Cinéma Utilitaire | Poems of love and combat, Algeria’s veiled International State
Lecture by Viktoria Metschl organized in the framework of the class African Cinema and Decolonization by Christian Kravagna.
In 1969, Sarah Maldoror describes her film Monangambeee (Algeria 1969) as a “testimony of cinematographic solidarity from one African state towards another”. Since the “Cinema Service” was founded as integral part of the FLN’s armed struggle during the Algerian Revolution, the Algerian government, after formal independence, continues to produce, finance and support works of anti-colonial “cinematographic solidarity” within its international, non-aligned scope. Produced in the “silent interval between colonization and decolonization” (Khatibi 1983), films like Monangambeee enact “a raging return to an imaginary veiled revolution acting as a veil for the national state that acts as a veil for the international state.” (M’chalet 2004) The talk features materials from this (Algerian) context of resistance against the “prison of appearance“ (Mbembe 2015) that colonialism and its visuality build; tracing “international” connections that show how Maldoror’s cinema defies deeper structures – past and present – of the “colonialist prison“ (Fanon 1960).
Viktoria Metschl works as a researcher in the project “Mobile Cultures and Societies. Interdisciplinary Studies on Transnational Formations” at the University of Vienna. She studied Theater, Film and Media Studies and Development Studies. Before joining the research project, Viktoria had been working as translator and office assistant for independent film productions and a program of legal protection for refugees and asylum seekers in Algiers.