Rachida (2002)

Dir. Yasmin Bachir

This return of "Algeria" as a traumatic spectre haunting Europe was paralleled by the trauma within Algeria suffered in the civil war that began in 1991. One of the most striking visualizations of that conflict was Yamina Bachir's film Rachida (2002). Bachir studied at the National Algerian Film School, first established by Vautier. Rachida was Bachir's first film, made in the face of what she calls the "dismemberment of the film industry" in Algeria, after the elections of 1991. It evokes the collapse of Algerian civil society by means of the story of a young woman teacher named Rachida (Djouadi Ibtissem). While there is a postcolonial state of denial in France concerning Algeria, Bachir was trying to evoke what is repeatedly called in her film a mutual "culture of hate" operating between all sides in the country itself.

Bachir developed her idea from an incident in which antigovernment militants tried to compel a teacher to carry a bomb into her own school. When she refused, she was shot, as is Rachida in the film. In the crucial opening scene, the teacher Rachida is attacked with the intent to make her carry a bomb.


Rachida needs to hide not from a colonial army but from her own neighbors, creating such great anxiety that she thinks she is going mad. A local woman doctor in the village diagnoses "post traumatic psychosis," but adds that the "whole country suffers from it." Rachida later dreams that she will be assassinated by the terrorists in the village in a very realistic scene that emerges as a dream only in the aftermath.

The film then imagines what might have happened next, as Rachida goes into hiding in the countryside, having survived being shot, for fear that her assailants would return to kill her. At first, understandably depressed, Rachida returns to teaching and is attending a wedding when the local version of the terrorists (the term used in the film) attack and devastate the community. Bachir created what she calls "a 'perfect' victim" as the center of her protest, and the film suffers somewhat from this idealization. At the same time, the film was made against the background of censorship; thus, for example, when a young woman is raped in the village and soldiers come to investigate, her distress at the fact that her attackers also wore military uniforms is the only hint the film can offer to suggest the army, as well as the "terrorists," was committing outrages.

The film gains in texture when seen against its predecessor, The Battle of Algiers. Early in Rachida, the television news declares that "terrorists attacked a man in the Casbah," evoking the French propaganda of the 1950s, just as a bomb-making scene recalls the similar FLN activity in The Battle of Algiers. However, in Rachida a woman has to be coerced into carrying a bomb, whereas in The Battle of Algiers there were many volunteers. In another scene, Rachida watches a television news report of the murder of several monks, an incident recently made into a popular French film, Of Gods and Men [Des hommes et des dieux] (2010, dir. Xavier Beauvois).

The level of persistent psychic damage in Algeria depicted in Rachida reinforces the importance and necessity of the return of Fanon's case studies in The Wretched of the Earth in Ahtila's project. Indeed, the 2003 inaugural conference of the Société Franco-Algérien de Psychiatrie heard case studies that Robert Keller, who attended, described as "near replications" of Fanon's from fifty years earlier. Fanon's clinic in Blida is now within a center of the Groupe Islamique Armée, and the facilities are described as ruins, with the wards reduced to a "warehouse of bodies."

The village life evoked by Bachir has more texture than the simple peasant scenario sketched by Ahtila. The one public telephone in the village, for instance, is constantly used by Khaled, a young man who is in love with Hadjar, whose father, Hassen, will not sanction the match because Khaled is too poor. Hadjar's arranged marriage ends the film, a counterpoint to the love match seen in The Battle of Algiers. In Pontecorvo's film, an FLN official apologizes for the simple ceremony, but evokes the possibility of a transformed future that Rachida suggests is still yet to come. The violent scenes are shot with a hand-held camera, giving the "realistic" jerky feel pioneered by Pontecorvo, but there are also long interludes in the separate spaces of the women, from the courtyard to the baths. Here, the lyricism of Ahtila's Algeria is matched by reveries such as one evoked by the scent of figs. But Bachir brings us back to earth when, in a subsequent scene, a local man harasses Rachida, gesturing with a carrot and saying he can smell the scent of a woman.

There are only two moments in the film that step outside the realism sustained by terror. As Rachida is teaching in the village, she sees a bubble floating near her head. She turns and all the children in her class are blowing bubbles at her. This moment is recalled at the very end of the film when, in what Bachir calls a Brechtian moment, Rachida dresses in her clothes from Algiers, sets her hair loose, and heads through the devastated village toward the school in order to teach. Several children emerge from nowhere, and they sit down in a class held in a vandalized room. Strikingly (for a Western viewer), Rachida begins the class by telling the students to take out their slates, a tool that evokes a remote past for those in wealthier locations. Although she writes "today's lesson" on the board in Arabic, she does not specify a topic. Since the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century, the education of the working and subaltern classes has been central to the consolidation of the right to look. Although it proposes no solution, the ending to Rachida imagines another reality, in which today's lesson is always open to question, always about to be begun, and not yet foreclosed.

While that would be a satisfying place to conclude, it would overlook many more complex realities. Algerian schools have been the subject of intense national controversy, first stressing Islam and Arabic, and then returning to a curriculum that includes French and science. However, journalistic estimates in 2008 suggested that, although there is 70 percent literacy (cited without definition), only 20 percent of eligible children attended high school, with the majority dropping out for economic, political, or religious reasons. After forty years of independence that figure seems very low.

Today a new generation of Algerian filmmakers is beginning to address some of these problems. It's too much to say whether these shorts in and of themselves offer new possibilities over the long term but they are encouraging. The Pan-African Film Festival was held in Algiers in 2009, forty years after the first such event. More prominent has been the success of Hors la loi (2010, dir. R. Bouchareb), a family history version of the Algerian war that was nominated for an Oscar. Collectively, these new projects amount to the beginning of the end of Algeria's post-traumatic shock.

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