Nicholas Harrison

Pontecorvo's 'Documentary' Aesthetics: 'The Battle of Algiers' and the Battle of Algiers

Pontecorvos Battle of Algiers has often been approached as pseudo- or quasi-documentary, or as akin to newsreel. This article aims to show that the films 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.

World literature: What gets lost in translation?:

In What is World Literature? (2003) and other influential works David Damrosch suggests repeatedly that world literature “gains in translation”. This article begins by showing that Damrosch gives no convincing account of what this phrase means. It then develops a wider argument that, even if translations may be accomplished literary works in their own right, the very notion of literature — or at least, one important notion of literature — is associated with untranslatability, or what is lost in translation. The losses, it is argued, may be felt or imagined in various dimensions, and reach into the institutional foundations of the study of literature and of foreign languages.

BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS

Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers of 1966 is extraordinary both as a work of cinema and for its involved and influential afterlife. The film is of its time, politically and cinematographically, but, forty years on, it retains its ability to touch nerves. As I write this, in May 2007, it has just been re-released in the UK; viewed today, it appears dismally pertinent to a world of ‘terror’, torture, oppression and war. The Battle of Algiers tells the story of an early phase in the Algerian War of Independence, a phase that ended in an apparently conclusive victory for the French paratroopers. The war began on 1 November 1954, when the newly formed FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) launched guerrilla attacks on military and police targets. The early stages of the war saw polarization and radicalization of opinion, and a rapid escalation of violence on both sides not least, in these early stages, among Algerians, as the FLN sought to impose its authority. (According to John Ruedy’s history of modern Algeria, ‘[d]uring the first two and one-half years of the war, the FLN killed only one European for every six Muslims it liquidated’ (2005 [1992]: 164).) Prominent incidents prior to the ‘Battle of Algiers’ included the vote in the French parliament in March 1956 that granted ‘special powers’ to the French military in Algeria, and the kidnapping in October

AN INTERVIEW WITH SAADI YACEF

Saadi Yacef was an FLN leader during the War of Independence and produced and co-starred in The Battle of Algiers, in which he played himself. (The details of his role as the films producer are described in David Forgacs’ article above.) Yacef was born in the Algiers casbah in 1928, became involved in nationalist politics in 1945, and was arrested in September 1957. He was imprisoned in Barberousse and sentenced to death. In prison he began writing the memoirs that later became the basis of Pontecorvos film. Partly thanks to the intervention of Germaine Tillion and partly thanks to the amnesty offered by de Gaulle, his death sentence was commuted, and he was released after independence. He later became a member of the Algerian Senate. The material published here, translated from French and edited by Nicholas Harrison, combines parts of a question and answer session, led by David Forgacs, that took place at the ICA, London, on 8 May 2007, and an interview conducted the following day.1 Questions from audience members at the ICA are marked Q. 1Editors note: I would like to thank those involved with the ICA event, especially Richard Larcombe of The Associates and David Forgacs, for making the interview possible. I am grateful to Richard and to Kevin Durst for providing images.

Said’s Impact: Lessons for Literary Critics

Very few literary critics can expect their work to have the sort of impact achieved by Edward Said. He positioned Orientalism, his best-known book, against ‘an implicit consensus [...] building up for the past decade in which the study of literature is considered to be profoundly, even constitutively nonpolitical,’ and lamented the fact that literary critics tended to apply their techniques only to strictly literary objects.1 If that consensus was real, Orientalism, published in 1978, helped shatter it. Said’s angry critique of Western attitudes toward the East has been widely and enduringly influential, and not only because his topic had evident political gravity. The book also set an example methodologically. Others could take inspiration from Said’s willingness to break through disciplinary boundaries, and could adapt Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ to launch a critique of, say, ‘Africanism,’ drawing in diverse situations and materials. A significant amount of the activity inspired by Orientalism has accordingly taken place outside the literary-critical realm, and a fair proportion of it outside universities. And that dimension of the book’s legacy is tied to its own fundamental impetus to link academic and literary materials with, and in some important sense give priority to, a wider world of politics and conflict.

Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot (review)

703 of modernity and identity in Latin America should show them locked together in a paradoxical state of mutual antagonism and dependence, rather than alternating in prominence over the course of time. Such a view would also be able to account for the interesting fact that this oscillation frequently occurs within the work of one and the same writer, as the examples of Domingo Sarmiento and Paz demonstrate. Larrain’s view is that Latin American intellectuals have presented identity and modernity as polar opposites. One of the principal aims of his book is to break down this opposition. He convincingly argues that modernity in Latin America ought not to be associated with “the acquisition of an alien identity (Anglo-Saxon, for instance)” (206). Indeed, the pursuit of modernity has been such a prominent aspect of Latin American history that it has become “an important part of the process of identity construction” (ibid.). There is, then, a specifically Latin American modernity whose features “constitute, for better or for worse, important elements of Latin American cultural identity” (ibid.). One cannot help noticing that Larrain often describes these features in terms of a lack or absence: “the lack of autonomy and development of civil society”; “the weakness of democratic institutions”; “the fact that Latin America has never had a welfare state” (193, 195, 199). Still, his argument that modernity is an integral part of the continent’s own heritage—not a foreign imposition—is an extremely important one. It is an argument supported here by a profound respect for history, both as the accumulation of the past and as a realm of future possibility. For as Larrain points out in the closing pages of Identity and Modernity, even if the features of a Latin American modernity are part of Latin America’s identity, “nothing prevents their critical appraisal or their change in the future” (206).

Circles of Censorship: Censorship and Its Metaphors in French History, Literature and Theory

The French Revolution of 1789 bequeathed an enduring rhetoric of human rights which made it conventional to declare oneself against censorship and in favour of freedom of expression. But as this book demonstrates, the apparent consensus on this issue in modern France and elsewhere rests on a shaky sense of that rhetorics history. And while censors have continued to the present day to charge clumsily across delicate moral and political fields, opponents of literary censorship, in particular, have frequently displayed excessive respect for censored material, mistakenly assuming that the censor can be relied upon to identify material that is disturbing, subversive, or true. Circles of Censorship focuses on key episodes in the history of literary censorship in France. It examines the Madame Bovary trial of 1857, and the prosecution a century later of Pauvert, publisher of Sades complete works. It analyses and criticizes the Freudian-influenced attempts by the Surrealist movement and by Barthes and the Tel Quel group to subvert and evade censorship. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and approaches including history, literary theory and feminism, Nicholas Harrison presents a provocative and timely critique of the ideas on censorship which resurfaced repeatedly in the discourse of human rights, psychoanalysis and literary culture.