Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Colonialism and Postcolonialism
La Battaglia di Algeria ( The Battle of Algiers, Gillo
Pontecorvo, 1965), a powerfully realist depiction of
colonialist oppression. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED
BY PERMISSION.
of evolutionary progress when the story is summarized
via voice-over: ‘‘The Aborigine and the girl—30,000
years apart—together.’’ A concomitant cinematic trend
in the postcolonial era has been the representation of the
imperialist past in epic films suffused with colonial nostalgia
and dedicated, at least in part, to the restitution of
colonialism’s reputation. Commenting on this trend in
1984, Salman Rushdie described a spate of British productions,
including A Passage to India (David Lean,
1984) and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1984), as
‘‘the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb’’
(p. 92). In many late twentieth-century films that met with
overwhelming critical and popular success, the tendency
to romanticize the native and to offer up a kinder, gentler
version of colonialism worked in tandem. For example, it
is precisely their association with a colonized culture that
is closer to nature and thus less corrupted and inhibited
than that of their white counterparts that redeems certain
white characters as well as the colonizing culture with
which they are associated in Out of Africa (Sydney
Pollack, 1985), Indochine (Indochina, Régis Wargnier,
1992), and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993).
Indeed, film plays a significant role in neocolonialism
just as it did in colonialism decades ago; at the same
time, however, the postcolonial era has produced many
powerful films, filmmakers, national cinemas, and film
movements, which creatively confront the past, ponder
the present, and give voice to perspectives that are underrepresented
in the cinema discussed thus far. A pivotal
film in this regard is La Battaglia di Algeria (The Battle of
Algiers, 1965), a film about the Algerian War (1954–
1962) by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo (b. 1919).
While the film is remarkable for its even-handed
approach to the conflict, its gritty realist aesthetic, and
its representation of women as active revolutionaries,
what is most striking is how singular it was at the time
of its release. Despite the fact that a large percentage of
the French population did not support the response of its
government to Algerian insurgency, films made in France
during the conflict did not prove a site of significant
dissent or critique. Only the occasional film even
acknowledged the war by making oblique reference to
it, and the one film that did attempt to represent the
event directly in order to explore the amorality of torture,
Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier, Jean-Luc Godard,
1963), was banned from French screens for several years.
It took an outsider to provide a frank account of the
watershed events that ultimately led to Algeria’s political
autonomy and thus to produce what has come to be
regarded, despite the number of subsequent films with
the same narrative agenda, as the definitive anticolonial
film.
The Battle of Algiers is an exemplary representation
of resistance made in the postcolonial era, but equally
revolutionary are the many resistant representations that
have been produced by ‘‘Third,’’ ‘‘Fourth,’’ and ‘‘First’’
World filmmakers alike during the later half of the
twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first.
These representations are extremely varied in form,
encompassing everything from the ‘‘aesthetics of hunger’’
promoted by the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement in
the 1960s to the high production values and lavish spectacles
of Bollywood musicals, from the Brechtian-infused
realism of Ousmane Sembene (b. 1923; Senegal) and
Cheick Oumar Sissoko (b. 1945; Mali) to the genredefying
experimentation of Trinh T. Minh-ha Trinh
(b. 1953; Vietnamese American), and Tracey Moffatt
(b. 1960; Australian Aboriginal). Furthermore, these
filmmakers examine a wide array of subjects. While films
like Como Era Gostoso Meu Francêes (How Tasty Was My
Little Frenchman, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971) and
Surviving Columbus (George Burdeau, 1990) engage
with the colonial past by revisiting its primal scene in
order to rewrite the ‘‘discovery’’ narrative, others do so by
focusing on the possibilities and pitfalls that emerge in
its aftermath, such as Chinese Box (Wayne Wang, 1997).
Still others, particularly the output of Fourth World
filmmakers, reveal a colonial present that often escapes
330 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM