Meryem Belkaïd, From Outlaw to Rebel: Oppositional Documentary in Contemporary Algeria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Meryem Belkaïd (MB): After several years working and teaching in France, I felt, in the United States, more encouraged to develop an active research agenda focused on North African literature and cinema through a decolonial perspective. While acknowledging the legacies and traumas of colonialism, I wanted to showcase North African cultural productions and analyze Algeria not systematically or exclusively through the lens of its colonial past but as a dynamic place of knowledge production and artistic creation, despite the many challenges the country must navigate. I wanted to insist on the importance of considering the country and the region as a thriving center and not as a mere periphery. I also wanted to showcase Algerian texts and films and to link them to current socio-political realities on the ground with the hope of (re)affirming Algerian agency. And among all the works produced in Algeria, documentaries stood as a dynamic and engaging genre while often under-analyzed and under-appreciated, as is the case for documentaries in general.
... documentaries allow the introduction of new languages, techniques, and interpretations into the public sphere.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MB: I examine the political significance and the esthetic power of some of the most influential Algerian documentaries produced since the 2000s. My first chapter is dedicated to the history of the documentary in Algeria, a chronology and presentation that has never been comprehensively realized before. In the following chapters, I use case studies to highlight the works of four Algerian filmmakers: Malek Bensmaïl, Hassen Ferhani, Djamel Kerkar, and Karim Sayad. My central claim is that the documentary genre—born an outlaw during the Algerian war of independence—continues to craft complex and relevant work on modern Algerian citizenship and convey a broader understanding of Algerian society and identity. The title of the book is a homage to Mouny Berrah, an important Algerian female critic in the field of Arab cinema, who wrote that Algerian cinema was born an outlaw and remained a rebel. By deconstructing and opposing the mechanisms that make the mythological machine of the official discourses so effective, documentaries allow the introduction of new languages, techniques, and interpretations into the public sphere.
In independent Algeria, films sponsored by the state often functioned—and still function—as a glorification of the past. This did not prevent some filmmakers from crafting alternative images and discourses in the early sixties and throughout the following decades. After the civil war a new critical mass has been reached in Algerian documentary filmmaking with what I call immersive and oppositional documentaries. Filmmakers like Bensmaïl, Ferhani, and Kerkar, as well as Tariq Teguia and Habiba Djahnine, constitute a new political generation that has freed itself from the obligation to produce works aligned with any hegemonic or imposed discourse about Algerian identity. That is why I call their work oppositional. I look also more closely at documentaries whose directors have chosen immersion and observation as a main strategy of formal experimentation in the field of nonfiction filmmaking. They provide a more immediate, intimate, and sensory representation of particular people, territories, and environments. This emphasis on senses and sensory representations led the Tunisian cinema expert Insaf Machta to coin the expression “aesthetic of immersion,” which I find relevant for the Algerian documentaries analyzed in this book. These films’ emphasis on the material, physical, affective, and sensory qualities of lived experience suggests that some Algerian filmmakers are interested in conveying a different kind of knowledge, one that is not communicated solely via discourse and clear political statements. For example, the films’ refusal of voice-over (“the voice of God,” as critics call it) is a strong invitation to the audience to observe and immerse itself in the universe as filmed.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MB: Before my book on Algerian cinema, I worked on Francophone crime fiction. While these dual pursuits may seem disparate, they jointly reflect my interests in the ways political, social, and cultural change are reflected in the works of contemporary writers and filmmakers. In addition, these two different pieces of research consisted of a similar scholarly approach that combines close analysis; historical, sociological, and political contextualization; and critical and theoretical engagement. Francophone studies also has an intrinsic relationship with the history of colonialism and its aftermath.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MB: Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema presents intimate analyses of Arab cinema and focuses on well-known and new authors, historical and contemporary movements, specific films, and significant moments in Arab and North African film history. The series encourages multi-disciplinary methods that create a close contact with the diverse cinematic modes and genres of the Arab world. The format of the series insists on concision, and I chose the press for the promise of accessibility and perhaps wider academic and pedagogical distribution. I have been encouraged by the reaction of peers in my field who have responded enthusiastically to the book as a source of both scholarly and pedagogical value: it appears to have potential for both experienced and emergent researchers in the field. It should be of interest for students and scholars of cinema studies, Francophone studies, and MENA studies.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MB: My other work is for a broader audience (journalism, blogging, podcasting, and creative writing) and is intimately tied to my scholarly pursuits. It allows me to keep commenting upon current events, culture, and politics in Algeria and the Arab region more broadly. My first novel in French, Ecris et je viendrai, is about to be published in Algeria in October 2024.
I am also currently working on a new book that examines the representations and narrations of colonial crimes. History is often the fruit of power, and we can be hostages of discourses that power has created. Literature and cinema produce alternative narratives, especially by giving voice to the silenced and the marginalized—those who have been dominated by colonialism, authoritarianism, and patriarchy. My main goal is to keep looking for these voices and to make them heard. Western historiography often omits the points of view and accounts of the victims. It emphasizes the scale of the violence, the cover-ups, and the military and political failings, but does not dwell on the stories, trajectories, and beliefs of indigenous people. My book aims to explore their side of the story. It will have a comparative approach with narratives from Algeria, Arizona, New Caledonia, Palestine, and elsewhere.
J: You mentioned Palestine. How is your current work impacted by what is going on in Gaza since October?
MB: First, as many scholars, I am outraged to see the international community sit by and continue to allow the destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. In From Outlaw to Rebel, I wanted to showcase Algerian agency after independence and highlight stories that are not always linked to the colonial past. I think it is important, as I wrote in an article for Romanic Review recently, to take Algerian agency seriously despite the political challenges the country faces. But the fact is that colonialism is far from being over and that means that all who deny the colonial dimension of what is happening in Gaza have not learned from the past. As an academic and a teacher, I feel that the least I can do is keep sharing stories of resistance and resilience to colonial domination and violence. The more the colonized are dehumanized the more I will look for stories that humanize them.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 2)
One day early in my research for this book, I was having coffee in Paris with Hassen Ferhani and Djamel Kerkar. Both are Algerian filmmakers, and later chapters in this book will focus on their respective films. We were discussing the history of Algerian cinema and talking about some of the more influential Algerian documentaries made in recent decades (I was already thinking about this chapter) when Kerkar asked a question that has been on my mind ever since: Why have the Algerian state and the national structures and institutions that fund the arts in Algeria always privileged fiction over documentary? He added—not without irony, since he is a documentary practitioner himself—that the omission was surprising “because documentary can be an efficient form of propaganda.” We laughed and then continued our conversation, trying to understand why documentaries have failed to thrive in the national cinema, and especially how the documentary could languish as a form, even as the state and the leaders of public institutions insisted on the educational aspect of Algerian cinema and understood it as a tool.
In fact, as early as 1964, with the Centre National de Cinéma (CNC) and the Office des Actualités Algériennes (OAA), and in 1968, with the Office National pour le Commerce et l’industrie Cinématographique (ONCIC) and The Centre des Actualités Cinématographiques (CAC), all cinematographic activities, including production, distribution, programming and exhibition were handled by the state. As Mouny Berrah wrote in 1984, the orientation of the Algerian national cinema—as claimed by those in charge of cinematic institutions—has inarguably been one of “educational cinema.” That educational label should be understood in the broad sense of a cinema created for the benefit of the Algerian people as, after independence, they collectively grappled with the need to emerge from underdevelopment and the hardships of colonial rule. Algiers, with its dynamic Cinémathèque created by the state in January 1965, was throughout the 1960s the hub of Third World cinema. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s Third Cinema Manifesto, which attracted a worldwide following, was well known in cinephile circles in Algiers, and Third Cinema filmmaking practice explicitly favored documentary:
The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the concept has today, from educational films to the reconstruction of a fact or a historical event, is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary filmmaking. Every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or deepens the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or purely artistic fact; it becomes something which the System finds indigestible.
If during the Algerian War of Independence documentaries were perceived as a revolutionary tool, competing with colonialism’s official narrative, in the years immediately following independence in 1962, Algerian filmmakers did little to exploit the political potential of documentary as Solanas and Getino had theorized. In considering what circumstances might have allowed fiction to flourish more than documentary in national cinema production, Djamel Kerkar, Hassen Ferhani, and I wondered if this orientation toward fiction had in fact been chosen consciously. We pondered whether perhaps this preference for fiction, the neglect of forms like documentary, derived from a long-standing dichotomy between commercialism and critical social commitment. Did the commercial imperatives imposed by the ONCIC, and its officials’ rather conservative understanding of cinema, indicate that public institutions privileged fiction because they thought action films and to some extent comedies were more likely to satisfy the tastes of larger audiences? We surmised that documentary had rapidly been considered as a genre more appropriately screened on television and financed by the public Television and radio channel, la Radio et télevision algérienne (RTA), rather than by the ONCIC, which funds nearly all cinematic production in Algeria. And yet, were there perhaps deeper reasons why, in a nascent nation, documentary seemed inadequate, despite its recognized importance as a genre during the recent war of independence?
In the months after this conversation, as I immersed myself in scholarly work about documentary production over the past thirty years, I was struck by the theory of documentary as primarily focused on the complex relationship between reality and representation, with documentary film often seen as a genre that strives for an objective relationship to reality but always fails to realize it. Documentary can never be objective, can never sustain a straightforward relationship between the image and the real. As Stella Bruzzi explains, this missed objectivity has been seen as problematic: “Too often in the past documentary was seen to have failed (or be in imminent danger of failing) because it could not be decontaminated of its representational quality (…)”. And yet debates over what reality means, whether reality in fact exists and whether or not documentaries can represent it, were not exactly what I had in mind when I began my work on Algerian documentaries. I had a rather different take on the genre: whatever documentary’s relationship to reality, it seemed to me more important to explore the organic relationship between documentary and freedom, and perhaps even documentary and democracy. Much later in my research, during an interview with Malek Bensmaïl, I found this intuition confirmed. Bensmaïl offered that he sees documentaries as a barometer for democracy: “On a scale from one to ten, ten being democracy, I would say that in Algeria today, we are at four. Because even if you manage to overcome all the difficulties related to censorship, even if you obtain permission to film, our films are very rarely distributed and seen in Algeria. Documentaries are indeed a barometer of democracy, and we still have a long road ahead of us.” In Bensmaïl’s mind documentaries thrive together with freedom—they get made when the powers that be are not nervous about the truth and competing narratives.
Documentaries may vary in their form, their intent, their treatment of reality, but every documentary brings a fresh and personal eye to events as they take place in a specific setting. When I went back to the simple and straightforward definition of documentary offered by an early practitioner, John Grieson, in the 1930s—that documentary is “the creative treatment of actuality”—I realized that documentary theory often took for granted an idea implicit in that definition. For a filmmaker to be creative with actuality – however “creative” and “actuality” are understood– the filmmaker needs a minimum of leeway and freedom to engage in that creative work. It is with this basic premise in mind that this chapter will tell a brief history of documentaries in Algerian cinema. This is not to sidestep important questions about objectivity, reality, and representation: it is always possible for filmmakers, in whatever the political context they work, to treat reality with more or less honesty, to play with codes, to tell stories through editing, to bring formal innovations, to be close to “cinema direct”—or, on the contrary, to stage and rehearse situations and then present them as natural. But in postcolonial Algeria, it seems of much greater importance to consider the conditions in which this representation of reality—authentic or not—can freely occur.
