Exhibition Sites

Mise-en-scène, 2019   

Editing of found 35 and 16 mm film sequences, scanned and transcribed into video, colour, sound 

Music: Mohamed Iguerbouchène 

 

The Algerian film industry experienced a great boom between the 1960s and the end of the 1980s, favouring the development of a film-loving people and a political conscience. But since then, the industry and the archives have suffered the consequences of the deterioration of the political and economic situation. This short video consists of image sequences taken from various militant films made in Algeria from 1960 onwards. This archival material has been edited to create a new narrative. The work evokes the diversity of films screened in Algeria. Certain sequences lead us to remember the political action in this country, which was one of the African nations where the liberation movements could best prosper. Others show the traces of time, which has deteriorated the chemical composition and the emulsion of the film, resulting in abstract images with a grainy texture. Sedira uses these sequences, where the filmed scenes are difficult to recognize, to demonstrate the disappearance of memory and the pitfalls inherent in the use of archives as resources. One can also see in this act of appropriation a direct reference to the experimental cinema and the structural films of the 1960s, whose approach strictly opposes cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms.