Creator's Statement

Research aims

The treatment of temporality in The Battle of Algiers is a controversial aspect of the film. Critics have noted the film’s complex sjuzhet but have argued that the film offers ‘an episodic view of history quite alien to the possibility of understanding [history] as an open horizon of possibilities and alternative realities’ (Sainsbury 1971: 7); the film is said to be guilty of an ‘excess of historical teleology’ (Khanna 2006). My own study of The Battle of Algiers, which I have taught for many years and have recently been writing about in a short book (O'Leary 2019), has convinced me that the orders of time that fashion the film are not reducible to the teleological (though that dimension is certainly there, and it is registered, wryly I hope, in the video essay). And so, work on this video essay was intended to capture something of the complexity of the film’s temporalities and to encapsulate something of the viewer’s experience of these.

Process

The essay was begun at the 2018 edition of the Scholarship in Sound and Image workshop on videographic criticism at Middlebury College, led by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell. My working approach grew directly from the parametric exercises that were set in the first week of the workshop. These exercises (developed from those described in Keathley and Mittell 2019) imposed strict formal constraints on the choice and treatment of material to be used from the workshop participant’s chosen text. This process appealed to me for several reasons. Firstly, parametric approaches—those that deploy methods variously described in terms of ‘obstructions’, ‘oblique strategies’, ‘constraint satisfaction’ etc.—are an attested stimulus to creativity, because they are designed to bypass the preconceptions of the creator and they lend themselves to material thinking, of which videographic criticism is an excellent example.[1] Secondly, the parametric approach bracketed the idea of theme: in that first week at Middlebury, it didn’t matter what your videoessay was about, just that it was developed in a given way. This meant that you didn’t have to begin with some prior argument that you then hoped to illustrate. The formal constraints made for a genuine investigation, in other words, one that could lead to unexpected outcomes or discoveries. As Keathley and Mittell put it, ‘formal parameters lead to content discoveries’. [2] Thirdly, parametric approaches can be seen to be in opposition to the Romantic idea of the artist who expresses their essential self, or to the idea of the intellectual who authoritatively pronounces on a particular theme. Using a parametric approach, the video essayist intervenes in a system while recognising themselves to be part of that system rather than a Godlike figure beyond and independent of it.

The ‘parametric’ exercises at Middlebury involved making a ‘pechakucha’ style video on the first day, and dealt with voiceover, onscreen text, and multiscreen on the subsequent days of the first week. All these exercises informed my essay as it evolved (even if it doesn’t use authorial voiceover), but the essay’s final form was suggested by the exercise set over the weekend at the end of the first week. We were each asked to make a ‘trailer’ for our planned essays, and the final piece published here, a kind of conceptual supercut of the film’s temporalities, is an expansion of the ‘trailer’ I made. As such, it can be described in terms of advertising (the trailer) and fandom (the supercut). These are modes apparently remote from the scholarly investigation,[3] so it can justly be asked what’s academic about all this. For me, the scholarly dimension inheres in the critical impulse: as a trailer, it is a celebratory piece, but it is a critical and analytical trailer. The critical-analytical aspect is meant to emerge, not in explicit argument (via voiceover, for example), but in terms of organisation and juxtaposition; and instead of the approach that makes of the reader/viewer the passive observer of the report and illustration of an argument, I adopted one that elicits the engagement of the viewer in determining the diverse tones of the ‘discussion’.

Combination, subtraction, sequence

One of the guest mentors at the Middlebury workshop was the media theorist and practitioner Allison De Fren, who has made powerful and influential videoessays on the female body and technology in cinema.[4] Allison’s videographic approach is closer to the standard academic prose essay in which the author’s conclusions are known to herself in advance and the evidence set out in order to guide and persuade the reader. At the workshop, she was critical of the parametric approach and of the ‘poetic’ pole of videographic criticism. Thinking about and rejecting Allison’s scepticism for my own purposes, I realized I liked iterative and permutational form—the theme plus variations approach—which I think of as a formal and historical alternative in the essay tradition to the conventional argumentative form. In my essay, I allowed an accumulation of examples to replace this conventional argumentative form, and I hope my critical position and my ambivalence emerges, rather than being stated, in terms of unresolved or dialectical juxtaposition, where the relation of discrete audio, visual and textual elements must be interpreted by the viewer in the light of their knowledge of and familiarity with the film.

The viewer’s work of interpretation is also meant to occur ‘affectively’, or at least as reflection upon the experience of the essay rather than just upon the content (as in standard academic prose where the form is intended to be transparent if not invisible). In any case, I think of this approach as a form of immanent criticism, where the material of the film itself is remixed to reveal its structures, rhetoric, and contradictions. Thus, all audio and visual material used in the essay, apart from credits and intertitles, comes from The Battle of Algiers itself (I consider the explanatory phrases in square brackets a compromise in this respect), as set out in the table below.