Individual and Collective Trauma in Cartouches Gauloises

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the representation of trauma in Cartouches gauloises in light of recent scholarship about trauma and memory. Without a preference for FrenchAlgarian or Arab-Algerian, director Mehdi Charef explores trauma of forced displacement and witnessing the massacres mainly through children’s perspectives. Charef also depicts the process of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ of individual and collective trauma among the characters, and the nation they represent, by use of camera language. Meanwhile, placing the film in its historical context highlights the collective trauma of two important groups in Algerian society after the war: the Pieds-Noirs (the FrenchAlgerian) and Harkis (the pro-France Algerian warriors). They experience social trauma due to the exile and their lacking sense of belonging absent a national identity as they are not recognized as citizens of either government. A final section discusses the measures which the Algerian and French governments respectively took after the war. Unlike to the commemorative monuments and museums the Algerian built, the French government denied the existence of the war for a long time thereby aggravating the socially embedded trauma.