Film Talk: The Battle of Algiers

​Join historians Tamara Maatouk, Lacy Murphy, and Marianne Dhenin to discuss Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo and Algerian rebel leader Saadi Yacef’s now-classic 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers. Sixty years after the film debuted at the Venice Film Festival, this one-hour webinar will cover what it got right about the Algerian War, how it fit into the Arab world’s socialist sixties film scene, and what lessons it offers for today’s liberation struggles.

​You’ll find The Battle of Algiers on most streaming platforms. Click here to read Marianne’s spoiler-free guide to the film and come prepared with a question for the audience Q&A!

​Tamara Maatouk is an assistant professor of film studies at The American University in Cairo. She is a historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on film as an art form, an industry and a social practice. Her first book, Understanding the Public Sector in Egyptian Cinema: A State Venture, examined the emergence, expansion and eventual decline of Egypt’s public film sector. Her current project, Filming Socialism, explores Egypt’s socialist sixties through the lens of cinema.

​Lacy Murphy is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Scholar-in-Residence in Art History at the University of Houston, where she teaches courses on modern art and architecture in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, as well as Islamic art and its intersections with European modernism. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation, “Colliding Worlds: Visual Culture in France and Colonial Algeria (1918–1962),” offered the first comprehensive study of the apogee, deterioration, and conclusion of French colonialism in Algeria with particular attention to ephemeral and reproductive media.

​Marianne Dhenin (moderator) is a journalist and historian. They wrote their Ph.D. on the modern Middle East and North Africa at the University of Basel.