Notes on/for a Film
Detail, Notes On/For a Film, Digital Photo Montage, 400x200 cm, 2023
In a scene from the classic film The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, three women carefully remove their white haïks—a loose-fitting garment fully covering the head and body with a triangle of cloth below the eyes—in front of a mirror. The women then comb their hair, apply lipstick, and change into ‘European clothing’. A man enters the room and gives them handbags with specific instructions to be at three separate locations. Later, three bombs explode in Algiers milk bar, a cafeteria, and the Air France office.
Notes on/for a Film is a result of Takriti’s research on the representation of female freedom fighters of the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN), who organized the militant wing of the movement in the Casbah of Algiers for two years. Drawing from Pontecorvo’s film and its depiction of women as submissive recipients of orders. The film was commissioned by Yacef Saadi—FLN’s military chief of the Zone Autonome d'Alger (AAZ)—and was based on his autobiography, which held the same title as the film. Saadi did not only commission and produce the film; he also played his own role and worked closely with Pontecorvo to have the film reflect what they called "the true face of history on screen."
To understand the importance of this film in shaping the national narrative around the Algerian War of Independence, we have to look back into the early 1960s when the Secret Armed Organisation (OAS)—a group of far-right partisans of French Algeria—destroyed the archives of French Algeria as part of their scorched earth policy. They first tried to drown them. When that failed, they set them on fire. It was not an act of resentment but part of a larger strategy to deprive Algerians of anything that could potentially be useful for constructing a state. Hence, since its release in 1966, the film gets screened annually on the 5th of July as part of the Algerian Independence Day celebration in schools, universities, television, and cinemas across Algeria in an attempt to fill the gaps between the archive that has been destroyed by the OAS, the Algerian archives that are located in Aix en Provence in France to this day, and the memories of those who have witnessed the war.
What the film fails to address or even mention is that those women (known as the ‘Fidayate’, the militant females in urban areas, and the ‘Moudjahidate’, the female fighters of the rural command) who were depicted in that scene as silent and obedient, taking the orders to place bombs in the European Quarters from Yacef, were, in fact, the ones who have sought to establish contact with the FLN with that same plan for almost two years after the Algerian War has started.
The work confronts the narrative of the film by overlapping scans from Zohra Drif’s Autobiography Inside the Battle of Algiers, in which Zohra details the role women had in organizing the militant wing of the movement in the Casbah of Algiers for two crucial years of the revolution, along with archive images and screenshots from the film where the actors eyes stare back at us through the camera, attesting to the politics of visibility and invisibility that shape the memory of those women that was slowly erased over the years since Algeria’s Independence in 1962 and the release of the film 1966.