‘Once you can see the target, you can expect to destroy it.’

It is daytime in Algiers, but the curtains are drawn at the French military headquarters. The dark interior allows for a crisp home-cinema projection. The reel spins, playing footage recorded by hidden surveillance cameras on the borders of the Casbah. Colonel Mathieu, the sinister man who has been brought to Algiers to lead a crack-down of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) and secure the French position in Algeria once more, stands next to the projection and addresses his fellow soldiers. Crowds of Algerians pass by behind him as he speaks. ‘It is an unknown, unrecognisable enemy,’ he sighs, turning to gaze at the screen. A passing Algerian woman, white veil covering all but her eyes and forehead, seems to illustrate his point.

The Colonel turns to face his rapt audience as he addresses them. The film continues to show crowds flowing between layers of barbed wire. Among them, a beautiful woman in capris and a sleeveless blouse turns her head of coiffed hair to speak to a soldier who calls out to her. Crowds of people walk between the camera and her smiling face, half obscuring her, but she stands out. The audience of soldiers don’t recognise her, but we do: she is the FLN partisan who, moments after the footage was recorded, planted a bomb in a café in the French quarters, part of a series of three attacks by unveiled Algerian women in French dress – and the incident responsible for the increased French military presence in Algiers. Mathieu’s gaze is turned away from the film as he asks his soldiers, ‘How to recognise them?’ They clearly have no idea.

In ‘War and Cinema’, Paul Virilio argues that vision and visibility are as important to warfare as weaponry; and the expansion of military vision by means of cameras and other technological ways of seeing and surveilling have made it so that ‘eyeshot’ might soon ‘get the better of gunshot’ (2). Virilio illustrates his argument with a quotation from W.J. Perry, a former US Under-Secretary of State for Defense: ‘Once you can see the target, you can expect to destroy it’ (4). In colonial Algeria, the desire to ‘see’ (and thus ‘destroy’) the enemy was figured as an act of ‘unveiling’, which, as MacDonald has argued, ‘slipped unobtrusively into a pathological antipathy to the actual adoption of the veil by Muslim women’ (9). General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud remarked in the 1840s that ‘the Arabs elude us’ precisely ‘because they conceal the women from our gaze’ (Clancy-Smith, 154). If only Algeria could be ‘unveiled’, if only the French could see them, then the enemy could be knowable and recognisable, and then they could be destroyed. Behiery puts it succinctly: ‘because modernity associates vision and knowledge, the figure of the veiled woman challenges the epistemological role granted to sight’ (2013a, 418).

Throughout his 1966 film Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo stages subtle variations of the game of power fought between the camera and the veil. The French use the camera as technology of unveiling; the FLN elude them by exploiting the ‘tenacity of the veil sign’ (Behiery, 413). Similarly, Harun Farocki’s essay-film Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1984) revisits the colonisation of Algeria as a struggle for sight, articulated, too, between the camera and the veil. Farocki examines the joint assault on Algerian women that took place when they were unveiled and photographed in Kabylia, 1960. Both films use the image of the Algerian woman, unveiled, on camera, as the central symbol of the conflict. But their effects are at odds, not merely because Pontecorvo’s is a story of victory, and Farocki’s is a microhistory of defeat. Images of the World reproduces, rather than illustrates, the double violence of unveiling-photographing, making for a visually and argumentatively impactful, but empathetically limited, film; Battle of Algiers is by contrast playful in its approach to the roles of the veil and the camera in the war, and ultimately more generous to the Algerian people and political cause.

In Battle of Algiers, the French army’s intelligence-gathering mission is an act of visualisation, an image-gathering effort. They are obsessed with photography, compiling visual evidence of the FLN and its actions (Figures 4). The more they penetrate the structure of the FLN, the more photographs they have to show for it (Figure 5). There are no photographs of women in the film, although women formed an integral part of the FLN structure and in fact carried out the very operations the army is there to prevent happening again. As Frantz Fanon argued, the Algerian woman, concealed behind the veil, imposes a limit on sight and thus ‘marks the frontier of colonialism’ (1967; Decker, 1990).

The FLN exploits the veil’s power to limit eyeshot. In one scene, a checkpoint officer accosts a woman to search under her veil. She protests and is let go (Figure 6). “Never touch their women,” his colleague advises him. In the next scene, a veiled woman approaches a man outside a café. They greet one another, and in the embrace, she hands him a gun she had concealed in her veil. The man hides behind her to shoot and kill a soldier (Figure 7). In another scene that almost approaches slapstick, FLN male partisans disguise themselves in veils to pass by French soldiers unnoticed (Figure 8). Once they are behind them, they open fire and kill them (Figure 9).

The FLN also exploits the ‘epistemological role granted to sight’ by using the removal of the veil as its own form of disguise. The female bombers exploit the construction of innocent Western femininity, built by contradistinction to the suspicions projected on the Muslim woman (Kahf; Behiery) which are centered on the ‘tenac[ious] veil sign’ (Behiery, 413). When Colonel Mathieu revisits the surveillance footage of the day of the bombings, the female attackers pass undetected as innocent French citizens, or perhaps as Algerians who had complied with the French colonial desire to ‘unveil’ them. The checkpoint soldiers are not looking for Western-coded suspects; they assume that the unveiled women that pass by them are unveiled because they have nothing to hide. One of the checkpoint soldiers supposes the woman captured in the footage is going to sunbathe on the beach. His job is to look and make judgements. His satisfaction with her level of visibility, and his fantasy of undressing her further, ironically prevent him from seeing the enemy who is before his very eyes (Figure 10).

This scene illustrates an argument Farocki makes in Images of the World: seeing and knowing are not the same. Examining CIA reconnaissance photography in Germany that clearly showed the Auschwitz concentration camp, he explains how Allies could have remained ignorant of the Holocaust: they were not looking for it. Ironically, this is not an argument Farocki extends to himself when he examines his Algerian source material.  Farocki turns several times in his essay-film to Marc Garanger’s book Femmes Algériennes 1960, a selection of around 200 portraits of Algerian women from a corpus of over 2,000 identity photos Garanger took as a French military photographer in a regroupment camp in the mountain villages of Algeria.[1] Farocki uses the images of the women photographed by Garanger as one of many illustrative examples of the function of photography ‘not only to record and preserve but also to mislead, deceive and even destroy’ (Alter, 218). As Sontag argues, it is impossible to glean intrinsic meaning from photographs: ‘all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions’ (10).[2] In Farocki’s film, the photographs of the women are ‘captioned’ in turns by the narrator’s language, the mood of the soundtrack, the use of cropping, and Farocki’s own physical interactions with Garanger’s book. As such, Farocki’s interpretive lens has the immense power to inscribe meaning in the images. The ‘Inscription of War’ is less on the subjects themselves and more in Farocki’s ‘captioning’ work.

The women in Garanger’s photographs were unveiled in a very different context to the women in Pontecorvo’s film. Regroupment camps, set up under General Maurice Challes, were highly militarised and surveilled quasi-concentration camps designed to destabilise the FLN structure: mountain villages were destroyed, and villagers were displaced and ‘regrouped’ in new configurations. Since most male villagers had left to fight in the Algerian wars of independence, most camp dwellers were women. These women had never had their photograph taken before, never experienced what Roland Barthes calls the ‘micro-version of death’ of ‘a subject who feels he is becoming an object’ (14). ‘Adding to the violence of the mass displacement,’ explains Katarzyna Falęcka, ‘selected women were instructed to remove their head coverings […] to increase, in the words of army officers, the ‘legibility’ of the identity photographs’ (2023, 45). The subjects of Garanger’s photographs are doubly violated by visibility: once through the forced removal of their face and head coverings, and a second time through the taking of their photographs (Chaulet Achour, 101).

As Farocki builds his thesis on the inherent violence of photography, he captions Femmes Algériennes 1960 in increasingly disturbing ways. The photographs first appear in the first ten minutes of film (8:01-8:32). The sequence begins with three close-up shots of Garanger’s photographs, displayed for about 10 seconds each. The three women shown, unveiled, meet our gaze before the context of their portraits is explained by the narrator. Yet to be explained by the narrator’s ‘caption’, the impact of their gaze is ‘immediate and powerful even when its precise meaning remains […] suspended’ (Hall, 309). Their haunting looks ‘fill the sight by force’ and we are faced with ‘nothing but the exorbitant thing’ (Barthes, 91). Contrasting to the white noise playing in the previous shot, there is no sound but the narrator’s sparse lines and the silences in between exacerbate the uncanny moment. While sound functions through the registering of change, the static sight of their gaze appears ‘eternal’ (Hans Jonas). When she does speak, the narrator asks,

‘How to face a camera? The horror of being photographed for the first time. The year 1960 in Algeria. Women are photographed for the first time. They are to be issued with identity cards. Faces, which up ‘til then had worn the veil.’

The narrator knits together the experience of the first photograph and the experience of unveiling into a singular moment by the similar temporal expressions, ‘for the first time’ and ‘up ‘til then’. The repeated phrases imply a loss of something akin to virginity. The virginal innocence of the women is implied in the question ‘How to face a camera?’, an act most adults have been socialised to perform intuitively (and which Barthes nevertheless identified as an indication of the suppressed madness of modernity). The photograph and the unveiling are synchronous acts of defilement. As Benjamin argues, ‘the cameraman penetrates deeply into [reality’s] web’ (235); while in her analysis of the veil’s place in the Western imaginary, Yeğenoğlu describes the garment as a screen ‘around which western fantasies of penetration revolve’ (47). Immediately contextualised as a moment of ‘horror’, this penetration of the private space is characterised as violent. As in several of the film’s other sequences, Farocki ties this violence to (more) explicit forms of colonial state violence: ‘they are to be issued with identity cards.’

We then see photographs displayed in a physical copy of Garanger’s book (8:32-9:01). The book is filmed from a high angle, Farocki’s left hand flicking through its pages while his right hand rests next to the book on a low glass table. The glass allows us to see the metal table leg and parquet floors under it. Perhaps we are in a mid-century-modern home. Perhaps this is a fittingly stylish coffee-table book. The tiny faces of the Kabylian women gaze at us from its pages. The narrator says,

‘Only those close had looked on these faces without the veil. Family and household members. When one looks into the face of an intimate, one brings something of a shared past. The photograph captures the moment and thus crops away past and future.’

‘Only those close had looked on the women’s faces without the veil’, and, like any human being alive before the advent of photography, only those who had been physically near them had seen them altogether. The photographs and the unveilings come together to ‘explo[de] the private into the public’ (Barthes, 97) and Farocki’s display of the photographs as the mechanically reproduced commodity of the coffee-table book highlights their detonating impact. In ‘Reading Refugee Coffee-Table Books’, Szörényi argues that the exhibitionist format ‘produces a spectacle’. Not only are the subjects in the photographs objectified by the camera, but the format of the book itself is an aesthetic object to be admired. The juxtaposition of Farocki’s hands and the book affirms this multi-layered objectification: his hands are large, three-dimensional, flesh-toned; their faces are tiny, flat as the page, printed in black-and-white. 

As the narrator says, we are not ‘family or household members’ and the camerawork compounds this. From the high angle, we are invited to believe we are in Farocki’s home, peering over his shoulder as he shows us his book. The implied dynamic of viewer-as-guest and Farocki-as-entertaining-host exacerbates the spectacle. The intimacy of these photographs is occluded by the implied social occasion of being shown a picture book. These are not ‘face[s] of intimate[s]’, as they were intended to be seen, but a-temporal and a-geographical objects, ‘cropped’ by the camera and relocated to a German living room.

The next time Images of the World returns to Garanger’s photographs, Farocki places his hands on the photographs. They cover the women’s eyes and mouths in turn to illustrate the narrator’s point: ‘The eyes must be accustomed to meet a strange gaze. The mouth cannot be accustomed to being looked at’ (11:26-11:29). The hand’s movements crudely exemplify the spoken sentences: first, look at just her eyes; now, here is her mouth. The first motion mimics the ‘custom’, the veil; the second reverts it, emphasising the vulnerability of an exposed mouth by concealing the rest of the face. The photographs are explicatory props, used to make the viewer aware of their own ‘strange gaze’. The women’s bodies are to be read anatomically, for didactic purposes or perhaps just for an experiment in discomfort. The experiment intensifies: a scratched and spliced recording of classical piano plays as shots of the women’s mouths are shown in quick succession. Farocki’s captioning is erotic, provocative. The camera stops for a moment on an open mouth and the narrator says, ‘A mouth, to be able to taste something, must come close to its object.’ The ‘screen’ of the veil has been ‘penetrated’ and we are close enough to taste. We have forgotten about the women; this has become a meditation on the exposed mouth as cavity, as entrance, as intimate body part. After this sequence, the photographs almost always appear only as cropped mouths until the very last appearance in the film, by which time the subject has been so spliced and anatomised the viewer cannot meet her gaze the same way. Farocki has made his point: visibility can be violent and can expose you to more violence. The Kabylian women photographed by Marc Garanger in 1960 are his sacrificial example.

Nora Alter has asked whether Farocki is ‘fully in control of his inscription (Inschrift) of the re/presentation of women’ (218-9). By framing it as a question of ‘control’, she implies his interpretative capacities are governed by libido. Indeed, like Pontecorvo’s French solider gazing into the female bomber’s eyes, Farocki sees what he wants to see in Garanger’s images. As Falęcka has argued, the ‘interpretative field of these photographs’ is incredibly ‘limited’ by the ‘projections’ of critics (58) and Farocki is no exception. Drawing on Neil MacMaster’s scholarship, she has shown the various historical inaccuracies in popular assumptions about the Kabylian women. They ‘represented a breadth of political alliances during the war, with some married to harkis – Algerian men serving with the French army – rather than with the FLN’ (214). Moreover, a large proportion of the women retained their veils for the portraits; Farocki only shows those who were most exposed. Farocki fetishises the violence of the camera and the unveiling of the colonial subject to the point where he can only reproduce it. He shows no curiosity about their subjectivity. He objectifies them to demonstrate that they are victims of objectification. If this is a rhetorical decision, it is a poor one; but it is perhaps worse to imagine that he does this because of a lack of ‘control’.

Both films, of course, encounter the same paradox: they critique the violence of visibility through a primarily visual medium (filmmaking) and thus at least in part perpetuate the same paradigms they aim to expose. This essay is not long enough to dissect the limitations of Pontecorvo’s representation of women – of which there are some, of course, although the film is remarkable for ‘eschewing popular stereotypes both of Muslim women and sensual female guerrillas’ and conveying the ‘interiority’ of female characters (Sawers, 90, 96). Suffice to say that in Battle of Algiers, women are not destroyed by the removal of the veil nor by the camera. Just because that can happen, does not mean it is a filmmaker’s only option, which is what Farocki seems to imply.

[1] Though the questions raised by Garanger’s photographs and Farocki’s appropriation of them form a large part of my analysis, I believe it would be hypocritical to include stills in this essay and at the same time critique Farocki for adopting these images as ‘illustrative’ examples of his argument. For discussions on the politics of including photographs of subjects in research, see Moreno Figueroa (2008) and Saidiya Hartman (2008; 2019).