Abstract
This chapter focuses on how the films of Djamel Kerkar outline different trajectories and build a new narrative about contemporary Algeria. In 2012 Kerkar first directed Archipel a short documentary that documents the daily life of two women in a factory and deconstructs stereotypical representations of women. In Atlal (2017) he films Ouled Allal, a village destroyed during the Algerian Civil War. With no elements of contextualization and no music, the audience stays focused on the personal narratives, the sounds of the village, the architecture, and the landscapes. The shortcomings of the testimonies, the silences, the sudden revelations, all convey a fragmented memory that is trying to overcome the trauma of the 1990’s conflict.
You shall not be built until you are in ruins.—Yunus Emre
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- 1.
Interview conducted in May 2019. All subsequent quotes from Kerkar will be from this interview.
- 2.
Dalila Ennadre (1968–2020) is a Moroccan documentary maker whose works depict the daily life in Morocco such as Des murs et des hommes (2014) on the Casbah of Casablanca. Her last documentary, Jean Genet, notre père des fleurs (2020) is an homage to writer and poet Jean Genet who is buried in Morocco and like Ennadre was placed for adoption at a young age.
- 3.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, p. 7.
- 4.
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem. University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 3.
- 5.
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, p. 11.
- 6.
Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie. Éditions Karthala, 1998, p. 101.
- 7.
Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie, p. 22.
- 8.
Some first-person accounts have reinforced the hypothesis that the secret service(s) may have played a role in the conflict. These accounts, written by former members of the military secret service or the Algerian Army and published in France include most notably Nesroulah Yous, Qui a tué à Bentalha? Algérie: chronique d’un massacre annoncé. La découverte, 2000; Habib Souaïdia, La sale guerre. Le témoignage d’un ancien officier des forces spéciales de l’armée algérienne. La Découverte, 2012; Aboud, Hichem, La Mafia des Généraux. JC Lattès, 2002.
- 9.
Djamel Kerkar borrows the expression from Pierre Nora, who, in his influential book Les lieux de mémoire, explores sites that participate in generating French history and memory, See Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire. Quarto Gallimard, 1997, p. 29.
- 10.
In All the names mentionned in this documentary ’ammi means uncle and is a sign of respect.
- 11.
David Macdougall, “Films de mémoire,” Journal des anthropologues, n°47-48, Printemps 1992.
- 12.
David Macdougall, “Films de mémoire,” p. 72.
- 13.
Contrary to other countries like Argentina that have experienced modern political trauma, Algeria has not seen the development of a testimonial genre with its centering of first-person witnessing and its implied factuality.
- 14.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge, 1991, p. 79.
- 15.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed experience: trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 11.
- 16.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony, p. 9.
- 17.
James, D. Le Sueur, Algeria since 1989: between Terror and democracy. Zed Books, 2010, p. 80.
- 18.
Elisa Adami, “The Truth of Fiction: Some Stories of the Lebanese Civil Wars”, in Karine Deslandes, Fabrice Mourlon and Bruno Tribout (ed.), Civil War and Narrative. Testimony. Historiography, Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
References
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Belkaïd, M. (2023). Djamel Kerkar. Past, Present, and Poetry. In: From Outlaw to Rebel. Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19157-2_5
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