About the Book
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 been represented and contested through visual means since the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. It probes the contours of colonial and 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 new 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.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Visualising the Franco-Algerian Relationship
Part One. Algerian Pasts in the French Public Sphere
1. Wish We Were There: Nostalgic (Re)visions of France’s Algerian Past
2. Visions of History: Looking Back at the Algerian War
3. Out of the Shadows: The Visual Career of 17 October 1961
Part Two. Mapping Franco-Algerian Borders in Contemporary Visual Culture
4. War Child: Memory, Childhood and Algerian Pasts in Recent French Film
5. Bridging the Gap: Representations of the Mediterranean Sea
6. A Sense of Place: Envisioning Post-Colonial Space in France and Algeria
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Edward Welch is Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen Joseph McGonagle is Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the French-speaking World at The University of Manchester.
Review :
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. This incisive and fascinating study provides a new perspective on the complex relationship between France and Algeria by analysing the central role that visual culture plays in shaping our understanding of the two countries' common history. It encompasses a wide range of material, tracing the circulation of, and connections between, diverse still and moving images made on both sides of the Mediterranean since the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. Part I explores the role played by the photographic image in mediating French Algeria and the Algerian War, both at the time and subsequently. Chapter 1 examines the construction of a nostalgic vision of French Algeria in photobooks from the 1990s and 2000s produced for a pied-noir audience by authors of similar origin or connections such as Jacques Gandini, Teddy Alzieu, and Elisabeth Fechner. The visual strategies they employ are highlighted through analysis of the alternative perspectives that emerge in photobooks by Pierre Bourdieu and Marc Riboud. Chapter 2 explores the visual legacy of the Algerian War in images of the pied-noir exodus and, primarily, of military conflict. It demonstrates the heterogeneity of visual representation of the Algerian War, assessing not only images by well-known photographers Rene Bail and Marc Flament but also photographs taken by conscript soldiers (including Marc Garanger), as well as official images that reveal an Algerian perspective (by Mohamed Kouaci). Chapter 3 focuses on the 'visual career' of the events of 17 October 1961 in Paris, when the police brutally repressed a peaceful protest by Algerian immigrants. It argues convincingly that photographic representation is crucial to the historical fortunes of these events, while it considers the impact of an iconography of victimhood on the Franco-Algerian relationship. Part II examines the legacy of the Algerian War and post-independence Franco-Algerian relations in contemporary visual culture. Chapter 4 provides an original slant on representations of the Algerian War in French cinema by showing how it is restaged from the viewpoint of the male child in contrasting post-2000 examples by Mehdi Charef, Thomas Gilou, and Michael Haneke. Chapter 5 explores depictions of the Mediterranean Sea either as barrier or frontier or as bridge, hyphen, or point of crossing. Diverse media and perspectives, from both France and Algeria, are analysed, including the iconic photographs of the pied-noir exodus, a documentary film byE' lisabeth Leuvrey, video installations by Zineb Sedira and Katia Kameli, and a 'map' for clandestine migrants by artist Zineddine Bessai... Chapter 6 considers how the relationship between France and Algeria is staged through the representation of postcolonial space in both countries in films primarily by Merzak Allouache, Dominique Cabrera, Tony Gatlif, Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche, and Djamel Bensalah, as well as in a book of photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. These nuanced analyses draw on a range of criticism from the fields of history, French (and wider) cultural studies, photography studies, and film studies. This timely volume will be most useful to scholars and students in these areas, but will also appeal to those with an interest in the history of the Franco-Algerian relationship and its ongoing intricacies fifty years after decolonization. This timely volume will be most useful to scholars and students in these areas, but will also appeal to those with an interest in the history of the Franco-Algerian relationship and its ongoing intricacies fifty years after decolonization. This is an important and profoundly interesting book. It is timely in every sense: it is informed by the retrospective focus prompted by the fiftieth anniversary of the 1962 Evian accords leading to Algerian independence; but it remains topical in its reflections on both France's and, more generally, the EU's problematic relationship with migration from across the Mediterranean, that privileged maritime space of liminality and limbo 'helping suture, metaphorically, the metropole's southern shores to Algeria's coastline' (p. 121). The opening chapter, devoted to what has been called 'la nostalgerie francaise' (largely accommodated in recent photo-book reproductions of nineteenth-century postcards), establishes both a way of seeing and a mode of remembrance with far-reaching consequences. And that the specifically visual dimension of the collective memory, whether consecrated by the state or resisting the official histories, is as pertinent today is underlined by reference to exhibitions closed or films dismissed at the point at which even images produced in the new millennium are perceived as offending pied noir or republican sensibilities. Most of the works explored are indeed those which have appeared in this last decade. What the book also succeeds in doing, in this respect, is to make a compelling case for photography's role in the shaping of history, not as mere source or resource, but as being integral to the inflection of our narratives of the past. Necessarily, therefore, the illuminating analyses of images of the Franco-Algerian 'psychodrame' are grounded in an attention to context, target audience, production values and ideological positioning as well as to more traditional aesthetic and technical concerns. The result is a thought-provoking study of the residual imbrications of France and its former colony. Propagandist views from above are set against those from below, but never in simplistic opposition: the photo-journalist 'embedded' with conscripts during the Algerian War retains the freedom to produce images as disturbing as those shot during the notoriously violent police repression of demonstrators in Paris on 17 October 1961; the camera as an instrument of identity-defining surveillance unveils an indigenous female regard which is threatening, at odds with the 'exoticizing and eroticizing' Orientalist mythology of the harem. And as so many films are located on the ferries plying back and forth from Algiers to Marseilles, so the book as a whole shuttles across points of view: alternating French and Algerian cinematographic perspectives; the mournful iconography of the 1962 exodus, on the one hand, and, on the other, post-Civil War immigrant hopes of a better life; the Algerian cafe within the delimiting and Gaullist peripherique; panoramas of monumental Paris visited by the marginalized inhabitants of the banlieue contrasted with returns to North Africa in which its decadence, physical decay and native poverty conjure up fears of the invading 'other'. The argument is well made that, on both sides, it is the imagined space that determines real lives, political rhetoric and public policy, a mental territory mapped in inconsistent versions of desire and revulsion. And guilt. The book challenges any comforting notion that amnesia and denial have been left behind, precisely because it is only now that temporal distance and the lifting of censorship (both legislative and self-imposed) make it possible to gain critical purchase on the postcolonial legacies of a traumatic and symbolic chapter in modern French, and European, history. The book includes some 15 illustrations, not many of which are as telling as the visual material to which detailed reference is made in the text. The latter masterfully negotiates current scholarship while modestly asserting the originality of looking differently. And not the least of this book's achievements is that its joint authorship finds expression in a seamless clarity of writing, intelligence and insight. This is an important and profoundly interesting book. It is timely in every sense ... this book's achievements is that its joint authorship finds expression in a seamless clarity of writing, intelligence and insight. The objective of this well-documented essay is ambitious: to analyze the production, circulation, and consumption of images (such as film, postcards, posters, photos, and book and press covers) that have presided over the Franco-Algerian relationship from colonial to postcolonial times. Or, to put it differently, to analyze Franco-Algerian tensions and at times convergences in the visual representation of what Balibar has called a "Franco-Algerian set" along three spatial and temporal axes: a French historical one, a recent Mediterranean one, and a contemporary Algerian one (which includes the Algerian diaspora). The first section provides the historical context of the Franco-Algerian relationship as it traces the visual representations of Algeria by France in colonial times (e.g., at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900) echoed in the nostalgerie felt by the pieds-noirs who had moved to France after 1962 in the form of photo-books, postcards, and special issues of magazines. Images of the 1957-62 war then surface in various formats: photographs by photojournalists, by conscripts, by French engineers working in Algerian villages. The authors point out the "mal d'archives" (the severe lack of archives) in Algeria bemoaned before them by historian Benjamin Stora. They devote chapter three to the 17 October 1961 massacre of peacefully demonstrating Algerians in Paris, whose corpses were thrown into the Seine, and to the visual career of a shocking event that became subsumed under what Anne Donadey has called "the Algerian Syndrome." They show how the massacre was first reported to represent threatening Algerian males in the right-wing press; how it was then forgotten, and then recently remembered by, among others, Leila Sebbar and Michael Haneke. Perhaps more crucially, this far-reaching chapter also grapples with the interplay of photography and history, and with the role of the historian as she analyzes a visual frame. This is by far the most successful and engaging chapter in the book. The second section maps out Franco-Algerian borders in mostly contemporary films. The first group are about the war of liberation (e.g., L'Ennemi intime, Florent Emilio Siri, 2007), but soon, the authors plumb a series of films that feature small male child protagonists allowing the various directors to depict both the past and the present of French and/or Algerian individuals. The film sample is French, Algerian, and from the Algerian diaspora (e.g., Thomas Gilou's Michou d'Auber, 2007; Mehdi Charef's Cartouches gauloises, 2007; Michael Haneke's Cache, 2005). The second movement in this section attempts to re-envision the Mediterranean as a space that binds both countries together: it is a crossing space in one direction (the pieds-noirs visiting Algiers) or the other (Algerians emigrating from Algeria to France) that becomes a fluid and hybrid space of networks. Yet, in the end, and through the analysis, among other visual works, of Zineddine Bessai's 2010 map for clandestine migrants, H-OUT: le guide de la Migration (reproduced on the cover of the book), the Mediterranean becomes a zone of containment and of perilous circulation for migrants: even if it challenges the very notion of nation-states, the Mediterranean is also a ruthless border rendered by Bessai as barbed wire. The last section looks at diasporic films and video installations, applying Rosello's notion of "performative encounter" to the study of film narratives and frames. Noting the way characters travel from Algeria to France and from France to Algeria in such films as Merzak Allouache's Salut cousin (1996), Alexandre Arcady's La-bas ... mon pays (2000), Tony Gatlif's Exils (2004), Mahmoud Zemmouri's Beur blanc rouge (2006), Djamel Bensalah's Il etait une fois dans l'oued (2005), or the way in which the photographer travels over Algeria in Yann Arthus-Bertrand's aerial photography book Algerie: vue du ciel (2006), the authors tease out visual representations of Algeria as either a place of terror and chaos (the Algeria of the 1990s) or a place of normalcy and beauty (in particular in Bensalah's and Arthus-Bertrand's works). This section further seeks to place the Franco-Algerian visual economy in wider geopolitical contexts. This book is very successful in putting together and analyzing a rich and diverse portfolio of images that have circulated (or not) between France and Algeria over the course of Franco-Algerian history. It breaks new ground in that it pays close attention to visual representations outside of film and interrogates the power or usefulness of photographs in refining - or derailing? - historical narratives. However, because of its emphasis on the visual economy as an almost exclusively male enterprise, it looks to this reader that a few blind spots need to be addressed. Although the authors mention (but do not dwell on) the films of Nicole Garcia, Rachida Krim, or Agnes Varda, they fail to take into account a few important films in the Franco-Algerian visual economy, such as Brigitte Rouan's Outremer/Overseas (1990) and Djamila Sahraoui's Barakat!/Enough! (2006), for instance. The first film shows the French colonial presence and eventual war from a French woman's perspective while the second features an Algerian character, Khadija, who, while helping her friend Amel locate her kidnapped husband during the civil war of the 1990s, reminisces about her role during the liberation war. The recent blockbuster documentary on Chaabi music, El Gusto (2011) by Safinez Bousbia, also shows the trans-Mediterranean links between musicians in Algeria and in France, thus underscoring the role of women's images in the representations of the Franco-Algerian history. , This book is very successful in putting together and analyzing a rich and diverse portfolio of images that have circulated (or not) between France and Algeria over the course of Franco-Algerian history. It breaks new ground in that it pays close attention to visual representations outside of film and interrogates the power or usefulness of photographs in refining - or derailing? - historical narratives.
