Algiers (1966), which explores the Algerian war of independence against France, and specifically addresses issues of urban guerrilla warfare, and the limitations of counter terrorism still relevant today. After all the French won the battle but lost the war. The film also helps visualize what David Rapoport (2002) calls the second wave of terrorism. The second chosen is the Palestinian film, Paradise Now (2005), about the journey of two suicide bombers heading to Israel. This film not only speaks to the literature of scholars like Robert Pape, but serves as a window to the study of psychology and religion. I use Paradise Now as the springboard for role of religion in terrorism (though it is important to point out that religion is not what necessarily drives these two Palestinian men). Finally, I examine In the Name of the Father (1993), while ostensibly about the wrongfully arrested Guilford Four and the United Kingdom's war against the IRA, the film allows a broader class room discussion of the problematic of fighting terrorism in a democracy that values civil liberties. A perfect illustration is how students react to Daniel Day Lewis as Gerry Conlon and compare that to young Arab men wrongfully arrested after 9/11.By examining these three films this paper also hopes to continue expanding the study of film use in the classroom. Films are a dynamic and interactive process over how social reality will be perceived. While most of these films are based on true stories, they have to some extent been fictionalized to suit the dramatic needs of the audience and the financial expectations of the industry. For Americans the war on terrorism has been fought in the modern 24 hour/7 days a week news cycle. I argue that if done properly, popular films about terrorism can serve as a stimulating jumping off point to illustrate the theories, concepts, and issues discussed in the course.

The Battle of Algiers and Colonial Analogy in the Panther 21

It made headlines when the prosecution screened The Battle of Algiers (1966) as evidence in a 1969–1971 New York Supreme Court case concerning over a dozen members of the Black Panther Party. According to the prosecution, the pseudo-documentary depicting a pivotal battle in the fight for Algerian Independence informed the defendants’ purported plan to bomb sites in New York City. The allegation presented a tactical link between the defendants and the anticolonial organization, the F.L.N., depicted in the film. This paper argues that the screening acted counterproductively for the prosecution, however, by highlighting and bolstering an ideological link between the F.L.N. and the Panthers, in turn reinforcing the relevance of the “colonial analogy” the Panthers popularized.

Women in Conflict, ‘Woman’ Conflicted: The Representation of Women in The Battle of Algiers (1966) Against the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Women in Conflict, ‘Woman’ Conflicted: The Representation of Women in <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> (1966) Against the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Shifting Positions: Amputation, Prosthesis, and the Embodied Memory of Algeria

By exploring the autobiographies of two childhood amputees, Nicole Guiraud and Danielle Michel-Chich, who were maimed in the Battle of Algiers in 1956 as Algeria fought for independence from France, the article addresses the varied positions of these women with relationship to France’s colonial history and within writing itself.

Sedimented Significations: Framing To Be King through Foucault’s Frontispiece, Lacan’s Borrowed Slide and the Fanonian-Inspired Film The Battle of Algiers

Sedimented Significations: Framing To Be King through Foucault’s Frontispiece, Lacan’s Borrowed Slide and the Fanonian-Inspired Film The Battle of Algiers

Transcending the Paradox of Violence: A Dialectical/Dialogical Interrogation of the Colonial/Anti-Colonial Struggle in Algeria

Abstract The growing complexity of contemporary globalized human culture, while creating greater opportunities for human relation, has likewise generated profound challenges to our human capacity to relate meaningfully. Using Gillo Pontecorvo's 1956 film The Battle of Algiers, Frantz Fanon's paradigmatic text The Wretched of the Earth, and the writings of Albert Camus as representative accounts of colonial/anti-colonial violence in the Algerian struggle for independence, this article will question the legitimacy of a dialectical approach to transcending the paradox of violence, proposing instead a manner of dialogical reconciliation through the human capacity for solidarity-in-relation.

Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter

Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter

Restaging Terror in the Algerian War: Zohra Drif, Malraux, Camus, Fanon

This article challenges widespread understandings and approaches to terror and terrorism, notably on display in Michael Walzer, through an analysis of the figure of Zohra Drif. A self-identified terrorist, Drif penned an apology for terrorism that engages in literary exegesis to defend her bombing of Le Milk Bar during the Battle of Algiers. I leverage her readings of Malraux's La Condition humaine and Camus's Les Justes in order to address two questions: what are the various constellations of meaning mobilized, contested, and reconfigured in identifying Drif as a "terrorist"? And, two, how does this particular case study open up to larger analyses about reading practices and the role of literature in creating, reinforcing, and contesting such constellations?

Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements by Suzanne Gauch

Gauch, Suzanne. Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-19-026258-7. Pp. 234. Highlighting themes of cinematic transnationalism, this study analyzes works by nine directors from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The essays are organized according to formal and critical considerations and will be useful to scholars working on Mohamed Chouikh, Lyès Salem, and Tariq Teguia (Algeria); Nabil Ayouch, Farida Benlyazid, and Faouzi Bensaïdi (Morocco); and Nejib Belkadhi, Nadia El Fani, and Nacer Khemir (Tunisia). Because the book brings together a wide variety of films (1988 to 2008) available to spectators in North America, it also provides rich material for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels.As in her Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (2006), Gauch engages with various theoretical, disciplinary, and area studies models. She dialogues, notably, withViola Shafik—whose now-classic Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (1998, 2007) established the historial importance of popular cinema as a post-independence vehicle of critique— as well as with key voices in comparatist, postcolonial, and film studies (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam).A central focus of Maghrebs in Motion is to explore how Maghrebi filmmakers have eschewed the traditional “didacticism and romanticism” (7) of popular cinema in favor of more nuanced and critically generative approaches. While the filmmakers in part 1 reformulate “the popular” by drawing innovatively upon“precinematic”regional and transnational texts (Beynlayzid, Chouikh, Khemir), those in part 2 critique history through the adaptation and hybridization of mainstream genres (Ayouch, Salem, El Fani). A third grouping of filmmakers pushes further in stylistic terms, offering autoreflexive and satirical meditations on the past and future of regional cinema (Teguia,Bensaïdi,Belkadhi).Contrasting with and complementing recent works by scholars such as Roy Armes, Guy Austin, Sandra Carter, Florence Martin, and Valerie Orlando, Gauch’s close readings explore the films’ aesthetic and figural dimensions in order to address broad sociological and historical questions. As she explains, while each film discussed is “distinct in [its] thematic, generic, narrative, and aesthetic approach,” each attempts to “dismiss the regional rivalries, easy dualisms, and fetishized signs that were colonialism’s deepest legacies” (6). The curatorial texture of Gauch’s work echoes her initial discussion of the “vexed” category of “Maghrebi cinema” (6) and reveals the irony of her opening evocation of the Orientalism-tinged“wonder,”“astonishment,”and“admiring inquisitiveness ” (2) with which the Northern gaze has tended to perceive the Maghrebi cultural and historical landscape.Countering the blinkering effect of major historical-spectatorial events such as The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966) or media representations of the “Arab Spring” (2011–), Gauch convincingly underscores the myriad powerful ways in which Maghrebi cinema continues to reveal and bypass the limits of “statesponsored [...] and civilizational discourses” (115). University of North Carolina, Wilmington Greta Bliss 206 FRENCH REVIEW 91.2 ...

The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics

Political cinema, particularly third cinema of the 1960s and subsequently inspired films, often relies upon the formation and transformation of subjectivity. Such films depict a becoming-political of their characters, such as Ali LaPointe's transformation from bricklayer and boxer to revolutionary in Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 ). As subjects are politicized, they reveal social, moral, existential, or ethical exigencies that drive the politics of the film. In this respect, most narrative-driven political cinema is biopolitical cinema, although its expression shifts from film to film, or from one period of time to another. Gilles Deleuze articulated such a shift in his two works on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Namely, he points to the breaking of the link between action and reaction that marks a shift from pre-World War II cinema to the postwar filmmaking environment. To update Deleuze's project on political cinema, this article posits another qualitative shift in political cinema stemming from the emergence of neoliberal economic policies and the growth of networked information systems from the 1990s to the present. This shift compromises earlier models of political cinema and results in a modern political cinema based on the fragmentation of political publics and the formation of new political exigencies. Two films set in Algeria will be used to document this shift in political modes, in a move towards the modern political cinema: Battle of Algiers and Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi, Rachid Bouchareb, 2010 ).

Women resisting terror: imaginaries of violence in Algeria (1966–2002)

ABSTRACT This article charts the roles and representations of Algerian Women as both agents and victims of violence in the War of Independence (1956–1962) and the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s in which the role of women emerged as a significant site of ideological, religious, and political struggle. This vision of Algerian Women, caught between models of participation and passivity, can be located within a long imaginary of Algerian women as exposed to colonial, patriarchal, state, or terrorist violence, but also possessing fortitude and resilience in the face of conflict. I examine the model of female agency through the figure of the bomb carrier in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), illuminating the gap between the freedom depicted, and promised, and the reality of women’s experience after the war. I then turn to the Algerian Civil War, considering one of the most enduring photographs to emerge from the conflict, Hocine Zaourar’s La Madone de Benthala (1997), an image that inscribes a quasi-universal image of female victimhood. Finally, an exploration of Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (2002) reveals a more complex staging of female resistance in times of terror. The film offers a delicate exploration of the emotional and psychological effects of political and symbolic violence, which troubles a more usual imaginary of Algerian women as noble, suffering, and endlessly resistant or resilient figures.