Representing the Algerian War in Algerian Cinema: Le Vent des Aurès

Abstract

The Algerian War has been evoked by numerous French films without ever becoming part of the French national consciousness, partly because of state censorship, self-censorship and controversies around issues such as torture. French films about the war have, however, met with a certain amount of critical attention. The same cannot be said of Algerian films about the war, which have often been dismissed out of hand as state propaganda. This article considers the development of Algerian cinema in the years immediately after the liberation from French colonial rule, and delineates the features of the dominant post-war mode known as cinéma moudjahid (freedom fighter cinema). There follows a close analysis of the representation of indigenous suffering in Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina's 1966 film Le Vent des Aurès. Paying particular attention to the representation of the female protagonist in her native landscape, the article will explore how Algeria, so often fantasized as empty of Algerians in French cinema and in colonialist thought, here becomes inhabited and dramatized according to indigenous spatial, religious and cultural concerns. Conclusions will be reached regarding the place of Le Vent des Aurès in Algerian national cinema and the ways in which the film transcends the spatial logic of colonial rule.

The 'nothing' there was to see in Algeria

Attacking the reticence of French cinema regarding the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, former Cahiers du cinéma editor Serge Daney wrote in his last-ever article that he had had enough of 'the "nothing" that there was to see at Hiroshima'.¹ This article arises from a similar frustration at the 'nothing' that there was to see in Algeria, according to French cinema. Where Daney's remark refers in particular to Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959), it is another film by Resnais, Muriel (1963), that crystallizes French film's relation to the Algeria War: 'Muriel, ça ne se raconte pas'. Muriel's torture and death is a metaphor for what happened in Algeria, but it takes place off-screen. I hope to replace such nothingness with a representation of indigenous struggle and suffering in Algerian French cinema, via an analysis of Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina's 1966 feature film Le Vent des Aurès.²

The Algerian War began on 1 November 1954, and lasted for seven and a half years, during which time a total of two million French troops fought there. Algerian independence was finally recognized by France in July 1962, and was followed in Algeria by a settling of scores between the triumphant Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and their rivals. As is well known, since Algeria was a département of France, war was never declared as such and the conflict was considered by the French authorities an operation to maintain law and order.³ Consequently, while the war swiftly assumed a heroic, mythologized status in the discourse of the FLN, it had a reduced status in France. Controversies regarding torture, rape and atrocities also dogged the French and have continued to attract press attention in the decades since the ceasefire.⁴ Despite intense press interest, the publication of memoirs and so on, the French military presence in Algeria has figured as an absence in the cinema. The films made have not been commercially successful and have not left a mark. According to the leading cultural historian on the Algerian War, Benjamin Stora, although there had been over forty French films on the subject by the late 1990s, 'Les images cinématographiques ne se sont pas imprimées véritablement dans la conscience collective française'.⁵ For Stora the French will never understand Algeria, in part because they have filmed neither the war nor the origins of the French occupation, the conquest of 1830: 'Ce qui rend l'Algérie incompréhensible, en un sens, c'est l'effacement du commmencement'.⁶

Jean-Michel Frodon, in a recent article, agrees that the Algerian War 'n'est jamais entrée dans la mémoire collective française'.⁷ As Frodon adds, one of the few apparent exceptions to...