- 3 I Fashion a Nest Between Spines & Stories
- 4 Sonic Beirut, Displaced
- 5 The Translation Institute
- 6 Air as Commodity, Image as Spectacle
- 7 Auditory Escape
essays
2 Between City and Self
Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Fall 2023
Turning the Other Cheek, or the Screen:
Colonial French Cinema in Algeria
Colonial French Cinema in Algeria
Independent Paper
Advised by Professor Nasser Rabbat
Abstract
In 1895, French brothers and photographic equipment manufacturers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the Cinématographe, a compact, kinetic, dual-claw film camera that functioned as both a photo developer and a projector which could be taken anywhere. After being commercialized in 1897, the cinematograph, whose meaning translates in Greek to “the writing of movement”, was planted in numerous cities all over the world to capture around 1400 films. Commissioning camera operators to collect footage from places like Algeria, Egypt, Tunis, and Morocco, the Lumière brothers built a catalog of cinematic material that arguably empowered French colonial governments in Northern Africa and concretized certain stereotypes about the colonized people.
With a focus on Algeria, this paper bridges early 20th century French colonial films depicting caricatural representations of the colonized Algerians with the late-colonial period, at the end of the Algerian War of Independence between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front from 1954 to 1962. In picking certain representative films from the early and mid 20th century, one can delineate an evolution in the French representation of Algerians and French people alike. In the 1950s and 1960s, French colonial culture finetuned its narrative of French society to be absolved of its crimes in the colonized land. It is this paper’s contention to outline an arc of attitudes between the Lumière and Méliès epoch of propaganda filmmaking in the early 1900s and its mutation into a redemptive reinvention of French innocence at the end of the Algerian war, with an emphasis on the latter.
In 1907, special-effects filmmaker George Méliès who followed the Lumiere tradition, releases the film Delirium in a Studio, whose original name translates to Ali Drinks Oil. I examine Méliès film as an example of colonial representation of Arabs in derogatory tropes that activate a long-lived trend of misrepresentation and deliberate patronization of the Oriental figure in colonial cinema. Focusing on two late-colonial French films in Algeria, I explore narrative and audiovisual elements to exemplify the redemptive pacifism embedded in this cinema. Scholar Mani Sharpe coins the term “redemptive pacifism” to label the phenomenon of representing colonial societies as innocent or absolved of the atrocities committed against native people. The 1962 film The Olive Trees of Justice (Les Oliviers de la justice), which is illustrative of the French reimagination of Algeria during the war, chronicles a man’s return to his native Algeria to visit his dying father. The film shifts the narrative from an explicit survey of a war-torn city’s reality to romanticized accounts of familial relations and personal histories. Similarly, in 1963, filmmaker Alain Resnais’ film Muriel, or the Time of Return (Muriel ou le temps d’un retour) summons compassion for a French soldier haunted by the murder of a mysterious, non-visualized woman, Muriel, from his military service during the War of Independence.
Through a close reading of these films, one can uncover how French cinema evolved to mirror the French colonial rule’s changing policies and values in the period between the two World Wars. Intensifying the influence of these sociopolitical changes was the literature that erupted in France, most notably the journal Les Temps Modernes (The Modern Times) in France founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir. The cultural lens of cinema, within the scripted cinematic space between France and the Other, attempts to reimagine history, turning into a more ethically-reassuring, fabricated post-colonial reality, adopted both individually and collectively on the national scale.
In 1895, French brothers and photographic equipment manufacturers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the Cinématographe, a compact, kinetic, dual-claw film camera that functioned as both a photo developer and a projector which could be taken anywhere. After being commercialized in 1897, the cinematograph, whose meaning translates in Greek to “the writing of movement”, was planted in numerous cities all over the world to capture around 1400 films. Commissioning camera operators to collect footage from places like Algeria, Egypt, Tunis, and Morocco, the Lumière brothers built a catalog of cinematic material that arguably empowered French colonial governments in Northern Africa and concretized certain stereotypes about the colonized people.
With a focus on Algeria, this paper bridges early 20th century French colonial films depicting caricatural representations of the colonized Algerians with the late-colonial period, at the end of the Algerian War of Independence between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front from 1954 to 1962. In picking certain representative films from the early and mid 20th century, one can delineate an evolution in the French representation of Algerians and French people alike. In the 1950s and 1960s, French colonial culture finetuned its narrative of French society to be absolved of its crimes in the colonized land. It is this paper’s contention to outline an arc of attitudes between the Lumière and Méliès epoch of propaganda filmmaking in the early 1900s and its mutation into a redemptive reinvention of French innocence at the end of the Algerian war, with an emphasis on the latter.
In 1907, special-effects filmmaker George Méliès who followed the Lumiere tradition, releases the film Delirium in a Studio, whose original name translates to Ali Drinks Oil. I examine Méliès film as an example of colonial representation of Arabs in derogatory tropes that activate a long-lived trend of misrepresentation and deliberate patronization of the Oriental figure in colonial cinema. Focusing on two late-colonial French films in Algeria, I explore narrative and audiovisual elements to exemplify the redemptive pacifism embedded in this cinema. Scholar Mani Sharpe coins the term “redemptive pacifism” to label the phenomenon of representing colonial societies as innocent or absolved of the atrocities committed against native people. The 1962 film The Olive Trees of Justice (Les Oliviers de la justice), which is illustrative of the French reimagination of Algeria during the war, chronicles a man’s return to his native Algeria to visit his dying father. The film shifts the narrative from an explicit survey of a war-torn city’s reality to romanticized accounts of familial relations and personal histories. Similarly, in 1963, filmmaker Alain Resnais’ film Muriel, or the Time of Return (Muriel ou le temps d’un retour) summons compassion for a French soldier haunted by the murder of a mysterious, non-visualized woman, Muriel, from his military service during the War of Independence.
Through a close reading of these films, one can uncover how French cinema evolved to mirror the French colonial rule’s changing policies and values in the period between the two World Wars. Intensifying the influence of these sociopolitical changes was the literature that erupted in France, most notably the journal Les Temps Modernes (The Modern Times) in France founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir. The cultural lens of cinema, within the scripted cinematic space between France and the Other, attempts to reimagine history, turning into a more ethically-reassuring, fabricated post-colonial reality, adopted both individually and collectively on the national scale.
* Paper available upon request *