Yehia rejects his egotistical, ignorant son, notwithstanding the latter’s skill and stature as a performing artist—a move clearly paralleling Chahine’s rejection of a once-admired America; the film bristles with disparaging comments about the United States. However, the fact that the same actor (Ahmed Yehia) plays both the young Yehia and Alexander draws critical attention to similarities between the two, and to Yehia’s—indeed Chahine’s—own egotism (also refracted across the earlier films in the series). Chahine apparently sees little hope in Alexandria or Egypt any longer either, while his attempt to draw parallels between his own career and Egypt’s history has struck critics as self-important.
ALEXANDROWICZ, RA’ANAN (1969–)
Born in Israel to Soviet immigrants, Alexandrowicz is known for directing films that analyze critically the contradictions of Zionism. His first feature, James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003), offers a scathing critique of Israeli capitalism that indicts both victims and victimizers. Before that, Alexandrowicz directed The Inner Tour (2001), a vérité documentary that sympathetically depicts a group of Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) who have acquired tourist visas under the auspices of an Israeli bus tour in order to briefly revisit their ancestral village sites in Israel. His The Law in These Parts (2011) exposes the apartheid legal system in the OPTs through personal interviews with the men who devised it.
ALGERIA
Much of Algeria, the largest country in Africa since the division of the Sudan, consists of the Sahara desert, with the major cities of Algiers and Oran positioned in the north on the long Mediterranean coast. It is bordered by Tunisia and Libya to the east; Niger, Mali, and Mauritania in the south; and Morocco as well as a sliver of the Western Sahara to the west. Once populated mostly by Berber peoples, the region, known together with modern-day Tunisia and Morocco (and sometimes, Libya and Mauritania) as the Maghreb, experienced successive waves of Arab Muslim immigration, and much of the region was united under Arab rule in the eighth century. Algeria became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and earned notoriety as the base of the Barbary pirates until the early 19th century. The French invaded the country in 1830, and Algeria became an integral part of the French colonial system.
The assimilationist policies characteristic of French colonial rule, whereby the elite of colonized peoples were instructed in French culture and history and groomed as “overseas Frenchmen,” were applied somewhat differently in Algeria than elsewhere, as a very large number of French and other European settlers arrived, and the country, uniquely, became a part of France, consisting of three regional départements. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Arab and Berber Algerians were not given French citizenship. Thus two parallel cultures existed in the country by the beginning of the 20th century, and this is reflected in the cinema, which was the exclusive province of the European settlers prior to independence in 1962. Thus, the representation of Arabs in French-made Algerian films was typical of colonial cinema in their portrayal of happy fools or uncivilized ruffians.
By 1954, 300 cinémathèques, based in the country’s northern urban centers, were serving settler audiences. Algeria was also the setting for exotic adventure films, of which Julien Duvivier’s poetic realist classic Pépé Le Moko (1937) is the best known. Not a single feature was made by an Algerian during this period. However, it seems likely that the colonial practice of depicting the indigenous, non-European population as barbarians in need of civilizing guidance may have backfired, since the clear evidence these films supply of French colonial-settler—or pied-noir—racism and class consciousness seems to have helped catalyze the anticolonial struggle.
Many Algerians fought alongside the French in World War II, but calls for independence after the defeat of Nazism were met with the brutal suppression of demonstrators in May 1945. The war for liberation began in 1954, led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The French fought hard to maintain control, but their resolve was weakened by determined resistance, failure in Southeast Asia, and increasing anticolonial sentiment at home, until, in 1962, independence was conceded. Algerian national cinema started just before, when the provisional government-in-exile created a production unit and then a film school directed by René Vautier, a French filmmaker active in the FLN. Vautier trained the earliest Algerian filmmakers, including Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, Amar Laskri, and Ahmed Rachedi, who made shorts from FLN bases in Tunisia.
Most of the major institutions organized by the newly independent Algerian state directly modeled those in France or those established during the colonial era. The government dictated the themes that films were to treat, privileging prevailing ideologies of national unity. The focus of virtually all filmmaking during those early years (cinéma moujahid) was the war of liberation, a subject vital to the first generation of Algerian filmmakers, many of whom had been active in the struggle. In 1963, the state created its production organization, the Office des Actualités Algériennes, the focus of which gradually shifted from newsreel productions to short documentaries, then to fictional features, including Lakhdar-Hamina’s The Wind of the Aures (1966). Meanwhile, Mustapha Badie directed the ambitious The Night Is Afraid of the Sun (1966), a three-hour epic study of the origins, development, and outcome of the war, for the Centre National du Cinéma. In addition, the state television organization, Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne, founded in 1962, supported cinema development by coproducing films and training professionals.
In 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed realist re-creation The Battle of Algiers was released. The Algerian state nationalized the country’s exhibition sector, built postproduction facilities, and opened the Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (ONCIC), a state-run monopoly production agency responsible for some of the most influential Arab and African films, marked by their directors’ personal critical perspectives and cinematic styles. The first ONCIC film, The Way (Mohamed Slim Riad, 1968), analyzes its director’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France. ONCIC subsequently moved into coproduction, lending support to three films directed by Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and, in 1975, to Chronicle of the Years of Embers, Lakhdar-Hamina’s epic account of events leading up to the establishment of the independent Algerian state, and the first Arab (or, for that matter, African) film to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’or. By that time, Lakhdar-Hamina had assumed a position of power within ONCIC, of which he would eventually serve as director from 1981 to 1984.
During the 1970s, Algerian cinema shifted focus to the theme of agrarian reform, the subject of The Charcoal Burner (Mohamed Bouamari, 1972), Noua (Abdelaziz Tolbi, 1972), and The Nomads (Sid Ali Mazif, 1975). The period also witnessed the appearance of a “new cinema” (cinéma djidid)—films made on low budgets and typically utilizing neorealist approaches to treat social problems. A new generation of filmmakers had begun to represent Algeria’s everyday economic, cultural, and sociological life in films such as Omar Gatlato (Merzak Allouache, 1976), Children of the Wind (Brahim Tsaki, 1981), and Nahla (Farouk Beloufa, 1979).
ONCIC was disbanded in 1984; its duties were split between separate production and distribution agencies, and further reforms followed in 1987, when the Centre Algérien pour l’Art et l’Industrie Cinématographiques (CAAIC) assumed both duties, while the reorganized state television company also offered support to filmmakers and increasingly cooperated with CAAIC. Emigration and the difficulties encountered by Algerians in France were the subject of films such as Ali in Wonderland (Rachedi, 1978) and several more focused on women’s issues, including Houria (Mazif, 1986). Initially, the 1987
