In the first session, we watched three short films, Pierre Clément’s Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef (1958), René Vautier’s Algeria in Flames (1958, courtesy of Moïra Chappedelaine-Vautier) and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s A Nation is Born (1961). The first two films were produced during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) under the instructions of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). The third was also a film to order, made to mark the birth of independent Senegal in 1960.  In some ways, these are the hardest kinds of films to engage with – purposefully produced with not-so-subtle messages denouncing colonial rule and/or embodying the homogenising nationalist stories of newly independent states, they were also often made with limited material resources. With the discussion led by Walid Benkhaled (Bodleian) and Natalya Vince (Univ), we explored how these films sought to respond to colonial ways of framing Africa, politically and cinematographically, and the extent to which they succeeded in challenging tropes, or why they might have reproduced them for purposes of political expediency.

The question of the relationship between politics and violence, and who can claim a legitimate monopoly on violence, was clearly a key theme in this early period of anti-colonial and post-colonial film making. This theme was centred the following week, with a screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). The best-known film in the series, coopted by a wide array of liberation movements as well as the states and armies fighting them as a how-to manual on both guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency, we sought to re-situate the film in its Algerian conditions of production in the mid-1960s, before the film acquired a mythical status, its own mythology and indeed provided the narrative structure for some Algerian veterans to recount their war stories. Back in 1966, however, Algerian national newspaper El Moudjahid gave a short review to the film on page eight, rather casually describing it as “not a masterpiece, but a good film.”

One of the most famous scenes in The Battle of Algiers is when three Algerian women prepare to go and plant bombs in the European quarter to the pounding beat of karkabous. The women don’t speak, instead we see them unveil, undress, dye their hair and put on “European” clothing. This led to a discussion of the nationalist male gaze – Pontecorvo is influenced by psychiatrist and Third World intellectual Frantz Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled” (1959) and the script refers to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as an example of anti-colonial solidarity in the film, but we don’t really hear from the women themselves. This is despite the fact that women’s testimony was a key propaganda tool for the FLN – rather than Sartre, we might instead name check FLN activist Djamila Boupacha, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi, and how the latter women worked with the former to bring her story of rape and torture in the hands of the French army to international attention.
Discussions around nationalist men and their relationships with women, and post-colonial relations between the formerly colonised and former colonisers continued into the third week, with a screening of Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966). The story of Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a Senegalese woman who is employed as a nanny, and then as a maid, by a white French family allowed Mobeen Hussain (Univ) and Lyn Kouadio (Univ) to centre debates about post-colonial continuities and discontinuities. The visual world of this 1960s film – the advertisments for Mon chéri chocolate in glossy magazines, tins of Nestlé milk in the kitchen, prints hanging on the wall of Patrice Lumumba, the politics of Diouana’s changing hairstyles and the ambiguous meanings of the “African mask” which she offers to her employers as a gift and which they proudly declare “the real thing” – gave a rich seam of discussion about the production of “authenticity” and “modernity”.

In the fourth week, we left behind both former French colonies and male filmmakers, with a screening of Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972). Set in Angola and filmed in the People’s Republic of the Congo whilst the Angolan struggle for independence was still ongoing, Sambizanga follows Maria (Elisa Andrade), as she desperately tries to find out what has happened to her partner Domingos Xavier  (Domingos Oliveira), arrested by the Portuguese police. As Ruth Shoo (Faculty of History) and Dan Hodgkinson (Department of International Development) pointed out, this is a war film which eschews many of the war film codes – it is an intimate, tender portrait of familial and community solidarity, albeit with an unswerving political message. As in previous weeks, one of the frustrations of presenters and audiences alike was the patchy translation of some of these films. Whilst a number of these works have recently been painstakingly restored visually, little attention has been paid to the audio. Moreover, in many of the films, the only languages which are translated into English subtitles are French, Portuguese and Arabic (and some of the Arabic translation is hit-and-miss). Unless you speak Lingala or Kimbundu, audiences do not know always know what the actors are saying in Sambizanga, they are only translated when they speak Portuguese. This not only forces us to pay closer attention to the visual and the gestural, it also has the curious effect of putting most audiences in the position of European colonisers in Africa, who “watched over” people who were often unintelligible to them.

In the fifth week, we moved back to North Africa, with Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace. Released in 1994, this film is set in two, earlier times. It begins in the 1960s, after Tunisian independence in 1956, but is mostly a story told through a long flashback to the final months of French colonial rule. What is very striking about this film, however, is that Tlatli does not take her audience by the hand and explain this historical context in a didactic way. Instead, this is a story told from the perspective of one of the most marginalised groups in society in 1950s Tunisia, female domestic servants, confined to the walls of the palace where they work for the Tunisian upper class. As organisers, we did wonder what our audience would make of this film – it is more than two hours long, has relatively little dialogue and the story primarily takes place in one location. We were therefore pleased (and relieved) that many of our attendees told us that this was their favourite film in the series. This was not because it was easy to watch – one student described crying the whole way through – but because it was beautifully and powerfully constructed. It also, of course, allowed us to think about what decolonisation meant not just for the leaders and fighters, but also for “ordinary” people, and especially working-class women.

Our season finale saw a return to documentary, with a screening of William Klein’s The Pan-African Festival of Algiers. In July 1969, thousands of artists and politicians from across the African continent and diaspora gathered in the Algerian capital to both celebrate African culture and discuss and debate what African culture was, or should be. In our final panel, Walid Benkhaled, Peter Brooke (African Studies Centre), Lyn Kouadio and Ruth Shoo engaged in thorny and complex issues such as why this celebration of pan-African culture was organised along the lines of new nation-states, the significance of the presence and absence of different countries at the festival and the fierce, unresolved debates within and beyond the film about what it means to “decolonise” culture. Klein’s documentary was a big, noisy end to our series exploring the multiple meanings of decolonisation and the relationship between politics and culture, and for every tentative explanation, a whole series of new questions were opened up.