The Algerian Novel

What is national history, if not a narrative built upon the ruins of those it chooses to erase? This is the question at the heart of Katia Kameli's richly layered visual investigation. Unfolding across three distinct chapters, this polyphonic "novel" probes Algeria's fraught relationship with its own images and the symbols they produce. The personal and philosophical reflections of its many interlocutors echo and collide, revealing that an image is continually transformed by the gaze that brings it into the present.

Beginning at the famous postcard kiosk on Larbi Ben M'hidi Street in Algiers, the film first revisits the city's revolutionary and colonial photographic archives, exploring how they shape the relationship to history and identity of those who encounter them. The second chapter introduces philosopher Marie-José Mondzain, who was born in Algiers and returns to these same archives to reflect on the complexities of a national memory riddled with absences. Entire chapters of history, such as the Black Decade, have been all but erased from the official narrative.

The film's final chapter follows Mondzain into the heart of the Hirak in 2019. Amid the surge of demonstrations, a torrent of long-suppressed memories suddenly seems to surface, revealing that despite the state's nationalist drive to impose a singular narrative, the transformative power of images resists any attempt at unification. Algeria's past cannot be reduced to a single voice, and Kameli's investigation continually uncovers, almost by chance, its many faces.
 

Miriam Sbih
Author and Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature