Breaking Forms: Ideology in Representations of the Algerian War of Independence

Abstract

The dissertation examines the relationship between ideology and narrative experimentation in representations of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). It identifies a series of experimental approaches to representing memory and time, each of which creates possibilities for identifying the mechanisms of ideology in the production of historical knowledge. Its four chapters each compare examples of one such approach. By studying these alternative forms, one finds it is possible to generate knowledge about aspects of the war that have been insufficiently addressed from an institutional standpoint. The dissertation’s hybrid theoretical lens draws from and synthesizes diverse approaches—Althusserian Marxism, Derridean deconstruction, Benjaminian philosophy of history—that, together, inform the complex relations between structural social domination, subjective experience, and narrative representation. By emphasizing works that lack any prescriptive explanation and thus rely on the interpretive acts of readers, the dissertation argues that inventive approaches to narrating the past—and to reading those narratives—create the conditions of possibility for producing new historical knowledge.Chapter One analyzes approaches to narrating silences in films by Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais; it considers silence’s potential as a hermeneutic tool from two complementary standpoints: ideological determination (i.e. when a silence is performed but not intended) and subjective motivation (i.e. when an object is thought of but not spoken about). Chapter Two studies works of writing, film, and video—by Charlotte Delbo, Laurent Mauvignier, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ariane Tillenon—that undertake a direct narrativization of the functioning of either archival or human memory without recourse to authorial explanation. Chapter Three examines multigenerational personal narratives—a written narrative by Béatrice Commengé and a comic book by Jeanne Puchol—whose approaches to the past juxtapose multilayered memories that attain an archaeological dimension and compares these works with a detective novel by Didier Daeninckx whose investigation highlights an archaeological approach’s relevance for ideology critique. Chapter Four turns to writings by Nathalie Quintane and visual artworks by Kader Attia in which symbolic or literal acts of breaking push readers or spectators to confront the irreparability of objects of knowledge and therefore to draw their own tentative connections and conclusions.