Severed images: Women, the Algerian War of Independence and the mobile documentary idea

Abstract

During the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), conflicts over the meaning of appearances, particularly in relation to the bodies of Algerian women, were a major locus for political conflict, subterfuge and violence. As demonstrated in the most famous representation of the war, Gillo Pontecorvo’s widely celebrated film La bataille d’Alger (Pontecorvo, 1966), the strategic use of the veil and of unveiling was the mechanism that produced the Algerian woman as insurgent. What the eyes (or camera) saw was not always to be believed and nor was visual appearance akin, in any straightforward way, to truth. Drawing on key historical examples, including La bataille d’Alger, Marc Garanger’s Femmes algeriennes 1960 (1960) and Assia Djebar’s 1979 essay ‘Regard interdit, son coupe’, as well as Zineb Sedira’s contemporary film installation Gardiennes d’images (2010), this article proposes a theory of the documentary image in light of the political complexities over vision and appearance that have continued to haunt the historical representation of Algerian women. Placing an emphasis on the circulation of images and the mobility of meaning, the argument stresses communities of political belief rather than visual truth in establishing documentary meaning.