Cinema in an Age of Terror: North Africa, Victimization, and Colonial History (review)

The author examines a diverse but relatively small cinematic corpus in his attempt to find a common thread — victimization, real and perceived — that would link anti-colonial struggles, particularly the Algerian War, to what he calls our current 'age of terror'. In the first chapter Michael O'Riley raises the interesting case of the 2003 Pentagon screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's La Bataille d'Alger (1966). In a reversal of the dynamics of spectatorship, a film that was widely viewed as a celebration of the struggle against French colonialism in Algeria was used, within the context of the American invasion of Iraq, as a case study that could yield lessons on counterinsurgency tactics. One notable influence in Cinema in an Age of Terror is Tom Conley's wide-ranging Cartographic Cinema (2007), which O'Riley applies solely to the postcolonial paradigm. Especially in Chapters 2 and 3, devoted to Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes (2006) and Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) respectively, the author endlessly — and tiresomely — repeats his motif of the 'mapping of victimization' as a cinematic process found in certain films devoted to the colonial era and its lingering consequences. O'Riley often refers to the relentless focus on victimization as 'problematic', since it tends to reinforce a Manichean, us-against-them worldview that fits into the 'clash of civilizations' fallacy: 'The desire to occupy the victim's position so as to retaliate with victimization is central to the contemporary age of terror' (p. 32). However, this critique of the widespread, indiscriminate desire to lay claim to the status of victim or martyr is undermined by the prominent referencing of such authors as Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said, whose writings are in no small part based on the notion of victimization. What O'Riley calls the 'return of colonial history' is also problematic. While la mémoire of the Algerian War continues to haunt a French society that has yet to come to terms with the consequences of large-scale immigration from North Africa, no other Western country has quite the same historical relationship to the collapse of its former colonial empire. The fourth chapter of Cinema in an Age of Terror is the most insightful, with close readings of a small selection of films generally categorized as part of 'Beur' cinema, which has recently enjoyed much critical success. The author could have usefully expanded the scope of his analysis to include more films (such as Bab El-Oued City, 1994) by noted director Merzak Allouache. The last chapter juxtaposes Julien Duvivier's film Pépé le Moko (which was released in 1937, not 1941 as indicated in the Filmography, p. 189) with Assia Djebar's novel La Disparition de la langue française (2003). O'Riley argues that the main character of the novel 'becomes a perpetual prisoner of the colonial past' (p. 146), as had been the eponymous character of the film, trapped within the Casbah of Algiers. This reflects the author's broader tendency to represent Algerian society mainly through the prism of its colonial history. Half a century after independence, this evaluative framework is increasingly unconvincing.