Gender, genre and intertextuality in Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la loi

This article examines the close relationship between gender, film genre and intertextuality in Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s 2010 feature film Hors la loi to argue that the film’s problematic gender politics detract from Bouchareb’s intended construction of an imagined community. Hors la loi is a historical film about Algerians’ struggle for national liberation from the French, focusing particularly on the Algerian community in Paris. Bouchareb’s multiple filmic intertexts include Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and Hollywood genres such as gangster/mafia, crime, war and western movies. These film genres all tend to center on male characters, a feature also found in Bouchareb’s film. In Hors la loi, female characters are types and stock characters. The film does not reflect the historical reality of Algerian women’s active participation in the war. Bouchareb’s problematic representation of women’s role in the war is due primarily to the influence of epic Hollywood intertexts, which leave less space for female agency than The Battle of Algiers did. As Bouchareb’s war films have reached large audiences, this blind spot is of concern because women of Maghrebian descent in France are simultaneously centered and silenced in public discourse today, thus increasing the need for developing complex representations of their agency in various cultural productions.