Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (review)

Readers familiar with Roy Armes's previous books will be on familiar ground as they open Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film. They will recognize the author's critical signature, his encyclopedic knowledge of North African cinema, and his ability to address different audiences, including university students. This book builds on his earlier work, combining, in one study, the characteristics of many of the previous publications. The first part, "Histories," has the breadth and scope of Arab and African Film Making (with Lizbeth Malkmus); the second part, a series of detailed closed readings of individual films, is reminiscent of the type of work done in Omar Gatlato, and the forty-page portion that appears after the conclusion brings the 1996 Dictionary of North African Film Makers up to date, ending in 2002.

The project is to provide an overview of how the film industry developed right before and after the three Maghrebi countries became independent. Armes shows what Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have in common, and how each of these nations dealt with their colonial legacy and their own postindependence cultural and political development. The first part, "Histories," divides the corpus into five equal chunks of time: from "Beginnings in the 1960s" to "Into the Present." Armes adopts the decade as the organizing principle—a decision that has the advantage of immediate clarity but the disadvantage of being arbitrary, especially as each of the countries is individually analyzed within each decade, although, as Armes makes clear, there is no linear pattern shared by them. To this triadic nomenclature, the author adds a fourth category, which problematizes and fruitfully destabilizes the strict geographical or chronological layout: "immigrant" cinema is treated as a separate category, which emerges after the 1970s. Under this rubric appear the films of directors based mostly in France, but also in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The second part adopts a new organizing principle: each chapter offers a detailed reading of one film. These selection of ten carefully chosen examples explores in depth many of the issues identified as significant in the introductory chapters, sometimes at the risk of downplaying the originality of each work of art. Several of the decades are represented, from the 1975 Chronicle of the Years of Embers, an early Algerian account of the war of liberation, to the most recent film, Ali Zaoua (1999), whose heroes are Moroccan street children, and whose director is a French-Moroccan national. Armes is keen to document what he sees as recent feminist statements in films made by both male and female directors. Besides the chapters on the by-now classic Omar Gatlato (Allouache's 1976 portrait of an Algerian antihero) and La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (Djebar's 1978 attempt at filming women's memory), two studies of the ambiguity of space in recent Tunisian films come to mind: the chapters on Ferid Boughedir's 1990 Halfaouine and on Moufida Tlatli's 1994 Silences of the Palaces. Not exactly comparative in nature, this book could be described as a rich paratactic experiment, which allows fruitful points of comparison to appear as the reader finishes complementary chapters.

Armes's study is user-friendly and accessible, and it may be used productively in different ways by different audiences. Undergraduate and graduate students who take courses in film studies or interdisciplinary North African studies will find the first part a useful overview, whereas scholars already familiar with the cinema of the region and its historical context may prefer the analyses of specific films. Experts whose focus is Algerian, Tunisian, or Moroccan cinema will engage with the readings, even if they do not need some of the introductory material. They will appreciate and often return to the last part of the book, a forty-page section featuring a "Dictionary of Feature Filmmakers" (a recapitulation of biographical data, followed by the titles of the directors' films) and a "List of Films," organized chronologically and by location (Armes uses the same system as in...