Context
Algiers, between yesterday and today
Jean-Lucien Bonillo
The film looks at the various myths and the images of Al Djazaïr [the Arab name for Algiers] emphasising, naturally enough, the casbah and the landscape with adjectives such as "el bahdja" (the joyful), "el mahroussa" (the well guarded) and "la blanche" (the white). The film evokes the singers and poets who have translated, sung and praised Algiers – the seductive, the captivating, the fascinating. But on the whole it only quotes the poets who sing of an independent Algeria: Kateb Yacine, Amin Maâlouf, Louis Aragon, Jean Sénac.
On the question of creating an image of the town in one's imagination, one could pick out three sequences: the orientalist dream, which extends from the 19th century through to 1930; the modern metropolis, European and African, which dominated until the 1960's and independence; and finally the Algerian republic and the Algerians' re-appropriation of their own country.
In the first period, the orientalist dream is brought to life by writers, artists and architects. In mythical cities like Constantinople or Cairo, this imaginary construct often expresses itself as an otherness, in Algiers, however, it comes up against the all too tangible evidence of colonialism, with its destruction of the old town and the building of a European city laid out according to the logical model of 19th century French town planning, starting with the Rue de Rivoli under Napoleon I. The descriptions by Flaubert, Daudet, Vernet and Chasseriau attest to this schizophrenia between a colonial city and an Islamic town. Some, like Théophile Gautier, Eugene Fromentin and Gustave Guillaumet, rage against the destruction carried out by their contemporaries, and with Pierre Loti the tone becomes frankly anti-colonial. By Loti's time everyone admired the authenticity (and exoticism) of the upper town, the medina which has kept the name of the Turkish fortifications and the casbah. They even evoke Scherazade and the "Thousand and One Nights".
In the 1930's the imaginary image of this part of the town definitely changes, it becomes a cosmopolitan universe, a world of trade and prostitution, illustrated by painters such as Jacques Assus, Jean Launois, Etienne Bouchaud. There is a parallel with Marseille and its old town (the Le Panier district) similarly stigmatised. Julien Duvivier's film "Pépé le Moko" (1937) is another example of that particular imaginary image, with Jean Gabin as a (French – from Toulon) gang leader hiding out with his men in the Casbah.
In the second period the image wavers between this duality and a more synthetic vision. It's the period of "Algiers metropolis", "Algiers the African" (Henry de Montherlant, Henri Bosco). During the 1930's Le Corbusier, with his different versions of the "Obus Plan" for the town, which he defends in his book Poésie sur Alger, imagines the utopia of a city's destiny in harmony with the sublime qualities of the site. But his positive vision of the casbah does not extend to the slightest desire to preserve the Arab heritage intact. We should note particularly how the Mediterranean awareness, Latin and Algerian (Robert Randeau, Jean Pomier, Albert Camus), simply replaces the orientalist imagery. This change of identity myths is because some wanted to create a cultural and spiritual convergence, unifying the two communities. Paradoxically the ruines of Tipasa would have served that idea better than the complex and stratified urban space of Algiers, where the traces of the Roman city, Icosium, have been lost
Over the last 50 years nothing or no one could better illustrate the reconquest and reconstruction of the Algerians' own imaginary image of themselves than the poet Momo (the late Himoud Brahimi), who opens the first sequence of the film with one of his poems, a tribute to the white citadel, "el bahdja" and "el mahroussa".
Brief bibliography but to the point
- Siblot P., « La ville d’Alger dans quelques constructions de l’imaginaire français », in coll. Regards croisés – La ville de l’autre, Saint Gely du Fesc, ed. espaces 34, 1992.
- Deluz J.-J., Alger – Chronique urbaine, Paris, ed. Bouchène, 2001.
- Peltre Ch., « Entre Constantinople et Zanzibar, le nouvel Alger au miroir des voyages », in Cohen J.-L., Oulebsir N., Kanoun Y. (dir.), Alger – Paysage urbain et architectures, 1880 – 2000, Besançon, ed. de l’Imprimeur, 2003.
- Coll. (Jean-Lucien Bonillo, resp.), Actes de la XVIe Rencontre de la Fondation Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier et Alger, Paris, ed. de la Villette, 2012.
