Since its birth, just like painting with the question of perspective, cinema has constantly been confronted with the issue of representing space. With the invention of the moving image, the art of filmmaking was quickly compelled to devise different aesthetic approaches to portray places, territories, and spatial modes of occupation. In doing so, it could not disregard the implications of this formidable creative power in staging a given social and economic order. In other words, whether or not it acknowledges these stakes, through its multiple readings/interpretations of space, cinema takes part in the ideological processes through which discourses of legitimization and delegitimization of social relations and mechanisms of domination are produced, disseminated, and confronted.
As examples, one may cite the various representations of the suburbs (or the medina in colonial contexts) in relation to the city, or more generally the urban space in its relationship with rural/mountain environments. One may also mention the world of the American Western and its thematic treatment of the frontier. In any case, whatever the setting (urban or rural, local or exotic), the question concerns the different ways of inhabiting space and therefore the “tactics” and “strategies” (De Certeau) mobilized by “users” and political actors to defend their respective interests.
Historically speaking, within the context of the tremendous socioeconomic, scientific, and cultural dynamism of capitalist Western societies, cinema quickly became involved in major imperialist undertakings, and thus took part in the military-industrial processes of domination over colonial territories. To quote Yves Lacoste’s famous phrase, “geography is first and foremost for making war,” and similarly, cinema contributed to shaping territorial imaginaries connected to the Western imperialist adventure in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. One only needs to recall the first images filmed in Algeria for the Lumière brothers by the cameraman Alexandre Promio in 1896 to be convinced of this. The intention to stage the appropriation of “native” space and its transformation into a modern and prosperous colony was unmistakably explicit.
Later, in the 1930s–40s, productions such as Pépé le Moko or L’Atlantide clearly reveal how colonial cinema, aligned with orientalist aesthetics, managed to construct a relatively elaborate semiotic apparatus aimed at defining and hierarchizing “indigenous” spaces (medina or desert), in order to assimilate them at a folkloric level and reduce “native” communities to the status of ghost-like extras—present yet disturbing. In reality, as Fanon puts it: “The colonized world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the border, is indicated by barracks and police stations.” It is precisely this “dividing line” that the War of Liberation would shatter by challenging relations of domination and responding to colonial violence with revolutionary counter-violence.
This would offer emerging Algerian cinema the opportunity to reclaim the spaces and sites of national identity (the Casbah, the maquis) and to portray its new emblematic figures (the resistance fighter, the martyr). One cannot help but think here of the documentaries of René Vautier (Algeria in Flames) and the first filmmakers committed to the national cause. In the post-independence period, through major productions or television series (The Winds of the Aurès, The Battle of Algiers, Hassan Terro, El-Hariq), Algerian cinema—fully financed and managed by state institutions—contributed significantly to nurturing and enriching the national narrative. The challenge was to articulate historical and political spaces whose symbolic dimensions could lead to contradictory interpretations—such as the countryside (defined as the original cradle of the Revolution and its first, “authentic” component: the peasantry) and the city (conceived as an alternative site of resistance, with its lumpenproletariat and old urban traditions).
In the 1970s, with what critics would later refer to as “El Djadid cinema,” a “new wave” of filmmakers attempted to rethink the relationship to national space, and therefore to national identity, in light of new post-independence socioeconomic and cultural challenges. It became a time of questioning, interrogation, and even disillusionment. By critically—sometimes polemically—reinvesting urban space and its boundaries (social, cultural, administrative, political), films like Le Charbonnier or Omar Gatlato reflect both ideological contradictions and the expectations of younger generations. Conversely, by imagining for its protagonists a “nomadic” topography rooted in a reality that is both fantastical yet using a vibrant blend of distinctly Algerian identity references, Le Clandestin (Benaamar Bakhti) foreshadows, in a way, the sociocultural distress of the future generation of clandestine migrants (harragas).
Later, with the “Black Decade” and its consequences, filmmakers were confronted with the need to account for a renewed relationship with the geography of a country torn by violence—violence that redefined territories through shifting power dynamics between the actors of the national tragedy, while also projecting imaginaries toward new horizons shaped by exilic trajectories.
Mourad Yelles
Inalco – Lacnad (Paris)
