Days of Glory and Outside the Law: Counter-Historical Remembrances

Resumen

French mainstream cinema has always celebrated and memorialized the resistance and heroism of white French soldiers and citizens, overlooking the decisive and vital contributions of the colonized to the independence of France and Europe in general from the Nazi regime. This erasure of the subaltern is the product of a Eurocentric History (with capital H) that “Appropriates the cultural and material production of non-Europeans while denying both their achievements and its own appropriation.” (Shohat and Stam 1994: pp 2, 3) Yet, via their films, French-Maghrebi filmmakers challenge and deconstruct such Eurocentric History through counter-filmmaking, screening a revisionist programme of alternative remembrance.