L'Année du Maghreb : Nouvelles puissances politiques du cinéma

Call for papers L'Année du Maghreb

Research Dossier 33 | 1, juin 2025

Coordinators of the issue: Marie Pierre-Bouthier and Salima Tenfiche

For the Editorial Committee, Editor-in-Chief: Marion Slitine



The New Political Powers of Cinema

Comparative Approaches and The Historicity of Contemporary Practices



Considered "minor" in the world cinematographic landscape, the cinematographies of the Maghreb remain little known to this day, in their own countries, in France and elsewhere. However, as early as the 1950s, the two "French Algerian" journalists Maurice-Robert Bataille and Claude Veillot drew up the first inventory of films shot in whole or in part in North Africa since the arrival of the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe in the region in 1896, and were already denouncing the Orientalist and racist vision of these works of popular entertainment aimed at "Europeans" and audiences in mainland France. This reference work on what is now known as postcolonial studies is extended by the writings of journalist Pierre Boulanger and by researchers Abdelghani Megherbi and Abdelkader Benali. However, while films from the colonial period were the subject of critical studies from a very early stage, the contemporary history of the post-colonial Maghreb, and a fortiori its cultural history, has yet to be written, as shown by the state of the art studies by Abdelfettah Benchenna, Patricia Caillé and Nolwenn Mingant in 2015, or more recently by Marie Pierre-Bouthier in 2018 and Salima Tenfiche in 2022.