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Representations of History: From Acedia to the Dialectical Image in Bourlem Guerdjou's Vivre au paradis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

Can a film based on fiction contribute to the restoration of historical memory? can films help fill in the blanks of history? What exactly is the filmmaker's position? What faculty and what means does he or she require to make such a prodigious feat possible? Are films capable of creating sites of memory, and by what means? What traces will make it possible to set up markers in a site of a scotoma? The questions become increasingly precise: Can cinema lift the veil that colonial history has thrown over the history of the Algerian War? And what can the nature of the blind spot be if every effort has been made to keep it hidden?

Type
Correspondents at Large
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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