Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France

5. Re-Visions of the Algerian War of Independence: Writing the Memories of Algerian Immigrants into French Cinema

In the fiction films produced by the French descendants of Algerian immigrants,the war of independence (1954–62),while not absent, has rarely taken center stage. A few notable exceptions—Sous les pieds des femmes (Rachida Krim 1997), Vivre au paradis (Bourlem Guerdjou 1998), and Cartouches gauloises (Mehdi Charef 2007)—have proposed historical reenactments of the war, while other films have touched on the subject in subtle, if meaningful , ways. The overall discreet presence of the war in these films contrasts with the renewed public interest in the conflict since the 1990s, which historians Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora have termed “the end of amnesia” (2004). In this chapter, I propose to put this relative absence into perspective by exploring the specific challenges filmmakers of Algerian descent face in producing cinematic re-visions of the war. By inviting viewers to re-envision their relationship to a contested past through popular understandings of history that foreground the role played by Algerian immigrants in France, these filmmakers have not only compensated for the overall paucity of representations of the war 5 RE-VISIONS OF THE ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE Writing the Memories of Algerian Immigrants into French Cinema Sylvie Durmelat 94 RE-VISIONS OF THE ALGERIAN WAR on the French domestic front (Branche 2008,112),they have also interrogated the way national genealogies are constructed.Such cinematic revisions of the role of immigrants in France go beyond building a “retrospective sense of historical continuity”—which endows the descendants of immigrants with legitimacy, thus fostering integration in France in the present (Tarr 2005, 126)—to question the building of national commemorative narratives and explore the possibility of writing a transnational, French-Algerian history of the war, one that is still being shaped on and off the silver screen.1 Writing the War of Algerian Immigrants into National Genealogies At first glance, filmmaking by the descendants of immigrants does not seem to significantly differ from French cinema as a whole,with respect to the relative lack of references and reenactments of the war, on which it has become customary to comment, if not to lament (Branche 2008, 107). Cinema critic Jean-Michel Frodon corrects this view somewhat: Algeria is present in a significant number of the most beautiful films of the 1960s (“Le petit soldat, Muriel,Le combat dans l’île,Cléo de  à ,Adieu Philippine,Les parapluies de Cherbourg,Le joli mai”)—albeit in fragmented,roundabout,and distant ways. French cinema, he suggests, recorded the Algerian War of Independence as such because the colonial empire had in fact been written off, and out of the national genealogy (2004, 75): “Cette histoire-là n’est jamais entrée dans la mémoire collective française, elle n’est pas refoulée (à l’intérieur) mais reste exclue (à l’extérieur)” [This history has never made its way into French collective memory; it is not repressed (inside) but remains excluded (outside)] (2004, 76). To be sure, state censorship, and the self-censorship it induced, played an active role in keeping images and references to the war off the silver screen (Stora 1997,111–25; Jeancolas 2007,14).2 However,lack of interest and indifference on the part of both directors and the public (Stora 1997, 193; Branche 2008, 109) also ensured that the war—as well as the larger history of colonial migrations to the metropole, and colonial history—remained peripheral and hardly integrated into the core of French society (Stora 2005, 58–59). In fact, the very coinage of the word “decolonization” in the 1960s helped to convey the fallacious impression that colonization could actually be wished away, thus adding to the mystification that the latter not only happened elsewhere but was also a thing of the past (Shepard 2006, 269–72). Writing the war into, rather than off, what has been hastily constructed as two separate French and Algerian national historical legacies becomes the aes- SYLVIE DURMELAT 95 thetic,political,and personal challenge of those who,whether they are of Algerian descent or not,deem that colonization still shapes the former metropole, despite independence.For these filmmakers,Frodon’s distinction—between repression and exclusion,between an inside and an outside—does not hold. In re(en)visioning the war,their works invite viewers to account for the unacknowledged and complex ways in which France and Algeria inhabit and are inhabited by each other, thus confirming what Étienne Balibar brilliantly articulated: when...