Footprints of Fanon in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Sembene Ousamne’s Xala

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of two important films – Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Sembene Ousmane’s Xala – within the context of postcolonial theories. While its focus will be, in the main, on the postcolonial as a historical framework, the essay attempts to transcend this framework through its engagement with the postcolonial as an  awareness of identity, conflict and challenge on personal, communal and national levels. The issues broached range from colonialism, decolonisation, neocolonialism, and violence to Fanonism, mimicry and the neo-bourgeoisie. In the course of this analysis, recourse is made to the Third Cinema,1 as it “anticipates and touches borders with postcolonial theory” (Wayne 2001, 22), and its master concept of decolonisation. While the article inaugurates the debate with individual close examinations of The Battle of Algiers and Xala, the discussion will be complemented by stringing the two films together on threads that bind them as two “great cinematic documents of the age of empire” (Said 2001, 291).