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This essay examines the ideological terrain of the Algerian War and takes seriously the question of the nature of the fight; not only the type of anticolonial discourse and mobilization (whether ideological or militant), but also the vision deployed in pursuit of independence, and the means by which it is pursued. In doing so, it explores the idea that how we fight determines the types of futures made possible by anticolonial revolt. I thus not only investigate the types of anticolonial imaginaries that came to compete for legitimacy and possibility during the Algerian War, but also examine the idea that the predicament of the national liberation state was not simply about policies adopted post-independence (whether regarding political or economic development, or social policies). Rather, the predicament came to life during the anticolonial struggle, and acquired poignancy once the task of the struggle – removing the colonizer – was accomplished. In that sense, I seek to explore here both the varied ideological anticolonial terrain and the immense cost exacted by a specific vision of decolonization that came to prevail. What Amilcar Cabral identifies as "the struggle against our own weaknesses" remains a struggle very much unfinished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses Muriel (1963), the third feature-length film from Alain Resnais, which attempts to make sense of a fragmented past and present that have been torn apart by international wars and domestic conflicts. The film highlights the multitude of silences and amnesias surrounding the French–Algerian War and its remembrances (or lack thereof) as the nation struggled to come to terms with colonial guilt. After mapping out the ways in which representations of destruction and rebuilding around both the French–Algerian War and the Second World War inform Muriel, the essay goes on to examine how form and content subtly reveal memory and masculinity as being tied up in this postwar, postcolonial identity crisis, exemplified by the visual absence of Muriel, an Algerian woman who was tortured and killed by a French Army unit during the war. Although the torture scene is not represented visually, its haunting presence exemplifies how the Algerian female body functioned as a screen onto which French men could project their anxieties around colonial power and masculinity. While the visual absence of torture and the title character is a glaring omission, it is one that could be also interpreted as obliquely addressing issues at the heart of the Franco-Algerian conflict, including censorship, torture and war crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on the participation of women in the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) during the Algerian War of 1954–62 has largely focused on one group of women FLN activists, the mujahidat. The mujahidat were women who left their homes and families to join the FLN armed guerrilla bands, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN). Within the historiography, two conflicting views on the mujahidat have emerged: that the FLN-ALN and male combatants by and large accepted their presence in the ALN, or alternatively that they were on the whole hostile to the presence of women. This essay examines these contrasting views on the history of the mujahidat and argues that, although divergent, studies on women in the ALN are not necessarily opposed, and may be largely complementary. Indeed, the debate over the mujahidat opens the way to new questions and reflections about the ways in which the history of the mujahidat has been written, and illustrates the diversity of women's experiences during the war, the contradictions found within the sources, and the contrast between different sources. More important, this debate also raises the question of the use of oral testimonies – the main source for the history of the mujahidat. A focus on silences – what is not said – in oral testimonies opens the way to reflections about the ways female participants have reflected on their own roles in the war in a postcolonial setting, as well as the ways historians have approached women's testimonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2004 Pontecorvo's controversial film, The Battle of Algiers, was shown on prime time French television for the first time, nearly forty years after its original release. Using newspaper articles from the time to discuss the film's initial reception, this article traces the history of its invisibility and explains how, unlike other films produced about the Algerian War, The Battle of Algiers was in fact never subject to official censorship. Instead, its absence from French screens can be attributed to two factors: in the 1960s and 1970s cinema owners were deterred from showing the film by threats from veterans' organizations and pied-noir groups in the context of what Stora terms the 'memory wars'. And more recently the film has been subject to a more subtle kind of censorship: the disinterest of spectators unwilling to be confronted with this painful episode in French history. Thus even on its recent re-release and despite the controversy surrounding the film, it failed to attract a substantial audience. [MS] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers has often been approached as pseudo- or quasi-documentary, or as akin to newsreel. This article aims to show that the film's relation to historical reality is more complicated and more interesting, both historically and aesthetically, than such an approach would imply. I argue that, through its sophisticated aestheticization of its historical material, the film could be said to raise disconcerting questions that, in a sense, it refuses to answer. It is deeply non-committal, I argue, about the importance of the actual 'Battle of Algiers' and the place of torture within it - issues 'decided', and still debated, in a sphere of representations and a history of which, as the article shows, the film itself quickly became an important part. This process, I suggest finally, reveals something about the peculiar relations between history and its representations in this particular case, and raises more general issues about the relations between aesthetics, history and the work of the critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]