Algerian National Cinema by Guy Austin (review)

A poster for Mohamed Chouikh’s La Citadelle (1988), reproduced on the cover of Guy Austin’s book, depicts a veiled woman staring at the viewer. The lower half of her face is blurred, perhaps veiled; her mouth is invisible. Her symbolic voicelessness anticipates Austin’s approach to Algerian cinema since independence in 1962. He refutes many of the claims made of national cinema in postcolonial states, particularly those concerning cinema’s unifying function. Postcolonial cinema, for Austin, can contest as well as consolidate national identity. It took until the 1980s for Algerian cinema production to break free from state control, and censorship has proved more difficult to shake off. Nonetheless, Austin finds films from across the period of Algerian independence that work to challenge hegemonic representations of national identity. (In this connection, it is worth noting that Algerian cinema’s reliance on French finance and distribution networks still poses a problem to the notion of Algerian national cinema.) Austin’s readings of Algerian cinema pay attention to groups excluded from state-sanctioned representations of Algerian identity: women, Berbers, youths. Each main chapter offers formal analyses of three films, with particular attention to their use of diegetic space, music, and colour. It is the first time that many of these films have received close reading, and Austin avoids reducing them, instrumentally, to simple signifiers within broader historical narratives. This is to be welcomed, but not everyone will be convinced by the way Austin moves between formal and political analysis. Discussing Rome plutôt que vous (Tariq Teguia, 2006), for example, he reads the movement of a cigarette salesman from the edge of the screen to the centre as an example of the subaltern’s interruption of social space. On another occasion, while Austin denounces the promotion of the hegemony of Arabic through the politics of Arabization, he claims, in analysing Rachida (Yamina Bachir Chouikh, 2002): ‘The [left to right] camera movement here — the opposite of the direction of reading in Arabic culture — subtly suggests an inversion, a movement in the wrong sense, towards death’ (p. 151). It is hard to imagine any comparable claim being made about French culture and French film. Behind many of Austin’s analyses lie Pierre Bourdieu’s anthropological work in Kabylia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Ranjana Khanna’s account of Algerian women’s exclusion from the newly independent state. Of particular importance is Khanna’s discussion of Algeria’s (alleged) postcolonial ‘melancholia’. Generalizations of that order need to be treated with caution, however, and Austin’s observations about circulation and reception (in Algeria, France, and elsewhere) raise further questions: he touches on this issue but does not treat it extensively, although it might help flesh out his claims about the political work done by films. Nevertheless, Austin argues convincingly for the existence of multiple Algerian cinemas, which offer a privileged space for the discussion of language, gender, and identity in postcolonial Algeria. With the exception of Roy Armes’s Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Films (Indiana University Press, 2005), Algerian cinema has not received a wide-ranging study in English since the 1970s. Austin’s book will be welcomed by film scholars with interests in North African cinema, and contributes more broadly to interdisciplinary postcolonial studies.