Trauma in Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema: Stories of Civil Conflict Told by the Living Dead

Abstract

This chapter addresses the representation of trauma in recent Algerian documentary cinema generated by the so-called civil war or ‘black decade’ that Algeria experienced in the 1990s. In the aftermath of a conflict that claimed between 100,000 and 200,000 victims, the state pushed through amnesty laws and attempted to mobilise a process of national forgetting. However, the same period also saw a rise in Algerian documentary film-making which has sought to listen to the stories of those traumatised by the conflict. Taking as case studies the films Algérie la vie quand même (Sahraoui 1998), Aliénations (Bensmaïl 2004) and Lettre à ma soeur (Djahnine 2008), this analysis will address the means whereby the themes of loss, depression and trauma are represented. Theoretical support will be provided by readings of recent studies that are outside the core corpus of trauma studies but in fact present illuminating ways of addressing trauma as it relates to issues of representation and depression, for example Ranjana Khanna’s Algeria Cuts (2008) and Anne Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). The aim of this chapter is to increase our understanding of the filmic representation of trauma in a post-conflict society and more generally of a culture (Algeria) that is often under-represented in Western research on film and media.