Rachid Bouchareb Research Articles

Rachid Bouchareb’s ethical cinema: Louisette and Annie, two women in the Algerian war of independence

ABSTRACT This article analyses the ethics of representation in Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s short 2019 documentaries Louisette and Annie, which highlight the participation of mujahidat (female militants) Louisette Ighilahriz and Annie Fiorio-Steiner in the 1954–1962 war of independence from the French. Given how much these women suffered (including under torture) during the war, how to convey their experiences in an ethical manner is a central concern. Bouchareb achieves an ethical balance between avoiding voyeurism and bearing testimony to these women’s suffering and active agency through using film techniques that approach his protagonists with respect, a central feature of his ethical cinema. He also relies on techniques that enhance spectatorial identification with the protagonists through triggering emotional responses. I identify and detail specific formal and thematic choices he made to highlight the past’s continuing relevance to the present and to centre women’s experiences, voices, and bodies. The films finally honour mujahidat (almost a decade after Bouchareb’s male centred epic film Hors la loi). Seeking to both stage and remedy the difficult anamnesis of the war, they bring memories together and carry messages about the need to always fight against injustice that are relevant on both sides of the Mediterranean, sixty years later.

Review: Contemporary Political Cinema, by Matthew Holtmeier

Review: <i>Contemporary Political Cinema</i>, by Matthew Holtmeier

ReFocus: The Films of Rachid Bouchareb. Edited by Michael Gott and Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

<i>ReFocus: The Films of Rachid Bouchareb</i>. Edited by <scp>Michael Gott</scp> and <scp>Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp</scp>

ReFocus: The Films of Rachid Bouchareb ed. by Michael Gott, and Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Rachid Bouchareb ed. by Michael Gott, and Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp Vlad Dima Gott, Michael, and Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, editors. ReFocus: The Films of Rachid Bouchareb. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020. ISBN 9781474466530 (webready PDF). 265 p. Paru dans la série "ReFocus: The International Directors," le nouveau volume édité par Michael Gott et Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp représente une contribution substantielle aux études consacrées au film français et à ses interactions avec le cinéma [End Page 345] postcolonial et international. Le réalisateur Rachid Bouchareb est un nom important du monde cinématographique. Or, avant la publication de cet ouvrage, son œuvre filmique n'était pas suffisamment étudiée dans le champ académique. Aussi le volume de Gott et Kealhofer-Kemp vient-il pallier ce manque en proposant une étude détaillée des films et des thèmes de prédilection de Bouchareb. L'objectif principal est de considérer, voire de proposer, de nouveaux cadres d'analyse permettant d'appréhender sa carrière. D'entrée de jeu, l'introduction des éditeurs offre une perspective d'ensemble sur la carrière du cinéaste français d'origine maghrébine, tout en convoquant des éléments biographiques (dont plusieurs entretiens avec le cinéaste), thématiques (les croisements culturels, la politique, l'immigration, la mobilité, les limites physiques et identitaires etc.), géographiques (ses films sont tournés au Sénégal, au Vietnam, en Algérie, aux États-Unis, en France etc.) et théoriques (à savoir le lien entre l'œuvre de Bouchareb et des concepts tels que "cinéma-monde," "cinéma francophone," "cinéma national," "cinéma de banlieue" ou "cinéma transnational"). En somme, les éditeurs et contributeurs tentent tous d'aborder Bouchareb comme "cinéaste global français." Leur démarche souscrit dès lors aux efforts menés récemment dans le domaine du cinéma francophone/postcolonial/français pour favoriser une approche plus "horizontale" entre les productions du Global South et celles du Global North, en vue d'éliminer toute trace de notion de hiérarchie. L'ouvrage s'organise en deux parties principales: la première, "A Multidimensional Œuvre," contient sept chapitres dont chacun traite d'au moins deux films; la seconde, "Case Studies," se décline en cinq chapitres, chacun consacré à un seul film, suivant l'ordre chronologique. Faute d'espace, nous proposons ici de n'en discuter qu'une sélection, nous permettant de mettre en valeur certaines des idées principales du volume. Dans le premier chapitre, "Pre-production Process," Kealhofer-Kemp s'inspire des mots de Bouchareb et de ses rencontres dans la vie réelle pour explorer le processus d'élaboration et de production filmiques, avant le tournage. Le résultat est la création d'un genre archipélique, à la fois personnel et philosophique, qui diversifie la sphère de création du cinéaste. Dans "The Road from Baton Rouge: Mapping Rachid Bouchareb's Transnational Mobile Movies," Gott compare pour sa part plusieurs films de Bouchareb et postule l'existence d'une catégorie spéciale dans l'œuvre de l'artiste: le film mobile et transnational. Cette sous-catégorie cinématographique trace une sorte de cartographie internationale qui nous pousse à reconsidérer les limites de la francosphère. Il importe aussi de mentionner que le propos de Gott offre d'excellents commentaires sur le texte des films, en particulier sur l'utilisation du plan traveling. La représentation de la femme (arabe) est traitée au chapitre 3 ("Questions of Gender and Embodiment in the Intimiste Films of Rachid Bouchareb") par Kaya Davies Hayon. La critique y examine en effet la représentation du corps de la femme [End Page 346] (à travers des exemples diégétiques mettant en scène des personnages qui pratiquent la danse du ventre) dans ce qu'elle appelle les films "intimes" de Bouchareb. Soulignons au passage que Davies Hayon ne manque pas de critiquer la tendance du cinéaste à renforcer des stéréotypes, et ce en dépit de son intérêt pour les gender politics. À titre d'exemple, elle maintient qu...

Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah's The Slaves, Haile Gerima's Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb's Little Senegal

86 CLA JOURNAL Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves, Haile Gerima’s Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal Helena Woodard Since at least the 1980s, high-profile West African slave forts, also known as dungeons, have attracted visitors in the international community for the forts’ role in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ghana’s Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, along with Senegal’s House of Slaves at Gorée Island, originally functioned as holding cells or prisons for slave captives awaiting sell to European traders before being transported across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage. In Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa,A.W. Lawrence writes,“Nowhere else have small and transitory communities of traders so changed the life of the alien peoples who surrounded them and indirectly of a vast region beyond” (29). Renovated and designated as world heritage sites by UNESCO to mark its historical role in the slavery past, the slave fort has also appealed to certain writers who--through tourism as prism--transformed it from mass cultural artifact to a geo-political, public memory space. Though I write about the slave fort in the context of Atlantic Slavery in my book, Slave Sites on Display: Reflections of Slavery Through Contemporary “Flash” Moments, I am primarily interested, here, in the symbolic slave fort’s mediative function in select contemporary literature between African “locals” and disproportionately slave-descendant African Americans who travel to those sites.In this article,I have chosen to focus on three works that expose complexities in that relationship through partial or full settings that begin at a slave fort in Africa before evolving, diachronically, through a failed Pan-Africanist motif (or the notion of an African diaspora unification) to immersion in debate about tourism, responsibility for the slavery past, and relations between Africans and diaspora slave descendants. By appropriating that motif in this article, I regard the slave fort’s function as a potent symbol for Atlantic slavery through complications regarding departure and return for African diaspora slave descendants who visit slave forts as tourists, and their relationship with African locals that they encounter. Haile Gerima’s classic film, Sankofa (1993), and Rachid Bouchareb’s independent film, Little Senegal (2000), for example, employ migrations themes and transnational identities through African and slave-descendant African American protagonists, but their relationships demonstrate deep fissures largely attributed to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Opening scenes in Sankofa and Little Senegal foreground the slave fort--or what Playwright Mohammed Ben-Abdallah refers to in The Slaves as the “stone CLA JOURNAL 87 Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in The Slaves, Sankofa, and Little Senegal monster” by the sea--where an African griot and slave-descendant African Americans briefly converge and communicate a need to mend their strained relationships. Both films intersect with Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves through the dungeon as a geo-political, public memory space. The play formalizes the dungeon as a foundational setting for Atlantic slavery, a precursor to the Middle Passage journey, and a foreshadowing of tensions between Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. I therefore place Sankofa and Little Senegal in conversation with The Slaves as these works dramatize the fort or dungeon as a pivotal, originary site that communicates a need for slave-descendant African Americans in the U.S. to connect with their African ancestry and the slave past in an effort to heal its lingering wounds. But while Ben-Abdallah allegorizes Atlantic Slavery within the confines of that space for captive Africans, Gerima and Bouchareb reinscribe its lineage in a complex meditation on slavery and race across the Atlantic through migrations themes and transnational identities for Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. Appropriating the Dungeon as Public Memory Space in The Slaves In anAuthor’s note about The Slaves Revisited,in the publication,titled The Fall of Kumbi and Other Plays, Mohammed Ben-Abdallah stated that his first objective for the revised script was“to provide a confrontation, a dialogue as it were, between the pain and angst of Africa at large, and the Big, White, Stone Monster by the sea . . . the slave fort” (iii, 25 March 2011...

Tracing a history of terrorism in Rachid Bouchareb’s films: London River (2009), Hors la loi (2010) and La Route d’Istanbul (2016)

This article examines Rachid Bouchareb’s London River, Hors la loi and La Route d’Istanbul. The trilogy explores terrorism’s many forms that range from anti-colonial and ethno-national to state and jihadist terror in the twentieth century. Hors la loi, a narrative of anti-colonial Algerian terrorism, exposes the juxtaposing meanings of being outside the law – as victims of the unjust colonial law and as a strategy to use victimhood as a weapon. London River and La Route d’Istanbul, on the other hand, by focusing on the grief of politically neutral parents, leave the origins and causes of jihadist terrorism unexplored.

Missing children: Merzak Allouache and Rachid Bouchareb or, 2005 ten years later

ABSTRACTIn José Emilio Burucúa and Nicolás Kwiatkowski's ‘The Absent Double: Representations of the Disappeared,’ the authors, writing about the ‘systematic and clandestine murders’ of thousands of Argentine citizens between 1976 and 1983, introduce the notion of ‘representational formulas,’ devices that bind together ‘fact, truth and narration’ in the various attempts of artists to confront a past of and present haunted by political violence. In particular, the authors claim that representational formulas are ways of coming to terms with ‘historical massacres,’ acts of political violence for which ‘a group rather than an individual is responsible, and exceptionally cruel methods are used. Moreover, the victims, dead or alive, are treated with utter contempt,’ while too often, ‘the perpetrators face no great physical risks.’ This essay develops the concept of representational formula in the work of Lisandro Alonso, proposes the voyage form or search for a missing child as one such formula, and examines its use by the Algerian filmmakers Merzak Allouache and Rachid Bouchareb. It concludes by comparing their handling of the formula with that of two other filmmakers, Pawel Pawlikowski and Nacer Khemir, also confronting acts of historical, political violence in other parts of the world. What is at stake in every case is giving the spectator time to think and resources, often theological in origin, to think differently about time. In short, encounters with ontological, political and aesthetic openness.

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 ).

Cannes 2015: Where Is Africa?

Cannes 2015:Where Is Africa? Olivier Barlet Translated by Nzingha Kendall and Julie Le Hégarat We’re reading everywhere that Africa will be almost absent at this year’s edition of Cannes. But which Africa do we mean? With the last-minute addition of Lamb (2015, Ethiopia), by the Ethiopian filmmaker Yared Zeleke in the official selection of Un Certain Regard, African cinemas are present in the most prestigious international competition, the event where the largest concentrations of journalists worldwide assemble for a film festival. The anxiety was this: the continent’s absence, its invisibility, and also its rejection—the lack of recognition of its value. Herein lies the point of contention. Until Mahamat Saleh-Haroun’s Un Homme qui crie / A Screaming Man (2010, Chad) was awarded the jury prize in 2010, Sub-Saharan African filmmakers had been absent from official competition for thirteen years, despite being represented almost every previous year. During this time North African filmmakers were not present either, except for Rachid Bouchareb with Indigènes / Days of Glory (France) in 2006 (whose main actors won a collective award for Best Actor) and Hors la loi / Outside the Law (dir. Rachid Bouchareb, France) in 2010. Since then African filmmakers have been present. However, gone are the days when the French Minister of Foreign Affairs pressured the festival to include films that were financed by the Ministry in competition. Why, moreover, should a program that aims for excellence, be obliged to represent all five continents if none of the continents produces a film that supersedes the rest? Especially since the Official Selection assembles a large group of established cineastes (with a few exceptions), whereas A Certain Regard welcomes up-and-coming directors. The secret of Cannes’s program, and its enduring success, is that the selected films maintain a balance between demanding auteur films like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2010 Golden Palm winner Loong Boonmee raleuk chat / Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thailand), and others that [End Page 234] bet everything on cinema’s magic power over a more general audience. The selection committee is also equally attentive to choosing films from the most diverse number of countries—without overrepresenting one over another—especially in the case of French films. The creation of Un Certain Regard in 1978 allowed more daring and original films and lesser-known auteur films to be shown. In 1962 the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics created International Critics’ Week, which was reserved for first and second films. The French Directors Guild established the Directors’ Fortnight in 1969, and later ACID (Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema) started their own program [in 1993]. Thanks to these associations, a large number of films that normally would not receive as much attention have a showcase at Cannes—which does not necessarily imply that they have greater visibility overall. The relative absence of Africa at Cannes corresponds to an ongoing crisis (due to the reduction of international funding) in African auteur cinema. Currently African films increasingly rely on digital equipment, but their low budgets and filmmakers’ lack of formal training mean that these productions are geared toward a local audience. Thus, very few of these filmmakers make their mark on the international scene. Nonetheless, every choice brings frustrations, and at times resentment. Every year has its hard feelings or misunderstandings reinforced by the awards: the selection committee is called misogynist (not enough films by women), too intellectual (too many auteur films), or ethnocentric (not enough films from the global South). Of course we are most interested in this last point. Due to too much competition or lack of recognition some great films have not been accepted or were only shown at less popular special screenings which are out of competition. Such was the case of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006, Mali), which had a successful theatrical release (195,444 tickets sold in France in 2006). Although his Timbuktu (2014, Mali) did not win any prizes in competition at Cannes in 2014, he got his revenge winning seven Cesars, and at last count, the film had sold 1.2 million tickets in France, breaking the record for African film held by Youssef Chahine...

To remember in order to be able to forget: Rachid Bouchareb’s Outside the Law and the construction of a new, inclusive French national identity

At its screening in Cannes, Rachid Bouchareb's film on the Algerian war of independence, Hors la loi (Outside the Law, 2010), was met with vehement protests from veterans and French right-wing politicians who accused it of presenting an ‘anti-French’ account of this traumatic war which is still affecting many Frenchmen's attitude towards North African immigrants and their descendants. Rather than addressing the war along Manichean national allegiance lines, however, the film emphasises similarities between the Algerian fight for freedom and the French Resistance during the Second World War. Its setting in Paris among Algerian immigrants highlights the war as a shared national heritage, and through its mainstream format it invites all Frenchmen, regardless of their backgrounds, to remember this largely occulted war, in order to be able to move on … and forget. In a postcolonial understanding of Ernest Renan's claim that the establishment and consolidation of a nation requires its individual members to forget past controversies, Outside the Law can thus be said to contribute to the construction of a new and more inclusive understanding of the French nation.

Gender, genre and intertextuality in Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la loi

This article examines the close relationship between gender, film genre and intertextuality in Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s 2010 feature film Hors la loi to argue that the film’s problematic gender politics detract from Bouchareb’s intended construction of an imagined community. Hors la loi is a historical film about Algerians’ struggle for national liberation from the French, focusing particularly on the Algerian community in Paris. Bouchareb’s multiple filmic intertexts include Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and Hollywood genres such as gangster/mafia, crime, war and western movies. These film genres all tend to center on male characters, a feature also found in Bouchareb’s film. In Hors la loi, female characters are types and stock characters. The film does not reflect the historical reality of Algerian women’s active participation in the war. Bouchareb’s problematic representation of women’s role in the war is due primarily to the influence of epic Hollywood intertexts, which leave less space for female agency than The Battle of Algiers did. As Bouchareb’s war films have reached large audiences, this blind spot is of concern because women of Maghrebian descent in France are simultaneously centered and silenced in public discourse today, thus increasing the need for developing complex representations of their agency in various cultural productions.

Code-switching as Power Strategy: Multilingualism and the Role of Arabic in Maïwenn’s Polisse (2011)

The presence of multilingualism, and its representation as a strategy for exerting power, is steadily increasing in twenty-first-century French cinema. In recent films such as Un Prophete (Jacques Audiard, 2009), Entre les murs (Laurent Cantet, 2008) and London River (Rachid Bouchareb, 2009), multilingualism does not merely function as a decorative or secondary element, but as a central narrative component, a device for wresting and wielding power and a means of (re)negotiating interpersonal hierarchies. Thus contemporary multilingual French films are not merely multilingual; they are about multilingualism. This article focusses on a sequence of code-switching between French and Arabic in the film Polisse (Maiwenn, 2011). Contrasting this scene with earlier depictions of Arabic in French cinema, it interrogates how Polisse uses code-switching to reconfigure the power relationship between French and languages historically underrepresented, trivialised or marginalised.

Współczesne kino francuskie wobec pamięci postkolonialnej

Contemporary French Cinema Facing Postcolonial Memories&#x0D; For years little has been said the French public discourse about North and West African contribution to the World War II efforts, the sacrifice in blood of their soldiers was mentioned only rarely and occasionally. However, filmmakers embraced this topic unfamiliar to the public. Rachid Bouchareb – a French director of Algerian descent – is one of them. His film Indigènes (2006) is a tribute of sorts to the “forgotten heroes”, who have lost their lives fighting Germans in the south of France and later Alsace. By portraying four soldiers, the artist poses important questions regarding topics such as ethnicity, equality, discrimination, and racism, but also that of being forsaken, leaving an emptiness in the collective mind of a nation. The author describes the attitude of contemporary French filmmakers towards the postcolonial past and themes of ethnicity, concentrating on a film by Rachid Bouchareb. The picture seems to be especially relevant from the point of mutual relations between ethnicity, the politics and culture.

Rethinking the Diaspora through the Legacy of Slavery in Rachid Bouchareb's &lt;em&gt;Little Senegal&lt;/em&gt;

Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal (2001) sheds light on different experiences of African migration, dramatizing the protagonist Alloune’s investigation into the traces of slavery to pinpoint the legacy of forced displacement in the construction of the African diaspora. The film articulates the fantasy of a past through reconstructing Alloune’s genealogical tree, which displays the distance between the African character and his African American counterparts. Bouchareb interrogates the legacy of French colonialism on the postcolonial subject while exposing the limits of the diaspora as a unifying concept among Africans and African Americans.

La pirogue by Moussa Touré

Reviews 249 wake of a devastating accident; Laurence Anyways (dir. Xavier Dolan), an exuberantly imagined and photographed epic tale that explores the nature of love and the title character’s transition into a transgendered individual; and Inch’Allah (dir. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette), a portrayal of Israeli-Palestinian hostility through the eyes of an outsider (a Québécois obstetrician) living in Israeli territory and working in a West Bank refugee camp. Finally, under the rubric“French Connections”: French directors are working outside France, as evidenced by Rachid Bouchareb’s Just Like a Woman (Great Britain/ United States) and Anne Fontaine’s Two Mothers/Adore (Australia/France). Fontaine’s film, from a Doris Lessing story, was particularly intriguing as the director continued to explore her favorite theme—the emotional and sexual tensions in relationships among women and men. El taaib (The Repentant) by Merzak Allouache (Algerianborn veteran of the French industry) and Les chevaux de Dieu by Nabil Ayouche (Paris-born, Morocco-based) screened in SIFF’s inaugural African Pictures project. Ayouche received the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Director in recognition of his absorbing tale of three boys from a Moroccan bidonville who become suicide bombers. My favorite films this year came from Spain and Estonia. Their connections to France? Both are in French and each features an octogenarian French thespian whose performance is pure pleasure. In The Artist and the Model (dir. Fernando Trueba), Jean Rochefort plays a dispirited artist in Occupied France who is unexpectedly inspired by a young passeuse to make one last attempt to capture Beauty in his art. In A Lady in Paris (dir. Ilmar Raag), Jeanne Moreau (in a supporting role) creates the most cantankerous senior citizen imaginable. Her haughtiness, complaints, and demands (croissants must be au beurre, fresh from the bakery) cause her Estonian caretaker frustration and anger, but eventual compassion and friendship. Deeply humane stories both—don’t miss them! University of Idaho, emerita Joan M. West Touré, Moussa, réal. La pirogue. Int. Souleymane Seye Ndiaye, Laïty Fall, Malaminé ‘Yalenguen’ Dramé. Chauves-Souris, 2012. Senegalese director Moussa Touré’s 1997 film TGV was featured at the 2013 New York African Film Festival, due to the great success of La pirogue, his latest. TGV is a comic satire about Rambo, who drives a brightly painted bus between Dakar and Conakry, Guinea, and a host of passengers, each with different reasons for paying the handsome fare to make the dangerous journey. Fifteen years later, La pirogue tells a similar tale, only now as epic tragedy, and the vehicle is a brightly painted huge pirogue piloted by Baye Laye, who can no longer make his living from a sea overfished due in part to his government’s preference for international industrial fishing companies. Like TGV, passengers in La pirogue have different reasons for making the dangerous trip from a popular fishing port of Dakar to the Canary Islands. It is a story featured regularly in newspapers about scores of victims who die en route, or wash up as corpses on tourist beaches, or arrive at their destination only to be repatriated or interned in centres de rétention (one character in the film burns his papers since, according to international law, sans-papiers cannot be returned to a country for which they hold no proof of origin). Touré’s purpose is to move viewers beyond headlines and into the lives of people who, in increasing numbers, leave loved ones, homes, and businesses behind, searching for a better life for themselves and their families. At the port from which the pirogue departs, Touré depicts the construction of numerous étages (as homes with a second floor are called), which, a character remarks, is the sign of a successful crossing to Spain. But it comes with a price: a seven-day trip across open sea in a pirogue offering no shelter from burning sun, raging storms, and dwindling supplies of food, water, and fuel. Passengers, however, by no means share a common dream. Of the thirty lives Baye Laye must navigate to safe harbor, one-third come from a tribe in Guinea seeking no more than the possibility of day labor in Spain...

Indigènes after Indigènes: post-war France and its North African troops

This article focuses on North African soldiers who served in the French army of occupation in western Germany after its liberation in 1945. Taking as its starting point Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 film, Indigènes, the article contrasts claims the film made about the memorial exclusion of the colonial soldier with his surprising centrality to French accounts of their own military exploits. Using publications issued by the army for its internal readership and archival records of the military occupation's day-to-day activities, the author argues for a modified understanding of the French Republican notion of assimilation that is able to take account of the prolific representation of the North African soldier, and his accommodation, in Cold War Germany.

Maghrebi-French Women in French Téléfilms: Sexuality, Gender, and Tradition from Leïla née en France (1993) to Aïcha: vacances infernales (2012)

A comparison of feature-length French téléfilms (made-for-television films) whose narratives are constructed from the point of view of Maghrebi-French women reveals a striking similarity: the significance of the interconnected themes of sexuality, gender, and traditions associated with Maghrebi Muslim cultures. Through an analysis of the treatment of virginity, marriage, and exogamous relationships – relationships between Maghrebi-French women and men who are not Muslim – in téléfilms by directors such as Miguel Courtois, Rachid Bouchareb, Rachida Krim, and Yamina Benguigui, this article examines the extent to which French téléfilms can be seen to challenge dominant paradigms about Maghrebi-French women in France, and in particular the notion that they are victims of a patriarchal Arab Muslim culture due to their gender and/or agents of revolt against oppression. It will also consider the influence of the articulation of these themes on the representations of Maghrebi families in France. This study will argue that while the main source of conflict between Maghrebi-French women and their parents lies in questions relating to sexuality, gender, and tradition, these themes are in fact reconfigured in key ways in téléfilms broadcast since 2005. This shift results in a more nuanced and less critical portrayal of the Maghrebi family and opens new space in the narratives, which is devoted to other matters of importance to people of Maghrebi descent in France, such as (un)employment, socio-economic disparity, and discrimination.

Rachid Bouchareb’s Outside the Law: Aesthetics and Reception in France

This article is a critical reading of the Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s films and their reception in France, Algeria, and the United States. Whereas Days of Glory, which deals with African soldiers who fought on behalf of France in World War II, was praised for its realism, Outside the Law, taking the form of a gangster film, failed to garner the label of authenticity in its treatment of the Algerian War of Independence. By analyzing the shift from Day of Glory to Outside the Law in the filmic language that characterizes Bouchareb’s style, and the public response to it, Merkel attempts to construct a language of tropes, forms, and contexts that determine the palatability of African art, notably in metropolitan France.

Crossing the linguistic threshold: Language, hospitality and linguistic exchange in Philippe Lioret's Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb's London River

ABSTRACTInterest in the dynamics of border-crossing and migration has been a remarkable development among both film-makers and film scholars in recent years, and the cinemas of France and of the francophone world have been no exception to this. There is still much room for work, however, concerning the linguistic aspect of this dynamic. This article will discuss the use of multilingualism in two French films of 2009, Philippe Lioret's Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb's London River. In both these films a meeting between local and migrant characters is negotiated by use of a third language, native to neither and also displaced. Adopting the metaphor of hospitality developed by Mireille Rosello, which Lioret's film in particular makes explicit in its structure, and reflecting also on Jean-Luc Godard's famous description of language as ‘la maison où l'homme habite’, the article traces the concept of a ‘threshold language’, a space ‘on the doorstep’ in which a tentative cultural meeting can be initiated on equal terms and without commitment to the dangerous crossing into that place where the other is at home. It thus examines the negotiation of linguistic territories and suggests that these two films offer a challenge to conventional assumptions about linguistic assimilation and, through language, an alternative to the fraught assumptions of migrant relationships as those between host and guest.

Cosmopolitan (Dis)encounters: The Local and the Global in Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering and Rachid Bouchareb’s London River

Abstract: Through the postcolonial reading of Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006) and London River (Rachid Bouchareb, 2009), I mean to analyse the multiethnic urban geography of London as the site where the legacies of Empire are confronted on its home ground. In the tradition of filmmakers like Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Michael Winterbottom or Mike Leigh, who have faithfully documented the city’s transformation from an imperial capital to a global cosmopolis, Minghella and Bouchareb demonstrate how the dream of a white, pure, uncontaminated city is presently «out of focus», while simultaneously confirming that colonialism persists under different forms. In both films the city’s imperial icons are visually deconstructed and resignified by those on whom the metropolitan meanings were traditionally imposed and now reclaim their legitimate space in the new hybrid and polyglot London. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming presence of the multicultural rhetoric in contemporary visual culture, their focus is not on the carnival of transcultural consumption where questions of class, power and authority conveniently seem to disappear, but on the troubled lives of its agents, who experience the materially local urban reality as inevitably conditioned by the global forces –international war on terror, media coverage, black market, immigration mafias, corporate business– that transcend the local. This paradox is also perceived in the way the two filmmakers depict the postcolonial metropolis as the locus of social inequality and disequilibrium, but also as the scenario of unexpected encounters and alliances where both the protagonists and the spectators can explore the fantasies and fears about Otherness, and thus contest racial stereotypes. _______________________________________________________________ Resumen: Mediante una lectura postcolonial de Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006) y London River (Rachid Bouchareb, 2009) trato de analizar la geografia multietnica de Londres como el espacio desde donde interrogar el legadodel Imperio desde el lugar mismo en que este se origino. En la tradicion de directores como Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Michael Winterbottom o Mike Leigh, que han documentado fielmente la transformacion de esta ciudad desde la capital imperial a la cosmopolis global, Minghella y Bouchareb demuestran que el sueno de una ciudad blanca, pura y no contaminada es irrealizable, constatando, al mismo tiempo, la pervivencia del colonialismo bajo diferentes facetas. En ambas peliculas, la iconografia imperial de la ciudad es visualmente reconstruida y resignificada precisamente por aquellos sujetos sobre los que tradicionalmente se han impuesto los significados de la metropolis, los mismos que ahora reclaman un espacio legitimo en la nueva Londres hibrida y poliglota. No obstante, y pese a la apabullante presencia de esta retorica de lo multicultural en la cultura visual contemporanea, el objeto de estos directores no es el carnaval transcultural de la ciudad donde las cuestiones de clase, poder y autoridad parecen haber desaparecido, sino la existencia conflictiva de sus habitantes, que experimentan la realidad cotidiana como inevitablemente condicionada por fenomenos globales –guerra contra el terrorismo, medios de comunicacion, mercado negro, inmigracion ilegal, economia multinacional– que transcienden la materialidad de lo local. Esta paradoja tambien se percibe en el modo en que los dos directores conciben la metropolis postcolonial como lugar de desigualdades y desequilibrios, pero tambien como el escenario de encuentros y alianzas inesperadas donde protagonistas y espectadores pueden explorar las fantasias sobre el Otro y cuestionar los estereotipos raciales.