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Flood, Maria. France, Algeria and the Moving Image: Screening Histories of Violence 1963–2010, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 56, Issue 2, April 2020, Page 248, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqaa014
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Extract
Maria Flood’s thoughtful study looks at the aesthetic and political interweaving of France and Algeria’s turbulent relationship in order to assess the role played by the moving image in promoting and influencing particular reflections of and on the past. The key term here is ‘aesthetic’, and Flood makes clear that her work is less interested in evaluating the historical verisimilitude of these films than in contextualizing them within particular cinematic movements and moments to better ‘illuminate the intersections between the historical, the political and the aesthetic in the works in question’ (2). Flood’s book considers five films – three French, two Algerian – spanning almost fifty years. Analysis of the generic features of films broadly contemporary with one another – whether belonging to the cinéma de l’urgence (Viva Laldjérie (2004)) or heritage cinema (Des hommes et des dieux (2010)) – reveal divergent ‘ideological motivations’ (133) in their portrayal of Franco-Algerian relations. Flood is interested in the politics of creation and reception of these five films that intercalate past and present, where historical events play a seemingly tangential role, thus challenging conventional notions of cinematic historicization. She examines the often nuanced, implied representations of violence they contain, looking at the effects of violence on those implicated directly or indirectly in its historical and familial perpetuation – and here women figure large – rather than through ‘straightforward’ visual accounts, thereby capturing the haunting invisibility of so many of the victims of Franco-Algerian histories of violence. While the historical accuracy of filmic representations is not Flood’s main concern, she does provide contextualization of the films discussed – whether the murder of hundreds of innocent Algerians in Paris in October 1961; the torture of Algerian women and the role of rural women during the Franco-Algerian War; or Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s and its effects on the sexually and geographically marginalized. Through her assured analyses, Flood points up the ongoing complexities of cinematic representations of the Franco-Algerian relationship and the power of the moving image to create fantasy realms that nonetheless help us to consider that relationship in the non-cinematic world from very different perspectives.
