(Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures 27) Edward Welch, Joseph McGonagle - Contesting Views - The Visual Economy of France and Algeria-Liverpool University Press (2013)

Contesting Views
the visual economy of France and Algeria
Contesting Views
Contesting Views
Fifty years after Algerian independence, the legacy of France’s Algerian
past, and the ongoing complexities of the Franco-Algerian relationship,
remain a key preoccupation in both countries. A central role in shaping
understanding of their shared past and present is played by visual culture.
This study investigates how relations between France and Algeria have the visual economy of France and Algeria
been represented and contested through visual means since the outbreak
of the Algerian War in 1954. It probes the contours of colonial and Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle
postcolonial visual culture in both countries, highlighting the important
roles played by still and moving images when Franco-Algerian relations
are imagined. Analysing a wide range of images made on both sides of
the Mediterranean – from colonial picture postcards of French Algeria to
contemporary representations of postcolonial Algiers – this book is the
first to trace the circulation of, and connections between, a diverse range
of images and media within this field of visual culture. It shows how the
visual representation of Franco-Algerian links informs our understanding
both of the lived experience of postcoloniality within Europe and the
Maghreb, and of wider contemporary geopolitics.
Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle

‘Contesting Views is an incisive and timely analysis of visual culture
and its role in the mediation of Franco-Algerian relations, and makes
a convincing case for the importance of visual image and visual forms
in considering the postcoloniality of both France and Algeria.’
Dr James House, University of Leeds
Edward Welch is Senior Lecturer in French at Durham University.

Joseph McGonagle is Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the French-speaking
World at the University of Manchester.
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Cover image by Zineddine Bessaï
Design by Emily Wilkinson
Contesting Views
The Visual Economy of France and Algeria
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 27
McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 1 02/04/2013 08:37:49

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
Series Editors
EDMUND SMYTH CHARLES FORSDICK
Manchester Metropolitan University University of Liverpool
Editorial Board
JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS MIREILLE ROSELLO
University of Melbourne Dartmouth College University of Amsterdam
MICHAEL SHERINGHAM DAVID WALKER
University of Oxford University of Sheffield
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Recent titles in the series:

11 Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes: 19 David H. Walker, Consumer
Intercontinental Travel in Francophone Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in
African Literature Modern French Literature
12 Lawrence R. Schehr, French 20 Pim Higginson, The Noir Atlantic:
Post-Modern Masculinities: From Chester Himes and the Birth of the
Neuromatrices to Seropositivity Francophone African Crime Novel
13 Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in 21 Verena Andermatt Conley, Spatial
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Progress World-Space in French Cultural
Theory
14 Andy Stafford, Photo-texts:
Contemporary French Writing of the 22 Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the
Photographic Image Collège de France
15 Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A 23 Hugh Dauncey, French Cycling: A
Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Social and Cultural History
Canon
24 Louise Hardwick, Childhood,
16 David Scott, Poetics of the Poster: The Autobiography and the Francophone
Rhetoric of Image-Text Caribbean
17 Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage 25 Douglas Morrey Michel Houellebecq:
of French Comics Humanity and its Aftermath
18 Jean Duffy, Thresholds of Meaning: 26 Nick Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique:
Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Antillean Critical Theory from
Contemporary French Narrative Toussaint to Glissant

E DWA R D W E LC H
and
JO S E PH M C G ONAG L E
Contesting Views
The Visual Economy
of France and Algeria
Contesting Views
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Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Visualising the Franco-Algerian Relationship 1
I Algerian Pasts in the French Public Sphere
1 Wish We Were There: Nostalgic (Re)visions of France’s

Algerian Past 13
2 Visions of History: Looking Back at the Algerian War 39
3 Out of the Shadows: The Visual Career of 17 October 1961 65
II Mapping Franco-Algerian Borders

in Contemporary Visual Culture
4 War Child: Memory, Childhood and Algerian Pasts in

Recent French Film 93
5 Bridging the Gap: Representations of the Mediterranean Sea 121
6 A Sense of Place: Envisioning Post-Colonial Space in
France and Algeria 145
Conclusion 180
Notes 186
Bibliography 207
Index 226

Illustrations
Illustrations
1 Display of books in Bordeaux’s Mollat bookshop, September 2009

2 Photograph from the cover of Jean-Luc Einaudi, La Bataille de
Paris (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Reproduced by permission.
3 Photograph from the cover of Jim House and Neil MacMaster,
Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford
University Press, 2006). Reproduced by permission.
4 Front-cover of Paris Match, 28 October 1961.
Reproduced by permission.
5 Both dream and nightmare: Life in wartime Algeria for Ali in
Cartouches gauloises (Mehdi Charef, 2007)
6 Once Messaoud, now Michou: Michou d’Auber (Thomas
Gilou, 2007)
7 Nothing to see? The opening shot of Caché (Michael Haneke,
2005)
8 Front-cover of Paris Match, 2 June 1962. Reproduced by
permission.
9 Zineddine Bessaï, H-OUT: Le Guide de la migration (2010)
10 Reframing the Parisian banlieue: Les Courtillières in Salut
cousin! (Merzak Allouache, 1996)
11 Oran in Paris: The local Algerian café-bar in L’Autre Côté de
la mer (Dominique Cabrera, 1997)
12 Policing frontiers in Algiers in Beur blanc rouge (Mahmoud
Zemmouri, 2006)
13 Before the journey begins: On the margins of Paris in Exils
(Tony Gatlif, 2004)
14 Sealing Kamel’s fate in Bled Number One (Rabah
Ameur-Zaïmèche, 2006)
15 Showcasing the city: The Basilica of Notre-Dame d’Afrique in
Il était une fois dans l’Oued (Djamel Bensalah, 2005)

Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
The research for this book was funded by a grant from the Arts
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) between September 2008
and December 2011, ‘France and Algeria: Visualising a (Post-)Colonial
Relationship’. We would like to express our gratitude to the AHRC for
supporting us through the grant and enabling us to undertake this work.
We would also like to thank all those who contributed to the project in
different ways, whether as participants in the various projects associated
with it, or as critical friends, readers and interlocutors. Particular
thanks are due to Guy Austin, Amanda Crawley Jackson, Charles
Forsdick, Jim House, Amy Hubbell, Nadira Laggoune-Aklouche,
Jonathan Long, Andrea Noble, John Perivolaris, Chris Perriam, Henry
Phillips, Libby Saxton and Helen Vassallo. As part of the project, the
authors curated New Cartographies: Algeria–France–UK, an exhibition
of contemporary visual art exploring the theme of the Franco-Algerian
relationship at Cornerhouse, Manchester between April and June 2011.
We would like to express our gratitude to all the team at Cornerhouse
for the enthusiasm and support they gave to the project over a period of
some two years.
Collaborative research and writing is still a rare enough occurrence

in the humanities for it to have been a source of curiosity and conver-
sation with a number of colleagues during the lifetime of the project.
Having emerged enriched from the experience, both authors would
argue strongly for the intellectual stimulation and pleasure to be had in
sharing and discussing ideas over a long period of time, and hope that
both are reflected in the material which follows.
Edward Welch would like to add a personal note of gratitude for the love
and support shown by his wife Sophie and mother Christine during the

viii Contesting Views
time of the project and the writing of the book, and to dedicate it to the
memory of his late father Derek.
Joseph McGonagle would like to thank his wife Alex, parents Mary
and Hugh Joseph, and sister Kathleen for their love and encouragement
throughout the project and during the book’s completion.

Introduction:
Visualising the Franco-Algerian
Relationship
Introduction
Nineteen March 2012 proved to be a notable date in France for two

reasons. First, it was marked by extensive coverage in the French media
of the fiftieth anniversary of the ceasefire agreed in the Évian accords
between the French government and the Gouvernement Provisionnel
de la République Algérienne (GPRA). The ceasefire marked the official
suspension of military hostilities in Algeria, and the first stage of the
process towards the declaration of an Algerian republic on 5 July 1962.
The extent of the coverage, and the way in which it drew together
diverse perspectives on the war, including those which in the past had
often been marginalised or occluded, suggested that after fifty years
France was finally in a position to recognise and acknowledge more fully
the complexity of the Algerian War, its colonial activities in the country,
and their persistence as a reference point for large sections of the French
population.
However, reflection on the war came to be overshadowed by a
dramatic series of events played out that morning in Toulouse in South
West France. Following the assassination of three off-duty soldiers the
previous week, three schoolchildren and an adult were shot dead at close
range outside a Jewish school by a lone gunman, Mohamed Merah. It
soon became clear that the adult was both father to two of the children
and a teacher at the school, and that the other child was the daughter
of the school’s head teacher. Following an armed stand-off at his flat in
the city, Merah would himself be shot dead by a police marksman a few
days later. It would subsequently emerge that Merah, a French citizen of
Algerian origin, claimed to have received training at an Al-Qaeda camp

2 Contesting Views
in Pakistan, and had sought to avenge Muslim deaths in Palestine, Iraq

and Afghanistan.
While giving a precise indication of Merah’s ethnic origins, the French
media did not pursue the juxtaposition of the two events, and the echo of
history to be heard – intentionally or otherwise – in Merah’s murderous
assault. Nevertheless, its concern to signal his background did not
escape the attention of the Algerian press, which commented angrily on
it (Akef 2012; Selim 2012). Nor was it surprising that Marine Le Pen,
the leader of the far-right Front National, was quick to instrumentalise
and capitalise on the events as part of her presidential election campaign
(the first round of which was to take place the following month), using
them to thematise anxieties over the perils of immigration and multicul-
turalism, and the perceived threat posed to French culture by Islam
(Mestra 2012).
Both of the problems posed by the Merah incident – namely, how to
account for the emergence of such radicalised figures in France’s secular
republic, and the reaction in Algeria to the emphasis placed in France
on his ethnic origin – served to encapsulate the persistent legacies and
complexities of the relationship between France and its former colony,
and the equally persistent difficulties of moving that relationship on to
less sensitive, less unstable ground. Ever since Algerian independence
in 1962, the Franco-Algerian relationship has remained fraught with
tension, which manifested itself at various points during the 2000s
alone: in October 2001, at the Stade de France in St-Denis, when France
and Algeria encountered each other for the first time on the football
field, and the French national anthem was booed by large sections
of the crowd; in 2005, during the controversy over the infamous law
passed by the French National Assembly – subsequently repealed by
the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) – on the ‘benefits’
of France’s historical presence overseas, especially in North Africa;
and again in May 2010, when Hors-la-loi, by Franco-Algerian director
Rachid Bouchareb, was presented at the Cannes film festival. Offering a
controversial account of the Algerian struggle for independence, the film
was notable in particular for its evocation of the bloody repression by
French colonial authorities in May 1945 of nationalist protests in Sétif,
and provoked angry responses from politicians on the political right in
France (McGonagle and Welch 2011; Vince 2011: 305–6). As Le Monde
put it somewhat theatrically at the time, referring to the controversy
provoked by the film, ‘entre l’Algérie et la France, le psychodrame est
permanent’.1

Introduction 3
We would agree with Jean-Robert Henry (1993: 9) that the (pop)

psychoanalytical perspective signalled by Le Monde’s vocabulary is
not always the most appropriate for analysing inter-societal and inter-
cultural relations; but if we follow it for a moment, and pursue the
analysis of France’s Algerian past proposed by Anne Donadey in the
mid-1990s, we can say that since that time the French have left behind
the phase of repression and denial (Donadey 1996) and entered a far
more garrulous phase associated with the Freudian ‘talking cure’. This is
reflected in the increasingly expansive media coverage at key anniversary
moments related to the Algerian War in 2004 and 2012.
Nevertheless, as Benjamin Stora has observed, it is also notable that
the fiftieth anniversary of the ceasefire was met with silence at state level
in both countries, and that any commemorative initiatives in France are
pursed by civil society (for example, veterans’ associations) or at local
political level (through acts such as street naming or the unveiling of
commemorative plaques) (Cailletet 2012: 20). Governmental uncertainty
in the face of France’s colonial legacy, and the simultaneous sensitivity,
particularly on the political right, to lobby groups associated with the
rapatriés of French Algeria, make clear that at all levels the country still
struggles to come to terms with the consequences of the war and the
period of French history it drew to a close. 2
In her influential account of decolonisation and modernisation in
post-war France, Kristin Ross has argued that the Gaullist government
‘slammed shut the door’ on colonial history with the end of the Algerian
War (1995: 9), refusing to look back as it marched steadfastly into a
future that was to be technologically improved and technocratically
managed. Moreover, as Todd Shepard (2006b) has examined persua-
sively, the regime’s desire for a clean break with its Algerian past was
encoded in the various legal and administrative procedures enacting
Algerian independence and the process of decolonisation, not the least
of which involved establishing clear dividing lines of citizenship between
the different populations in Algeria, and making decisions about who
did and did not have the right to be seen, and see themselves, as French.
In an ideal world, one might have imagined the separation of France
and Algeria to be a relatively straightforward matter. The clean break
desired by the governments on both sides of the Mediterranean should
have been facilitated by the physical distance between the two countries;
but, as Richard Derderian (2002) has pointed out, it was of course not
to be. The desire to shut the door on the colonial past overlooked (or
wilfully ignored) the extent to which it would remain a fundamental

4 Contesting Views
part of lived experience for millions of people – whether as affective and

emotional bonds rooted in memory and myth, or as transnational links
and networks resulting from migration, exchange and passage back and
forth between the two countries. Indeed, the complexity and intricacy
of those links proved to be such that in 1998, Étienne Balibar would
question the extent to which France and Algeria could be considered
two separate nations. In a way, suggested Balibar, we do not really
cross between France and Algeria at all, but are constantly encountering
and negotiating the legacies and consequences of their shared history,
and their on-going imbrication. For him, what he termed ‘l’ensemble
franco-algérien’ exists as a vast ‘frontière-monde’, or frontier world
(Balibar 1998: 81). At once an entity which resembles a vast frontier
zone of contact, co-mingling and métissage, it is also a space with
global resonance through the way it highlights the currents of trade and
migration symptomatic of the contemporary world.
The persistent and unavoidable significance of the Franco-Algerian
relationship, both in terms of their shared past and how that past plays
itself out in the present, has been explored at various points in the
previous two decades. The attention paid to it reflects both its specific
importance in the history of each country and its exemplarity in terms
of understanding the nature of post-colonial relations and the condition
of ‘postcoloniality’ more broadly. 3 Edited volumes by Hargreaves and
Heffernan (1993) and Lorcin (2006) have underscored the historical
depth and intricacy of the relationship in colonial and post-colonial
contexts. Silverstein (2004) examines transnational and transpolitical
networks between Algeria and France in the contemporary period, and
considers how France becomes a location in which issues relating to
contemporary Algerian (and especially Berber) politics and identity are
played out and inflected in that context.
We would share these scholars’ belief in the centrality of the Franco-
Algerian relationship, and France’s Algerian past, for understanding the
past and present of both countries. Our aim in this book is to explore it
from a particular vantage point, one that, like Poe’s purloined letter, is
at once strikingly obvious and yet, in many respects, has often remained
unremarked – namely, how the Franco-Algerian relationship finds itself
articulated, expressed and represented through visual means and in
visual form. As is often the case in such matters, this vantage point can
emerge in ways and locations which might seem peripheral or ephemeral,
but in fact (and perhaps for that very reason) prove themselves to be at
once revealing and significant.

Introduction 5
Figure 1 September 2009 display in Bordeaux’s Mollat bookshop
In September 2009, for example, one of the authors encountered a

display of books in Bordeaux’s famous Mollat bookshop on the theme
of the Algerian War and French Algeria (Fig. 1). The display had
undoubtedly been motivated by the publication a few weeks earlier of
the novel Des hommes by Laurent Mauvignier, prominently displayed at
the centre of the table. Des hommes tells the story of a group of former
conscript soldiers in provincial France, whose memories of their time
in Algeria during their military service continue to haunt them in later
life. The booksellers of Mollat clearly saw in the novel’s publication an
opportunity to bring together a number of related books on the theme,
including historical accounts by well-known scholars of the period such
as Yves Courrière, Jean-Luc Einaudi and Benjamin Stora, and classic
texts such as La Question (1958), Henri Alleg’s account of torture at the
hands of the French army in Algiers.

6 Contesting Views
The book display was noteworthy for two reasons in particular.

First, it signalled the extent to which France’s Algerian past increasingly
permeates public space in France in a range of ways, from the ephemeral
and opportunistic, to more permanent expressions of collective memory
such as street naming or the inscription of war memorials. It offered an
instance of the sorts of traces of Algeria in France which Leïla Sebbar
mapped across three volumes of diaries in the 2000s (Sebbar 2004;
2005; 2008).4 At the same time, and crucially, it drew attention to the
role played by the visual image and visual forms in mediating that
presence. If the display caught the eye, it was in large part because of the
photographs used on the covers of a number of the books to present and
mediate the historical accounts and narratives they developed.
If we dwell on a seemingly fleeting constellation of images and objects
such as this, it is because it exemplifies a broader phenomenon which our
book sets out to examine. The visual qualities of the display underline
and illustrate the degree to which the Franco-Algerian relationship,
and France’s Algerian history, are played out and staged through visual
culture. Moreover, they point to a number of questions driving our
investigation: what vision of the conflict do such images articulate?
What work do they do in shaping perceptions and understanding of the
war? What impression do they convey of France’s colonial expansion
and its relationship to the contemporary period?
In other words, the Mollat book display at once confirms Sebbar’s
insight that France is shot through with traces and memories of Algeria,
and invites us to pursue it further, by foregrounding the central role
played by the visual image and visual culture in mediating those traces
and memories. Our book therefore explores how visual culture, in its
range of modes and forms, shapes understanding of the Franco-Algerian
relationship and France’s Algerian past. Part I focuses especially on the
role played by the photographic image in this process, for two reasons.
First, while historians are beginning to acknowledge the centrality of
the photographic image in mediating French Algeria and the Algerian
War, as we discuss further in Chapter 2, there has been so far relatively
little critical analysis of photographic material from, and of, the period.
Secondly, in examining that material, and as we discuss at length
in Chapter 3, our study seeks to push forward recent work on the
relationship between photography and history, and the role played by
the photographic image in shaping historical understanding. That is
to say, investigating the visual representation of the Algerian War and
France’s Algerian past offers new insights into how that history has been

Introduction 7
articulated and vehicled in the public sphere; and, at the same time, it
sheds light on broader issues relating to the place of the photographic
image within history and historiography.
While the photographic image is a key focal point for this book, our
aim is also to situate both still and moving images in relation to each
other as part of a broader spectrum of visual culture. We understand
visual culture to encompass a broad array of visual forms and media. For
example, we would argue for the need to consider how the photographic
image itself functions across a range of different contexts, from the
disposable or semi-permanent format of the newspaper or magazine, to
the highly valued (in economic and cultural terms) work of documentary
photographers such as Raymond Depardon, or visual artists such as
Zineb Sedira. More specifically, we would follow the anthropologist
Deborah Poole in arguing that we need to approach visual material
not simply as constituting a ‘visual culture’, but as forming part of a
‘visual economy’; that is to say, as bound up in processes of ‘production,
circulation, consumption and production of images’ (Poole 1997: 8). In
thinking about the visual economy of the Franco-Algerian relationship,
we need to remain attentive to the different ways in which images – both
still and moving – circulate within and between the two countries, and
what sort of images tend to dominate those flows. We also need to bear
in mind another idea implicit within the notion of a visual economy, that
of the often unequal relationships on which those flows are predicated.
At various points in the book emerge questions about where images are
produced; who produces them; how they enter circulation; and how, in
doing so, they begin to constitute a form of visual understanding about
France and Algeria, whether it be in relation to the picture postcard
producers of the early twentieth century (Chapter 1), or the independent
filmmakers of Algerian origin at the turn of the twenty-first century
(Chapter 6).
The book tracks the visual economy of the Franco-Algerian relationship
across different periods, from the colonial to the post-colonial. It is also
alert to the relationships and connections between those periods, turning
its attention especially to how the colonial is configured and represented
visually in post-colonial contexts and debates. It is arguably here, in
the constant interplay between past and present, history and memory,
where the complexity and specificity of the Franco-Algerian relationship
lie. Part I pays close attention to the weight and role of history in the
relationship. It considers the visualisation of French Algeria and the
Algerian War both at the time and subsequently, investigating how

8 Contesting Views
historical understanding of these periods takes shape retrospectively

through the visual image. Its primary (though not exclusive) emphasis is
on the French context, which reflects in part the extent to which France’s
Algerian past has emerged as a central preoccupation in the country in
recent decades. Furthermore, as the subject of each chapter makes clear,
this habitually involves marginalised memories and memory groups of
different kinds.
One of the peculiarities of the Algerian War and France’s Algerian
past is the way in which the position of victimhood is taken up by
different, and potentially competing, groups, all of whom feel themselves
to be excluded from historical narratives of the war, and are driven by a
sense of historical injustice, whether real or perceived (Branche 2005: 13;
Derderian 2002). We examine how the photographic image plays a role
in articulating these marginalised perspectives and reinscribing them
into broader historical narratives about France’s Algerian past. Chapter
1 explores the restaging of French Algeria in nostalgic photo-books
produced by and for a pied-noir audience. 5 In Chapter 2, we see
how the photographic image becomes an important means by which
conscript soldiers can reassert a lived experience of the Algerian War
which was for many years occluded. Chapter 3 explores how the
events of October 1961 in Paris, when a peaceful protest by Algerian
immigrants was brutally repressed by the Paris police, are articulated
through photography both at the time and subsequently, as they come
to be recognised as a key episode of the war, and those involved, their
relatives and the activists supporting them, make demands for historical
justice.
In Part II, we examine how the Franco-Algerian relationship continues
to be played out in contemporary visual culture. We consider how
contemporary visual culture shows itself to be preoccupied both with
the legacy of the Algerian War and with the ongoing intricacies of
the Franco-Algerian relationship in the post-colonial era. Chapter 4
draws attention to the striking way in which contemporary cinema
by directors from a range of backgrounds (Franco-Algerian, Algerian
émigré, European) have chosen to restage and present the Algerian
War from a child’s perspective, and the perspective of the male child
in particular. The remaining two chapters discuss how the social,
political and cultural configurations produced by the end of France’s
colonial activity in Algeria, and the persistent legacy of that activity in
the post-colonial era, are articulated in visual forms, whether it be in
terms of a mystified relationship with Algeria as mother country among

Introduction 9
French youths born to parents of Algerian origin, or the multitude of

familial and cultural networks which bind together France and Algeria
and make negotiating between the two central to the lived experience
of countless individuals. The chapters consider too how recent events,
such as the brutal civil conflict in Algeria during the 1990s, render even
more complicated attempts to live through and with the legacies of the
colonial period.
These final two chapters foreground especially some of the key
theatres and spaces in which the Franco-Algerian relationship is staged.
Chapter 5 highlights the role played by the Mediterranean as a locus
of representation, and explores the dual values it carries: as barrier or
frontier on the one hand, for people on both its French and Algerian
shores; and as bridge, hyphen or point of crossing on the other. If,
following Balibar, we need to think through France and Algeria together,
then it is the physical space of the Mediterranean especially which is
arguably one of the most active parts of that frontier world. It has a vital
role to play in inflecting individual trajectories and producing complex
post-colonial subjectivities – subjectivities which, as Élisabeth Leuvrey
makes clear in her documentary film La Traversée [The Crossing] (2006),
are predicated on a sense of ‘in-between-ness’ or ‘back-and-forthness’
between France and Algeria.
Chapter 6 takes us back to dry land. It draws attention to how the
Franco-Algerian relationship is staged through the visual represen-
tation of space in both countries. It maps trends over the 1990s and
2000s, during which time the primary stage for portraying the Franco-
Algerian relationship shifted from France to Algeria, and visual culture
offered a means to normalise and even render spectacular a beleaguered
country emerging from its civil war. It considers how France and
Algeria are made visible to each other through contemporary visual
culture, and how some visual tropes which emerged during the colonial
period (such as the visualisation of Algiers as a dazzling seaboard
city) continue to play a role in this. It considers too how the staging
of the Franco-Algerian relationship is configured by photographers
and filmmakers from different contexts and backgrounds, whether it
be French filmmakers of pied-noir origin; Algerian émigré directors;
or indeed, internationally renowned documentary photographers who
bring to bear on contemporary Algeria a means of viewing and a
technical apparatus designed to emphasise the scale and beauty of the
country, with the hopeful intention of encouraging consensus about its
past, present and future.

10 Contesting Views
However, it is with a return to French Algeria that our study begins.

We investigate how it has been portrayed, staged and restaged, as it
recedes into history and persists as an object of controversy.

part i
Algerian Pasts
in the French Public Sphere

1
Wish We Were There:

Nostalgic (Re)visions
of France’s Algerian Past
Wish We Were There
Postcards from the Colonies
As France established itself in Algeria during the nineteenth century,

visual culture came to have a central role in shaping perceptions and
understandings of the new colony. It helped to transform the country,
its landscapes and people into objects of knowledge, spectacle and
consumption, playing out once again the fundamental interconnection
of visuality and imperialism analysed most notably by Mary Louise
Pratt (1992). Deborah Cherry (2003) notes how rapidly Western artists,
tourists and photographers began to arrive in Algeria, and the excitement
with which they set about depicting what they saw. With the subsequent
dissemination and circulation of their images, the colony not only ‘entered
into visuality’ (Cherry 2003: 41), but did so within an established Western
set of aesthetic frameworks and modes of representation such as landscape
and portraiture, motivated especially by a sense of the ‘picturesque’.
Moreover, the emergence of what David Prochaska terms an ‘Algérie
imaginaire’, or imaginary Algeria, was fuelled especially in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the technical advance of
photography as a medium, and its use in the equally new and fast
expanding industry of picture postcard manufacture, which both resulted
from and responded to the development of Algeria as a tourist destination
(Prochaska 1990; Terpak 2009). Images of Algeria were produced in
ever increasing numbers both locally and by the major metropolitan
publishers, including Lévy frères and Neurdein in Paris, and Combier
in Mâcon, many of whom employed their own photographers to take

14 Contesting Views
pictures ‘in the field’ (Prochaska 1990: 375–6).1 The material produced
fell broadly into the genre of scènes et types, constituted both of views
of Algeria’s cities, towns and landscapes (scènes) and of images depicting
different occupations, ways of life and social ‘types’, particularly among
the country’s indigenous populations. The most notable and notorious
examples of the latter, of course, are the exoticising and eroticising
images of Algerian women which Malek Alloula set out to ‘return to
sender’ with the publication of Le Harem colonial [The Colonial Harem]
in 1981.
In some respects, the visualisation of Algeria through picture
postcards was simply part of the broader enthusiasm for this new
form of mass visual medium which took hold towards the end of the
nineteenth century. Prochaska (1990: 375) notes the startling growth
of picture postcard production in France, from 8 million in 1899 to 60
million in 1902, for which the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris was
largely responsible. As Naomi Schor has argued, the opportunities for
self-promotion and display afforded by the ‘postcarding of Paris’ (1992:
215) at this time played a key role in efforts to underline the country’s
economic and political power and to assert its nationalistic and imperi-
alistic ambitions (1992: 195); but ‘postcarding’ had an equally important
role to play in relation to those places where France’s ambitions were
in the process of being exercised and realised, one exemplified by the
Algerian case. For Prochaska,
Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Algeria functions
as a kind of colonial laboratory in which various elements – art and
photography, capitalism and colonialism – interacted to create a colonial
discourse distinctive to Algeria, but which at the same time constituted
a subfile of the larger visual archive of the world and its peoples which
nineteenth century photography was assiduously assembling. (Prochaska
1990: 375)
The production and circulation of picture postcard images were
therefore not just symptomatic of colonial activity, but constitutive of it. 2
Postcards might at first appear to be the most mundane form of visual
culture, not least because of their ubiquity and potentially ephemeral
qualities; but it is precisely their ubiquity – the extent and reach of their
circulation – which lends them their distinctive importance in establishing
or consolidating certain ways of seeing. That picture postcard images of
Algeria had particular agency during the colonial period is reflected
in Alloula’s suggestive (though unsubstantiated) argument that the
circulation of so-called ‘harem’ images began to decline in the 1930s,

Wish We Were There 15
‘once their mission is accomplished’ (Alloula 1986: 129 n. 5); in other

words, once they had served to reinforce relationships of knowledge
and power both within the colonial context and in terms of how the
conquered lands of Algeria were made visible to metropolitan France for
consumption.
Implicit within Alloula’s observation is an understanding of the
historical specificity and mutability of these ways of seeing, and the
ideological frameworks in which they are constituted. He points to a
sense in which colonial postcards come to have their day, appear as relics
of a bygone era, or lose their value as currency once the historical era
which gave them meaning comes to an end. Indeed, the publication of
Le Harem colonial in 1981 was itself indicative of such a shift, as Alloula
set out to provoke the re-evaluation of colonial postcards in the context
of post-colonial and post-Foucauldian critical debate. 3 It seemed that if
the visual culture of the colonial era were to have any kind of life in the
wake of Le Harem colonial, it would most obviously be as material to
be read symptomatically; that is to say, as material which could be used
to understand the discursive and social formations of colonialism within
the French context, but which also offered insights into the visual,
political and cultural economy of colonialism more broadly, and its
operation as a system for the production and circulation of knowledge,
meaning and value.
Yet, at the same time, a large amount of visual material from the
colonial period continues to survive and circulate in a rather different
context, and has a different role to play in relation to France’s Algerian
past. The last two or three decades have seen a growing industry in
photo-books depicting French Algeria. They draw extensively on picture
postcards, particularly from the early twentieth century, as well as
stock and archive images from other sources for decades up to Algerian
independence in 1962. Reproducing images in black and white for the
most part (with the occasional exception of images used as cover art or
retouched in colour), the volumes restage French Algeria for the viewer,
focusing usually on the major cities of the North (Algiers, Oran and
Constantine) and the regions associated with them.
As some of their titles would suggest, these volumes are frequently
produced by and for a pied-noir audience. In offering a return to
colonial Algeria, they both respond to and themselves foster a sense
of nostalgérie, that nostalgia among pieds-noirs for the lost homeland
provoked and crystallised, as Jean-Jacques Jordi (2003) has argued, by
the rapid and dramatic exodus during the summer of 1962, when the

16 Contesting Views
vast majority of the European settler population, faced with the prospect
of Algerian independence, fled to France. Photo-books such as Jacques
Gandini’s Alger de ma jeunesse, 1950–1962 [Algiers of my Youth]
(1995), Teddy Alzieu’s Alger: mémoire en images [Algiers: Memory in
Images] (2000) and Élisabeth Fechner’s Souvenirs de là-bas: Alger et
l’Algérois [Memories of Over There: Algiers and the Algiers Region]
(2002a) invite reader-viewers to revisit and resituate themselves in the
spaces, environments and landscapes of French Algeria, and, in doing
so, offer an opportunity to assert French Algeria as a place of individual
and collective memory, of belonging and origins. As the cover blurb
for Alger: mémoire en images puts it, ‘à travers cette sélection de lieux
familiers, les Français natifs d’Alger pourront retrouver avec nostalgie
des images précieuses, indispensables racines de leur passé “pied-noir”’.4
Indeed, paratextual material such as this may often give the non-pied-
noir reader an uncomfortable impression of sitting in or intruding on
a private moment of reminiscence by a group which is happy to define
itself in quite precise historical, social and cultural terms. The explicit
construction of its target audience, often through the use of the first
person plural ‘nous’, establishes a viewing position in relation to the
images which includes (and by extension, excludes) on the basis of
common ground, experience and understanding.
At stake in these photo-books, then, is the construction and
expression of a nostalgic vision, a way of seeing which reflects a shared
understanding of what France’s Algerian past looked like, and how it
could or should be remembered by those for whom it represents home.
The first aim of Chapter 1 is to explore this nostalgic vision, and the
ways in which France’s Algeria is portrayed for and by the pied-noir
community in nostalgic photo-books. At first sight, it is perhaps easy
to dismiss such publications as marginal or symptomatic phenomena
at best, and at worst as historically and morally suspect. Mary Vogl,
for example, is quick to condemn the ‘wilful nostalgia’ of pied-noir
photo-books and the occlusion of history they display (2003: 174).
It is undoubtedly the case, as we shall see later, that they display
some obvious blind spots in relation to the historical realities of the
colonial dynamic. However, we would also argue that it is not enough
to dismiss them as exercises in wilful, or in Kimberly Smith’s terms,
‘mere’ nostalgia (Smith 2000). Rather, we would agree with Smith
that nostalgia should be taken seriously as a mode of remembrance
and historical understanding, and that we need to get to grips with its
forms of expression, its politics and ethics. Such issues are all the more

timely given, as we discussed in the Introduction, both the persistent

presence of images of French Algeria in the broader public sphere in
France and its increasing visibility in French culture. Material such as
Nicole Garcia’s film Un balcon sur la mer (2010), which returns us to
the ghostly streets of French Oran, or recent photo-books evoking the
final days of French Algeria by prominent figures of French culture such
as Pierre Bourdieu (2003), Raymond Depardon (2010) and Marc Riboud
(2009), point to an ongoing preoccupation with how French Algeria is
visualised, and therefore remembered and understood, in French society
more generally. The chapter draws on the alternative perspectives
opened up by these latter volumes in order to capture the modalities
of more nostalgic photo-books, the visual and narrative strategies they
adopt in order to restage French Algeria, and the issues they raise in the
process about photography, memory and place.
Photo-books and the Visualisation of Nostalgérie
Despite what is sometimes assumed, the concept of nostalgérie does

not emerge as a consequence of the repatriation of European settlers
to France at the time of Algerian independence. Both Philip Dine and
Amy Hubbell locate its first appearance in the 1930s, even if they credit
different writers with the coinage of the term (Dine 1994: 150; Hubbell
2011: 160 n. 1);5 but the nostalgic longing for the lost homeland of
Algeria it describes certainly came into sharp focus among the pied-noir
community in the decades following the end of the Algerian War. It
was fuelled by a double trauma, the longing for the homeland made
all the more acute by the impossibility of return. With the granting
of independence to Algeria, the past for the pied-noir community had
literally become a foreign country in which, despite the assurances
supposedly built into the Évian Agreements about the place of the
European community in a sovereign Algeria, they felt themselves, for the
most part, to be unwelcome.6
Moreover, dislocation from the land of their birth was compounded
by the distinctive political and historical context in which the end of
the war and repatriation took place, and the ambiguous status acquired
by the pieds-noirs as a result. On the one hand, the political situation
in independent Algeria itself made them feel that return was out of the
question; on the other, France’s own attempt to deal with the end of its
colonial adventures by reconfiguring itself, as both Frederick Cooper

18 Contesting Views
(2003) and Todd Shepard (2006a) have argued, as a post-imperialist and

essentially European country – one whose future lay at the heart of the
new European project – left them marooned on the political and social
margins of French society, an unwanted legacy of a tiresome chapter in
France’s recent history.
The scenario of dislocation and marginalisation with which the
pied-noir community was confronted inevitably proved to be fertile
ground for a growing sense of nostalgia, which found expression across
a range of cultural forms. Indeed, expressions of nostalgic longing and
regret provided the precise foundation for a sense of shared identity among
the exiled pied-noir community. It was in the literary field in France
where nostalgic evocations of French Algeria emerged most obviously.
As Dine reminds us, an extensive literature by pied-noir writers quickly
appeared in the years following independence and repatriation (1994:
150–4), and was in large part preoccupied with themes of loss, injustice,
regret and self-justification.
The sustained exploitation of visual material to portray French Algeria
was initially more sporadic. Paul Azoulay’s La Nostalgérie française
[French Nostalgeria] (1980) drew on picture postcards of the scènes et
types style to restage French Algeria, and in particular its indigenous
populations, in an un-self-consciously Orientalist and exoticising way
(a point to which we return below). In 1988, Marie Cardinal, perhaps
the most high-profile pied-noir writer in terms of making Algeria and
her relationship to it a sustained focus of her work, published Les
Pieds-noirs, a substantial and lavishly produced coffee-table book which
made use of a range of visual material, including archive photographs
and picture postcards, in its depiction of European settler life in Algeria;
but for the most part during the 1980s and 1990s, publications which
set out specifically to exploit photographic material in their evocation
of French Algeria were the product of a cottage industry. Many of the
photo-books produced during this period are defined by relatively low
production values, reflected in often poor-quality image reproduction,
low print runs, and finishing more reminiscent of magazine or brochure-
style publications (stapled bindings in the case of Tudury 1994, for
example). More prolific authors such as Jacques Gandini embarked
on self-publishing ventures, Gandini producing a series of volumes
beginning with Alger de ma jeunesse, 1950–1962 (1995) that focus
explicitly on the final years of French Algeria; but his more substantial
volumes (hardbound and large format) nevertheless reflect a small-scale
output in their design and production.

The material qualities of these publications are an indication of their

economically and culturally marginal status, in terms of their viability
and interest for a mainstream commercial publisher. At the same time,
it is also true to say that authors such as Gandini appear unconcerned
by their marginal position in the field of cultural production. As the
prefatory material in both Alger de ma jeunesse and Oran de ma
jeunesse, 1945–1962 (1997) makes explicit, his volumes are perceived
above all to perform a service to a self-recognised community. Writing
in Alger de ma jeunesse, Francette Mendoza, national president of
the Amicale des Enfants de l’Algérois, an association of pied-noir
expatriates from the region of Algiers, observes that
C’est tout un programme que nous permet de découvrir Jacques Gandini
au travers son ouvrage. ‘Alger’ ‘jeunesse’ deux mots clés empreints
de souvenirs: nos racines et l’insouciance d’une ville heureuse qui la
favorisait. En flânant, il retrouve en photos et avec plaisir pour le lecteur,
la promenade traditionnelle des Algérois. (Gandini 1995: 3)7
In Oran de ma jeunesse, Geneviève de Ternant, editor of the monthly

pied-noir magazine L’Echo de l’Oranie, comments that ‘le témoignage
d’amitié que nous donne Jacques Gandini, c’est d’avoir fait siens des
souvenirs qui sont nôtres, c’est d’avoir fait revivre une ville disparue
qu’il a retrouvée dans nos pensées et dans nos cœurs’ (Gandini 1997:
3).8 His volumes are recognised as binding the community together
through shared memories, and facilitating both individual and collective
remembrance (underscored by the use of the first person plural pronoun
in both prefaces) through the visual re-presentation of the cities of French
Algeria. While the titles of his volumes assert a link between French
Algeria and his own personal history, the two prefaces point to the fact
that his individual connection with and memories of the places portrayed
will also inevitably constitute shared memories. The Algiers of his youth
will be recognisable as that of his pied-noir peers, forced to abandon the
city during their adolescence and early adulthood. Furthermore, a sense
of collective endeavour is expressed again at the end of the volumes on
Algiers and Oran in Gandini’s request for readers to submit photographic
material for subsequent volumes on each city. In effect, we can see in this
call a desire to produce work which is collectively authored, and in which
images, almost like those in a family album, serve as shared or common
ground for a community of reader-viewers.
In the decade since 2000, two noticeable trends are apparent concerning
nostalgic photo-books of French Algeria. The period has seen continued

20 Contesting Views
growth in the number of such publications on the one hand, and, on the
other, the growing professionalisation of that production, in terms both
of more sophisticated production techniques and support from more
well-established, commercial publishing houses. At the same time, the
field remains the domain of a relatively small number of prolific authors,
all of whom have pied-noir origins or connections. Also notable is a
certain consensus in terms of their approach, which, following Gandini,
is geographical or place-based, with volumes focusing on specific cities,
towns and regions across Algeria; and, like Gandini, as the blurb for
Alzieu’s 2000 volume indicates, they continue to be oriented primarily
towards a particular (pied-noir) audience; but they also reflect shifting
political, historical and social contexts in intriguing ways. Three figures
from the period stand out in particular.
The writer Élisabeth Fechner followed her largely text-based volume
of 1999, Le Pays d’où je viens [The Land from which I Come], with a
series of softbound photo-books on each of the three main Algerian cities
and their surrounding regions. Produced by the long-standing Parisian
publishing house Calmann-Lévy in 2002, and making use of images
from a range of archival sources and personal collections, they were
clearly intended to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Algerian
independence. Indeed, Fechner is at pains to argue in her introduction
to Alger et l’Algérois that the volumes reflect a turning point in relation
to memories of French Algeria, a ‘passage au souvenir apaisé’ (Fechner
2002a: 9), 9 not just for the pied-noir community, perhaps, but also
within France more generally.
Teddy Alzieu has proved to be the most prolific author of nostalgic
photo-books on French Algeria since 2000, with some sixteen titles
produced in the ten years to 2010, all of which are published by Éditions
Alan Sutton. Like Fechner, Alzieu focused initially on Algeria’s major
cities, gradually expanding his coverage to include a number of smaller
towns and provincial areas. Alzieu’s volumes make extensive use of
picture postcard material, as well as archival material and images (such
as aerial photography) from public and private agencies. Finally, the
historian Philippe Lamarque, author of illustrated histories on a range
of subjects, published two photo-books towards the end of the decade,
the first on French Algeria as a whole (2006), the second focusing on
Algiers (2009). Unlike Alzieu and Fechner, he draws exclusively on
picture postcard material from the Belle Époque period, that ‘heyday’
of picture postcards, to borrow Prochaska’s term (1990: 416). Like those
of Alzieu, however, Lamarque’s volumes are notable for being produced

by a commercial publisher (HC Éditions) established in a particular

niche market. Both HC Éditions and Éditions Alan Sutton specialise in
producing richly illustrated but relatively affordable soft and hardbound
books focusing on popular history, which take the form especially of
anthologies of old photographs and picture postcards depicting past
times and places. Indeed, Lamarque’s second volume, Alger d’antan
[Algiers of Yesteryear], is positioned explicitly as part of a series entitled
‘La Collection d’antan’, offering portraits of French cities and regions
in times past through the medium of picture postcards. Likewise, a
number of Alzieu’s volumes for Alan Sutton, in terms of both format and
approach, find a place alongside similar visual depictions of ‘France of
yesteryear’ published in recent years by the firm.
Striking here, and indeed explicit in the case of Alger d’antan, is
the way in which these volumes serve to reincorporate and rehabilitate
French Algeria into the historical and memorial geography of France
more generally. Placed on an equal footing with other great French
cities and regions which constitute France’s sense of national identity,
Algiers is acknowledged as a legitimate part of provincial French
history. As such, its incorporation marks a challenge to the vision
of spatial and therefore national identity established after the loss of
Algeria in 1962, when the assertion of France’s European-ness by its
political leaders was reinforced by the currency rapidly acquired by the
figure of the hexagon to describe the country’s geographically neat and
self-contained shape.10 Indeed, the normalisation or neutralisation of
French Algeria represented by the publication of these volumes would
perhaps confirm the mood of apaisement in relation to French Algeria
identified by Fechner in 2002, and arguably facilitated, as Claire Eldridge
notes, by the shifting political context in France during the decade, as
politicians on the mainstream right fostered and encouraged debate on
the ‘positive aspects’ of French colonialism, culminating in the notorious
law voted by the National Assembly in February 2005 (Eldridge 2010:
133–4).11 The trends of the last decade, and the gradual re-emergence
of French Algeria into the broader public sphere facilitated by nostalgic
photo-books such as these, raise significant questions not just about how
French Algeria might be viewed nostalgically by a specific constituency,
but also about the place a nostalgic vision of the former colony might
have in contemporary France as a whole. Central to these questions are
the nature, role and function of nostalgia itself, and colonial nostalgia
especially, issues to which we now turn.

22 Contesting Views
The Nostalgic Vision: Suspicion and Resistance
Nostalgia is a mood or attitude which seems frequently to be viewed

with suspicion, particularly among those of a more progressive political
persuasion. The term has come to be imbued with negative connotations;
to be nostalgic is to be trapped between memory and fantasy in a way
which is unhelpful and unhealthy, and which almost inevitably implies
a conservative and reactionary politics. As Kimberly Smith (2000: 507)
remarks, ‘nostalgia has come to mean a universal but aberrant yearning
for an irrecoverable past; a reality-distorting emotionalism triggered by
thoughts of home, small towns, and rural life; an understandable but
destabilizing force infecting our politics with irrationality, unreality and
impracticality’. Svetlana Boym (2001: 3) notes that, when it was first diag-
nosed as a medical condition towards the end of the seventeenth century,
‘nostalgia was said to produce “erroneous representations” that caused the
afflicted to lose touch with the present’. In failing to reconcile themselves
with the loss of the past, the nostalgic not only lose touch with present
realities, but tend to view that past and their place in it in a deluded way.
The desire to hark back to a golden past is what Boym defines as
‘restorative’ nostalgia, which ‘attempts a transhistorical reconstruction
of the lost home’, and sees itself as defending ‘truth and tradition’
(2001: xviii). It is tempting, as Amy Hubbell does, to see nostalgérie as
a manifestation of restorative nostalgia (2011: 149), in its attempts to
reassert the continuing existence and relevance of a lost past without
properly recognising the impossibility of doing so; or, indeed, as Vogl
does, to dismiss pied-noir representations of the past not just as erroneous
but as morally and ethically wrong in their portrayal of French Algeria.
However, as we noted above, it is equally problematic simply to dismiss
nostalgérie and its cultural forms in this way. Smith calls for more careful
reflection on the formation of nostalgia as a concept, drawing attention
to the ways in which it was produced as a discursive category within
progressive political debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
She underlines the central role it came to play in defining which memories
were valid and whose perspectives counted. To be labelled nostalgic
was to be called into question as a legitimate voice. For Smith, nostalgia
emerges as ‘an important weapon in the debate over whose memories
count and what kinds of desires and harms are politically relevant’ (2000:
507). Indeed, echoes of the progressive orthodoxy concerning nostalgia
can be heard in Vogl’s critique of nostalgérie, which performs precisely
the gesture of silencing to which Smith draws attention.

It is arguably more fruitful to reflect on the role and place of nostalgérie

within the broader French cultural dynamic. At stake above all is what
it means to be of minority heritage within post-colonial France. As
a minority group, of course, the pieds-noirs have fared rather better
than others struggling to establish themselves in the post-colonial
French Republic, thanks to their possession and exploitation of greater
economic, social and cultural capital (reflected not least in their activities
in the sphere of cultural production in France). They would nevertheless
perceive themselves to be relatively marginalised, as their persistent
struggle for recognition within the political arena would suggest, and at
constant risk of being disregarded or silenced by the majority, victims of
the ‘forgetfulness’ which Henry Rousso has famously identified as consti-
tutive of historical memory, and the ‘dominant’ memory of the nation
state especially (Rousso 1987; Lorcin 2006: xxiv). From this perspective,
nostalgérie appears as a form of resistance to official history, taking on
the disruptive quality identified by Kimberly Smith as it challenges the
silences and opacities of national memory. Herein lies the interest of the
form taken in particular by the Alzieu and Lamarque volumes, and the
seemingly unproblematic way in which they reincorporate French Algeria
into the historical geography of the French nation. They open up and
operate in a gap between collective memory and national memory by
maintaining in circulation a vision of France’s colonial past which – until
the middle part of the 2000s at least – remained on the margins of the
mainstream political sphere.
So nostalgic photo-books have an important role to play asserting a
vision of French Algeria, and of maintaining that vision in circulation;
but a number of significant questions remain to be considered. How do
they work to produce a nostalgic vision of France’s Algeria? How do
we recognise it as such? And, perhaps most fundamentally, why might
the visual image and the photo-books emerge as privileged locations
for nostalgic evocations of French Algeria? Central to these questions is
the complex relationship between memory, photography and space, one
which these authors clearly recognise as significant, even if they never
quite spell out why.
Photography, Past and Presence
Essential to the relationship between photography, memory and nostalgia

is that which each one holds to space, time and temporality. Boym (2001:

24 Contesting Views
xv) argues that while nostalgia might appear to be about yearning for a
lost place, it is in fact about yearning for a different time. More precisely,
we might say that it is about attempting to recapture lost time through
space, and, in particular, through memories of place. The emphasis
of nostalgia is not so much on lost locations as on lost moments in
those locations – on what went on there. Fechner captures this idea
rather nicely when she suggests, introducing her photo album on French
Algiers, that while people might forget the names of streets or districts,
everyone remembers the name of ‘la première fille qu’on avait prise dans
ses bras. […] Ce rêve d’un soir, allez savoir comment, restait à jamais
fixé sur la pellicule’ (2002a: 9).12 Lurking within Fechner’s observation
is the established understanding of photography as a medium which is
primarily about time, and which makes us sensitive to the passage of
time precisely through the way in which it arrests time. Photography,
from this point of view, is about making brief incisions into the flow
of time, and capturing moments which are already significant, or will
have significance bestowed upon them. They are simultaneously to be
treasured for the way in which they store these moments, and feared for
the way in which they remind us continually of our growing distance
from them – Fechner’s ‘à jamais’ is a cry at once triumphal and plaintive.13
Yet the photographic image is also, fundamentally, about space.
If a photograph captures or arrests time, it does so by spatialising
it, by rendering time in spatial terms. Not only is the product of the
photographic act an object which renders the moment in two-dimensional
form,14 but the moment that object represents is one which is located in
space: photographs are always of something, someone or somewhere.
Hence, perhaps, the productive convergence of nostalgic yearning and
photography. If the photographic image serves as the ideal vehicle for the
nostalgic’s journey back in time, it is because its transformation of time
into space coincides with the nostalgic’s pursuit of time through space.
At the same time, other consequences emerge from the distinctive
spatio-temporal qualities of the photographic image. By rendering past
moments in object form, the photograph facilitates not simply a return
to the past, but also, and perhaps more significantly, the presence of the
past in the present. In mobilising the notion of presence here, we are
drawing on the stimulating work of Eelco Runia, who has argued that
historians have failed properly – both in historical analysis and histori-
ography – to engage with and account for the various ways in which
traces of the past remain in the present. One consequence of doing so,
contends Runia (2006: 9), is to rethink history and historical change not

as a linear narrative, but in terms of contiguity and discontinuity; that is

to say, to adopt a perspective which envisages history in spatial as much
as temporal terms. Runia identifies the rhetorical trope of metonymy
as an important, yet largely unrecognised, vehicle for ‘presence’ in
historiography and historical discourse: by foregrounding an element of
a whole, or displacing attention on to a particular aspect or quality of
something, it serves to draw attention to that thing or phenomenon as
a whole, and, in doing so, reminds us of its presence in absence. More
than that, it can cause a ripple in our understanding by presenting that
thing or those phenomena in a new or unexpected way, and in doing so
becomes, as Runia puts it, ‘conspicuous’ or ‘just slightly “out of place”’
(2006: 16).
However, as Runia also points out, metonymy is not a purely linguistic
phenomenon. Metonymic qualities, and above all, the peculiar ability
at once to stand for and embody the entity referred to, can inhere in
any object. Moreover, physical objects of all types, from monuments
to photographs, are particularly rich in terms of their metonymic
qualities, thanks to their ability to persist in time, and their existence
as physical traces of the past. For Runia (2006: 17), they ‘make past
events present on the plane of the present, fistulae that connect and
juxtapose those events to the here and now’. Indeed, Andrea Noble
(2010: 156–7) has argued persuasively that Runia’s call to pay attention
to how the past persists in the present, and his focus on metonymy as a
device which helps us do so, offer powerful insights into the ontology of
the photographic image and the role it has to play in shaping historical
understanding. The qualities noted above – the spatialisation of time,
and the transformation of past moments into object form – make the
photograph a strikingly effective vessel for the resurgence (or, to use
Runia’s term, the ‘leakage’) of the past into the present. Moreover, the
photograph is itself inherently metonymic in nature; that is to say, an
image of a single location or moment in time (a city square on a busy
morning, for example) can easily come to stand for places, times or
events as a whole (the European quarters of French Algiers as a thriving,
industrious and modern metropolis). Photographs can be endowed with
a level of generality and authorised to stand for or sum up the whole.
We might say, following Runia, that they acquire the status of ‘common
places’, not so much in the established sense of ‘commonplace’ as cliché
or banality, but in the stronger sense of locations which serve as common
ground open and recognisable to a wide range of people, and therefore
as vehicles for collective memory. As Runia puts it (2006: 13), ‘common

26 Contesting Views
places’ are ‘the places where history can get a hold of you’; but, as Runia
suggests, and nostalgic photo-books themselves illustrate, the past which
photographs allow back into the present, and the narratives they permit,
have the potential to open up alternative and potentially disruptive
ways of seeing and understanding both the present and the historical
narratives it has composed. How then is French Algeria returned to us
through photography? How do nostalgic photo-books stage the country
for us, and what is at stake when this vision of France’s past enters
circulation in the present?
Envisioning Memory and Space
Perhaps the most striking characteristic of nostalgic photo-books is their

insistent foregrounding of space. Both Alzieu and Lamarque offer us a
tour of the different districts of Algiers, working back and forth across
the city from the imposing boulevards of the harbour front. Fechner and
Lamarque take us beyond the city boundaries to the surrounding region
(Fechner) and Algeria as a whole (Lamarque). This shared focus on the
towns and cities of French Algeria serves to organise pied-noir memory
in spatial terms, from specific streets and quarters of the major cities to
provincial towns settled and developed by the colons (colonial settlers)
in the decades following occupation in 1830. In doing so, they at once
restage familiar locations, and assert the nature and extent of Algerian
development under colonial rule.
As we noted earlier, if the spaces of French Algeria are a shared
concern, the manner in which they are depicted varies in interesting
ways. First, we have the sustained use of picture postcards from the first
decades of the twentieth century by Alzieu and Lamarque. The effect in
Lamarque’s volumes especially is to offer a consistent vision of French
Algeria at a specific point in its history, when extensive urban planning
and design had given its cities, and Algiers above all, a look which was
recognisably French. The image of cosmopolitan sophistication they
create is perhaps the most potent example of the blending of memory
and fantasy, which Boym (2001: xiii) argues is constitutive of a nostalgic
vision. Of course, if Lamarque can build a volume from vintage picture
postcards, it is because of the wealth of material available; but, as
Prochaska suggests, that material is itself symptomatic of the historical
moment it depicts. The volume of visual material produced at once bears
witness to and makes manifest the triumph of the colonial project in

Algeria. It signals the high-water mark for the political and social order
of French Algeria, ‘the period when the settlers established their de facto
hegemony in Algerian affairs over both the Algerians and metropolitan
France’ (Prochaska 1990: 416). From a nostalgic perspective, the attrac-
tiveness of the period depicted in the postcards lies in its coherence and
stability. They capture a world in which the natural balance had yet to
be challenged either by world historical events (the Second World War,
nationalism and the dismantling of empire) or by the French state itself
(last-ditch strategies of modernisation, containment and pacification
during the war of independence in the 1950s). They articulate a vision
not just of how things were, but of how things might have stayed had
the world taken a different path – what we might call the ‘if only’ of
nostalgia.
Where Lamarque invites us to dwell on the French Algeria of the Belle
Époque, Jacques Gandini focuses on the look of French Algeria in its
final years. Moreover, the titles of his volumes give his project an overtly
autobiographical dimension, as they intertwine those last decades with
his own youth. To remember one, he suggests, is to remember and to
understand the other. Gandini’s biographical investment in the places he
depicts reflects Yedes’s observation that the particular trauma for many
pieds-noirs lies in being uprooted not just from their homeland but also
from their childhood. To be wrenched from French Algeria is to be cut
off from that childhood: ‘now they could connect with childhood only
in memory with no more physical space to relate to’ (Yedes 2003: 247;
emphasis in the original). As Gandini’s project would suggest, and as
we discuss further below, the popularity of nostalgic photo-books lies
precisely in the opportunities they afford for restaging the spaces and
places of those memories. At the same time, his project is concerned to
display and celebrate colonial action in French Algeria. The city of his
youth, the one presented to his readers, is the one defined and shaped in
particular by the modernising ambitions of the colonial authorities in
the last decade or so of French rule. It is the 1950s’ Algeria of extensive
urban development and the nascent Plan de Constantine, launched by
the Gaullist government in 1958 as the final attempt to retain colonial
authority in Algeria by means of interventionist urban planning, housing
construction and economic growth.15 If the triumph of French Algeria,
for Lamarque, is to be found in the untroubled period of the Belle
Époque, it is located for Gandini in the final, heroic period of struggle to
save Algeria’s colonial soul.
The overriding preoccupation with colonial French space and place

28 Contesting Views
in nostalgic photo-books of the past two decades marks a significant

shift away from the organising principle of typological categorisation in
terms of scènes et types, focused on colonised populations and reflected
both in the captions and labels given to postcards produced during the
colonial era and in the early retrospective portrait of French Algeria
produced by Paul Azoulay. Indeed, the concentration in Azoulay’s La
Nostalgérie française almost entirely on local populations and their
ways of life makes the volume curiously anachronistic, not so much a
product of post-colonial upheaval as a remnant of the colonial way of
seeing mimicked with intentional (albeit risky) irony by Alloula in Le
Harem colonial.16
So how are we to account for the shift towards space and place as
organising principles for the visualisation of French Algeria’s past?
Joëlle Bahloul (1996) has underlined the important role played by the
spatialisation of memory among diasporas and communities in exile,
especially among those for whom return to the homeland is (perceived
as) impossible. In her work on memories of colonial Algeria among the
exiled Algerian Jewish community, she develops Maurice Halbwachs’s
emphasis on the fundamental relationship between memory and place
to explore what she terms the ‘architecture of memory’ – namely, how
memories take shape by being mapped on to and constituted through
specific spaces and places, and, inversely, how specific locations become
identified with particular memories. As Nancy Wood puts it, discussing
Bahloul’s work,
The ‘uprooted memories’ of a diasporic community […] must compensate
for lack of access to their own lieux de mémoire and the more ‘intangible
relation to the past’ that such physical distance may impose, by summoning
memories whose key locus is the very spatial parameters from which the
community is physically estranged. (Wood 2003: 263)
For Bahloul, the domestic context provides the primary site for
diasporic memory, which is grounded in the intimate activities of the
domestic sphere and private life. Nostalgic photo-books, on the other
hand, while confirming the centrality of space as a vector for memory
through their restaging of French Algeria, also make clear how public
spaces and places can be reconstituted as a theatre for remembrance
which is at once private and collective, offering common ground familiar
to many where individual memories might also be located. Of central
concern here is how the public spaces and places of French Algeria take
shape through photography.

Both Alzieu and Lamarque use the device of the walking tour to
structure their portrait of Algiers. In fact, Lamarque’s text explicitly
adopts the tone and conventions of a guidebook at times, introducing the
figure of the wandering tourist to focalise the description and discovery of
the city.17 The tour begins (as it does in all these photo-books) with shots
of the harbour front, dominated by the imposing façades of the buildings
on Boulevard de la République and Boulevard Carnot above the arcades
which serve the port. It progresses gradually around the European
quarters and the most significant districts of the city – significant, that is
to say, for our implied or intended readers. The effect of this conceit is to
foreground the individual’s encounter with, and bodily location within,
the city and thereby to open up perspectives and viewpoints on the city
from which memory and recollection might emerge. Yet it also raises the
question of precisely how the viewer is positioned in the city, in terms of
the perspectives they are invited to adopt and what can be seen (not to
mention, as we discuss below, what can be less readily so).
Central to the nostalgic restaging of colonial space is a principle
of iteration which we can see at work across all these volumes. By
this, we mean the repetition not necessarily of precisely the same
images from one volume to another, but certainly the same views and
perspectives. For example, there emerges a certain way of photographing
the seafront esplanade in Algiers, looking down the length of Boulevard
de la République towards the Djema-Djedid mosque and Place du
Gouvernement to capture the facades of the grand European buildings,
the bustling port activity and the supposedly harmonious intermingling
of Western and Eastern cultures symbolised by the mosque gleaming
white in the sun.18 Likewise, a certain way of visualising the Basilica of
Notre-Dame d’Afrique emerges when we compare images in the books
by Cardinal (1988: 142) and Fechner (2002a: 31). While the images
themselves are different, one taken at a greater distance than the other,
the perspective they share is similar. Viewed from a higher point, the
Basilica is positioned prominently not in relation to the broader urban
context of Algiers but against an expansive backdrop of sea and sky.
What we are invited to see above all is its exalted and elevated position.
Indeed, the origins of this way of seeing the Basilica can be found in
earlier picture postcard images reproduced in volumes by Alzieu (2000:
85) and Lamarque (2009: 74).
Thus, through the material they exploit, repeat and recirculate,
nostalgic photo-books are both grounded in, and help to perpetuate,
visual commonplaces, established ways of seeing and understanding

30 Contesting Views
spaces and places by constituting and foregrounding not just familiar

and significant locations but familiar perspectives on those locations.19
Moreover, they are views and perspectives which come to stand in for
or represent the place as a whole; in other words, which acquire an
important metonymic role. The repetition of particular perspectives on
particular locations (‘cette sélection de lieux familiers’, as the blurb for
Alzieu’s Alger: mémoire en images puts it) helps to produce and sustain
a recognisable place and a shared understanding of what French Algeria
looked like – and, more specifically, looked like from the pied-noir point
of view.
Another important constituent of the nostalgic perspective is aerial
photography. It is certainly the case, particularly in volumes drawing
extensively on picture postcard material, that the perspective proposed
for the viewer is from street level, and, occasionally, from elevated
positions afforded by upper floors or rooftops. Such perspectives offer
a naturalistic way of positioning the spectator in the cityscape, thereby
grounding their authenticity as a view as if from the turn of the street
corner, for example. However, Fechner makes abundant use of aerial
shots in her visualisation of Algiers, and they appear too in books
by Alzieu and Gandini. All three authors favour panoramic views of
Algiers taken from above the port harbour, with the city spreading out
along the bay and tumbling up the hillside, the European quarter with
its imposing seafront buildings holding back the comparatively more
unruly dwellings and streets of the Casbah. 20 Fechner’s volume extends
that panoramic, aerial perspective beyond Algiers into the surrounding
regions. We catch a glimpse of towns in provincial Algeria nestled in
rural areas or set amongst well-established agricultural landscapes.
In many such shots, the key landmarks in these settlements – civic
buildings, churches, municipal spaces – are located in the centre of
the frame, with the infrastructure of French colonisation (road and
rail networks) spreading out to the edge of the frame and beyond as it
connects them to the rest of the country.
Now, the mapping of French Algeria in this way undoubtedly performs
a documentary function in the first degree: that is to say, the images
situate colonial settlements with which the viewer might have personal
or family connections within a broader geographical context. Also
implicit within the use of aerial photography in both Fechner’s volumes
and elsewhere, however, is a reassertion of the commanding gaze of
colonial authority. In encompassing the territory as a whole, from above
and at a distance, aerial photographs (like maps) abstract out or render

invisible the different populations coexisting in those settlements, with

their differences, inequalities and antagonisms: precisely the differences
and antagonisms on which the colonial project itself would ultimately
founder. Indeed, we might say that it is in the very restaging of the
colonial view – a view which, in the context of a nostalgic photo-book,
can only ever be once-commanding – that a sense of loss and nostalgia is
communicated most clearly. The easy loftiness of the aerial perspective
offers a powerful reminder of the spaciousness and capaciousness of the
land they once inhabited.
(Not) Seeing the Casbah
The legacy of a colonial way of seeing can also be felt in the engagement
with, and portrayal of, the Algiers Casbah. Long established as the
historic core of the city, the Casbah has been a persistent source of
fascination, anxiety and myth since the beginning of the French colonial
period, as both Victoria Thompson (2006) and Zeynep Çelik (1997: 21;
2009a) have made clear. Its role as a vehicle for myth is one it continues
to play in retrospective visions of the city, though its presence takes
noticeably different forms across the corpus. It has much greater presence
in volumes which draw for the most part on picture postcard material,
and whose engagement with the Casbah is primarily in the mode of
the picturesque. The principles of iteration and repetition noted above
emerge once more, as conventional views of the Casbah are reproduced:
narrow, winding streets shaded by overhanging eaves; local populations
going about their business, most notably Algerian women dressed in the
enveloping white haïk; Moorish architectural details, especially in the
form of elaborate doorways.
The accumulated effect of these images is to assert the Casbah as a
space of closure and opacity. The foregrounding of doorways underlines
their symbolic significance as markers of secrecy, mystery and promise.
In Lamarque’s Alger d’antan, pages on the Casbah follow on from an
exploration of the neighbouring European quarters, re-enacting again
the geographically naturalistic order of the walking tour; but, unlike
the introduction to the European quarters, the reader-viewer’s first
encounter with the Casbah is not so much with buildings, spaces and
places as with its inhabitants. We are confronted with the full-page
image, captioned ‘Alger – Rue arabe’, of an Algerian family standing
at the bottom of a stepped street which appears to make its way up

32 Contesting Views
and into the heart of the Casbah (Lamarque 2009: 53). The image is
striking in its ambiguity: at once on display in its surroundings, in a pose
reminiscent of the ethnographic photographic practices of the nineteenth
century, the family serves at the same time as a physical barrier to the
Casbah beyond, and presumably a reminder to the intended viewer of
the fundamental otherness of this space at the heart of Algiers, both
architecturally and demographically. The text which accompanies this
introductory portrait (an extended quotation from Julien Duvivier’s film
Pépé le Moko) reiterates some of the dominant myths of the Casbah,
which are then played out in the pages that follow. 21
In Alzieu’s Alger: mémoire en images, on the other hand, it is only in
the final chapter when we finally encounter the Casbah, as he invites us
on ‘une balade dans la Casbah’ (2000: 111). 22 Thus, despite the number
of pages devoted to it (six in all), the Casbah finds itself dislocated
and marginalised within his visual portrait of Algiers. Moreover, it is
presented in a way which indicates its somewhat uncertain or discordant
place within Alzieu’s Algiers, and its status as a ‘ville à part dans la ville
européenne’ (2000: 113). 23 He shows us first an image of the original
Casbah, the military fort high up the hillside with a commanding
view of the city and the bay of Algiers. The second image, spread over
two pages, is an aerial photograph of the city taken from the bay, its
ostensible aim being to locate the Casbah in the context of the city as
a whole; but the commanding view offered by this shot is accompanied
by a text which once again asserts the mysterious and opaque nature
of the Casbah as an unknowable, ungraspable place. The assertion
is borne out by the postcard images on subsequent pages, which, like
those in Lamarque’s volumes, confirm a conventional, Orientalist vision
of the Casbah. The disjunction here between the discursive and visual
representations of the Casbah – between the desire to locate the Casbah
clearly within the city, and the recognition (even celebration) of its
fundamental unreadability – signals an ambivalence which finds even
clearer expression in the volumes by Fechner and Gandini.
Their portraits of Algiers are striking for the concerted circum-
scription, even occlusion, to which they subject the Casbah, in terms of
both the limited space afforded to it and its portrayal. Both authors adopt
a similar strategy, favouring a long-range, contextualising shot showing
the Casbah rising up the hill behind Place du Gouvernement, whose civic
buildings and spaces dominate the foreground: for example, see Fechner
(2002a: 22–3), also reproduced as the book’s cover art, and Gandini
(1995: 93). In other words, their visualisation of the Casbah emphasises

how it has been contained or held back by the incursions into its lower
quarters which were a feature of colonial planning during the nineteenth
century (Çelik 1997: 25–8; 2009b). Moreover, the brief glimpse they
offer of local life in the Casbah comes from some of the wider, more
modernised streets on its fringes, and enacts a certain reluctance to
penetrate further into its interior. Indeed, this uneasy visual skirmish
with the Casbah is reflected in its discursive construction in Gandini’s
book: his brief history of the district is marked by a rhetoric of decline
from a golden age of occupation by an indigenous bourgeoisie (‘Il y avait
une vie sociale; il s’y donnait des réceptions et des fêtes, mais peu à peu
la population a changé’)24 to a period under French colonial rule when,
as an influx of working-class populations and increasing problems of
moral decline led to the gradual departure of the bourgeoisie, a strategy
of containment in the form of interventionist urban planning (‘La partie
basse de la Kasbah [sic] fut l’objet de transformations consécutives à
l’aménagement des boulevards Anatole-France et Amiral-Pierre, des rues
Bab-el-Oued, Bab Azoun et de la Lyre […]’)25 is implied as being both
inevitable and necessary (1995: 93).
What is at stake in the uncertain, even hostile, portrayal of the
Casbah in these volumes? Their treatment of the area serves as an
example of how they structure pied-noir forgetting of French Algeria
as much as they do its remembrance. Their unease in acknowledging
the place of the Casbah in the city is perhaps an expression of the
trauma of loss or separation from French Algeria; or, to put it another
way, the relative occlusion of the Casbah confers on it the status of a
defining absent presence. The problem with the Casbah, as Gandini
himself implies and Çelik points out (1997: 26), is not only that it was
resistant to French modernisation, organisation and control, but that it
proved during the Algerian War to be a locus of disruption. It emerged
as a ‘counter space’ (Çelik 2009a: 135), a source of revolutionary energy
which would ultimately help bring about the end of French Algeria as
a whole, for all the insistence, in Gandini’s volumes especially, on the
success and promise of a modernised city and a modernising colonial
power.
Nonetheless, in the final analysis, one of the central concerns of these
photo-books is to celebrate the modernity of French Algeria. They are
preoccupied not just with evoking memories of places once known
but with asserting a misunderstood or forgotten success, of which, it
is implied, we should be proud. Their vision of French Algeria might
be constituted for the most part by black-and-white images, but it is

34 Contesting Views
clear from tonal contrasts and plays of light and shadow that the sun is
usually shining in them, that French Algeria was, and could have been,
a place of radiance.
Images of End Times
The specificities and contours of nostalgic visions of French Algeria

emerge even more sharply when we compare them to two other visual
portraits which have appeared in recent years. Like Gandini and Fechner,
these books focus on French Algeria in its final years; but their visuali-
sation of the colony’s end times opens up a contrasting understanding
both of the colonial dynamic and of the historical process more broadly,
as they remind us of the beginnings which lie beyond the end of French
Algeria.
Pierre Bourdieu’s Images d’Algérie: une affinité élective [Images of
Algeria: An Elective Affinity], published posthumously in 2003, brings
together a selection of images taken in 1958 and 1959 during time spent
in Algeria, and in particular when he was undertaking ethnographic
fieldwork in Kabylia at an early stage in his academic career. Like
Gandini and Fechner, Bourdieu’s concern is with French Algeria in its
most advanced and final form, and how the French colonial presence
expresses itself in spatial form and organisation. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
though, the locations he explores and the perspectives he adopts in doing
so are rather different.
Away from the grandiose architectural statements of Algeria’s
European cities, and the familiarity of its colonial settlements, the focus
of Bourdieu’s research was on the modes of life among the established
populations of rural Kabylia, and the ways in which those modes of
life had been challenged and disrupted by other aspects of colonial
planning policy and spatial intervention. Chief among these was the
policy of regroupement and resettlement which took shape towards
the end of the 1950s, and which involved whole villages being displaced
and relocated in planned settlements nearby. 26 The policy was driven at
once by counter-insurgency tactics (ridding nationalist rebels of their
support infrastructure in rural Algeria, which was the main theatre of
conflict during the war of independence) and by a strategy of enforced
modernisation of rural populations (relocation in settlements offering
a bare minimum of modernised living conditions). At the same time,
Bourdieu’s images explore the presence of local Algerian populations

in the urban spaces of colonial settlements and European quarters (a

presence resulting in part from the internal migration and displacement
from rural areas, what Bourdieu termed ‘le déracinement’ [uprooting],
provoked by the policies implemented there).
Looking back at Bourdieu’s work in Algeria during the late 1950s,
the French ethnographer Fanny Colonna (2009: 70–1) discusses the
photographs presented in Images d’Algérie in critical terms. While they
certainly foreground and focus on local populations, she suggests, they
do so in a way which negates their existence within a period of historical
momentum (anti-colonial struggle) of which Bourdieu himself was fully
aware, and which had motivated his desire to undertake fieldwork in
Algeria in the first place. Colonna (2009: 70) therefore notes especially
the lack of evidence of both the French military presence and the
European populations, even in those photographs depicting Algerians
in largely colonial urban environments. She concludes that Bourdieu’s
portrait serves merely to assert the otherness and difference of the local
populations, and leaves us with the impression of a population and
culture existing outside history.
However, we would argue that Colonna here undertakes a rather
reductive reading of these images. To criticise Bourdieu for a partial
vision of French Algeria by eliding the military presence or European
populations is arguably to miss the point of his approach. His images
of rural Kabylia repeatedly foreground and dwell on the presence and
effects of the colonial project as manifested in the lived environments
and landscapes of the populations he studies. He plays close attention
to the infrastructures and mechanisms of colonial modernisation:
electricity pylons stretching out across landscapes in which Kabyle
peasants are working (2003: 138–9); an old couple walking down a road,
the husband on a donkey, past a modern road sign (2003: 117); and lines
of farm labourers in harness to a crop-spraying machine (2003: 35, 141),
a rather unsettling example of the techniques of agricultural mechani-
sation pioneered in French Algeria. Bourdieu captures too the nature
and form of the villages de regroupement which were central to the
policy of resettlement. Projected on to the landscape rather than taking
shape in response to it, the settlements are striking for their disciplined
regularity, based as they are on a grid plan organised around a central
square featuring the civic buildings and monuments typical of any
French settlement (school, town hall, war memorial). As Bourdieu (2003:
79) observes, the desire to discipline and modernise local populations is
made manifest in this mode of spatial organisation, and the assumption

36 Contesting Views
that the modernisation of space will inevitably lead to the modernisation

of the populations located there.
Finally, Bourdieu also explores the relationship of individuals to
the environments of French Algeria, whether it be the rural peasants
working and living around the villages de regroupement or their original
villages, or the ways in which Algerians inhabit and respond to the
urban environments of colonial settlements (street vendors, families
walking and talking, veiled women riding on mopeds). It is not the case,
in other words, that Bourdieu’s portrait of the local populations depicts
them simply as an atemporal, pre-modern Other. At stake, rather, is the
staging of the encounter between the indigenous populations of Algeria
and the organising principles and activities of an increasingly militarised
colonial presence. His images capture changes in the modes of life of local
populations which are symptomatic of the déracinement he explores in
his work. It is precisely through the location of individuals within the
landscapes of French Algeria, and the simultaneous examination of
those landscapes, where we can see evidence of those changes.
Through his visual exploration of the infrastructures of colonialism,
and his insistent reinscription of local populations in a range of
environments beyond the confines of the Casbah, Bourdieu gives the
viewer-reader a strong sense of going ‘behind the scenes’ of French Algeria.
That his images open up a perspective in sharp contrast to those of his
pied-noir contemporaries is perhaps to be expected, given his political
and academic predispositions; but, in doing so, they help to crystallise the
modalities of pied-noir photo-books; that is to say, the visual strategies
they use in order to construct French Algeria for consumption and
remembrance. As we noted above, for example, their frequent recourse
to aerial photography serves not only to render spectacular the urban
landscapes of the colonial cities, but also to empty people from those
landscapes, to lose them from sight. It underscores their preoccupation
with the décor and landscapes of French Algeria, and the celebration of
space and dominion over it. When people are present, it is principally in
the form of crowds, whose function is to denote the energy, activity and
bustle of the city. Local Algerian populations may form part of these
crowds, but, for the most part, they are to be seen in their designated
place, as part of the picturesque of the Casbah. If proper attention is
paid to them elsewhere, it is not as part of everyday life, as in Bourdieu’s
volume, but as disconcerting spectacle. This is the case especially of
women dressed in the traditional and enveloping white haïk. Fechner’s
album on Algiers gives striking prominence early on to a photograph of

a young woman wearing a haïk walking down one of the city’s seafront
boulevards (2002a: 17). The viewer’s eye is undoubtedly caught both by
her isolated prominence on the pavement in the right-hand foreground of
the image and by a European woman looking at her from the back seat
of a passing car. The act of looking caught on camera, and the expression
of curiosity, surprise and uncertainty we can distinguish, reflect the
ambivalence of the photograph itself in the context of Fechner’s volume,
as at once a recognition of the presence of local Algerian populations in
Algiers, and an acknowledgement of their latent disruptiveness, of the
challenge and threat they came to pose to the colonial order.
Comparison with Bourdieu’s images also throws into relief the
perception of historical time and change in relation to French Algeria
at work in nostalgic photo-books. In his discussion of memory and
place, Andreas Huyssen (1995: 88) points to the relationship between
nostalgia and Utopia. Contrary to what we might think, he argues,
Utopia is not the opposite of nostalgia, but is constitutive of it: nostalgia
is not just about how we remember a place to be, but how we wish it
could have been. The role of images in nostalgic photo-books is to put
a stop to time, to allow a return to lost worlds which remain in pristine
condition, and which continue to gleam in the sun. A sense of eternity,
of being out of time or beyond time, is reinforced by the predominance
of black-and-white photography. 27 In contrast, through their depiction
of déracinement and internal migration, Bourdieu’s images of French
Algeria stage the profoundly revolutionary changes provoked by the
policies and strategies of the colonial authorities under conditions of war,
in terms of the shifts in population distribution and behaviour whose
consequences the authorities themselves perhaps only partially grasped.
They capture the ways in which the war itself contributed to social
transformations which in turn helped to feed the political momentum of
the independence movement. 28 His images articulate a sense of history in
progress, of radical change, of instability and becoming.
A similar vision of historical change takes shape in another
contemporary photo-book by photojournalist Marc Riboud, Algérie
indépendance (2009). Like Bourdieu’s volume, it provides a revealing
counterpoint to the vision of end times offered by pied-noir photo-books.
Riboud’s book draws together images taken during the spring and
summer of 1962, and focuses on the days surrounding the proclamation
of Algerian independence at the beginning of July. It offers an alternative
understanding of the Algerian War and Algerian independence not as
an end of history but as a start, as its Year Zero. 29 It captures the way in

38 Contesting Views
which a country changes hands, and does so in particular by focusing on

crowds. Like Bourdieu, Riboud shifts the emphasis away from space – as
we have argued, the dominant vector for the depiction of French Algeria
in pied-noir photo-books – towards people. His photographs foreground
people in space, and fill space with people. Further still, these are not just
photographs with people in them, but photographs in which the historical
agency of the crowd is asserted. The crowds in Riboud’s images are not
merely part of a picturesque décor, or indistinguishable participants in
public life, but a force of historical, social and political change, captured
as they fill and overrun the spaces and places of empire.
History through Photography
Comparing nostalgic photo-books with the divergent perspectives on

French Algeria offered by Bourdieu and Riboud, then, allows us to
crystallise the modalities of their way of seeing; but it also raises more
general questions about the visualisation of history through photography,
and the concomitant role played by the photographic image in shaping
historical understanding. As we shall see in Chapter 3 especially, they
are issues which have an abiding importance in relation to various
aspects of France’s Algerian past and perceptions of events during the
Algerian War. If nostalgic photo-books are of particular significance in
this respect, it is not just because of how they portray France’s Algerian
past, but also because of what is at stake in sustaining that vision of the
past in the present, and doing so through visual means. Key here are the
ontological specificities of the photographic image and its metonymical
qualities. Most obviously, these volumes serve as vehicles for nostalgia
by acting as a ‘fistula’ or passage back and forth between past and
present, and recreating French Algeria as a pristine Utopia; but, simulta-
neously, they establish the radical and disruptive contiguity of past and
present by making space – literally as much as figuratively – for the past
in the present, and helping to maintain the presence of French Algeria
within the contemporary public sphere in France as a result. 30 They
are at once an effort to reassert its place as part of broader collective
memory, and a disruptive reminder of France’s last major colony as a
triumph of modernity and modernisation. The narrative they articulate
has spent much of the past fifty years in the wilderness; but, as the events
of the past few years have suggested, it is one which might slowly be
gaining traction.

2
Visions of History:
Looking Back at the Algerian War
Visions of History
Making Visible the Algerian War
If the 1990s and 2000s were marked by a growth of photo-books

and other visual material restaging, celebrating and mourning French
Algeria, the period was defined too by persistent debate within France,
particularly among historians, over the visual representation of the
Algerian War and its relationship to collective memory of the conflict.
The issue was first raised by Benjamin Stora in his groundbreaking
work of 1991, La Gangrène et l’oubli [Gangrene and Forgetfulness].
Stora (1991: 248) argued that French amnesia in relation to the war
could be linked to the lack of visual images in circulation subsequent
to it. In particular, he suggested, the conflict seemed to lack the potent
or iconic images around which narrative, memory and history could
coalesce as they had for other conflicts, and most notably the Vietnam
War. For Stora, the Algerian War was a conflict more written about
than seen (1991: 255). As such, it would demonstrate by exception the
importance of the visual image as a catalyst for collective memory and
historical narrative. Moreover, argued Stora in later work, a corollary of
the conflict’s subsequent disappearance from sight was the emergence of
an enduring myth – one which he was at pains to challenge – that the
Algerian War was invisible at the time as well, largely unmediated by the
visual image (2009: 13).
Since his initial intervention, Stora and other historians have been
working on a variety of fronts in order to foreground and develop
understanding of what we termed in the Introduction, following
Deborah Poole, the ‘visual economy’ of the Algerian War. They have
drawn attention to both the mediation of the conflict by the visual image

40 Contesting Views
and the processes regulating the flow and circulation of those images
within French (and to a lesser extent, Algerian) culture at the time of the
conflict and subsequently. In the first place, historians of the war have
examined the range of visual material in circulation during the conflict,
and the conditions of its production within, and as part of, the French
military apparatus. Recent work has underscored the important role
such material played in the propaganda efforts of the French authorities,
whether directly (in official documentation and publications such as
Bled, the army newspaper) or indirectly, through its reproduction in
metropolitan news publications such as Paris Match (Chominot 2005;
2008). Secondly, they have been active in setting out to reintroduce
visual material from the war into the contemporary public sphere. Stora
himself was responsible for staging a series of exhibitions in France in
1992, 2002 and 2004 which had the explicit aim of restoring a visual
dimension to knowledge and understanding of the war, and exploring
how the conflict was constituted through images. Indeed, looking back
at the first exhibition in 1992, a crucial year for public debate in France
about the war and the Algerian question, Stora would claim (2009: 15)
that it had even helped to ‘organise’ memory of the war through the
range of material it put on display.
The exhibition of 2004, Photographier la guerre d’Algérie, which
Stora co-curated with Laurent Gervereau at the Hôtel de Sully in
Paris, was perhaps the most comprehensive effort to draw attention
to the conflict’s visual dimension. It was accompanied by a large
format book which offered a sustained survey of the ways in which the
war was mediated by the photographic image, and how those images
circulated both at the time and subsequently (Gervereau and Stora
2004). The project was attentive to the wide range of agents at work
in visualising the conflict, and the different contexts and conditions in
which images were produced, including the extensive activity of official
military photographers such as René Bail and Marc Flament, whose
images would subsequently be incorporated into the French military
archives; the role of professional photojournalists such as Raymond
Depardon and Marc Riboud covering the war for the metropolitan print
media and picture agencies; and the vernacular photography produced
by the appelés (conscripts) sent to Algeria as part of their military
service. It also highlighted the distinctive position and role of actors
such as Marc Garanger, professional photographers who were called
up and found their expertise mobilised by the regiments in which they
served.

Visions of History 41
Moreover, the curators were concerned to address the unequal balance

of visual power between the two sides of the conflict, what they termed
‘une guerre inégalitaire des images’ (Gervereau and Stora 2004: 8), or
unequal war of images, to which Stora had already drawn attention
in 1991. The Algerian War was a conflict dominated by French image
production, and, as such, one whose historical visualisation would
take shape largely through material produced within a French context
and from a French perspective. Both the exhibition and the book,
therefore, at once set out to foreground the fundamental imbalance
in the visual economy and visual history of the conflict, and began to
redress it through the incorporation of material produced by and within
the Algerian independence movement. In other words, through the
investigation of the still image and its production lay the opportunity to
reshape historical understanding and perception of the conflict.
This turn by historians to the war’s visual legacy invites further
reflection precisely on the place and status of the photographic image
within the historiography of the conflict, and, indeed, within the domain
of historiography more broadly. The question is all the more significant
given that the academic production of knowledge on the war, partic-
ularly in France but not exclusively, has been dominated by the discipline
of history, whose methodologies and approaches have not always
acknowledged the role visual images might play in shaping historical
knowledge and understanding. As Gervereau and Stora themselves
argue, the time has now come to take images seriously as a historically
valid resource:
Alors ces photos exhumées, inédites ou célèbres, ces photos décryptées,
commentées, légendées, restituent une partie de la réalité d’une époque.
[…] Elles s’accompagnent des avancées les plus solides de l’Histoire,
de manière à les ‘qualifier’, à la fois par rapport à ce qu’elles évoquent
factuellement, et aussi par rapport à leur place dans une histoire du visuel
plus large. (Gervereau and Stora 2004: 9)1
They must be seen not simply as illustrating historical narratives, but as
nuancing or inflecting existing understanding.
In the context of historical research on the war, the turn to the
photographic image promoted by Stora offered the opportunity (partic-
ularly for younger scholars) to stage a break which enabled a sense
of epistemological progress within the field. Thus, in 2008, Marie
Chominot could make the case for a history of the Algerian War through
photography, by foregrounding and examining the extensive archive of

42 Contesting Views
visual material from different sources, such as military archives, personal

collections, and holdings assembled by the Algerian nationalist movement
(Chominot 2008: 15). Similarly, work by Claire Mauss-Copeaux on
vernacular photography by conscript soldiers (2003; 2005) offered a way
of understanding and reconstructing lived experience of the war from the
point of view of a group who, as we discussed in the Introduction, felt
themselves to be marginalised and forgotten in France once the war was
over. Moreover, reintroducing what we might term a perspective ‘from
below’ can be seen to challenge the dominant or hegemonic vision of the
war produced within the French military apparatus, and subsequently
sustained by the military archives. Finally, the break was enacted by Stora
and Gervereau themselves, with their call to recognise the diversity of
visual material mediating the war reflected in their choice of cover image
for the 2004 exhibition catalogue. The photograph, taken in 1957 by
Dutch Magnum photographer Kryn Taconis, depicts a small detachment
of Algerian nationalist soldiers dressed in fatigues and camouflage gear,
undertaking surveillance in the hills of rural Algeria.
The rhetorical intentions of the curators in using this image are
arguably threefold. First, there is the simple fact that it is an image of
Algerian fighters. In other words, the photograph makes visible an enemy
which myth – both at the time and subsequently – asserted was largely
invisible; a myth reflected in images taken on the French side showing
the army patrolling, observing and moving through seemingly empty
landscapes, whether in the mountains of the Aurès or the deserts of the
Saharan regions. Secondly, the image not only makes the enemy visible,
but presents it in the guise of a unit whose outfits and equipment make
them easy to mistake at first glance for their French counterparts. In
doing so, it challenges a further dominant myth of the Algerian fighters
as fellagha (swiftly abbreviated to fells by French soldiers), terrorists
or guerrillas wearing traditional dress and emerging with knives and
guns to ambush unsuspecting soldiers and civilians, or slit the throats
of those Algerians suspected of collaborating with the enemy. An image
of the Algerian fighters as shadowy terrorists rather than an organised
military force took hold rapidly both among the French army and in the
popular imagination. Indeed, it frequently found reinforcement through
the visual image: a well-known image by army photographer Marc
Flament, for example, depicts arrested Front de Libération Nationale
(FLN) fighters being paraded through a provincial town carrying knives
between their teeth. 2 Thirdly, by focusing on and opening up a view
of the Algerian side of the conflict, the image enables the disruption of

dominant paradigms of viewing which present the war essentially as a

French conflict, and from a French perspective.
The turn to the photographic image among historians of the war,
and their recognition of its importance for historical understanding,
is certainly welcome and necessary, though does also display certain
limitations. In particular, it is arguably the case that the central concern
of recent debate has been with the volume of visual material in the public
sphere. The emphasis has been placed both on recognising the scope
and diversity of the material produced and on reintroducing it into the
public sphere as a way of combating the myths of the war’s invisibility.
This move is itself part of the broader historiographical project led by
Stora and others focused on overcoming France’s historical amnesia in
relation to the Algerian War and normalising the conflict as an object
of historical study – that is to say, on locating it more clearly within
the domain of the historical rather than the memorial, and thereby
attempting to lessen social, cultural and political tensions around it.
As Stora himself (2010: 3) has argued, ‘cinquante ans après la fin de la
guerre d’Algérie, l’heure est maintenant venue du passage, de la mémoire
douloureuse à l’histoire accomplie, de la blessure à l’apaisement’. 3
While it is important to acknowledge the work done by historians,
particularly during the 2000s, in reminding us of the visual representation
of the war, it is also important not to overlook the extent to which visual
material depicting the war had already been in circulation in the French
public sphere. Historians themselves might have begun to emphasise the
presence and role of the visual only relatively recently, but visual images
had for some time been at work supporting, establishing and consoli-
dating historical narratives of the war. Furthermore, engaging with that
visual material means thinking more carefully about its role in shaping
historical memory and understanding of the conflict (a process of which
the recent turn to the visual among historians is itself part, of course).
We therefore need to examine the work images do in shaping our
perception of events, and their function as part of a broader economy of
meaning and understanding. The issue arguably remains something of
a blind spot in historical thinking about the photographic image, which
(as we discuss further in Chapter 3) tends to see it as a historical source
or resource, rather than a mode of representation with its own peculiar
materiality and modes of signification. After all, the lesson of the Mollat
book display we considered in our Introduction, demonstrating as it does
how photographic material is mobilised to frame and present historical
accounts, is to remind us of the extensive reach of the photographic

44 Contesting Views
image in the public sphere. The photograph is a ubiquitous presence

doing unobtrusive work in relation to our understanding of the war. By
foregrounding particular themes or tropes at particular moments – such
as the encounter on an Algiers street between French soldiers and an
Algerian woman wearing traditional dress – it helps to shape the ways
in which the war is remembered, ways which need our close attention.
The question of the work done by images in shaping historical
understanding is one we pursue both in this chapter and the next. Our
aim here is to explore how the Algerian War persists in visual form
subsequent to the conflict. We consider how memories and perceptions
of the war are constituted through photography during the following
decades, and how historical narratives about it take visual shape. Such
issues are thrown into particular relief, as we examine at length in
Chapter 3, by the historical fortunes of the events which unfolded in Paris
on and around 17 October 1961, when a peaceful protest by Algerian
immigrants against a night-time curfew was brutally suppressed by the
police. We consider there the role played by the photographic image in
facilitating the trajectory of 17 October from an occluded and forgotten
event to ‘un fait historique majeur’ (Branche 2005: 46).4
In discussing these questions, we focus mainly on the situation in
France, not least because it is in France where the debate has been most
active, and where concern over the role and status of the photographic
image has been most clearly articulated. Indeed, the various aspects
of that debate, including the acknowledgement of an image deficit on
the Algerian side, and the desire to address it by incorporating images
taken by and of Algerian combatants, itself reflects a more general and
persistent concern over the historiography and historical understanding
of the war in France. Moreover, it is a concern which, as we discuss later in
relation to the Algerian photographer Mohamed Kouaci, who had a key
role as the official photographer of the Algerian provisional government
(GPRA) and its newspaper El Moudjahid during the conflict, stands in
ironic contrast to the seeming indifference, even suspicion, displayed by
the Algerian authorities towards the historical and memorial value of
photography.
Visualising the End of French Algeria
From Philip Dine’s study (1994) of representations of the Algerian War in

France (which, somewhat belying its title, focuses more on literary rather

than visual images of the conflict), two themes emerge as particularly

important: on the one hand, the often nostalgic evocations of pied-noir
Algeria by populations displaced to France as independence loomed in
the summer of 1962; and, on the other, depictions of the military conflict
which brought their world to an end, and lived experience of it. Both of
these themes also shape the visual legacy of the war in the French public
sphere.
We saw in Chapter 1 how nostalgic visions of French Algeria, while
fuelled by a sense of mourning and loss, tend to elide the moment
of departure in favour of images of accomplished modernity, and
a recognisable sequence of locations which viewers can inhabit and
invest with their own memories. The drama of rupture and exodus
is more obviously played out when the subject enters the broader
public sphere, serving frequently over the years as the focal point of
retrospective coverage of the conflict in the French print media. It is
often translated into images of anxious families surrounded by luggage
on the quayside at Algiers, or looking back from the deck of a ship as the
homeland disappears from sight. What can be termed an iconography of
exodus forms the starting point for coverage in both L’Express and Le
Nouvel Observateur marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end
of the conflict in 1987, which focused on the successful integration and
increasing economic and political influence of the pied-noir population
in metropolitan France. Both magazines use images of departure on their
front cover to introduce the subject (L’Express favouring passengers on
the deck of a ship, Le Nouvel Observateur preferring a mother and
children surrounded by suitcases in a waiting area). 5
Also notable is that while the visual focus of these two news
magazines moves on to other, often more problematic aspects of the
war in subsequent years, such as the events of 17 October and the role
of torture in the conflict (a reflection of their political position on the
centre-left), the drama of pied-noir exodus remains the central concern
of those sections of the print media such as Paris Match and Le Point
whose political position on the right of centre makes them more attuned
both to the pied-noir constituency itself and to the broader sympathy
for it on the political right in France. Le Point’s coverage of the fortieth
anniversary of the end of the conflict in March 2002, for example, was
headlined ‘Retour sur le malheur pied-noir’.6 The first double-page
spread of the story is dominated by a close-range shot of a pied-noir
family waving from the deck of a departing ship. At the centre of the
image, a young girl looks over the shoulder of her father directly at

46 Contesting Views
the camera, thereby fixing the viewer with a mournful gaze that is
implicitly interrogative. Forty years after the event, we are placed in a
position which invites an affective response, undoubtedly of sympathy,
but also perhaps of shame and guilt.
Paris Match is particularly revealing in terms of how it modulates the
narrative of pied-noir fortunes over the years. In 1992, its retrospective
coverage of the war was dominated by the iconography of exodus,
including images of families surrounded by their belongings at the
quayside, and a reprise of the image from its famous cover from June
1962 showing a young, nuclear family gazing back at Algeria from the
deck of a ship.7 Ten years later, at the end of March 2002, it published
a two-part retrospective on French Algeria over consecutive weeks.
The first week was devoted to a celebration of French involvement in
the colony, or what the magazine described on its cover as ‘la grande
aventure des Français d’Algérie’.8 With its description of the colonisation
of Algeria as an ‘adventure’, an essentially diverting or ludic spectacle,
the cover strapline set a rhetorical tone which was carried through into
the copy of the feature itself. Deploying the vocabulary of fictional
drama, the editors characterised the settlement of Algeria by the French
as a ‘saga’.9 It is as if the historical, material and political consequences
of European settlement had been gently neutralised or washed away by
the simple passage of time. Impressions of benign or benevolent coloni-
sation are reinforced by image sequences which underscore France’s
‘civilising’ mission in Algeria, and which echo visions of nostalgérie
articulated by pieds-noirs themselves. Celebrating their renown for
agricultural innovation, for example, the magazine reproduces over
two pages a photograph of a group of colons (settlers) standing before
an American combine harvester which, the caption tells us, had been
further modified and developed by the settlers themselves: ‘inventifs et
ingénieux, les paysans du désert font jaillir l’or vert’.10
Also present on the left-hand side of this photograph, lined up on the
roof of a shed and watching on, stand a row of Algerian men, whom we
assume to be farmhands. Their presence in the image makes it strikingly
over-determined, in that it can be read as telling us either more than it
should, or exactly what we need to know, about the nature of French
colonialism in Algeria. On the one hand, we might be tempted to read
the presence of the Algerian farmhands on the margins of the image
as symptomatic of the colonial dynamic in terms of the way in which
it literally displaced the local population from their land, and reduced
them to the status of spectator, paid labour and sometimes both. Yet on

the other, by asserting and celebrating the presence of technologically

advanced machinery on Algerian land, the photograph makes perfectly
clear the understanding about colonialism which accumulates as the
magazine’s retrospective account of French Algeria unfolds – namely,
that it brought the benefits of France’s so-called ‘civilising mission’ – but
ones that subsequently have been squandered since independence.
Themes of tragedy and adversity for the pied-noir population come
to the fore in the second part of the magazine’s retrospective, which,
echoing the coverage in Le Point from the same period, itself thematises
‘le malheur pied-noir’. It mobilises a similar iconography of exodus
which also sets out to provoke affective responses of sympathy and
guilt, this time by focusing in particular on the elderly as they wait in
line at the quayside, whose ‘visages muets de douleur font pourtant
entendre un cri de détresse qui, loin de la politique, se situe au plus
profond du cœur des hommes’.11 The viewer is invited to look beyond
the political and historical circumstances which have produced this
situation, and understand it in the transhistorical or timeless terms of
human tragedy.
Moreover, establishing the pieds-noirs as tragic figures in the drama
of French Algeria is central to the narrative arc of the magazine’s
retrospective, which sees them swing rapidly from being masters of
their own universe to victims of forces beyond their control. History
as it is presented here by Paris Match is, it would seem, less a question
of the conjunction of social, political and economic forces at any
one time, than of a much more abstract (and therefore ultimately
uncontrollable) force beyond human control, to which the only viable
responses are the particular human qualities of resilience and resource-
fulness; and it is those qualities which, as the magazine makes clear,
are displayed by the pied-noir populations both at home and in exile.
Both visually and textually, therefore, the magazine helps to consolidate
an understanding of the pied-noir community as heroic and forgotten
victims of contemporary French history.
Picturing Conflict in Algeria
While narratives of pied-noir triumph and tragedy constitute a significant

aspect of the visual legacy of the Algerian War, its most obvious visual
form is as a military conflict. Indeed, something of a template for
viewing and understanding it as such can be found on the cover of

48 Contesting Views
the first issue of Historia magazine: la guerre d’Algérie, published in

1971. Historia magazine serialised the history of the conflict over three
years. Addressing a general audience, it was one of the first major
historical accounts of the war, and certainly the first to make extensive
use of images in its telling. The cover of the first issue offered a visual
synopsis of the war through a grid-based montage of key historical
actors and moments, as well as locations of the war, from Algiers itself
to the maquis (scrub) of the Aurès mountains and the desert regions
of southern Algeria. While the magazine would go on to cover a range
of themes and issues, from the role of conscripts to daily life during
the war, the initial visual rendering of the war in this way nevertheless
establishes it primarily as a matter of political and military strategy,
played out across diverse theatres of conflict within Algeria.
This perspective is further developed in the range of subsequent
photo-based publications whose primary concern is with the war
campaign led by the French military, whether it be depictions of French
operations from the point of view of military strategy and history, such
as René Bail’s Hélicoptères et commandos-marine en Algérie (1983) and
Actions de choc et commandos en Algérie (1998); or often untroubled
accounts by and about key military figures of the war, perhaps the
most obvious being Ma guerre d’Algérie (1995), a lavish photo-book by
Marcel Bigeard, the French parachute regiment commander famous for
his involvement in the Battle of Algiers. The album draws extensively on
images by Marc Flament, who had a long-standing role as the official
photographer within Bigeard’s unit. As Chominot and Stora (2004: 46, 50)
observe, Flament became well known for his heroic portraits of warrior
soldiers, often portrayed alone in a gruelling or challenging landscape.
His images of French military heroism consolidate in visual terms the
myths surrounding the French army, and paratroopers especially, played
out, as Dine (1994: 23–43) explores, in literary representations of the
war.
We noted briefly above that photographers such as Bail and Flament had
a key role to play in shaping visual representations of the war as a result
of their integration into the French military apparatus. While Flament
was attached to the third Colonial Parachute Regiment led by Bigeard,
Bail was based in Oran. Charged with maritime surveillance duties,
he also worked extensively with the French Marine forces (Chominot
and Stora 2004: 57). Meanwhile, photo-reporters such as Jean-Baptiste
Ferracci worked for the French army magazine, Bled. Their coverage
of French army activity in Algeria often focused on the work of the

Sections administratives spécialisées (SAS), specialised administrative

platoons introduced in 1956 by Algeria’s Governor General, Jacques
Soustelle. SAS units were created to undertake development work among
local populations in isolated, rural areas of Algeria, including building
schools and roads, and improving agricultural production. They were
a key part of a strategy of pacification and neutralisation through
development, according to which the material improvement of living
conditions for local populations would starve the Algerian rebels of
their support and bring unrest to an end.12 As such, images of the SAS
working in the field, both with and for local Algerian populations,
inevitably took on a propagandist quality.13 Finally, as we discuss later
in the chapter, perhaps the most well-known of these military photog-
raphers was Marc Garanger, who went to Algeria as a conscript soldier,
and was co-opted by the commander of his regiment to take identity
photographs of civilian Algerian populations which would later make
him famous.
The significance of their role is related first to the context in which
they operated, and which saw them producing images as part of
the French military apparatus. Marc Garanger illustrates this most
obviously, mobilised by his unit to take images of unveiled Algerian
women for the purposes of identification. Bail and Flament were very
active in the field, capturing the operation of the French military units
in a way which underscored the professionalism, courage and heroism
of the French army, and its elite units in particular. A number of these
images subsequently began to constitute a visual repertoire of the war,
particularly in publications addressing a general audience. An image by
Bail of a Sikorsky helicopter landing in the Algerian hills by a group
of soldiers, for example, appears in various illustrated histories and
discussions of the war (Slama 1996; Bail 1998; Pervillé 2002; Gervereau
and Stora 2004; Stora and Quemeneur 2010, among others). In Slama’s
history of the war for Gallimard’s extensively illustrated, mass market,
Découvertes series, the image forms part of a longer, opening sequence
of Bail’s photographs which foreground French military action in
the field (Slama 1996: 1–9). The sequence helps to establish a certain
understanding of the Algerian War as a largely rural conflict, fought for
the most part (specific episodes such as the Battle of Algiers notwith-
standing) in the maquis and hilly terrain of the Algerian interior;
but also as a conflict fought – as were many colonial wars – against
an enemy perceived as both invisible and troublingly resistant to the
technological superiority of a modern army.

50 Contesting Views
Secondly, the context in which these images were produced would

have a bearing on their afterlife, and the extent to which they could
continue to shape historical understanding of the conflict. Many of
the images produced by military photographers such as Flament and
Ferracci would go on to form part of the French military archives
following the war, held by the Établissement de communication et de
production audiovisuelle de la Défense (ECPAD) [Ministry of Defence
Department of Audiovisual Communication and Production] at the Fort
d’Ivry near Paris. Not only does the archive represent an institutional
framework which permits the preservation of material, but it is also a
location from which images can be reintroduced into circulation as the
war is reinscribed in French history and memory. Thus, photo-books by
Miquel (1993), Bail (2001) and Ferracci (2007) draw heavily on material
from the ECPAD archives.
Views from Below: The Conscript Perspective
As such, it is tempting to assume the existence of what Chominot calls a

‘monopole militaire’ (2008: 31)14 in relation to the visual representation
of the Algerian War both at the time and since its end. However, if a
perspective from within the French military apparatus might dominate
the visual field, it is important to recognise that this perspective is
not homogeneous, nor indeed stable through time. For while, on the
one hand, it incorporates the official production of images within
the framework of the military apparatus – images which often had a
role to play in consolidating or justifying French military activity and
the forms it took – it includes, on the other, vernacular photography
taken by conscript solders sent to Algeria as part of their military
service. Their images of the conflict in its everyday form (life off duty
in the barracks, leisure time in Algerian towns and cities) have been
recuperated especially by Claire Mauss-Copeaux. In some respects,
they are unsurprising in terms of their themes, focus and style. In the
manner of holiday snaps, they might capture the unfamiliar and exotic
environments of a country which was foreign to many metropolitan
conscripts; or they offer them the opportunity to express their temporary
identity as soldiers, and, concomitantly, a certain sense of masculinity,
through the poses they strike (Mauss-Copeaux 2003: 20–1). At the same
time, as Mauss-Copeaux also notes, conscript images tend to elide the
more brutal realities of the conflict (2003: 11).

In many respects, it seems that the importance of the conscript

perspective for Mauss-Copeaux lies above all in its ability to offer
a challenge to the dominant vision of the conflict articulated within
established military (and academic) frameworks. As she puts it, ‘les
récits des photographies rassemblées ici brisent le monopole du discours
des spécialistes et le relativisent en donnant le point de vue des civils
ordinaires. Ils sont nécessaires car ils permettent également de mieux
comprendre le présent’ (2003: 11).15 It is a perspective whose authenticity
or evidential weight is guaranteed by its very ordinariness or stereotypical
banality, and which therefore has the potential to open up a more honest
or critical understanding of the war. At the same time, the recuperation
of the conscript perspective is indicative of broader trends in the histori-
ography and memorialisation of the Algerian War. To focus attention on
the conscript is to reintegrate a view lived as and perceived to be margin-
alised; and doing so is at once a means to a better (more comprehensive)
history of the war, and a step towards settling what increasingly seemed
to be a moral debt, namely the collective neglect of a trauma which went
unspoken because speaking about it was felt to be impossible.
One of the best-known attempts to open a space for appelés to
articulate their memories and recollections was the 1992 documentary
film by Bertrand Tavernier and Patrick Rotman, La Guerre sans nom
[The War Without a Name]. The film is made up of interviews with
former conscripts from the region of Grenoble, and combines talking
heads of the conscripts themselves with cutaways to photographs from
their own private collections and shots of the mountainous landscapes
of the Isère in France and the Djurdjura in Kabylia (East of Algiers in
Northern Algeria). The juxtaposition of what Dine (1994: 231) describes
as the ‘pointedly similar’ nature of these rugged and snowy landscapes
can be seen to restage the way in which conscripts from France found
themselves in a landscape which was uncanny in its familiarity and
difference. Moreover, the vast emptiness of the Algerian scenes reflects
their own unease over the nature of the war they had been sent to fight,
its location and the location of their enemy.
However, while the juxtaposition of the two environments might
invite us to reflect on the relationship between Algeria and France,
and the sense that physical similarities between the two facilitated
the incorporation of Algeria into France’s geographical and political
imaginary, it proved to be a technique not without its problems. As Guy
Austin notes, for all its attempts to do justice to the conscript perspective,
the film can still be seen to play out some persistent blind spots in

52 Contesting Views
French metropolitan thinking about Algeria, blind spots highlighted in

a famous critique by the Algerian newspaper El Watan:
Les Algériens (qu’ils qualifient de ‘fells’ tout au long du film) sont les
grands absents, les grands muets de toute cette histoire. Leur présence
n’est jamais montrée. C’est la guerre sans les Algériens, contre adversaires
invisibles. […] Tavernier et Rotman, pour mieux encore appuyer leurs
propos, ont filmé en Algérie des … paysages! C’est vraiment l’Algérie,
sans les Algériens. Le vieux rêve colonial enfin réalisé, c’est le cas de le
dire. (Austin 2007b: 185)16
This occlusion of the presence of Algerians in their own land finds an
echo, as we discussed in Chapter 1, in pied-noir visual reconstructions
of French Algeria.
Just as the 1990s were marked by the rapid growth in visual
recreations of French Algeria, so too the decade saw the emergence
of a trend for photo-books evoking conscript experience of the war,
such as Serge Drouot’s Algérie 1954–1962: arrêt sur images inédites
(1992) [Algeria 1954–1962: Focus on Unpublished Images], published
by the left-leaning veterans’ association, the Fédération nationale des
anciens combattants d’Algérie-Tunisie-Maroc (FNACA) [National
Federation of Ex-Servicemen in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco], or
Jacques Demougin’s J’étais à Alger: témoignage d’un appelé, 1958–1962
(2001) [I was in Algiers: Testimony of a Conscript, 1958–1962]. The
articulation of the appelé perspective in volumes such as these, from the
first glimpse of Algeria from the deck of a troop ship to the return to
Marseilles, suggests that while the blind spot identified by El Watan may
be politically and ideologically problematic, it may in fact express quite
accurately the disjunctions which emerge when conscripts live through
and remember their time in Algeria.
Drouot’s book quickly establishes a mood of uncertainty, unease and
the uncanny as it depicts the conscript’s arrival in what he calls ‘troublée
et troublante Algérie’ (1992: 12):
La traversée pourtant hâtive de la ville rassure un peu. Longues et
larges avenues, immeubles cossus, commerces, le magasin des Nouvelles
Galeries … On se croirait en France … S’il n’y avait à un carrefour
cette publicité: un arabe coiffé d’une petite chéchia remplaçant le petit
bonhomme Jean Mineur. La guerre, où est-elle? (Drouot 1992: 25)17
It continues to build a sense of the conscript’s surroundings as
unreadable and therefore threatening. As the caption accompanying
a photograph of a local mosque and meeting-place suggests, perhaps

it is ‘le lieu de rendez-vous clandestin de quelque chef du FLN. Qui

sait?’ (Drouot 1992: 42).18 At the same time, in establishing a mood
of alienation and anxiety among the conscript contingent, Drouot’s
book also raises questions about their agency in the prosecution of the
conflict. Strangely disconnected from the world around them, they find
themselves caught up in a tragedy in which they too are victims. Indeed,
the rhetoric of victimhood has emerged clearly by the end of Drouot’s
volume, as the conscript returns home: ‘pendant sa longue absence, la
vie s’est organisée sans lui. Aujourd’hui, il est de trop: grain de paille
dans un engrenage trop bien huilé. Mal de vivre, mal venu, mal entendu,
malheureux, mal aimé’ (1992: 250).19
A similar sense of bewilderment, alienation and lack of agency is
played out in Demougin’s volume, which depicts the war from the
perspective of a conscript posted in Algiers. The early pages set the
scene, conveying life in Algiers through a series of images which – as
might be expected – draw on a well-established iconography of the
city as a place of contrasts and cultural collisions (wide, tree-lined
boulevards and Haussmannian apartment blocks, local populations in
traditional dress). The mood changes suddenly after thirty or so pages
with a dramatic image over two pages of the damage wrought in the
city centre by a car bomb, and a sense of cosmopolitan life brutally
disturbed: ‘un jour tout se gâta. Les voitures sautèrent … Les maisons
s’effondrèrent … Les passants succombèrent’ (Demougin 2001: 30–1). 20
Striking here is the way in which the historical narrative unfolds. Once
again, the conscript is displaced as an agent of history, the self-propelling
momentum of which is suggested by the use of the reflexive verb (‘tout
se gâta’). Himself caught out by the sudden eruption of violence, by the
‘once upon a time’ of events, the conscript can only act as a bystander
and witness to the unfolding tragedy of French Algeria.
The mood of catastrophe intensifies as the volume draws to a close,
and is captured in two images especially, printed on facing pages almost
in the manner of a diptych (Demougin 2001: 128–9). The first depicts
the departure of pieds-noirs in the summer of 1962; but rather than the
standard iconography of exile seen elsewhere (figures looking back to their
disappearing homeland), the image in Demougin’s book shows refugees
waiting to file directly into the hold of a ship, almost in the manner of
livestock. The image is freighted with heavy symbolism (echoes lurk of
images of deportation from the Second World War), filled as it is by the
blank wall of the ship’s hull framing the entrance to the hold, and empty
of signs of sea, sky or horizon (‘À fond de cale, ils ne verront même pas

54 Contesting Views
Alger une dernière fois’, runs the caption). 21 In apparent contrast, the
photograph on the facing page shows a young Algerian girl being carried
by her father on a sunlit day shortly after independence. Nevertheless,
the caption to the image – ‘la fête est finie’22 – inflects it with a suitably
ominous tone, the wisdom of historical distance and hindsight inviting
the reader to see the moment of independence as a false dawn and wasted
opportunity.
Marc Garanger, Conscription and Photographic Agency
It is certainly the case that the conscript perspective became increasingly

visible during the 1990s and 2000s, thanks to activity both by and on
behalf of appelés; but perhaps the most sustained articulation of the
position and perspective of the appelé had in fact begun to take shape
much earlier thanks to the activities of Marc Garanger, whose work as a
photographer in his army unit led him to produce some of the Algerian
War’s most famous images. Indeed, both his activity as a photographer
and his explicit desire to position himself as an appelé arguably draw to
the surface some of the key issues surrounding the visual representation
– and, through that, historical understanding – of the war.
Born in 1935 and, as a left-wing militant, hostile to the war, Garanger
was working as a photojournalist when he was called up to serve in
Algeria in 1960. Garanger tells the story that, frustrated with the post
allotted to him in his regiment’s administrative office, he left some of his
photographs lying around in the hope of attracting the attention of his
superiors (2002: 121). The strategy worked and while, unlike Bail and
Flament, his position as a photographer was always an unofficial one,
his commanding officer began to deploy him on a range of photographic
missions in the Aumale sector south-east of Algiers, where the unit was
based. Thus, Garanger found himself mobilised as part of the French
military apparatus, or what he terms ‘le Pouvoir militaire’ (1990: 7), the
capitalisation here a clear indication of his desire to underline the agency
inherent in its structures. Moreover, he became an active instrument of
that apparatus as part of the army’s strategy for the containment and
management of the local Algerian populations. For his role included
producing the images which would later help to define both his work and
visual memory of the war – namely, the full-face portraits of Algerian
women unveiled in order to be photographed for the purposes of security
and identity checks. 23

Garanger’s rate of production was almost industrial: he took a total

of 2,000 photographs at something approaching 200 photographs a
day (Garanger 1982: unpaginated [13]). The resulting images became
famous for the often proud and defiant looks with which the women
confront the camera. Reflecting on the images and the circumstances in
which they were produced, Garanger (1982: unpaginated [13]) observes
that ‘j’ai reçu leur regard à bout portant, premier témoin de leur
protestation muette, violente’. 24 His remark here signals some of the
complexities and ambiguities of his role and agency in what we can
term, following Ariella Azoulay (2008: 14), the ‘photographic situation’.
For, as Garanger is quick to assert, his portraits were rapidly invested
with symbolic resonance – not least by Garanger himself – as capturing
a collective look back at the French colonial forces by a population on
the road to national independence. 25 At the same time, the trigger for
those looks of resistance was the specific presence of Garanger and his
camera as agents of the military force which was increasingly the most
visible evidence of the French colonial presence in rural areas of Algeria.
Connected as he was to figures of the anti-war movement in France
such as Robert Barrat and Francis Jeanson, Garanger began to mobilise
the critical potential of his images at the time. A selection was smuggled
to Switzerland in 1961 and published in L’Illustré suisse, thereby avoiding
strict censorship laws in France. Subsequent to the war, he would
continue to lay claim to a position of critique in relation to the French
presence in Algeria, a position predicated (perhaps paradoxically) on
his images of unveiled Algerian women. That is to say, the very images
which made manifest how photography was deployed as part of an
apparatus of policing and surveillance could in fact open up, in a way
which confirmed the fundamentally unstable nature of photographic
meaning, a space of resistance to that apparatus. As such, they allowed
opponents of the colonial system to marshal their deconstructive force
– a force all the more powerful given that it was the colonial system in
its final, fully militarised stage that was producing such discursive and
symbolic material.
Fundamental to Garanger’s own position of critique is his conscript
status, one emphasised frequently in the texts which accompany his
images. As an appelé, he can present himself as someone caught up in
the conflict not actively through choice (in the manner, perhaps, of Bail
and Flament) but as a result of French government policies concerning
national service. Writing in the preface to La Guerre d’Algérie: vue par
un appelé du contingent [The Algerian War: A Conscript’s View], the

56 Contesting Views
volume of photographs which asserts most clearly his role as a conscript,

he calls the war ‘un piège dans lequel je suis tombé comme quelques
centaines de milliers de Français de ma génération’ (1984: 13). 26 Like
other conscript soldiers looking back on their time in Algeria, he goes
on to thematise a sense of passivity and loss of agency as part of a more
powerful, almost abstract force: ‘à chaque étape, à chaque tour de roue,
comme l’impression de descendre, de se couper encore plus de sa vie,
de perdre pied, de chavirer. Jamais je ne me suis senti autant manipulé’
(1984: 13). 27 At the same time, it is under those conditions of subjection
that he produces work which has the potential to open up a more critical
or honest perspective on the war: ‘je lance ces images pour tous ceux
qui ont vécu cette guerre, pour libérer la parole, pour lever la chape de
silence qui la recouvre’ (1984: 14). 28 In other words, he invests in the
conscript position the same sense of authenticity and, by extension,
historical validity, which, as we have seen, emerges more generally in
post-war reconsiderations of the appelés and their role.
Garanger’s sense of the privileged and authentic nature of the conscript
perspective is made clear in the photographs which constitute La Guerre
d’Algérie: vue par un appelé du contingent. The volume places some
of his more famous images (of the unveiled Algerian women and the
arrested FLN commander Bencherif) in the broader context of work
produced during his period of military service. His aim is both to reveal
different aspects of the conflict, including the arrest of FLN fighters and
their death in captivity (after interrogation, we assume), and, in a way
similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s photographic engagement with Algeria, to
look beyond the conflict and grasp the specificities of the country in
which it was taking place. This is true in particular of his images of rural
life. Nevertheless, a number of the images also remind us of some of the
ambiguities inherent in his position within the military apparatus. The
most notable of these are his aerial images of resettlement villages such
as Le Mezdour (1984: 51), which confirm the privileged and commanding
views afforded to him by his role as a military photographer.
Indeed, the ambiguities of Garanger’s position, in terms especially
of his agency as both soldier and photographer, emerge as a recurring
motif in his work, most notably in the handwritten preface to Femmes
algériennes 1960 [Algerian Women, 1960], the volume which presents
some of the most powerful of his portraits of unveiled Algerian women.
The facsimile reproduction of this handwritten preface is a constant
feature of the three editions (to date) of the volume published since the
first appeared in 1982 (Garanger 1982, 1989, 2002). The note recounts

the background to their production, and Garanger’s desire to bear

witness through them to the events and nature of the Algerian War. In
particular, it expresses his pride at the fact that they capture the women’s
looks of animosity and resistance: ‘j’ai reçu leur regard à bout portant,
premier témoin de leur protestation muette, violente’ (1982: unpaginated
[13]). Moreover, Garanger’s ownership of the images is asserted precisely
through the material form of the note, which foregrounds the embodied
subjectivity of its author through the physical trace of handwriting. His
gesture of ownership and authenticity is all the more striking for the
way it serves to introduce images that were intended as far as possible
to have the neutral or objective qualities required by the full face
identity photograph – perhaps the purest expression of photography
as an instrument of state power. 29 In other words, Garanger’s preface
can be seen as an attempt to wrest back ownership of his images from
the apparatus of which they were part, in order precisely to illuminate
the nature and functioning of that apparatus. Despite this, Garanger
leaves us with a further paradox, which reflects the fundamental contra-
dictions of the conscript position to which he lays claim: for at the same
time as his preface asserts his subjectivity, ownership and authorship of
the images through its material form, his presentation of his activity in
the field displaces his agency as a photographer on to the situations and
structures in which he found himself caught up (the ‘Pouvoir militaire’),
and which themselves were responsible for the images he made:
Dans chaque village, les populations étaient convoquées par le chef de
poste. C’est le visage des femmes qui m’a beaucoup impressionné. Elles
n’avaient pas le choix. Elles étaient dans l’obligation de se dévoiler et de se
laisser photographier. Elles devaient s’asseoir sur un tabouret, en plein air,
devant le mur blanc d’une méchta. (Garanger 1982: unpaginated [13])30
Reflecting elsewhere on the circumstances in which the images were
produced, he underlines even more clearly the agency of the structures
in which he was obliged to work: ‘dans Femmes algériennes 1960, les
portraits que je présente ont été faits dans d’autres circonstances, sur
demande du Pouvoir militaire dans un but purement policier, et j’étais
entouré pour les faire de soldats en arme’ (Garanger 1990: 7). 31 Thus,
we find Garanger oscillating between the desire simultaneously to claim
and to deny responsibility for the images he produces and the resistance
they express. 32
Nevertheless, it was Garanger’s images of unveiled Algerian women
which served as the foundation for his career as a documentary

58 Contesting Views
photographer as it developed following the war. Indeed, the transfor-

mation undergone by the work, from material with a primarily
administrative and bureaucratic function to a form of singular, artistic
expression, offers a striking insight into the mechanisms behind
the creation of artistic value and legitimacy at work in the field of
photographic practice at the time. In 1965, Garanger was advised by
Pierre Grassmann, the director of a professional photography laboratory,
to submit his work for the prestigious Prix Niépce. Grassmann suggested
how Garanger could transform his photographs into more aesthetically
arresting images: ‘il m’a convaincu de tirer les portraits des femmes
algériennes en les recadrant dans un format vertical, et en estompant le
fond tout autour des visages, pour aller progressivement au blanc pur, ce
qui renforçait le côté esthétique de ces photographies’ (Garanger 2002:
122). 33 In effect, Garanger found himself being inducted into the norms
and conventions governing the aesthetics of documentary photography.
Moreover, Grassmann’s advice paid off. Garanger won the prize in 1966,
which afforded him recognition and consecration as a photographer
producing serious and engaged documentary work.
Even though his images were not published in book form until 1982,
they circulated widely before then within the networks and institutions
of international documentary photography and photojournalism.
Evidence of Garanger’s privileged position as a critical photographer of
the Algerian War was confirmed in July 1981 when images from Femmes
algériennes 1960 formed part of an exhibition on visual coverage of
the conflict at that year’s Rencontres d’Arles, curated by the festival’s
then-director, Alain Desvergnes. First organised in 1970, the aim of the
festival was to promote photography, and documentary photography
especially, both as an aesthetic form and a mode of social, political
and historical commentary (Morel 2006: 26–7). Indeed, the decision
by Desvergnes to curate a show on the theme of the Algerian War at
a time when it remained very much on the margins of French politics
and society signalled the festival’s desire to assert the medium (and, by
extension, the festival itself) as a vital element of public debate within
France, and to capitalise on a change in political climate heralded by the
election of a Socialist president in May of that year. 34
The critical intent of Desvergnes’s exhibition was signalled by its
format and content, and not least by the fact that it drew together
perspectives from both sides of the conflict. A sequence of images by
Garanger, including those of unveiled women, segued into material
published in Paris Match during the conflict, and concluded with

a series of images by Mohamed Kouaci depicting the struggle for

independence from an Algerian perspective. Reflecting in later years
on the juxtaposition of his images with those by Kouaci, Garanger was
struck by the differing reactions their presence and role as photographers
produced in those they photographed. For if they both took images of
Algerian women, while those photographed by Garanger responded with
looks of resistance or hostility, ‘les femmes algériennes maquisardes’
photographed by Kouaci ‘lui souriaient!’ (Garanger 2002: 123). 35 For
Garanger, the contrast was an insight into how the presence of the
photographer can inflect the event or situation they are there to record.
Namely, the presence of the camera and the photographic situation it
creates has a bearing on the actions and reactions of those present, and,
thereby, not just on the potential unfolding of the event but also on the
retrospective understanding of the event as constituted and recorded
by the camera. Such moments of inflection and influence (conscious
or otherwise) by the photographer, as we shall see further in the next
chapter, can have significant consequences for the ways in which events
come to be portrayed and subsequently understood by visual means. The
smiles of the women photographed by Kouaci can be seen to reflect their
role as part of a historical process of revolution, a collective endeavour at
once confirming and consolidating a narrative of national solidarity on
which the government of an independent Algeria by the FLN would be
predicated. They capture too the dynamism and energy which another
engaged photojournalist, Marc Riboud, would encounter and draw out
in his photographs of the first days of independence in July 1962, as we
discussed in the previous chapter.
Visualising History in France and Algeria
The juxtaposition of work by Garanger and Kouaci in the 1981

exhibition is also illuminating in terms of the light it sheds on attitudes
to the war and its visualisation in both countries, at the time of the
show and subsequently, and the role photographs could and should
play in organising historical understanding of the conflict. As the
official photographer of the GPRA in Tunis, and later of the Algerian
government, Kouaci is emblematic of Algerian approaches to the visual
representation of the war. Furthermore, the fate of his work in the
decades since independence is revealing of changing attitudes to the war
and its visual representation on both sides of the Mediterranean during

60 Contesting Views
that time, attitudes which emerge when we pursue further the parallels
between Kouaci and Garanger.
The year 1984 was marked both by the publication in France of
Garanger’s La Guerre d’Algérie vue par un appelé du contingent and by
the appearance in Algeria of Compagnons de lutte, 1954–1962 [Comrades
in Arms, 1954–1962], a collection of images edited by Kouaci to coincide
with the opening in Algiers of the new Musée national du moudjahid to
commemorate the war of independence. Both books shared a common
concern with the perspective of the soldier on the ground. Garanger’s
volume reflected his particular circumstances as an appelé incorporated
into the military infrastructure of the colonial power, and as a professional
photographer whose distinctive way of seeing had allowed him to assert
his singular perspective on the war. Kouaci’s book, in contrast, presented
vernacular photographs taken by ordinary rebel fighters, capturing
military activity in the rural areas which were the key arenas of conflict.
As such, it foreshadows the amateur photography which would become
the focus of attention in later decades in France, as conscript memory of
the war was recovered and revalorised. The volume closes with a series
of images of Algerian soldiers and their military equipment whose more
obviously aesthetic and stylised qualities would suggest – even though it
is not made clear – that they are the work of Kouaci himself.
Kouaci’s volume is notable first of all for the parallels which can be
drawn with French vernacular conscript photography. The war looks
strikingly similar on both sides, in terms both of locations (woodland
and low scrub of the maquis) and themes (daily activities of training
and patrol), as well as the lack of a visible enemy. The key difference
between them, of course, lies in the historical narrative to which the
images contribute. Images of French conscript life often suggest boredom,
uncertainty and anxiety cut through with an uneasy assertion of
masculine identity. In Kouaci’s volume, images are framed by short texts
of anonymous (and therefore, implicitly collective) authorship. Songs and
poems celebrate the heroism of the fight for liberation and those involved
in it, and the revolution takes shape as the work of a population united in
struggle against the colonial oppressor. As such, the book encapsulates
and reflects the historical narrative of the war dominant in Algeria since
independence, and reasserted at key symbolic moments and lieux de
mémoire [realms of memory], such as the Mémorial du martyr [Martyr’s
Memorial] and the Musée national du moudjahid.
Yet, at the same time as the book celebrates images by rebel fighters as
an expression of popular participation in the revolution, it simultaneously

puts that perspective firmly in its place, in a way which can be seen to
reflect attitudes of the Algerian state both to the historiography of the
war in general and, within that, to the place and role of the photographic
image. The volume’s introductory text (whose authorship is again
unclear) calls into question the historical validity of the images even as it
presents them as a perspective on the war:
[C]et ouvrage ne peut avoir aucune prétention historique et ne doit être
accueilli que comme un hommage à la multitude qui a donné le meilleur
d’elle-même pour ‘rendre la lumière à ce peuple’.
Nous avons sacrifié la précision historique à la poésie qui se dégage de
la spontanéité, de la simplicité et de l’extrême générosité des documents.
(Kouaci 1984: unpaginated [1])36
Moreover, their historical validity is mitigated further by the fact that
they are images produced by actors on the ground, who therefore lack
the full historical knowledge and understanding of the broader processes
of which they are part: ‘il est bien entendu que cet ouvrage ne peut
prétendre rendre compte de toute l’histoire de la lutte de libération, plus
vaste, dont chaque composante peut justifier une œuvre isolée’ (1984:
unpaginated [1]). 37 Images by soldiers on the ground can only record
particular events or situations; they usually have little to tell us about
the direction or meaning of the struggle more broadly. The message
of Kouaci’s volume of photographs is therefore clear, if paradoxical:
photography itself cannot be relied upon to do the work of history; it can
only support other forms of telling. A place can be found for it within
the public domain, not least as an expression and confirmation of the
war of liberation as a popular war (in both senses of the term); but it is
an expression of popular participation which has its limits. In this way,
it reflects quite accurately the way in which, for all the official rhetoric of
the Algerian state has emphasised the popular ownership both of the war
and the nation born from it, the realities of post-independence politics
and governance (autocratic rule within the context of a single-party
state) suggest otherwise.
Anxiety and Indifference
The attitudes expressed in Kouaci’s book, in relation both to vernacular

photography and the more general limitations of photography as a
historically valid medium, are in sharp and obvious contrast to those

62 Contesting Views
which emerged in France. There, vernacular photography of the war in

particular, as we discussed above, would come to be privileged precisely
because of the perceived authenticity, veracity and rootedness of the
perspective it offered. Indeed, its status was at once confirmed and further
consolidated over the years through its investigation and exploitation by
different agents of legitimation, whether they be academic historians,
publishers or the print media. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of
the end of the war in 2012, the conscript perspective would have centre
stage, from lavish, full-colour photo-books reproducing hundreds of
conscript images (Quemeneur and Zeghidour 2011), to image slideshows
foregrounding the lived experience of the conflict by conscripts on the
digital platforms of the mainstream French media. 38 As we also noted
earlier, the rising fortunes of conscript photography in France could be
understood as part of a broader anxiety about the visual economy of the
Algerian War and its role in shaping understanding of the conflict. Not
only was the vision of the conflict predominantly a French one, but it was
also that of ‘le Pouvoir militaire’, to borrow Garanger’s phrase. Hence
the desire at various points – one of the earliest of which is arguably
Desvergnes’s inclusion of Kouaci’s material at Arles in 1981 – to broaden
the spectrum of images in circulation; to reincorporate marginalised
perspectives; and, in doing so, simultaneously to underscore the validity
of photographs as historical evidence and source material.
Meanwhile, the anxious embrace of the photographic image on the
French side stands in contrast to the seeming indifference towards the
photographic on the Algerian side, an indifference reflected in the fate
of Kouaci’s own archive of work, produced during his time as an official
photographer of the GPRA and the Algerian government. Since his
death in 1996, his increasingly frail widow Safia has been left in charge
of his boxes of images and negatives, all of which are gently decaying
with time owing to the lack of proper archival conditions. They are
the victims of the perhaps surprising failure on the part of the Algerian
authorities to take charge of material which might seem to make an
important contribution to the history of the war and Algeria’s first years
as an independent nation. The fate of the archive is highlighted and
explored in Gardiennes d’images [Image Keepers], a video installation
by French-born artist of Algerian origin, Zineb Sedira, first shown in
Paris in 2010, and subsequently in Manchester in 2011. Projected on
to three screens, footage is shot in the widow’s apartment in Algiers,
a bright, airy, colonial-era dwelling reappropriated following the mass
departure of the pied-noir population in 1962. It combines interviews

with Safia, in which she discusses her husband’s work and her own
memories of Algerian history, as well as close-ups of a selection of
images from her husband’s archive, which offer a synoptic history of the
war, and Algeria’s subsequent role as a leading nation in the non-aligned
movement after independence.
In weaving together Safia’s memories about her life with her husband,
and traces of his activity as a photographer charged with producing a
visual record of the emergence and activities of a newly independent
Algerian nation, Gardiennes d’images foregrounds questions about
what history and memory mean in relation to the individual and the
collective, and the ways in which photography serves to convey and
articulate them. At the same time, and as the pluralised first noun of
its title would suggest, the piece itself is conceived as an intervention in
support of the archive. The film is a means by which both Sedira and
her collaborator, Algerian artist Amina Menia, can attempt to raise
consciousness about the archive and the risks posed to it by institutional
neglect. It is nevertheless revealing that the motive force behind this
desire to save the Kouaci archive is a French artist of Algerian origin
based in the United Kingdom, whose work consistently interrogates
the nature and legacy of the relationship between France and Algeria
and the position and history of those living between and across both
countries and cultures. Indeed, Sedira is an artist whose success in
France (she holds the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres,
bestowed on her by the French Ministry of Culture) signals the extent
to which such issues have gained currency within that country’s sphere
of cultural production. Yet, it is also the case that at the same time as
Sedira aims to draw attention to the fate of the Kouaci archive and
the questions it raises about historical memory in and of Algeria, her
intervention in a sense restages and replays the structural inequalities of
the Franco-Algerian visual economy, which reflects the extent to which
the debate about Franco-Algerian history, culture and memory continue
to be instigated from the northern side of the Mediterranean, and in
many ways seem to resonate more widely there. 39
Thus, in terms of both the themes it addresses and the context
of its production, Gardiennes d’images crystallises central questions
about photography’s relationship to historical narrative and to historical
understanding in relation to both France’s Algerian past and the Franco-
Algerian relationship as it continues to play out. It foregrounds especially
the ambiguities we have traced throughout this chapter, as an increasing
recognition of the importance of the photographic image coincides with

64 Contesting Views
persistent uncertainty over the precise nature of its role. We pursue

our examination of these issues in the next chapter as we turn our
attention to a key incident of the war, for once played out not in Algeria
but on the streets of the colonial capital – namely, the events on and
around 17 October 1961, when a peaceful Algerian demonstration was
violently suppressed by the Paris police. We explore the evolving role of
photography in the narration and historical understanding of the events,
and what it reveals more generally about the relationship between
photography and history.

3
Out of the Shadows:

The Visual Career of 17 October 1961
Out of the Shadows
Re-viewing State Violence
Of all the events of the Algerian War, those which took place in Paris
on and around 17 October 1961 are now among the most notorious
and controversial. A brief account of the episode runs as follows: on
the evening of 17 October, with the war still several months from its
conclusion, several tens of thousands of Algerian immigrants were
mobilised by the FLN, converging on central Paris from different points
in the suburbs. Their aim was to stage a peaceful protest march against
a curfew on their movements imposed earlier that month by the Chief of
the Paris Police, Maurice Papon. Crowds began to assemble at different
locations on the Right and Left Banks of the capital after the curfew
hour of 8.30 p.m. The police response to the protest was brutal: an
unknown number of Algerians were killed and injured, initially on the
streets of the capital and its suburbs, and later in detention centres such
as the Palais des Sports at the Porte de Versailles, to which the protestors
were bussed before being deported to Algeria. Some estimates, most
notably those by the historian Jean-Luc Einaudi (1991), place the number
of dead as high as 200. If uncertainty remains over the precise figure, it
is because many bodies were never recovered or identified, pitched into
the Seine or buried in mass graves. According to Jim House and Neil
MacMaster, authors of the most authoritative account of 17 October, its
prehistory and aftermath, the events represent ‘the bloodiest act of state
repression of street protest in Western Europe in modern history’ (House
and MacMaster 2006: 1).
Since the end of the Algerian War, the events of 17 October have
undertaken a remarkable historical trajectory. They are perhaps one

66 Contesting Views
of the most obvious examples of what Anne Donadey (1996) terms

France’s ‘Algeria Syndrome’, in reference to Henry Rousso’s diagnosis
of a ‘Vichy Syndrome’ in post-war France; that is to say, a refusal to
engage with and account for aspects of the Algerian War which echoes
similar denial and obfuscation about the Occupation and Vichy France.
After provoking brief controversy in their immediate aftermath, the
events were quickly marginalised and forgotten for over two decades,
before gradually re-emerging in the public sphere during the 1990s and
2000s through the work of militants, historians and memory activists,
who succeeded in establishing 17 October as one of the most significant
and troubling moments of the conflict. Making use of anniversary
moments in 1991 and 2001, they also profited from the famous trial of
Maurice Papon in 1997 for war crimes during the Vichy regime. During
wide-ranging scrutiny of Papon’s professional past, 17 October became
the focus of a ‘trial within a trial’ (House and MacMaster 2006: 310–12).
Interest in the events has been political as much as academic, reflecting
the fact that, until recently, as Michael Rothberg observes, most work
on 17 October has taken place outside the mainstream academic context
(Rothberg 2009: 234). Turning attention to 17 October is not just about
establishing the facts of the events as far as possible, but, in so doing,
about reminding the public of a hidden or forgotten act of historical
injustice; sustaining the presence of the events in public memory; and
seeking acknowledgement of past wrongs on the part of the state, if not
from the state itself then at least from civil society more broadly.1
If the events have particular potency, it is because, like the Algerian
War as a whole, they have an uncertain place ‘between history and
memory’, to borrow a phrase from Rothberg (2009: 231). Indeed,
the very name of the association which led militant activism around
17 October in the 1990s, Au nom de la mémoire, places an emphasis
precisely on memory rather than on history. Its primary concern is with
the persistence of the past within the present, and the emotional and
affective investment in that past by individuals and social groups in a
way which helps to shape their personal and collective identity. As House
and MacMaster suggest, the events of 17 October continue to resonate
strongly for two reasons: first, because they have fostered a sense of
personal and collective memory and identity on the part of successive
generations of descendants of Algerian immigrants; secondly, because
the unequal power relations between France and its colonial subjects
which were expressed in the violent repression of 17 October continue
to be echoed and played out in the post-colonial lived experience of

Out of the Shadows 67
immigrant and minority ethnic communities in contemporary France. In

other words, the events have acquired a symbolic or paradigmatic quality,
‘referring to violent, racially inspired or expressed colonial governance,
the legacies of which continue today in terms of racism, denial of dignity,
lack of state accountability, and certain policing methods’ (House and
MacMaster 2006: 299). At the same time, as House and MacMaster
also explore in compelling fashion, the historical fortunes of 17 October
offer a revealing insight into the ways in which history and memory are
shaped, written and established through time.
Indeed, the work of House and MacMaster and others has itself
undoubtedly played a part not just in enabling proper attention to be
paid to 17 October, but in asserting its place as a key episode of the
war. However, if we turn attention to it once again, it is because one
crucial dimension of the event and its historiography remains properly
to be considered. From the immediate aftermath of the events to their
resurrection in the 1990s and 2000s, the photographic image has had a
key role in the representation of 17 October. The events were the subject
of a multi-page photo-story in Paris Match in the week following the
protest, for example, which was announced by a dramatic front-cover
picture and headline, ‘Nuit de troubles à Paris’. 2 Accounts in progressive
journals and newsweeklies such as Témoignage Chrétien, L’Express and
France-Observateur were also accompanied by images making clear the
violent and repressive measures taken by the police.
At the same time, images had a central role to play when the events
were reinscribed in the public sphere in the 1990s. One of the key
militant publications from the period was Le Silence du fleuve (1991)
[The Silence of the River], by Anne Tristan and Au nom de la mémoire,
which made extensive use of photographs to illustrate their account of
17 October and its historical context. It drew in particular on images
by the militant photojournalist Élie Kagan, one of only a handful of
photographers to capture the events, whose work had illustrated contem-
porary reports in the progressive press. Kagan’s images also featured
in Jean-Luc Einaudi’s groundbreaking study from the same year, La
Bataille de Paris (1991) [The Battle of Paris]. Kagan himself is in fact
a central protagonist in Einaudi’s book, depicted ranging across Paris
with his camera on a scooter and in the Métro, capturing visual evidence
of police violence. In 2001, Einaudi edited 17 Octobre 1961, a slim and
sober monograph of Kagan’s images from that night which served to
confirm him as a privileged witness to events (Einaudi and Kagan 2001).
Retrospective press coverage of 17 October (at the time of anniversaries

68 Contesting Views
in 1991 and 2001, and during the Papon trial in 1997) also made repeated
use of Kagan’s work. Our contention is that such images of 17 October
– both at the time and since then – have contributed in important ways
to shaping understanding of the events and the meanings ascribed to
them. Moreover, arguably, the nature of that contribution has remained
overlooked.
The aim of this chapter is therefore to explore the iconography of
17 October and to consider the work images do in relation to the event
(and, indeed, to historical events more broadly). It sets out to examine
how images are used in relation to the narration of 17 October, its
shaping as an event, and the understandings about it which might be
articulated as a result. It explores ways in which the event has been
visualised, and ways in which those visualisations might have changed
over time; or, indeed, might have settled around particular visual tropes
or devices. It also argues that paying attention to the visualisation of 17
October, and the ebb and flow of images around it, enables us to shed
new light on the processes by which it was first evacuated from and
then reintroduced into the public sphere in France. In other words, this
chapter suggests that visual representation – and photographic represen-
tation especially – is key to the historical fortunes of 17 October over
time, by which is meant both its place or visibility within the histori-
ography of the Algerian War and the ways in which the events of 17
October have come to be understood. What emerges in particular is
the pivotal role played throughout by the body, and the male, Algerian
body specifically, in the visual portrayal of the events. We consider what
is at stake when the visualisation of 17 October is predicated in large
part on the display of broken male bodies, and how that might have
a bearing on understanding not just of France’s wartime activities but
also of the relationship between France and Algeria more generally. In
doing so, we mobilise recent thinking by Judith Butler on the notion of
‘grievability’, the conditions in which human lives become grievable,
and the relationship between grievability, corporeality and vulnerability
(Butler 2004; 2009).
Equally, what can be termed the ‘visual career’ of 17 October
(understood as the changing ways and contexts in which it has been
expressed visually through time) raises more general conceptual issues
about the relationship between photography and history, a relationship
we can understand in two ways: first, in terms of the role played
by the photographic image in shaping historical understanding; and,
secondly, in terms of the value ascribed to photographs within history

as an academic discipline. The first part of our discussion pursues

these questions, which are thrown into sharp relief both by the events
themselves and by the ways in which they have been represented over
time.
Photography and History
The covers of two landmark historical accounts of 17 October, by Einaudi

and House and MacMaster, illustrate different ways in which the events
find themselves mediated by the visual image in the contemporary public
sphere. On encountering Einaudi’s book in its most common paperback
format, the reader is confronted by an enlarged detail from a black and
white photograph by Élie Kagan showing a beaten Algerian man in a
corduroy jacket from the chest up. Blood can clearly be seen running
down his face from a head wound, while he looks down towards the
ground through half-closed eyes with a dazed expression (Fig. 2).
The man’s shirt is soaked in blood, and his tie pulled down away from
the collar. The image, one of a sequence later reproduced in 17 Octobre
Figure 2 Jean-Luc Einaudi, La Bataille

de Paris (1991)

70 Contesting Views
1961, has been cropped of its contextualising background and set starkly
against the plain white background typical of the Points paperback series
in which it appears. As such, it focuses our attention unavoidably on the
anonymous individual, his injuries and his expression of suffering, and
leaves us wondering how and why he has found himself victimised in
this way.
By contrast, the image used on the cover of House and MacMaster’s
later account presents a more contextualised picture, taken by a photog-
rapher from Agence France-Press (AFP). It shows a line of Algerian
protestors crouching on the pavement, some with their hands on their
heads, in front of what appears to be a café or bistro in Puteaux, on
the outskirts of Paris. While the focus of our attention remains the
demonstrators themselves, two of whom have their faces turned towards
the camera, we also notice the framing presence of a policeman on the
right-hand edge of the image (Fig. 3).
We can see not just the policeman’s truncheon standing near vertically
to the same height as the Algerians crouching before him, but also his
shadow, looming on the wall behind and above them, and marked out
by his distinctive hat, the képi. On the left-hand edge of the image, we
glimpse the truncheon of a second policeman. A poster in the window
Figure 3 Jim House and Neil MacMaster,

Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror,
and Memory (2006)

announces ‘La Grande Nuit des vendanges’, an evening of entertainment

on the following weekend, the title of which can be read as an ironic
commentary on the police’s own ‘harvest’ of protestors on the streets of
Paris and its suburbs.
In both instances, we can see how the cover photograph plays a role
in adumbrating and delineating the historical narrative in each text.
Where the image on Einaudi’s book serves to reflect his concern with
the human drama and tragedy of the events, that used on the cover of
House and MacMaster’s account, through its staging and presentation
of both sets of protagonists, signals an intended shift of emphasis away
from the disputes over death tolls which had tended to dominate debate
up to that point (House and MacMaster 2006: 13) and towards a more
nuanced discussion drawing out the infrastructure and mechanisms of
‘state terror’ revealed by the repression of the demonstration, and the
institutional, social and political contexts in which it was played out. In
drawing the policeman into the frame, it draws attention much more to
the agency of the French state and its strategies of repression.
Images, then, have certainly been given a role in accounts of 17
October so far, and not simply as cover illustrations. Einaudi reproduces
a number of Kagan’s photographs in La Bataille de Paris, for example,
and House and MacMaster draw frequently on images by Kagan
and other photojournalists to accompany their account of the events.
However, historical work to date has paid insufficient awareness either to
the work that images might do in shaping understanding of 17 October,
or indeed to its own use of images in its discussion of the events. Despite
the foregrounding of images such as Kagan’s, photographs have enjoyed
a curiously subordinate status in discussions up to now. It often seems
that their principal function is to reveal the ‘smoking gun’ of police
violence or state-organised repression and put it beyond doubt, merely
serving to offer visual evidence supporting or confirming the textual
account. If they are given this role, it is because of their apparent fidelity
to reality, a perceived ability to show ‘what was there’ which derives
from the technical qualities of the photographic process, and its direct
transcription of the physical world by mechanical and chemical means.
As such, their use would seem to reflect a broader trend in
historiography. According to Peter Burke,
When they do use images, historians tend to treat them as mere
illustrations, reproducing them in their books without comment. In cases
in which the images are discussed in the text, this evidence is often used
to illustrate conclusions that the author has already reached by other

72 Contesting Views
means, rather than to give new answers or to ask new questions. (Burke
2001: 10)
His analysis is endorsed by Michael Wilson (2004: 29), for whom
contemporary historians are for the most part ‘logocentric’: ‘visual
sources are of interest insofar as they confirm what historians learn
by examining other kinds of records’. Introducing a special issue of
History and Theory on the relationship between photography and
historical interpretation, Jennifer Tucker (2009: 4) notes that historians
have tended to be somewhat ‘flat-footed’ in their engagement with
the photographic image. They have not quite managed to get to grips
with the role of photographs in the historical process, or, indeed, the
problematic nature of the photographic image as a mode of represen-
tation; and this despite the fact that, as Elizabeth Edwards (2008: 330)
observes, ‘photographs are, with film, the major historical documents of
the last century and a half’.
We would argue that the relationship between photography and
history, and the role of photographs in ‘doing history’, to borrow
Edwards’s formulation (2008: 330), are precisely the issues which are
thrown into relief by the visual representation of 17 October, and which
the case of 17 October helps to illuminate. The relationship between
photography and history has come under increasing critical scrutiny in
recent times, often from those whose academic background lies outside
the discipline of history (anthropology, memory studies, politics or art
history, for example). At stake, as Michael Roth (2010) puts it in the title
of a review article on the subject, is ‘why photography matters to the
theory of history’. Interest in the question is exemplified by interventions
like Tucker’s special issue of History and Theory, which brings together
key contemporary figures in the field of photography criticism such as
John Tagg, Geoffrey Batchen, Patricia Hayes and Elizabeth Edwards.
What the special issue also illustrates, however, is the way in which
debate to date has tended to focus on the status of photographs as
historical evidence, historical document or source material – on how
photographs ‘function as conduits to the past’, as Edwards puts it
elsewhere (2008: 330). In her introduction, Tucker identifies some of the
key questions framing the debate: ‘in what ways, if any, can photographs
tell us about the past? Do photographs differ in character from other
kinds of historical sources? […] How have photographs functioned, and
how should they function, as historical evidence?’ (Tucker 2009: 6).
Similarly, in his review essay, Roth (2010: 91) asks, ‘how do photographs
work in telling the truth about history?’

Tackling these questions, as Edwards in particular makes clear,

means learning the lessons from photography criticism of the past thirty
or so years about the ambiguous characteristics of the photographic
image: on the one hand, the qualities of referentiality which would seem
to make it eminently qualified as a ‘conduit to the past’, and which have
seen it become freighted with ‘cultural expectations of truth, directness
and actuality’ (Edwards 2008: 333); on the other, its actual complexity
as a material and symbolic form which mediates, represents and codifies
the world through a range of processes and devices, a complexity
which need to be factored into an engagement with photographs as
historical documents. In other words, and perhaps unsurprisingly,
while photographs certainly deserve to be taken seriously as sources of
historical knowledge, the conclusion must be that they ‘are neither more
nor less transparent than other documentary sources’ (Tucker 2009: 5).
We would endorse both an assertion of the photograph’s legitimacy
as a source of historical knowledge and the caveats outlined by Edwards
among others; but we would also suggest that the debate to date,
preoccupied with the photograph’s relationship to the past, has occluded
other aspects of the relationship between photography and history. What
is at stake, arguably, is not so much what photographic images might
reveal about the past, nor how they might reveal different things about
the past compared to other historical sources. Approaching photographs
in this way implies a model of history whereby the past lies magically
beyond and through the discursive and material traces which remain of
it. Our understanding of that past, however, must always both rely on
and contend with the mediations those traces represent.
Rather than bring to light what photographs can tell us about the
past, the case of 17 October instead illuminates how they are mobilised
in narratives of the past. To cast this subtle but important distinction
differently, we would reformulate the question posed by Michael Roth.
The issue is not ‘how do photographs work in telling the truth about
history?’, but ‘how do photographs work in the telling of history?’ Or,
alternatively, and ascribing a greater sense of agency to the photographic
image, ‘what work do photographs do in the telling of history?’ Namely,
what role do they play in the construction of historical narratives and
therefore in the shaping of historical understanding? In answering
these questions, we need to think about the performative dimension
of the photograph, its rhetorical effects and affective qualities – about
the things it does to the viewer who encounters it in different narrative
contexts. 3

74 Contesting Views
The work of Elizabeth Edwards has been instrumental in focusing

attention on the productive agency of images; that is to say, on the idea
that images are not passive or inert, but actively do things and produce
effects in the social world. A sense that images do work in shaping
historical and political understanding has been latent within critical
thinking on photography for decades. Barthes’s investigation in the
1950s and 1960s of how the visual image can be co-opted by myth and
ideology would be an obvious example. The theme was further pursued
by Burgin and Tagg, as they developed approaches based on semiology
and historical materialism in the 1980s. Tagg’s work examines how
photographs and photography have been mobilised and instrumentalised
within particular social and discursive formations, and especially those
with repressive or regulatory functions. For him, the photograph is ‘a
material product of a material apparatus set to work in specific contexts,
by specific forces, for more or less defined purposes’ (1988: 3). In Tagg’s
account, the photograph is a relatively passive medium: ‘photography
as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power
relations which invest it’ (1988: 63). Photographs are caught up in social,
ideological and bureaucratic machinery, and made to do specific sorts
of work at specific moments, their effects produced by the discursive
systems in which they are inscribed and circulate.
Edwards’s work, emerging out of anthropology, and influenced by
‘thing theory’ of Appadurai, Gell and Latour, marks a shift in emphasis
in its focus on the agency of the photographic image as a productive
force in the social environment. As Edwards suggests,
The potential of the idea is a historiographical liberation if, as a heuristic
device, we accord photographs a certain agency in the making of history,
allowing them to become social actors, impressing, articulating and
constructing fields of social actions in ways that would not have occurred
if they did not exist. (Edwards 2001: 17)
Her point is pursued by Ulrich Keller, who investigates ways in which
photography gradually establishes itself as a credible and authoritative
witness of history during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its
success in doing so lay in its ability ‘to fuse event and representation in
increasingly smooth and believable fashion’ (Keller 2010: 103); in other
words, to produce an instantaneous and faithful record of events. But
Keller argues that the perception of photography as a witness of history
in fact ‘elided its agency in the shaping rather than just the recording of
history’ (2010: 103–4, Keller’s emphasis). For Keller, the fusion of the

event and its representation meant the camera had a growing influence
on the performance of history, and the unfolding of events, as historical
actors took on board the requirements and benefits of performing before
and for the camera (2010: 107–8). In other words, we need to recover
and understand photography’s role in making and performing history, a
role which at times seems almost covert, or at the very least unobtrusive,
perhaps because almost entirely naturalised.
So what is it specifically that photographs do? How are we to
understand the role of the photograph in what Edwards (2008: 330)
calls the ‘visualisation of history’? A useful starting point is provided by
David Campbell’s definition of photography as ‘a technology of visuali-
sation that both draws on and establishes a visual economy through
which events and issues are materialised in particular ways’ (Campbell
2009: 53). In other words, photographs show us certain things in certain
ways, and generate a range of effects, meanings or understandings in
doing so. Of central importance here is the relationship between event
and photograph. The ‘materialisation’ of events through photography,
as Campbell has it, is better seen as a process of production or shaping.
Photographs give form to historical flux by making ‘visual incisions in
space and time’ (Edwards 2008: 334). Carving out or fixing particular
moments allows narrative shape and coherence to be given to discon-
tinuous or heterogeneous combinations of incidents, reactions and
interventions unfolding in time, and between which there may at first
appear to be little in the way of causal connection. The photographic
act introduces a relationship of metonymy whereby the moment caught
comes to represent the event as a whole, and, in doing so, can take on
explanatory power in relation to it. Thus, the form given to a particular
incident through its photographic representation (such as images of
bloodied Algerian men, sprawled and battered in the wake of police
violence) enables certain understandings of the broader event to be ‘read
off’ or deduced from it. As Edwards (2008: 334) puts it, photographs are
the ‘little narratives’ on which larger narratives can be grounded; but it is
also important to bear in mind that they have the potential to drive and
dominate those larger narratives. Not only does the photographic act
privilege certain moments over others, but it also institutes a privileged
way of seeing, and therefore of understanding those moments. This
is most obvious in the case of those images which acquire ‘iconic’
status; that is to say, which are seen to concentrate or encapsulate an
event and its meanings, and which do so through repeated circulation
and reproduction.4 Nick Ut’s ‘Accidental Napalm’ would be one such

76 Contesting Views
example (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 171–83); Élie Kagan’s images of

17 October, as we will discuss below, would be another.
What interests us in relation to 17 October, then, and what the case of
17 October arguably helps to clarify, is the photograph’s role as an agent of
historical narrative and historical understanding. Paying attention to the
‘visual enactment’ (Campbell 2007: 380) of 17 October is transformative
of, and not just supplemental to, our existing understanding of the
meaning and significance of the events. It is not simply that we need
to consider the visual representation of 17 October, but that visual
representation itself has a role to play in shaping how the events are
perceived and reconfigured over time. Moreover, it does so often by its
mere presence as part of a discursive ensemble of text and image. In the
remainder of the chapter, we investigate how the events of 17 October
are enacted visually both at the time and subsequently. What narratives
of the event emerge, and how are they articulated and mediated through
photographs? How does the visualisation of 17 October change over
time? What role do images play as the events are reintroduced into the
public sphere after a long period of invisibility? More precisely, how
might they be used to drive the reconfiguration of the events, and help
to assert the status of those who died as innocent victims of a state crime
to whom a debt of remembrance is owed?
Corporeality, Masculinity and Grievability:

The Visualisation of 17 October
Central to the visual enactment of 17 October is the body. It quickly

becomes the key ground on which meaning of the events and our
understanding of them are established and negotiated. Indeed, the body
was fundamental to the mode of protest itself. It can be said that 17
October was an event in which the body was overtly put to work for
symbolic ends, as massed bodily presence on the streets of the capital
was used to express resistance by a population which had finally been
granted partial French citizenship in 1958, and yet had found itself
singled out for repressive measures by the authorities. 5 The target
destinations of the demonstrators were the capital’s most prestigious
locations: the Grands Boulevards on the Right and Left Banks, with their
cafés, theatres and metropolitan crowds, and, ultimately, the French
Republican spaces of the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées.
Of course, what was a bold act of defiance for some was for others an

outrageous invasion of metropolitan public space by the troublesome

indigenous population of an increasingly troublesome colony. That the
event was perceived as something scandalous is suggested by a comment
from an onlooker reported in L’Express: ‘C’est un comble, on se croirait
à Alger!’6 It represented a gesture which suddenly and disruptively placed
the front line of the Algerian War at the heart of the colonial capital, and
which could not be left unpunished because of that.
A sense of the protest as a physical insurgency is conveyed in much of
the contemporary visual coverage. Reports in the daily and weekly news
press across the political spectrum carried pictures of crowds marching
along the Grands Boulevards. At the same time, two diverging narratives
quickly emerged, played out along the political and ideological lines
dividing the progressive press (including left-of-centre newsweeklies
L’Express and France-Observateur and the Catholic newspaper
Témoignage Chrétien) from the conservative and pro-government press
(dailies such as L’Aurore, Paris-Presse-L’Intransigeant and France-Soir,
and Paris Match, the weekly photo-reportage news magazine), which
held the upper hand in terms of reach, circulation and proximity to
the fields of political and economic power. If the latter presented the
events of 17 October in terms of a narrative of containment, the former
denounced them angrily in terms of a narrative of repression by the state;
but in each case, the body has a central role to play.
A template for the narrative of containment can be found, perhaps
unsurprisingly, in coverage broadcast on French state television. The
evening news carried reports on the events on 18 and 19 October. On
18 October, the protests were the second item on the news, following
coverage of a national rail strike which had taken place that day. The
report opened with scenes of damage to shops and property on the
Grands Boulevards, before showing arrested protestors being marched
out of Métro stations at various locations around Paris, and loaded on to
buses. The following evening, viewers were presented with scenes from
Orly airport, where protestors (some wearing bandages and carrying
traces of the beatings they had received) were shown being loaded on
to planes under armed guard, for deportation back to Algeria. Within
two days, therefore, the end of the demonstrations as an event was
already being signalled. As if to underline its consignment to history, the
demonstration featured in a weekly round-up of news broadcast on 25
October. Drawing on the footage shown the previous week, the report
could present the episode according to a classic narrative structure of
threat, disruption and ultimate return to order, confirmed by images

78 Contesting Views
not just of containment (arrest and removal to detention centres) but

of expulsion, as the foreign bodies which caused the disturbance were
dispatched definitively from metropolitan territory.
We can track the visual enactment of the containment narrative across
the print media as well. On Friday 20 October, for example, the front
page of France-Soir carries a report suggesting police had successfully
thwarted a second Algerian protest. The story is accompanied by the
image which would reappear some decades later on the cover of House
and MacMaster’s book. Indeed, its appearance here would seem to
be the first instance of its publication. Where some forty years later,
it would be used to adumbrate an examination of state brutality, the
anchorage provided in this instance by the headlines and captions
encourages a somewhat different interpretation. Striking in particular
is the presence on the left of the CRS officer, absent from the version
used by House and MacMaster. His upright authority is underlined by
the way in which he forms a perpendicular with the protestors cowering
in a line before him.
Perhaps the most extensive visual representation of the events in the
print media at the time was to be found in Paris Match. Launched in
1949, and modelling itself on phenomenally successful antecedents such
as Life, Paris Match was a weekly news magazine which made extensive
use of photo-reportage in its coverage of current affairs. The magazine
soon acquired significant political weight and influence in France, thanks
to its commercial success (circulation soon climbed past the one million
mark); a politically and socially conservative readership (drawn from
the middle and aspiring middle classes); and close proximity to the field
of power (allowing it to secure ‘exclusive’ and ‘intimate’ portraits of the
country’s political and social elite). Not quite a government mouthpiece,
its alignment with the Gaullist regime was nevertheless beyond doubt.
The magazine’s significance and distinctiveness also lay in its emphasis
on the visual. As Roland Barthes for one made clear time and again in
the 1950s and 1960s, it was a place where the photographic image was
involved in an extensive amount of ideological work.7 In short, following
Barthes, its visual enactment of the world could be seen to help pass off
as natural or self-evident certain ideas and understandings (‘myths’, to
use Barthes’s own term) which were in fact historically determined and
politically motivated. Its coverage of 17 October, mobilising as it does
a number of assumptions and implications about French Algeria and
Algerians, offers a powerful example of how such ideological work is
undertaken.

Figure 4 Paris Match,

28 October 1961
Paris Match reports on the events of 17 October in its issue dated 28

October 1961, highlighting the story with a bold, front-cover image in
black and white showing a busload of arrested protestors anchored by
the headline ‘Nuit de troubles à Paris’ (Fig. 4). Inside the magazine, the
narrative of the evening’s events is told through a nine-page sequence
of images (again in black and white) whose often blurred focus and
hurried composition position them firmly at the scene of the action.
What, then, does 17 October look like in the pages of Paris Match? Its
visual narrative of the events is striking for a number of reasons. First,
the physical insurgency is foregrounded, in both image and text. Two
double-page spreads are given over to scenes of crowds on the street,
some showing the crowd as a mass in the middle distance, others showing
demonstrators passing in orderly fashion by ranks of police officers
(pp. 42–5). The captions evoke a city caught by surprise: ‘à l’heure du
grand film apparaît une foule inattendue qui brave le couvre-feu’ (p. 43).8
The crowd’s sudden and mysterious appearance is presented as a chilling
dream sequence: ‘pendant une heure, les boulevards des théâtres vont
vivre un cauchemar. Des milliers de travailleurs nord-africains sont

80 Contesting Views
venus de leurs banlieues ignorées et surgissent, inquiétants, sous les

lumières de la ville’ (p. 40).9 The innocent civilians of the capital find
themselves confronted by a nightmarish disruption of the established
order by a dark force surging disruptively, and literally, from below, out
of the shadows and the Métro into the bright lights of the ville-lumière
(as the headline introducing the picture story has it, ‘le drame arrive en
métro’).
The unfolding of the story over the following pages suggests careful
editorial sequencing. A double-page spread of demonstrators passing
by (‘les premiers défilés se déroulent dans le calme’, p. 43)10 segues into
scenes of destruction to commercial property on the following pages. An
image of ransacking is juxtaposed with two further crowd scenes, the
first showing protestors blocking the path of car drivers, and a second,
larger image showing an angry crowd of men (pp. 44–5). The threatening
turn taken by the protests is confirmed by the caption: ‘la tension monte,
les vitrines volent en éclats, les automobilistes se trouvent bloqués face
à une marée de visages menaçants’.11 The larger image places the viewer
only a few feet from these ‘visages menaçants’ (p. 45). Alongside the
racial undertone which can be detected in the use of metonymy to focus
on the faces of the protestors (which are threatening, perhaps, simply
because they are the faces of the racialised other), the caption also works
subtly to place agency (and therefore blame) on the protestors, figured
here as a tidal surge.
This image serves to mark the high point of the danger or disorder. The
medium-range shot of the threatening crowd is followed, in the manner
of a cinematic jump cut, by a sudden shift to images of containment
and the aftermath of the police intervention: arrested demonstrators
being watched over by the police, the loading of protestors on to buses,
some circumstantial evidence of physical violence (prone bodies on
the ground). The role of the text in distributing agency and inflecting
interpretation is again important here. In suggesting that it was on the
Grands Boulevards where ‘contact entre les manifestants et les forces
d’ordre a été le plus violent’, (p. 47),12 the caption implies an equal
distribution of agency between the two protagonists, and conveys an
impression of violent clash, rather than unequal pursuit.13
At the same time, it is notable how Paris Match signals the police
presence and containment of the protestors from the start of its coverage:
the first image of the sequence shows arrested protestors in the corridors
of the Métro, filing past police officers with their arms raised. Indeed,
the cover image had already presented the events as over, both visually

(by displaying captured protestors) and temporally (by reducing them to

a single night of ‘troubles’ and eliding the subsequent days of beatings,
arrests and deportations), even before the magazine’s readers could
watch them unfold. The cover photograph is certainly ambiguous, the
reader’s eye surely drawn in particular to the look of alarm or fear on the
face of the man looking out of the window on the left-hand side of the
image, which offers a hook for a rather different reading of the events,
one which would highlight the brutality of police repression; but this
alternative narrative impulse is not carried through the rest of the report.
Of greater importance, it would seem, is the sight of the protestors
secure inside the bus. In a move which is in fact typical of Paris Match,
the image offers a frisson of danger for the reader tempered by the
knowledge that the potential threat has been neutralised. Like the state
television news report, Paris Match’s coverage consigns the episode
unambiguously to history. It becomes little more than an aberration,
an unfortunate incident in which the citizens of Paris found themselves
caught up. Alongside an image of buses lined up in front of the Paris
Opera to take protestors to detention centres and out of sight once more,
the final caption notes that ‘une épisode de la tragédie algérienne se
termine au cœur de Paris sur la place de l’Opéra’ (p. 49).14 The political
skill of the comment lies in the way it dislocates Algeria from Paris
and the métropole, and implies that the ‘Algerian tragedy’, with its
multiple twists and turns, was one in which the colonial capital had no
role and with which it had no business. Moreover, in doing so, it can
be seen to align itself with a dominant mood of war weariness among
the metropolitan population at the time, a weariness reflected in the
magazine’s reference in its editorial to ‘une guerre qui n’en finit pas
de finir’ (p. 15).15 If the forces of law and order were to be thanked for
containing the protest and limiting disruption to metropolitan life, the
incident nevertheless served as a reminder of the need to find a rapid
solution for an increasingly tiresome affair, one which would prevent
honest citizens from facing a similar ‘nightmare’ in future.
While coverage of the episode in the pro-governmental press
diminished over the next few days and weeks, the progressive press
(and in particular the newsweeklies France-Observateur and L’Express,
hostile to the Gaullist regime) attempted to sustain debate into November,
with coverage of the aftermath of the repression, the containment of the
demonstrators, and analysis of the government’s handling of the Algerian
question. Visually, it highlighted the physical violence done to protestors,
drawing in particular on the images taken in and around Paris by Élie

82 Contesting Views
Kagan. The front page of L’Express on 19 October shows a shaken man

being led down the steps of a Métro station by a fellow Algerian. In its
issue of 2 November, France-Observateur carries extracts of a speech
made by the editor, Claude Bourdet, during an emergency debate on the
events held by the Paris municipal council. The article is illustrated by
an image showing a wounded Algerian man, blood trickling down his
face, being helped by a young, white militant from the Parti socialiste as
an example of a rare act of solidarity.
On 16 November, a report in L’Express on the difficulties for
Algerian militants to form an alliance with the French working classes
is accompanied by an image of a demonstrator sitting on a bench in
the Métro clutching his wounded shoulder. This same image is used
by France-Observateur on the front page of its issue of 26 October to
announce an investigative report on the demonstration on its inside
pages. Headlined ‘Aucun Français ne peut plus ignorer ça!’,16 the report
is illustrated by another Kagan image, this time of a prone figure with a
bloody head wound, either dead or unconscious. A second image shows
a group of Algerian men standing in line with an armed policeman in the
foreground, with a third depicting a large crowd of men in a detention
centre, accompanied by the caption ‘Cela ne vous rappelle rien?’17 In
each of these cases, photographs are being used in a way which is now
axiomatic of the rhetorical strategies of human rights discourse. Visual
evidence of physical violence and repression by the state is mobilised in
order to stimulate a range of responses – indignation, guilt or shame
– and, in so doing, to reinforce a call to action.18 Indeed, as Michael
Rothberg (2009: 236–45) observes, such evidence is intended to be all
the more compelling by invoking memories of past atrocities ignored by
the majority: in its implied reference to the rounding up and detention of
Jews at the Vélodrome d’hiver in Paris during the Occupation, France-
Observateur’s apostrophic caption to the photograph of the detention
centre is designed to provoke a sense of guilt by association, and
therefore a militant response to the current state of affairs.
Despite their opposing political and ideological motivations, both
modes of visualising 17 October – whether as containment or repression
– share notable common ground in their foregrounding of the male body,
and the male Algerian body especially. To be sure, this in part reflects
certain demographic and historical realities: first, that a substantial
proportion of the demonstrators was male;19 and, secondly, that it was
male protestors who were the target of police repression. Nevertheless,
it was also the case that a number of women and children were on the

march, as Paris Match noted in its report (p. 43), and as some images
published at the time reveal. Indeed, in the pro-governmental press, their
presence could be used as evidence of the FLN’s political ruthlessness,
and its willingness to put even the most vulnerable members of its
community on the front line.
However, not only is this aspect of the demonstration soon occluded in
contemporary coverage of the events, but neither does it register visually
when they are reintroduced into the public sphere in later decades. The
male Algerian body becomes the key site for understanding, negotiating
and revalorising the meanings of 17 October, both at the time and in
later years. As we have seen, much reporting of the demonstration staged
Algerian masculinity as disruptive, destabilising and dangerous, a power
in need of containment and castration. An understanding such as this
is enacted in Paris Match’s prominent image of a crowd of chanting
men (p. 45), two of whom look directly at the camera in what we can
only presume to read, encouraged by the caption describing ‘une marée
de visages menaçants’, as a gesture of unruly defiance. It can be seen
as a perhaps unsurprising reiteration of myths about North African
masculinity which, as David Macey (1998) discusses, had long informed
France’s involvement in and perception of the Maghreb. In the context
of the war, fantasies of threatening Algerian masculinity were embodied
most obviously in the fellagha (rebel fighters) skirmishing with French
forces in the colony’s mountainous hinterlands.
Indeed, the emergence of the body as a focal point in contemporary
coverage of the protests signals its central importance within the colonial
dynamic, and its role as a vector through which colonial power is
exercised. For Sidi Mohammed Barkat, representations of the Algerians
as a physically disruptive and threatening force helped to legitimise
violent repression of the protests of 17 October, and facilitate the
neutralisation of ‘le sentiment de culpabilité qui aurait dû normalement
accompagner un tel acte’ (Barkat 2005: 70). 20 Indeed, we have seen how
Paris Match goes out of its way precisely to assert the innocence of
those in metropolitan France, caught up in a drama for which they are
not responsible, and from which they are rescued by the state. In stark
contrast, the mainstream progressive press confronted its readers with
images of wounded and broken bodies and displays of corporeal vulner-
ability, in order to make manifest the inherent violence of the colonial
dynamic being acted out on the streets of Paris. Here, Algerian men
appear not as a redoubtable threat to the public and political order, but
as tragic victims of that order. 21

84 Contesting Views
Despite the best efforts of the progressive press and some politicians, 17
October remained only a brief controversy. Indeed, a telling comparison
can be made with another infamous episode of the latter stages of the
war, which took place only a few months later. During the forcible
break-up of another mass demonstration on 8 February 1962, this time
against the extreme nationalist terrorist group, the Organisation Armée
Secrète (OAS), eight protestors were crushed to death on the steps of the
Charonne Métro station in Paris as the crowd tried to escape from the
same police who had attacked the Algerians a few months earlier. Unlike
the Algerians, however, these victims of police violence were white trade
unionists or members of the French Communist Party. Their deaths
were marked by a mass rally and funeral procession on 13 February
which remained for some time one of the largest single gatherings ever
held in Paris (House and MacMaster 2006: 251), documentary footage
of which Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme memorably inserted in their
cinéma-vérité essay on life during the springtime of 1962 in Paris, Le Joli
Mai (1963).
Not only did the reaction to their deaths suggest that the victims of
Charonne were worthy of public grief, but the organisational structures
and mechanisms were in place to ensure that grieving could take
place promptly. Indeed, the extent to which the rally took command
of public space was an indication of at least some degree of sanction
or cooperation by the authorities. Moreover, the grieving itself was
spectacular in nature, in the sense precisely that it took on the quality
of spectacle. Visual coverage of the event emphasised long shots of the
vast crowds extending down the Parisian boulevards behind the funeral
cortège. At the Place de la République, a space was created for the
display of large-scale photographic portraits of the victims, held up by
their grieving families for the benefit of the crowd and the cameras. This
technique of individualisation through photographic portrait has since
become a familiar trope of human rights activism across the world. 22
Portraits of loved ones are mobilised in order to confront the world with
loss and absence, and to underscore their right to grievability. In short,
the victims of Charonne were at once more legitimate victims than their
Algerian counterparts, by dint of their political and racial identities, and
also more legible as victims.
Overshadowed by the events of Charonne, those of 17 October more
or less disappeared from the broader public and historical consciousness
for at least two decades. While there was sporadic coverage in the
1980s (anniversary articles in the left-wing Libération and Communist

L’Humanité, brief retrospective reports on the television news in 1981

and again in 1984), it was only in the 1990s that momentum properly
began to build around efforts to disinter the events and reintroduce
them into the public sphere. So how does 17 October appear when it
re-emerges into the public sphere in later decades? What role do images
have to play in the historical re-presentation of the demonstration? The
focus of memory activists and historians in the 1990s and subsequently
is precisely on asserting the status of the victims of police brutality at the
time as victims. They set out to uncover the truth about the extent of
the killing at the time, and to gain recognition for the dead as victims of
state terror and as deserving of judicial recompense, if not legally then
at least historically and symbolically. To borrow a notion developed by
Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009), we
can say that the aim of memory activists in the contemporary period is
to make the victims of 17 October more ‘grievable’.
If we invoke Judith Butler’s work here, it is because we would argue
that her notion of grievability allows us to understand both the initial
failure and the subsequent success of the narrative of repression and
victimhood we have identified in relation to 17 October. The notion
of grievability also offers an important insight into the visual economy
of 17 October in the contemporary period. The central question asked
by Butler in Precarious Life and Frames of War is ‘what makes for a
grievable life’ (Butler 2004: 20). In other words, what are the conditions
in which lives become notable, significant and worthy of grief? She
asks the question in response to the USA-led conflicts of the early
twenty-first century in which indigenous casualties (whether civilian or
military) were for the most part lost from sight or elided as the discursive
frameworks governing the representation and mediation of war – ‘what
can appear, what can be heard’ (Butler 2004: 147) – placed the emphasis
elsewhere. As Butler (2004: 150) makes clear, the possibility of grieva-
bility depends fundamentally on the ‘conditions of representation’ which
pertain in a given historical moment. We can take this to mean not just
what can and cannot be shown or heard, but also which representations
or narratives gain purchase in the public sphere, and which fall by the
wayside. The fortunes of 17 October are illuminating in this respect. As
we have seen, it is not that narratives of victimhood and repression were
absent from coverage of the events at the time, but that the necessary
conditions were not in place to secure the recognition of the victims
of police violence as victims, and so enable them to become worthy of
collective and public grief.

86 Contesting Views
If the events of 17 October gain a greater profile in the 1990s and

2000s, it is due in part to a shift in the conditions of representation in
France which enabled revisionist histories of the war to take root. It
became easier, though still not straightforward, to make space for its
events and consequences in the public sphere. The period is marked by
a growing consensus over the need to revisit the past and to recognise
as problematic some of the actions taken by the French state during the
Algerian War. A change in mood is signalled in particular by the role of
the televisual media in disseminating more critical accounts of the events
at the key anniversaries of 1991 and 2001, and also during the trial of
Maurice Papon in 1997. 23 Coverage at the time of the 2001 anniversary
was particularly extensive, with the three main television channels
(privatised TF1 and publicly owned France 2 and France 3) giving voice
to revisionist historians and memory activists.
This shift in the conditions of representation offers much more fertile
ground for the narrative of victimhood and repression to take hold in
France, and it emerges as the principal narrative strategy in relation
to the events of 17 October across the field of cultural production,
from the mass print and televisual media to more specialised historical
and academic publications. Moreover, the visual enactment of the
events in the contemporary period is dominated by an iconography
of victimhood and vulnerability. Where visual coverage at the time
was notable for its diversity (crowd scenes, civil disturbance, violence,
arrests, deportations), contemporary coverage involves a much greater
concentration on, and repetition of, an increasingly select number of
images and moments. Examples would be Kagan’s image of a man
sitting on a bench in the Métro clutching his wounded shoulder, used
in cropped form on a reissued edition in 2000 of Péju’s Ratonnades à
Paris [Lynchings in Paris], or the haggard individual in corduroy jacket
and tie with blood trickling down his face from a scalp wound (Fig. 2),
which dominates the paperback edition of Einaudi’s La Bataille de Paris,
and features in uncropped form on the cover of the 2001 monograph,
17 Octobre 1961. Another key image in this respect, as we have also
seen, is the AFP shot of protestors crouching before two CRS agents.
When it first appears on the front page of France-Soir on 20 October
1961, it is part of a narrative which was unfolding in time and was being
shaped by the print media (in this case, a report highlighting ‘mopping
up’ operations in and around Paris, and the prevention by the police of
a second protest march). Forty years later, it is used by both France-Soir
and Le Nouvel Observateur to accompany retrospective accounts. 24 It

was mobilised by TF1 in its reports on 17 October broadcast in 1991,

1997 and 2001. State television, meanwhile, made use of photographs
by Élie Kagan to illustrate reports broadcast in 1991 (on Antenne 2) and
1997 (on France 2).
In the shift from current affairs to history, certain images begin
to serve as a visual shorthand for an episode of narrative complexity
and temporal duration, occluding certain threads and foregrounding
others. The agency portrayed, in images such as AFP’s ‘La Grande Nuit
des vendanges’ photograph, is that of the state. In other images, the
moment of violence itself is often absent, and we see only its aftermath.
The viewer is confronted by broken male bodies displaying pain and
anguish, physical contortion and streaming blood. Dazed expressions
and trickling blood on beaten men imply the existence of an omniscient
power beyond the frame of the image. Figures are often seen in isolation,
thereby accentuating a sense of their vulnerability and abandonment.
There is a marked emphasis on facial expressions, as well as looks
directed at the camera (the crouching man in AFP’s ‘La Grande Nuit
des vendanges’ image, for example). In short, the visual enactment of 17
October in the contemporary period is defined by a rhetoric of affect, in
which photographs are mobilised to produce ethical responses through
provoking emotional or affective reactions to corporeal vulnerability.
Moreover, the viewer’s exposure to such vulnerability is reinforced by
subjection to the look of the repressed and the victimised.
If an iconography of victimhood takes centre stage in the contem-
porary period, it is thanks in particular to the increasing prominence
afforded to the work of Élie Kagan. Not only are Kagan’s images often
selected to accompany retrospective accounts of 17 October in the
print and televisual media, but he is also promoted as the principal
eyewitness of the events. French historian Jean-Luc Einaudi especially
has been instrumental in doing so, highlighting Kagan’s activity in
both his account of 1991, as we have seen, and in a volume of Kagan’s
images from the period published in 2001. Indeed, in his introduction
to that volume, entitled ‘Élie Kagan, le témoin’, Einaudi makes a telling
remark about the photographer’s work: ‘Élie Kagan fut bien le seul dont
les photos expriment la souffrance des Algériens’ (Einaudi and Kagan
2001: 27). 25 If Kagan’s images are privileged, in other words, it is because
they enable and reinforce a narrative of suffering and victimhood; and
if the visual display of corporeal vulnerability is perceived as the key
to grievability, it is because the historical conditions of representation
which frame the circulation of those images increasingly allow them

88 Contesting Views
to be read as images of victimhood and injustice. Such a point was

underscored by the belated release in October 2011 of Jacques Panijel’s
once-banned Octobre à Paris (1962), a film that famously foregrounds
the testimony of witnesses and survivors, several of whom show in
detail the scars and damage inflicted upon their bodies at the hands of
the Paris police.
Indeed, the extent to which an iconography of victimhood defines
the visual representation of 17 October in the contemporary French
public sphere is revealed by comparison with the images circulating
in the Algerian press during the same period. The historical narrative
of 17 October in Algeria is governed by a different set of political
agendas, of course (national unity and collective popular heroism, for
example). Yet it is nevertheless striking that the visual emphasis lies not
on the evidence of French colonial brutality, but on the agency of the
protestors. In the pages of El Watan in 2001, for example, we see not
the bloody aftermath of the police intervention, but a proud and orderly
procession of people dressed in their best clothes, a critical mass of
protestors – precisely those images, in fact, which by and large fail to
reappear when the events are revalorised in France in the last decades
of the twentieth century. 26
The assertion and persistence within contemporary France of a
narrative and iconography of victimhood in relation to 17 October
raises some important broader questions about how Franco-Algerian
relations, and, through them, Franco-Algerian identities, continue to be
perceived and articulated within the French public sphere. In the first
instance, it reflects a specific national context of guilt and historical
acknowledgement, which has provided at least a partial attempt to
confront France’s ‘Algeria Syndrome’. Moreover, its rhetoric of affect
reflects the dominant performative dynamic of contemporary human
rights discourses in its mobilisation of shame and guilt through a
visual encounter with the repressed and the victimised. But, as with
other manifestations of such discourses, it is not without its problems.
Positioning these people as victims almost inevitably implies neutralising
or denying their agency as subjects. It is undoubtedly important, in one
sense, that victimhood is asserted in order to throw light on historical
injustice. Doing so represents the most obvious strategy in a context
of struggle for retribution, human rights and the recognition of past
wrongs. At the same time, we would agree with House and MacMaster
when they note that ‘accepting the status of victims for the Algerians
subjected to state violence in 1961 should not close them off within an

identity of victimhood during the war, nor should it do so for them and
their descendants today’ (2006: 333).
Nevertheless, we need to bear in mind how the continued circulation
of historical images of colonial victimhood in the public sphere, even
through such apparently benign and innocuous things as book covers,
might continue to inform understanding and perception of Franco-
Algerian relations and Franco-Algerian identities in the present, even once
the historical and memorial work of returning events such as 17 October
1961 to collective consciousness has been largely accomplished. What is
at stake when the visual enactment of France’s Algeria focuses not just
on Algerian corporeal vulnerability, but on male vulnerability especially;
and when it places agency firmly on the side of state authorities, and away
from Algerian subjects? To what extent does it succeed in mobilising that
community based on grief and a shared recognition of vulnerability that
Judith Butler identifies as a potential source of political action? Or to
what extent does it simply serve to restage and reinforce a dynamic of
power which seems little changed in the post-colonial period? What is
at stake when historical images of emasculated Algerian men circulate
in concert with portrayals of Franco-Algerian identity in contem-
porary visual culture which continue to interrogate and render complex
Franco-Algerian masculinity? Part II of the book turns its attention
to contemporary portrayals of the relationship between France and
Algeria, and explores the extent to which they resonate with or map on
to the historical narratives about Algeria laid down in the French public
sphere over the years, and explored in Part I. It highlights in particular
the importance of masculinity and gender identity more broadly as a
vector for the articulation of this relationship. It begins by turning its
attention to the portrayal and evocation of the struggle for independence
in contemporary cinema, and the striking role played by the (invariably
male) child in mediating the narration of this fundamental turning point
in the national history of both countries.

part ii
Mapping
Franco-Algerian Borders
in Contemporary Visual Culture

4
War Child:
Memory, Childhood and
Algerian Pasts in Recent French Film
War Child
In keeping with the heightened awareness of the Algerian War provoked

by key anniversaries during the first decade of the twenty-first century
(fortieth anniversary of 17 October 1961 and the ceasefire of March
1962; fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war), the period also saw
a distinctive surge in the number of French-produced or co-produced
feature-length films that explicitly tackled the subject of the conflict.
Alain Tasma’s Nuit noire (2005), for example, dramatised the events
leading up to 17 October 1961 and the night itself in Paris. Philippe
Faucon’s La Trahison (2006) and Florent Emilio Siri’s L’Ennemi intime
(2007) focused on French military experiences in Algeria. Laurent
Herbiet’s Mon colonel (2006) weaved together scenes set in present-day
France with flashbacks from wartime Algeria in its examination of
French army uses of torture. Meanwhile, Hugues Martin and Sandra
Martin broke with the realist conventions of these films, setting their
unusual supernatural thriller Djinns (2010) in the Algerian Sahara in
1960.
Although far from the first French films to address the Algerian
War, several reasons can be advanced to explain this concentrated
number of releases post-2000 of films wholly or partially set during the
wartime period.1 Jean-Pierre Jeancolas (2007: 44) has argued that French
directors have historically been reluctant to film war at the time of its
fighting, choosing instead to represent it much later on. Moreover, fear
of censorship by the French state during the conflict itself undoubtedly
encouraged self-censorship amongst filmmakers, consequently reducing
the likelihood of warfare scenes appearing in films released at the time.

94 Contesting Views
Furthermore, Benjamin Stora (2002) has suggested that a period of

thirty or forty years following the end of a war may be necessary before
certain memories and realities of it can become widely acknowledged
publicly, a point ostensibly substantiated by the 1992 release of Bertrand
Tavernier and Patrick Rotman’s documentary film La Guerre sans nom,
which foregrounded the first-hand testimony of a range of French army
conscripts and soldiers during the Algerian War, many of whom had
never before spoken publicly of their wartime experiences. As Dine
(1994: 232) argues, the parallels that La Guerre sans nom shares with
another landmark documentary film interrogating the complex wartime
experiences of French citizens, Marcel Ophuls’s Le Chagrin et la Pitié
(1971), seem more than coincidental.2
In terms of contemporary filmmaking practicalities, location shooting
in Algeria (presumably desirable for directors in terms of on screen
authenticity) became more feasible for foreign film crews following the
end of the Algerian civil war in the early 2000s, and recent French-made
releases have subsequently been filmed there. Moreover, the phenomenal
success of Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes (2006), which focused on the
fate of a group of Maghrebi soldiers serving in the French army during
the Second World War, confirmed that a focus on wartime Franco-
Algerian relations could be commercially viable for the mainstream
French film industry, especially when all the Algerians shown on screen
fly under the French flag.
Finally, the confluence of a number of events related to the Algerian
War in France around the turn of the twenty-first century – such as the
Papon trial in October 1997; the French state’s official recognition of
the war as a war in June 1999; Le Monde’s publication in June 2000
of Louisette Ighilahriz’s accounts of her torture in 1957 by French
soldiers; and the flurry of books published to commemorate the fortieth
anniversary of the war’s end in 2002 – ensured that the visibility of
memories of the conflict increased and awareness of its aftermath
was heightened (Stora 2004). The clear thirst of both the public and
the media in France for the subject during this period may duly have
inspired the genesis of a number of the subsequent films that dwell upon
the war and its aftermath; and, as we noted in the Introduction, France’s
increasing historical distance from the Algerian War has allowed for
the depiction of a greater range of experiences both of the conflict and
its legacy. 3
This chapter will examine three such examples to interrogate how
cinema in France post-2000 has engaged with the Algerian War. So

War Child 95
as to explore the parameters of representation during this period,

we have chosen films that, although released within a short time
frame, differ markedly from one another: Mehdi Charef’s Cartouches
gauloises (2007), Thomas Gilou’s Michou d’Auber (2007) and Michael
Haneke’s Caché (2005).4 Shot by very different directors, set in dissimilar
locations and during distinctive periods, these three films also use
contrasting genres, differences that might ordinarily impede their direct
comparison. 5 Nevertheless, several important themes resonate between
them and facilitate their joint analysis. All three provide a look back at
the past of both France and Algeria, and invite viewers to contemplate
the vicissitudes of memory and history. Furthermore, they do so through
their shared and striking preoccupation with the perspective and gaze of
children, and male children in particular.
It is Caché, of course, that remains the most famous of these three
films and that has consistently generated new scholarship: surely, few
recent French films can rival it in terms of the critical attention it
persistently attracts, underlined by its recent inclusion already as one
of the few French-language films in the British Film Institute (BFI) Film
Classics series (Wheatley 2011).6 If we too evoke it here, however, it is in
order to analyse it in the context of a wider visual economy, one beyond
the film itself and Haneke’s filmography, which remain the dominant
parameters in which it is typically discussed. By positioning it here
alongside two other recent films that engage with the Algerian War,
our chapter will consider what Haneke’s film reveals about the visual
economy of France and Algeria and the extent to which it conforms to
other recent films that have also tackled events during the wartime era,
and focused especially on children during this period.
Evoking the representation of children in films set during the Algerian
War might automatically lead viewers to recall the film most readily
associated globally with the conflict, namely Gillo Pontecorvo’s La
Bataille d’Alger (1966). However, in contrast to the prominence given
to the young male child Petit Omar in the Italo-Algerian co-production
– a trend reflected in Algerian cinema more widely – few French films
set during the war feature children as main characters within the cast.7
This chapter therefore sets out to examine some of the stakes involved
in making children and childhood memories so prominent within these
retrospective representations and explores how the films portray the
figure of the child during the Algerian War and its aftermath.

96 Contesting Views
Watching Violence:
Child Spectatorship in Cartouches gauloises
We start our analysis by considering a film set in the spring of 1962

in Algeria, as the war reaches its end. Directed by Mehdi Charef,
Cartouches gauloises is told from the perspective of Ali, an eleven-year-
old Algerian schoolboy (loosely based on Charef himself) who is the
film’s main protagonist and lives in a provincial Algerian town (Fig. 5).8
His part-time job as a local newspaper vendor provides a convenient
device with which to introduce viewers to the local inhabitants Ali meets
on his round and, given the considerable access to many different sectors
this intermediary position affords him, to penetrate a variety of spaces,
from a pro-OAS café and army prison cells to a brothel frequented
by French soldiers. Happy-go-lucky Ali gets on well with everyone he
meets, and his ability to cross ethnic boundaries is also shown via his
friendship with many pied-noir peers, and in particular with Nico.
As the war continues, however, one by one his pied-noir friends leave
for France and after Nico’s departure the film ends with Algerian
independence being celebrated, just as Ali’s father seems set to return
from fighting with troops.
This conventional happy ending, however, belies the violence that
precedes it. Repeatedly punctuated with point-blank shootings, summary
executions and bomb explosions, along with glimpses of the death and
destruction their aftermath brings, Charef’s film quickly establishes a
murderous cycle of violence whose end only emerges as the final scenes
herald the prospect of French defeat. For a film set during the Algerian
War to represent such violence is certainly not uncommon. What is
distinctive is the way in which Cartouches gauloises frequently shows
such violence from the perspective of a child.
Critical reaction to the film in France was mixed. Although praised
by some for tackling the subject, and for certain performances, others
dismissed the film as too didactic and pedagogical. Le Monde seemed
disappointed by its conventionality and argued that its ‘avalanche’
of historical episodes distracts attention away from Ali and Nico,
overwhelming the chronicle of childhood (Sotinel 2007). In a similar
vein, Libération labelled Cartouches gauloises a ‘tir mal ajusté’ 9 and
considered it heavy and stifling. Reviewers also cited the film’s lack of
plausibility as one of its chief failures. Owing to its acute focus on the
endgame of the Algerian War, many critics categorised Cartouches
gauloises as belonging above all to the genre of historical film. Very few

War Child 97
Figure 5 Both dream and nightmare: life in wartime Algeria for Ali in Cartouches
gauloises (Mehdi Charef, 2007)
pondered the potential significance of the fact that much of the film’s
action is seen through Ali’s eyes. Le Canard enchaîné was an exception,
but argued that Ali’s gaze – deemed ‘superflu’ – impedes viewers’
understanding and merely ‘désamorce ces cartouches gauloises’.10
Reviewers read Ali as passive and inert, and judged his role as bystander
ineffectual. Yet the remarkable sangfroid and composure he usually
displays in the face of such relentless violence can be read otherwise.
Rather than criticise Cartouches gauloises for being either too historical
or not historical enough, it seems more productive to view the film not
as a realist representation of the Algerian War as historical event, but
(given its many oneiric aspects) as a dream.11
By showing a slumbering Ali kissed goodbye by his father, the opening
sequence arguably heralds such a mood, and a sense of the dream-like
permeates several scenes that follow. The static point-of-view shots that
focus on acute details during extended takes, such as the close-up on the
gramophone record playing on a loop as Julie’s murdered relatives lie
slumped in their garden, suggest elements of the hyperreal. The aura of
heightened senses also extends to sound. Whereas extra-diegetic music
is seldom heard, the soundtrack’s volume appears augmented during
moments of violence and tension witnessed by Ali, thus accentuating
the gunshots heard when a friend of Ali’s mother, Habiba, is executed;
the detonation of a bomb in a pied-noir bar; and the scream of the boy
dropped from a French army helicopter followed by the thud of his body
against the ground. Furthermore, shown often as a silent and largely
motionless bystander, Ali habitually appears strangely aloof from events
in a way which suggests somnambulance.

98 Contesting Views
Yet to show such wartime violence largely via children presents

Charef with a problem. For were they to react as viewers might expect –
recoiling, running away or closing their eyes – point-of-view shots from
their perspective would prevent much of such violence and its aftermath
from being shown directly. Moreover, because Charef usually elects
to show acts of violence directly on screen, rather than, for example,
children flinching from it, Ali and his peers also watch almost all of
those committed, and many shots duly emphasise their spectatorship
within such sequences. Even if the frequency with which they are shown
bearing witness to such violence might make their potential desensiti-
sation to it comprehensible, their often understated reactions jar and
consequently stretch credibility, suggesting Charef neglected to think
through the problematic of how children can be shown witnessing such
violence.12 At the same time, while the film’s rhythm of following such
scenes with lighter moments (such as having Nico reassure Julie that
they will find her missing cat as they walk away from her murdered
family, or showing Ali calmly eating a sweet after seeing a French soldier
shoot dead a man at the market) avoids the tone becoming too dark, it
also risks creating bathos, thereby further emphasising the children’s
odd disconnection from the events around them.
Indeed, the film does not seek to explore what effect the witnessing
of so much violence might have on a child such as Ali. The trauma it
risks inducing is never voiced, as, without siblings and seldom seen
with his mother, Ali confides in no one, and viewers are given very few
insights into his inner thoughts. With the war only evoked amongst
schoolfriends via playful banter and taunts, Ali’s personal experiences
do not seem capable of being verbalised, which, notwithstanding his
considerable resilience, only makes him appear even more peculiarly
unfazed by events.13 We shall see later how this seemingly uncomplicated
spectatorship of violence contrasts sharply with Haneke’s Caché, where
the representation of violence and the theme of children viewing violence
are presented as far more complex and affecting.
Charef’s recurrent habit of showing Ali and friends watching
violence neverthless merits further reflection. For, even if the children’s
remarkable composure defies belief, this distinctive use of mise en scène
draws attention to the filmic aspects of events depicted on screen, and
hints that a reflexive meta-level within the film may also be detected.
In particular, the frequent shots showing Ali looking through windows
and apertures (at Julie’s family home, for example, or when he witnesses
Habiba’s execution), establishes the importance of framing, and a sense

War Child 99
that elements of the film might constitute a mise en abyme of filmmaking

itself is further strengthened at various points. In a tribute to Ali’s love of
cinema, the pied-noir stationmaster Barnabé – a surrogate father figure
for Ali – narrates his own departure for France as if reciting directions
and dialogue from a film script, complete with horn sounding on cue at
the requisite moment. He ends with a plea to Ali that ‘il faut pas nous
oublier, petit: sinon on est morts’.14 His reference to forgetting links this
sequence to Charef’s earlier and most explicit allusion to filmmaking,
when Ali (based, as we have pointed out, on Charef himself, of course)
delights in watching Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1951) from the
projectionist’s booth in his local cinema.
Foreshadowing Charef’s later career as film director, Ali is shown
muting the sound to voice the lines spoken by a young boy, who, like
Ali, is also waiting for his father to return. Despite its very different
setting of early 1950s’ Mexico, Buñuel’s film also shares further parallels
with Charef’s: the importance of looking and sight is underscored by
the name of the young boy that Ali ventriloquises (Ojitos or ‘little eyes’)
and the fact that Don Carmelo, with whom he converses, is blind.15
Childhood and violence similarly form part of its main themes and, once
this Buñuelian link becomes apparent, Ali’s sleeping during the opening
scene and the dream-like qualities of Charef’s film might also recall the
famous sequence of Los Olvidados showing young Pedro’s nightmare,
which forms part of the wider unreality of Buñuel’s film. Although
its bleak vision of urban life and humanity may differ markedly from
Charef’s portrayal of the final days of French Algeria – and it is surely
a highly unlikely film for a child as young as Ali to enjoy and know
so well – Los Olvidados clearly forms a notable and unusual intertext
within Cartouches gauloises, its inclusion strangely fitting given the
disjunctures in mood present within Charef’s film.
In conclusion, it was perhaps the many ways in which Charef’s
film departed from traditional notions of the historical film that led
reviewers to find it wanting and its lack of credulity testing. Presenting
children as remarkably composed bystanders in the face of such violence
strikes an odd note in what is otherwise a fairly conventional film and
arguably impedes viewers’ suspension of disbelief. It also suggests that
Charef did not fully consider how problematic the sight of children
witnessing such violence might be. However, the reflexive meta-level
discernable within Cartouches gauloises, through its repeated emphasis
upon filmmaking and its various oneiric qualities, might suggest that
despite the historical subject matter and autobiographical inspiration,

100 Contesting Views
realism was not Charef’s prerogative.16 The Algerian War seen through
Ali’s eyes – Charef’s double lest we forget – becomes more a personal act
of remembrance by the director that challenges viewers’ expectations
in order to present an idiosyncratic portrait of the dying days of French
rule in Algeria.
Michou d’Auber: Passing as ‘French’ in the Métropole
We now move away from the advent of independence in Algeria to

a film set two years earlier back across the Mediterranean, Thomas
Gilou’s Michou d’Auber (2007). Through its setting in wartime
metropolitan France, Gilou’s film presents an exception to most recent
Algerian War-era films, relatively few of which have focused on wartime
experiences in the métropole.17 If pathos was the intended dominant
mode of Cartouches gauloises, humour is undoubtedly the driving
force of Michou d’Auber. Set predominantly within a small countryside
village in the Berry region, the war’s front line is far more distant in
comparison to Charef’s film, but its effects still form a distinct backdrop
to this period comedy set within la France profonde of the early 1960s.
The plot revolves around another young male child of Algerian heritage,
but, unlike Ali in Cartouches gauloises, his view is not foregrounded
and he must share centre stage, his co-stars being none other than two
of France’s most popular actors, Gérard Depardieu and Natalie Baye.
Beginning in the autumn of 1960 and concluding shortly after the war’s
end, Michou d’Auber tells the story of nine-year-old Messaoud, born in
Aubervilliers to Algerian parents with whom he and his older brother
Abdel live. Their family life together is never shown on screen. Rather,
the film’s opening sequence sees Messaoud’s father Akli, unable to
juggle work and parental responsibilities following his wife’s admission
to hospital with a long-term illness, hand over his sons for them to be
lodged indefinitely with foster-parents. Their short walk across Paris
beforehand opens events and, by clearly situating the action in wartime
metropolitan France and striking a humorous tone, efficiently sets the
mood for the film as a whole. Indeed, the initial comedy is aided by the
appearance of the famous Algerian comedian Fellag as Michou’s father
Akli, whom viewers see warn his two sons to beware of lions in the
streets, just before they exit the Métro opposite the famous lion sculpture
that adorns Place Denfert-Rochereau in central Paris. Their exit at this
station recalls an earlier war on French soil (the lion commemorates the

War Child 101
efforts of Colonel Denfert-Rochereau during the siege of Belfort in the

Franco-Prussian War) and the sense that France is under military threat
once again is quickly established. As they exit the Métro, the camera
carefully shows pro-Algérie française graffiti chalked on the steps they
climb up, and a prominent voice off-camera declares that ‘on a perdu
l’Algérie avec le Parti communiste’.18 A climate of suspicion and hatred
is then evoked in the subsequent scene where, as they pass a large wall
scrawled with the graffiti ‘FLN dehors’ and ‘Mort aux Arabes’, police
officers coincidentally detain four men at gunpoint, two of whom are
held prostrate over a car bonnet while they interview another who may
be of Maghrebi origin.19
This atmosphere of xenophobia extends beyond the doors of the
Assistance publique where Akli deposits his two sons. When Messaoud,
classified officially as a ‘Français musulman’, is later presented as a
possible foster-child to Gisèle (played by Baye), her first reaction is to
call him a ‘petit Arabe’: a predictable assumption made all the more
ironic by the preceding sequence’s emphasis upon the Kabyle, and
therefore Berber, origins of Michou’s family. She then claims that the
wartime colonial experiences of her army veteran husband Georges
(played by Depardieu) would render it impossible for them to accept
Messaoud. Nevertheless, when Gisèle, having previously rejected two
other potential foster-children, realises that Messaoud is the final child
she will be offered, she relents and returns home with him. Messaoud’s
brother Abdel is subsequently placed separately with a couple who run a
nearby farm, both of whom are also white and presented as part of the
French ethnic majority.
The brothers’ arrival within their new homes, however, is not
perceived as an opportunity to embrace ethnic, cultural and religious
differences. Whereas the woman who returns home with Abdel is told
‘tu t’es fais avoir’20 by her husband, Gisèle immediately attempts to
dissimulate Messaoud’s origins in advance of her husband Georges
meeting him. In a remarkable sequence, viewers see her quickly dye
Messaoud’s dark curly hair blond, hide his birth certificate and instruct
him henceforth to forget his family. She also informs him that he must
now pretend to be Christian and, given that Georges ‘n’aime pas trop les
noms arabes’21 and neither do other locals, she persuades Messaoud to
adopt the name of Michel, which is then abbreviated to Michou (Fig. 6).
Finally, anticipating some of the questions that locals may duly ask him
about his background, Gisèle tells (the now) Michou to say he hails from
the north and that his father was seriously injured in the mining industry

Figure 6 Once Messaoud, now Michou: Michou d’Auber (Thomas Gilou, 2007)
there. Later, with the help of local schoolteacher Jacques, she enrols him
at primary school under the pseudonym Michel Daubert and also enlists
the help of a parish priest to help keep up the pretence and safeguard
their secret.
Such a plot may seem incredible, even for a popular comedy, but
it in fact chimes well with Gilou’s previous films, such as La Vérité si
je mens! (1997) and La Vérité si je mens! 2 (2001), which also pivoted
around attempts by characters to pass as ethnically different others
(McGonagle 2007). By focusing on an outsider’s penetration of a small
community constituted as a discrete ethnic group, Michou d’Auber
remained faithful to the formula Gilou had previously deployed, and
created a similar dynamic between identity, performance and passing in
order to produce much of the comedy on screen. In La Vérité si je mens!,
however, the gentile Daniel’s need to convince those around him of his
Jewishness made this a much more active process. In Michou d’Auber,
the young Michou is comparatively more passive in performing his new
identity and both he and Gisèle largely rely upon their fellow villagers
assuming he belongs to the white ethnic majority. 22
The film’s peculiar plot led critics to identify several earlier popular
films whose dynamic also revolved around ethnic or cultural differences
between children and the surrogate parents with whom they live, such
as Jean-Loup Hubert’s Le Grand Chemin (1987). Two such films centred
on Second World War experiences: Claude Berri’s Le Vieil Homme et

War Child 103
l’enfant (1967), where a nine-year-old boy in 1943 is sent from Paris to

Grenoble and must keep his Jewishness secret; and Moshe Mizrahi’s
La Vie devant soi (1977), where Simone Signoret plays a concentration
camp survivor who acts as surrogate mother in 1970s’ Paris for Momo,
a young boy of Maghrebi origin. Such connections between the Second
World War and the Algerian War, and the attendant parallels between
Jewish and Algerian experience in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
France, evoke the links explored by Rothberg (2009) in his examination
of the ways in which ‘multidirectional memory’ can connect different
groups in spite of contrasting contexts. This transition from Second
World War Jewish experience to Algerian experience in France also
recalls arguments that the 1990s heralded a decisive shift in French
popular historical memory and culture, where the memorialisation of
Vichy in French popular culture began to be supplanted by a surge in
public remembrance of the Algerian War (Austin 2009: 117). Yet, while
the increase in French-produced and co-produced films that focus on
the Algerian War post-2000 ostensibly further accentuates this trend,
the release of several films set during the Occupation, such as La Rafle
(Roselyne Bosch, 2010), Elle s’appellait Sarah (Gilles Paquet-Brenner,
2010) and Les Hommes libres (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2011), suggests that
experiences of Vichy France continue to resonate with audiences in France
and can cohabit cinematically with the Algerian War on screen.23 Indeed,
the last-mentioned film explicitly links Jewish and Algerian experiences
in France by focusing on the friendship between an Algerian migrant in
1942 Paris with a singer of Algerian Jewish origin, thereby highlighting
precisely the kind of imbrication championed by Rothberg’s study.
Although there are hints to the Occupation era within Michou
d’Auber (Georges tells Michou that local man Didier was a collaborator,
and the priest admits to Gisèle that he issued false baptismal certificates
to Jewish children during the Second World War), Gilou’s focus remains
squarely on how Michou’s Algerian origins can remain hidden and,
as prevailing binary notions of identity ensure that being simulta-
neously French and of Algerian origin is perceived as oxymoronic, he
can therefore by default pass as ‘French’. 24 Moreover, since the village
population appears to be exclusively white, Frenchness and whiteness
are conflated. This explains why Michou too must be ‘whitened’, both
physically, via the bleaching of his hair by Gisèle, and symbolically, by
the adoption of a name of greater linguistic consonance with provincial
French metropolitan norms. He finds himself thereby integrated into
his new society, in an acting out of the French republic’s secular and

assimilationist dream. His metamorphosis complete, the stage is set for a

predictable series of trials and tribulations to ensue, providing the main
narrative thread for the film’s remainder.
Though Michou appears to be accepted by locals, the various queries
people raise with regard to his origins ultimately indicate how delusional
Gisèle’s masquerade is. Nevertheless, despite the elaborate lengths to
which she goes to conceal the truth from Georges, Gisèle’s fears with
regard to his reaction prove unfounded. When their lodger Paul tells
Georges that he knows that Michou is ‘arabe’, Georges claims he
suspected as much and, although predictably he instructs Paul not to tell
anyone, he never confronts Michou and his relationship with him seems
unaffected. When Georges’s suspicions are subsequently confirmed by
his drunken discovery of Michou’s hidden birth certificate, it provides an
epiphany that leads to Georges reuniting with Gisèle (who left him after
he reacted violently to news of her affair with Jacques) and accepting
Michou’s ethnic difference.
Before this reconciliation, however, the film has to mark Georges’s
definitive rupture with his fellow local army veterans, all of whom are
uniformly represented as bigoted OAS sympathisers. Gilou does this by
having Georges declare to them in a local bar, with no trace of irony,
that ‘maintenant je peux le dire sans honte: je suis un Arabe, et puis je
suis un Juif aussi […] comptez plus sur moi: à partir d’aujourd’hui on se
connaît plus’. 25 To emphasise further his difference from them, he asks
Duval how many people he raped and tortured in Algeria during the war.
Despite Georges’s clear beauf tendencies (he is shown as hard-drinking,
womanising and boorish in several scenes, not to mention chauvinistic
and misogynistic), the film positions Gaullist Georges as the voice of
reason amongst men in the village when they express anti-Gaullist
sentiments and vocal support for the OAS. Indeed, Depardieu excels in
this role, which conforms to his well-established star image by combining
an imposing physicality with inner emotional sensitivity (Austin 2003:
90). The egalitarian discourse he preaches, even if viewers may struggle
to see the extent to which Georges’s symbolic power as French white
male heterosexual might equate to that of religious or ethnic minority
groups within France, ultimately recalls the key message of Gilou’s
previous films: namely, that ethnic, cultural and religious differences can
be overcome and need not stand in the way of love and friendship.
Given Gilou’s wider œuvre, Georges’s Damascene conversion may
therefore appear preordained. Its rapidity is nonetheless striking, given
Georges’s casual racism and the backhanded comments he makes to

War Child 105
Michou earlier in the film. For example, the sight of Michou socialising
with Muslim families while selling sheep ahead of Eid to a group of men
in a nearby town prompts Georges later to ask Michou whether he might
have any Moroccan heritage. Michou denies this, but Georges reassures
him that ‘je crois que même si tu me disais que tu étais arabe […] ça me
gênerait pas’26 and, anticipating the speech he later delivers to locals,
concludes that ‘on est tous pareils, on est tous différents. […] Qu’on soit
d’ici ou d’ailleurs on est tous égaux’. 27 This championing of egalitarianism
nevertheless contradicts some of the vocabulary Georges uses elsewhere,
the most flagrant example of which occurs when, incensed that his
secret stash of money to fund his visits to prostitutes has been stolen, he
interrogates Paul and Michou and informs them that ‘tous les bicots sont
des voleurs: c’est pour cela qu’on leur coupe la main!’28 The irony that he
stashes his money in a Banania tin – a brand whose distinctive colonial
imagery has perpetuated racist stereotypes (Rosello 1998: 5) – may not
be lost on some viewers and coheres with the film’s clear lack of political
correctness. The film’s dialogue here ultimately seems part of a deliberate
strategy by Gilou to evoke the politics of an era, supposedly bygone
within metropolitan France, when such comments were more prevalent
and publicly acceptable. However, and as the continuing popularity
within the contemporary era of merchandise with original Banania
branding demonstrates (Donadey 2000: 28), the film risks propagating an
unreconstructed brand of colonial nostalgia in doing so.
Such overt displays of racism by Georges would therefore substantiate
Gisèle’s earlier claim that he would never agree to foster a child of
Algerian origin, perhaps making her extraordinary attempts to disguise
Messaoud’s identity more comprehensible. Moreover, Georges is far
from alone in expressing hostility towards people of Algerian origin,
as the film suggests that such intolerance is widespread amongst village
locals. Viewers see a child in the school playground label Michou and his
brother ‘bougnoles’, and several of the village’s army veterans are shown
discussing the merits of conducting a ratonnade (lynching). Even if the
film’s candour in depicting such racism and xenophobia is striking, the
conventions of the film’s genre generally work to defuse any tension by
ensuring that their proponents appear patently ridiculous. Viewers are
encouraged to laugh at rather than with them, ensuring their sympathies
remain with Michou.
There are nevertheless two particular moments in the film where the
general comedy is briefly sidelined as events take a more dramatic and
menacing turn. The first occurs when Michou reluctantly assists Georges

and friends in the garden as they slaughter a pig. As Michou helps hold
the animal steady, a medium shot emphasises his trepidation before the
camera quickly cuts to a low-angle close-up of army veteran Duval,
dressed in khaki military cap, sinking his blade into the pig’s stomach
with a moan of pleasure. In a manner more worthy of the horror genre
rather than melodrama, his incision immediately sprays Michou with
blood, causing him to recoil in disgust and run away to vomit. He heads
inside to seek comfort from Gisèle, telling her that he felt unwell after
Duval said he would ‘enterrer les Arabes dans la peau du cochon’.29
She wipes his face and reassures him before scolding the men outside
for upsetting Michou. Even if Georges and others are supposedly still
oblivious at this stage to Michou’s real origins and faith, viewers may
still find this sequence rather shocking (if not downright offensive) in its
gratuitous and gruesome linking of Muslims with an animal considered
unclean according to Islamic dietary rules. 30 The scene nevertheless
provides an intriguing parallel with the recurring flashbacks used in
the following film we shall discuss, Michael Haneke’s Caché, where the
sight of a child covered in an animal’s blood meets with a very different
reaction from his foster-parents.
A second encounter between Michou and Georges’s army veteran
friends also temporarily disrupts the film’s comic tone, but this time
neither Georges nor Gisèle can come immediately to Michou’s rescue.
After meeting Abdel one night before he secretly leaves to find their
father in Paris, Michou inadvertently witnesses a group of army veterans
daubing a pro-OAS slogan in white paint on a village wall. Angered
by his presence, they chase and capture him, providing Didier with
the opportunity to confirm his suspicions with regard to Michou’s real
origins. He promptly pulls down Michou’s trousers and they rejoice
upon discovering that Michou is circumcised, presumably proof for
them that he is Muslim. Ignoring Michou’s distress, Didier then decides
to teach him a lesson by painting his buttocks white. If, once more,
Michou is symbolically whitened, the aim here is more to accentuate
his anatomical difference, which for them makes Michou irredeemably
other, rather than to engineer his assimilation.
Disturbing though these incidents may be, they remain exceptions
within a film where, in sharp contrast to Cartouches gauloises, references
to the Algerian War often generate humour, usually at the expense of
the ragtag bunch of bumbling veterans. This is signalled early on when
Georges first introduces Michou to them and pokes fun at the taciturnity
of Duval – whose silence since returning from a hunt for fellagha during

War Child 107
the war at this point remained unbroken – and later when the misspelling
of the group’s graffiti ‘OAS vincra [sic]’ is emphasised. 31 Wider references
to the conflict are generally limited to the incorporation of television
and radio broadcasts by De Gaulle about the war: an opportunity for
the film, unlike Cartouches gauloises, to explore how the conflict in
Algeria impinged upon life in rural provincial metropolitan France.
Beyond briefly showing veterans watching or listening to such broadcasts,
however, this remains largely unexplored, save for the sequence in which
Georges delivers a letter to local farmer Robert announcing the death
of his son in Philippeville, and his funeral is subsequently held. The
ceremony provides an occasion for Didier to propose conducting a local
ratonnade in response, which Georges greets with strong disapproval. 32
Later, when Georges is finally reunited with Gisèle and Michou,
and his rupture with the pro-OAS veterans is complete, the film flashes
forward two years later as the war finally draws to a close. Viewers
see Michou react with joy when Georges and Gisèle tell him they have
applied to adopt him, the fact that his hair has now returned to its natural
colour supposedly signalling that Gisèle no longer feels compelled to
disguise Michou’s ethnicity. Their happiness together proves shortlived.
The following scene shows Akli, having been alerted by the authorities
of their intention to adopt his son, return to reclaim Messaoud. Despite
his protestations, Michou must therefore leave his surrogate parents
behind to rejoin his biological family.
A final flashforward nevertheless allows Michou to be reunited with
Georges when he grants Michou his parting wish to visit the sea
together. A closing slow-motion scene of Michou and Georges alone
frolicking by the water’s edge might recall François Truffaut’s Les
Quatre cents coups (1959), released the year before the period when
Michou d’Auber’s beginning is set. 33 Although Truffaut’s final freeze
frame and bleak ending conveyed a rather different message about
male childhood experience, the knowledge that Michou’s mother had
died in childbirth during the intervening period, and the absence here
of his former foster-mother Gisèle, permit the scene to be interpreted
similarly as a symbolic search for his missing mother, mer connoting
its homonym mère (Holmes and Ingram 1998: 118). However, whereas
Truffaut emphasises Antoine’s solitude, Gilou’s reuniting of Georges
with Michou symbolically fulfils his adoption of him, even if ultimately
this never occurs legally.
The happy ending to Michou d’Auber forms a fitting finale to a
popular comedy whose dominant mode – notwithstanding the vocal

racism and xenophobia of village locals – is nostalgia, as inferred by the

succession of black-and-white wartime vernacular photographs shown
during the sepia-tinged opening credits. Some of the pleasures of the film
for French audiences may indeed derive from period details of 1960s’
French provincial life, and in particular the music that bookends it:
Dalida’s ‘Bambino’ (1956) at the start and Enrico Macias’s ‘L’Oriental’
(1962) at the end. Both are apt choices. Apart from anticipating Gisèle’s
attempt to dissimulate Michou’s origins and then accepting them
(Dalida sings of ‘tes cheveux si blonds’ and Macias describes himself
as ‘le brun’), the transition from the blond-haired Italian ‘bambino’
to the dark-haired Easterner symbolises Georges and Gisèle’s eventual
recognition of Michou’s ethnic difference. Moreover, the inclusion of
two singers whose appeal famously extends across both sides of the
Mediterranean facilitates the film’s ultimate message of the need for
cross-ethnic harmony as the war draws to a close.
The nostalgic mood becomes even more understandable before the final
sequence when viewers realise that, however incredible the preceding plot
may have seemed, a true story inspired it. A voiceover from the real-life
Michou and the film’s closing intertitles affirm that Michou d’Auber was
based upon the childhood experiences of its co-scriptwriter, the actor
Messaoud Hattou, who had previously starred in Gilou’s Raï (1995) and
Merzak Allouache’s Bab el-Oued City (1994) and Salut cousin! (1996). 34
The script of Michou d’Auber, however, moves Hattou’s story back
from 1964 to coincide with the final years of the war, a decision Gilou
hoped would establish ‘un parallèle entre la montée dramaturgique de
l’indépendance de l’Algérie et la montée dramaturgique de l’histoire
de ce gamin, le mensonge de Gisèle devenant une métaphore de la fin
de la guerre d’Algérie’. 35 Although arguably a rather odd metaphor, it
suggests Gilou saw Gisèle’s need to deny and conceal Michou’s origins
as mirroring France’s reluctance to recognise Algeria’s ‘difference’ from
France and consequently to cede it independence.
In addition, and in a manner not dissimilar to Cartouches gauloises,
it implies that the local events seen on screen within the Berry region
can index national ones within the métropole and beyond. Gilou’s
imbrication of Michou’s story with events from the war alludes to how
the conflict inflected daily provincial life in France, but, in contrast
to Cartouches gauloises, relegates it to the background in favour of
Michou’s relationship with his foster-parents. Focusing on Michou’s
story provides a device to investigate wartime attitudes towards ethnic
and religious difference within provincial metropolitan France, with

War Child 109
people of Algerian origin (the only ethnic minorities who feature in the
film), clearly positioned as the Other, regardless of whether or not they
are born in France like Michou.
The sudden reappearance of Akli to reclaim Michou therefore heralds
a return to order for the village’s ethnic homogeneity; but the happy
ending permitting the reunion of Michou with Georges, however brief,
implies that cross-ethnic harmony following Algerian independence is
possible in metropolitan France (though the fact that it takes place well
away from Michou’s erstwhile host village may well be telling). Whether
all people of Algerian origin, regardless of age, might be so embraced
following the end of the war is not explored, and so the extent to which
young Michou might prove more the exception than the rule remains a
moot point. 36
Michou and Georges both end the film laughing, and despite the
wartime setting, Gilou indeed wrings much humour from the plot.
This is certainly helped by the provincial rural setting where, despite
the regular reminders that the conflict is ongoing, the Algerian War
generally remains distant, hence the brevity of the funeral scene and
silence on its emotional toll locally. Had the latter been probed more
vigorously, the tone may have become more sombre and the comedy
consequently incited less laughter, perhaps too much of a deviation
from the film’s genre for Gilou to risk. Ultimately, as long as the OAS
sympathisers generally appear more buffoonish than threatening, and
the grave impact of the war for both individuals and nations is at best
glossed over, the conflict can be played for laughs.
The Camera Always Lies? Replaying the Past in Caché
We turn now to a film whose genre, plot and setting form a stark
contrast to both Cartouches gauloises and Michou d’Auber. Michael
Haneke’s bleak and enigmatic Caché (2005) encourages viewers to
ponder questions of postcolonial guilt and responsibility in metropolitan
France four decades following the end of the war (Fig. 7). Awarded
several prizes at Cannes and garnering widespread acclaim, the film
was released nationally in France in October 2005. Of the three films
discussed here, not only did it receive the most media coverage in France,
but it has also attracted the greatest critical attention globally out of all
the recent French films set during the Algerian War. It also met with
considerable success at the international box office, and the number

Figure 7 Nothing to see? The opening shot of Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
of viewers it attracted in both the UK and USA significantly exceeded

expectations for a foreign-language film (Cousins 2007: 223).
It might seem at first sight that Haneke’s sophisticated exploration
of (post)colonial memory and guilt has little in common with the first
two films discussed here. Unlike them, it sets only a few fleeting scenes
during the wartime era, with almost all of the action taking place
within present-day Paris. Furthermore, the theme of (male) childhood
is less immediately apparent, not least because the lead characters
are adults rather than children. However, as Caché unfolds, Haneke
establishes important parallels between their childhoods and young
male descendants in the present day; and it becomes increasingly clear
that a relationship between two children during the war, its premature
end, and its continuing consequences within the present day play a
decisive role in the events portrayed on (and off) screen.
The film famously opens with an apparently banal and unremarkable
sight in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement: a static establishing shot of a
residential street in a prolonged take lasting in excess of two minutes.
The ocular overtones of the street’s name, Rue des Iris, provide an
immediate wink to viewers of the importance of seeing within the
film even if, despite the length of the take, nothing worth watching
appears to happen. However, when tracking marks suddenly appear on
screen and voices are heard off it, viewers realise that rather than being
real-time action shot outside, the image emanates from a videotape that

War Child 111
married couple Georges, a literary talk show television host (played by

Daniel Auteuil), and book publisher Anne (played by Juliette Binoche)
are scrutinising on their television screen inside at home. The images
were filmed outside their property but they seem baffled as to why it is
being filmed and by whom. This is the first of several such videotapes
they are sent, the only clue as to their provenance being the child-like
drawings that accompany later copies, one appearing to show a child
with blood streaming from its mouth and another a cockerel. The
unease induced by these unsolicited items is further heightened by the
anonymous telephone calls the couple also subsequently receive. Their
anxiety peaks when their son Pierrot fails to return home one night and
they fear he may have been abducted by the videotapes’ sender.
Georges initially insists to Anne that he has no idea whom their sender
might be, but viewers later see him travel to Romainville on the north-
eastern periphery of Paris to confront Majid, a man of Algerian origin
he knew as a child. Majid denies any involvement in the making of the
tapes, and maintains his innocence despite the fact that one recording
films a journey to his very flat. Suspicion later falls on Majid’s young
son, but he also asserts his innocence. As Georges and Anne’s unease
mounts, Georges seems convinced that Majid is waging a campaign of
harassment against them but it is only after Majid suddenly commits
suicide in front of Georges that he finally feels compelled to explain to
Anne how they are linked by a pivotal event during the Algerian War.
When they were both children, Majid’s parents worked on Georges’s
parents’ estate; but when Majid’s parents never returned from the 17
October 1961 march in Paris, Georges’s parents, believing they had
been killed, decided to adopt the twelve-year-old orphan. Six-year-old
Georges, however, resented Majid’s presence and in a bid to contrive
his removal told his parents that Majid had been coughing up blood.
When this lie failed to convince them, Georges changed tactic. He
informed Majid that his father wanted him to behead their cockerel.
Once Majid had duly obliged, Georges told his parents that Majid
had sought to frighten him by doing so. Apparently as a consequence
of these lies, Majid was sent away to an orphanage. The very brief
and enigmatic interluding scenes featuring young children that have
previously punctuated the film now become clearer: they relate to Majid
and Georges’s mutual childhood past and appear to derive from the
latter’s perspective.
Following Majid’s death, his son surprises Georges at work. Expressing
little remorse for Majid’s suicide, Georges steadfastly refuses to accept

any responsibility for his actions as a child and their ramifications on

Majid’s life. Majid’s son, for his part, insists that neither he nor his father
was responsible for the videotapes and drawings sent. The penultimate
scene then returns to the moment when Majid was forcibly removed
from Georges’s family home, and the film ends with a prolonged take
and static shot outside the entrance of Pierrot’s school.
The enigma of the opening scene, coupled with that of the closing
one, may invite a reading of Caché as a puzzle, and lead viewers to
wonder what exactly is happening and, indeed, hidden. In comparison
to Cartouches gauloises and Michou d’Auber, viewers are therefore
made much more active from the start in a film that seems part-mystery,
part-drama and part-thriller. Viewers familiar with Haneke’s previous
work, where the ontology of images is habitually undermined, would
undoubtedly already be on their guard, and here too all is not quite as it
seems. For, as Ezra and Sillars (2007a: 211–12) argue, although the film
is ‘certainly puzzling in many respects, it resists attempts to read it as a
puzzle to be decoded […] Not only do we not learn “whodunnit”, but the
film reveals this question to be beside the point’.
Nevertheless this did not stop some viewers from assuming that the
filming of the videotape footage remained a mystery to be solved, and
criticising flaws in the plot’s internal logic. Grossvogel (2007: 41) describes
how some bemoaned Haneke’s ‘technical errors due to carelessness.
They pointed out, for example, that in the second tape (night shot)
car headlights project the shadow of the camera onto a foregrounded
tree. Worse yet, that shadow is seen again after Georges rewinds the
tape for another examination’. Furthermore, as Wheatley (2006: 35)
observed, ‘the vast majority of the taped scenes are shot from seemingly
“impossible” angles: filmed from outside walls where bookcases stand,
or from a position too high for a handycam operator unless they were
standing very conspicuously on the roof of a car’. For the footage in such
scenes to be recorded, but the camera never seen, is therefore technically
impossible; and conveniently enough, initial speculation by Georges on
how the recordings were made is conspicuously brief (Penney 2011: 83).
His focus instead remains on figuring out their provenance, thereby
allowing Haneke to discourage viewers from pondering how the images
are created, and to consider instead the effects they have on Georges.
Why the tapes are being made and sent, more than how, is the question
that predominates in Georges’s mind and one that undoubtedly many
viewers mused too. 37
As with the impossibility of the tapes’ production, viewers still keen

War Child 113
to detect the ‘who’ in this supposed whodunnit must jettison rational

explanation and, arguably, return to the opening sequence for clues.
An answer to the enigma is supplied there by the very first two words
spoken in the film. As they scrutinise the videotape footage together for
the first time, Georges asks Anne ‘alors?’, to which she replies succinctly,
with a word that recurs throughout the film, ‘rien’ (‘nothing’). Anne’s
comment refers to how little she can glean from studying the images;
but, given that the tapes’ production cannot logically be explained, it
might be better interpreted as a comment on what can be found where
the camera should be physically: nothing. As Burris (2011: 153) argues,
‘no one is sending Georges the tapes because they are nothing more
than visual manifestations of his paranoid self-surveillance […] the
surveillance videos represent the internal economy of his self-alienation’.
The sending of the videotapes and drawings ultimately serve as a plot
device to probe Georges’s troubled state of mind; uncover his hidden
history with Majid; and form a metaphor for Franco-Algerian postco-
lonial relations. Indeed, even if Haneke himself has argued that the film’s
themes are moral rather than narrowly national in scope (Tinazzi 2005),
its setting within present-day Paris and reference to 17 October 1961
clearly position the Algerian War as a spectre that still haunts France.
The hidden event of Georges’s childhood acts as a metaphor for the
relative silence that surrounded the massacre in which Majid’s parents
were presumably killed, and for the position of the Algerian War within
French public memory as a whole. 38
Haneke’s choice to explain the disappearance of Majid’s parents via
17 October 1961 certainly reflects the increasing awareness of the event
and its growing visibility since its fortieth anniversary, as we discussed
in Chapter 3. Whilst this helps anchor Georges and Majid’s childhood in
the war, the fact that its mention only occurs once and rather cursorily
means that the historical significance of the event itself is not evoked in
detail. 39 Instead, it performs a totemic function, serving as an emblem
for the hidden moments of colonial history that individuals and nation
states often prefer to forget; the painful process involved once they are
belatedly acknowledged; and the difficult and searching questions they
pose about guilt and responsibility.
However, the positioning of Georges simultaneously as the main
character through whom this past is seen, and the main point of identi-
fication for viewers, presents them with a quandary. Leaving aside his
rather dislikeable character, it becomes clear as the film progresses
that the curious interludes depicting events four decades earlier are

less flashbacks that yield insight into the wartime era than ‘memory-
images resurfacing in Georges’s consciousness and dreams’ (Saxton
2007: 9). Moreover, as his lies, deceit and denial become more apparent,
Georges’s reliability as witness is thrown into doubt and the credibility
of these analepses becomes increasingly compromised.40
The main casualty of his selective memory is, of course, Majid. With
Georges as the film’s narrator of the past, viewers never see wartime
events from Majid’s point of view, and the trauma Georges’s childhood
actions inflicted on him remains almost unheard.41 This makes his last
act of free will all the more important and shocking. Just as Georges’s
childhood lie played upon cultural assumptions in the French cultural
imaginary about the belligerence of Algerian men (Macey 1998), so
too Majid resorts to a knife. But, rather than reassert that particular
stereotype, the slashing of his throat closes a narrative arc that began
when he first wielded a blade to kill the cockerel, the scene of which this
automatically recalls, and gives him on the point of death an agency
which Georges’s childhood lies so cruelly deprived him of in life. The
fact that he chooses in his final words to reassert calmly his innocence
with regard to any involvement in the videotapes and drawings only
further compounds his victimhood.
Georges is therefore unwittingly invited to a live spectacle of violence
that his television bosses might blanche at broadcasting and that –
unlike the rolling television news coverage of international conflict
which plays out in the background at his home – is unmediated by
screens and not operated by remote control. Tellingly, however, Haneke
spares viewers the macabre sight of Georges negotiating his departure
from a room whose sole exit is blocked by Majid’s lifeless body, a final
means by which Majid forces Georges to acknowledge, albeit posthu-
mously, his existence. Rather than show a man whose career and
life is structured according to screens – televisual, psychological and
emotional – engage haptically with a dying man, Haneke’s prolonged
take instead emphasises Georges’s self-patrolled distance from Majid:
his failure to rush to Majid’s immediate aid not only suggesting shock
but perhaps callousness too.42 Indeed, it comes as little surprise that
rather than call the emergency services, his response is to revert to type:
retreating to a multiplex cinema doubtless to seek solace in another
world of screens. The fact that one of the films projected there, the latest
release by Jean-Jacques Annaud, happens to be entitled Deux frères,
suggests that while he may physically flee the past, psychological escape
will prove illusory.

War Child 115
Surely still absorbing the shock of having witnessed Majid’s surprise

suicide, viewers are unlikely to need such a pointed reminder from
Haneke of their own spectatorship. To be subject as viewers to such a
sight – and to subject them to it – raises a range of ethical questions,
which Haneke arguably compels his viewers to consider by giving
them so little time to look away before Majid’s left carotid artery is
severed. For Wheatley, ‘part of Haneke’s project in Hidden […] is to
restore shock-value to the image, a project in which he incontrovertibly
succeeds, to judge by the collective gasp that shook the cinema audience
at the film’s Cannes screening during one key scene of unexpected
finality’ (2006: 34).43 Forcing us to witness the suicide, to be ‘présent’
just as Majid so wished Georges to be, automatically implicates us too as
viewers in this spectacle, perhaps leading us to ponder what investments
we make and desires we derive when consuming such sights on screen.
As Saxton (2008: 109) duly observes, ‘ethical meaning in Haneke’s films
emerges not only in their traumatic confrontations with the other’s
vulnerability and pain, but also, and perhaps most urgently, in their
appeal to us to contemplate our own roles in these close encounters as
consumers, observers, witnesses and potential actors’.
The ethics of seeing implied here is, of course, first suggested by the
opening sequence’s foregrounding of acts of looking. There, Georges
and Anne scrutinise the videotapes more for what can be seen than
heard; but, given how crucial sound becomes by the film’s end, Haneke’s
film arguably advocates an ethics of hearing too.44 For, as they study the
images together, what is not immediately clear is what sound cannot be
heard no matter how many times they rewind or fastforward, namely
the childhood cries of Majid. Only when the penultimate scene replays
the moment when young Majid was wrenched away from his foster-
family’s home does the uncanny resemblance between the ambient noise
recorded outside their Parisian home and the soundtrack presumably
played in Georges’s mind become apparent (Ezra and Sillars 2007b:
221).45 The shock of involuntarily assisting Majid’s suicide finally allows
this ‘memory-sound’ to be unlocked in a dream seemingly induced,
appropriately enough, by his taking of two tablets (or, in French,
cachets, a homonym for the film’s title and metaphor of hidden history).
Viewers might now recall too how little sound the previous memory-
images contained, making Majid’s cries and struggle over four decades
earlier in this penultimate scene all the more affecting, and highlighting
just how adept Georges has been at muffling those sounds he did not
wish to hear.

As Macey (1998: 159) argues, ‘sites of memory are also sites of

amnesia. They are places where what must be remembered collides with
what cannot be remembered’. How fitting, then, that Haneke closes the
film on the steps of Pierrot’s school as Majid’s son approaches the young
boy. Although the conversation they share is inaudible, if the scene is
read as a prelude to Majid’s son apprising Pierrot of his father’s actions,
it suggests that learning about the past can never solely take place within
the classroom (a lesson some politicians in France might do well to heed,
given the controversy surrounding the infamous bill passed by députés
in the same year of Caché’s release that, had it not subsequently been
repealed, would have obliged schools to teach pupils about the ‘benefits’
of France’s historical presence overseas).46
The enigma of this final scene has provoked various interpretations
amongst critics. Some have read the first apparent meeting of Georges
and Majid’s sons on screen as an optimistic omen that greater cross-
ethnic dialogue may be possible amongst younger generations, and
that their shared past and the legacies of the Algerian War can be
acknowledged. Others have judged the film’s ending as more sinister,
pondering whether their meeting instead implies their collusion in
sending Georges the drawings and videotapes (Cousins 2007: 225). As
the film gives so little away, it is unsurprising that viewers may seize
upon the scene as a final chance to glean clues as to how events can
be explained and to speculate on what the future may hold for those
involved. As the action on screen, in contrast to the preceding scene,
appears to be set within the present day and follows Georges retiring
to bed in the afternoon, many may assume the scene takes place while
Georges sleeps, as Pierrot finishes school for the day.
However, as this final scene, like its predecessor, also comprises a
prolonged take and static shot – filmic elements that come to be associated
with Georges’s mind as the film progresses – it can also be interpreted
more bleakly as a projection of Georges’s concerns for Pierrot, on whom
he fears Majid’s son might prey (Burris 2011: 161). Alternatively, it could
signal that his paranoia has reached a new paroxysm and that he now
suspects that Pierrot and Majid are working in tandem. Considered thus,
the meeting of the two sons would not herald a rupture with Georges’s
destructive fear and behaviour but instead reinforce it, perhaps leaving
viewers to fear – within the logic of the film – which containment
strategy Georges might feel compelled to adopt in order to staunch the
flow of images that now threaten his career and social position. For, as
Majid asks Georges, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’on ne ferait pas pour rien perdre?’47

War Child 117
In his discussion of Caché, Paul Gilroy (2007b: 235) bemoaned

Haneke’s film for leaving viewers ‘jolted but with no clear sense of
how to act more justly or ethically’. Many viewers may have shared
Gilroy’s frustration; but the chances of Caché being explicitly didactic
were always remote. Haneke seems too wary of the messy realities of
postcolonial life to offer a moral or ethical roadmap through his cinema.
Although several writers have taken issue with his criticism of the film,
Gilroy nevertheless raises several important questions towards the end
of his reading:
Are the structures of Georges’s own personality, his unhappy household
and his divided nation all homologically configured? Are the guilt, denial
and repression that operate in each of those spaces in the same essential
shape and tempo? Are the same kind of pathological results produced in
each of those settings? (Gilroy 2007b: 235)
The rhetorical thrust of Gilroy’s argument make his thoughts here clear,
signalling his apparent disappointment with both the film’s conflation
of the actions of an individual child and those of an empire and with
its apparently unproblematic link between colonial and postcolonial
temporalities.
However, as we have seen, Haneke’s use of editing and shot selection
complicates any neat equivalence between micro- and macro-levels of
history. Such criticism of Caché hinges on perceptions of Georges’s
exemplarity: while it may be tempting to see him as fulfilling a purely
metonymic role, he should perhaps be considered more as metaphorical,
a symbol of certain aspects of a wider societal phenomenon, rather
than representing it in its totality. Indeed, as Silverman (2007: 248)
argues, ‘Haneke’s contemporary parable of Franco-Algerian relations
may suggest […] that Georges and Anne are not to be read as an allegory
of France but only of a certain generation and class of French men and
women’.48 Despite their original intention to adopt Majid, this generation
would include Majid’s fleeting foster-parents, whose apparent readiness
to believe their son’s lie – along with his mother’s distant and rather
dispassionate recollection of that time as a ‘mauvais souvenir’ – implies
they also belong to ‘an adult system founded on underlying prejudice,
violence and racism’ (Mecchia 2007: 134). Furthemore, as Coulthard
(2011: 77) argues, ‘What is most significant in Caché is not Georges’s
past act, but the way he reinscribes and exacerbates that original act
through its repetition. He lies, hides and places his own well-being and
comfort above others in the same way he did when he was six’.

Viewers are therefore encouraged to criticise Georges for not changing

his behaviour and continuing to act as he did in childhood. However
pathetic Georges’s lies and attempts at dissimulation may appear, the
film does not seek to hold Georges accountable per se for his childhood
lie. Rather, it condemns him for refusing to acknowledge the past and
to face up to the consequences of his actions within the present. How
one lives with these consequences form the film’s ethical drive, and
is the key question posed to viewers by Haneke; but by emphasising
Georges’s remorselessness and lack of repentance, Haneke refuses to
advocate an appealing answer. The mea culpa from Georges that might
conventionally be expected thus never arrives, and, perhaps, just as the
mystery surrounding the videotapes’ genesis and the location of the
hidden camera cannot logically be solved, Haneke’s uncompromising
conclusion is that no clear-cut answer can readily be found.
Conclusion
As we argued at the start of this chapter, the prioritising of childhood

experience during the Algerian War in these three films marks them out
as unusual within the wider canon of French films set during the conflict.
What purpose do children therefore serve within these narratives?
Despite the significant differences between the films of Charef and Gilou,
Ali in Cartouches gauloises and Michou in Michou d’Auber are perhaps
not so dissimilar. Both of primary school age, and with a similar happy-
go-lucky personality, each finds alternative father figures outside their
ethnic group, despite the prevalence of casual racism shown within early
1960s’ France and Algeria. However, Charef’s sole focus upon Ali means
the extent to which his intermediary position makes him the exception
rather than the rule remains unclear; and Messaoud’s integration in
Gilou’s film is predicated on his real origins remaining hidden. A clear
parallel also exists between the ends of both films, where, as the war
closes, absent fathers return to rejoin or reclaim their sons. The original
family unit therefore restored, viewers are left to assume that a return to
relative normality – coincidentally coinciding with ethnic homogeneity
– awaits following Algerian independence.
By providing no such happy ending in Caché, Haneke might appear
to signal an epistemic break with the consensual narratives of such films
set during the war. In his vision of postcolonial Paris, fatherhood equates
more with absence: hence Majid’s loss of his father during October 1961

War Child 119
is compounded when he is rejected by Georges’s father; Majid’s son

must mourn his father’s suicide; Georges’s father is presumably already
deceased; and the emotional distance between Georges and Pierrot
seems set to increase. Moreover, whilst the ambiguity of the final scene
allows it to be interpreted as potentially anticipating a more hopeful
future for Majid and Georges’s sons – and perhaps for cross-ethnic
relations more generally within metropolitan France – the distinct
possibility that it may be more a paranoid fantasy in Georges’s mind
offers a bleaker vision of the dominant political culture his character
epitomises, which appears unwilling to engage meaningfully with the
consequences of French colonial rule (Bancel, Blanchard and Lemaire
2006). Regardless of how the film’s ending is read, Haneke’s film
positions twenty-first-century Paris as an enduring site of postcolonial
melancholia (Gilroy 2004).
But why choose children as the main characters or figures in these
films? The casting of children within Algerian cinema set during the
war is ostensibly understandable. As Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger
demonstrated, their presence alongside adults helped present Algerian
society as a united front in resistance against colonial forces and
their vulnerability may potentially elicit sympathy from viewers. Such
children’s youth also mirrored Algeria’s fledgling independence and
signified hope for future generations of Algerians, somewhat less of a
concern historically within French cinema.
The ethnicity of Charef and that of Gilou’s co-scriptwriter and
actor Messaoud Hattou are, of course, not incidental here. The autobi-
ographical narratives that drive Cartouches gauloises and Michou
d’Auber allow them both to revisit their past during the war. They also
form part of a growing corpus of French-produced and co-produced
films made by or starring beurs that explicitly engage with experiences
of older generations of people of Algerian origin pre-dating the present
era. Despite depicting wartime France and Algeria as places of violence,
racism and xenophobia, both Cartouches gauloises and Michou d’Auber
form generally affectionate portraits of the real-life figures that inspired
the stories shown on screen.
Haneke’s inspiration and motivations for Caché were very different.49
With no personal investment in showing an ultimately consensual
retrospective account, and by insisting that the film’s themes have a
wider resonance beyond French borders, he seems less concerned about
the sensibilities of French audiences and presents a distinctly unflat-
tering portrait of colonial and postcolonial metropolitan France, where

the accommodation of ethnic Others presupposes their spatial margin-

alisation, and children, through the figure of Georges, are not merely
witnesses of violence but also author it: a key difference from Charef and
Gilou’s portraits of wartime childhood. 50 Indeed, the distinctiveness of
Haneke’s vision, and the fact that his film did not herald a paradigm shift
with regard to how the war is envisaged within French cinema, reveal
some of the limits of the current Franco-Algerian visual economy. Only
time will tell whether the ethics of seeing and remembering advocated by
Caché can become more widespread, and quite how unusual Haneke’s
film must remain.
Despite its differences, by focusing on the lives of two male children
during the war, Caché does share one further peculiarity with these two
films: namely, almost all the children shown on screen are male. Thus,
even if Ali’s peer Julie features as a named character in Cartouches
gauloises, she is the only significant female child and merely delivers one
line. Girls of school age are similarly seldom seen in Michou d’Auber
and heard even less frequently. The retelling of Georges and Majid’s
shared past within Caché also features no female peers and (both
seemingly only children) their relationship is ultimately paralleled by
their sons, neither of whom appears to have female siblings either. This
striking absence of female children within all three films may merely be
coincidental, albeit conforming to the traditional association between
war, men and masculinity in many societies; but it nevertheless seems
indicative of a distinctive trend within the wider canon of films (whether
French or Algerian) set during the Algerian War, where women’s voices
– regardless of social class, ethnicity or nationality – are generally
disregarded. 51 Muriel’s own absence in Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps
d’un retour (1963) therefore seems premonitory, and the prominence
of Marie-Jeanne within Marc’s childhood memories of French Algeria
in Nicole Garcia’s thriller Un balcon sur la mer (2010) all the more
distinctive. 52 A sustained engagement with female experiences of the
conflict therefore remains to be imagined within such films and, as a
consequence, the business of war – even amongst children – remains
resolutely a male affair.

5
Bridging the Gap:

Representations
of the Mediterranean Sea
Bridging the Gap
During French colonial rule in Algeria, the Mediterranean Sea and

wider region played an important role in helping suture, metaphorically,
the métropole’s southern shores to Algeria’s coastline. French colonial
scholars, for example, positioned the Mediterranean region as the
historical cradle of human civilisation and a crossroads of cultures linked
by a shared Latin Mediterranean heritage. The historical links claimed
between Algeria’s Berber population and metropolitan French society
here proved pivotal, positioning Berbers as ‘not only the privileged
inheritors of Latin civilisation, but also the true homo mediterraneus’
because they were considered ‘the original inhabitants of North Africa,
who had preserved more than any other people their Mediterranean
identity’ (Silverstein 2004: 64). Emphasising a common Latin and
Mediterranean heritage shared by French and Berber society allowed
imperial France both to reconnect with its classical past and to present
Islam as an impediment to trans-Mediterranean unity.1 Furthermore, by
excavating Algeria’s Roman past, and marginalising the contributions
of other cultures and societies, European rule in North Africa was
presented as part of a wider historical continuity, which helped justify
French colonisation (Lorcin 2002).
Therefore, as Dine (2009: 20) argues, ‘the French colonial myth of
a pan-Mediterranean civilization constitutes a privileged site for the
exploration of the ideological and indeed psychological landscape of
Algérie française’. Moreover, as the prominence of coastal landscapes in
the images discussed in Chapter 1 made clear, tethered to this psycho-
logical landscape was the Mediterranean Sea. This might explain why

expressions such as ‘La Méditerranée traverse la France comme la Seine

traverse Paris’2 came to gain currency during French colonial rule,
positioning the Mediterranean Sea as ‘nothing more than an internal
waterway in the ideological discourse of supporters of Algérie française’
(Majumdar 2007: xxv). As Weber (1986) notes, it was only after Algerian
independence that the hexagon gained wide currency as a figuration
of metropolitan France in public discourse, further confirming the
Mediterranean Sea’s pivotal role in sustaining notions of French identity
prior to major decolonisation.
The launch in 2008 of the Union pour la Méditerranée by the French
President Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated that the Mediterranean Sea and
its surrounding region remain important geopolitically and econom-
ically for France today. However, the fledgling organisation’s muted
response to the Arab Spring (Henry 2012) underlined its continued
political impotence, despite well-meaning rhetoric on increasing cross-
border cooperation in areas such as environmental protection and
transport. Tellingly, indeed, French and wider EU policy in recent years
has concentrated more on maintaining the security of southern EU
borders and increasing migration control (Pace 2010). For French policy-
makers today, as Godin and Vince (2012: 2) argue, the Mediterranean
Sea and surrounding region continue to symbolise ‘both a proximate
space in which ambitious foreign policy can flourish and the worryingly
close location of an invading “other” which needs to be contained and
controlled’. 3
In spite of European Union (EU) priorities and those of individual
nation-states, the Mediterranean region has nevertheless provided an
important alternative space of identity and belonging for minority
groups, such as those of Berber origin, which has allowed them to
transcend national borders and challenge state national authority by
asserting the primacy of transnational affiliations (Silverstein 2004: 226).
With regard especially to France and Algeria, the Mediterranean Sea
itself has also served as an important site of identification for different
groups. This is especially the case within the literary world, where
Francophone writers of Algerian origin such as Assia Djebar and Leïla
Sebbar have symbolically situated themselves within this maritime space
so as to claim they write in between France and Algeria, rather than
solely in either. Purposely defying national borders, such writers have
claimed the sea as a productive space of ‘in-between-ness’, positioning
it as ‘le lieu géométrique des relations franco-algériennes’ (Basfao and
Henry 1991: 51).4 It follows that the Mediterranean has also figured

Bridging the Gap 123
prominently within so-called beur literature (Silverstein 2002: 17), of

which Akli Tadjer’s Les ANI du ‘Tassili’ (1984) provides a paradigmatic
example. Set entirely aboard the Tassili ferry sailing from Algeria to
France, Tadjer’s novel posits Franco-Algerian relations as a dialogue by
focusing on the lead protagonist Omar’s many conversations with fellow
passengers from both shores. The time and space of the crossing duly
furnishes Tadjer with a device to sketch a microcosm of the different
societal groups connected to both postcolonial countries.
Seas have, of course, been a rising subject of interest across a range
of academic disciplines in recent years, leading Horden and Purcell
(2006) to characterise the growing appeal of analysing the histories of
metaphorical as well as real seas and oceans as a ‘new thalassology’.
Gilroy (1993) remains a crucial reference point here and his concept
of the black Atlantic has duly inspired many scholars to focus on such
spaces. Marshall (2009), for example, importantly took up the challenge
of delineating a ‘French Atlantic’ by providing a cultural history
of how different Francophone spaces that form part of the Atlantic
world interrelate. While demonstrating the myriad ways in which this
challenges notions of Frenchness – and noting how the twin phenomena
of modernisation and decolonisation after the Second World War forge
surprising links between Algeria and the Atlantic within French history
– Marshall nonetheless acknowledged that ‘the dominant postcolonial
legacy in France is irrefutably that of North Africa and especially
Algeria, as manifested in highly visible social and political problems
and their attendant cultural, intellectual and media manifestations and
debates’ (2009: 3).
All the more reason, then, for us to turn our attention to how the
maritime space that both divides and unites France and Algeria has been
represented. Yet, while studies of books such as Tadjer’s and related
literary and cultural production (Hargreaves 1997; Rosello 2005) have
interrogated the role played by the Mediterranean Sea within contem-
porary cultural imaginaries, curiously little has been written on how it
has been represented visually with relation to both France and Algeria. 5
In acknowledgement of its key symbolic role, this chapter will therefore
scrutinise how the Mediterranean Sea and its attendant seaboard spaces
have been envisioned from both French and Algerian shores.
In doing so, we seek to build upon works such as Chambers (2008),
Chambers and Curti (2008) and Giaccaria and Minca (2011), which
have posited the Mediterranean as pivotal for interrogating notions
of the sea itself and its surrounding region. Rejecting the myth of

Mediterraneanism (Herzfeld 1984; 1985) and its attendant essentialism

of the Mediterranean region as a coherent space, such work instead
proposes viewing the Mediterranean more ‘as a continual interweaving
of cultural and historical currents’ (Chambers 2008: 34) where the
figure of the crossing, and the inherent hybridity and fluidity it evokes,
challenges conventional European histories of the Mediterranean region
by highlighting how the sea forms a complex and shifting space of
networks. For, as Giaccaria and Minca (2011: 350) have argued, ‘if the
reassuring trope of an aestheticized Mediterranean heritage is abandoned
and we turn our gaze towards the social, economic, political and
cultural characteristics of the Mediterranean’s unfolding modernities,
such composed and pacified images simply fall apart before our very
eyes’. In short, the Mediterranean today is first and foremost a ‘postco-
lonial sea’ (Chambers 2008: 23). Given how much France historically
has invested in this maritime space, and that the end of the Algerian
War ushered in a new and distinctive phase of postcoloniality for it,
the need to consider it in terms of French and Algerian perspectives is
clear. Looking at how French and Algerian visual culture have engaged
with this space since 1962 can inform our understanding of how the
Mediterranean has been configured, constructed and understood more
broadly as a socio-cultural, economic and, above all, political space.
Sea Change: Farewell to French Algeria
The prominence of the Mediterranean Sea in the evocation of Franco-

Algerian links quickly becomes apparent when surveying contemporary
visual production. In one of the most recent photographic engagements
with Algeria in France, for example, Raymond Depardon’s Un aller
pour Alger (2010), the space of the Mediterranean Sea is foregrounded
from the front cover: the moody black-and-white cover image of choppy
waters and dark clouds creates a sense of foreboding and menace
mirrored by the moments of tumult captured by Depardon during the
Algerian War. The cover of the wartime-era novel La Baie d’Alger
(2007), by the pied-noir writer Louis Gardel, provides a similar focus
on the sea, even if the clearer sky and bleached out colour create an
impression of greater serenity.
In contrast to the Mediterranean Sea as depopulated space, images
of people (particularly men) contemplating the sea from Algerian shores
have also become a visual commonplace. An example of this includes

Leïla Sebbar’s Mon cher fils (2009), the cover of which comprises a
photograph of an elderly man, shot from behind, resting by a balustrade
looking out to sea and the horizon beyond. Most iterations within
this iconography, however, choose young men as subjects. Indeed, the
book from which Sebbar’s cover image was taken, Yves Jeanmougin’s
Algériens, frères de sang (2005), also featured a man by the coastline
staring pensively towards the sea upon its cover, but one far younger in
appearance. The emphasis upon youth and younger male generations
within this visual repertoire is not coincidental: it chimes with media
interest in the continuing phenomenon of clandestine migration from the
Maghreb to Europe, and can therefore connote a desire to reach southern
European shores. The front cover of the February 2012 edition of Le
Monde diplomatique’s bimonthly magazine Manière de voir, marking
the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, duly conformed to
this pattern by using a photograph taken in contemporary Algiers of two
young men sitting by the shoreline facing out towards the sea.
However, it would be wrong to suggest that such images of the
Mediterranean Sea from Algerian shores are merely a recent phenomenon.
Fifty years earlier, the endgame of the war generated similar iconography,
albeit showing other constituent groups gazing northwards with very
different emotions. As the exodus of pieds-noirs gathered pace, images
of pieds-noirs setting sail from Algiers, often with uncertainty and
anxiety etched upon their faces, became a defining image of the close of
the war. The stretch of sea they traversed had begun its mutation from
mere French ‘internal waterway’ to definitively international waters, ones
that would form a maritime buffer zone between the newly displaced
populations and là-bas, the phrase commonly used both to signal the
time and space of their former homeland (as we saw in Chapter 1) and to
refer euphemistically to postcolonial Algeria (Baussant 2002: 449; Smith
2006: 174).
In Chapter 2, we considered briefly the role played by this iconography
of exodus subsequent to the war, as memories of the conflict and the end
of French Algeria found visual form. We now need to return to these
images in order to ponder how they depict the Mediterranean Sea. Since
the majority of colonial settlers left North Africa by boat and arrived in
Marseilles (Jordi 2003: 61), the Mediterranean formed the arena for one
of the largest population transfers of the twentieth century as the war
ended (Evans 2011: 320); and its prominence in accounts of this moment
and its aftermath confirms the important role it still plays for many
pieds-noirs. By migrating from the country to which their ancestors

had formerly travelled, the settlers became ‘doubly diasporic’ (Andrea

L. Smith 2003: 24) and the sea would consequently fulfil a totemic
function, recalling links with earlier generations who had traversed
the same space to settle in French Algeria. In the media at the time, the
visual representation of pied-noir exodus was dominated by images
of departure by sea rather than air too. Unsurprisingly, therefore, as
Hubbell (2011: 152–3) notes, the only image that symbolically connotes
the pied-noir exodus in Marie Cardinal’s photo-text homage to French
Algeria, Les Pieds-noirs (1988), is one showing a passenger ship departing
from Algiers (1988: 293).6
However, Cardinal’s juxtaposition of this image with tourist posters
promoting ferry and train travel in France, allied with her discussion
of colonial settlers holidaying in the métropole, make her engagement
with the trauma of pied-noir exodus markedly oblique. It also reminds
us, as Chapter 1 discussed, how often books that commemorate French
Algeria pointedly draw a line at showing decolonisation. By contrast, the
closing quotation included by Cardinal from the pied-noir writer Janine
de la Hogue’s Ballade triste pour une ville perdue does, as its title infers,
gesture towards this moment. In doing so, it reveals a wider important
trend. Mourning the passing of the eponymous town, and of French
Algeria more broadly, its former pied-noir population is described as the
‘enfants désemparés’ (‘helpless children’) of an erstwhile ‘ville-enfant’
for whom ‘le Destin avait déjà tracé les chemins d’exil’ (Cardinal 1988:
293).7 The sense of bereavement and the implication that pieds-noirs
are innocent victims of history are clear. Neither is the positioning of
pieds-noirs as children far from coincidental, conforming as it does
to a crucial pattern that took shape precisely as the pied-noir exodus
gathered pace. Let us now turn to some of the defining images of that
moment.
One of the most iconic photographs of the exodus in the early summer
of 1962 was taken by Maurice Jarnoux on 23 May 1962. Showing a
young white European couple and child looking back at Algiers from
aboard a departing ship, it was made famous when it adorned the cover
of Paris Match on 2 June 1962 in cropped and colourised form (Fig. 8).
The subsequent inclusion of the original black-and-white image in works
such as Gervereau and Stora (2004: 96) and in Stora and Quemeneur
(2010: 70) emphasised its iconicity. Tellingly, too, the Paris Match cover
was one of the images chosen to accompany Le Nouvel Observateur’s
cover feature on the conflict, entitled ‘Notre guerre d’Algérie’, in October
2010. Indeed, Paris Match’s appeal in April 2012 for help in locating

Figure 8 Paris Match,

2 June 1962
the whereabouts of the couple and their daughter further confirms

the image’s appeal and its subjects’ enduring newsworthiness for the
magazine’s readership.8
Fifty years later, the image’s power clearly remains undiminished. It is
not difficult to see why. The sight of the young family huddled together
on deck – a mother holding a handkerchief to her face, seemingly in
tears, while her husband clutches their baby in his arms and stoically
stares into the distance – still invites compassion; and the fact they
are shown alone, with only the empty sea beside them, accentuates
their vulnerability. The image bears witness to the moment when their
personal destiny chimed with that of French Algeria, one that saw the
Mediterranean separate them from their former home and irrevocably
consigned their former lives to the past. Their gazes towards the left
(typically connoting regression according to Western visual conventions)
further emphasise this. In addition, the fact that the woman pictured
was a pied-noir born in French Algeria and that her husband, originally
from the métropole, had served as a soldier, also meant that their
union symbolised two sides of the conflict from a French perspective,
undoubtedly resonating with the magazine’s readership, and helping to

establish the image as an emblematic visual shorthand for this definitive

moment of French history.
The young couple’s profession as primary school teachers may also
have increased the image’s ideological appeal. Exporting the benefits of
a French republican education had always formed part of justificatory
discourses that buttressed French colonialism; and the sight of two young
teachers departing from Algeria for good may therefore have confirmed
to metropolitan readers that the end of the war was finally imminent.
Furthermore, it lent a curious circularity to the conflict by providing an
oblique link to its outbreak when another married couple, and fellow
teachers, famously hit the headlines. Amongst the reports of the series of
co-ordinated attacks that marked the start of the war in November 1954,
it was the fate of Guy Monnerot and his wife that notably galvanised
French media attention. Caught in an FLN ambush in the Aurès region,
the young couple had recently returned from honeymoon and had only
taken up their posts in the small village of Tiffelfel three weeks earlier.
Both wounded in the resulting gunfire, Guy Monnerot would later bleed
to death (Horne 2006: 91). He subsequently has often been cited as the
first victim of the war, the symbolism of whose death as ‘hussard noir
de la République’ was clear for contemporaries (Lévy 1991: 272).9 The
choice of image to mark this moment in June 1962 therefore also conjured
up the spectre of the Monnerots’ plight and, by strangely mirroring the
war’s beginning, may have subconsciously reassured readers that its end
was finally nigh.
When the image was reproduced on the cover of Paris Match, of
course, accompanying text worked to make its message clear. The
headline posed a question that readers may have assumed echoed the
pictured couple’s thoughts: ‘La France nous aime-t-elle toujours?’10
Given the hostile reaction to pieds-noirs upon their arrival in Marseilles
(Jordi 2003) and the extent to which anti-pied-noir sentiments were
successfully whipped up in France as fears of further OAS attacks
grew (Shepard 2006a: 151), a more pertinent question might have
been whether France could. As the exodus grew and exceeded official
predicted numbers, French politicians and the media had to work hard
to change tack when the absorption of the pieds-noirs into metropolitan
France became inevitable. The discourse that had presented pied-noir
men en masse as mere metonyms for the OAS was now jettisoned in
favour of representations that sought to assert their heteronormativity
and Frenchness: hence the prevalence of images such as Jarnoux’s, which
presented pied-noir men within family groupings. As Shepard (2006b:

227) argues, ‘through the multiple resonances of familial imagery, the

repatriates were positioned as weak rather than violent, as themselves
children, and as profoundly French’.
The popularity of familial rhetoric to describe Franco-Algerian
relations – likening their relationship to a marriage and warning that
future separation would be tantamount to a divorce (Ross 1995: 124–5)
– may also have helped position pieds-noirs as child-like, uprooted
and displaced from their familial home following the acrimonious split
by their ‘parents’. A rival image to Jarnoux’s Paris Match cover, also
discussed briefly in Chapter 2, certainly adheres to this pattern. The
Gamma/Keystone image shows a young girl held aloft by an older man,
presumably her father, resting against his shoulder. On the right-hand
side, an older woman, presumably her mother, waves, again to the left,
from the ship carrying them away from Algeria. Turned towards the
camera, the young girl appears to stare mournfully towards the photog-
rapher and, therefore, at viewers. The way she clings to her father’s
shoulders, emphasising her youth and vulnerability, implores us to
sympathise with her family’s predicament, but also, given the reception
that greeted many pieds-noirs settling in metropolitan France, may
now retrospectively connote guilt and shame owing to the hostility with
which they were welcomed. However the image is read, its recurring
reproduction in the French press on or around key anniversary dates,
such as in L’Express in 1987, Le Point in 2002 and Marianne in 2012,
confirms that it too has come to crystallise this moment of history in
France.11
Indeed, the positioning of pieds-noirs as children still retains wider
visual currency. The cover of Dominique Fargues’s book Mémoires de
pieds-noirs (2008) provides an evocative example. It features a black-and-
white photograph, seemingly taken on board a ship at sea, that shows a
young man on deck with his back turned towards the camera, holding a
handkerchief to his eyes and apparently in tears.12 The high-angle shot
shows the sea stretching out beyond him and at a similar level to him. As
his tears seemingly fall into the sea, the composition of the image gives
the impression of him being enveloped by the Mediterranean; but as he
covers his eyes and blots out the land on the horizon, its waters seem to
signify rupture rather than comfort.
In contrast to the waters of the Mediterranean as barrier, we now turn
to consider how two important works that marginalise the shorelines
of France and Algeria prioritise instead the maritime space that lies
between them. Through the figure of the crossing, as well as the specific

time and space of the ship, they present a distinctive vision of relations in
the Mediterranean Sea, and position it above all as a space of liminality
and place of passage.
‘La mer te ronge’: The Sea as In-between
We start with Élisabeth Leuvrey’s La Traversée [The Crossing] (2006), a

fifty-five-minute documentary film set entirely on board ferries travelling
back and forth between Marseilles and Algiers. Weaving together
footage filmed from over twenty crossings, Leuvrey’s film constructs
the ferry travellers as a community of sorts, and noticeably includes a
spectrum of passengers, from the elderly Francophone Algerian woman
never taught Arabic as a child, who divides her time between France and
Algeria each year, to the French couple, both of pied-noir origin, visiting
the home of their ancestors for the first time. The cross-section of society
captured in the film represents a microcosm of contemporary Franco-
Algerian relations. It also offers the starting point for reflection on the
post-colonial realities of life for people connected with both countries,
which duly forms the subtext of several discussions shown on board.
However, the main focus remains on the camaraderie between
Algerian men, who are either travelling to work in France or to rejoin
family in Algeria, and, for the youngest ones, their dream of long-term
or definitive migration to France. Indeed, the recurrent mention of the
word ‘visa’ serves as a reminder of the current constraints upon their
circulation. This is vividly demonstrated in an evocative scene where,
to the tune of ‘La Marseillaise’, a group of Algerian men sing a football
chant that bemoans how life in Algiers today has changed for the
worse and implores God for a visa.13 Despite showing their enthusiasm
for what might appear to be a European Eldorado, the film does not
celebrate postcoloniality or hybridity as a condition. Instead, it dwells
at length on the experiences of people who shuttle between France and
Algeria and the personal and socio-economic difficulties this entails. Its
focus on the lived experience of a range of different travellers linked to
the Mediterranean reminds us of the timely question posed by Stuart
Hall when considering the complexities of the term ‘post-colonial’: ‘Can
Algerians living at home and in France, the French and the Pied Noir
[sic] settlers all be “post-colonial”?’ (1996: 245; emphasis in the original).
A large proportion of the conversations heard in La Traversée feature
only men, which serves to gender the space of the ferry largely as

male. While women’s voices are sometimes heard – for example, when
Leuvrey discusses the politics of language in French Algeria with the
elderly Francophone Algerian woman – they tend to be Francophone:
the comparative silence from Arabophone and Berberophone women is
striking, and a reminder that while this portrait of the crossing may seem
representative of many ferry passengers it occludes these sections of French
and Algerian societies. Nevertheless, communication is itself a major
theme of the crossings we see, and viewers are invited to follow different
passengers’ conversations. Despite the fact that most are intra-Algerian
(between the Algerian men who regularly cross the Mediterranean), cross-
linguistic and cross-national dialogue is also shown: a Frenchwoman is
taught Arabic expressions; and later, alongside her partner, they discuss
their families’ pied-noir origins with a fellow traveller.
The documentary therefore functions as a portrait both of the lives of
Algerian migrants and of Franco-Algerian relations more generally, and
the prominence afforded to debate and conversation between passengers
seems to posit the Franco-Algerian relationship as an ongoing dialogue.
It is far from a coincidence, therefore, that the film is dedicated to
Abdelmalek Sayad, whose ethnographic work with Algerian migrants
in France, and analysis of their feelings of estrangement and identity
(2004), clearly influenced Leuvrey’s practice. Her focus on the lived
experience of postcoloniality for people who regularly travel between
France and Algeria notably presents them as migrants whose identity
cannot be neatly confined to discrete nationalities or circumscribed
according to state borders. And, as Leuvrey’s editing disrupts the
teleology and chronology of the crossing, and only time on board is
shown, the emphasis here is upon the ongoing psychological effects of
such ‘in-between-ness’, as well as the social and economic consequences
of migration. As Ben, one of the passengers, openly wonders while the
camera slowly pans across the empty blue sea, ‘est-ce que ça existe,
quelque chose qui ne serait ni l’un ni l’autre? […] L’idéal serait peut-être
d’arriver de faire des deux mondes un troisième monde’.14
In contrast to such utopianism, the film’s sensitive portrayal of
passengers from contrasting backgrounds means that events aboard
the ship are very much grounded in reality. In this sense, Leuvrey’s
film is unusual for being one of the relatively few works that feature
a broad range of people from both countries with their own personal
and historical connections to the Mediterranean.15 In doing so, she
encourages viewers to ponder the coexisting legacies of pied-noir and
Algerian migration across the Mediterranean. As such, her film chimes

with the ‘transnational and intercultural perspective’ that Gilroy (1993:

15) advocated when analysing the black Atlantic as a distinct space and
political and cultural formation that transcends ‘both the structures of
the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particu-
larity’ (Gilroy 1993: 19). Moreover, one of the chronotopes that Gilroy
championed in order to plot such connections and challenge dominant
histories of Western modernity was the ship, which is not merely a vessel
but also ‘a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion’
(Gilroy 1993: 4), a point strongly borne out by Leuvrey’s film.
The mundanity of many aspects of life on board, and the rapports
that are established between different travellers, are also reminiscent of
the ‘ordinary multiculturalism’ and ‘conviviality’ celebrated by Gilroy
in his analysis of society within contemporary, post-colonial Britain
(Gilroy 2004: xi). Marking his distance from the term ‘identity’, Gilroy
championed the notion of ‘conviviality’ because ‘the radical openness
that brings conviviality alive makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, and
reified identity and turns attention toward the always-unpredictable
mechanisms of identification’ (2004: xi). By showing how surprising
links are woven between different travellers, as well as the flux of
identities that migrations across the Mediterranean Sea generate,
Leuvrey’s film arguably presents the peculiar time and space of the
crossing as an emblematic example of such conviviality and, crucially,
the Mediterranean Sea as a key space for imagining different forms of
identity and belonging within postcolonial French and Algerian society.
At the same time, while the focus of the film is resolutely on the
present day and on the generations of travellers who have shuttled
back and forth across the sea since 1962, the brief mentions made of
patterns of migration that pre-date the Algerian War and its aftermath
are important. By evoking, however briefly, the experiences of older
travellers, Leuvrey historicises such phenomena so that they do not solely
seem unique features of contemporary life. Such moments provide a
timely reminder that, as Gilroy argues, contemporary migration (and the
racist and xenophobic responses it attracts) must be analysed as part of
a wider historical continuity that traces the transcolonial links inherent
within European discourses. In this way, ‘the postcolonial migrant needs
to be recognized as an anachronistic figure bound to the lost imperial
past’ (2004: 165), something that, through its focus on everyday life for
such travellers, Leuvrey’s film subtly emphasises.
Nevertheless, the final scene of the film, as drivers prepare to
disembark, serves as a timely reminder that this diasporic movement

through a transnational space still cannot efface the memory and

historical legacy of colonial relations. As a vexed man pointedly tells
the group around him, ‘la plaie n’est pas encore cicatrisée’.16 Indeed, as
Derrida reminded us when considering the historical and cultural signif-
icance of Franco-Maghrebi identities, for all the pleasures and privileges
that hyphenated identities may bring,
Le silence de ce trait d’union ne pacifie ou n’apaise rien, aucun tourment,
aucune torture. Il ne fera jamais taire leur mémoire. Il pourrait même
aggraver la terreur, les lésions et les blessures. Un trait d’union ne suffit
jamais à couvrir les protestations, les cris de colère ou de souffrance, le
bruit des armes, des avions et des bombes. (Derrida 1996: 27)17
Ultimately, Leuvrey’s film shows how, while such journeys may merely be
a day-to-day reality for some travellers, crossings of the Mediterranean
Sea are far from mundane and are not without some emotional cost.
We now move from a vision of the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea
as an immersive group experience to one shown as a profoundly solitary
journey undertaken alone. Although sharing the same premise as La
Traversée, set as it is aboard a ferry travelling between Marseilles and
Algiers, Zineb Sedira’s MiddleSea (2008) offers a complete contrast.
Not just in terms of genre or length: lasting a mere sixteen minutes
and designed to be viewed as a single-screen projection in a very large
installation, her interpretation of the voyage eschews Leuvrey’s collective
portrait of the different diasporas which share its specific time and
space, focusing instead on the figure of an unnamed and silent man
whose motivations for crossing the Mediterranean remain unknown.
MiddleSea can be read as the middle part of a planned trilogy by
the British-based Franco-Algerian artist that centres on the themes of
migration, displacement and the sea. This trilogy marks a rupture with
much of her previous practice (often categorised as autobiographical),
for, even if Franco-Algerian relations still serve as a backdrop, the sense
of mystery, explicit focus on composition and aesthetics and emphasis
upon sound rather than dialogue arguably transcend local specificities
to encourage universal resonances.
The first work in this series, Saphir (2006), an eighteen-minute
dual-screen video projection, focuses on the postcolonial landscape of
Algiers by interrogating the roles of space and architecture there today
and the continuing importance of migration and diasporas travelling
to and from the city. Both screens show two silent figures: a woman
described as French and of pied-noir origin, staying at the Hotel Safir,

and a local Algerian man walking outside it who silently stares out to sea.
The careful camerawork, sequencing and editing foreground aesthetics
rather than politics, with a recurrent focus upon the colours blue and
white, while the distinctive rhythm generated by oscillation between
motion and stillness, and a lack of dialogue or obvious narrative, instill
a powerful sense of enigma. The hotel is also shown as being at the heart
of a transport nexus, further emphasising the theme of migration and
evoking a palimpsest of journeys and displacements. But this ultimately
proves ironic: both characters seem in a state of stasis on screen, and are
framed within shots that suggest constraint. As such, a palpable tension
reverberates between movement and inertia.18
It is important to establish this, as a familiar dynamic resurfaces
in MiddleSea (2008), where the same male actor (Samir El Hakim)
reappears. Set upon a boat sailing between Algeria and France – but
with the direction never explicitly emphasised – the film focuses on
the journey rather than departure or destination, presenting a poetic
vision of migration. The combination of deftly composed close-ups
and slow-motion scenes heightens the poetic mood, and any sense
of teleology is further disrupted by black-and-white footage which
connotes flashbacks. The dream-like quality of the images underlines
the rejection of a documentary approach: nothing about this man’s
life is revealed, and he remains silent and nameless. Furthermore, he is
always shown alone. This is a personal rather than collective journey,
and consequently migration becomes a solitary experience. Although
precious little psychological insight is given into the ship’s unnamed
passenger, the editing together of a series of close-ups on his face, then
his eyes, the boat itself and the sea highlights how personal this journey
is, and how individual the experience may be. It also suggests that to
cross the sea is as much a mental as a physical experience, the borders
traversed during the crossing being emotional and psychological, as well
as geographical. The film proposes that wherever a map may plot the
co-ordinates of travellers the psychological location of the place they
mentally inhabit may prove rather different.
Indeed, given the length and time of the crossing, that place may well
feel like limbo, a sense suggested by the fact that the man never
disembarks from the ship and the moment of departure and arrival are
underplayed. This portrait of the crossing as limbo and sea as non-space
is also connoted visually by a striking forty-four-second take that
comprises a slow 180-degree left-to-right pan filmed from the centre of
the ship’s stern. Bereft of passengers, the surrounding sea and horizon

mirror the ship’s emptiness, suggesting literally that this space of

liminality is a no man’s land. Such an emphasis upon liminality recalls
Bhabha’s identifying of ‘the indeterminate temporality of the in-between’
(1994: 227) within translation – a theme explored in its spatial sense
within the film, but also connoted linguistically via its title, which refers
to an abbreviated form of the Arabic for the Mediterranean Sea
( becomes ). Sedira creates a neologism
that, translated into English as one word, catachrestically emphasises the
Mediterranean’s median position by deleting the space between the noun
and adjective.
Despite the protagonist’s silence, and fittingly given the title’s musical
homophone, this is a sonic as well as a visual experience. The prominent
soundtrack and heightened volume add further texture, and the sound
collages are striking: at one stage static noise and radio signals seem to
merge with the sound of helicopters, suggesting military implications and
functioning as another timely reminder of the boundaries of ‘Fortress
Europe’. Elsewhere, the hiss and crackle of different radio frequencies
being scanned (but never quite tuning in) present communication as
scrambled, amplifying the enigma but also showing how airwaves can
breach land borders.
Ultimately, this journey across the Mediterranean, through the
uncanny time and space of the ferry’s crossing, seems as much psycho-
logical as physical; but the traveller’s muteness and solitude also present
it as an inherently personal and private experience. In its own way, then,
Sedira’s film gestures towards some of the pains and pleasures voiced
by Leuvrey’s fellow passengers, one of whom pointedly reminds viewers
that even if the Mediterranean Sea constitutes a privileged transnational
and hybrid space, diasporic life presents its own difficulties. However
metaphorically attractive it may be to view the Mediterranean as a
productive space of postcolonial alterity, we idealise life there at our
peril. For, as the traveller puts it, ‘la mer te ronge’.19
All Points North? Making Waves in Algiers
In our final section, we return to land in order to consider how the

Mediterranean Sea has been represented from Algerian shores, and
specifically those bordering Algiers. To do so, we analyse two distinctive
recent works: Dissolution (2009), a video installation by Franco-Algerian
artist Katia Kameli, and the Algerian artist Zineddine Bessaï’s map for

clandestine migrants, H-OUT: Le Guide de la migration (2010). In

contrast to the vision from aboard ship of the Mediterranean Sea as
liminal space, the theme of the Mediterranean as barrier returns in these
works, but this time for those contemplating it from the Maghreb.
In his study of Mediterranean crossings, Chambers argues that in
order to complicate dominant Northern European perceptions greater
attention needs to be paid to views of the Mediterranean from its
southern and eastern shores. By doing so, he contends,
A geopolitical area, a historical and cultural formation, is […] transformed
into a critical space, a site of interrogations and unsuspected maps of
meaning. A North viewed from the South of the world represents not
a simple overturning but, rather, a revaluation of the terms employed
and the distinctions that have historically constructed the contrasts and
the complexities of this space. […] Here the Mediterranean proposes a
composite historical site that interpellates, interrogates, and interprets
the potential sense of Euro-America and the modernity and progress it
presumes to represent. (Chambers 2008: 34)
It would be remiss not to consider such representations of the
Mediterranean given the remit of our chapter. Moreover, as we shall
see, visual representations of contemporary Algeria’s relationship with
the Mediterranean and the other countries that border it are indelibly
marked by geopolitics and the economics of global commerce. A key
aspect of the latter, of course, is maritime trade, which is thematised in
the first work we will consider, Katia Kameli’s sixteen-minute single-
screen video installation, Dissolution (2009). Composed from a single
take of footage filmed with a static extreme long shot, her video shows
a series of container ships slowly travelling on screen, mostly from
right to left, across an unidentified stretch of sea. In sharp contrast
to the films of Leuvrey and Sedira, no land is glimpsed or identifiable
landmarks included, and the lack of dialogue and text on screen
heightens the enigma. The use of colour and depth of field within
the video, meanwhile, serves to deterritorialise further the space. The
horizon is noticeably indistinct, and a palette of blues, whites and
greys blend together. The landscape is haziest within the centre of the
image, where the vapour emitted from two metal chimney stacks in the
foreground creates a striking optical illusion: as each of the ships slowly
pass behind it, their form becomes temporarily indistinct.
Although never revealed in the video itself, paratextual information
accompanying the public display of the installation reveals that the
footage was originally filmed in the bay of Algiers. This location seems

all the more fitting given that port cities, as Tom Trevor (2007: 14)
reminds us, are ‘by definition […] located at the meeting point of the
land and the sea, traversing the threshold between two fundamental
physical states’. As such, they constitute ‘symbolic sites of cultural
exchange. They are the points of entry and departure, the mouth of
an imagined body of the nation-state, where the foreign gets muddled
up with the familiar and land-locked certainty is blurred by maritime
exchange’. The passage of the ships behind the stream of vapour
can be seen to symbolise such blurring and, akin to the video’s title,
encourages viewers to reflect upon the different states of transition
that cargoes, whether of goods or people, undergo when crossing the
Mediterranean Sea.
This is not, however, the only haptic quality of Kameli’s work for, as
with Sedira’s MiddleSea, audio also forms a key aspect of the installation.
Incorporating ambient elements and muffled industrial noise, Kameli
channels sound within the exhibition space to create a sensorial effect
upon the bodies of viewers, especially via the soundtrack’s prominent,
rumbling bass. Her efforts pay off: when it was shown as part of an
installation conceived for the exhibition New Cartographies: Algeria–
France–UK (2011), held at Cornerhouse in Manchester, visitors reported
that experiencing the installation reminded them of their own previous
journeys by sea, even inducing seasickness in some. As such, Dissolution
evocatively underlines the importance of embodied spectatorship, as
explored by Marks (2000).
Kameli clearly succeeds in recreating some of the peculiarities of
such maritime crossings for viewers. The languor with which the vessels
travel across the screen conveys well both what Allan Sekula has termed
the ‘slow time’ of the sea and, by showing the gentle movement of
commercial ships, its ‘containerisation’, since 90 per cent of the world’s
cargoes are now apparently carried by ship (Sandhu 2012). The instal-
lation therefore not only reminds us of postcolonial Algeria’s increasing
incorporation into such global flows of capital and commerce, but
also invites us to reflect on the nature of the Mediterranean Sea in an
era of globalisation, as the incessant flow of goods shown on screen
contrasts with the far greater hurdles faced by much of the human traffic
attempting to navigate the same space. The extreme long shot used
throughout accentuates this division, intimating that those watching
from the Mediterranean Sea’s southern shores are far removed from such
circuits. While onlookers may enjoy the view, the static camera angle
deployed arguably positions them as passive and powerless before this

spectacle of global capitalism, and infers that its much-lauded benefits

may well be passing many of them by.
A further trick employed by Kameli confirms this for, given the
hypnotic qualities of these ponderous images, viewers may not initially
realise that the footage they watch is not continuous but a single
take played four times on a loop. 20 By never showing ships depart or
arrive, Dissolution, like La Traversée and MiddleSea, emphasises the
Mediterranean Sea’s liminality; but by repeating the footage of cargoes
crossing the same space, Kameli also underlines the relentless flows
of global commerce, which, coupled with the distinctive use of sound
within the installation space and the murkiness of large sections of the
images on screen, suggest it is a force more to be feared than celebrated.
We now turn finally to a work also conceived in Algiers that similarly
muses on the significance of the Mediterranean Sea from southern
shores, but provides a particularly idiosyncratic vision of postcolonial
migration. Consisting of a large-scale map, by Algerian artist Zineddine
Bessaï, H-OUT: Le Guide de la migration (2010) playfully charts a
variety of paths for potential migrants departing from Algiers (Fig. 9).
The map incorporates a dense array of text and image which presents a
distinctly Algerian vision of such themes, placing the Mediterranean at
the centre of its world view while at the same time, by drawing a new
cartography of the globe, situating it in relation to other parts of the
world. 21
By focusing on migration, Bessaï’s work engages with one of the key
narratives of contemporary Algeria, namely the increasing numbers of
harraga (mostly young Algerian men) who risk their lives by taking to
the Mediterranean Sea in order to gain clandestine entry into the EU. 22
Regularly reported within the Algerian press, the public has reacted with
shock to the phenomenon, and been appalled by the risks clandestine
migrants will take to reach the Mediterranean’s northern shores. 23
Within Algeria itself, it has also formed the subject of several recent
films, notably Tariq Teguia’s Rome plutôt que vous (2008) and Inland
(2009), and Merzak Allouache’s Harragas (2010). 24
Despite the playfulness of much of Bessaï’s imagery, which
incorporates a range of ludic symbols, the perils faced by harraga who
attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea are not disguised in his guide.
If target destinations for migrants are marked with the largest and most
prominent symbol, that symbol is still an ‘X’: one that marks the spot
but also signifies negation. Meanwhile, scattered liberally across the
sea are skull and crossbones symbols, which, the map’s legend tells us,

Guide de la
H-OUT: Le
Zineddine
migration
Figure 9
Bessaï,
(2010)

denote locations of drowning (‘Naufrage/Noyade’); and the fragility

of the makeshift vessels often used by migrants is highlighted by the
flotilla of paper boats that fill the space between southern Europe and
North Africa. Meanwhile, the use of paper planes to signify short-term
visas similarly emphasises the constraints upon circulation that face
most Algerians today: even when travel abroad is legally permitted, the
welcome is usually fleeting.
It follows, then, that within Bessaï’s guide, a clear divide operates
between two worlds. This is asserted visually by the strands of barbed
wire that separate the Mediterranean and other seas into two distinct
sections, with Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia clearly
above the line, and Africa, the Middle East and South America firmly
below. The words that straddle the wire confirm this: ‘monde normal’
above and ‘tiermonde wine koulech normale’ (‘tiers-monde là où tout
est normal’) below, the latter caption drily playing upon the use of the
word ‘normal’ within Algeria to denote wry resignation at the state
of affairs. The map therefore presents the world in binaristic terms
for would-be migrants in Algiers: anywhere above the barbed wire a
potential destination; anywhere below, where clock faces without hands
signify political and economic stasis, of considerably less appeal.
Bessaï’s division of the Mediterranean Sea with barbed wire serves as
a powerful reminder to viewers that even if, as Pickles argues, ‘border
zones are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather
are at the centre’, and that ‘it is in these “contact” zones of movement
where new formations of a people (demos) constitute new constellations
and powers of citizenship where translations are already taking place’
(2005: 263; emphasis in the original), the border is also ‘the materiali-
zation of authority’ (Chambers 2008: 6). This is borne out forcefully by
Bessaï’s choice of word, houdoud, to define the barbed wire in Arabic.
Noting that there are many different words for ‘border’ in Arabic, such
as hijab – in the sense of ‘screen, curtain, dividing text(ure)’ – Zaccaria
(2011: 11) describes hudud in contrast as ‘closer to the idea of a fortified
curtain’. As such, the term captures the increasing militarisation of the
EU’s Mediterranean borders and of the sea itself in response to growing
numbers of undocumented migrants. Yet that response itself in many
ways has simply served to exacerbate the problem it sets out to solve. For
David Lutterbeck (2006: 78), ‘the very existence of the phenomenon of
“boat people” has been a problem of European countries’ own making:
it has been the consequence of their increasingly strict immigration, visa
and asylum policies, which have left clandestine entry as practically the

only possibility to enter the EU’. The deployment of warships by some

European navies in response to clandestine migration has simply forced
migrants to choose even more perilous routes; increased their reliance
on human traffickers; and seems to have had little effect on reducing the
total volume of clandestine migration towards countries such as Italy
and Spain (Lutterbeck 2006: 78).
As Bessaï’s legends and captions would suggest, and despite the
prominence of the visual icons used to denote different destinations and
hurdles for migrants, the map also has a linguistic message to convey.
Moreover, the main language used is neither French nor standard Arabic
but darja, the Arabic dialect spoken by most Algerians. Very much a
hybrid language, incorporating as it does words from Arabic, Berber,
French and Spanish, the foregrounding of darja by Bessaï can itself be
viewed as a political act, since the Algerian state refuses to recognise it as
a distinct national language. Indeed, the complete absence of any Arabic
script makes the cartographer’s rejection of the state-sanctioned version
of classical Arabic clear. Although the standard language spoken within
Algeria, darja is seldom formally written. The fact that Bessaï uses it to
designate place names and define symbols in the accompanying key is
therefore highly significant. Chambers and Curti (2008: 390) argue that
‘translation introduces the possibility of alterity, and of being “othered”’.
By using a language that officially does not exist, but is spoken in some
variation by practically all Algerians, Bessaï’s map resonates with their
argument that ‘other histories’ (Chambers and Curti 2008: 390) of the
Mediterranean need to be considered in order to challenge conventional
understanding and dominant norms. As H-OUT makes clear, such
histories also need to be read in new, different languages.
Furthermore, the linguistic playfulness that characterises darja is
inherent within the very title of the map, which fittingly connotes the
maritime. Presented within the form of a fish in the top left-hand corner
of the map, ‘h-out’ derives from the word hout ( ): used generically
to mean ‘fish’ within Algerian Arabic. It is also used more widely in
Arabic to denote the zodiac sign Pisces and as a word for ‘whale’,
thereby suggesting links with Melville’s Moby-Dick. The time and space
of that famous maritime tale might seem far removed from the world
mapped by Bessaï; but as Gilroy (2007a: 22) argues, citing C. L. R. James
(2001), the vision of a new humanism offered by Melville remains
relevant today and ‘anticipated features of territorial solidarity which
would not become fully visible for some time to come’. It remains to be
seen whether Bessaï’s vision of life on the seas will come to be similarly

prophetic, but his work certainly reminds viewers of the limits of the
cosmopolitanism across land and sea that James hoped Melville’s work
would herald.
Cartography, of course, served as a key tool of colonial hegemony
during French Algeria and, as Gil and Duarte (2011: 1) point out,
‘mapping is simultaneously a task of discerning and appropriating, of
study and domination’. Given the power relations to which Bessaï’s
work bears witness, we might instead read H-OUT as a counter-map,
redrawing the world from the perspective of a prospective migrant from
Algiers. By explicitly providing a view of the world from an Algerian
male perspective, Bessaï provides no pretence with regard to the subjec-
tiveness of his vision of global spatial relations. 25 Indeed, this is the
point: by redrawing this map of the world, he presents a peculiarly
Algerian vision of contemporary migration and the many barriers that
impede it. 26
Bessaï’s work reminds us forcefully, therefore, of how the contem-
porary geopolitics of the Mediterranean Sea have created a space of
containment and perilous circulation for many migrants from southern
shores. While those who, largely through accident of birth, have the
right passport or profile to be granted the necessary visas permitting
legal crossings of this maritime space, those with neither find the EU’s
door closed firmly shut. As Bessaï’s map so pointedly and poignantly
suggests, most would-be migrants are left with a stark choice: make
paper planes and boats like the ones depicted and daydream about
departure, or embark on the flimsy unseaworthy craft they represent and
chance their luck on the lottery of the sea.
Conclusion
We noted in the Introduction how Étienne Balibar, confronting the

complex links that unite France and Algeria, was moved to question in
the mid-1990s whether France and Algeria could in fact be considered
separate nations. Arguing that national belonging need not necessarily
be thought of in terms of whole numbers, he proposed instead that,
given their interdependence, Algeria and France together might add up
to 1.5 rather than 2. Furthermore, rather than view both countries as
divided by post-colonial borders, Balibar suggested that together they
were becoming a ‘frontière-monde’ (1998: 81): a thick and complex
contact zone that itself also functions as a frontier.

The novelty of this vision was certainly distinctive. What was

surprising, however, was how little the Mediterranean Sea featured
in Balibar’s arithmetic. Apart from referring to ‘la Méditerranée’ in
passing in his opening paragraph (1998: 73) and briefly mentioning the
‘deux côtés de la Méditerranée’ (1998: 77), the only other reference lay in
his final sentence, where he lyrically concluded that the exemplarity of
France and Algeria as a ‘frontière-monde’ remains of wider importance,
and that it is ‘par ce biais que l’idée très générale d’un “espace méditer-
ranéen”, laquelle ne désigne pas tant une histoire ou une culture, qu’un
point de rencontre et de conflits permanents entre histoires et entre
cultures, pourra redevenir l’horizon d’un projet de civilisation’ (1998:
88). 27 The inference may be that the sea lies at the centre of such a
space, but the elision of its specific importance for both countries within
his essay remains striking. Arguably, its decidedly spectral presence
recalls the supplementary logic identified by Jacques Derrida (1967: 208)
whereby, ‘qu’il s’ajoute ou qu’il se substitue, le supplément est extérieur,
hors de la positivité à laquelle il se surajoute, étranger à ce qui, pour être
lui remplacé, doit être autre que lui’.28 Here the Mediterranean performs
such a supplementary function: both added extra, supplied incidentally,
and integral part that completes Balibar’s vision.
The significance of this point, however, extends beyond the confines
of Balibar’s essay. As this chapter has shown, representations of the
Mediterranean Sea regularly recur when the links between France and
Algeria are probed, and so much so that the Mediterranean arguably
functions as a supplement itself to both countries. Perhaps we therefore
need to redo our maths and propose a way of conceptualising the
Franco-Algerian relationship that factors in the sea lying between them.
A spatial metaphor we might suggest could be to draw their relationship
instead as a Venn diagram, with France, Algeria and the Mediterranean
Sea as three sets, all of which overlap one another. Their symmetric
difference would mean neither that both countries are ad infinitum
locked together nor that the Mediterranean Sea exists as an exclusively
Franco-Algerian space, but their intersections would highlight how the
three inhere within one another. The central intersection found within
all three, meanwhile, could symbolise the supplementarity that links
them all, and show the Mediterranean as a space which continues to
bind both countries together; which lies at the heart of their relationship;
and without which neither is ever quite complete.
Whether as spatio-temporal barrier to French Algeria, space of
liminality for migrants and diasporic groups, or increasingly policed

border between the EU and the Maghreb, the Mediterranean Sea has
clearly played an important role in how links between France and
Algeria have been represented. Notions of borders and frontiers between
and within both countries, of course, pertain beyond the Mediterranean
Sea and its shores. We now turn our attention inland to explore how
further notions of space and place – so crucial when France and Algeria
are depicted visually – have been represented away from the coastline.

6
A Sense of Place:
Envisioning Post-Colonial Space
in France and Algeria
A Sense of Place
Space and the Post-colonial
The previous chapter foregrounded the space of the Mediterranean and its
role as a theatre for depicting and investigating the relationship between
France and Algeria. We explored how it interferes with and inflects the
trajectories of people on both its French and Algerian shores whose
lives are defined in some way by moving between the two countries; or,
indeed, by the desire or inability to do so. The Mediterranean is both a
space to be negotiated and a horizon beyond which lie lands at once real
and fantasised. Our aim in this final chapter is to examine how France
and Algeria themselves are envisioned in the contemporary period, and,
in particular, how they are portrayed as post-colonial countries. We
have considered already, in Chapter 1, how an understanding of colonial
Algeria is sustained in the present through visual culture. Our focus
here is on how the two independent, sovereign states which emerged out
of the Évian Agreements of March 1962, each attempting to forge their
own way following decolonisation, are perceived and portrayed visually
in relation to each other, and what spaces are privileged as locations for
staging their relationship on both sides of the Mediterranean. Where do
journeys between the two begin and end? What spaces and places are
bridged as a result? What points of comparison, contact or opposition
are established between France and Algeria through the depiction of
space, and what sense of each place do we acquire as a result? How do
the circulation of individuals and their movement between and across
the spaces of France and Algeria – whether as characters in films or

travellers with cameras – open up perspectives on each territory and

shape our understanding of them?
Once more, therefore, we return to the central role played by space
and its visualisation in the articulation, delineation and exploration
of identity, whether national, collective or individual. We discussed in
Chapter 1 how the visual representation of French Algeria is a privileged
vector for pied-noir remembrance. The spatialisation of memory
through the photographic image was seen to facilitate individual and
collective memory through identification and recognition. At stake in
nostalgic photo-books is the restaging of colonial space, and colonial
dominion over space, which at once acknowledges and wishes away the
epochal break represented by Algerian independence in 1962, and the
subsequent assertion of Algerian sovereignty over a henceforth national
territory. The central concern of this chapter, on the other hand, is with
representations of post-colonial space. Aware of the contested life of
the term ‘post-colonial’, as we noted in the Introduction, we use it here
first in a chronological sense, to characterise space on both sides of the
Mediterranean which emerged as a result of the disentanglement of
France and Algeria, and was shaped by the economic, political, social
and demographic forces affecting each country as they took separate
paths. An obvious example of this in the French context would be the
extensive programme of state-led modernisation in the Gaullist era,
which, as Kristin Ross (1995) has argued, and as we discuss further
below, can be seen as directly related to processes of decolonisation.
Yet, at the same time, many of those forces affected both countries
together given that, as Forsdick and Murphy (2003: 3) point out, while
their relationship may have become ‘post-colonial’ from a chrono-
logical perspective, it was also ‘postcolonial’, in the sense of being
heavily influenced by the persistent legacy of the colonial relationship,
whether in terms of the migratory flows between the two countries or
‘a reluctantly shared history repressed and yet constantly threatening to
return’. Moreover, and increasingly during the contemporary period,
the Franco-Algerian relationship has found itself configured within the
broader geopolitical and economic transformations characteristic of
globalisation, defined both by the accelerated flow of goods and capital
around the world and by its corollary, the increasingly chaotic flow of
people in pursuit of opportunity, especially from the global South to the
global North (a figuration of economic and geopolitical power relations
whose currency was well established by the end of the twentieth century,
and for which the Mediterranean basin was a key location).

A Sense of Place 147
As Hardt and Negri (2000) argue, the shift in the balance of power
from nation to capital implied by economic globalisation poses a threat
to national sovereignty and national identity, one which each country
must negotiate, and which is arguably felt all the more keenly given that
asserting a sense of national identity was central for both in the years
following Algerian independence. For, as Benjamin Stora has underlined,
both the war and Algeria’s accession to statehood were crucial events
for each country: overtly so, in the case of Algeria, where the national
revolution was presented as ‘l’essence même de la légitimité du pouvoir’,1
particularly following the military coup of 1965 led by Houari Boumediene
(Stora 1991: 7; Evans and Phillips 2007: 81–8); less obviously, but no less
significantly in France, where the political upheaval triggered by the war,
in terms of the constitutional crisis of 1958, the return to power of Charles
de Gaulle and the institution of the Fifth Republic, led to the country’s
political and economic reconfiguration (expressed most notably in a
sustained programme of modernisation), and shapes to this day France’s
political culture, permeated as it is by persistent debates over republican
ideology and national identity in a post-colonial context (Silverman 1992;
Blanchard, Bancel and Lemaire 2006).
We noted in the Introduction that the Franco-Algerian tandem
presents particular complexities in its post-colonial form. On the one
hand, to explore their post-colonial relationship is to consider the
encounter between two distinct sovereign, national spaces and, concomi-
tantly, the portrayal of two (increasingly distinct) national identities. We
need therefore to consider how the national spaces of each country are
made manifest and brought into dialogue through visual representation,
and also how it might capture and display the consequences of decoloni-
sation for both countries in spatial and other terms. For example, while
the two capital cities of Algiers and Paris certainly act as focal points
for the staging of the Franco-Algerian relationship – in films such as
Merzak Allouache’s Salut cousin! (1996) or Mahmoud Zemmouri’s Beur
blanc rouge (2006) – we can also identify the persistence of other notable
topoi, such as the bled (ancestral village) in Algeria, and the banlieues
(deprived suburbs of major cities) in France, the development of which
in the post-war period as both a phenomenon of urbanisation and a
political and social problem is in many ways related directly to the legacy
of decolonisation as it is played out in terms of immigration, population
distribution and state-led modernisation.
Yet, as we also noted in both the Introduction and in Chapter 5,
the extent to which post-colonial France and Algeria can be thought

through as independent nation states has itself been called into question,
most notably by Étienne Balibar, for whom each is irrevocably bound up
in the other. What he terms ‘l’ensemble franco-algérien’ (1998: 81) has
the appearance of two nations, the will to be two nations, but in many
respects the everyday reality of one nation, a reality forged in particular
by the extensive transnational networks constituted by familial links,
diasporas and migrations. Balibar asserts the complexity of the Franco-
Algerian entity, arguing that France and Algeria are not divided by a
frontier in the post-colonial era so much as themselves constituting what
he calls a ‘thick’ frontier or ‘frontière-monde’ (1998: 81); that is to say,
they constitute a world as frontier, as vast border zone or contact zone.
As such, the Franco-Algerian space is at once hybrid and hybridising, a
location of transnational encounter and identity formation. The notion
is pursued by Paul Silverstein (2004) in his discussion of ‘Algeria in
France’. For Silverstein, the imbrications of Algerian immigrant (and
especially Berber) communities within contemporary France opens up
what he terms a ‘transpolitical’ space in which political and cultural
debate and exchange cut across national boundaries.
From the perspective offered by Balibar and Silverstein, the Franco-
Algerian tandem emerges as an exemplary coupling for thinking about
broader issues concerning the status, stability and location of frontiers
in an era when national sovereignty is increasingly called into question
by the deregulated flows of capital driving globalisation, and by the
political responses to capital’s demands, the most notable of which was
the creation of the supranational space of the European Union in 1992.
Indeed, Carrie Tarr (2007) notes how an increasing number of French
films during the 1990s and 2000s explore encounters at and through
France’s borders. In doing so, they can be seen to stage a general anxiety
over the porosity of national borders, and their uncertain status in the
context of European integration. For, while the national boundaries
within the EU are legislated away (for example, via the gradual expansion
of the Schengen area throughout the 1990s and 2000s to facilitate cross-
border movement), the EU’s own supranational frontier is asserted as
a filter and bulwark against perceived threats from beyond – a beyond
which begins with countries such as Algeria on the southern shores of
the Mediterranean.
Mireille Rosello sounds an important note of caution in relation
to this. Even as we sketch out the possibilities of a transpolitical and
transnational Franco-Algerian space, she argues, we cannot overlook
the persistence and realities of borders on the ground, particularly – as

we saw in the previous chapter – for those looking north from Algeria
and elsewhere: ‘pour beaucoup de ressortissants qui cherchent à mettre
en pratique une double appartenance, la séparation est peut-être au
contraire plus traditionnellement binaire que jamais’ (2003: 795). 2 The
peculiarity of the Franco-Algerian relationship, then, lies in the fact that
the frontier between them oscillates constantly between dissolution into
the transnational and the transpolitical on the one hand, and obstinate
persistence on the other, as a structuring of identity rooted and defined
in clearly national terms. Moreover, the Franco-Algerian frontier can
manifest itself not merely at the bureaucratic and administrative levels
of the state, but at different moments and in a range of contexts and
locations: familial, social or cultural. The simultaneous presence and
absence of frontiers emerges as a key tension whenever the relationship
between the two countries is staged and played out. What interests us
here is how visual culture helps to map and understand the complex
contours of the Franco-Algerian relationship, and the role played by the
visual depiction of space and place in this process.
Any portrait of post-colonial states and spaces will inevitably be
inflected by the contemporary realities of those states, and the material,
social and political transformations they undergo as they forge their own
way in the world. Equally inevitably, such portraits will also be informed
by the history and consequences of the colonial relationship between
France and Algeria, or what Michael O’Riley (2010: 80), drawing on
Balibar, describes as ‘the haunting of both national territories by the
phantom memories of Franco-Algerian colonial relations’. Put another
way, post-colonial Algeria and France are spaces with history populated
and traversed by people with histories and memories; people who very
often – as we have seen throughout this book – are all too aware of the
way in which memory and identity are bound up in place, and whose
lives and trajectories are frequently constituted by co-ordinates plotted
between and across both national spaces.
Furthermore, the visualisation of post-colonial spaces in contem-
porary visual culture is frequently inflected by, and embodied within,
particular perspectives, subjectivities, histories and memories, whether
it be life stories which are staged and dramatised in cinematic form, or
(auto-)biographical journeys and projects in the case of a photographer
such as Bruno Boudjelal (2009). We therefore need to consider how
individual trajectories illuminate and draw together the post-colonial
spaces of France and Algeria, and the interplay they involve back and
forth between the individual and collective, past and present, history

and memory, and across spaces which are at once transnational and
unambiguously national. So our concern in this chapter is with what we
can term, following Rosello (2005), ‘performative encounters’ between
the national, post-colonial spaces of France and Algeria, encounters
whose mediation produces new forms of understanding. Where Rosello
investigates them in the domain of literature, we explore their manifes-
tation in the sphere of visual culture. We are concerned too with how
those encounters are presented and lived by individuals with their own
memories, histories and trajectories.
Visualising Post-colonial Encounters
The post-colonial encounter between France and Algeria is a theme

evoked most obviously (at first glance at least) in the films made by
French directors of Maghrebi origin in the 1980s and 1990s that focused
on the lives and fortunes of Maghrebi immigrants and their descendants
in France and came to be known collectively as beur cinema. As Naficy
(2001) and Tarr (2005) among others have argued, such films foreground
questions of identity as ‘in-between-ness’, exploring the difficulty
many people of Maghrebi heritage face, and men in particular, when
negotiating a place for themselves within post-colonial metropolitan
France. They evoke how it feels to live between different cultures and to
receive the ‘hospitality’ – or, more accurately, the lack of it – shown by
the French republic towards those over whose families it once claimed
dominion.
They are also films in which the depiction of space has a vital
role to play. Indeed, for Levine (2008: 45), space and territory are the
most productive perspectives from which to view beur cinema. These
films repeatedly investigate France’s post-colonial landscapes and, most
notably, the housing estates on the edge of the country’s major cities
where many immigrant populations found themselves settling, and
which frame their lived experience within the French republic. In doing
so, they reveal the spatial dynamics of power at work in contemporary
metropolitan France – namely, how power relations are manifested in
spatial terms, and predicated on a persistent opposition between centre
and periphery (or, at the very least, the persistent perception of the
currency of that opposition).
However, as Higbee and Lim (2010: 12) have rightly observed, beur
cinema for the most part has been concerned over the years with

articulating the place of Franco-Maghrebi youth within the French

nation, a preoccupation signalled by Malik Chibane’s Hexagone (1994),
one of the best-known examples of such films. Its title makes explicit
reference to the familiar metaphor for French national space, which,
as we noted in Chapter 1, took root with particular vigour in political
discourse during France’s early post-colonial years, as the country found
comfort in a figure which asserted a certain self-contained geometry,
order and precision, and reflected the modernity it was determined to
embrace. The film stands as an invitation to remember the beurs and
the banlieues to which many of them have been relegated as integral to
that national space, and a call for the contemporary republic to reflect
on its identity and direction in the wake of the decolonisation which
itself triggered the reconfiguration of France’s spatial imaginary, and its
understanding of its own borders and frontiers.
For Higbee (2007), Algerian émigré directors such as Merzak Allouache
or Mahmoud Zemmouri, whose activities, political positions or personal
circumstances have led them to leave Algeria or operate between France
and Algeria, have engaged more directly with questions of transnational
connections, movement and exchange, and explored identity as it might
take shape within and between each nation and culture. Yet while they
have attracted the most sustained critical attention, figures like Allouache
are not alone in staging the relationship between France and Algeria. It
is also the concern of directors of pied-noir origin such as Alexandre
Arcady, Dominique Cabrera and Nicole Garcia, whose own histories and
trajectories have made them sensitive to the dynamics of loss, memory,
nostalgia and fantasy we explored in Chapter 1. Furthermore, neither is
it solely in the domain of cinema where these questions are pursued, even
if cinema is where they have been most visibly explored, and where most
critical debate has been focused in recent years. Staging the encounter
between France and Algeria in spatial terms has been a recurrent theme
too of contemporary photography and the visual arts by those with roots
on both sides of the Mediterranean, whether it be the exploration of the
role of the ferry as a liminal space between France and Algeria in the
work of Élisabeth Leuvrey and Zineb Sedira, discussed in Chapter 5, or
Kader Attia’s sustained interrogation of the impact of French modernist
thinking on colonial space in Algeria (Crawley Jackson 2011).
Likewise, the theme is central to the work of various contemporary
photographers, including Bruno Boudjelal and Raymond Depardon,
who anthologised a selection of his work on Algeria in 2010. Particularly
curious, as we discuss later, is the lavish portrait of Algeria by French

photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand (2006). Part of his ‘vue du ciel’

project, Arthus-Bertrand’s glossy, full-colour images of Algeria from the
air stage its landscapes and urban environments in spectacular fashion.
Considering the visual mediation of the Franco-Algerian relationship in
the contemporary period therefore requires us not just to look beyond
the work of beur and émigré directors to that of other filmmakers
preoccupied by the issue, but also – and notwithstanding cinema’s vital
importance in staging and exploring the Franco-Algerian tandem – to
resituate contemporary cinema itself in the field of visual culture more
generally.
Negotiating History between France and Algeria
As we noted above, the spatial encounters between each country need to

be plotted against the backdrop of, and in relation to, a complex set of
historical co-ordinates. Moreover, these co-ordinates themselves have a
bearing on how and where the encounter is staged, and how each national
space is envisioned. We can identify two crucial determining contexts in
particular. The first of these involves contemporary historical realities,
the most notable of which is the period of bloody civil conflict in Algeria
which broke out following the cancellation of elections in 1992, persisted
for the best part of a decade, and had immediate, practical consequences
for the portrayal of Franco-Algerian relations. 3 Carrie Tarr (2005: 188–9)
points out that, despite an increasing concern with the relationship and
movement between France and Algeria, Algerian space is relatively
invisible in beur and émigré films of the period, owing to the impact of
the civil war not only on the practicalities of filming in the country but
also in terms of the threats posed to cultural figures in Algeria during
the conflict, including directors such as Allouache. Consequently, as the
1990s progressed, films evoking the Franco-Algerian relationship – such
as Salut cousin! and Dominique Cabrera’s L’Autre Côté de la mer [The
Other Shore] (1997) – were usually staged in a French setting, and it was
through photography that visual encounters with Algeria under civil
war conditions were played out, the relative mobility and discretion of
the still camera allowing photographers such as Boudjelal, Depardon
and Michael von Graffenried to avoid some of the problems confronting
cinema film crews.4
The relative settling of the security situation in Algeria during the
2000s, marked especially by the election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika as

president in 1999, the passing of the Law on Civil Concord which came
into force in January 2000, and subsequent amnesties for many of
those involved in the fighting (Evans and Phillips 2007: 262–5), meant
that more filming began to take place in Algeria, as Chapter 4 testified.
During the 2000s, a range of films, including Tony Gatlif’s Exils (2004),
Djamel Bensalah’s Il était une fois dans l’Oued [Once Upon A Time
in the Oued] (2005) and Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche’s Bled Number One
(2006), set out to stage the Franco-Algerian encounter on Algerian soil,
each dealing in its own way with the legacies and consequences of the
civil conflict. In fact, the films of this period are striking for the divergent
ways in which they envision Algeria, from the quasi-ethnographic
investigation of life in post-conflict rural Algeria through the prism of
emigrant figure Kamel in Bled Number One, to the spectacular aerial
photography of glittering seas and majestic Mediterranean cities in
Il était une fois dans l’Oued.
At the same time, material from this period engages with the legacy
of the Algerian War and French colonial involvement in Algeria, whose
consequences continue to be felt on both sides of the Mediterranean.
It maps the complex layering of history in which individuals become
caught up, and through which they must understand themselves and
their situation. L’Autre Côté de la mer and Exils, for example, depict
two types of ‘return’ by pied-noir figures, one to France and the other
to Algeria; and Exils, along with Bled Number One and Beur blanc
rouge, explores the position of Franco-Maghrebi characters in relation
to an increasingly mythical version of Algeria as a country of roots and
origins. Bled Number One focuses on the confused legal and cultural
status of those born in France to Algerian parents, whose unresolved
citizenship leaves them open to the perils of the so-called double
peine (expulsion to their parents’ country of origin following a prison
sentence). Indeed, it is through their investigation of migration, return
and the negotiation of frontiers that films such as Bled Number One
and Exils raise broader questions about the nature of national space and
national frontiers in the contemporary world, and lend the specificities of
the Franco-Algerian relationship an exemplary quality. In the remainder
of the chapter, we home in on filmic and photographic material from
the 1990s and 2000s, by figures from a range of backgrounds, which
brings together and holds in tension this constellation of historical,
political and social forces; and we examine how such forces are
played out in spatial terms, across the different locations in which the
Franco-Algerian encounter is envisioned.

Visions of Post-coloniality in France
If we begin on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, it is because

– for the historical and political reasons noted above – films evoking
the Franco-Algerian encounter in the 1990s are predominantly set in
France. They can be situated in relation to a broader concern at the
time across the spectrum of French culture with mapping post-colonial
France, from beur and banlieue cinema to literary texts by writers such
as Annie Ernaux (1993; 1997), François Maspero (1990) and Jean Rolin
(1995), and photographic projects and collaborations (such as Larvor
and Sebbar 1998). Such work identified the often radically modernised
spaces of contemporary France, many of which were to be found on the
suburban margins of its major cities (both geographically and socio-
economically), as key locations for understanding the political and
demographic transformations of post-colonial France, and central to the
debate over identity in and of the contemporary French republic. In doing
so, it signalled the intimate relationship between French decolonisation
and modernisation asserted by Kristin Ross (1995).
If the spaces of the banlieue were emerging as particularly important,
it is because they were home to large sections of France’s multiethnic
and multicultural immigrant populations, welcomed by France as a
cheap labour force during the years of modernisation and expansion
in the 1950s and 1960s; but those spaces were themselves products of
the extensive programme of spatial reconfiguration and modernisation
pursued with particular vigour under De Gaulle in the 1960s. Having
drawn a line under French Algeria, and all it represented in terms of
France’s imperial ambitions, De Gaulle identified in territorial moderni-
sation a means of reasserting the country’s national identity, or what he
had famously called ‘une certaine idée de la France’ (De Gaulle 1954: 1).
Moreover, it was a strategy dependent directly on France’s colonial
legacy, not only in terms of the influx of cheap immigrant labour it
required, but also because it exploited planning techniques developed
in the French colonies, and implemented by the numerous colonial
administrators who were beginning to return home. In effect, as Ross
(1995: 7) puts it, France ‘turned to a form of interior colonialism’ during
the 1960s. The close links between (de)colonisation and modernisation
in France were made manifest by the appointment in 1961 of Paul
Delouvrier, who had previously served as the French government’s senior
representative in Algeria between 1958 and 1960, to oversee the modern-
isation and development (aménagement) of the Paris region. 5

By the 1990s, in short, and to borrow from Didier Lapeyronnie (2006),

the banlieue had become a ‘théâtre colonial’, where the legacies and
consequences of France’s activities and ambitions were played out. Itself
a product of France’s post-colonial transformation during the 1960s
and 1970s, it contributed in turn to the developments which are seen as
symptomatic of France’s post-colonial dis-ease, in terms of ghettoisation,
social exclusion and communitarianism; and it is with the problem of
how France is living with itself in the contemporary moment that much
of the literary and visual cultural production of the period is concerned.
The first two films we consider here recalibrate that perspective
through their explicit thematisation of contact between France and
Algeria. They historicise our understanding of post-colonial France by
bringing Algeria back into the frame via their central characters, and
reminding us of the ways in which Algeria persists in France. If we
bring together Allouache’s Salut cousin! and Cabrera’s L’Autre Côté de
la mer, it is first because of the common ground they share. Released in
the late 1990s and set in the contemporary period, both feature a visit
from Algeria to France, one by Alilo, an Algerian national who comes to
Paris to collect clothes destined for trabendo (trade of illegally imported
goods) in Algiers and meets up with his cousin Mok, of Algerian
immigrant origin but Parisian born and bred; the other by Georges, a
pied-noir businessman who remained in Oran after independence and
whose visit to Paris for an eye operation leads to encounters with various
family members and acquaintances with connections to Algeria. Both
films open up perspectives on Paris as a post-colonial city through the
viewpoints of the central characters and the places where they spend
their time. At the same time, the contrasting socio-cultural origins and
trajectories of the films’ main characters (already signalled by their given
names) mean they plot different routes across the city, and make clear
the complex and heterogeneous nature of its postcoloniality.
Salut cousin! is in many ways an essay about contemporary Paris,
and how the city has been shaped, constituted and populated in the
post-colonial period. The theme of urban change is foregrounded from
the start, when Mok brings Alilo home to his flat in the ramshackle
and crumbling neighbourhood of La Moskova in the eighteenth
arrondissement, an area which he optimistically presents as ‘l’avenir de
Paris’6 thanks to the young, upwardly mobile and artistic populations he
claims are settling there. Its instability as a space and its uncertain future
is confirmed, in more negative tone, by Mok’s neighbour Fatoumata
(with whom Alilo will become romantically involved at the end of the

film), who argues rather that it is ‘menacée par la disparition’.7 Indeed,

during a tour of the city which Mok gives Alilo shortly after having
taken him to this relic of the Parisian past, the film highlights a recent
attempt to express a vision of French modernity and futurity in the form
of the Opéra Bastille.
Completed in 1989, it is one of the most recognisable of the grands
travaux commissioned during François Mitterrand’s presidency to mark
the bicentenary of the French Revolution; but, along with buildings
such as the Grande Arche de la Défense, its role was also to articulate
France’s national identity and status in the contemporary world through
the symbolic manipulation of space. By locating an institution of high
culture on the site of one of the founding events of the French Revolution,
the state set out to make manifest France’s position as an advanced
nation and beacon of enlightenment, and underscore the relationship
between that position and the events which had taken place at the
Bastille 200 years previously; but if Allouache dwells on the building,
it is perhaps because of what it obscures as much as what it symbolises.
Panivong Norindr (1996: 251) has argued that the aim of Mitterrand’s
grands travaux was to ‘fortify the construction of a national cultural
identity and of an imaginary homogeneous community’, and that it did
so at the expense of obscuring or denying the realities of the increasingly
pluralist French society embodied by Mok himself, and the multicultural,
multiethnic district to the north in which he lives.8
Allouache triangulates these two locations in central Paris with a third
in the near suburbs which reflects another form taken by post-colonial
modernisation in France. Mok’s parents live on the high-rise housing
estate of Les Courtillières in Bobigny, developed as part of the spatial
reorganisation of the Paris region led by Paul Delouvrier in the 1960s.
Drawing in part, as we noted above, on lessons learned about urban
planning and spatial development in the former colonies, the Schéma
directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris, which
Delouvrier published in 1965, proposed the radical reshaping of the
region’s economic and transport infrastructure; the creation of five new
départements (including Seine-Saint-Denis, of which Bobigny was the
administrative capital); and the expansion of mixed and social housing
(including projects such as Les Courtillières) in order to accommodate a
rising urban population, many of whom were of immigrant origin.
The first scenes at Les Courtillières, shot at night as the cousins return
from an unsuccessful rapping gig by Mok, assert the estate’s foreboding
monumentality, verticality and scale, and, as such, contribute to an

Figure 10 Reframing the Parisian banlieue: Les Courtillières in Salut cousin! (Merzak
Allouache, 1996)
established iconography and understanding of the post-war banlieue

as a fundamentally alienating landscape. Moreover, their encounter
with it provokes Mok’s gloomy narrative of his family history which
sounds almost like a textbook example of deprivation and exclusion
(unemployed father, mentally ill mother, one brother in prison and the
other dead from an overdose, sister who has been forced to turn to
prostitution). However, Allouache successfully complicates this vision
of the banlieue when Alilo returns to Les Courtillières on his own to
visit Mok’s parents, and discovers the gap between Mok’s narrative and
the stable reality of their family life (father retired, brothers successfully
pursuing careers in New York, sister a taxi driver): the banlieue suddenly
appears synonymous less with alienation than with everyday life in all
its ordinary normality. Allouache’s more nuanced vision of the banlieue
is expressed in a sequence shot taken from an elevated position as the
sun sets, and which tracks Alilo as he moves through the estate in search
of his relations’ housing block. The wide angle panorama certainly
underlines the scale of the estate and its surroundings, as Alilo, a tiny
figure far below us, makes his way between the buildings; but he does
so accompanied by the sounds of a football match we can see being
played in the centre of the shot, and which grounds his second encounter
with Les Courtillières in a more reassuring context of communal leisure
activity (Fig. 10).

Tracing the circulation of Alilo around Paris, Salut cousin! invites us

to re-view the city from the immigrant’s perspective, while at the same
time mapping the locations of immigrant and diasporic life within it. In
this regard, the film dwells on the area around Barbès in the eighteenth
arrondissement, and reminds us in doing so that immigrant communities
are not always spatially peripheral, but constitutive also of the spaces of
central Paris. The boulevards and bars around Barbès emerge in the film
as the locus of an Algiers-in-Paris, where transnational networks are
activated, established and confirmed. Within minutes of arriving in the
area, for example, Alilo has encountered Rachid, a former policeman
who fled Algiers in fear of his life. The film draws the two cities into
dialogue from the start, encouraging the audience to think Paris through
in relation to Algiers and vice versa: ‘ça me rappelle Alger’, 9 observes
Alilo in the opening minutes with some surprise, as he encounters Mok’s
decrepit neighbourhood for the first time. On one level, Alilo’s bemused
reaction is clearly intended to serve as a humorous and deprecating
comment on both cities: if Mok’s quartier reminds him of Algiers, we
assume, it does so in its very decrepitude. His response destabilises the
presumed hierarchy between the two cities by signalling a gap between
the imagined grandeur and advancement of the former colonial capital
(an advancement whose wished fulfilment is expressed in buildings
such as the Opéra Bastille) and the reality of its uneven development in
the post-colonial era. Yet, read unironically, Alilo’s comment can also
be taken to express a sense of uncanny familiarity between Paris and
Algiers, a recognition on his part of how France left its imprint on the
look and feel of urban space in Algiers.
However, Alilo’s role involves more than just articulating an Algerian
perspective on Paris. Rather, he can be seen to take on a metonymic
quality through the way in which his embodied presence also allows
Algiers, we might say, to present itself within Paris. It is precisely through
Alilo’s presence in and movement through the city that Algiers-in-Paris
starts to materialise, and the spectator can grasp how Algiers is present
in filigree within Paris through a network of traces and connections
both historical and contemporary. From Rachid, the policeman fleeing
extremist threats and dogged by his actions during the unrest of October
1988, and the radical imam from Algiers who appears in the basement
mosque frequented by Alilo’s uncle, to the senior Algerian official
who organises a bogus arranged marriage for his daughter and Alilo
himself, the film reveals the extent to which Paris functions as something
approaching a spatial adjunct or extension of Algiers, a back yard for the

other capital in which its political disputes and parallel economy can be
given freer rein.
The constellation of Algerian characters introduced by Allouache
can be seen to encapsulate and summarise recent Algerian history
(and, in particular, how the FLN as Algeria’s ruling single party at first
resists, then initiates, then quashes political change over a period of
three or so years between the riots of October 1988 and the cancellation
of multi-party elections in January 1992). It also demonstrates how
historical and political processes begun and played out at a national level
have an impact on the lives of ordinary people at the level of the everyday,
not least in terms of the country’s increasing political and economic
disarray; but drawing out how Paris is shot through with Algiers serves
too as a reminder of how much Algeria’s present is embedded within and
defined by its Franco-Algerian past.
The historical depth and persistence of transnational connections
between France and Algeria are captured when Alilo meets the Jewish
pied-noir clothes manufacturer with whom his boss in Algiers does
business. The appearance of M. Maurice is a reminder of both the
diversity of the Algerian diaspora in Paris and the degree to which
relations between France and Algeria constitute the economic, social
and cultural life of the French capital. While he is sure never to return to
Algiers, Maurice maintains the presence of the city through recordings
of traditional Algerian music, which – in an echo of the situations
discussed in Chapter 1 – trigger memories of Algiers spatialised as walks
through the city’s European neighbourhoods. Thus, it seems, Alilo is
confronted at every turn with reminders of Algiers, and the diverse ways
in which Algeria is present in France, and vice versa.
However, the film also points to the fragility of these transnational
connections, and the ease with which people can fall foul of the borders,
frontiers and controls which intervene in post-colonial Franco-Algerian
relations. The two most obvious reminders come in the form of the
deportation first of Rachid (caught selling counterfeit Rolex watches)
and, secondly, at the end of the film, of Mok himself, whose failure
to acquire French citizenship, despite being born in France, leaves
him exposed to the threat of expulsion. The post-colonial realities of
frontiers manifest themselves with the arrival at his flat of the police to
serve a warrant for his deportation and escort him to the airport. Of
course, his arrest is central to the dramatic irony with which the film
concludes, as Alilo, having fallen in love with Fatoumata and having
decided to remain in Paris, replaces Mok within the parallel economy

of the black market and illegal immigration, according to what Rosello

(2001: 85) describes as a ‘logic of interchangeability’; but Mok’s fortunes
also serve as a warning that Alilo runs the risk of the same fate, and that
his new-found happiness with Fatoumata risks being only temporary.
Allouache’s portrait of Algiers-in-Paris, then, is inhabited by a
fundamental tension. At once an insight into the persistence and signif-
icance of the transnational connections which bind Algiers and Paris,
and the different locations where Algeria is present in Paris, it is simulta-
neously a reminder of the risks run by the individuals who populate
and constitute those networks, and the impermanence of their position
within and between each country. The vitality of transnational flows
and exchanges belies the fragile position of those who find themselves
without the papers necessary to confirm their national identity and
belonging, and therefore fall foul of the state’s ‘inhospitable suspicion of
strangers’ (Rosello 2001: 118).
The imbrications of Algeria and France are also pursued in Cabrera’s
L’Autre Côté de la mer, which came out a year after Salut cousin!. The
complexity and instability of the relationship between the two countries
is expressed in the film’s title, for it is unclear to which side of the sea,
France or Algeria, it refers. The fact that the film tells the story of a
visit to Paris by the pied-noir Georges Montero, who has continued
to live in Oran since Algerian independence, suggests that the ‘other’
side is France; but the insistent presence of Algeria in the film returns
us constantly to the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Thus, from
the start, the film foregrounds the undecidability of their relationship.
It signals the persistent role played by each country as the ‘other’ of the
other, as a defining and yet absent presence, one figured neatly in the
periphrasis of the title. At the same time, and in concert with Balibar, it
suggests how the two countries are in many respects one and the same,
how their relationship is defined by contiguity rather than difference.
Moreover, the film maps out how this mirroring and doubling shape the
lives of the characters and are central to their sense of identity, belonging
and self-understanding.
Like Salut cousin!, the film draws together and holds in tension
different facets of the Franco-Algerian relationship. Set against the
backdrop of the ongoing civil conflict in Algeria, news of which we see
filtering through into France and which, as the action unfolds, begins
to spill over into the streets of Paris, it depicts Montero’s visit to Paris
for a cataract operation (performed by a French doctor of Algerian
origin with whom he strikes up a friendship), and his encounter, after

thirty years, with sisters who fled Algeria with the rest of the family
in 1962. As Montero’s stay prolongs itself, and the situation in Algeria
deteriorates, it becomes clear that his business in Oran is the subject of
deals and negotiations as parties in both countries set out to exploit the
growing chaos in Algeria. The film succeeds in holding these different
historical periods and narratives in relation, and does so in large part by
playing them out – in a manner similar to Salut cousin! – in the spaces
of the former colonial power. Central to this is the way in which the film
distributes the history and memory of the Franco-Algerian relationship
across its different characters and locations.
The film’s similarities with Salut cousin! also extend to key elements
of the plot. Structured around the relationship between two male
protagonists, both films are about the (re)discovery of the former
colonial capital by visitors from Algeria, and the encounter with
memories of Algeria which persist in France. Nevertheless, differences
between Alilo’s Paris and that of Georges quickly appear, and reflect
their different social origins and trajectories. Where Alilo’s Paris is
that of the northern arrondissements and the working-class suburbs,
Georges circulates much more in the grand spaces of central Paris (as
he attends his consultation at the Hôtel-Dieu on the Île de la Cité), the
expensive suburb of St-Germain-en-Laye to the west (where he stays
with his doctor, Tarek) and the leafy banlieue pavillonnaire, where he
tracks down a teenage flame from the last years of French Algeria. His
travels also take him beyond Paris to the elegant house and garden of
one of his sisters in provincial France. This visit especially highlights
the solid middle-class credentials, relative success and accumulation of
different sorts of capital by the pied-noir diaspora since their emigration
in 1962.
The two films also share common ground in the form of main
characters with an Algerian immigrant background. Like Mok in Salut
cousin!, Tarek considers himself to be French above all else. Despite
being born to Algerian parents, he has no interest in his Algerian
heritage, refuses the assumptions of fraternity and shared origins among
Algerian immigrants articulated in ritualised references to the bled
(ancestral village), and denies any knowledge of the Arabic language.
However, his fortunes are in sharp contrast with those of Mok: as a
successful doctor in central Paris who lives with his (white) wife and
child in the smart western suburbs, Tarek stands as an exemplar of
ethnic minority and immigrant integration into the French republic,
and, as such, offers a counter-narrative to the dominant stories of

marginalised and alienated youth of Maghrebi origin thematised in beur

and banlieue cinema of the period.10 However, Tarek’s drama stems from
the price paid for this apparent success, and he expresses it in spatial
terms: ‘je suis de la cité et non de St-Germain!’11 he exclaims, during a
heated argument with his wife over growing financial difficulties. The
trajectory of socio-economic ascension which displaces Tarek from the
housing estates of the deprived suburbs to the elegance of St-Germain-
en-Laye marks him out as a miraculé in the sense developed by Pierre
Bourdieu; in other words, as someone who has overcome the various
obstacles (imposed and inherited) placed in the way of social mobility
and self-improvement;12 but, as Bourdieu suggests, the social trajectory
which confirms the success of the miraculé also risks bringing with it a
feeling of dislocation or existential uncertainty, a fragile or uncertain
sense of one’s place in the social order which Tarek articulates precisely
through the spatial dislocation he has experienced.
While the differing histories and trajectories of their characters mean
that each film maps out contrasting post-colonial geographies of Paris
and France, L’Autre Côté de la mer nevertheless shares one key location
with Allouache’s film: a local Algerian café-bar which we can imagine
to be in one of the capital’s northern arrondissements and which serves
as a nodal point for much of the film’s action. Indeed, its importance is
signified by the fact that it is the first place to which Georges is taken
after his arrival from Oran. The bar functions as a microcosm of
Algeria-in-France, in that it is not only a meeting-place for those with
Algerian connections but a location where different histories converge
and encounter each other, whether it be the individual histories of
the people who pass through its doors (emigrants, beurs, pieds-noirs
and clandestine migrants) or the large-scale national histories which
themselves inflect individual trajectories, from the Algerian War, with its
consequences for migration between France and Algeria, to the contem-
porary civil conflict, news of which is relayed by the bar’s television, and
produces division and conflict within the bar itself.
As the presence of the television suggests, the bar also plays a crucial
role as a place where Algeria is mediated, constructed and represented
for both the film’s viewers and the characters themselves. It foregrounds
questions about how Algeria is made visible to and within France, not
least through its own decor. On our second visit there, the camera pans
round to reveal a large painting of Oran on a back wall, depicting a
panorama of the city from the cathedral of Santa Cruz perched on a hill
above it (Fig. 11).

Figure 11 Oran in Paris: the local Algerian café-bar in L’Autre Côté de la mer
(Dominique Cabrera, 1997)
The painting can be read as a mise en abyme of the film’s concern to

explore the idea of Algeria as a remembered, imagined and idealised place.
It opens up a fourth dimension in the café as a space which can vehicle
memory, fantasy, loss and nostalgia, its role in doing so underscored by
the fact that the shot of the painting concludes a sequence during which
Georges watches a customer as he cries over the news that his brother
has been assassinated in Oran. The realities of contemporary Algeria,
whether mediated by the television news or lived through as shock and
grief, enter into collision with the envisioned Algeria of its diasporic
communities. Indeed, the film persistently thematises ways in which
Algeria exists in mythologised form within France, from the myths
of fraternity and the bled resisted by Tarek, to the assumptions about
life in independent Algeria expressed by Georges’s pied-noir relatives
(repeatedly countered by Georges with his own stories – equally fanciful,
perhaps – of Sundays at the beach and his Mediterranean lifestyle).
Therefore, both Salut cousin! and L’Autre Côté de la mer hold in
dialogue the complex intermeshing of the Franco-Algerian past and
present, and map them spatially across Paris and beyond. Not only do
they produce a portrait of post-colonial France but they also remind
us of the extent to which contemporary France is infused with Algeria.
They are also films which, not least by locating their action solely in a
French context, are also about the nature, form and persistence of an
‘Algérie imaginaire’ among Algerian diasporas in France. They explore

how Algeria is fantasised and envisioned by different communities in

different ways, and how it provokes questions of belonging and identity
for those who feel caught between two nations and locations.
The theme is pursued in Beur blanc rouge, a comedy by Algerian émigré
director Mahmoud Zemmouri, released in 2006. The film focuses on the
character of Brahim, a young, male beur whose mystified relationship
to Algeria as mother country is staged and explored through events
surrounding the friendly football match between France and Algeria held
at the Stade de France in October 2001. The event gained notoriety for
both the booing of the French national anthem before the game and the
pitch invasion which led to it being abandoned in the second half; but,
as Mireille Rosello (2003) has argued, it was also richly symbolic. Not
only did it mark the first time that the two nations had played each other
since Algerian independence, but the encounter itself, and the manner in
which it unfolded, also served to encapsulate the persistently problematic
nature of Franco-Algerian relations more broadly. We see in the film how
football acts as a catalyst for (mis-)recognition and (mis-)identification
by provoking expressions of belonging among supporters, with Brahim
– born in France and a French citizen – proudly displaying his allegiance
to Algeria with his flag-draped car and his Algerian national team strip.
Furthermore, the film problematises the question of national identity
through its depiction of French team member Zinedine Zidane (born
in Marseilles to Algerian immigrant parents in 1972) as an archetypal
transnational figure located between France and Algeria. The question
of who owns Zidane and where his allegiances should lie surfaces
frequently, and is expressed most notably later in the film by the presence
of his framed photograph in the office of an Algerian customs official.13
As such, Beur blanc rouge destabilises questions of belonging and
identity, and does so, we might say, by opening up a gap between national
allegiance (identification with a country rooted in affect and emotion)
and national identity (a more bureaucratised formalisation of belonging
expressed through state-controlled documentation such as passports
and identity cards). It also signals the importance of such issues for the
so-called beur generation in France. We might therefore be tempted
to read the film as a celebration of transnational and transcultural
identity in contemporary France, and an exploration of how a sense of
‘Algerianness’ can be constitutive of an identity which is also French.
Like Salut cousin! and L’Autre Côté de la mer, it is a film about transna-
tional connections and flows between the two countries, and, through
that, encourages us to ponder the nature of hybrid identities.

Figure 12 Policing frontiers in Algiers in Beur blanc rouge (Mahmoud Zemmouri, 2006)
However, like the earlier films, Beur blanc rouge is also about
the limits to those transnational movements and exchanges, about
the frontiers and borders between France and Algeria and the forms
they take (bureaucratic, most obviously, but also cultural, social and
imaginary). It explores how the two post-colonial nations assert their
national identity and sovereignty through the policing of their frontiers
and the exercising of border controls. Much of the film’s action is located
at national frontiers in air and sea ports in both France and Algeria, and
dramatises what happens when national frontiers cut across and disrupt
expressions of transnational allegiance and identification (on making a
trip to Algeria at the end of the film, Brahim’s family is outraged to hear
that they need a visa to enter the country) (Fig. 12).
Moreover, and befitting a film about crossing between North Africa
and Europe in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the
USA, it signals how the Franco-Algerian tandem comes to be situated
within a broader geopolitical context and renewed anxieties about
identity and alterity in the contemporary world: as he jokes about
having shaved off his beard before flying to Paris for the match, Brahim’s
Algerian cousin Saïd recognises that more so than ever he and his fellow
citizens risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the frontier between
the West and the Rest.
Beur blanc rouge, like Salut cousin!, also draws attention to the
precarity of belonging and identity, particularly for those who are

perceived as being of immigrant origin in France. The theme is drawn

out at the start of the film when Brahim, his car covered with Algerian
flags in the days before the match, is challenged by a policeman over his
identity, and asked to produce his papers. On the one hand, the exchange
is a reminder that, more so than other French citizens, immigrants, and
those of immigrant origin, ‘are constantly exposed to the inquisitive
gaze of power, which seeks anomalies, defects and irresoluble problems’
(Guénif-Souilamas 2009: 222). On the other, it opens up the ironic
possibility that Brahim’s own professed uncertainty over his identity
and sense of belonging (as a French citizen whose heart, he tells us, is
in Algeria) could be clarified for him by the implacable bureaucracy
of the French state, alert to the likelihood of illegal immigration. The
speed with which Brahim asserts his identity as a French citizen, and
locates himself firmly on the French side of the Franco-Algerian frontier
through the presentation of correct papers, signals the limits of his own
investment in, and identification with, Algeria.
Brahim’s fantasised relationship with Algeria is further challenged
by the visit of his Algerian cousin Saïd, a successful businessman. Like
Georges in L’Autre Côté de la mer, Saïd repeatedly calls into question
the mystified way in which Brahim views Algeria, dismissing his opening
greeting (‘tu sens bon le bled!’), predicated on the myth of the bled as
ancestral home, as without meaning (‘t’es fou, ou quoi?’).14 Furthermore,
both Saïd’s success and the possibility he offers for Brahim to find gainful
employment in Algeria bring to light the complex balance of socio-
economic status and power between the Algerian diaspora in France
and their relatives ‘back home’. For the arrival of the successful cousin,
dressed in a business suit and wearing an expensive watch, throws into
relief the socially and economically marginal position of Brahim and his
acquaintances in France.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between Beur blanc rouge and
the two earlier films in terms of their depiction of Franco-Algerian
relations is that the final part of Zemmouri’s film is shot and located in
Algeria itself, as Brahim (reluctantly) and his parents (less so) make an
abortive trip to Algiers in order to secure his future through working
for Saïd and marrying a distant cousin. The trip itself makes clear that
Brahim’s relationship with Algeria can only remain in the realm of the
imaginary and that France remains his real home. The frontier which
separates him from his country of election is made manifest by the police
car which carries him through the city from the airport to the ferry
terminal, Brahim having been identified at the border as a pitch invader

during the France–Algeria match and summarily expelled. Nevertheless,

the family’s brief passage through Algiers is also an opportunity for the
city to be presented to the audience. Static long shots in the city allow the
viewer to absorb its bustling streets and expansive boulevards, while the
closing credit sequence, shot on and around the car ferry as it leaves and
heads to France, allows the film to close on images of Algiers’ instantly
recognisable harbour front, and, in doing so, remind us of its grandeur
as a Mediterranean capital. The spectacular quality of these closing
shots is echoed in other films of the period, as we shall see.
Visualising Returns to Algeria in the 2000s
The use of Algerian locations in Beur blanc rouge was undoubtedly

facilitated by the easing security situation in the country during the
2000s, and reflects a broader trend in cinema exploring the Franco-
Algerian relationship at this time. One of the first films to stage a return
to Algeria in this period is Alexandre Arcady’s Là-bas mon pays (2000),
about a pied-noir journalist and television presenter, Pierre Nivel, who
goes to Algeria during the civil war in order to help the daughter of an
Algerian woman with whom he fell in love as a teenager, and left behind
in 1962. The film makes visible the conflict of which only glimpses were
caught in Salut cousin! and L’Autre Côté de la mer, and offers a portrait
of a country in civil war conditions (road blocks, high-speed pursuits,
ambushes, tense and silent darkness).
At the same time, through its central character, the film thematises
precisely the problem of visualising and mediatising Algeria during the
civil war. Nivel, we are told, is motivated by the need to bear witness to
events in Algeria, and would seem to have the apparatus at his disposal
in order to do so; but, as Salut cousin! and L’Autre Côté de la mer would
suggest, the extent to which news from Algeria can penetrate the rest
of the world, and the form and coherence of the narrative told, remain
uncertain. The film itself, and the plot which sees Nivel gunned down
by extremists, confirms the Algeria of the civil war as a place of terror
and tragedy above all, a place where normality has been suspended. A
similar theme emerges in documentary photographic work depicting
Algeria at the time. Images taken by Bruno Boudjelal and Raymond
Depardon are snatched, hurried and furtive, displaying unexpected
angles and perspectives and disobeying conventions of framing and
composition. They produce a fragmented portrait of a shattered country,

and convey a sense of Algeria as a place in the shadows, a spectral place

– one rendered, as Benjamin Stora (2001) has argued, largely invisible
internationally during the 1990s.
Algeria’s role in films from the 1990s as a presence in France at once
obscure and defining is in sharp contrast to its growing visibility in films
and visual culture of the 2000s. Indeed, as Beur blanc rouge would
suggest, visual culture clearly had a key role to play in re-establishing
the perception and understanding of Algeria during this period, and
reinserting it into a wider visual economy. The decade sees an increasing
number of films which stitch together the spaces of France and Algeria
(Exils, Beur blanc rouge, Il était une fois dans l’Oued) or use Algeria
as the main stage on which to explore the nature of the relationship
between the two countries (Bled Number One). Moreover, the theme of
returns is one they frequently foreground.
Tony Gatlif’s Exils (2004) uses the generic device of the road movie
to draw France and Algeria together, in the form of a trip from Paris
to Algiers by the central couple, Zano and Naïma, both of whom
embody specific histories and memories.15 Zano, of pied-noir origins,
has an urge to return to his ancestral home. Like Tarek in L’Autre
Côté de la mer, Naïma is born of Algerian immigrant parents, but sees
Algeria as a purely abstract location, one in which she has no interest
or emotional investment. Their positions are established in the film’s
opening exchange, with Zano’s sudden and earnest enquiry (‘Et si on
allait en Algérie?’)16 met by Naïma’s amused and dismissive response
(‘Qu’est-ce que tu veux aller foutre en Algérie?’).17 Also significant
is where this exchange takes place. The film’s establishing sequence
situates us in a high-rise apartment block looking along a section of the
boulevard périphérique, the ring road which encircles Paris and divides
the city itself from its urban periphery (Fig. 13).
The location is rich in terms of its symbolic geography, placing the
two characters as it does on the periphery of the centre, and thereby
inviting us to infer metaphorically their similarly marginal position
within contemporary French society; but the boulevard périphérique is
also one of the most obvious and significant products of the Gaullist
aménagement of the 1960s, through which post-colonial France was
reshaped and its newly minted hexagonal identity confirmed. In
propelling its characters from the margins of one post-colonial city to
the past of another, the film suggests that the journey they undertake is
one from being in exile in France to returning home to their Algerian
roots, and implies the therapeutic nature of that return. In doing so,

Figure 13 Before the journey begins: on the margins of Paris in Exils (Tony Gatlif, 2004)
however, it in fact renders more opaque rather than resolves the question
of where home is located.
The film links Paris and Algiers by depicting their arc to the west
over land and sea via Spain and Morocco, leading to encounters with
a variety of people, most of whom are heading north to and through
Europe, and have themselves been forced into a different sort of exile
– namely, the economic migration symptomatic of contemporary
globalisation. While the visual symbolism of this part of the film could
appear somewhat laboured, as the two French citizens go against the
swelling tide of migration from south to north, it nevertheless offers
Gatlif, like Zemmouri in Beur blanc rouge, the opportunity to situate
the central characters, and, through them, the Franco-Algerian tandem,
in a broader context. For the legacy of the colonial history which
drew together France and Algeria now finds itself being played out
in the context of population flows between and across developed and
developing countries, and the frontiers which inflect and filter those
flows. The film’s passage to the west opens up a multi-temporal space in
which are concatenated historical, memorial and geopolitical narratives
more usually understood in straightforwardly linear terms: those still
haunted by events in Algeria some forty years ago, as France brought its
colonial adventure to a close, come up against people struggling to cope
with socio-economic realities brought about by the geopolitical transfor-
mations of the contemporary, post-colonial era, and, most notably, the
reconfiguration of national and supranational borders in Europe in
response to the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the growing dominance
of economic liberalism. Their journey south, as they head towards

an encounter with the colonial past, reveals the unresolved nature of

post-war and post-colonial history and its persistent ramifications in the
present.
The couple’s arrival in Algiers focuses attention more specifically
on the legacy of France’s Algerian adventure, and does so especially
through the way in which the city is filmed. Book-ending the action of
the film in Paris and Algiers invites the audience to draw comparisons
between the two post-colonial cities; and, not unproblematically, against
the confident but alienating modernity of Paris, Algiers appears in turn
as a decadent and even tragic place, with rubbish piled high in the
streets, earthquake damage left unrepaired, and abandoned European
cemeteries. Following Zano and Naïma around the city, Gatlif’s mode
of filming accentuates the viewer’s likely sense of dislocation and disori-
entation. Algiers becomes a city of steps and stairways, of constant
movement up and down. Despite the occasional panoramic view, the
overall geography of the city is difficult to grasp.
If Algiers appears as a place of ruins and memory in the film, it is in
part a reflection of Zano’s own preoccupations as he tracks down the
apartment in which his family used to live. His exuberant and emotional
rediscovery of the flat is in many ways the crux of the film, not least
because it suggests the cathartic potential of a return to origins; but it
is also a curious and unsettling reflection on the persistence of Algeria’s
French past. Preserved largely intact by its Algerian occupiers, the
family’s paintings still on the wall, it has the air almost of a museum
or memorial to pied-noir life. A sense of Algerian deference before
colonial culture and history is reinforced when one of the occupiers, an
old woman, brings out a box of old photographs for Zano almost as if
she had been in anticipation of this moment of return. We are left with
the disconcerting impression that Algeria’s French colonial past remains
latent at every turn, embedded in the material objects, material culture
and built environments which constitute the habitat of the country’s now
liberated population.
As its emphasis on the uncompromising modernity of Paris
would suggest, the film’s staging of the encounter between its main
characters and the memory-laden spaces of Algiers can also be read
as a commentary on identity and belonging in contemporary France.
In particular, Naïma’s persistent, and in many ways commendably
French republican, indifference to her cultural and historical origins (‘Je
suis française, moi’,18 she asserts on at least one occasion) becomes an
increasing source of tension within Algeria, until she is persuaded (or,

perhaps better, obliged) to undergo a similarly cathartic return to origins

by means of a dramatic trance at the hands of a Sufi priestess.19 Only by
properly embracing one’s ethnic, cultural and historical origins, the film
suggests, can one properly find contentment, self-understanding and
a sense of belonging. Yet, by ending as it does with Zano and Naïma
leaving the European cemetery in Algiers, walking hand in hand and
out of shot, the film fails precisely to relocate its characters in the reality
of contemporary France. It is unclear whether their fresh start will lead
them anywhere other than back to the peripheral location in which we
found them at the start of the film. It is as if, in attempting to resolve
questions of belonging through its characters’ return to Algeria, the film
only serves to problematise them further. Indeed, for Higbee (2011: 72),
their return is confirmation, above all, ‘of a loss of belief in a fixed sense
of either home or identity’.
The questions of origins, belonging and identity posed for Naïma are
also explored in Bled Number One (2006) by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche.
The film begins as Kamel, the central character (played by
Ameur-Zaïmèche), ends his journey from France, having apparently
been expelled following a prison sentence, to his home village in rural
Kabylia. The interest of the film lies first in the locations it uses (the
villages of rural Kabylia and the city of Constantine, rather than the
country’s grand, Mediterranean capital city), and, through those, its
portrait of Algeria in the aftermath of civil conflict. It maps the tension
and unease which persist within the village community as local militia
groups man a road block to guard against attacks by Islamic extremists.
Secondly, like a number of the films discussed already, it uses the
device of the return by outsiders or relatives from ‘l’autre côté de la mer’
(in the form of both Kamel and Louisa, a woman who left her husband
behind in France to return to Algeria, and is later repudiated by him)
to examine the persistence of the real, tangible frontiers which remain
even for people who might be perceived to be living transnationally, and
which are located not just at the level of border crossings and frontier
posts, but within communities and between individuals. The film is an
exploration both of hospitality and of the ways in which the gesture of
hospitality simultaneously embraces guests and marks them as different.
It traces the gradual evolution of Kamel’s presence in the village from
feted cousin to troublesome foreign body, which, by the end of the film,
must be expelled.
The process is defined especially by the discursive construction of
Kamel as an outsider, the foundations of which are laid in the seemingly

Figure 14 Sealing Kamel’s fate in Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche, 2006)
jovial and innocuous nickname of ‘Kamel la France’ he acquires

soon after his return. At once a mark of endearment, the nickname
nevertheless differentiates him from the group in spatial and national
terms: he is always of another place and origin even as he participates in
the celebrations and rituals of community life in the village. We see how
welcome, identification and recognition mutate into suspicion, hostility
and rejection, and do so in almost unnoticeable ways. A key sequence
in this regard takes place around a domino table, where a group of the
senior men in the village discuss Kamel following an altercation where
he set upon Louisa’s brother in retaliation for his beating of her (Fig. 14).
As Kamel surfaces in the conversation, the epithets attached to him
shift as his criminal past is recalled (‘C’est un grand bandit!’) and the
group agrees he must go (‘La France, c’est fini’). 20 Once the conversation
returns gradually to the game (‘Lui, il a été en prison, il a été expulsé, et
nous on n’a pas fini la partie!’), 21 his fate is sealed. From that point on,
Kamel becomes increasingly aware of the community’s active hostility
towards him, and that departure is the only option (‘Il faut que je parte
d’ici’, 22 becomes his mantra).
A similar fate befalls Louisa: given her increasingly troublesome
behaviour, the culmination of which sees her wandering the streets of
the village, smoking and in her night clothes, to the shocked amusement
of the male population for whom public space is their reserved domain
(particularly at night), the only logical conclusion, adumbrated by the
whispered commentary of the astonished onlookers, is for her to be

categorised as ‘mad’. After a suicide attempt in Constantine, she finds

refuge in a psychiatric hospital, a female-dominated space which appears
to offer a more compassionate environment than the world outside.
The film ends with Kamel reflecting on his options. Determined
to return to France, but lacking the necessary documentation to do
so legally, his only way out is to the east, via Tunisia, along another
of the routes of clandestine migration from south to north depicted
by Exils. In raising this prospect, the film joins Exils in relocating
characters produced by the specific history of colonial and post-colonial
relationships between France and Algeria in the broader context of
contemporary, global flows. It sketches the uncertain fate of the people
who constitute those flows, and the directions of travel and boundaries
which regulate them.
Both Exils and Bled Number One offer a melancholic or uneasy
portrait of contemporary Algeria, Bled Number One through its depiction
of the legacy of civil conflict and its impact on local communities, and
Exils by filming the aftermath of the 2004 earthquake in Algiers,
which contributes to an impression of the city as an increasingly ruined
place permeated by the ghosts and relics of the past; and while explicit
reference to the civil war is absent from Gatlif’s film, the audience is
arguably invited to see the earthquake as a metaphor for its impact and
consequences. However, it is striking how another vision of Algeria
starts to take shape simultaneously elsewhere within this visual economy,
which in many ways set out consciously to emphasise the country’s
return to normality as the decade progresses.
Normality, Spectacle and Contemporary Algeria
We have discussed already how, in Beur blanc rouge, the agency of

Algeria as a sovereign, independent state is articulated in scenes which
stage passport and border controls, where the country’s authority over
its borders is made clear. The Algerian customs official’s implacable
assertion that French nationals need a visa to enter the country, in the
face of the surprise and indignation expressed by Brahim’s mother,
reminds us that Algeria is no longer a country in which French citizens
– of whatever origin – can come and go as they please (‘C’est pareil pour
nous en France’, he remarks). 23 We also noted that Algeria’s sovereign
status is further reflected in the film’s depiction of Algiers. In particular,
the use of long shots and panoramas offers a spectacular, even touristic

vision of the city and its landmarks (such as the iconic harbour front)
which underscores its size and status as a capital city.
This way of envisioning Algiers is pursued to an even greater degree
in Djamel Bensalah’s comedy Il était une fois dans l’Oued (2005). While
in many respects a curious, perhaps even inconsequential film, it offers
another example of how, as Higbee (2007: 57) observes, cinematic
comedy in the hands of beur and émigré directors is used to raise
complex socio-cultural issues. The film’s conceit involves a young, white
Frenchman from the Parisian banlieue (played by Julien Courbey, also
featuring in Beur blanc rouge as a character of similar socio-economic
background), who has developed a fantasised relationship with Algeria,
convinced that it is his land of birth, and that he was adopted by, rather
than born to, his parents of Alsatian and Breton origin. The film is set
in summer 1988 – in other words, before the uprising of October 1988
(when riots broke out across Algeria) and the onset of the civil war in
1992 – and depicts Johnny’s ‘return’ to Algeria in search of his lost roots.
The film is framed by a voiceover from Johnny from the perspective
of the present day, which at the end of the film maps out the largely
successful and uncomplicated lives of the main characters since 1988.
For Johnny himself, we learn, this involves settling down in Algiers and
opening up a corner shop. The film therefore draws together two periods
of relative normality in Algeria, and, in doing so, conveniently brackets
off the rather more fraught period of the civil war (a point to which we
return below).
As this brief synopsis suggests, the film can be seen in the first
instance as an ironic commentary through its inversion of the dominant
way in which the relationship between France and Algeria is understood.
The commentary unfolds principally in Johnny’s trajectory as a white,
working-class lad leaving France (and doing so illegally, indeed,
smuggling himself out in a fridge being transported to Algeria by a
friend’s family) to settle in Algiers and serve as the Algerian equivalent
of what is popularly known in France as the Arabe du coin; that is
to say, the North African immigrant shopkeeper for whom entrepre-
neurship provides greater socio-economic mobility. In the manner of an
allegorical fable, Johnny’s story serves to comment on perceptions of
immigration and immigrant trajectories within France, and the status
of France as a land of aspiration and potential to those on the outside. 24
That the film is to be understood primarily as an allegory about France
and what it stands for in the contemporary world is further suggested
by its representation of space, and, in particular, the way in which

Figure 15 Showcasing the city: the Basilica of Notre-Dame d’Afrique in Il était une fois
dans l’Oued (Djamel Bensalah, 2005)
it brings the spaces of France and Algeria into dialogue and thereby
invites comparison between Johnny’s actual and elected homeland. By
casting Algeria as a land of immigration rather than emigration, a place
of promise and opportunity, the film allows us to grasp how mythical
visions of France as a promised land take shape; and crucial here is
precisely their status as visions or images of a dream world. For the two
countries are portrayed in sharply contrasting ways. The story begins
in France in a location familiar from nearly two decades of beur and
banlieue cinema – namely, the rectilinear, concrete blocks of a post-war
suburban cité; but it also reminds us (again in the tradition of much
of this cinema) that, for the most part, such places are inhabited by
a disadvantaged multiethnic and multicultural population. Moreover,
the action is filmed predominantly in close-up or at mid-range, and
in interior or enclosed settings. Doing so generates an impression of
confinement and restriction, and leaves the viewer with no sense of the
geographical location of the estate or the world beyond it.
The contrast is sharp with Bensalah’s filming of Algeria: the spectator’s
first encounter with Johnny’s dreamland is suitably sumptuous. His
arrival is marked by a sequence of aerial shots filmed from a helicopter.
The highly mobile camera offers a spectacular, bird’s-eye view of the
city’s key landmarks, including the Basilica of Notre-Dame d’Afrique
and the harbour front, filmed on a bright and sunny day, with buildings
glinting and the sea sparkling (Fig. 15). Indeed, they are views which
– use of colour aside – invite comparison with the equally sparkling
images of the city which dominate the nostalgic visions of French Algeria
discussed in Chapter 1.

Furthermore, this sumptuous vision is not restricted to Algiers: as

Johnny’s journey takes him around the country, into the desert landscapes
of the interior and along the coast to Oran, repeated emphasis is placed
on the spectacular drama of the country’s cities and open spaces. In
short, we might say that Il était une fois dans l’Oued offers a tourist
vision of Algeria, a vision constructed for a tourist gaze. Indeed, this
perspective is further implied by the viewer’s initial encounter with the
country as Johnny arrives on the ferry with his friend Yacine’s family.
Unlike the other films discussed here, Il était une fois dans l’Oued
locates our first glimpse of Algeria outside the subjective point of view of
the main character. From the interior of the customs shed where Yacine’s
family have their passports checked, the film cuts to its aerial flyover of
Algiers in a way which puts the city on show uniquely for its audience.
Once more, we might be tempted to see the spectacularisation of
Algeria as part of the film’s ironic mode, the extravagance of its
portrait reflecting Johnny’s fantasised relationship with the country
as dreamland. In doing so, it could be seen to offer a commentary on
the way in which immigrants or outsiders invest in and (mis-)recognise
the place they have elected as home. Yet, at the same time, Bensalah’s
spectacular rendering of Algeria is a gesture which presents itself as not
at all ironic. In the ‘making of’ documentary which accompanies the film
on DVD, Bensalah discusses his desire to assert the normality of Algeria
in the face of the widespread perception that ‘tout y est compliqué’. 25
Viewed in the light of this comment, Bensalah’s images of Algiers can be
seen as something akin to a love letter to the city, an attempt to render
the country visible once more to the wider world after the obscurity of
its years in crisis; and it would seem that the tourist vision is perceived
as the most reliable mode in which to enable that process.
Indeed, the notion of Algerian normality is also pursued at a thematic
level in the film through the portrayal of the country as a holiday
destination for French citizens, and reflected especially in sequences
on board the ferry from Marseilles to Algiers. The crowds sunning
themselves on deck represent the well-established seasonal tourist traffic
between the two countries and the transnational links which bind the
two as people visit friends and family. Finally, it is in the film’s treatment
of Algeria’s recent history – or, more accurately, its elision of it – where
the theme of normality is most notably played out. As we noted earlier,
the film is set in 1988, with a voiceover from Johnny presenting the
events (as becomes clear by the end of the film) from the perspective of
the present day. A veil is therefore drawn over the decade or more of

violence which separates these two periods. The only violence present in
the film is the slapstick violence of comedy, and recent Algerian politics
and history are conspicuously emptied from it. 26
A desire to normalise perceptions of Algeria in the years following the
country’s civil conflict is also central to a photographic project contem-
porary to Il était une fois dans l’Oued. In 2006, Yann Arthus-Bertrand
published Algérie: vue du ciel, a substantial and glossy coffee-table book
offering a portrait of the country composed, following his signature
style, of full-colour aerial shots taken (like those in Bensalah’s film)
at relatively low altitude from helicopters and light aircraft. Algérie:
vue du ciel is part of the broader photographic project which brought
Arthus-Bertrand international fame at the turn of the millennium. In
tune with contemporary concerns, La Terre vue du ciel [The Earth From
the Air] (Arthus-Bertrand 1999) is a celebration of diversity of both
populations and environments, and an attempt to raise consciousness
about the planet’s fragility. It exploits the distance and height of aerial
photography to produce gently defamiliarising perspectives, albeit ones
which often have an anthropomorphic quality to them.
During the 2000s, Arthus-Bertrand produced various spin-off
volumes, including the one devoted to Algeria, which – again, we can
assume, for security reasons related to the civil conflict – did not feature
in the original project. Algérie: vue du ciel is a comprehensive survey
of the country which displays its landscapes, geology and cultural
and geographical diversity, from the mountains of the Aurès to the
dunes and rock formations of the Sahara. It also depicts many of the
country’s urban centres and highlights their key landmarks. Of course,
as the scale and modalities of the project would suggest, it required
extensive resources and logistical assistance in order to be carried out
successfully. Indeed, both the long list of acknowledgements at the end
of the volume (Arthus-Bertrand 2006: 336) and Arthus-Bertrand’s note
of thanks to Algerian president Bouteflika in his foreword, make clear
the extent to which the project was supported and sanctioned by the
Algerian government. As Arthus-Bertrand (2006: 1) puts it, ‘je lui suis
donc très reconnaissant de m’avoir laissé une liberté totale pour voler
au-dessus de son pays et de faire ce livre à ma façon’. 27 It is therefore
perhaps unsurprising that the volume aims to display Algeria in its most
advantageous light, suggesting firmly that it is now very much open for
business.
In fact, such aims are spelled out by Benjamin Stora, once again
positioned as a key commentator on Algeria, in an introductory essay

entitled ‘Redécouvrir l’Algérie’ [Rediscover Algeria]. Stora (2006: 30)

presents Arthus-Bertrand’s volume as an object around which different
communities with a stake in Algeria can gather and share memories,
from pieds-noirs and Algerian immigrants in France, to appelés sent to
serve in the Algerian War and those who went into exile during the civil
conflict. It is a book conceived for a transnational, Francophone audience,
in which we once again find the photographic image being mobilised as
a privileged vector for individual and collective memories, but also in
order to vehicle those memories and responses in a certain way. As Stora
suggests, pursuing a reflection begun a few years previously on how
memories of Algeria have become ‘partitioned’ among different groups
(Rosello 2003), the aim of Algérie: vue du ciel is to enable ‘le dépassement
de ce constat d’une irréconciliabilité des peuples. Ne voulant plus la
répétition obsessionnelle des comportements, la violence des propos qui
éloigne, il vise l’entente, la réconciliation possible’ (2006: 37). 28 It sets out
to create, channel and structure shared feelings, emotions and responses,
and, in doing so, contribute to a work of reconciliation at a national and
transnational level.
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of Arthus-Bertrand’s project
concerns the parallels which can be drawn with the photographic
material we discussed in Chapter 1, not just in terms of its affective
and emotional intentions, but also in relation to the visual strategies
it deploys. Chief among these are the foregrounding of space as a way
to mobilise memory and identification, and the extensive use of aerial
photography, with its spectacular and expansive qualities. Moreover,
their use in Arthus-Bertrand’s project invites similar questions. What
does aerial photography both show and conceal? What can we see,
and what finds itself elided? Just as, during the colonial period, aerial
photography’s elevated viewpoint disguised the inherent tensions and
contradictions of French Algeria, so too, in the aftermath of Algeria’s
civil war, it disguises not just the fragile communities and individuals
portrayed in Bled Number One, but a country increasingly beset by
problems of unemployment, corruption, poverty and social division. It
helps to assert the unity of national space and the mastery of a governing
perspective over tensions, divisions and dissent on the ground (in a
literal as much as figurative sense). As we have seen at various points
in our discussion of the visualisation of Algeria, aerial photography is
unavoidably the perspective and prerogative of the powerful. It implies
in its very nature an inequality between those with the ability to make
visible (including a successful photographer able to call on the resources

of the country he seeks to portray) and those being visualised. Thus, even
as it calls for consensus and reconciliation, the book’s very modalities
cannot help but remind us of Algeria’s existence as a contested place, and
the extent to which it remains a place both of election and exclusion for
the audiences it sets out to address.
Beyond the Franco-Algerian Tandem
We need finally to consider a further dimension of Arthus-Bertrand’s

volume, one which aligns it with much of the material discussed in this
chapter. For, while it addresses a specific audience in the first instance
(Francophone transnational), it nevertheless reflects Arthus-Bertrand’s
wider environmental concerns, a theme touched on in various texts
accompanying his images. 29 In other words, like a number of films
from the same period, his project suggests that we need not simply to
understand how France and Algeria relate to each other in colonial
and post-colonial terms (terms which also imply the assertion and
negotiation of ideas about national identity, nationhood and sovereignty)
but also to grasp the wider geopolitical contexts in which the historical
specificities of that relationship are now being played out (contexts
alluded to in different ways by Gatlif, Ameur-Zaïmèche and Arthus-
Bertrand). Furthermore, the frequency with which the dynamics of
the Franco-Algerian relationship themselves raise these broader issues
underlines, for all its complex historical specificity, the exemplarity of
that relationship in and for the contemporary world. Our discussion has
also demonstrated, we hope, the vital role visual culture plays in staging
and negotiating those issues, through the way it envisions space and
reminds us that national spaces are also transnational spaces, as well as
ones subject to the forces of globalisation. As such, they also always and
automatically remain spaces of contestation.

Conclusion
Conclusion
In early May 2012, France elected François Hollande, candidate of the

Parti socialiste, as its new President. Hollande’s second-round victory
followed an entre-deux-tours notably marked by a move to the right in
Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign as he sought to woo those who had voted for
the far-right Front National in the first round. Preparing the ground for
subsequent legislative elections, the reactions from centre- and far-right
politicians following the celebration of Hollande’s victory at the Place de
la Bastille on election night were telling. Bemoaning the lack of French
tricolors on display, and heavily criticising the number of foreign flags
visible, the Ministre de l’Apprentissage Nadine Morano warned that
such scenes would prove increasingly common if the Parti socialiste
were to honour its pledge to grant voting rights in France to foreigners.
Meanwhile, the vice-president of the Front National, Louis Aliot, saw the
presence of Algerian flags as categorical proof that communitarianism had
now become a daily reality within French society.
To identify the sight of Algerian flags flying in Paris as a threat
might strike many as a predictably cynical strategy at any moment of
the French political calendar. Commentators failed to notice, however,
that this brief furore – by quirk of timing – arose on the eve of the
anniversary of an increasingly notorious moment in French history, when
the carrying of the Algerian flag on French territory provoked a far more
terrifying response. As the end of the Second World War was celebrated
in France on 8 May 1945, the shooting by police in French Algeria of the
flag-bearing young scout Saal Bouzid during a peaceful pro-Algerian
independence march in Sétif provoked an insurrection that was brutally
countered by the colonial authorities (Thénault 2005: 39). Their response
over the following months culminated in the deaths of between 15,000
and 45,000 Algerians within the wider North Constantine region (House
and MacMaster 2006: 36). The French colonial regime was well aware

Conclusion 181
of the dangers of allowing protestors to bear an Algerian flag: hence why

demonstrators had been banned from displaying them, along with any
other nationalist symbols deemed politically provocative. Indeed, for
many of those who witnessed the protests, it was the first time they had
seen the flag at all, an emblem that would subsequently symbolise the
FLN movement (Mekhaled 1995: 137).
Returning to the present day, it was a representation of that defining
moment of Franco-Algerian history that hit the headlines in May 2010
when Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors-la-loi (2010) – as we mentioned in our
Introduction – was premiered at the Cannes film festival. Bouchareb’s
recreation on screen of Bouzid’s death attracted vocal controversy in
France from a number of pied-noir associations and political figures,
chief amongst whom was Lionnel Luca, Union pour un Mouvement
Populaire (UMP) deputy for the Alpes-Maritimes in the National
Assembly. Brushing aside the fact that he had yet to see the film
himself, Luca condemned it as ‘anti-French’ and warned that the film’s
uncompromising depiction of colonial conflict risked igniting tensions
between communities of Maghrebi origin and the wider population in
France (Berretta 2010). Furthermore, for Luca, its partial view of history
denied others, such as ‘les victimes européennes et les algériens [sic]
fidèles à la France’, of their rightful claims to victimhood.1 Rather than
uncovering the truth, he claimed, the film instead constituted ‘un gros
mensonge fait pour aviver les plaies et non les cicatriser’. 2
A more consensual film – coincidentally also one that meditated on
Franco-Algerian relations – would happen to win the Grand Prix at
Cannes that year. Set during the Algerian civil war, Xavier Beauvois’s
Des hommes et des dieux (2010) was praised by reviewers for its
sensitive portrayal of the final months of a group of French Cistercian
monks kidnapped in 1996 from their monastery in Tibhirine in northern
Algeria and later found dead (Kaganski 2010; Regnier 2010). The film
subsequently attracted over three million viewers at the French box
office, a strikingly similar number to the one achieved by another
major film that a few years previously had interrogated an earlier era of
Franco-Algerian history, Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes (2006). Unlike
his portrayal of the unsung role played by Algerian soldiers in the French
army during the Second World War, Bouchareb’s more controversial
follow-up in 2010 received a decidedly lukewarm response from critics
and, despite the publicity generated during its Cannes premiere, it
noticeably failed to attract similar box office numbers when it went on

general release later that year, remaining firmly beneath the half-million
mark. 3
The virtually simultaneous release of two films engaging with different
aspects of the Franco-Algerian relationship, and the contrasting reactions
they provoked, attest to the perpetual fascination that Algeria holds in
contemporary France. Importantly, those reactions also highlighted the
political and emotional sensibilities that perennially surround Franco-
Algerian relations. Nor are such sensibilities confined to cinema: at the
moment when Bouchareb’s film was attracting controversy in Cannes,
an exhibition a few miles north-east at the Musée national Picasso in
Vallauris by the Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira was suspended for
over two months following complaints by pied-noir and war veteran
associations (Hancock 2010: 20). Their ire had been provoked by the
translation of the word harki as ‘collaborateurs’ in the accompanying
subtitles to Sedira’s video Retelling Histories (2003), a reaction that led
the local UMP mayor, Alain Gumiel, to close the entire museum on the
grounds of public order (Guerrin 2010).
Similar stories surfaced in 2012, as events began to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of the war’s end. The artist Christine Peyret, whose project
(Peyret 2012) comprised large-scale embroidered versions of wartime
photographs taken in Algeria, reported similar pressures to those felt
by Sedira when exhibiting work in France. Choosing discreetly not to
name the municipalities in question, she revealed that while only her
works showing peaceful children were selected for display in one town,
in another all those including a French flag were omitted (presumably
to the great chagrin of politicians such as Morano and Aliot). A major
exhibition long-planned for autumn 2012, and intended to premiere the
entire series of images in France, was itself cancelled by unspecified local
authorities, apparently for fear of the uproar it might arouse in a region
where many people are of pied-noir origin.4
Such controversies remind us once again of the important role always
played by images when Franco-Algerian history and memory are
represented, and the extent to which such images constitute a diverse and
contested site within this particular visual economy. It is precisely the
contours of this site that our book has traced, identifying and analysing
some of its most important features across a wide range of media.
In Part I, the visualisation of history through photography, and the
concomitant role played by the photographic image in shaping historical
understanding, proved to be of pivotal importance: whether the subject
was French Algeria as pristine Utopia; French conscript and military

Conclusion 183
experience in wartime Algeria; or the 17 October 1961 massacre in Paris.

We began by surveying how pre-war images of French Algeria have been
resurrected to sustain its place within a broader collective memory. As
our analysis showed, the time and space they depict are resolutely of
a nostalgic order, presenting France’s last major colony as a triumph
of modernity and modernisation. The outbreak of war must therefore
be elided, further fossilising the world the images project. While their
tranquil nature may comfort those who romanticise life in French
Algeria, the fact that few people are often featured is far from coinci-
dental, and signals a profound sense of mourning for a land consigned
to historical oblivion.
Another significant publishing phenomenon in recent decades has
been the privileging of vernacular photography when evoking conscript
wartime experience, presenting French Algeria as a battlefield rather
than timeless, unblemished idyll. The structural inequalities of the visual
economy of the war necessitated our focus on French-made images;
but, as our discussion of the work of Mohamed Kouaci indicated, the
growing interest his work has aroused in recent years suggests that the
range of wartime images in circulation may broaden over time. We saw
that the championing of such marginalised perspectives through image-
making is symptomatic of a wider anxiety about the visual economy of
the Algerian War and its role in mediating historical understanding of
the conflict in France. A corollary of the increasing need it generated to
counter the preponderance of state-sanctioned French military images
has been the reassertion of the validity of photographs as historical
evidence and source material.
With regard to both conscript photography and representations of
events on and around 17 October 1961, our longitudinal approach
allowed us to investigate why while certain images retain or increase
in visual currency over time others disappear. We demonstrated that
the photographic image has played a particularly important role here in
facilitating the trajectory of 17 October from an occluded and forgotten
event to pivotal historical moment. As we argued, the assertion within
contemporary France of a narrative and iconography of victimhood in
relation to 17 October reflects a specific national context of guilt and
historical acknowledgement, and constitutes an attempt to confront
its ‘Algeria Syndrome’ (Donadey 1996; House and MacMaster 2006:
10). The success of such circulation is, however, double-edged: whilst it
may foster a sense of community united in grief and recognition of the
protestors’ vulnerability – helping to mobilise political action as it does

so – it risks reinscribing transcolonial power relations by prioritising

Algerian corporeal vulnerability at the expense of the colonial subjects’
agency.
As Part II showed, many of the historical narratives about Algeria
embedded in the French public sphere that we traced in Part I inform
contemporary portrayals of Franco-Algerian relations. This includes a
continuing emphasis upon male experience during the Algerian War and
the conspicuous marginalisation of female voices, as our analysis of recent
films set during the wartime era demonstrated. The corpus of works we
considered when mapping representations of the Mediterranean Sea
afforded greater opportunities to focus on works by female artists and
filmmakers but, even if women have greater prominence here, a distinct
focus on men and masculinity remains: a pointed reminder of the
enduring ways in which gender inflects depictions of Franco-Algerian
relations. We considered too how notions of space have also played a
crucial role in how links between the two countries have recently been
represented. None more so than with regard to the Mediterranean Sea.
As our analysis showed, when viewed as a shared Franco-Algerian
space, the Mediterranean functions visually as a palimpsest: at the same
time a spatio-temporal barrier to French Algeria, a liminal area for
various migrant and diasporic groups and an increasingly policed border
between the EU and the Maghreb.
Our final chapter asserted that inland and urban spaces, on both
sides of the Mediterranean Sea, also crucially merit attention in order
to understand how notions of France and Algeria have evolved in the
postcolonial era. We underlined the important roles played by visual
culture when different spaces in Paris, Algiers and beyond are envisioned
and how they show national spaces functioning simultaneously as
transnational ones. We particularly emphasised how such spaces – all
subject to the forces of globalisation – function fundamentally as spaces
of contestation. The broader resonance here of these issues with regard
to Europe, the Maghreb and beyond also serves to remind us of the
importance of Franco-Algerian links for informing our understanding
of wider contemporary geopolitics, especially as played out in and
around the Mediterranean Sea and within Europe and Africa’s major
cities. Indeed, notwithstanding its complex historical specificity, here the
Franco-Algerian relationship clearly has an emblematic role to play and
much to tell us both about how colonial pasts still shape and determine
lives on both sides of the Mediterranean and about the lived experience
of postcoloniality more widely.

Conclusion 185
Our study, then, has interrogated some of the defining images that
have marked how relations between France and Algeria have been
represented and contested since the outbreak of the Algerian War in
1954. Of course, as the next fifty years of remembrance and negotiation
of the Algerian War and France’s Algerian past begin, only time will tell
which of these images will continue to articulate the countries’ shared
history. The importance of visual culture in mediating our understanding
of their relationship, however, can only increase throughout the twenty-
first century. The growth in digital culture and the expansion of
technological access will undoubtedly play a key role in influencing
how such images are made and circulate, perhaps – albeit partially –
redressing the imbalance in production that has hitherto characterised
this specific visual economy. As first-hand memories of French Algeria
and the war recede, younger generations in both countries may well
bring fresh perspectives on how France and Algeria’s mutual history and
complex relationship can be represented visually. Ultimately they will
help determine quite how permanent the Franco-Algerian ‘psychodrame’
must be.

Notes
Notes to pages
Introduction
1 ‘Algeria and France exist in a permanent state of psychodrama’. ‘Algérie-
France: le choc des mémoires – encore’, Le Monde, 20 May 2010. All translations
our own unless otherwise stated.
2 Contrast this with the extensive state-led programme of celebrations
timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of independence in Algeria, celebrated
on 5 July 2012, to which French representatives were not officially invited
(Mandraud 2012).
3 Our use of these terms both here and throughout the book is informed
by the critical debate about them which broke out in the early 1990s, and
is reflected well in Williams and Chrisman’s edited volume (1994). See in
particular the essays by Mishra and Hodge (1991) and McClintock (1992).
Central to their concerns are the (often Euro-centric) assumptions of historical
progress and linearity inferred by the term ‘post-colonial’, and the tendency for
discussion of ‘postcoloniality’ (hyphenated or not) to elide local and historical
specificities. For discussion of the issues in the context of Francophone studies,
see Forsdick and Murphy (2003) and Majumdar (2007). We would argue that
the hyphenated term ‘post-colonial’ has its uses as a chronological marker to
describe the ontological and empirical realities of nationhood which arise when
Algerian independence is recognised by France, and require both countries to
(re)think themselves as nation states. We deploy it as such where relevant in
this book. At the same time, and along with Forsdick and Murphy, we would
assert that the empirical facts of independence and state sovereignty do not
mean that a clear line is drawn between a colonial past and a post-colonial
present, but that the legacies of colonialism and ‘coloniality’ (among which are
certain ways of seeing and relationships of power), persist in and continue to
shape, the nature, understanding and perception of both France and Algeria,
and produce complex social, political and cultural forms and modes typical of
an unhyphenated, ‘postcolonial’ condition.
4 On Sebbar’s exploration of ‘Algeria in France’, and her attempts to

Notes to pages 6–19 187
articulate collective memory through personal nostalgia, see Jones (2010) and
Vassallo (2011).
5 Pieds-noirs (literally ‘black feet’) is the term widely used to designate
colonial settlers of European origin, who arrived in Algeria in successive
waves from France and elsewhere during the nineteenth century. By the time of
Algerian independence in 1962, they numbered approximately one million, or
10 per cent of the country’s population. The vast majority were repatriated to
France in the summer months of 1962. See Jordi (1995).
Chapter One
1 On the French picture postcard industry and its major players, see also
Schor (1992: 206–7).
2 Jennifer Yee (2004) has explored how the visualisation of Indochina,
in which the picture postcard again played a central role, drew on visual
codes, templates and conventions established in North Africa at an earlier
stage in France’s colonial activity. For comparative perspectives on the role of
the postcard in the colonial dynamic, see Geary and Webb (1998). Elizabeth
Edwards (1996) discusses how paradigms of viewing established during the
colonial period continue to inform tourist postcard images of ‘exotic’ places
and people.
3 Though Alloula’s strategy for doing so was not without its problems.
For an overview of the controversy provoked by Le Harem colonial, see Vogl
(2003: 163–5).
4 ‘Through this selection of familiar places, French natives of Algiers
can rediscover with nostalgia some precious images, essential roots of their
pied-noir past’.
5 Lynne Huffer (2006: 230 and n. 6) notes that Jacques Derrida is often
mistakenly credited with the creation of the neologism.
6 On this aspect of the Évian Agreements, see Cohen (2003: 130–1) and
Stora (1991: 114–15).
7 ‘Jacques Gandini’s book offers us a whole programme of activity.
“Algiers” and “youth” are words steeped in memories both of our roots, and of
the carefree mood of a happy city. Through photographs, and to the delight of
the reader, his tour of the city recreates the traditional strolls its residents used
to enjoy’.
8 ‘Jacques Gandini’s gesture of friendship here is to have made our
memories his own, and to have brought back to life a disappeared city, one
which he found in our thoughts and hearts’. Also notable here is the way in
which, through her description of Gandini’s volume as a ‘témoignage d’amitié’,
understood as being from an Algérois to the Oranais, Ternant signals how
pied-noir memory communities root and invest themselves in specific locations,
and in doing so articulate clear borders with other such communities. Even as

188 Notes to pages 19–32
his contribution to the remembrance of Oran is welcomed, Gandini’s status
as an outsider to the group is made clear. On the role played by pied-noir
associations in sustaining a sense of group identity, see Averell Manes (2005)
and Eldridge (2010).
9 ‘Move towards more tranquil memories’.
10 On the emergence of the figure of the hexagon within French political
discourse, see Weber (1986).
11 On the law and the context of its development, see also Bancel (2009).
12 ‘The first girl one held in one’s arms. […] An evening’s dream, who
knows how, remained forever fixed on film’.
13 Barthes (1980) remains the classic reflection on photography as a
temporal and therefore inevitably melancholic medium.
14 Even if virtually, in digital form, on the computer screen.
15 On state housing and planning policy in Algeria during the 1940s and
1950s, see Çelik (1997), especially chapters 4 and 5.
16 Alloula’s strategy of ironic citation in Le Harem colonial has been
subject to critique by Mieke Bal (1991) among others.
17 For example, describing a route away from the centre and towards the
so-called ‘vieil Alger’, or old Algiers: ‘en partant de la place de Bab el-Oued par
la rue Marengo, le promeneur passe devant le lycée des garçons. […] À droite,
on aperçoit la caserne Pélissier au-delà de laquelle se trouve la bibliothèque
municipale’ (Lamarque 2009: 50). [‘Leaving Bab el-Oued Square by Marengo
Street, the walker passes in front of the secondary school for boys. […] On
the right can be seen the Pélisser barracks, beyond which is the municipal
library.’]
18 See Alzieu (2000: 33), Alzieu (2003: 5), Lamarque (2006: 12), Lamarque
(2009: 36–7).
19 The process is undoubtedly akin to the ways in which sights and sites
are constituted by and for the tourist gaze. See Urry (1990), Selwyn (1996) and
Crouch and Lübbren (2003).
20 As both Deborah Cherry (2003) and Frances Terpak (2009) remind us, it
is a view whose genealogy can be traced back to the first portrayals of the city
by European artists in the nineteenth century.
21 For example: ‘De tous côtés, dans tous les sens, des escaliers, des
montées abruptes comme des échelles, des descentes vers des gouffres sombres
et puants, des porches suintants envahis de vermine et d’humidité, des cafés
obscurs bondés à toute heure, des rues désertes, des rues aux noms étranges!’
(Lamarque 2009: 52). [‘On all sides, and in all directions, there are staircases
and ascents as steep as ladders, descents towards dark and stinking depths,
porches infested with vermin and glistening with damp, dimly-lit cafés packed
at all hours, deserted streets and streets with strange names!’]
22 ‘A stroll through the Casbah’.
23 ‘A city apart from the European city’.

24 ‘There was a real social life there, with functions and parties, but little
by little the population changed’.
25 ‘The lower part of the Casbah underwent changes following the
development of Anatole-France and Amiral-Pierre Boulevards, Bab el-Oued
Street, Bab Azoun Street and Lyre Street’.
26 See Bourdieu (1960) and Bourdieu and Sayad (1964).
27 Amy Hubbell (2011) discusses the difficulties encountered by pieds-noirs
returning to contemporary Algeria in negotiating the gap between their visions
and memories of French Algeria, and the present-day realities they find.
28 Bourdieu argued at the time that ‘la seule existence de la guerre a
suscité une transformation radicale de la situation, c’est-à-dire du champ
sociologique dans lequel s’accomplissent les comportements, en même temps
qu’une mutation de l’attitude des individus insérés dans cette situation à
l’égard de la situation elle-même’ (Bourdieu 1960: 25). [‘The mere existence
of the war has provoked a radical transformation of the situation, that is to
say of the sociological field in which actions play themselves out, as well as of
a shift in attitudes to that situation on the part of the individuals caught up
in it’.]
29 In this way it chimes with the images of pre-war 1950s’ life made
in Algeria by the Hungarian photographer Étienne Sved, published in the
book Alger 1951: un pays dans l’attente (2005), which pictures the Algerian
population waiting for the tide of history to turn. Although shot in 1951,
Sved’s documentary-style images, like those of Bourdieu and Riboud, similarly
present French colonial rule as a relic of the past, and strongly suggest that the
days of French Algeria are numbered.
30 Evidence is extensive of the persistent sensitivities around the ownership
of French Algeria’s history, and the threat which settler organisations are seen
to pose by other groups representing marginalised or repressed memories. In
a statement published in March 2011, for example, anticipating the fiftieth
anniversary of the now notorious night of repression in Paris on 17 October
1961, the ‘Collectif 17 octobre’ noted that ‘certains osent encore aujourd’hui
continuer à parler des “bienfaits de la colonisation”, célébrer le putsch des
généraux à Alger contre la République et le pouvoir encourage les nostalgiques
de l’Algérie Française et de l’OAS’. <www.17octobre61.org/> (accessed 17
September 2011). [‘Certain people today still dare to speak of the “benefits of
colonisation”, to celebrate the generals’ putsch in Algiers against the Republic
and those in power encourage those nostalgic for French Algeria and for the
Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS)’.]
Chapter Two
1 ‘Whether newly published or well known, these exhumed images,
decoded, analysed and captioned, thus restore part of the reality of a historical

moment. […] They are accompanied by the most up-to-date historical
scholarship, and thereby accounted for in terms both of what they show, and
of their place within a broader history of the visual’.
2 For an analysis of the broader assumptions and myths about the
‘dangerous Algerian’ which lurk beneath the popular image of Algerian fighters
as violent and brutal terrorists, see Macey (1998). To display and photograph
captured fighters with knives between their teeth was, as Macey’s discussion
would suggest, to tap into a well-established association in the popular French
cultural imaginary (1998: 160). We discuss in Chapter 4 how the association
re-emerges in Michael Haneke’s film, Caché (2005).
3 ‘Fifty years after the end of the Algerian War, we are at the point of
passage from painful memory to finished business, from injury to a sense of
calm’.
4 ‘A major historical fact’.
5 L’Express, 19–25 June 1987 and Le Nouvel Observateur, 19–25 June
1987.
6 Le Point, 15 March 2002, pp. 64–5. ‘Looking back at the misfortunes of
the pieds-noirs’.
7 Souvenirs Paris Match (Paris: Filipacchi, 1992), p. 21. On this cover
image, see Chapter 5 and Shepard (2006b: 224–5).
8 Paris Match, 28 March 2002.
9 Paris Match, 28 March 2002, p. 66. Indeed, it is striking that, in the
hands of Paris Match, the colonisation of Algeria is precisely a French rather
than a European affair: an editorial decision that duly elides the role played by
settlers drawn to Algeria from across southern Europe.
10 Paris Match, 28 March 2002, pp. 84–5. ‘Inventive and ingenious, the
farmers of the desert make green gold spring forth’.
11 Paris Match, 4 April 2002, p. 72. ‘Faces struck dumb with pain
nevertheless articulate a cry of distress which, far from politics, resonates
deeply in the human heart’.
12 On the creation and role of the SAS units as part of a so-called ‘political
development’ strategy, see MacMaster (2009: 70–8).
13 See Chominot (2008: 481–90).
14 ‘Military monopoly’.
15 ‘The stories told by the photographs collected here break the stranglehold
of specialist discourse on the subject, and throw it into relief by bringing to
bear the perspective of ordinary civilians. Such stories are also important
because they allow us to understand the present better’.
16 El Watan, 24 February 1992, p. 24, cited in Stora (1997: 340). ‘It is the
Algerians (described as fells throughout the film) who are the most notably
absent and silent in the whole story. Their presence is never shown. It is war
without the Algerians, against invisible enemies. […] In order to underscore
their words, Tavernier and Rotman came to Algeria and shot … landscapes!

It really is a case of Algeria without the Algerians, nothing less than the old
colonial dream finally realised’.
17 ‘The quick journey across town is somewhat reassuring. Long and wide
avenues, opulent buildings, shops, the Nouvelles Galeries department store …
You could almost believe you were in France … If it wasn’t for an advertisement
at a crossroads, where an Arab in a fez has replaced the Jean Mineur character.
Where is the war?’
18 ‘The secret meeting-place of some FLN chief. Who knows?’
19 ‘During his long absence, life has organised itself without him. Today,
he is in the way, a mere grain of sand in a well-oiled machine. Fed up with
life, unwelcome, ignored, unhappy, unloved’. Drouot here airs a long-standing
theme of alienation and dislocation which finds one of its first visual cultural
expressions in Jacques Demy’s feature film, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)
[The Umbrellas of Cherbourg]. For a discussion of literary representations of
the conscript experience and its consequences, see Dine (1994: 109–45).
20 ‘One day it all went wrong. Cars exploded … Houses collapsed …
Passers-by were killed’.
21 ‘In the depths of the hold, they won’t even catch a final glimpse of
Algiers’.
22 ‘The party’s over’.
23 On the broader politics of unveiling in the context of debates about
female emancipation in French Algeria, see MacMaster (2009).
24 ‘I received their glares at point-blank range, first witness of their silent,
violent protest’.
25 For critical perspectives which consolidate this view, see Vogl (2003:
178–81) and Eileraas (2003).
26 ‘A trap into which I fell like a few hundred thousand other Frenchmen
of my generation’.
27 ‘At each stage, with each turn of the wheel, the impression of falling, of
cutting yourself off more and more from your life, of losing your footing,
of reeling. Never had I felt so manipulated’.
28 ‘I am releasing these images for all those who lived through this war,
to encourage people to speak out, and to lift the veil of silence which covers
it’.
29 For a classic discussion of the identity photograph and its relationship to
the state, see Tagg (1988), and Chapter 3 especially.
30 ‘The population of each village was summoned by the local officer. The
women’s faces impressed me the most. They had no choice. They were obliged
to remove their veil and be photographed. They had to sit on a stool in the open
air in front of a whitewashed wall’.
31 ‘The portraits published in Femmes algériennes 1960 were done in other
circumstances, on the orders of the military authorities as a policing measure,
and I took them surrounded by armed soldiers’.

32 The often paradoxical tensions inhabiting Garanger’s relationship with
his images are further played out in a curious story told by Andy Stafford
about a later volume, Femmes des Hauts-Plateaux: Algérie 1960 [Women of
the High Plateaus: Algeria 1960], published in 1990 with a text by Franco-
Algerian novelist Leïla Sebbar. Once more focusing on the women of the
region in which Garanger was based, but taken while he was off duty, the
images it features suggest encounters with the local population beyond the
constraints imposed by the conflict and the military forces prosecuting it. On
first appearance, the volume is the result of a collaboration between Sebbar
and Garanger, who also contributes a foreword. However, Stafford notes that
until it appeared Garanger knew nothing of the publication, which it seems
was entirely the work of Sebbar and from which ever since he has been keen
to distance himself (Stafford 2010: 123). Indeed, it is striking that the images
gathered in Femmes des Hauts-Plateaux offer obvious (and because of that,
potentially rather facile) contrasts to those published in Femmes algériennes
1960. The women in the later volume are seen not immobile and pinned against
a wall by the photographer and his camera, but going about their daily life in
and out of domestic interiors. Rather than staring blankly or defiantly at the
camera, they are smiling and joyful as part of a larger family unit, and shot in
colour rather than black and white. We are left with a clear sense that Femmes
des Hauts-Plateaux, by restaging the encounter between the photographer and
his subjects outside the military apparatus, aims to offer a truer account of the
lives of the people he encountered and, in doing so, serves almost as an act of
repentance for his military activity precisely by allowing the agency both of
the photographer and his subjects to express themselves more freely. Yet this
expression of liberation from the constraints of the photographic situation
imposed by the military is itself imposed on Garanger and his work by a writer
who may find it expedient to imply the contrition of someone she describes
(against his will) as a ‘soldat-photographe’ (Stafford 2010: 123). For further
discussion of how Sebbar’s text in this volume frames, presents and interprets
Garanger’s images, see Stafford (2010: 129–39).
33 ‘He convinced me to reframe and print the portraits of Algerian women
in a vertical format, and blur the background around the faces in order to make
it as pure a white as possible, which helped to underline the aesthetic dimension
of the images’.
34 On the shifting fortunes of French photography and its institutions
during this time, see chapter 2 of Morel (2006).
35 ‘The Algerian female guerrilla fighters […] smiled at him!’
36 ‘This book can have no historical pretensions, and must not be seen as
anything other than a homage to the multitude who gave the best of themselves
in order to “bring these people to light”. We have sacrificed historical accuracy
for the sake of the poetry which derives from the spontaneity, the simplicity
and the extreme generosity of these documents’.

37 ‘It goes without saying that this book cannot claim to offer a compre-
hensive history of the larger struggle for liberation, each part of which deserves
its own account’.
38 For example: France Inter <www.franceinter.fr/dossier-algerie-1954-
1962-la-derniere-guerre-d-appeles?page_dossier=2> (accessed 2 April 2012);
Le Nouvel Observateur <http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/galeries-photos/
les-50-ans-de-la-fin-de-la-guerre-d-algerie/20120313.OBS3687/guerre-d-
algerie-les-souvenirs-brules-des-soldats-du-soleil.html> (accessed 2 April 2012);
Le Monde <www.lemonde.fr/afrique/portfolio/2012/03/17/jean-claude-
larroche-appele-en-algerie-en-1959-1960_1671466_3212.html> (accessed 2
April 2012); Le Monde <http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120317040837/
http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2012/03/15/la-memoire-refoulee-des-
appeles-d-algerie_1669673_3212.html> (accessed 17 December 2012).
39 This point was proved once again in 2012 when the German publisher
Steidl reissued the book Algerien [Algeria] by the West-German photographer
Dirk Alvermann. First published in East Berlin in 1960, Alvermann’s book
documented life behind Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) lines and, like
Kouaci, presented the movement for independence as, above all, a collective
struggle. Remaining out of print for over half a century, its timely reissue
has allowed Alvermann’s images to re-enter circulation and they provide
a welcome supplement to those that comprise the Franco-Algerian visual
economy. Nevertheless, the fact that the instigation for republishing in 2012
such unique and important images of the war stemmed not from the Algerian
state but by the inclusion of a facsimile reprint of Alvermann’s original book
in the British Magnum photographer Martin Parr’s photo-book box set, The
Protest Box (2011), speaks volumes about the power relations that continue
to determine the circulation of such wartime imagery and the Algerian state’s
continuing indifference towards such visual legacies.
Chapter Three
1 As such, and as House and MacMaster suggest (2006: 299–300), recent
activism in relation to 17 October can be aligned with other movements seeking
historical justice which proliferated within a global human rights framework
during the 1990s and the 2000s.
2 ‘Night of unrest in Paris’.
3 In this sense, our approach differs radically from the archaeological
work undertaken by historians Vincent Lemire and Yann Potin (2002) in
relation to a photograph by Jean Texier for L’Humanité of the graffito ‘Ici on
noie les Algériens’ [‘Algerians drowned here’], which appeared on a wall by the
banks of the river Seine in the aftermath of the 17 October demonstrations.
Unpublished until 1985, the photograph was taken up by militant groups as
they fought to reinscribe the events in the public sphere. Lemire and Potin

set out to uncover the archival origins of the image, troubled as they are by
the way in which it becomes entangled in differing, and often conflicting,
uses and interpretations (2002: 144). We argue, on the other hand, that
attention needs to be paid precisely to the work of historical interpretation and
understanding being done by and through photographs in different contexts and
moments.
4 The most systematic recent account of the nature and role of photographic
icons is offered by Hariman and Lucaites (2007).
5 On the changing legal status of ‘Français musulmans d’Algérie’ during
this time, see Shepard (2006b: 19–54).
6 ‘It’s outrageous; you’d think we were in Algiers!’ L’Express, 19 October
1961, p. 8.
7 The most famous example being Barthes’ discussion in Mythologies of
the Paris Match front cover showing a saluting African boy cadet, which he
used to develop his analysis of myth in terms of connotation and denotation
(Barthes 1972: 189).
8 ‘Around the time of the main feature film a crowd appeared unexpectedly,
in defiance of the curfew’.
9 ‘For an hour, the boulevards of the theatre quarter would be plunged
into a living nightmare. Thousands of North African workers had come from
their forgotten suburbs to appear suddenly, and alarmingly, beneath the city
lights’.
10 ‘The protest march began calmly’.
11 ‘The tension mounts as shop windows are shattered and motorists find
their way is blocked by a wave of threatening faces’.
12 ‘Contact between the protestors and the police was at its most violent’.
13 House and MacMaster (2006: 117) note that ‘as events were to prove,
violence was a unilateral police phenomenon’.
14 ‘A scene from the Algerian tragedy comes to an end at the heart of Paris,
on the Place de l’Opéra’.
15 ‘A war whose end seems never-ending’.
16 ‘The French cannot ignore this any longer!’
17 ‘Does this remind you of anything?’
18 On the mobilisation of shame in human rights discourses, see Drinan
(2001) and Keenan (2004).
19 According to House and MacMaster (2006: 62–3), men accounted for
just over 70 per cent of the Algerian population in Paris in 1961. Many were
single and employed as unskilled manual labour.
20 ‘The sense of guilt that such an act should normally have instilled’.
21 Indeed, as House and MacMaster (2006: 236) note, the construction of
Algerians as victims of state violence in this way itself displaced attempts by
the more radical, anti-colonial French left to present the demonstration as an
example of how the Algerians were asserting their own political agency.

22 On the role of photographs in transnational human rights practices, see
Noble (2009).
23 The British terrestrial television channel Channel 4 also played a role in
increasing the event’s visibility by producing and broadcasting the documentary
film Drowning by Bullets (shown in France as Une journée portée disparue)
in 1992, which shed important light on the events of 17 October. Indeed,
by its narrator stating that ‘privé d’images à la télévision, le grand public a
refusé de croire au massacre’ [‘deprived of television footage, the wider public
refused to believe that the massacre had occurred’], the programme makers
simultaneously reasserted the power that television can wield with regard to
galvanising public opinion towards such events and the conspicuous lack of
television footage of the massacre itself: a deficit of moving images that has
only further increased the symbolic capital of figures such as Kagan and of the
existing photography of the events overall.
24 Éric Coder, ‘Quarante ans d’amnésie pour une ratonnade d’État’, France-
Soir, 17 October 2001, p. 14 and ‘17 octobre 1961 … Genèse d’un massacre’, Le
Nouvel Observateur, 25–31 October 2001, pp. 108–9.
25 ‘Élie Kagan was indeed the only photographer whose images capture the
suffering of the Algerians’. The privileged status afforded to Kagan’s images
is further reflected and reinforced by the fact that they now form part of the
photographic archives of the Musée d’histoire contemporaine in Paris, under
the aegis of the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine
(BDIC). Our thanks to Jim House for reminding us of this point. As we discussed
in Chapter 2, in relation to material taken by photographers and subsequently
housed in the Établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle
de la Défense (ECPAD) military archives, the institutional frameworks provided
by archives and research libraries often facilitate the recirculation of certain
images in a way which allows them to gain prominence over others.
26 ‘40 ans de lutte contre l’oubli’, El Watan, 17 October 2001, p. 12.
Chapter Four
1 Emblematic examples of such earlier feature-length films include:
Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963), Le Petit Soldat (Jean-Luc
Godard, 1963), Élise ou la vraie vie (Michel Drach, 1970), Avoir vingt ans dans
les Aurès (René Vautier, 1972) and Les Roseaux sauvages (André Téchiné,
1994). The Algerian War was also evoked more indirectly in several other fiction
films set in wartime France, such as Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962) and Les
Parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), and in the documentary-style
films Chronique d’un été (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) and Le Joli Mai
(Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1963). For detailed filmographies, see Dine
(1994) and Hennebelle, Berrah and Stora (1997).
2 Though, as we noted in Chapter 2, their film provoked hostile critical

reaction in Algeria at the time of its release, because it was seen to occlude not
only an Algerian perspective on the conflict but the very presence of Algerians
in their own country. Nevertheless, it was this film that Le Nouvel Observateur
included with its edition of 21–27 October 2010, whose front-page story read,
‘Notre guerre d’Algérie: les témoignages des soldats, des pieds-noirs et des
Algériens’.
3 Contemporary Algerian cinema has shown markedly less interest in
the conflict so far, the notable exception being Bouchareb’s multinational
co-production Hors-la-loi (2010), which was Algeria’s entry for best foreign
language film at the 2011 Academy Awards. Early post-independence Algerian
films tackled the war and its aftermath via the state-driven cinéma moudjahid,
comprising films such as Le Vent des Aurès (Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina,
1966) and Les Hors-la-loi (Tewfik Farès, 1969). See Austin (2012).
4 Their respective French release dates were: 5 October 2005 (Caché), 28
February 2007 (Michou d’Auber), and 8 August 2007 (Cartouches gauloises)
(source: <www.bifi.fr>).
5 Furthermore, whereas Michou d’Auber and Cartouches gauloises are
both directed by French directors and are solely French productions, Caché is
a co-production between France, Austria, Germany and Italy and is directed
by the Austrian director Michael Haneke. His film can be seen as French,
however, owing to its French majority funding, language, setting and cast, and
it was duly nominated in four award categories at the 2006 Césars ceremony
(source: <www.unifrance.org>).
6 A special dossier on Caché was published in Screen 48 (2007): 211–49.
Some of the many other articles and books that have analysed Haneke’s film
include Austin (2007a and 2009), Burris (2011), Grossvogel (2007), Mecchia
(2007), Radstone (2010), Rothberg (2009), Saxton (2007), Seshadri (2007) and
Silverman (2010).
7 An important exception here from the wartime era itself is the short
documentary film J’ai huit ans (1962), by René Vautier, Yann Le Masson and
Olga Baidar-Poliakoff, which explored the effects of the war of independence
on Algerian children.
8 Although the town is unnamed, since the film is inspired by Charef’s
own experiences growing up in Maghnia, it can be assumed that the action
takes place in north-western Algeria near the Moroccan border (Charef 2007).
9 ‘A poorly-aimed shot’.
10 ‘Superfluous’; ‘disarms this Gallic ammunition’.
11 Télérama appears to be the only major publication that recognised these
qualities of Cartouches gauloises, describing it as ‘comme un songe’ [‘like a
dream’] and linking it with the anti-realist elements evident within Charef’s
preceding films (Murat 2007).
12 The recurrent gendering of viewership in the film, which primarily
shows male rather than female characters witnessing violence or its aftermath,

is also striking. This pattern is reasserted when, after accompanying Julie back
to her home to learn the fate of her family, it is Ali and Nico who are shown
peering down to the garden where her murdered relatives lie, rather than her.
Such a trend may lead viewers to wonder why Charef refrains from showing
Ali’s female peers witnessing such scenes and how the film might be different
had he done so.
13 One scene does stand out, however, precisely because it deviates from
this rule and shows a more plausible reaction from children to immediate peril.
After Nico chases Ali through an orchard following an argument, the sudden
sound of gunshots and machine gunfire prompt them to sprint away together.
However, the marriage of the brief tracking shot that follows, showing the
child actors simulate fear, and the patently extra-diegetic sound effects, is
arguably more likely to evoke incredulity amongst viewers than tension.
14 ‘Don’t forget us, little one: otherwise, we are as good as dead’.
15 His blindness also recalls Charef’s description (2007) of his childhood
growing up in Algeria where the pieds-noirs in Maghnia ‘étaient gentils, mais
ne nous voyaient pas. […] Le bonheur les a aveuglés, ils avaient trop la belle
vie’ [‘were kind but didn’t see us. […] Their happy lives blinded them, they
lived too comfortably’]: a myopia subtly conveyed in several scenes of Charef’s
film. This metaphor for pied-noir experience is also evoked literally and figura-
tively to comic effect in Merzak Allouache’s Bab el-Oued City (1994), where
viewers see a blind pied-noir women guided around present-day Algiers by her
well-meaning nephew. The disjuncture between the daily realities of postco-
lonial life in the capital viewers see him witness and the idealised vision he
presents orally to his aunt, however, indicate that his own powers of sight are
selective at best.
16 In this sense it chimes with the allegorical qualities of Charef’s previous
feature-length film set in contemporary Algeria, La Fille de Keltoum (2002),
whose examination of the implications of adoption for an Algerian child within
Western Europe also shares parallels with Michou d’Auber.
17 The small corpus of films that comprise scenes set during 17 October
1961, such as Vivre au paradis (1999), Nuit noire (2005) and Hors-la-loi (2010),
form notable exceptions and make Michou d’Auber all the more distinctive for
being set within metropolitan France but almost entirely away from the French
colonial capital.
18 ‘The Communist Party has lost us Algeria’.
19 ‘FLN out’; ‘Death to Arabs’.
20 ‘You’ve been had’.
21 ‘Doesn’t care for Arab names’.
22 Compare Michou’s relative passivity with Mourad Ben Saoud, a
Frenchman of Algerian origin played by Kad Merad in L’Italien (2010), whose
success at passing as Dino Fabrizzi, an Italian Maserati car salesman in Nice,
only becomes threatened when he agrees to observe Ramadan in the place

of his sick father. Similarly, in Djamel Bensalah’s highly unusual film Il était
une fois dans l’Oued (2005), discussed further in Chapter 6, Julien Courbey
plays Johnny Leclerc, a white blond-haired Frenchman who strives to convince
others that he was born an Algerian called Abdelbachir. The fact that both
films are also popular comedies suggests that filmmakers continue to see this
as a particularly fertile genre for exploring such themes, undoubtedly due to the
comic potential of passing.
23 Indeed, the documentary film Gilou made between La Vérité si je mens!
2 and Michou d’Auber provides a neat link between the themes of Jewish
experience in France and childhood wartime secrets. Paroles d’étoiles (2002)
focused on the lives of some of the many Jewish children hidden throughout
France during the Occupation. Given the resemblances between such stories
and Michou d’Auber’s plot, such as the need to assume an alien identity and
maintain the disguise while living in unfamiliar countryside away from an
urban home (Brown 2010), the logic of Gilou’s choice to focus on Michou’s
story following this documentary becomes clearer.
24 The fact that Michou’s simultaneous Frenchness and Algerianness (or,
more precisely, perceived Arabness, given that ‘Arabe’ is how Gisèle first
refers to him and this is what others accuse him of being) are seen as mutually
exclusive functions as a reminder that the era in which the film is set pre-dates
beur consciousness within France. Given that the term ‘beur’ is usually
associated with those generations that came of age from the late 1970s onwards
(Hargreaves 1995: 105), Michou seems more a proto-beur.
25 ‘Now I can say without shame that I’m an Arab and a Jew as well […]
Don’t count on me any longer: from today, you’re no friends of mine’.
26 ‘Even if you told me you were an Arab […] I wouldn’t be bothered’.
27 ‘We’re all the same and all different. […] Whether we are from here or
elsewhere, we are all equal’.
28 ‘All the wogs are thieves, that’s why they get their hands cut off’.
29 ‘Bury the Arabs in the skin of a pig’.
30 An earlier scene where Michou is coerced by Georges into eating pork
at dinner similarly ended with Michou vomiting, although there Gisèle had
provided an alternative for Michou and tried to explain away to Georges
why he was not eating the same meal. In Gilou’s previous films, the various
protocols regarding food and mealtime rituals within different ethnic and
religious communities generally generated humour rather than drama. The
relative lack of comedy here suggests that Gilou thought better than to ridicule
Michou’s religious dietary requirements, even if Duval’s comments and the
brief incorporation of horror aesthetics risk undermining this.
31 ‘The OAS will win’.
32 A potential allusion is also made to the events of 17 October 1961, when
Jacques tells Gisèle about how recent demonstrations in Paris by Algerians have
been violently suppressed and he expresses concern for Michou’s father. The

brevity of this reference nevertheless prohibits any further exploration of such
events within the colonial capital during the war.
33 Childhood was also a privileged theme within Truffaut’s cinema (Lebeau
2008: 73); and as will become clear, Gilou’s film, like Truffaut’s (Gillain 2000:
142), was also autobiographically inspired.
34 In addition, Depardieu is a Berrichon himself and several events in the
film evoked his own experiences growing up there (Borde 2007).
35 ‘A parallel between the rising drama of Algerian independence and that
of this young boy’s story, Gisèle’s lie becoming a metaphor for the end of the
Algerian War’. As quoted in ‘Michou’, France-Soir, 28 February 2007.
36 Contrast this with the ways in which earlier films set during the war
and its aftermath, such as Michel Drach’s Élise ou la vraie vie (1970) and Yves
Boisset’s Dupont Lajoie (1975), pictured the sexuality and agency of male
adults of Maghrebi origin as threats to the social order for France’s ethnic
majority. As we discuss further below, Haneke’s Caché arguably also plays
upon this association within present-day France via Georges’s reactions to
Majid’s son.
37 This mystery may also explain the film’s commercial success and
resonance amongst critics. Haneke himself has argued that ‘si j’avais résolu
l’énigme, le film aurait été vite oublié’ (Tinazzi 2005). [‘If I had solved the
enigma, the film would have been quickly forgotten’.]
38 In his interview with Tinazzi (2005) about the film, Haneke asserted
that ‘il ne s’agit pas de donner des leçons aux Français. Mon film parle d’un
thème moral et non national, il s’agit de la culpabilité en général, des “taches
noires” qui se logent dans la conscience des individus comme dans celle des
collectivités’. [‘It’s not about teaching the French a lesson. My film highlights
a moral rather than a national theme, that of guilt in general, those “black
marks” which stain the conscience of individuals and of people collectively’.]
As Cousins (2007: 225) points out, however, foreign audiences may well view
the ‘colonial guilt on display’ as an exclusively French matter. Indeed, he
contends that ‘viewers in the dwindling British empire are not encouraged
to see their national guilt in Georges’s distress, just his and his wife’s social
situation’ (2007: 225), a reading that would view the film as overly parochial in
its focus on the ways in which the micro-history of Georges and Majid’s lives
resonates with wider Franco-Algerian history.
39 The nocturnal scene showing Majid and his son sitting silently under
arrest in a police van may nonetheless recall some of the main iconography
of 17 October 1961 discussed in Chapter 3; and, in the context of the wider
continuum established between colonial and postcolonial Franco-Algerian
relations within the film, the ease with which Georges engineers their arrest
forms a trenchant comment on how little power relations have changed in the
intervening period.
40 Given Haneke’s famously minute control as auteur, Anne’s mention

that a coming weekend marks the Assumption – formerly also know as the
Analepsis – is arguably not incidental. For Haneke to choose this as the
sole reference to religion within a film where the world on screen appears so
distinctly uncelestial is redolent of the black humour that characterised much
of his previous work.
41 Though, as Austin (2007a: 535) points out, the child-like drawings that
accompany the videotapes voice Majid’s trauma in a way that he himself does
not or cannot verbally: the tears he sheds once Georges departs from his first
visit to his flat therefore speak volumes about the pain their childhood rupture
caused him. As with the videotapes, however, neither the age nor the identity
of their maker or sender is ever confirmed.
42 Even if Majid’s death was swift, this scene’s emphasis upon his inaction
means Georges could theoretically risk the charge of ‘non-assistance à personne
en danger’ (Article 223–6 of the code pénal). However, Georges tells Majid’s
son that police confirmed his version of events, presumably therefore not
seeing any need to press charges. Whether this is due more to the futility of any
intervention or the combination of Georges’s greater social capital and Majid’s
Algerian heritage remains unclear.
43 Compare this with the successive images of violence to which viewers
are subjected in Cartouches gauloises that, coupled with the incredulity
and bathos frequently generated, serve more to anaesthetise viewers. Caché
arguably provides more shock value from two brief cuts to the neck: the
cockerel’s and Majid’s.
44 Given the care and attention paid to audio within the film, it comes as
little surprise to learn that this aspect of the mixing is one Haneke particularly
relishes. Quoted in Andrew (2009: 17), he revealed that: ‘I always love working
on the sound. When you’re editing the footage, your choice is limited to the
shots you did, so the possibilities are also limited. But with sound, you can
improve things in all sorts of ways: you can change the tone, even the actual
words used, and of course all the other sounds’.
45 Given the concatenation of the past and present within Haneke’s film,
this scene might also be read as an oblique commentary on the French state’s
continuing policy of forced expulsion of illegal immigrants. Silverman (2010:
60) has also explored other ways in which this sequence shot can be read as a
palimpsest of cultural and historical antecedents.
46 On the now infamous law of 23 February 2005 passed by the French
National Assembly, see among others Bancel (2009) and Le Cour Grandmaison
(2006). Both the debate provoked by the law and its eventual rejection by
France’s Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) in February 2006
affirmed the principle that the French state should not stipulate which versions
of history inform school curricula. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the aspects
of Western European history Haneke explores would have featured in French
textbooks had the bill become law.

47 ‘What wouldn’t one do not to lose anything?’.
48 Moreover, Haneke’s tradition of using the same names for his main
characters – Georges and Anne in Code inconnu (2000) and Le Temps du loup
(2003), Georg and Anna in Der siebente Kontinent (1989) and Funny Games
(1997) – might also be interpreted as encouraging viewers not to see characters
exclusively as unique individuals but instead as emblematic ciphers within his
wider critique of contemporary white Western European middle-class societies.
49 Haneke (quoted in Tinazzi 2005) identified a documentary programme
screened on Arte about 17 October 1961 as his inspiration for its inclusion in
the film, presumably the aforementioned Drowning by Bullets/Une journée
portée disparue (Brooks and Hayling 1992).
50 This forms another link with several of Haneke’s previous films,
including Benny’s Video (1992) and Funny Games (1997), where children and
young adults were also shown as perpetrators of violence. It also anticipates
Das weiße Band in this regard (2009).
51 Even if three women take centre stage in La Bataille d’Alger during its
famous bombing sequence, women’s experience is sidelined within the film as
a whole, arguably a reflection of the wider marginalisation of women within
cinéma moudjahid (Austin 2012) and the silencing of women’s voices generally
within post-independence Algerian society (Khanna 2008: 4). This pattern
recurs across the Mediterranean, with the rare exception of Rachida Krim’s
Sous les pieds des femmes (1997), which used flashbacks to reveal an Algerian
woman’s involvement with the FLN during the war.
52 Like Julie in Cartouches gauloises, Marie-Jeanne is nevertheless
pied-noir: a reminder of the comparative invisibility of Algerian girls and
young Algerian women in the wider canon of films set during this era, which
only further emphasises men’s prominence, regardless of ethnic origin, on
screen.
Chapter Five
1 For more on how French discourses constructed the Mediterranean as
an object of knowledge during the colonial period, see Ruel (1991) and Izzo and
Fabre (2000). For a discussion of how French cartographers and geographers
positioned the Mediterranean as a peculiarly French space following the coloni-
sation of Algeria, see Blais and Deprest (2012).
2 ‘As the Seine passes through Paris, so the Mediterranean passes through
France’.
3 Such fears about the Mediterranean Sea are also classic territory for the
Front National: pointedly exploited by its leader Marine Le Pen during her
2012 presidential election campaign. Following the death of Mohamed Merah,
the Frenchman of Algerian origin who killed seven people in south-western
France in March 2012, she provocatively asked during a rally: ‘Combien de

Mohamed Merah dans les bateaux, les avions, qui chaque jour arrivent en
France remplis d’immigrés?’ (Mestre 2012). [‘How many Mohamed Merahs are
on the ships and planes which arrive each day in France full of immigrants?’]
4 ‘The locus of Franco-Algerian relations’.
5 This is emphatically not to overlook the scholarship that has reflected
upon the significance of the Mediterranean Sea when represented in films that
posit and probe links between France and the Maghreb more generally. The
comparative dearth of studies that focus specifically on representations of
the Mediterranean in contemporary visual culture more broadly is, however,
striking, especially with regard to its role as shared Franco-Algerian space.
6 Contrast this with the emphasis upon aircraft in the photography of
people expelled from France, such as in press coverage of the Algerians in Paris
removed from the mainland following 17 October 1961, discussed in Chapter 3.
There the modernity of high-speed air travel by conveniently and quickly facili-
tating their removal appeared to offer a reassuring panacea to metropolitan
readers.
7 ‘Destiny had already marked out the paths of exile’.
8 ‘Rapatriés d’Algérie. Appel à témoins’. <www.parismatch.com/Actu-
Match/Medias/Actu/Rapatries-d-Algerie.-Appel-a-temoins-392787> (accessed
16 May 2012).
9 ‘Black hussar of the French Republic’. For a fascinating insight into this
incident, see Malek Bensmaïl’s documentary film La Chine est encore loin
(2010), where schoolchildren taught by Guy Monnerot – and the man who
claims to have killed him by accident – are interviewed.
10 ‘Does France still love us?’.
11 See Pataud (1987: 38–9); Décugis, Labbé and Recasens (2002: 64–5); and
‘Ils sont partis … ’, Marianne 779, 24–30 March 2012, pp. 112–13 (p. 112).
12 Images of children notably also adorn the covers of Baussant (2002)
and Jordi (1995) and it was the contemplation of such an image that incited
Brigitte Benkemoun to explore her own family’s pied-noir history and French
Algeria in La Petite Fille sur la photo: la Guerre d’Algérie à hauteur d’enfant
(2012).
13 The scene also serves as a reminder that football matches have
historically provided a significant space of sociality in Algerian culture. A
rare public space in which the young can voice concerns and challenge state
power (Amara 2012), they also constitute an important arena for transnational
identification.
14 ‘Does it exist, something which is neither one thing nor the other? […]
The ideal would perhaps be to turn the two worlds into a third’.
15 This also functions as a reminder of how seldom images of the exodus
of the pieds-noirs are juxtaposed with those of different groups crossing the
Mediterranean Sea. While visual histories sometimes show accompanying
images of those harkis (Algerians who served as auxiliaries in the French Army

during the war) who managed to flee Algeria during the same period, the lack
of longitudinal focus in many studies means that links with economic migrants
both pre- and post-1962 usually remain unexplored.
16 ‘The wound is not yet healed’.
17 ‘The silence of this hyphen pacifies or appeases nothing, no torment
or torture. It will never silence their memory. It might even aggravate terror,
lesions and wounds. A hyphen is never enough to conceal protests, cries of
anger or suffering, or the noise of weapons, planes and bombs’.
18 For a more detailed reading of Saphir, see McGonagle (2011).
19 ‘The sea eats away at you’.
20 This playing with a sense of time and space is apparent in other works
by Kameli, such as the video installation Dislocation (2008), which shows two
sets of footage filmed on a rooftop in Algeria. Both are captured via a circular
travelling shot and appear identical, but as one shot wipes another on screen,
the position of the camera’s revolution differs, creating a spatio-temporal shift
in perspective.
21 A guide featuring a smaller version of his map with accompanying
instructions for users has also been designed by Bessaï and was published in
a limited print run of thirty copies. As part of a future wider project, Bessaï
intends to distribute free copies of the guide to the public on the street in
Algiers.
22 Harraga(s) is a nickname for clandestine (and usually male) migrants
who set sail across the Mediterranean aboard small craft: it derives from the
Arabic for ‘to burn’, itself a translation of the French word brûler, here meaning
a transgression of rules, boundaries or frontiers. Whereas within Arabic
harraga is already conjugated in the plural, an ‘s’ is sometimes added as a suffix
in French to signal this.
23 An archive of Algerian press articles on this subject, and migration more
generally, can be found online at <www.algeria-watch.org/fr/mrv/mrvref/
criminalisation_immigration.htm> (accessed 5 May 2012).
24 For a detailed reading of Teguia’s films, see McGonagle (2013). The wider
phenomenon of undocumented migration from the Maghreb to Europe has
attracted attention internationally from contemporary visual artists. Examples
include Yto Barrada’s photographic series Sleepers (2006), depicting would-be
migrants resting in public parks in Tangiers as they wait to depart clandes-
tinely for Europe, and Ursula Biemann’s video installation Sahara Chronicles
(2006–7) that traces trans-Saharan migratory routes towards Europe.
25 This also extends to the ways in which Bessaï plays upon the recurrent
stereotyping of European women as ‘Beauté occidentale/Blondes’ by Algerian
heterosexual men.
26 In this way his work serves as a counterpoint to the Belgian artist
Sébastien Laurent’s Le Monde vu d’en bas/(clichés européens) (2011), which
presents a tongue-in-cheek map of Europe and the Mediterranean where

countries and cities are identified according to cultural stereotypes and clichés
from a xenophobic ‘European’ perspective. These include, for example, the
cities of Oran, Constantine and Algiers renamed respectively ‘Faussaires’,
‘Mariage blanc’ and ‘Les bronzés’.
27 ‘From this perspective that the very broad idea of a “Mediterranean
space”, which designates not a single history or culture so much as a permanent
point of contact and conflict between histories and cultures, could form the
goal of a project of civilization’.
28 ‘Whether it is an addition or a substitution, the supplement is on the
outside, beyond the positivity to which it adds, foreign to that which, in order
to be replaced by it, must be other to it’.
Chapter Six
1 ‘Fundamental to the legitimacy of power’.
2 ‘Many of the citizens who set out to live between the two countries
perhaps find themselves pulled in opposite directions more than ever’.
3 On the civil conflict of the 1990s and the events leading to it, see Evans
and Phillips (2007), Chapters 5–7.
4 Nevertheless, all three must negotiate the suspicion of, and hostility
towards photography in contemporary Algeria, a legacy in particular of the
civil war. As Graffenried (1998: 12) puts it, ‘je ne vois que de rares situations où
les Algériens acceptent l’appareil (célébrations) – pour la plupart des Algériens,
aucun moment banal ou quotidien n’est photographiable’ (‘I see only rare
occasions (such as celebrations) when the Algerians will accept the presence
of a camera – for most Algerians, no ordinary or everyday moment should be
photographed’).
5 On the role played by returning colonial administrators in French
post-war urban planning, see Fredenucci (2003).
6 ‘The future of Paris’.
7 ‘Threatened with disappearance’.
8 On the history of the Bastille district and its role as a site for the
expression of French identity, see Reader (2011).
9 ‘It reminds me of Algiers’.
10 On this, see Tarr (2005), and Chapter 6 especially.
11 ‘I’m from the estates, not St-Germain!’
12 The concept of the miraculé took shape in relation to Bourdieu’s work
on the French education system in the 1960s, which he characterised as a means
not of ensuring social mobility but of reproducing the dominant social order.
See especially Bourdieu and Passeron (1970). Miraculés were those students
from the ‘dominated fractions’ of society who were nevertheless able to achieve
educational and, through that, social success, albeit often at a price. Bourdieu
discusses his own trajectory in such terms, coming as he did from a peasant

farming background in the Pyrenees, in the ‘auto-analysis’ he wrote towards
the end of his life (Bourdieu 2004).
13 For a reading of Zidane as transnational, multiethnic and politicised
figure, see Guénif-Souilamas (2009).
14 ‘Ah, you smell of home!’; ‘Are you mad, or what?’
15 On the emergence of the journey theme in recent Maghrebi-French and
North African émigré cinema more broadly, see Higbee (2011).
16 ‘Supposing we went to Algeria?’
17 ‘Why the fuck do you want to go to Algeria?’
18 ‘Me, I’m French’.
19 When introducing herself earlier to a stranger in a bar in Spain, however,
Naïma noticeably describes herself as ‘algerina de Francia’ [‘an Algerian woman
from France’], a move at once testament to the playfulness of her character and
redolent of her and Zano’s ability to choose between Maghrebi and European
identities. Tellingly, this is a facility never enjoyed by the African migrants they
encounter.
20 ‘He’s a real criminal!’; ‘France is finished’.
21 ‘He’s been in prison and deported before we’ve even finished our
game!’
22 ‘I have to get out of here’.
23 ‘It’s the same for us when we come to France’.
24 On the film’s playful engagement with these cultural stereotypes, see
also Abderrezak (2011).
25 ‘Everything’s complicated there’. Will Higbee (2007: 61) notes that
Merzak Allouache had a similar intention in Bab el web (2005), situated in the
popular Bab el-Oued district of Algiers, and location of his film of ten years
earlier, Bab el-Oued City, which depicted the early years of the civil conflict in
Algeria.
26 Though it could also be argued that the film’s elision of a troubled
decade is itself a comment (intended or otherwise) on the Algerian govern-
ment’s own approach to normalisation within Algerian society in the wake of
the civil war, and its determination to restrict debate and memorialisation of
that conflict through the Law on Civil Concord in 2000. As Evans and Phillips
(2007: 266) put it, Bouteflika’s central strategy was simply ‘to bury the 1990s’.
Yet recent history, and not least that involving an earlier conflict in Algeria, as
we have discussed at various points in this book, suggests that it is a strategy
which will haunt Algeria for many years to come.
27 ‘I am therefore very grateful to him for having given me complete
freedom to fly over his country and to produce this book in my own way’.
28 ‘Movement beyond the notion that nations are irreconcilable. Tired
of obsessive repeated behaviour, or the violence of words which drive people
apart, its aim is understanding and reconciliation’.
29 See pp. 225 and 324, for example.

Conclusion
1 ‘European victims and Algerians loyal to France’.
2 ‘A huge lie designed to aggravate wounds rather than heal them’. Lionnel
Luca, ‘Profil bas’, 16 September 2010. <www.lionnel-luca.fr> (accessed 19
January 2011).
3 <www.cinefeed.com/index.php/box-office-2010> (accessed 12 May
2012).
4 ‘“Rien n’est simple dans les images …”. Entretien d’Érika Nimis
avec Christine Peyret’. <www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&
no=10703> (accessed 12 May 2012).

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Index
Index
Books appear under their authors or Témoignage Chrétien 67, 77

editors. Matter in notes is indicated by re-examination of (1990s and 2000s)
the letter ‘n’, e.g. 186n2. 66, 67–8, 85, 86–8, 193n3
television coverage of 77–8, 86, 87,
17 October 1961 protest 65–8, 69–71, 195n23, 201n49
76–89 victimhood 69–71, 81–2, 83, 85, 86,
‘Algeria Syndrome’ 66, 88 87–9
anniversaries of 66, 67–8, 86 17 octobre 1961 une journée portée
disappearance from public disparue (Drowning by Bullets)
consciousness 77, 84 195n23, 201n49
events of 65, 76, 77, 79–81
film and 88, 93, 111, 113, 197n17, ‘Accidental Napalm’ (Nick Ut) 75–6
201n49 aerial photography 30–1, 32, 56, 175, 177,
immigrant and minority ethnic 178–9
communities, legacy for 66–7 Algeria
narrative of containment 77–8, 79, see also Algiers; Kabylia; Oran; Sétif
80–1, 202n6 Algérie vue du ciel, L’, seen in 177–9
narrative of repression 71, 77, 81–2, apaisement in relation to 20, 21
85, 86, 87–8 capital and commerce, post-colonial
Paris and 65, 67, 76–7, 79–82 136, 137–8
photographic representation of 67–8, civil war see civil war (Algeria)
69–71, 76, 77, 78–83, 86–8 colonial
Algerian press 88 1945 insurrection 180–1
body, role of 76, 77, 79–80, 82, commanding gaze, reassertion of
83, 87 30–1
book covers 69, 69–71, 70 depictions of, Western see
rhetoric of affect 87, 88 photo-books; picture
violence 69–70, 80, 81–2 postcards
print media coverage 77, 81–2, 83, final period 27, 34
84–5 flag, national, bearing of 180–1
Express, L’ 67, 77, 81–2 history, ownership of 189n30
France-Observateur 67, 77, 81–2 indigenous populations, visual
France-Soir 77, 78, 86 images of 14–15, 18, 31–2,
Paris Match 67, 77, 78–81, 83 34–7, 37–8, 42, 46

Index 227
see also Algeria: colonial: Second World War, connections with
women, visual images 102–3
of; Algerian War: visual television coverage of 86
images: Algerian soldiers visual images 39–50, 52–63
Mediterranean region, Algerian approaches to 59–61
significance of 121 Algerian soldiers 42–3, 59, 60–1
modernisation 27, 33, 34, 35–6, 49 French dominance of 41, 42–3,
restaging of 15, 18, 26, 27, 28, 50, 51
29, 31 French military production of 40,
rural 30, 34, 35–6 48–50, 54, 57
women, visual images of 14–15, French soldiers 48–9
31, 36–7, 54–5, 56–9 conscript viewpoints 40, 42,
France, relationship with see Franco- 50–4, 55–7, 60, 61, 62
Algerian relationship photo-books 48, 50, 52–4, 56–7,
independence 1, 3, 37–8, 54, 186n2 60–1, 62
myths of 31, 32, 42, 83, 153, 163, 166 women, Algerian 54–5, 56–9
photography, attitudes to 62, 63, ‘Algérie imaginaire’ 13, 163
204n4 Algérie: vue du ciel 177–9
returns to Algiers
2000s films 167, 168–9, 170, Beur blanc rouge 167
171–2, 174 Casbah 30, 31–3, 36
pieds-noirs 167, 168–9, 170, 171, Dissolution 136
189n7 Exils 170, 171, 173
tourism 13, 176, 187n2 Il était une fois dans l’Oued 175, 176
‘Algeria-in-France’ 6, 148, 162–4 Monde vu d’en bas, Le 204n26
see also ‘Algiers-in-Paris’ Musée national du moudjahid 60
‘Algeria Syndrome’ 66, 88 photo-books, in 20, 21, 26, 29, 30,
Algerian provisional government (GPRA) 31–3, 53
1, 44 Place du Gouvernement 32
Algerian War post-colonial decay 170, 173
see also 17 October 1961 protest; Salut cousin! 158–9
Charonne Métro station deaths Saphir 133
anniversaries of 1, 45–7, 62, 84, 125, ‘Algiers-in-Paris’ 158–9, 160
129, 182 see also Algeria-in-France
books and 20, 62, 94 Aliot, Louis 180, 182
films and 93 Alleg, Henri, La Question 5
state and civil society reaction Allouache, Merzak 138, 151, 152, 197n15,
to 3 205n25
Casbah and 33 see also Salut cousin!
ceasefire 1 Alloula, Malek 14–15, 28
déracinement 35, 36, 37 Alvermann, Dirk 193n39
exhibitions about 40–1, 58–9 Alzieu, Teddy 20, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, 32
film and see film: Algerian War and Ameur-Zaïmèche, Rabah see Bled
French amnesia towards 39, 43, 113 Number One
historiography of 41–2, 43, 44, 48, 51 Amicale des Enfants de l’Algérois 19
propaganda 40, 49 ANI du ‘Tassili’, Les 123
rural terrain 34, 49 Antenne 2 (French television channel) 87

appelés see Algerian War: visual images: see also ‘frontière monde’
French soldiers: conscript Beur blanc rouge 165, 166
viewpoints Bled Number One 153, 171
Arab Spring 122 Exils 153, 169
Arcady, Alexandre 151, 167 Salut cousin! 159
Arthus-Bertrand, Yann see Algérie: vue Bouchareb, Rachid see Hors-la-loi;
du ciel Indigènes
Attia, Kader 151 Boudjelal, Bruno 149, 151, 152, 167
Au nom de la mémoire 66, 67 Boumédiène, Houari 147
Austin, Guy 51 Bourdet, Claude 82
Auteuil, Daniel 111 Bourdieu, Pierre, Images d’Algérie 17,
Autre Côté de la mer, L’ 153, 155, 160–4, 34–6, 37, 162
163 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 152, 177, 205n26
Azoulay, Ariella 55 Bouzid, Saal 180, 181
Azoulay, Paul, La Nostalgérie française Boym, Svetlana 22, 23–4, 26
18, 28 Buñuel, Luis 99
Burke, Peter 71–2
Bahloul, Joëlle 28 Burris, Jennifer 113
Bail, René 40, 48, 49, 50 Butler, Judith 85
balcon sur la mer, Un 17, 120
Balibar, Étienne 4, 142–3, 148, 149, 160 Cabrera, Dominique 151
banlieues 147, 151, 154–5, 157, 157 see also Autre Côté de la mer, L’
Barkat, Sidi Mohammed 83 Caché 95, 109–18, 110, 118–19, 119–20
Barrat, Robert 55 17 October 1961 protest 111, 113,
Barthes, Roland 74, 78 201n49
Bataille d’Alger, La 95, 119, 201n51 Cartouches gauloises, compared with
Baye, Natalie 100, 101 95, 112, 120, 200n43
Beauvois, Xavier 181 childhood 110, 111–12, 113, 114,
Ben (ferry passenger) 131 115–16, 118–19, 120
Bencherif (FLN commander) 56 Franco-Algerian relationship 113,
Benkemoun, Brigitte 202n12 116, 117, 120
Bensalah, Djamel see Il était une fois Michou d’Auber, compared with 95,
dans l’Oued 106, 112, 120
Berbers 4, 101, 121, 122, 131, 141, 148 moral outlook 113, 115, 116, 117–18
Bessaï, Zineddine see H-OUT: Le Guide mystery element 112–13, 116
de la Migration reaction to, critical and public 95,
Beur blanc rouge 164–7, 165 109–10, 112, 115, 116, 117
beur cinema 119, 150–1, 152, 174 seeing, significance of 110, 112, 113,
beur literature 123 115
Bhabha, Homi K. 135 sound and hearing 115
Bigeard, Marcel, Ma guerre d’Algérie 48 ‘technical errors’ 112
Binoche, Juliette 111 victimhood 114
‘black Atlantic’ 123, 132 violence, images of 114, 115
Bled (French army magazine) 40, 48 Campbell, David 75
Bled Number One 153, 171–3, 172 Canard enchaîné, Le 97
borders and border zones 122, 135, 140, Cannes film festival 2, 109, 115, 181
142, 148–9, 153 Cardinal, Marie 18, 29, 126

Index 229
Cartouches gauloises 95, 96–100, 97 visual images: French soldiers:
Algerian War and 96, 97, 98, 100 conscript viewpoints
autobiographical elements 96, 100, ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy) 132
119 Coulthard, Lisa 117
Caché, compared with 95, 112, 120, Courbey, Julien 174
200n43 Courtillières, Les (Bobigny) 156–7, 157
childhood 96, 97, 98, 99, 118, 120 Cousins, Mark 199n38
critical reaction to 96–7 Curti, Lidia 123–4, 141
dream-like nature 97, 99
female voices, disregarding of 120, darja 141
196n12 Delouvrier, Paul 154, 156
filmic aspects of on-screen events Demougin, Jacques, J’étais à Alger 52,
98–9 53–4
Franco-Algerian relationship 118 Depardieu, Gerard 100, 101, 104, 199n34
Michou d’Auber, compared with 95, Depardon, Raymond 7, 17, 40, 124, 151,
106, 107, 108, 118, 119 152, 167
Olvidados, Los and 99 déracinement 35, 36, 37
violence 96, 97–8 Derrida, Jacques 133, 143
Casbah (Algiers) 30, 31–3, 36 Des hommes et des dieux 181
Chagrin et la Pitié, Le 94 Desvergnes, Alain 58, 62
Chambers, Iain 123–4, 136, 140, 141 development see modernisation
Channel 4 (British television channel) Dine, Philip 17, 18, 44–5, 48, 51, 94, 121
195n23 Dislocation 203n20
Charef, Mehdi see Cartouches gauloises; Dissolution 135, 136–8
Fille de Keltoum, La Djinns 93
Charonne Métro station deaths (1962) Donadey, Anne 3, 66
84 Drouot, Serge, Algérie 1954–1962 52–3
Cherry, Deborah 13 Drowning by Bullets 195n23, 201n49
childhood, film and 95
Caché 110, 111–12, 113, 114, Echo de l’Oranie 19
115–16, 118–19, 120 ECPAD (Établissement de
Cartouches gauloises 96, 97, 98, communication et de production
99, 118, 120 audiovisuelle de la Défense) 50
Michou d’Auber 107, 108, 118, Éditions Alan Sutton 20, 21
120 Edwards, Elizabeth 72, 73, 74, 75
Chominot, Marie 41–2 Einaudi, Jean-Luc 65, 87
cinéma moudjahid 196n3, 201n51 Bataille de Paris, La 67, 69, 69–70, 71
civil war (Algeria) 152–3, 160–1, 167–8, Einaudi, Jean-Luc and Kagan, Élie, 17
171, 205n26 Octobre 1961 67, 69–70, 86
Collectif 17 octobre 189n30 Eldridge, Claire 21
colonialism (Algeria) see Algeria: Ennemi intime, L’ 93
colonial Établissement de communication et de
colonialism, ‘positive’ aspects of 21, production audiovisuelle de la
46–7, 116, 189n30 Défense (ECPAD) 50
Colonna, Fanny 35 European Union (EU) 122, 140–1, 142,
Communist Party, French 84 148
conscript viewpoints see Algerian War: Évian Agreements 1, 17

Exils 153, 168–71, 169, 173 Flament, Marc 40, 42, 48, 49
Express, L’ 45, 67, 77, 81–2, 129 FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) 65,
Ezra, Elizabeth 112 83, 128, 159, 181, 193n39
images of 42, 56
Fargues, Dominique, Mémoires de FNACA (Fédération nationale des
pieds-noirs 129 anciens combattants d’Algérie-
Fechner, Élisabeth 20, 21, 26 Tunisie-Maroc) 52
Pays d’où je viens, Le 20 football 130, 157, 164
Souvenirs de là-bas: Alger et Forsdick, Charles 146
l’Algérois 16, 24, 29, 30, 32–3, France 2 (television channel) 86, 87
36–7 France 3 (television channel) 86
Fédération nationale des anciens France-Observateur 67, 77, 81, 82
combattants d’Algérie- France-Soir 77, 78, 86
Tunisie-Maroc (FNACA) 52 Franco-Algerian identity 130, 131, 153
Fellag 100 see also ‘Algeria-in-France’;
female voices, absence of 120, 131, ‘Algiers-in-Paris’
196n12 Autre Côté de la mer, L’ 155, 161–2
Ferracci, Jean-Baptiste 48, 50 Beur blanc rouge 164, 165–6
Fille de Keltoum, La 197n16 Bled Number One 171–2
film Exils 168–9, 170–1
1990s 148, 150, 152, 154, 155 Il était une fois dans l’Oued 174
see also film: beur cinema; Michou d’Auber 100, 101, 103–4,
specific films 106, 107, 108, 109
2000s 93, 94–5, 148, 153, 167, 168, Salut cousin! 159, 160
174 Traversée, La 133
see also specific films Franco-Algerian relationship
Algerian civil war and 152–3, 160–1, see also Algeria: colonial; ‘Algeria in
167 France’; Algerian War; ‘Algiers-
Algerian emigré directors 151, 152 in-Paris’; borders and border
Algerian War and 93–5, 103 zones
17 October 1961 protest 88, 93, 2000s flashpoints 1–2, 182
111, 113, 197n17, 201n49 Algerian emigré directors 151
2000s 94–5 Autre Côté de la mer, L’ 155, 160,
Algerian films about 196n3 161–2, 163–4
Caché 111, 113 Beur blanc rouge 164, 165–6
Cartouches gauloises 96, 97, 98, Caché 113, 116, 117, 120
100 Cartouches gauloises 118
female voices, disregarding of 120 contemporary visual art and 151–2
Michou d’Auber 95, 100–1, 104, Exils 169–70
106–7, 108–9 football friendly October 2001 164
beur cinema 119, 150–1, 152, 174 ‘frontière monde’ and 142–3
cinéma moudjahid 196n3, 201n51 Gardiennes d’images 63
Mediterranean Sea and 130–3, 134–5, geopolitical context 146–7, 165, 173,
136–8 179
returns to Algeria (2000s films) 167, Hors-la-loi 181
168–9, 170, 171–2, 174 Il était une fois dans l’Oued 174–5,
sound and hearing 97, 115, 135, 137 176

Index 231
Michou d’Auber 101, 104, 105, 107, République Algérienne (GPRA)
108–9 1, 44, 59
pied-noir directors 151 Graffenried, Michael von 152
post-colonial space 145–6, 147–50 Grassmann, Pierre 58
presidential election (French) 2012 grieving and grievability 84, 85
180 Grossvogel, D.I. 112
Salut cousin! 155, 158–60 Guerre sans nom, La 51–2, 94
Toulouse shootings 2012 1–2 guilt, French national 88, 109, 110, 113
Traversée, La 130, 131, 133 Gumiel, Alain 182
‘French Atlantic’ 123
Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) 65, H-OUT: Le Guide de la Migration
83, 128, 159, 181, 193n39 138–42, 139
images of 42, 56 Hakim, Samir El 134
Front National 2, 180, 201n3 Halbwachs, Maurice 28
‘frontière monde’ 142–3 Hall, Stuart 130
frontiers see borders and border zones Haneke, Michael see Caché
‘harem images’ 14–15
Gandini, Jacques 18, 19, 27 harraga see migration: clandestine
Alger de ma jeunesse 16, 18, 19, 30, HC Éditions 21
32–3 Henry, Jean-Robert, 3
Garanger, Marc 40, 49, 54–9, 192n32 hexagon, figure of 21, 122, 151, 168
Algerian women, images of 54–5, Hexagone 151
56–9 Higbee, Will 150, 151, 171, 174
Femmes algériennes 1960 56–7, 58 Historia magazine: la guerre d’Algérie 48
Femmes des Hauts-Plateaux 192n32 historiography 25, 71–6
Guerre d’Algérie, La 55–6, 60 Algerian War, of 41–2, 43, 44, 48, 51
Garcia, Nicole 17, 120, 151 history
Gardel, Louis, La Baie d’Alger 124 contiguity and 25
Gardiennes d’images 62–4 ‘forgetfullness’ and 23
Gatlif, Tony see Exils images, significance for 41
Gaulle, Charles de 107, 147, 154 occlusion of 16, 87
Gaullist government 3, 27, 78, 81, 154, photography and 25–6, 41, 43–4, 61,
168 71–6
Gervereau, Laurent 40–1, 42 spatial terms, seen in 25
Gervereau, Laurent and Stora, Benjamin, History and Theory 72
Photographier la guerre d’Algérie Hollande, François 180
40, 41 Hors-la-loi 2, 181–2, 196n3
Giaccaria, Paolo 123–4 Hôtel de Sully (Paris) 40
Gilou, Thomas House, Jim and MacMaster, Neil, Paris
see also Michou d’Auber 1961 66, 67, 71, 88–9, 194n21
pre-Michou films 102, 104, 198n23, cover image 69, 70, 70–1, 78
198n30 Hubbell, Amy 17, 22
Gilroy, Paul 117, 123, 132, 141 Humanité, L’ 85
globalisation 137–8, 146–7, 165, 169, 173 Huyssen, Andreas 37
Godin, Emmanuel 122
Gouvernement Provisionnel de la identity
borders, border zones and 165

‘conviviality’ and 132 Manière de voir 125
Franco-Algerian see Franco-Algerian Marseilles 125, 164
identity Marshall, Bill 123
French 21, 103, 123, 147, 154, 156, 164 Mauss-Copeaux, Claire 42, 50–1
‘in-between-ness’ and 150 Mediterranean region 121, 122, 123–4
miraculés and 162 Mediterranean Sea 121–44
Ighilahriz, Louisette 94 barrier, as 125, 127, 136, 138–41
Il était une fois dans l’Oued 153, 174–7, borders and 140
175 colonial France, significance for
Illustré suisse, L’ 55 121–2
immigrant communities communication and 131, 135
17 October 1961 protest 66–7 ferry and ship crossings 130–3, 134–5
Autre Côté de la mer, L’ 161–2 film, represented in 130–3, 134–5,
Beur blanc rouge 164, 166 136–8
Il était une fois dans l’Oued 175, 176 ‘frontière monde’ and 143
Paris 155, 156, 157–60, 161–2 globalisation and 137–8
Salut cousin! 155, 157–60 H-OUT: Le Guide de la Migration
‘in-between-ness’ 122–3, 124, 130–2, 138–41, 142
134–5, 137, 138, 150 images of 124–9
independence, Algerian 1, 3, 37–8, 54, ‘in-between-ness’ 122–3, 124, 130–2,
186n2 134–5
Indigènes 94, 181 literature and 122–3
Islam, French attitudes to 2, 121 migration 125–9, 130, 131, 132–3,
133–4, 138–41, 142
James, C.L.R. 141–2 pieds-noirs and 124, 125–9
Jarnoux, Maurice 126–8 southern shores, perspective of 136,
Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre 93 137–8
Jeanson, Francis 55 see also H-OUT: Le Guide de la
Joli Mai, Le 84 Migration
supplementary function 143
Kabylia 34, 35, 51, 171 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick 141–2
Kagan, Élie 67–8, 69, 71, 81–2, 86, 87 memory
Kameli, Katia 135–6, 136–8, 203n20 see also nostalgérie; nostalgia
Keller, Ulrich 74–5 Au nom de la mémoire and 66
Kouaci, Mohamed 44, 59–63 ‘multidirectional’ 103
Kouaci, Safia 62–3 pieds-noirs and 16, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27
selective (Caché) 113–14, 115–16
Là-bas mon pays 167 space and 26, 28, 178
Lamarque, Philippe 20–1 Mendoza, Francette 19
Alger d’antan 21, 23, 26, 29, 31–2 Menia, Amina 63
Law on Civil Concord 153, 205n26 Merah, Mohamed 1–2
Leuvrey, Élisabeth see Traversée, La metonymy 25, 30, 75, 80, 158
Libération 84, 96 Michou d’Auber 95, 100–2, 102, 103–9
Luca, Lionnel 181 Algerian War 95, 100–1, 104, 106–7,
Lutterbeck, David 140–1 108–9
autobiographical elements 108, 119
Macey, David 83, 116

Index 233
Caché, compared with 95, 106, 112, Murphy, David 146
120 Musée d’histoire contemporaine (Paris)
Cartouches gauloises, compared with 195n25
95, 106, 107, 108, 118, 119 Musée national du moudjahid (Algiers)
childhood 107, 108, 118, 120 60
ethnic difference 101–2, 103–6, 107, Musée national Picasso 182
108–9
Franco-Algerian relationship 101, National Assembly (French) 2, 21, 116
104, 105, 107, 108–9 New Cartographies: Algeria–France–UK
humour 100, 102, 105, 106–7, 109 vii, 137
music, role of 108 Noble, Andrea 25
nostalgia 105, 108 Norindr, Panivong 156
Paris 100–1 nostalgérie 15–16, 17, 18, 22–3, 46
racism and 101, 105, 106, 109 nostalgia
MiddleSea 133, 134–5 aerial photography and 30
migration colonial view, restaging of 31
see also pieds-noirs: exodus from ‘if only’ of 27
Algeria (1962) iteration and 29–30
Bled Number One 173 meaning of 22
clandestine 125, 138–41, 173 memory and fantasy and 26
European Union and 122, 148 Michou d’Auber 105, 108
Exils 169 photo-books and 16, 23, 24, 26–7,
H-OUT: Le Guide de la Migration 29–30, 31, 37
138–41, 142 pied-noir literature 18
Il était une fois dans l’Oued 174, 175 restorative 22
Mediterranean Sea and 125–9, 130, space, time, temporality and 23–4
131, 132–3, 133–4, 138–41, 142 Utopia and 37
MiddleSea 134 ‘wilful’ 16
personal journey, as 134 Notre-Dame d’Afrique (Basilica of) 29,
Saphir 133–4 175, 175
Traversée, La 130, 131, 132 Nouvel Observateur, Le 45, 86, 126,
Minca, Claudio 123–4 196n2
miraculés 162 Nuit noire 93
Mitterrand, François 156
modernisation OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) 84,
Algeria 27, 33, 34, 35–6, 49 96, 104, 106, 107, 109, 128
France 3, 147, 154–5, 155–7 Octobre à Paris 88
Mollat bookshop display September 2009 Olvidados, Los 99
5, 5–6 Opéra Bastille 156
Mon colonel 93 Oran 17, 48, 162, 163, 176
Monde diplomatique, Le 125 Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) 84,
Monde, Le 2–3, 94, 96 96, 104, 106, 107, 109, 128
Monde vu d’en bas, Le 203n26 O’Riley, Michael 149
Monnerot, Guy 128
Morano, Nadine 180, 182 Papon, Maurice 65, 66
Moudjahid, El 44 Paris
Muriel ou le temps d’un retour 120

17 October 1961 protest 65, 67, 76–7, space and 26, 27–8, 29–30
79–82 walking tours, as 29, 31
‘Algiers-in-Paris’ 158–9, 160 Photographier la guerre d’Algérie
Autre Côté de la mer, L’ 160, 161–2 (exhibition) 40–1, 42
Charonne Métro station deaths 84 photography
Exils 168 aerial 30–1, 32, 56, 177, 178–9
immigrant communities 155, 156, Algerian attitudes to 61, 62, 63,
157–60, 161–2 204n4
male Algerian population (1961) ambiguity of 55, 73
194n19 camera and photographer, influential
Michou d’Auber 100–1 presence of 59, 75
modernisation and 155–7 grieving and 84
Musée d’histoire contemporaine historiography and 71–6
195n25 history and 25–6, 41, 43–4, 61, 71–6
Opéra Bastille 156 identity photographs 57
Place de la République 84 metonymy and 25, 75
Salut cousin! 155–9 nostalgia and 24
war weariness of 81 see also nostalgia: photo-books
Paris Match 40, 45, 46–7, 58, 79 productive agency of 74–6
17 October 1961 protest coverage 67, space and 24
77, 78–81, 83 time and 24, 25, 75
pieds-noirs exodus and 126–7, 127, Pickles, John 140
128 picturesque 13, 31, 36
Parti socialiste 82, 180 pieds-noirs
past and present, contiguity of 24–5, 26, see also Amicale des Enfants de
66 l’Algérois; Echo de l’Oranie, L’;
Péju, Paulette, Ratonnades à Paris 86 nostalgérie; photo-books
Pen, Marine Le 2, 201n3 Algeria, returns to 167, 168–9, 170,
Pépé le Moko 32 171, 189n7
Peyret, Christine 182 ambiguous status of 17–18
photo-books 15–17, 18–21, 23, 26–34 Autre Côte de la mer, L’ 160, 161, 163
aerial photography and 30–1, 32 childhood and 27
Algerian War, images of 48, 50, 52–4, children, portrayal as 126, 129
56–7, 60–1, 62 definition of 187n5 (see first note 5)
Algiers, in 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31–3, 53 economic migrants, links with 131
Bourdieu, Pierre 34–6, 37 Exils 168–9, 170
Casbah, Algiers 31–3 exodus from Algeria (1962) 15–16,
conscript viewpoints 52–4, 55–7, 60, 17–18, 45–6, 47, 53–4, 125–9, 127
61, 62 film directors 151
Garanger, Marc 55–7, 60 France, integration into 17–18, 23, 45,
indigenous populations, depictions of 128–9, 161
18, 31–2, 34–7, 37–8, 56–7 Hors-la-loi and 181
iteration in 29–30, 31 literature (post-independence) 18
modernity, celebration of 33–4 Mediterranean Sea and 124, 125–9
nostalgia and 16, 23, 24, 26–7, 29–30, memory and 16, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27
31, 37 see also nostalgérie
Riboud, Marc 37–8 Peyret, Christine, and 182

Index 235
Retelling Histories and 182 Saxton, Libby 114, 115
victimhood 47, 126, 128, 129, 181 Sayad, Abdelmalek 131
Place de la République (Paris) 84 Schéma directeur d’aménagement et
Place du Gouvernement (Algiers) 32 d’urbanisme de la région de Paris
Plan de Constantine 27 156
planning see modernisation Schor, Naomi 14
Point, Le 45–6, 129 seas, academic study of 123
Poole, Deborah 7 Sebbar, Leïla 6, 122, 154, 192n32
post-colonial space 145–6, 147–50 Mon cher fils 125
see also banlieues; hexagon, figure of; Sections administratives spécialisées
‘in-between-ness’; Mediterranean (SAS) 49
Sea; modernisation: France Sedira, Zineb see Gardiennes d’images;
beur cinema 150–1 MiddleSea; Retelling Histories;
Franco-Algerian relationship 145–6, Saphir
147–50 Sétif 180
French, mapping of (1990s) 154 Shepard, Todd 3, 18, 128–9
‘frontière monde’ 142–3 Sillars, Jane 112
Paris 155–9, 161–2, 168 Silverman, Maxim 117
postcards, picture 13–15, 18, 20–1, 28 Silverstein, Paul 4, 121, 148
Pratt, Mary Louise 13 Slama, Alain-Gérard, La Guerre
present and past, contiguity of 24–5, 26, d’Algerie 49
66 Smith, Kimberly 16, 22
Prix Niépce 58 soldiers see Algerian War: visual images
Prochaska, David 13, 14, 26, 27 Soustelle, Jacques 49
propaganda 40, 49 space
history and 25
Quatre cents coups, Les 107 memory and 26, 28, 178
nostalgia and 23–4
regroupement 34, 35–6 photo-books and 26, 27–8, 29–30
Rencontres d’Arles 58 photography and 24
Retelling Histories 182 post-colonial see post-colonial space
Riboud, Marc 17, 40 Stade de France 164
Algérie indépendance 37–8 Stora, Benjamin 39–41, 42, 43, 94, 147,
Rosello, Mireille 123, 148–9, 150, 160, 168, 177–8
164, 178 Sved, Étienne, Alger 1951 189n29
Ross, Kristin 3, 129, 146, 154
Roth, Michael 72 Taconis, Kryn 42
Rothberg, Michael 66, 82, 103 Tadjer, Akli 123
Rousso, Henry 23, 66 Tagg, John 72, 74
Runia, Eelco 24–6 Tarr, Carrie 148, 150, 152
Témoignage Chrétien 67, 77
Salut cousin! 108, 155–60, 157, 161, 162, Ternant, Geneviève de 19
163–4 Terre vue du ciel, La 177
Saphir 133–4 TF1 (television channel) 86, 87
Sarkozy, Nicolas 122, 180 Toulouse shootings, 19 March 2012 1–2
SAS (Sections administratives tourism 13, 176, 187n2
spécialisées) 49 tourist gaze 176, 188n19

Trahison, La 93 Algerian War 53
Traversée, La 130–3 Caché 114, 115
Trevor, Tom 137 Cartouches gauloises 96, 97–8
Tristan, Anne, Silence du fleuve, Le 67 Michou d’Auber 106
Tucker, Jennifer 72, 73 Vogl, Mary 16, 22
Union pour la Méditerranée 122 War, Algerian see Algerian War

Union pour un Mouvement Populaire Watan, El 52, 88
(UMP) 181, 182 Wheatley, Catherine 112, 115
Wilson, Michael 72
victimhood 8, 128 women (Algerian), visual images of
17 October 1961 protest 69–71, 81–2, 14–15, 31, 36–7, 54–5, 56–9
83, 85, 86, 87–9 women’s voices, absence of see female
Caché 114 voices, absence of
Charonne Métro station deaths 84 Wood, Nancy 28
French conscript soldiers 53, 56
pieds-noirs 47, 126, 128, 129, 181 Yedes, Ali 27
Vince, Natalya 122
violence, images of Zemmouri, Mahmoud 151
17 October 1961 protest 69–70, 80, see also Beur blanc rouge
81–2 Zidane, Zinedine 164

(Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures 27) Edward Welch, Joseph McGonagle - Contesting Views - The Visual Economy of France and Algeria-Liverpool University Press (2013)

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(Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures 27) Edward Welch, Joseph McGonagle - Contesting Views - The Visual Economy of France and Algeria-Liverpool University Press (2013)

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Contesting Views

the visual economy of France and Algeria

Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle

Edward Welch is Senior Lecturer in French at Durham University.

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 27

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 1 02/04/2013 08:37:49

Recent titles in the series:

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 2 02/04/2013 08:37:49

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 3 02/04/2013 08:37:49

I Algerian Pasts in the French Public Sphere

1 Wish We Were There: Nostalgic (Re)visions of France’s

II Mapping Franco-Algerian Borders

4 War Child: Memory, Childhood and Algerian Pasts in

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 5 02/04/2013 08:37:49

1 Display of books in Bordeaux’s Mollat bookshop, September 2009

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 6 02/04/2013 08:37:49

Collaborative research and writing is still a rare enough occurrence

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 7 02/04/2013 08:37:49

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 8 02/04/2013 08:37:49

Nineteen March 2012 proved to be a notable date in France for two

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 1 02/04/2013 08:37:49

in Pakistan, and had sought to avenge Muslim deaths in Palestine, Iraq

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 2 02/04/2013 08:37:49

We would agree with Jean-Robert Henry (1993: 9) that the (pop)

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 3 02/04/2013 08:37:49

part of lived experience for millions of people – whether as affective and

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 4 02/04/2013 08:37:49

Figure 1 September 2009 display in Bordeaux’s Mollat bookshop

In September 2009, for example, one of the authors encountered a

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 5 02/04/2013 08:37:50

The book display was noteworthy for two reasons in particular.

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 6 02/04/2013 08:37:50

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 7 02/04/2013 08:37:50

historical understanding of these periods takes shape retrospectively

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 8 02/04/2013 08:37:50

French youths born to parents of Algerian origin, or the multitude of

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 9 02/04/2013 08:37:50

However, it is with a return to French Algeria that our study begins.

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McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 11 02/04/2013 08:37:50

Wish We Were There:

Postcards from the Colonies

As France established itself in Algeria during the nineteenth century,

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 13 02/04/2013 08:37:50

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 14 02/04/2013 08:37:50

‘once their mission is accomplished’ (Alloula 1986: 129 n. 5); in other

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 15 02/04/2013 08:37:50

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 16 02/04/2013 08:37:50

timely given, as we discussed in the Introduction, both the persistent

Photo-books and the Visualisation of Nostalgérie

Despite what is sometimes assumed, the concept of nostalgérie does

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 17 02/04/2013 08:37:50

(2003) and Todd Shepard (2006a) have argued, as a post-imperialist and

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 18 02/04/2013 08:37:50

The material qualities of these publications are an indication of their

In Oran de ma jeunesse, Geneviève de Ternant, editor of the monthly

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 19 02/04/2013 08:37:50

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 20 02/04/2013 08:37:50

by a commercial publisher (HC Éditions) established in a particular

McGonagle and Welch, Contesting Views.indd 21 02/04/2013 08:37:50

The Nostalgic Vision: Suspicion and Resistance