Fragmentary, Censored, Indispensable

Abstract

While the massacre of peaceful Algerian demonstrators by French police on October 17, 1961, has been thoroughly studied by historians and is well known to the general public thanks to a sprawling corpus of novels, plays, songs, films, bandes dessinées, and other retrospective representations, to date there has been no careful archaeology of the event's original audiovisual archive from 1961. This article takes up that challenge in two stages: first, by identifying the photos and newsreel footage shot on the night of October 17, specifying the circumstances of their production, (non)distribution, and impact in the immediate aftermath of the massacre; second, by surveying how key elements of the original archive were recycled over the following sixty years to serve in turn as surrogates for and complements to other sources of knowledge about this infamous and long-dissimulated crime d’état.