Constrained militants: Algerian women 'in between' in Gillo Pontecorvo's.

Abstract

Beur filmaker Bourlem Guerdjou's 1998 film Living in Paradise follows the divergent trajectories of a young Algeria couple (Nora and Lakhdar) living in the Nanterre shantytown durign the Franco-Algerian war. Although the focus on Nora may seem on the surface to subvert the film's male-centred narrative as her growing political conscience leads her to harbour FLN militants from the French police , the film's gender politics are in fact complex and even problematic. Drawing on theories of women and nation in Algerian literature and film (Woodhull and Hadj-Moussa), this paper argues that Guerdjou is working within a stock set of images of women in Algerian society duting the Franco-Algeria war, inherited from nesreels, documentaries and film classics such as Gillo Pontocorvo's The Battle of Algiers.